Statement by Chargé d'Affaires of the Russian Federation Dmitry Polyanskiy at UNGA meeting on Ukraine
Colleagues,
Today's meeting represents yet another attempt by our Western colleagues to impose their vision of the situation in Ukraine. It is hard to view otherwise the agenda items which were the formal reason for this gathering. It is quite clear that the situation"on the ground has changed fundamentally and that we are already in a hot phase of the Ukrainian conflict. In this connection, I believe it would be appropriate to assess in my statement the situation on the ground and the prospects for a peaceful settlement of the crisis in Ukraine.
I hope that in the time that has passed since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, most of our colleagues from developing countries have conceived a clear understanding of what is happening. After all, no matter how much the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime talk about Russia’s alleged "unprovoked war of choice" in Ukraine, the facts show the opposite. Obviously, if the Kiev regime, which came to power in 2014 following an unconstitutional West-sponsored coup d'état, had not declared a war on everything Russian, had not set troops to Eastern Ukraine against unarmed peaceful cities, we would not be discussing the Ukrainian crisis here today. And also, Crimea, and then Donbas and a number of other Ukrainian territories would not have seceded from Ukraine to join Russia. For this, the Ukrainian authorities only needed to respect the rights of the Russian-speaking population of the country, who, according to the most conservative and rather understated estimates, accounted for more than 40% of the entire population in 2014. To demand respect for one’s right to speak their native language, profess their own faith and honor the heroes who had liberated their homeland from the fascists – is it something illegal?
In other countries it is called democracy, inter-ethnic peace and respect for diversity. This is how these issues are approached elsewhere but post-Maidan Ukraine. That country has outlawed everything Russian and started to praise as heroes all those who collaborated with the Nazis to kill tens and hundreds of thousands of peaceful Jews, Russians, Poles, Roma and fellow Ukrainians during the Second World War.
Of course, the Ukrainian minister who spoke before me would not tell you this, because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find a rational explanation for such an anti-people policy. But this is only if you perceive Ukraine as an independent, sovereign state, defending its own interests in the international arena and within its own country. Sad as it may be, Ukraine cannot be considered as such after 2014.
Today it is already obvious that the coup of 2014 was orchestrated by Western countries, primarily the United States, with quite clear goals: to make Ukraine "anti-Russia", arm it and prepare it for a war with my country. For this purpose, as we all know today, the Minsk Agreements were used, which neither Kiev nor its Western sponsors were ever going to fulfill. Another task was to move the conflict into a hot phase. This is exactly what happened in February 2022. As a result, today we all see the Kiev regime to have lost almost all of its own weapons and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Kiev is like an addicted drug user – it survives only thanks to massive influx of Western armaments. At the same time, the Kiev regime is taking great pains trying to prove able to defeat a nuclear power if given more weapons. And in this "vicious circle" tens of thousands of young Ukrainians are dying. As we know from social media, young people are being grabbed in the streets of Ukraine and thrown rights into the "Azov grinder” - that's the name they had given to the notorious stalled counteroffensive of Ukrainian forces.
To distract the population from this discouraging reality and from the failure at the recent NATO summit, Zelensky's regime is taking high-profile actions, which, however, have no military significance and are typical of international terrorists. These include assassinations or attempted assassinations of opinion leaders in Russia, shelling of Russian regions, and terrorist attacks like yesterday's explosion on the Crimean Bridge. It all looks pathetic and more like an agony.
A question arises: what are the Ukrainian interests in all this? The interests of Western states are clear. They want to set two fraternal peoples against one another in a classical neocolonial spirit, try to weaken Russia and make it bleed out as much as possible in order to prevent its revival as a world power or at least delay the emergence of a new multipolar world. In addition to that, they want to get rid of old decommissioned weapons by sending them to Ukraine, test new models there if possible, wheedle money out of taxpayers to re-equip their national armed forces while in the meantime letting their arms industries earn extra money - of course, not without some lucre for to the highest echelons of power.
But what is Ukraine’s interest? Be a devastated and a deindustrialized country (as we know, this process began immediately after the signing of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement) from where the majority of working-age population has moved westwards as labor migrants? Poison the fertile soil with depleted uranium shells supplied by the UK or cluster munitions supplied by the US? Raise a whole generation in the spirit of hatred of everything foreign, fierce nationalism and worship of Nazi criminals? Provide its people as "lab rats" for American bio-laboratories in Ukraine?
And this will be the legacy of Zelensky, who was elected by almost three-quarters of voters in 2019 thanks to slogans about protecting the Russian language and seeking a peaceful solution to the Donbas problem. That is, thanks to the promises that he never even tried to deliver on.
Another thing he will left behind is an unthinkable level of corruption and a rabid totalitarian dictatorship, where opposition and freedom of speech are banned, where the dissidents or those who are suspected of sympathizing with Russia are thrown into prison or duct-taped to lampposts in the streets. Where unprecedented persecution of canonical Orthodox Christianity is taking place, with churches being raided or set on fire, priests and parishioners being detained and prosecuted. Is this what Ukraine's national interests are all about? I really do not want to believe it, because we still think of Ukrainians as brothers and sisters and are always ready to live in good neighborly peace and harmony, as we did before 2014. It was in Russia where several million Ukrainians settled down voluntarily after the Maidan coup and the beginning of the hot phase of the Ukrainian crisis. Contrary to what you may hear from Western and Ukrainian propaganda, we never had a goal to destroy the Ukrainian identity or Russify Ukraine. We were quite happy with Ukraine the way it used to be. But we could not and will not tolerate blatant violations of the rights of the Russian-speaking population (which are not warranted by the constitution of Ukraine itself), the whitewashing and glorification of Nazi henchmen, and the shelling of peaceful towns in Donbas.
It was to protect them that our special military operation was launched in 2022 after Ukraine and its Western patrons had finally forsaken the Minsk agreements. We have always been prepared to attain the objectives of the special operation through peaceful, diplomatic means as well. But this did not fit the interests of Washington, London and Brussels, which prevented Ukraine from concluding a treaty that was initialed in March 2022 and included security guarantees satisfactory to the Ukrainian side without the country's accession to NATO. As a result, Ukraine was deceived into a belief that with the help of weapons from the collective West it would defeat Russia, that Ukraine was supposedly fighting for some democratic values and freedoms. In order to make sure that there was no turning back for Ukraine and in order to influence the opinion of the global audience in the right way, a disgusting provocation in Bucha was organized, after which myths started to spread about Russia’s alleged crimes. Ukrainian Foreign Minister who spoke before me was replicating those myths again.
We will hear more about these myths today. That’s for sure. These allegations are worth even less that the paper they are printed on. After all, in modern Western society, it is not facts and truth that matter, but a correct way to present information, even if what is presented is a complete lie. We have seen this on many occasions – when Russia was accused of meddling in the US elections, downing of MH-17, poisoning of the Skripals and Navalny. The Western society has been living in world where truth is irrelevant.
The question is if other states want to live in the same world or they want facts and evidence. This scenario is exactly what our Western opponents are very much afraid of, because they have neither facts nor evidence. There is only crass unconcealed Russophobia and a desire to ban Russia and everything connected with it – language, culture, sport.
Dear colleagues from non-NATO and non-EU states or their satellites, many of you reach out to us and ask what needs to be done for peace in Ukraine and how international mediators can help. We are grateful to all those who sincerely want peace and are worried about what is happening. If peace depended on ordinary Ukrainians and not on the puppet regime in Kiev, it would have come long ago. But today in Ukraine Russia is dealing primarily with Washington and its NATO allies, who are waging on us a "proxy war" to be fought until the last Ukrainian. So far, peace in Ukraine is not part of their plan.
They have not yet got rid of their futile hopes of defeating Russia on the battlefield with the hands of Ukrainians, although they have already begun to realize something over the past two months. So far their so-called "creative thinking" is still unable to produce anything other than Zelensky's notorious “peace plan", which, of course, is not even close to being a peace plan. They have not got rid of old weapons either. So the West continues to keep Zelensky's regime on a leash.
Therefore we have to be addressing the tasks of the special operation militarily, which include demilitarization and denazification of the criminal Kiev regime, destruction of its logistical and energy infrastructure in order to weaken and reduce its military capabilities, and ensure that our country and our citizens are never again exposed to a threat from Ukraine.
However, the more of you dare to tell the truth about the root causes of the Ukrainian conflict and the fact that the West does not care about Ukraine, but only cares about its own interests and about weakening Russia, the more chances there will be that the Ukrainian crisis ends sooner. This is how you can really help today.
I would like to believe that we hear such realistic assessments from unbiased member-states already in this meeting.
Thank you.
