The Russian Foreign Ministry said on June 26 that an annual human rights report released by the United States was politically motivated and ignored rights violations by Ukraine.
"As previously [the report] is a creation abounding with politicized evaluations and coarse ideological cliches," Foreign Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Interfax.
"The methodology of the report is detached from reality and based on an arbitrary 'ranking' of a state's level of democracy," he said.
The United States released its annual human rights report on June 25, saying that the political system in Russia was becoming "increasingly authoritarian" and that Moscow had passed new measures to suppress dissent.