Statement by Chargé d'Affaires of the Russian Federation Dmitry Polyanskiy at UNSC briefing on Ukraine
Mr.President,
At the outset, let me underscore our principled disagreement with the excessive number of delegations who have been admitted to speak under Rules 37 and 39 at this briefing. We assume the best and the most logical option would be to have two – the delegations of Ukraine and the European Union. It would have been the same thing that the Chinese Presidency wisely did back in November given an understanding that all the rest would be able to submit their statements in writing. The other three delegations who will speak today are NATO and EU members who have consolidated approaches on Ukraine. It is absolutely clear that their statements will have no added value today, exactly like in previous similar situations.
Each and every time, the Security Council has to waste time listening to the carbon-copied talking points that “junior” NATO and EU members read out on camera for some internal political gains. Mr.President, this undermines the authority of this Council.
Colleagues,
We have just heard the reports by Miroslav Jenča and Ramesh Rajasingham, which show that nothing extraordinary has happened in Ukraine that requires an open meeting of the United Nations Security Council. Before, such meetings at least would be called following tragedies in residential areas of Ukrainian cities that were groundlessly attributed to the Russian armed forces and that later turned out to be caused by Ukrainian air defense systems that were deployed near civilian objects in violation of international humanitarian law. Alternatively, there were attempts to pass off as such tragedies our attacks on UAF depots and warehouses disguised in supermarkets, granaries or other port facilities, or on such locations as hotels, hostels or recreation centers in case they were used as stations for soldiers of the Kiev regime or foreign mercenaries. Of course, the truth always came to surface either through Ukrainian posting on social media footage of detonating munitions, or through numerous obituaries of eliminated militants and nationalists that, again, appeared on social media networks.
For today, our Western colleagues were not able to find even as tentative a reason as that to convene a meeting. But it is important for them to try to keep the Ukrainian issue "afloat" in the UN Security Council by any means. And for this purpose they need to gather us in this chamber from time to time. Even though it looks cynical against the fact that the same countries still do not see the unfolding real humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip, where in two months, according to the UN Secretary-General, more children have died than in any conflict during his tenure. He called Gaza a children's graveyard, for that matter. However, according to the perverted logic of Western countries, this gives no reason to discuss this issue in the UN Security Council, because putting things this way would disadvantage them in geopolitical terms and present their strategic ally in an unfavorable light. That is why they prefer to gather us in the Security Council on Ukraine to promote anti-Russian invectives or, for example, on Syria – to advance anti-Syrian narratives during the absolutely void yet regular UNSC meetings on the Syrian chemical file.
In fact, the United States and its allies do not really care for Ukrainians. This was already clear at the stage when in April 2022, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin, arrogantly dissuaded the head of the Kiev regime from signing the draft peace treaty with Russia, which had been initialed already. Today, Kiev is frankly "punching the air", realizing that Ukraine will not have such favorable conditions for a peace deal any more. And many people already admit the obvious openly: in order to avoid an imminent collapse, the Kiev regime only needed to fulfill the Minsk Agreements, that is, to treat its own citizens like any normal state that claims to be a democracy. Namely, to stop shelling and killing them and to give them the same rights to national, cultural and historical self-identification as to other residents of Ukraine.
However, this scenario, as we all know today from many sources, was not beneficial for the Western sponsors of Zelensky's regime, who had orchestrated the anti-constitutional coup d'état on the Maidan almost 10 years ago. As former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President François Hollande admitted, they had not been arming Ukraine for seven years and preparing it for a war with Russia under the cover of the Minsk Agreements to just let our two brotherly peoples live in peace and harmony again.
Of course, colonial approaches mattered too. Our African and Asian colleagues remember very well how former European colonial powers had been dividing neighboring countries for decades by drawing artificial borders, fomenting and provoking wars and conflicts. Nothing has changed in their behavior over the years neither in Africa nor, in fact, in Ukraine, which they were preparing for years for the role of a pawn in their geopolitical struggle against Russia.
If we remain mindful of this obvious geopolitical context, there is no question why the already mentioned Boris Johnson had dissuaded, according to the recent testimony of Zelensky's fellow partisan David Arahamiya, the head of the Kiev junta from making peace with Russia with the following remarkable words: "Let's just make war!". And the EU's chief diplomat, Mr. Borrell of the self-proclaimed "blossoming garden" (and author of the idea to take money for the cause of war from the European Peace Fund) also said last April that “this war must be won on the battlefield".
And so Ukraine started fighting and promoting delusional Western slogans about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. And it has already gotten to the point where it is running out of soldiers, whom Zelensky’s regime is ruthlessly throwing into so-called "meat assaults". In Ukrainian society, conscription has long been known as "conscription to grave." People do not want to go to a sure and senseless death so badly that the average age of conscripts is approaching 50. As reported by the Ukrainian media the other day, the first batch of 17-year-old conscripted orphans were trained at the reserve training center "Gaidamatska-Sich". They were supposed to be deployed only in the rear areas of Kharkov region, namely in the 103rd Territorial Defense Brigade. However, the Ukrainian authorities, as usual, deceived everyone, and on December 3, one of the orphans died on the front line. Principal of the orphanage reported this on social media.
Zelensky and his associates are already creating a kind of "Hitlerjugend", just like the head of the Third Reich before its inevitable and inglorious end in May 1945. It is noteworthy that the agony of the Kiev regime and its “Führer” already becomes so obvious that his associates, like spiders in a jar, have started to squabble and fight for power turning away from their leader. In the last couple of weeks, only a lazy person in Zelensky's circle has not warned the media that a brutal dictatorship is forming in Ukraine, corruption is flourishing, fatal military miscalculations are being made, and everything generally goes wrong. We have been talking about this at Security Council meetings for a long time, but now even internal Ukrainian players (Arahamiya, Zelensky's former adviser Arestovich, or Kiev's mayor Klitschko) also make such revelations. There is also growing criticism of the blatant lawlessness promoted by Zelensky and his clique in their attempt to destroy canonical Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine.
I wonder when our Western colleagues who continue to invest their taxpayers' money in the criminal and corrupt regime in Kiev are going to realize the obvious. Some begin (though very slowly) to see the light, but this is not yet a trend. That is why we have proposed to discuss the implications of the ongoing deliveries of Western weapons to Ukraine for the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian crisis at a separate meeting of the UN Security Council on December 11. Also, these days mark 10 years since protests on the Maidan aquare in Kiev, after which Ukraine, through the efforts of the United States and its allies, has taken a fatal path that does not correspond to its national interests. In view if this, we will hold an informal Arria meeting of the Security Council this month where we will give the floor to participants of those tragic events.
Colleagues, since some Western delegations have touched upon the so-called grain deal today and at the previous such meeting of the Council and blamed Russia almost for causing hunger in Ukraine, I would like to make the following remarks before concluding my statement. If Ukrainians were really in such a dire situation as our Western colleagues try to make it seem, Kiev would probably not export such tremendous quantities of grain. According to expert estimates, in 2022-2023, almost 50 million tonnes of grain have been exported from supposedly "starving" Ukraine. Between January and August this year, food was sold for $14.6 billion, of which the main items are cereals, including wheat and corn. Here is my question. How does this trend correlate with the assessments of our Western colleagues about the so-called "new famine" in this country? If this is true, then you are actually contributing to this famine by pushing Kiev to supply grain to rich and well-nourished EU countries. Then, by the same logic, carriers from Eastern European countries who block trucks with Ukrainian grain at the border, are fighting this famine and prevent food from being taken out of the supposedly starving Ukraine.
As for the prospects of resuming the Black Sea Initiative, we have repeatedly expressed our position. Under the guise of this project, we have been deceived both by the Kiev regime who used the BSI to attack Russian facilities directly from the humanitarian passages and by Western countries who failed to implement anything of the Russia-UN memorandum, which was an integral part of the deal. Unless this is done and we receive guarantees that the West and Zelensky’s regime will fulfill provisions of the initiative, its revival is out of the question.
Thank you.
