Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at UNSC briefing on Ukraine
Mme.President,
We understand perfectly well that the only reason for convening today's meeting is the desire of the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime to keep the Ukrainian issue "afloat" in the UN Security Council in a particular way they need. It implies condemnation of the strikes carried out by the Russian Aerospace forces against facilities related to the military potential of Zelensky’s regime and a grotesque representation of their consequences for the civilian population. It all looks very unconvincing, especially against the backdrop of Israel's ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip.
Mme.President,
As usual, EU members have signed up en masse to speak at this meeting. It is obvious that we will hear nothing new from them. But we look forward to their active participation in tomorrow's meeting to convene at our initiative.
As for the massive precision strikes against Ukrainian fuel and energy facilities, they are a response to attempts by the Kiev regime to damage Russian oil and gas and energy infrastructure. The strike did achieve its goal, having disrupted the work of Ukrainian military industry enterprises and the transfer of reserves to combat areas. It also hampered the supply of fuel to the UAF. As in all previous cases, the civilian population was not threatened by the Russian military, no matter how much Zelensky’s regime and its Western sponsors try to prove the opposite.
What also gets in the way of Western propaganda makers is the opinions of ordinary Ukrainians, which they share on social networks, urging their compatriots to fear not Russian precision strikes but the consequences of the work of Ukrainian air defense systems that are deployed in residential areas in violation of IHL norms. Since Ukraine (as it now recognizes) has fewer air defense systems, there have also been fewer incidents due to their use. Ordinary citizens of Ukraine also noticed that.
Incidentally, the Ukrainian military have begun to complain openly that local residents in Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolaev, Dnepropetrovsk and other cities and regions of Ukraine have started to actively share with Russian military the coordinates of UAF arms depots and whereabouts of military reserves, which clearly demonstrates the real attitude of the civilian population to what is happening.
Ordinary Ukrainians have come to realize more clearly who their real enemy is and who poses a real, not an imaginary, threat to their lives. We can understand them, because they are concerned about things that our Western colleagues did not mention today.
For example, they have not said a word about violations of the rights of Ukrainian men of conscription age during their forced mobilization. This is a real scourge for Ukrainian families today. More and more evidence is being published on the Internet that military commissions mistreat Ukrainian men. In violation of all norms and laws, they seize them in the streets as if they were wanted criminals and send them straight to the front (without any special training) where the only way to survive is to surrender to the Russian troops. The latter is not that easy though, because of barrier squads consisting of nationalists, who try to avoid direct combat with the Russian troops, preferring to shoot their compatriots in the back. At the same time, whoever has money and connections, like MPs and officials, evade conscription themselves and take their relatives of conscription age abroad.
In Vinnitsa region, a ban was imposed on the entry of men of conscription age into the areas bordering Moldova in order to prevent them from fleeing.
As we see from a video report published recently by the German Deutsche Welle, in many Ukrainian villages there is simply no one left to conscript. In the village of Luzanovka (Cherkassy Region), with the population of 400 people, about 50 men have been conscripted. Head of the local Council complains that they do not have anyone to do the grave digging. And this happens all across Ukraine against the backdrop of the frank unwillingness of the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians to fight for Western geopolitical interests.
As President of the Kiev International Institute of Sociology admitted the other day, only 8% of men who had been surveyed are ready to voluntarily join the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Kiev regime rightly sees this as a lethal threat to its power and therefore "tightens the screws" in every possible way.
Thus, at the beginning of the month, the conscription age for Ukrainians was lowered from 27 down to 25, and, judging by the progress of Ukrainian troops at the front, it may soon be 17-18 years old. In his moment of agony, Hitler is known to have relied on "Hitlerjugend" for the defense of Berlin. Zelensky's agonizing regime is ready to do the same, and sacrifices not only Ukrainian men, but women too for the interests of others. The law on mobilization, which is about to be adopted, will completely turn Ukrainians into serfs whose lives are at the disposal of Zelensky and his clique. However, our Western colleagues prefer to keep silent about this. Just as they never admit how they were preparing Ukraine for a war with Russia for many years under the cover of the Minsk Agreements; and how they did not allow Ukrainians to make peace with Russia
Of course, no one said today that the human rights situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate rapidly. None of Western sponsors dares to criticize the head of the Kiev regime, who has usurped power, canceled elections and thrown into prison everyone who disagrees with his dictatorship.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazism is being more and more blatantly promoted in Ukraine, where accomplices of the Nazis are glorified; nationalist and racist sentiments are being cultivated among the population. Large-scale persecution of canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church continues. The Kiev regime takes pains to create an image of the UOC and its ministers as "collaborators of the enemy" and encourages illegal seizure of churches. Everything Russian (language, culture, education, media) is automatically subjected to "cancellation".
Let me give just one example. Last week, the odious Institute of National Memory declared the Kiev-born writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries and died in 1940, to be an "ardent Ukrainophobe" and equated the use of the writer's name with "propaganda of Russian imperial policy". In particular, the world-famous writer is accused of being "the closest of all Russian writers of that time to the current ideologues of Putinism and the Kremlin's justification of ethnocide in Ukraine". This is not something that a mentally healthy person would ever write. They would not fight art, destroy books and burn them in city squares. Only Nazis in the 30s-40s of the 20th century did that. And their ideological heirs are doing the same thing in Ukraine today, glorifying Bandera, Shukhevych and all those who helped the German Nazis during the war to kill Jews, Poles, Russians, Roma, and Ukrainians too. And today's Germans and others in the West, instead of words of condemnation, play deaf-and-dumb and supply the leader of the Kiev clique with weapons helping him to kill civilians. We will talk about this in detail at a separate meeting that we have requested for tomorrow.
Our Western colleagues got so accustomed to disregarding any crimes and ugly doings of the Kiev regime that they manage to ignore even the direct shelling and drone attacks on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which resumed a few days ago and which risk causing a nuclear catastrophe in the very center of Europe. We will raise this topic during the special meeting on April 15. We hope that IAEA (whose staff are present at the ZNPP and can observe Ukrainian provocations with their own eyes) will also give a fair assessment to those developments.
Colleagues,
All this is little encouraging, but there is good news too that instills optimism in all those who are tired of the Ukrainian crisis. Russian troops now advance in virtually all directions, destroying fortifications that have been constructed for years. There is a dramatic shift in the military actions that is taking place before our eyes, and neither Western aid packages nor "meat assaults" and counterattacks by the Kiev regime will be able to change this.
This situation is extremely worrying for Zelensky’s Western sponsors, who have already set a new goal for themselves: "to prevent Russia from winning" instead of "helping Kiev to defeat Russia". Zelensky himself has also noticeably changed his rhetoric, warning his masters that Ukraine will lose without continued large-scale Western assistance. By doing so, he confirms what we have said repeatedly: Ukraine today is nothing more than a private military company that is fighting to the last Ukrainian for the West and with Western weapons. All that remains for the Kiev regime is to act, in a fit of impotent anger, in the worst terrorist traditions, purposefully shelling peaceful neighborhoods of Russian cities and committing real terrorist attacks. This is how it will go down in history: an inhuman and misanthropic regime of terrorists and Nazis who betrayed the interests of their people and sacrificed them for Western money and handouts for Zelensky and his inner circle.
Under these conditions, the attempts of the head of the Kiev regime to promote his "formulas" and convene "summits" cause nothing but bewilderment. Soon enough, the only topic for any international meetings on Ukraine will be the unconditional surrender of the Kiev regime. My advice is that everyone should prepare for this in advance.
Thank you.
