Russian envoy to UN: West determined to destroy Russia

UNITED NATIONS (AP) – One week from the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United Nations said on Friday that the West was guided by its determination to destroy Russia, stating that ” we had no choice but to defend our country: defend it against you, defend our identity and our future.

Western ambassadors countered by accusing Russia of using the UN Security Council meeting on lessons learned from the failure to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists, which began in 2014, to justify what the French ambassador, Nicolas De Rivière, described as “unjustifiable”, the invasion of his neighbor on February 24, 2022.

Friday’s meeting at the Council, the only international forum where Russia usually confronts Ukraine and its Western allies, highlighted the yawning chasm that separates the two sides as the war enters its second year with no end in sight. with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides. parties and the forecast of new military offensives.

The ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, accused Western nations, including France and Germany, of “delaying” the implementation of the Minsk agreements, negotiated by the two countries to end the conflict between Ukraine and the separatists from Luhansk and Donetsk to the east, of a Russian-speaking majority, which broke up in April 2014 after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula.

“You knew very well that for you the Minsk process is just a smokescreen to rearm the Kiev regime and prepare it for war against Russia in the name of its geopolitical interests,” Nebenzia said.

Nebenzia accused the West of “deep Russophobia” and of being “determined to destroy my country, using others if possible”. Furthermore, he noted that Western nations are not interested “in building a European and Euro-Atlantic security system with Russia. because “for you such a system can only be directed against Russia”.

For his part, the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, accused Moscow of violating the Minsk agreements and cited as an example a memorandum of September 2014 ordering the departure of all soldiers, militiamen and mercenaries from Ukraine, which did not has never been applied.

“The truth is that Putin has shown once and for all that it is impossible to negotiate with him,” he said.