Statement by Ambassador Vassily A. Nebenzia, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, at the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine (before the vote)
It is no secret to Council members that the idea of discussing the situation regarding the forthcoming elections in eastern Ukraine on 11 November came from six delegations — Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, the United States and France. However, it occurred to none of them to invite the the people that the meeting is about, the representatives of the area, to participate in it.
Furthermore, its initiators proposed holding it as a closed meeting so that they could then report to the media only on the elements that they wanted to. We have long been familiar with these ways of working in the Security Council, and we condemn such blatant examples of double standards.
For reasons of transparency, therefore, we insisted on a public meeting and requested the participation of the heads of the central electoral commissions of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. We hope that the members of the Council are just as interested as we are in receiving complete information on the true state of affairs in Ukraine.
We call on them not to submit to these delegations’ pressure or to obstruct a briefing to the Council by the representative of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and parties to the Minsk agreements.
