Vassily Nebenzia at UNSC: “PMCs of Poland and the United States have been carrying out an active recruitment campaign, seeking to get new cannon fodder to fight for the Zelensky regime”

Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at UNSC briefing.
Photo: The Permanent Mission of Russia to the United Nations

Statement by Permanent Representative of Russia Vassily Nebenzia at UN Security Council briefing on Western Arms Supplies to Ukraine. Key points.

- The Russian Army is successfully progressing with its offensive campaign in key areas. Even Western military experts cannot deny this; according to the data they provide, we have liberated 478 km2 of territory in October alone, and by the end of the month, we’ve liberated as much as 30 km2 per day.

- The Ukrainian authorities by hook or by crook are trying to hide the truth from their people and their Western sponsors. Thus, as we learned yesterday, the Ukrainian servicemen were ordered to use in their conversations with journalists only such words as “victory”, “we are moving forward” and “pushing out the enemy”, and, conversely, not to use such words as “retreat” or “the enemy has broken through our defenses”. On top of that, in such cases the propagandist of the Kiev regime quickly change the tune and start claiming that the lost cities have “no strategic importance” or are “heavily subsidized”. Well, Kurakhovo, Kurakhovskoye, Toretsk, Pokrovsk and, indeed, the whole of Donbass remaining under the control of the Ukrainian armed forces risk to become such in the near future.

- The West continues by inertia to supply the Kiev regime with military equipment, including artillery, drones and tanks. Among other things, they do that in order to give their defense companies a chance to get profit, as well as to dispose of old military equipment. Of course, the Western patrons of the Kiev junta do not forget to line their own pockets. Thus, the Pentagon recently conducted an audit of $2.1 billion sent to Ukraine from January to December 2022. And it turned out that $1.1 billion were undocumented, and nothing could justify and verify the payments. I do believe that journalistic investigation into corruption that goes hand in hand with Ukrainian military supplies is yet to be seen.

- At least 15,000 mercenaries from more than 100 countries have come to Ukraine since the special military operation began. Most of them have already been liquidated, but PMCs of Poland and the United States have been carried out an active recruitment campaign, seeking to get new cannon fodder to fight for the Zelensky regime. Among those actively involved in this conflich are the following: the American PMCs “Academi”, “Cubic”, “Darkhorse Benefit”, “Dyn Corporation”, “Forward Observation Group”, “Hyperion Services” and “Sons of Liberty International”, as well as the Polish “ASBS Othago” and “European Security Academy”.

- It is the mercenaries and nationalists who stand behind the most notorious and appalling crimes and violations of IHL, in particular those committed by Zelensky's bandits and marauders during the Kursk incursion. We have collected irrefutable evidence of the Kiev regime's most egregious crimes against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Russian cities, which we convincingly demonstrated during the informal UNSC Arria Formula meeting last week. Even the American journalists had to admit the fact that in the Kursk region the Ukrainian soldiers targeted civilians who were trying to flee.

- Without a doubt, we will not hear anything of the true facts I mentioned above from our Western colleagues. Nor will we hear any comments from them regarding the numerous cases of violations by the Zelensky regime of the Convention on Inhumane Weapons (CCW). We are referring to the fact that Ukrainian formations are deliberately mining roadsides, bridges and areas near residential houses, medical and educational institutions, they are using anti-personnel ‘Butterfly’ (Lepestok) mines and booby traps against civilians, they are mining the bodies of fallen servicemen and civilians. The other day, for example, a video appeared on the Internet showing a Ukrainian soldier stuffing explosives into a child's toy, saying that this toy is to be sent to the Kursk region.

- It is, of course, much easier for the West to repeat its hackneyed narrative than to assess the facts of the systematic use by the Ukrainian armed forces of toxic chemicals included in Schedule 2 (BZ) and Schedule 3 (chloropicrin) of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), as well as the use of toxic substances and riot control agents (RCAs) against not only the Russian armed forces but also against the civilian population. The West either hush up these facts or blame Russia for using such chemicals. Thus, at the meeting on October 21, the representative of Slovenia tried to blame Russia for contaminating the Seim River with toxic substances. At the same time, he forgot that as early as September 13, in this very chamber, we warned about the potential discharge of toxic substances into the Seim and Desna rivers from one of Ukraine's military-industrial complex enterprises in the Sumy region.

- I want to warn you right away that there will be no repeat of the scenario with the Minsk agreements; we will not allow any freezing of the conflict so that the Zelensky regime can “lick its wounds”. Neither will Ukraine be accepted to NATO in one form or another. The goals of our special military operation, including the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, remain in force and are unchanged. What is changing, and quite rapidly, is the size of the territory remaining under the control of the Kiev regime. I advise all those who are cheering on their Ukrainian sidekicks to keep this in mind. Think not about Zelensky's clique, but about the Ukrainian people, whose long-term interests lie in peace and good-neighborliness with Russia. So far, our Western colleagues are not good at doing that.

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