РУССКИЙ
13:04 29.08.2024 •
Dmitry Polyanskiy
Photo: The Permanent Mission of Russia to the United Nations
Statement by Chargé d’Affaires of the Russian Federation Dmitry Polyanskiy at UN Security Council Briefing on Ukraine:
Around mid-August, journalists accredited to the United Nations began asking us why Western members of the Security Council were in no hurry to convene a meeting on the situation in Ukraine this month. Could it really be, they wondered, that the USA and its allies decided to give up on their practice of artificially keeping the Ukrainian issue “afloat” in the Security Council, regardless of the real need to discuss it in the Council.
Of course, we could not answer for our Western colleagues, although we had some ideas why they acted like this. It was the August “Kursk adventure” – as Ukraine itself dubbed the reckless attack of Zelensky’s regime on the peaceful Russian border region – that made their Ukrainian underlings look too unsightly. Our Western colleagues could not ignore ample evidence showing Ukrainian nationalists in the Kursk region executing civilians, including pregnant women, who tried to leave the area of hostilities. There is also evidence that Ukrainian nationalists hit civilian cars, launch drones at ambulances, journalists and volunteers trying to rescue people from Ukrainian punishers, loot Russian villages and stores and post it all on the Internet. They do shell and destroy civilian objects, including residential buildings, schools and hospitals, harass civilians and take them hostage, while demonstratively using Nazi paraphernalia and symbols.
Moreover, all these barbarities are taking place in the territory with no military facilities, mostly populated by peaceful women, children and the elderly.
Furthermore, there has emerged irrefutable evidence that the Kiev regime was intentionally shelling the Kursk nuclear power plant and was planning to take over the plant during their armed operation. This kind of recklessness, which potentially could trigger a nuclear incident with tragic consequences for the whole of Europe, is the best rebuff to those who have tried and are trying to ignore the Kiev regime's attack on the ZNPP: this is what your unprincipled ostrich-like stance leads to.
Such ostentatious savagery is uncomfortable even for Washington, London and Brussels, which back in 2014 gave the Kyiv Nazis “carte blanche” to commit any crime. The Western sponsors of the Kiev regime were also clearly embarrassed by the fact that during the attack the Kyiv regime did not even bother to camouflage its true colors, which were revealed during the attack on the Kursk region and shocked many in the world.
It is clear that this is not the best background possible to convene a Security Council meeting, so our Western colleagues waited until the very end of the month and requested the meeting “under the wire”, hoping that the plan of the head of the Kiev regime will somehow become clearer by this time, and that there will be at least some positive results of his adventurous decision for Ukraine.
However, the rationale behind the suicidal Kursk adventure of the “expired” Ukrainian president has not become clearer. The results are even worse. In fact, Ukraine, at the cost of huge losses in military personnel and Western equipment, for some reason holds a few villages in the Kursk region, diverting scarce reserves, inter alia from the east, where Ukraine's frontline is collapsing because of this strategic blunder. The pace of the Russian troops’ advancement has accelerated significantly, with more and more settlements in Donbas being liberated every day. In the recent days alone, we have liberated Timofeevka, Novosyolovka I, Veseloye, Lisichnoye, Ivanovka, Sergeyevka, Sviridonovka, Zhelannoye, Mezhevoye, Artyomovo, Kamyshyovka, Orlovka, Konstatinovka, Novogrodovka, Kalinovo and Memrik.
Among others, we’ve recently liberated the village of Novgorodskoye, which used to be called New York for three years during the Maidan regime. Our units have already entered such strategically important points as Selidovo and Toretsk (which will soon become Dzerzhinsk), as well as Karlovka, and are approaching the most important transportation and logistics hub in Pokrovsk (which will soon become Krasnoarmeysk again). The average territory liberated daily has more than doubled In August compared to July and amounted to 11.2 square kilometers a day, while in recent days this figure has risen to almost 30 square kilometers.
At the same time, it is important to realize that, with the Ukrainian armed forces lacking in reserves to be used in the Kursk region, the Russian forces are now liberating the last strongholds that the Ukrainian armed forces used to reinforce and hold since 2014. And this is only the beginning; Ukraine will have to pay for the Kursk adventure in full. We therefore understand with what a heavy heart the Western co-conspirators of Zelensky’s regime requested today's meeting.
And the U.S. and its satellites must also bear in mind the fact that Ukraine’s armed forces are fighting with Western weapons in the Kursk region (they have no weapons of their own left). They are using and losing German and American tanks and targeting peaceful towns with Western artillery and MLRS. Moreover, Western mercenaries and consultants are fighting and dying in the Kursk forests and fields, and without them, the AFU can do nothing. This means that the complicity of Western countries in the crimes of the Kiev regime has become even more obvious to everyone.
Therefore, it would be naive to expect the USA and its NATO allies to make any kind of objective, or simply humane, assessment of what has been done by Ukrainian murderers, terrorists and looters. For such cases, our Western colleagues invoke a well-worn mantra of Kiev’s “right to self-defence” and “protection from Russian aggression”. Today these words sounded particularly untrue in this hall.
This reckless “Kursk adventure” undertaken by the Ukrainian president has another practical consequence. As you will recall, in June, the Russian President put forward a peace proposal to Ukraine that reflected the real situation on the front and took into account the genesis of the Ukrainian crisis. For some time after that, the rhetoric of the Kiev leaders was more peace-loving, and many of our colleagues from the Global South rushed to the conclusion that we were about to start peace talks. Colleagues, those of you who thought this way did not take into account that the Kiev regime is simply unable to negotiate, and this inability to negotiate was evident in the case of both the Minsk agreements and the draft peace deal initialed in Istanbul in 2022.
And this time, the Kiev regime once again deceived everyone who played along talking about peace, and finally decided for escalation by attacking the Kursk region. Thus, all of the questions were removed this way. I do hope that no one has any more illusions about it. We’ve never had any, and therefore we’ll continue to implement the goals of our special military operation establishing peace in Ukraine, which is something the Zelensky regime is not a bit interested in.
In conclusion, I would like to call on all those UN members whom Washington and its allies are now actively trying to lure into geopolitical games by bribing elites and turning them against their neighbors and other influential world players. Please, look at the example of unfortunate Ukraine and you will understand what such policies can lead to. Ukraine used to be the wealthiest of the post-Soviet republics with impressive industrial potential, but it almost suddenly became one of the poorest states of the former USSR. Its economy is destroyed, its industry is collapsed, its land is sold off to greedy Western corporations, Ukraine has become a testing ground for American bio-laboratories, and now it is also a testing ground for new Western weapons and utilization of old ones.
Introducing the so-called Western-style “democracy” has led to the total absence of freedom of speech (and even freedom of religion), to thousands of political prisoners, and to the dictatorship of the president. And the president not only failed to fulfill any of his pre-election promises of peace, but also led the country to a suicidal war with Russia, in which Ukraine plays the role of a PMC defending Western geopolitical interests. And as a result, the head of the Kiev junta also flouted the constitution of his country and trampled on it by refusing to hold elections, and today he is throwing hundreds of thousands of his citizens into a senseless meat grinder essentially just to stay in power.
This is the real disappointing outcome that Ukraine has achieved by the 33rd anniversary of its independence. This is the cost of the mistakes and blunders made by the Ukrainian leadership to please the West.
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