РУССКИЙ
10:55 19.02.2025 •
Vassily Nebenzia
Photo: webtv.un.org
Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at a UN Security Council Briefing on Ukraine. Key points.
- Today marks ten years since the adoption of UNSC resolution 2202, which endorsed the “Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements”. Having thus expressed its support for the solutions that had been found in Minsk a few days prior, the Council took the implementation of these agreements under its supervision. We all hoped then that a long-term and lasting peace would finally come, but all hopes of ours were fated to fail. Moreover, today the very word-combination “Minsk agreements” has become something of a diplomatic euphemism replacing the words “failure” or “lie”. We believe that our Security Council has every reason to analyze why this happened and why peace in the east of Ukraine never came after that.
- First of all, let me briefly recall that the 13 points of the Package of Measures unambiguously defined the sequence of concrete steps to normalize the situation in Ukraine and bring Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (LNR and DNR) back to Ukraine’s fold. The last of these steps was to restore Kiev's control over the State border in the east of the country.
- However, it soon became clear that the nationalist Kiev regime, which came to power as a result of an anti-constitutional coup in 2014, from the very get-go had no intention of implementing a single one of the document's provisions. We are well aware of what transpired in Minsk during the meetings of the trilateral contact group. And we know how the Kiev representatives openly and complicitly sabotaged the agreement. We repeatedly talked about it, but all this fell on deaf ears and continue to fall on deaf ears.
- As became clear from the confessions of a number of former senior politicians (specifically, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and Pyotr Poroshenko), Western sponsors of the Kiev regime needed the Minsk agreements purely as a “smokescreen” to arm Kiev and prepare it for war with Russia. This is precisely what finally compelled us to begin our special military operation in Ukraine almost three years ago. We have repeatedly stated in this chamber (and not just in this chamber) that if the Minsk agreements had been implemented in good faith by Ukraine and its sponsors, none of what followed would have basically transpired.
- By ignoring the unambiguous signals that the Kiev regime was not going to implement UNSC resolution 2202, Western States completely failed a critical mission of the Security Council, which they single out in many other country specific situations – namely, they failed in preventive diplomacy.
- Today we observe that the deliberate sabotage of the implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures had fatal consequences for Ukraine. Not only did Ukraine miss the chance for peace and the restoration of control over Donbas, but also deliberately failed to harness the best means to resolve the internal conflict. The opportunity was lost to transform Ukraine into a civilized State where the rights of all citizens are respected without discrimination on political, linguistic or national grounds. Instead, Kiev embraced the path of confrontation, repression, suppression of freedom of speech and other human rights and freedoms. As a result, Ukraine today is bitterly referred to by many of its fellow citizens as a “Zelensky concentration camp”.
- We can all see what processes are currently taking place throughout the world after the Republican administration came to power in the US. Diplomacy has finally come into play, and this is what we have been calling for over the recent months. Thus, opportunities have emerged for the prompt end to the hot phase of the Ukrainian crisis.
- What lessons should today's negotiators draw from the process that failed so ignominiously three years ago? Let us try to answer this question.
- First, we understand now that the guarantors of Minsk, and on the whole the EU countries and the UK, are absolutely unfaithful to their word and cannot be a party to any future agreements on the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis whatsoever. They are blinded by primordial Russophobia, maniacal desire to defeat our country on the battlefield using to this end those Ukrainians who are left alive. Today's European elites are unfortunately incapable of thinking strategically and can hardly even imagine any security formulas involving Russia, since for many years, they have been shaping – covertly or overtly – exclusively anti-Russian political and military configurations. We do not know how long it will take to heal their minds (if it is possible in principle), but it is clear that they won’t do for guarantors or even mediators.
- Second, a ceasefire and a freezing of the Ukrainian conflict along the contact line per se are unlikely to secure the conflict resolution. This is the most important lesson to be drawn from Minsk and this lesson should be borne in mind by those who will be working on the new contours of possible agreements. All the more so given that European political dwarfs do not conceal the fact that in the event of a ceasefire they intend to rearm Ukraine and prepare it for a resumption of war. Suffice it to quote the EU’s new chief diplomat, Ms. Kallas, who said in Munich that the EU should “reallocate certain resources” to enable Ukraine to continue hostilities. There is no need for comments here.
- Third, in order to establish lasting peace in Ukraine, we need to eradicate the root causes of the Ukrainian conflict. The purpose of Minsk was to grant such autonomy to the east of the country and give such guarantees to the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine so that Donbass can be eventually brought back to Ukraine. This also included education in the Russian language, the opportunity to practice canonical Orthodoxy, and the right to honor those heroes who liberated Ukraine from Nazism rather than those criminals who alongside the Hitlerites exterminated hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians, Roma and the same Ukrainians. People should have the right not to honor those who are worshiped in Ukraine today, with Bandera on top of the list. All of this remains relevant, with the only one distinction – It is not only Crimea that Ukraine irreversibly lost, but also the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, which became part of Russia. Accordingly, there is also a need to rectify the situation in those regions that remains under Kiev's control.
- Finally, it is essential that the authorities dealing with the implementation of new agreements be genuinely interested in them, and these authorities are to emerge as the result of democratic elections. Zelensky, who pretends to be the Ukrainian president, lost his legitimacy last May. Moreover, having been elected by three quarters of Ukrainians for his promises to establish peace in the East, what he did was exactly the opposite – he dragged the country into a conflict for the advancement of someone else's geopolitical interests, and at the cost of lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. It is clear that neither he, nor his associates, nor those who opposed the Minsk agreements should have any role to play in the new Ukraine. This, in fact, is evidenced by public opinion polls in this country, which clearly indicate that Zelensky's cabal has lost even symbolic support of its citizens. That is precisely why the professional Ukrainian comedian and former President is deathly afraid of elections and is doing everything possible to drag them out.
- Lastly. The future Ukraine should be a demilitarized neutral state, not a part of any blocs or alliances. After all, as has been acknowledged by our American colleagues, in particular President Trump, it was exactly the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO that triggered the crisis. I think, this is now clear to everyone.
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