Russian envoy claims West is determined to destroy Russia

A week before the anniversary of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the Kremlin’s UN ambassador claimed that the West is driven by its determination to destroy Russia and declared: “We had no choice other than to defend our country — defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future.”

Western ambassadors shot back, accusing Russia of using a Security Council meeting it called on lessons learned from the failure to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists that began in 2014 to justify what France’s UN Ambassador Nicolas De Riviere called “the unjustifiable” — Russia’s attack on its smaller neighbour on February 24, 2022.

Friday's meeting in the council — the only international venue where Russia regularly faces Ukraine and its Western supporters — put a spotlight on the deep chasm between the warring parties as the conflict moves into its second year with no end in sight, tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, and new military offensives expected.

Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused Western nations including France and Germany of “holding back” on implementing the Minsk agreements brokered by the two countries to end the conflict between Ukraine and the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk in the country’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial east that flared in April 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“You knew very well that the Minsk process for you is just a smoke screen, so as to rearm the Kyiv regime and to prepare it for war against Russia in the name of your geopolitical interest,” Nebenzia said.

US deputy ambassador Richard Mills accused Russia of failing to implement “a single commitment it made” in the Minsk agreements while the other signatories — France, Germany, Ukraine and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe — “sought to implement them in good faith”.

France’s De Riviere said his country and Germany have worked “tirelessly” since 2015 to promote dialogue between parties. “The difficulties encountered in implementing these agreements can never serve as justification or mitigating circumstances for Russia’s choice to end the dialogue with violence,” he stressed.

De Riviere recalled that exactly a year ago, on February 17, 2022, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin reaffirmed to the council that the Minsk agreements were “the only international legal basis” to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, and that rumours of Russian military intervention were unfounded and stemmed from Western paranoia. Four days later, Russia recognised the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and on February 24 it attacked Ukraine.

“The one and only lesson to be learned here is that Russia, by attacking Ukraine, has chosen alone, to put an end to dialogue and negotiation,” De Riviere said. “It took the decision alone to shatter the Minsk agreements, whose main objective, let us remember, was the reintegration of some regions of Donetsk and Luhansk under full Ukrainian sovereignty, in exchange for broad decentralization.”

Britain’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward also cited Vershinin’s statement to the council that allegations of a Russian attack were baseless a week before President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, and said the United Kingdom had learned some lessons.

“Russia lied when we warned of its intention to attack Ukraine,” she said. “Russia was planning for war while we called for diplomacy and de-escalation, and Russia continues to choose death and destruction while the world calls for a just peace.”

Ukraine urges “healthy forces in Russia, if there are any, to come to their senses and force Putin to implement the demands of the UN General Assembly to immediately cease the use of force and to withdraw Russian military forces from Ukraine,” Kyslytsya said. “The dictator should give up and recede into the past.”