Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at the UNSC briefing on Ukraine
Point of order:
Mr. President,
Before we begin this meeting, I wish to draw attention to a number of procedural issues that are fundamental to understand what is happening.
As you know, the Slovenian Presidency’s work program for September did not include initially any “high-level briefings on Ukraine”. For the High-level Week, there was planned only one meeting, proposed by the Presidency, on an effectively unifying issue, namely Leadership for Peace. We could have had an interesting discussion to follow up on the issue of enhancing multilateral cooperation, which we raised during our presidency of the Security Council in July. This could have been the case, but obviously it will not, because the Western countries were unable to refrain from poisoning the atmosphere, and once again they tried to fill airtime with a hackneyed Ukrainian issue, which the rest of the world sees as such. The only reason they convened this meeting was to provide Mr. Zelensky with yet another concert venue at the United Nations, this time in the Chamber of the Security Council. As backing singers, he has today a whole group of EU and NATO members, who march in lockstep each time they are instructed to come to the Security Council to malign Russia.
This could even be a somewhat amusing illustration of how dependent these countries are on their big brothers from the NATO camp when it comes to their foreign policy agenda. But what we are witnessing now is yet another grim example of how the collective West is dealing blow after blow to the authority of the UN Security Council, in order to serve its geopolitical interests.
Today, the Slovenian Presidency intends to allow as many as eleven delegations to participate in the meeting under rules 37 and 39 of the UNSC Provisional Rules of Procedure, even though its format is not an open debate but a briefing, which, in accordance with established practice, does not provide for such a large number of participants from among non-Council members. What was the Presidency guided by when convened this “cheerleading squad”? We understand why Ukraine, the EU and countries bordering Ukraine participate in the briefing. But we can hardly understand why, say, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark, Italy are here. How are they specially affected by what is happening? For them, this is just an opportunity to make it into TV and practice their anti-Russian rhetoric. The Slovenian Presidency is perfectly aware of this. From the very beginning of its “watch” at the Council, the Presidency reaffirmed the commitment to improving the effectiveness of the Council’s work and pledged to strictly adhere to the established practices of this body.
However, all those promises appeared to be mere lip service, and Slovenia simply knuckled under its senior comrades from Brussels and other European countries. We regret that this took place. As a result, the Council will have to listen to “cookie-cutter” arguments drafted in Brussels by EU and NATO members, which provide no “added value” whatsoever to the discussion. I would like to warn you at once that we are not going to waste our time on listening to these “hackneyed” speeches.
Thank you for your attention.
Main statement:
Mr. President,
As for the eloquent British Foreign Minister who lectured us about imperialism — look who is talking! — I recommend that he reads our amendment to the Pact for the Future, based on the Article 2(7) of the UN Charter. Let him have a look at it first, and then tell us what he doesn’t accept there. Perhaps the reference to the UN Charter? He has already left the meeting, but I do hope that this will be conveyed to him.
Mr. President,
An absolutely horrific and inhumane military campaign is taking place today right before our very eyes. This is how the UN Secretary-General described it earlier in September: “The level of suffering we are witnessing is unprecedented in my mandate as Secretary-General of the United Nations. I’ve never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in the last few months.” The conflict has already claimed the lives of nearly 42,000 people, including more than 300 humanitarian workers. The territory, where 2 million people live, now lies in ruins, it has become uninhabitable and will remain so for years, if not decades. António Guterres previously dubbed this area a “graveyard for children” because so many women and children perished there. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council has been unable to achieve a ceasefire there (requested by all humanitarian workers without exception) for nearly a year now. This is due to the position of a single permanent member of the Security Council who cast a veto five times for this sake.
I believe it is evident to everyone that we are not speaking about Ukraine, but about the crisis in Gaza. For the difference between them to be even starker, let us recall that a year ago, after the beginning of the Israeli operation in the Strip, several thousand Israelis of Ukrainian origin moved to Ukraine, since they decided that they would be safer there. After all, the residents of Ukraine are perfectly aware that Russia does not carry out attacks against civilian objects unless they are used for military purposes. All such incidents hyped by the Ukrainian authorities happen because the Ukrainian air defence systems are operating from the residential areas of Ukrainian cities where they are deployed.
Under these circumstances, it is obvious why the whole world was expecting that the UN Security Council would bring together the eminent guests that have arrived to New York specifically to discuss the situation in Gaza. Moreover, the tectonic shifts caused by the crisis threaten to plunge the entire Middle East region, from Lebanon to Iran and Yemen, into a major and brutal regional conflict. In the last two days alone, almost 600 Lebanese were killed by Israeli strikes. However, Western members of the Security Council booked this chamber in advance specifically for the PR benefit of the “expired” Ukrainian president. If it were not for the Arab and developing countries who requested a meeting to be held on September 27th, the Security Council would not have discussed Gaza at all during this week.
All of this appears even more unseemly for the Council, given that what is happening around Ukraine is perfectly clear to all of us. Here is a brief recap for all you. The Kiev regime, which came to power as a result of 2014 coup d’état instigated by the West, immediately unleashed a violent civil war against the residents of the south and east of the country who were unwilling to renounce their identity and to bow to Nazi collaborationists. Because of this, the Maidan authorities lost Crimea almost immediately. Then in 2015, this conflict was frozen with the signing of the Minsk Package of Measures approved by the UN Security Council. However, instead of implementing this document, the new Ukrainian authorities took great pains to sabotage it, they actively armed themselves and prepared for war with Russia with the assistance of the United States and its allies, as a number of retired Western politicians admitted.
After the regime in Kiev categorically refused to implement the Minsk Agreements and its Western sponsors rebuffed any dialogue with Russia on European security issues, our country, having come face to face with a significant intensification of Ukrainian strikes targeting peaceful cities in the republics of Donbas, decided to launch a special military operation.
It could have ended one month later, when the Russian army was at the outskirts of Kiev, but the West dissuaded the Kiev’s ringleader from signing the draft peace treaty initialled by Ukraine in Istanbul, promising to do everything possible to support the Ukrainian army, which allegedly would be able to inflict defeat on Russia on the battlefield.
However, despite the bountiful supplies of weapons, including long-range weapons, deliveries of intelligence information, targeting, the deployment of mercenaries and instructors, and the West’s direct involvement in the conflict with the aim of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia with the hands of Ukrainians, the Ukrainian army today is on the verge of complete collapse. In order to be convinced of this, it suffices to read the military communiques stating the rapid destruction of Kiev’s fortification lines on the eastern front, which were erected over the course of almost 8 years.
To have the full picture, we should also take into account the fact that the recruitment of new soldiers, whom Zelensky’s regime is throwing to certain death in a pointless meat grinder, is being carried out almost exclusively by force as a result of raids. This is shown on videos which outraged Ukrainian citizens have posted, and the Ukrainian segment of the Internet is flooded with such images. In other words, the Ukrainians do not wish to go to war, they are trying their best to flee the country, and those who find themselves on the front without being appropriately trained, are attempting to either desert or surrender. Were it not for the barrier troops of deranged nationalists shooting them in the back, the number of prisoners would have been in the tens of thousands. For the same reason, the notorious “counter-offensive”, on which sponsors of Zelensky and his clique pinned great hopes, failed last year.
Understanding all of this, the head of the Kiev junta has decided to make use of the sole remaining chance to cling to power and to avoid reprisals from his own compatriots, namely by dragging the West into a direct confrontation with Russia. A large-scale Bucha-like provocation would have hit the bill, but it was so clumsy and so unpersuasive that the new one could not be convincing enough either. The other option would be to provoke a strong response on strikes with long-range western weapons targeting facilities deep within Russian territory, and then to “cry for help”. However, Western leaders, whose self-preservation instinct has not yet completely atrophied, have not yet taken this decision, or at least they are not eager to announce it.
Therefore, the Kiev’s ringleader decided to go all-in and, having lulled everyone with his reflections about peace, decided to launch a reckless attack on a peaceful Russian border region. However, here too, things did not go as planned. He did not achieve his goals and was forced to squander valuable human resources and Western equipment, which is in short supply, in the Kursk region while the collapse of the eastern front is under way, and at an unprecedented pace.
And here he is, in New York, once again with an extended hand, and once again he is attempting to persuade the states to “raise the stakes” in the conflict with Russia and throw their own sons to certain death in Ukraine, thus becoming a direct party to the conflict with a nuclear power. Zelensky has nothing to lose, but the US and its allies certainly do. And they are perfectly aware of the cost they will have to pay for an attempt to save the Ukrainian deadweight, “a suitcase without a handle”.
Mr. President,
Now actor Vladimir Zelensky is playing the role of a cool guy, an ally of the West and something even of the savior of all humankind from the Russian threat. He has become an ardent Russophobe and a fervent nationalist, who embraced the ideas of Bandera and other Hitler's henchmen at his mother's knee. However, the character who was sitting before us far from always played this role. To understand who we are dealing with, let's consider briefly the roles he has played over the last decade.
In the past, before being elected President and at the initial stage of his path to the country’s leadership, Mr. Zelensky was quite critical of the 2014 coup and called for an objective investigation into its “dark chapters”. Being a Russian-speaker himself, in 2014 he uttered the following words: “If people in eastern Ukraine and Crimea wish to speak Russian, back off, let them be. Let them speak Russian lawfully. Language will never divide our Motherland.” At the height of his election campaign in 2019, he announced that the oppression of the Russian language is unacceptable, he also spoke of the need to guarantee that Russian would develop on an equal footing with other languages. In addition, he promised to ensure a lasting ceasefire in Donbass. Not surprisingly, his program appealed to Ukrainian voters, and he won three-quarters of their votes in the election. What also played into his hands is that he gave interviews in Russian, he promised not to impose the cult of Nazi henchmen on those who do not regard them as heroes, and vowed to silence the guns in the east of the country, where the Ukrainian armed forces had been shelling peaceful towns for five years, killing women, the elderly, and children.
However, after the victory, he began to play a different role and failed to meet a single one of his promises. We can trace how he gradually betrayed the Ukrainian people and destroyed the state for the advancement of the interests of his Western sponsors. In his inauguration speech, he declared that the Ukrainian state should fight for the hearts and souls of the people of Donbass, not just for territories. Soon after coming to power, he began to sabotage the implementation of the Minsk Agreements; he supported all the most extremist laws against the Russian language and Russian speakers, and then even advised the residents of southeastern Ukraine who consider themselves Russians to move to Russia, and called them “specimens”.
I would like to ask Mr. Zelensky who called here today for respect for the UN Charter: How do these actions fit into the Charter? How do violations of basic human rights authorized by the leadership of the Ukraine fit in with it? Probably, you are ready to refer to only some parts of the document, namely the ones related to territorial integrity, aren’t you?
Instead of eradicating the root causes of the internal Ukrainian crisis that triggered the civil war, the new President of Ukraine decided to only exacerbate it. What the country faced was in fact a language “inquisition”; people were punished for the use of the Russian language, which is the mother tongue of the majority of Ukrainians. Even before Russia started its special military operation in Ukraine, the opposition was virtually destroyed, independent media outlets were shut down, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church was repressed, and nationalist and neo-Nazi groups flourished. In fact, everything that in one way or another connected Ukraine with Russia was outlawed, history was rewritten, and children were indoctrinated with delusional theories about the thousands years old Ukrainian civilization, from which the Jews, the Portuguese, and the French were descended. This is not a joke, this is not a fake. This is written in a geography textbook for the 8th grade of Ukrainian secondary school, and we have shown it here in this chamber.
Mr. President,
In western battle cries, Ukraine is portrayed as an “innocent victim of Russian aggression” and the United States and its allies – as peacekeepers. Nothing could be further from the truth than such assertions. Ukraine under the neo-Nazi Kiev regime has become a one-man dictatorship. And for the sake of preserving his power and in blind obedience to the West, the dictator is willing to not only drown the entire country in blood and sacrifice all young Ukrainians who were unable to flee the country, but also to push the world into the abyss of World War III. And just a few years ago V. Zelensky said the following: “I can assure you, for our heroes to not die any longer, I am willing to do anything. And I am certainly not afraid to make difficult decisions. I’m ready to lose my post without hesitation, if only for the advent of peace”. Now these phrases seem like something from the realm of fantasy, they have lost their relevance whatsoever. With his support among the population at an all-time low, he has a primordial fear of losing power, because he realizes that he will pay for all the crimes he committed while in office.
I would like to remind you that the next regular elections were to be held on March 31, but V. Zelensky canceled them under the pretext of martial law, which contradicts the country's Constitution. After May 20 this year, when the presidential powers should have been transferred (according to the Constitution) to the Speaker of the Verkhovnaya Rada, the leader of the Kiev junta turned into a conventional usurper of power. By the way, on August 28, the authorities of the ninth session of the Rada expired.
In the five years of his presidential term, he has brought the country entrusted to him to the abyss, selling out Ukraine to Western corporations, destroying its economy and plunging it into the deepest demographic crisis.
President Biden spoke today at the General Assembly about the need to save the Ukrainian nation. The Ukrainian nation is not threatened with anything. We are not fighting it. We are fighting against the criminal regime that has seized power in Kiev and is leading its people to disaster. And this is not a war “for territories”, as our foes claim. This is a battle for people's consciousness and people’s rights.
Mr. President,
A just and lasting resolution to the Ukrainian crisis is only possible when its root causes are eradicated. First and foremost, we are talking about the end of violations of the rights of the Russian-speaking population and the repeal of other discriminatory laws in Ukraine. Today from many corners, we hear calls for a political and diplomatic solution based on the United Nations Charter. However, there will be no resolution without overcoming the “Maidan legacy”, eradicating nationalism, Nazism and other manifestations of discrimination in Ukraine, without respect for the rights and fundamental freedoms of all without distinction as to race, gender, language and religion in accordance with Article 1.3 of the Charter. We have not heard about these seemingly obvious things either from our Western colleagues or from the UN Secretary General. Nor did we hear another important thesis that the purposes and principles of the Charter must be fully observed in their integrity, totality and interrelation. In addition to the provisions on respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, it also contains the principle of self-determination of peoples. That principle should never be overlooked, nor should be overlooked the principle of the responsibility of States for all their citizens without exception.
We hope that the Kiev regime will not be able to completely destroy their country and their people (which is already around the corner), nor push our world into the abyss of a nuclear catastrophe. For this purpose, it should promptly embrace realistic parameters for a long-term settlement of the Ukrainian crisis, rather than constantly slipping into some unrealistic ultimatums, plans for victory, etc. The price for this criminal “flipping arrogance” is paid by ordinary Ukrainians, whose resistance to the high-handed Kiev clique is visibly growing.
As far as we are concerned, Russia had always been ready to live in peace and good-neighborliness with Ukraine until it was shaped into an aggressive, Russophobic, neo-Nazi wasp nest, threatening our security, and began to make plans to draw it into the militaristic NATO bloc. We have always respected the Ukrainians; they are a brotherly people with whom we have unbreakable historical ties. It is no coincidence that several million of Ukrainians have found shelter in Russia. But if the Western camp will not allow us to get rid of this “cancerous tumor”(which is the current Kiev regime) by peaceful means, and if geopolitical and economic considerations of Washington and its satellites will persistently prevail over the goals to save the country, we will continue our special military operation until its objectives are attained by military means. If there is no other way to achieve peace.
Thank you for your attention.
