Russia has accused the European Union of turning human rights into an instrument of political pressure, rejecting the bloc’s latest annual report on human rights and democracy in the world.
Zakharova said on September 7 that the EU had set out that intention openly in the document, which the European External Action Service published on August 11. She said the level of criticism directed at each country was determined by its loyalty to Brussels rather than by conditions on the ground.
Zakharova singled out the section dealing with Russia, which she said described the bloc’s own course towards Moscow as a “war-time approach”. That framing, she argued, was meant to justify both false claims about her country and what she called European double standards.
She also dismissed the passages on Ukraine as uncritical, describing the country as mired in corruption and lawlessness. Her remarks were issued as a written comment by the ministry.
Much of the criticism was aimed at conditions inside the bloc itself. Zakharova said intolerance was growing steadily across the 27 member states, with rising numbers of racist incidents and more hate speech, while EU institutions looked the other way.
“European institutions completely ignore, and sometimes even condone, Russophobia,” she said.
She pointed in particular to statelessness in the Baltic states and to restrictions on schooling in Russian. Estonia and Latvia restored citizenship after the collapse of the Soviet Union only to people living there before 1940 and their descendants, leaving hundreds of thousands of Soviet-era arrivals and their children without a nationality.
Those residents hold non-citizen or undetermined-citizenship status, which carries restricted political rights and limits on consular protection. Estonia’s parliament voted in March 2025 to strip Russian and Belarusian nationals of the right to vote in local elections, with stateless residents losing the same right after the ballot held that October.
Zakharova further claimed that the EU was moving to silence dissent at home through censorship and bans on media outlets and political figures deemed hostile to Brussels. She referred readers to a joint Russian and Belarusian report on human rights in Europe published in June.
The EU has made human rights a central plank of its policy towards Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine. In May the Council of the European Union extended until 2027 its sanctions on 72 individuals and one entity accused of repression and serious rights violations in Russia.
Brussels has tied the clampdown on dissent, independent media and civil society inside Russia to the war in Ukraine.
