Ukraine urges UN to cap Russia’s veto
President lambastes Moscow for ‘misleading’ the world on Crimea
In a grim speech to the UN General Assembly, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko condemned what he called Russia’s “aggressive war against my country,” a more than year-long conflict with Russianbacked rebels that has left 8,000 Ukrainians dead in eastern Ukraine, including 6,000 civilians.
The speech, applauded by Poroshenko’s western allies, also urged members to limit the veto power that has prevented Security Council action against Russia. He joined France in a call for reforms to rein in the use of vetoes by the council’s five permanent members in cases of “mass atrocities.”
Russia has wielded its veto to quash a resolution to declare a referendum on Crimea’s secession from Ukraine illegal, after Moscow seized the largely Russian-speaking peninsula. It also blocked a resolution to set up an international tribunal to investigate the downing of a Malaysian airliner over territory held by pro-Russia rebels, with a loss of 298 lives.
President Vladimir Putin calls the Crimean invasion a defence of the rights of Russian-speakers, and strongly denies accusations of complicity in the crash of the Malaysian plane.
In a scathing denunciation, Poroshenko accused Moscow of “misleading” the world about its role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where it claims to have no military involvement.
“Russian leadership orders (removal) of insignias of its military servicemen and identification marks of its military equipment, to abandon its soldiers captured on the battlefield, to cynically use mobile crematoriums to eliminate traces of its crimes (on) Ukrainian soil.”
And he added that Ukrainian territory “occupied by Russia” in Crimea and Donbas regions is “approximately 44,000 square kilometres.”
During the conflict, Poroshenko charged, Russia has deployed “state of the art” heavy weaponry in east- ern Ukraine, and more than 1.5 million people in the Donbas region have been forced to flee their homes.
Last week the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, Stephen O’Brien, raised an alarm over an order from the Russian-backed “de facto authorities” to expel UN agencies in the eastern town of Luhansk. He called the resulting suspension of aid programs in Luhansk and Donetsk a “blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”
Alack of supplies is preventing hospitals from performing operations, he added. About 1.3 million people may lose access to clean water; 150,000 people are not receiving monthly food distribution; and 30,000 are deprived of shelter and household items they “urgently need.”
In his speech Tuesday, Poroshenko publicly objected to Russia’s detention of Ukrainian volunteer Nadiya Savchenko, a former pilot who was captured in eastern Ukraine and charged with directing an artillery strike that killed two Russian TV journalists last year. She has celebrity status in Ukraine as a symbol of anti-Russian resistance. On trial in southern Russia this week, Savchenko denied the charges and said she was a “prisoner of war and a hostage who has been abducted.”
Popular Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and activist Oleksandr Kolchenko are also being held on terrorism-related charges that the U.S. State Department denounced as “a clear miscarriage of justice.”
Ukraine’s battle with Russian rebels, and Moscow, has cooled slightly since early September, when the Ukrainian parliament agreed to give rebel-controlled territories more autonomy, in accordance with a peace deal reached earlier, and violated by both sides.
But the heated rhetoric from Ukraine and Russia at the UN this week makes it clear that the war is far from over.