West determined to destroy Russia – envoy

UNITED NATIONS: A week before the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s ambassador to the United Nations claimed that the West was driven by its determination to destroy Russia.

“We had no choice other than to defend our country — defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future,”Vassily Nebenzia told the UN Security Council.

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 Russianbacked separatists that began in 2014 to justify what France’s UN Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere called Moscow’s “unjustifiable” invasion of its smaller neighbor on Feb. 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.

Nebenzia accused Western nations, including France and Germany, of “holding back” on implementing the Minsk agreements — named after the capital of Moscow ally Belarus — brokered by the two countries to end the conflict between Kyiv and the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in Ukraine’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,” he said.

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

De Riviere said his country and Germany had worked “tirelessly” since 2015 to promote dialogue between parties, adding that 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.”

The French envoy also said Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin reaffirmed to the council on Feb. 17, 2022 that the agreements were “the only international legal basis” to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, and that rumors of Russian military intervention were unfounded and stemmed from Western paranoia.

Four days later, Russia recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and on February 24 it invaded 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.”

Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya accused Russia of violating the deals, citing as an example the Minsk memorandum of Sept. 19, 2014 ordering all military, militias and mercenaries to leave Ukraine that was never implemented.

“The truth is that Putin has proved once and for all to be impossible to negotiate with,” Kyslystsya said. “Russia’s consistent undermining and final killing of the Minsk agreements make that crystal clear.”

The United Kingdom’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward cited Vershinin’s statement to the council that allegations of a Russian attack were baseless a week before President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion.

“Russia lied when we warned of its intention to attack Ukraine,” Woodward 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 just peace.”

Nebenzia blamed “a criminal policy by the Ukrainian leadership, which was goaded by the collective West” for refusing to implement the agreements.

After a year of war, he told Western members of the council: “Obviously, we will not be able to live in the future the way we did in the past.”