Photo: The Permanent Mission of Russia to the UN
Statement by Chargé d'Affaires of the Russian Federation Dmitry Polyanskiy at UN Security Concil briefing on the issue of a systematic use of terrorist methods by Ukraine. Key points:
- Today we offer to discuss the terrorist essence of the Ukrainian government, which was formed after the deadly anti-constitutional coup d'état of 2014, sponsored by Washington and Brussels. For Russians, as well as the Ukrainians who are not zombified by Bandera’s ideology, this is an obvious thing that needs no explanation. At the same time, our Western colleagues who live in a world where the truth no longer plays any role, for whom black has gone white and vice versa, of course, will not hear or heed anything. But we are not doing this for them, rather for those of you who have not yet lost the ability to think and analyze.
- At the outset, I would like to quote one of the most eloquent “talking heads” of the Kiev regime, former adviser to V.Zelensky, O.Arestovich, who by the way pretends to be rather open-minded, even liberal. He said in an interview, “Zaluzhny (head of the Armed Forces of Ukraine) solves two problems, access to the sea and cutting off the land corridor, cutting off Crimea, demolishing the bridge and that's it. Two million Crimean citizens will have nothing to do without water and food, and then we can negotiate." That is, one of the leading ideologists of the Kiev regime asserts that the task of the Ukrainian forces is to take Crimeans hostage and start bargaining. This is a classic terrorist scheme, in the spirit of ISIL militants or Chechen terrorists who took civilians hostage (including children in Beslan in 2004) and were doing it with the tacit connivance of Western moralizers. Today, the latter will remain silent again, that’s for sure.
- At this point, I must underscore that Crimea that has been thriving and receiving millions of tourists since it reunited with my country, has been a pain in the neck of the Kiev regime for many years. According to Kiev's playbook, Crimea is supposed to be depressed and engulfed in protests. Hence their blind desire to punish the Crimeans and retaliate. Hence the two attacks of a terrorist character on the Crimean Bridge that took place on 8 October 2022 and 17 July 2023, for which the Kiev regime did not hesitate to take responsibility.
- We must bear in mind that the bridge has long been a solely civilian infrastructure. It ensures passenger and cargo transit, as well as railroad connectivity with the peninsula. There has long been no need to use it for transporting military supplies. Both Kiev and Western capitals are well aware of that. Head of SBU Vasyl Malyk called the first attack “an implementation” of SBU. Deputy Minister of Defense Anna Malyar labelled it as a “success of Ukrainian army”. What’s noteworthy is that the tactic for the first attack was again borrowed from ISIL. The driver of the truck that was laden with explosives was used blindly as a suicide bomber. Among the victims there were only civilians.
- The regime in Kiev mostly attacks not our military facilities, warehouses and fuel depots, but rather peaceful cities and objects that may be located as far as thousands of kilometers away from the combat zone. Also, Kiev resorts to ISIL-style methods of individual terror. What is the military expediency in shelling villages in Russia's border regions, where no military facilities are situated and only civilians become killed and injured? How can one justify the cowardly trips of Ukrainian sabotage and recon teams that do not shy away from shooting the fleeing children in the back, as in the Bryansk region? And what is the military threat that Daria Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky or Zakhar Prilepin pose to Ukraine? They did not take up arms on the battlefield. Their only weapon was words. By assaulting them, the Kiev regime, following the classic terrorist tradition, wanted to silence down and intimidate those in Russia and Ukraine who are not afraid to speak the truth about the developments in that country and the doings of Zelensky’s regime.
- What is the military expediency in launching random drone strikes on Moscow and other Russian cities? This being said, one must realize that dozens, if not hundreds, of terrorist attacks that the Security Service of Ukraine planned on the Russian territory have been prevented by the Russian security services. Such reports pop up in the news almost daily. Another pointless step in terms of gaining military advantage was made on July 22, 2023. On this day, US-supplied cluster munitions were used in the Zaporozhye region against a civilian car with journalists on board. The strike killed Rostislav Zhuravlev, a correspondent from RIA Novosti, and inflicted wounds of varying severity on four of his colleagues.
- Colleagues, there is one more mistake that I want to warn you against. One should not indulge into thinking that the regime in Kiev started to turn to terrorist methods only after the special military operation began in February 2022. In reality, Kiev demonstrated its terrorist essence after the 2014 coup. When the United States and the European Union financed and orchestrated the deadly coup of Maidan, they were well aware what exact forces they were bringing to power. Turchinov, Parubyi, Tyagnibok, Bilyi, Biletsky and their likes, (nationalists and radicals, criminals and extremists), were using terrorist methods in plain sight of their Western sponsors – to overthrow the legitimately elected government.
- The first to fall prey to them were the dissidents – Ukrainian politicians, journalists, public activists. On 18 February 2014, radicals threw Molotov cocktails at a branch of the ruling party, the Party of Regions. They started a fire and beat the people who tried to escape the office. Two people died.
- The same terrorist tactic was used in Odessa on 2 May 2014. Organized armed groups of nationalists, with the connivance of the police and authorities, turned a rally against the self-appointed "Maidan authorities" into a massacre. They drove the protestors in the building of the Trade Union House, then blocked the doors from the outside, and set the lower floors on fire with Molotov cocktails. They did what they could to let no one escape. Those who jumped from upper floors were killed on the ground. In total, about 50 people died at the hands of the neo-fascists.
- It would seem that looking at this terrible atrocity, the collective West, which advocates (as it says) for human rights and the fight against impunity, finally should have thought about who exactly it had brought to power. Alas, foreign support for the nationalists and radicals kept growing, giving the latter a sense of complete impunity.
- As a result, the flywheel of reprisals against dissidents was spinning ever more strongly. On April 15, 2015, O.Kalashnikov, a former member of the Verkhovna Rada from the Party of Regions, was killed at the door of his Kiev apartment. The next day, on April 16, journalist O.Buzina was shot dead near his home in Kiev. On July 20, 2017, well-known Russian and Ukrainian journalist P.Sheremet was blown up in a car in Kiev. Their killers were never held accountable.
- A multifold increase in violence in Ukraine occurred in April 2014, when "the acting president of Maidan", O.Turchynov, signed a decree to launch the so-called anti-terrorist operation. It gave start to a years-long campaign of extermination of the Russian-speaking population in Donbas, who refused to accept the outcome of the coup d’état. One of its characteristic features were the bombardments of peaceful towns, which were absolutely pointless from the military perspective.
- On 2 June 2014, Lugansk was targeted by air strikes that hit children day care, a garden square, residential buildings, city council building. 8 civilians died, 28 people were injured. 27 July 2014 went down in the collective memory of the people of Gorlovka as the “Red Sunday of Donetsk”. On this day, a massive air strike by Ukrainian artillery killed 13 people including children and injured dozens more. Every year since then, Russia has commemorated the children of Donbas who were killed by Ukrainian strikes. Western support instilled an intoxicating feeling of impunity in the “Maidan authorities”. From 2014 to 2022, this tactic of targeting peaceful towns that have no military facilities (which is something typical of terrorists) has claimed thousands of civilian lives. We do not have enough time today to list all the facts of Ukrainian crimes against the population of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
- After Russia started its special military operation, the Kiev regime has included more terrorist techniques in its toolkit. The Ukrainian military and nationalists borrowed "human shield" tactics from ISIL (baned in Russia). Artillery positions and ammunition depots were deliberately set up in schools, hospitals and residential buildings in order to hide behind the civilians. Particularly diligent was the neo-Nazi battalion “Azov”, which was stationed in Mariupol and is listed as a terrorist group in Russia. We have in our possession Azov's guidelines for turning residential high-rise buildings into "sandwiches" with the first and last floors occupied by the military and civilians being held hostage in the middle.
- Kiev also uses terrorist methods to address political tasks. For instance, the blast that took place on 5 June in the Kharkov Region at the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline, which is critical for global food security.
- Alongside with terrorist methods, heinous provocations were carried out to demonize my country. Suffice it to recall the strike on the overcrowded train terminal in the Kiev-controlled Kramatorsk. Dozens were killed and injured for just one reason, specifically to point at Russia. However as we know, this plot failed. In the aftermath of the incident photos of the missile’s wreckage was posted on the Internet, which made it possible to identify the projectile as a Ukrainian Tochka-U, and the serial number caught in the frame indicated that this product had belonged to the Ukrainian military. We also remember the attack by Nazis from Azov on a drama theater in Mariupol with people inside, only to pass this barbaric act off as a Russian bombing. And the staged provocation in Bucha will undoubtedly go down in textbooks as one of the dirtiest and most inhuman provocations in history.
- From our viewpoint, it would be highly naïve to expect Western countries to condemn the terrorist attacks of their Ukrainian protégés. The United States and its satellites, including the United Kingdom, have long been very vocal about their true goals in Ukraine. They talk about "inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia." They make no secret that they seek to maintain their dominance in the world at any cost and by any means.
- It is not the first time that Western security services create and use terrorist organizations (ISIL and Al-Qaida included – baned in Russia) to promote their geopolitical interests. They have implemented a similar scenario in Ukraine. All kinds of radicals, neo-Nazis, supporters of white supremacy theories, and other extremists, nurtured by the collective West, were first used as a battering ram to overthrow the legitimate government, and then were integrated into the armed forces, law enforcement agencies and special services of the country, where they began to promote the tactics and methods of terrorists. On the tip from its Westerns sponsors, Ukraine has turned into a collective suicide bomber, ready to protect foreign geopolitical interests until the last Ukrainian.
- At the same time, Western self-appointed champions of democratic values and human rights seem to be under the illusion that if they entrust all the "dirty work," including outright terrorism, to Zelensky and his associates, they can keep their own hands clean. It doesn't work that way.
- In order to carry out terrorist attacks, Ukraine uses i.a. Western weapons, equipment, and reconnaissance data. That is why Ukraine's generous sponsors share responsibility for its numerous crimes and acts of a terrorist character. You must have no illusions on this matter.
- Besides, it is obvious that without regular Western (primarily American) support of military, financial and organizational character, Kiev's terror machinery would have collapsed like a house of cards long ago.
- It is hard to believe that ordinary Americans who lived through the tragedy of 9/11 and know firsthand the dangers of terrorism, support the financing and arms pumping of a regime whose leaders openly admit to involvement in terrorist attacks and mock their victims.
- By the same token, citizens of EU countries cannot but have a reasonable question as to how support for Ukrainian terrorists correlates with "European values". Is it true that Western mass media, maddened by primitive Russophobia, have zombified the Western public completely and deprived people of an ability to think and analyze facts?
- Concluding, when we consider the process of Kiev sliding down to terrorism, we cannot but dwell on the role of the UN Secretariat and other international structures. After the deadly 2014 coup in Ukraine, all of them demonstrated marvels of selective blindness.
- They turned a blind eye to any atrocities and crimes of the Kiev regime, i.a. against the peaceful cities of Donbas. But they zealously joined in replicating and retelling any Ukrainian fake stories about Russia, be it a staged provocation in Bucha or wild fabrications about Viagra being distributed to soldiers for committing mass rapes.
- Recently, UN officials have started to give more frequently a uniform response to any information about the increasingly brazen crimes of the Kiev leadership, including outright terrorist attacks. They say that none of this would have happened if it had not been for the so-called "Russian aggression".
- This position is based on a gross substitution of concepts. The root cause of the crisis in Ukraine is precisely the exorbitant geopolitical ambitions of the collective West, which staged a coup in Russia's neighboring country and brought to power aggressive nationalists who hate everything Russian and are not strangers to any method of implementing their extremist ideas. Had it not been the case, no special military operation would be needed. By refusing time and again to condemn the increasingly heinous actions of the Kiev regime, the United Nations follows the Western narratives that give Zelensky and his clique carte blanche to commit any crime: “do whatever you want, we will blame everything on the Russian special operation”. As a result, Kiev became convinced of its impunity and turned to terrorism, which it engages in with undisguised delight. I wonder what comes next: nuclear, chemical or biological terrorism? Will you keep silent too or write it all off on Russia?
- We expect the leadership of the United Nations Secretariat to finally remember the principles of impartiality and independence and to have the courage to give an objective assessment of the actions of the puppet regime in Kiev. After all, Ukraine's use of terrorist methods is a factor that aggravates the Ukrainian crisis and postpones the prospects for a peaceful settlement. The United Nations should be fully aware of that.
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