Statement by Chargé d'Affaires a.i. Dmitry Polyanskiy at a UNSC Briefing on Ukraine
Mr. President,
To tell the truth, when we found out about the request by our Western colleagues to hold today’s meeting on Ukraine, we thought for a moment that such an intention was prompted by the poignant letter addressed to the UNSC President by a group of Ukrainian political prisoners, which we received in early July. Let me remind you that the letter was signed by well-known politicians, human rights defenders, civil servants, and members of parliament who are now prisoners of the Zelensky regime – Elena Berezhnaya, Vyacheslav Boguslaev, Vitaly Gordina, Artem Dmitruk, Alexander Dubinsky, Oleg Kulinich, Miroslav Oleshko, Alexander Oleynikov, and Yuri Ryabukha.
All of you have had the opportunity to read this letter and see for yourselves that the number of political prisoners in Ukraine runs into the thousands. Constitutional norms and laws are not being upheld, and people are being thrown into prison just for “calling for peace and elections, for opposing the war between Slavic peoples, for their religious and political beliefs, for criticizing forced mobilization, and for their civic stance.” Thus, Ukrainian political prisoners are calling on the UNSC to assist in lifting “all unlawful sanctions imposed since the beginning of the war against Ukrainian citizens as these are unconstitutional and repressive measures of political persecution.” This is essentially not just a letter, but a cry from the heart!
Back then, we did not draw the Council's attention to this document so as not to give any grounds for our foes to pass it off as Russian propaganda, as they always do in similar situations. Suffice it to recall the American citizen Gonzalo Lira, who was tortured to death behind bars by the Security Service of Ukraine in January 2024 – his revelations regarding human rights violations in Ukraine were also presented by the Kiev regime as Russian propaganda. Any criticism of the Ukrainian authorities – as the authorities themselves put it – is now Russian propaganda. This unsophisticated logic applies today as well.
The forced mobilization mentioned in the joint appeal by human rights activists is – as the Kiev clique alleges – also nothing but “concoctions of the Kremlin.” However, all Ukrainians know that Zelensky's military commissariats, or Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCRs), are literally abducting people in broad daylight – on the streets, in malls, in pharmacies, in sports clubs. They use the most brutal and sometimes inhumane methods. There are hundreds, if not thousands of cases of draftees being killed or maimed, which is something that all Ukrainians are talking about, but the Ukrainian authorities are blatantly denying. There is a plethora of videos on social media showing men being grabbed on the streets, ripped from their families, brutally beaten and shoved into buses, with their little children being often left alone on the streets – but Ukrainian officials cynically dub them as “Moscow Film Studio productions.” If we were to believe the Ukrainian authorities, Ukrainians are eagerly lining up to go to the front. Can you imagine how ordinary Ukrainians feel when they hear such vile lies?
Recently, however, this system of collective lies and mutual cover-ups had a crash. During a routine raid, draft officers of one of the TCRs in Zakarpatye seriously injured 45-year-old József Sebestyén, an ethnic Hungarian and citizen of both Ukraine and Hungary. He was taken to hospital, where he died a few weeks later. And this is despite the fact that Mr. Sebestyen had been deemed unfit for conscription for health reasons. There are hundreds of such cases involving Ukrainians – it is a new normality for the “Zelensky concentration camp,” which is how Ukrainians themselves have long labeled their country. And only for our Western colleagues is this topic taboo. This legal free-for-all is being hushed up by all European and American human rights activists, who have been instructed to speak about Ukraine either positively or nothing at all. No one abroad was supposed to ever find out about this poor soul, but to dismay of Zelensky and his sponsors, this person turned out to be a Hungarian.
Thus, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry protested decisively over the killing of their national and demanded an official explanation. In response, the Ukrainian authorities claimed that the draftee had supposedly attempted to escape and died in hospital of natural causes. Of course, the Ukrainian side, as in all similar cases, despite the obvious facts, refused to bear any responsibility for the man's death. This lie, of course, did not satisfy Budapest, and the scandal rages on.
Mr. President,
It is a good thing that we have Hungary. The country has taken a principled stance and, unlike the overwhelming majority of other EU countries, is unwilling to turn a blind eye to the dictatorship that has become entrenched in Ukraine. But who will stand up for the other unfortunate Ukrainians who have been forcibly mobilized and thrown against their will into the meat grinder by the regime headed by the presumptuous Kiev princeling only to serve Western geopolitical interests? Who, for example, will stand up for an elderly woman from the town of Merefa in the Kharkov region who the other day tried to stop a draft officer from taking her son away? With her last ounce of strength, she clung to the hood of a minibus carrying draftees, not letting it move, but the draft officers brutally pushed her away, leaving her unconscious right on the road. Images of this assault against a mother caused outrage across Ukraine. Try to guess what Zelensky's posse said in response. You’re right, they qualified this all as “Russian propaganda.”
Ukrainians have become accustomed to the fact that justice is simply unattainable, and those violating all legal norms in their country, including the Constitution, will hardly be punished. In those rare cases when criminal proceedings are initiated against draft officers for abuse of power, the State Bureau of Investigations, which is in charge of pre-trial investigations, simply finds no corpus delicti.
What can ordinary people do in these conditions, given that they have long refused to go to war? We increasingly see them blocking roads and entries to their towns, so that draft officers, or “manhunters,” could not simply reach them. Needless to say, Ukrainians fiercely hate TCRs officers and call them “polizei” (this term was used to refer to fascist punishers during the occupation of Ukraine in World War II). The hatred and despair have reached such a point that people are actively posting and sending the coordinates of those TCRs to the Russian military, and they are celebrating when we strike them. This is what the former comedian and self-professed dictator of all Ukraine has bestowed upon his people.
Mr. President,
When preparing for today's meeting, we were expecting that Western cheerleaders of Ukraine would finally mention the intensifying persecution of canonical Orthodox Christians. This is all the more so given that on July 2, the Ukrainian president issued a decree revoking the Ukrainian citizenship of Metropolitan Onufry, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on the grounds that, according to some pseudo-evidence gathered by the Ukrainian Security Service, he allegedly has Russian citizenship, which the clergyman himself denies. He is also accused of maintaining contacts with the Moscow Patriarchate and “consciously opposing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gaining canonical independence from the Moscow Patriarchate, representatives of which openly support Russian aggression against Ukraine.” And this is happening in a country where freedom of religion and the separation of church and state are enshrined in the Constitution.
In general, the medieval inquisition could have learned a lot from the Zelensky regime when it comes to persecuting dissent and “witch hunts.” And as for our Western colleagues – they just drop their eyes in shame when we point out what is being done by the authorities they've cultivated in Ukraine. And today, of course, not a single word was uttered about this outrageous situation.
What our Western colleagues also keep silence on today is yet another aspect of this “witch hunt” that the Kiev princeling has lately become so obsessed with. Having learned that independent anti-corruption agencies had gathered compromising information and were about to initiate criminal cases against him and his inner circle, the president leveraged his pocket parliament to pass a law that puts these agencies under the sway of the Prosecutor General's Office, which is accountable to him. Right now, as we speak, his henchmen are busy destroying documents exposing corruption in the highest echelons of power, incriminating the Kiev usurper and his posse in embezzling billions of dollars of budget funds and Western aid. After obtaining files containing incriminating evidence, they formally “backtracked” – supposedly in response to uproar in Ukrainian society and abroad. It is noteworthy that the bodies under attack were set up under pressure from the West and presented as an “antidote to corruption.” Hence the criticism coming from European capitals today. However, we’ve heard nothing about it today.
I cannot but mention the recent desecration of the Lvov memorial complex “Hill of Glory,” which can only be construed as an affront to the memory of countless victims of fascism and those who fell fighting Nazism, as well as disrespect to the immortal feat of the citizens of the Soviet Union. To advance their self-serving interests, the Ukrainian authorities unconscionably exhumed the remains of 355 Soviet warriors, including heroes of the Soviet Union, who died in the battles to liberate Lvov from German fascists. Not one of the Western representatives, nor the UN Secretariat, found the courage to condemn these shameful atrocities by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. This is despite the fact that the UN General Assembly every year adopts a resolution “Combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to the escalation of contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance", which emphasizes that it is inadmissible to destroy monuments and memorials erected in memory of those who fought against Nazism during World War II, and to illegally exhume and transfer the remains of the soldiers.
So why did we convene today's meeting, if not to discuss the issues I’ve just mentioned? As it turns out, once again, it was only to artificially keep the Ukrainian file afloat at the Security Council, especially amidst of the ongoing carnage and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, about which our Western colleagues are much less eloquent. This meeting also provides an opportunity for them to once again criticize Russia for methodically and consistently destroying military infrastructure and facilities related to Ukraine’s military capabilities, blowing up warehouses with Western-supplied ammunition and equipment, and targeting sites where Ukrainian military personnel, foreign instructors, and mercenaries are concentrated. In a word, Russia is doing everything it should be doing in a war imposed by NATO countries. Does this ritualistic propaganda narrative of our Western colleagues merit a UNSC meeting being convened?
Don’t waste your time, don’t waste ours, ladies and gentlemen. We destroyed, are destroying, and will continue to destroy military infrastructure of the Kiev regime as part of the demilitarization of this country, which is one of the objectives of our special military operation. We do not target civilian objects, which are affected solely due to the operation of the Ukrainian air defense systems stationed in residential areas of cities in violation of IHL norms. Ordinary Ukrainians are well aware of this – it is not Russian strikes that they fear, but rather the actions of their own soldiers. They also know that it is not them who we are fighting, but the Kiev regime, which has sacrificed the country along with all Ukrainians for the sake of the Western anti-Russian project. The more military supplies you send to the Kiev regime, the more we strike. This is not our choice; we have long and consistently proposed resolving the Ukrainian crisis through diplomacy. But that does not suit you, you are still willing to continue this war against Russia using Ukraine’s hands, and you appear completely unconcerned that there are fewer and fewer Ukrainians left. And that is why you are stubbornly trying to ignore how the utterly corrupt Kiev regime is seeking to save the skin of Zelensky and his posse, putting the future of their country at risk.
We will discuss this in detail at a separate meeting that we have requested for July 31. At that meeting we suggest focusing on actions that undermine the search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian conflict, including attempts to derail the direct Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul.
Thank you.
