In the News April 7

Accusations of Russian War Crimes in Bucha

Russian Ambassador to UN Calls on Ukrainian President to Make Right Decisions for Ukraine

At a meeting of the UN Security Council on April 5, Russia’s permanent representative Vassily Nebenzia used the bulk of his intervention to address Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally who was attending virtually and had already spoken.

He began by saying he would leave the “unsubstantiated sweeping accusations” directed at his country’s military to Zelensky’s conscience. He spoke of how Zelensky was elected in 2019 on a promise of establishing peace and ending the war in Donbass, giving especially Russian-speaking Ukrainians a lot of hope. But that hope turned out to be in vain, he said, shown by how the president had in so many ways gone back on his promise, treating the people of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics with contempt instead of protecting them. He mentioned his government’s failure to comply with the Minsk Agreements and instead its use of force to try and solve the problems of Donbass.

He said that in spite of Zelensky’s attempt to turn a blind eye to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, pretending they simply do not exist, they in fact are running the show and are allowed to openly flaunt their swastikas and organize. He said that they inflict suffering and kill both Russian soldiers and their fellow countrymen just like their Nazi collaborator heroes did, reading out details from the testimony of a number of women who witnessed or experienced their cruelty first hand.

Regarding the deaths of people in Bucha that he blamed, without evidence, on Russian soldiers, he told Zelensky, “I am aware that you saw the dead bodies and heard the stories. However, you only saw what they wanted to show you. You can’t fail to see blatant inconsistencies in the version of the events being promoted by the Ukrainian and Western media, including the fact that there were no dead bodies in the town after the Russian troops left, as evidenced by a number of videos.”

“Only complete amateurs or our Western partners who do not want to listen to anything and have long called everything that’s black white and vice versa, could fall for this fake show,” he said.

The ambassador concluded his remarks by saying the U.S. and its partners don’t care in the slightest about Ukraine. For them, it is “just a pawn in their geopolitical ploy against Russia, which they will easily sacrifice,” he said. They will try to prolong the conflict by supplying weapons and ammunition, he warned.

“I just want you to give it a thought and really hope that you will find a solution to this situation, because it depends only on you. We didn’t come to you for Ukrainian land. We came to bring a long-awaited peace to a bleeding Donbass. Not a truce, but a genuine lasting peace. To do so, it is necessary to root out the cruelty that I mentioned and remove that Nazi malignant tumour that is devouring Ukraine and would have eventually begun to devour Russia.”

He said Russia would achieve that goal, “hopefully sooner rather than later.” He said Russia was avoiding shelling civilian targets in order to save as many civilian lives as possible. “This is why we are not advancing as fast as many expected,” he said. The “radicals,” he said, have nothing to lose, couldn’t care less about civilians and were ready to “take all the people of Ukraine down with them into the grave.” The gruesome killings of civilians used to mount the provocation in Bucha clearly showed that, he said.

Ambassador Nebenzia’s final appeal to Zelensky was that he act on what he knew to be the truth, and not let the West achieve its goals: “Make the right decisions for your country, because the West is prepared to fight in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. Make this decision now. After all, you are well aware of the actual situation at the front. It may be too late after that.”

For the entire briefing click here.

TML Daily, posted April 7, 2022