There is little cause for celebration on Ukraine’s Independence Day, the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told a UN Security Council meeting on Thursday. Kiev’s policies in the wake of the 2014 Maidan coup have reduced the nation to being “in the hands” of Washington and its allies and sacrificed the country’s national interests to serve the West, he added.
According to Nebenzia, the US and its allies had planned a proxy war against Russia as early as 2014 and the Maidan coup played right into those plans. Now, neither Washington, London, nor Brussels are interested in stopping the conflict, Nebenzia stated, adding that Kiev’s Western backers prevented it from striking “an almost agreed” peace deal with Russia back in March 2022.
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Modern Ukraine is a state that persecutes people for dissent, the diplomat claimed. “We are aware of tens of thousands of Ukrainians arrested for merely visiting Russian websites or listening to Russian music on their phones,” he stated, adding that “anything linked to Russia had been outlawed in Ukraine long before the start of [Russia’s] special operation.”
The diplomat also pointed to the persecution of the Canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which has seen its churches and monasteries seized by order of Ukrainian officials amid the ongoing conflict.
The “rampant corruption” that Ukraine’s Western backers supposedly wanted Kiev to combat “has not gone,” but instead “grew to enormous proportions thanks to billions of dollars of Western aid,” the envoy claimed. He also blasted Kiev for “openly promoting terrorist methods as state policies,” and accused Ukrainian officials of being behind assassination attempts on civilians in Russia and coercing Russians into committing crimes in their own country.
“The worst thing is… that Ukraine… did it under the sponsorship of the US and its allies which… demonstrates selective blindness when it comes to the crimes of the Kiev regime both inside and outside of the country,” Nebenzia said.
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The diplomat accused Washington and other Western nations of complicity in Kiev’s crimes through arms shipments and intelligence sharing and of covering up “lies” about the nature of its conflict with Moscow.
“Blind pandering to the West and a readiness to relinquish one’s interests in favor of its geopolitical agenda” has only led Ukraine to catastrophe, Nebenzia said. “There is hardly anything to congratulate Ukraine on its Independence Day,” the diplomat said. “May the Ukrainian tragedy never be repeated again,” he added.