Harsh Statement By Russian Permanent Representative At UN Security Council Briefing On Ukraine

Mr. President, It is symbolic that it is our British colleagues, who are presiding over the Security Council this month, who pushed through today’s meeting, timing it to coincide with the 1,000 days since the Ukrainian crisis reached the hot phase. Once again, we have had a wonderful opportunity to see that for you and your colleagues, Mr. Minister, this briefing is nothing but a flashy media event to vilify Russia and pin on it some hackneyed labels that predictably abounded in the statements by the Western members of the Council. In your country – in Great Britain – Russophobia has become part of the national policy long before February 2022. Let me remind you that while preparing for today’s meeting, you missed another media occasion that has much more importance in the context of the Ukrainian crisis than the date you chose. Last Friday, November 15, marked exactly 950 days since the visit of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Kiev. That day – and we all know it for a fact today – he dissuaded the head of the Kiev regime from signing the peace agreement with Russia that had already been initialed in Istanbul, which would have stopped hostilities. At that time, we were very close to it. As a gesture of goodwill, Russia even withdrew its troops from the north of Ukraine, particularly from the areas in the immediate vicinity of Kiev. In other words, 50 days after the beginning of our special military operation, when the losses in the ranks of the Ukrainian army were not so significant, the hostilities would have had every chance to stop, had it not been for the interference of the British Prime Minister, who convinced Zelensky that he should continue fighting and that with the Western weapons and support he could well inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The British Prime Minister and his Western accomplices were very interested in such a scenario. Thus, in order to somehow explain such a turn to the Ukrainian and world public, an absolutely clumsy provocation was concocted in Bucha, with the direct involvement of the British security services and the media. Thus, after the withdrawal of the Russian army, corpses of people were brought to Bucha and arranged there in the streets; no one has ever bothered to explain the real cause of these people’s death, despite our repeated requests. In other words, it appears that the UK has pushed the Kiev regime closer to its inevitable defeat, compelling it to opt for continued confrontation with Russia. I think Ukrainians will long remember the fact that it is due to these actions that their country has suffered economic disaster, has lost most of its army, military equipment and at least four regions, besides Crimea that seceded from Ukraine in 2014. Ukrainians have long been unwilling to fight, for at least two years now there have been no volunteers in the Ukrainian army. The Kiev regime banned men from leaving the country, and is now grabbing draft evaders on the streets, including with the use of firearms, only to throw them (with almost no prior training) into a senseless meat grinder. The eastern front of the Ukrainian army in Donbass is collapsing before our very eyes – you are well aware of the pace of our army’s advance. And seeking to retain Western support, the Zelensky regime undertook an absolutely reckless incursion into the Kursk region and attempted to capture and mine the Kursk nuclear power plant, which resulted in the Ukrainian army losing tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers. This misadventure was a fatal mistake and only accelerated Ukraine’s imminent defeat on the battlefield, which cannot be avoided whatever new Western weaponry Kiev receives. As a matter of transparency, the initiators of today’s meeting should have shared with us the information regarding what fabulous profits the UK received during almost three years of military support for Ukraine, how your arms companies have enriched themselves on the blood and tragedy of ordinary Ukrainians, and how your defence ministry has safely disposed of old military equipment that in any case would have had to be disposed of. And it would also be good if you told us about the corruption intrinsic to these processes, the scale of the corruption is something we can only guess. Thus, according to the Ukrainian media, after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections, panic broke out among the Ukrainian elite. The panic was triggered not only by the fact that the US might revise its aid to Ukraine, but also because the new authorities might want to check all the money that was sent to Ukraine and conduct a full audit of the assistance already provided. This scenario, as all Ukrainian experts point out, is much more frightening for Zelensky, because a significant part of the aid has been simply plundered and misappropriated by the “expired” Ukrainian president and his entourage. Just military aid provided by the UK to the Kiev junta since February 2022 has amounted to $9.7 billio