United Nations (EFE).- The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, predicted this Friday before the UN Security Council that Russia, and specifically its president, Vladimir Putin, “is going to lose (the war) long before what you believe”.
“You’re going to end up in court,” he said, addressing Putin rhetorically, “and if you think the world is going to get tired of supporting us, actually the support only grows,” he said.
Kuleba considered that “Russian propaganda” is circulating the idea that sending arms to Ukraine will prolong the conflict and lead to the destruction of the world; however, “the sooner we receive them, the sooner we will put out the fire (of war).”
In fact, this shipment of weapons from the European Union (EU) and from the United States to Ukraine has been highly criticized by numerous countries in the past two days in the General Assembly, which shows that the Russian theses have more and more further predicament within a vague “stop the war” discourse.
“Receiving these weapons is totally legitimate according to the UN charter,” Kuleba reiterated, “on the contrary, sending weapons to Russia, “as an aggressor country that it is, is a war crime.”
“Russia is systematically obstructing this council – using its veto power. Russia is the world’s problem,” concluded Kuleba.
Kuleba’s ideas received support in one way or another from different European countries and the United States. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it this way: “If Russia decides to stop fighting, that’s the end of the war; if it is Ukraine that decides to stop them, it is the end of Ukraine”.
Russia says not to seek destruction of Ukraine
In turn, Russia affirmed this Friday in the Security Council that its objective has not been and is not “the destruction of Ukraine” nor the “de-Ukrainization” of its territory, but to have to the west “a peaceful neighbor and friend who does not threaten us ”.
The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasili Nebenzia, added that what his country calls a “special operation” -because it has banned the word “war”- will cease when it considers guaranteed that “genocide and discrimination of the Russian-speaking” in the east of its territory, although it did not say at any time that it intends to withdraw from those regions.
And he also included other conditions to end the war: “Resolving this conflict is inseparable from the question of European security, which seems to work only for Western countries”, and he specifically criticized the Western conception that NATO “has an absolute right to spread out of control.”
With all these premises, Nebenzia stated: “We are ready to negotiate, but we are not going to consider any mechanism”; and he also said he observed that “the West does not seem to be interested in ending hostilities”, either to give an outlet for its arms production or, in the case of Washington, to weaken its supposed European partner in the process.
Nebenzia referred very briefly to the Chinese initiative presented today in Beijing to end the war and said that his country “welcomes the Chinese proposal”, but immediately added that “the word now belongs to the West”, and more precisely Washington.
