28 September 2024
Dear Mr President,
Ladies and gentlemen,
A few days ago, this building hosted a forum called the Summit of the Future. Russia was supportive of the idea of the Secretary-General to convene it, since the crisis of our Organisation is deepening and something needs to be done about this. We devoted our efforts to preparing the summit. However, we were realistic in our expectations. There have been many ambitious events in the modern history of the United Nations which ended up with loud declarations which were soon forgotten.
The Millenium Summit proclaimed the goal to “free the peoples from the scourge of war”. Two years later the United States of America, at the head of the coalition of the willing, invaded Iraq – the country which has yet to get over the devastating consequences of this affair – under a ridiculous pretext, without the mandate of the UN Security Council.
The 2005 World Summit declared its commitment to establishing a just peace in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. But this sacred commitment did not prevent the United States and its allies from emboldening Georgia’s then-leader Mikheil Saakashvili to launch an armed aggression against the people of South Ossetia and Russian peacekeepers in 2008. Three years later, NATO orchestrated a military intervention in Libya that destroyed its statehood and undermined the stability of neighbouring countries.
In 2015, the UN Summit on Sustainable Development adopted grandiose plans to fight poverty and inequality. In the end, they turned out to be empty promises in the face of the unwillingness of Western countries to give up their neo-colonial practices of siphoning off the riches of the world for their own benefit. You can simply look at the statistics to see how many promises to fund development in the global south and transfer environmentally friendly technologies have actually been kept.
The current UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, just like Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon before him, has put forward an initiative under the slogan of a new start for global cooperation. This is a wonderful idea. Who could disagree? But what global cooperation is there to talk about, when the West has trampled all those unshakeable values of the globalisation that speakers on the podium talked so much about, trying to convince us that they would give everyone equal access to the goods of modern civilisation? Where is the inviolability of property, the presumption of innocence, freedom of expression, access to information, fair competition in markets under fair and constant rules? The Secretary-General speaks of global cooperation at the very moment when the countries of the West have unleashed a veritable war of sanctions against more than half, if not the majority, of the countries of the world, and the US dollar, promoted as an asset and a good for all humanity, has been crudely turned into a weapon.
Cuba has been subject to a trade blockade for more than sixty years, while the overwhelming majority of members of the international community have called for it to be lifted. In its pursuit of an increasingly unattainable goal of maintaining its dominance, Washington has blocked the normal work of the WTO to settle disputes and a reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, whose structure has long ceased to reflect the real balance of power in the world economy and finance. The UN wants to turn the West into a tool to promote its own selfish ends. The Summit of the Future showed that the number of attempts to blur the intergovernmental nature of the organisation has increased. The long-awaited changes in the way the Secretariat is staffed, with key positions in fact occupied and inherited by representatives of the Western minority, have been curtailed. When the Secretary-General calls for a new approach to global cooperation, the Secretariat must promote unifying ideas, propose options for compromise, rather than find excuses to integrate pro-Western narratives into the work of the United Nations.
It is not late to breathe new life into the United Nations. But this can be achieved through restoration of trust based on the charter principle – sovereign equality of all states – rather than out-of-touch summits and declarations. However, while the trust is undermined, including through actions by the West to create its subordinate narrow formats to resolve crucial issues bypassing the UN such as control over the Internet or determination of legal frameworks to use AI technologies. These issues touch upon the future of the entire humanity and they have to be considered on a universal basis, without discrimination and aspiration to achieve unilateral benefits. Thus, everything has to be agreed on a fair basis involving all UN members, and not like how the Pact for the Future was drafted: without a single plenary round of talks where all countries would be present. Instead, the work was done under the control of western manipulators. As a result, the Pact, already swelled the ranks of declarations written in beautiful English without even being born.
The situation is no better when it comes to implementing the binding resolutions of the UN Security Council. It is enough to mention the sabotage of the resolutions on the Kosovo settlement and the Dayton Accords on Bosnia and Herzegovina. The most egregious example is the postponement for more than 80 years of consensus resolutions on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.
Acts of terrorism which Israelis fell victim to on October 7, 2023 cannot be justified. But all those who are still capable of compassion resent the fact that the October tragedy is being used for a massive collective punishment of the Palestinians, which has turned out to be an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. The murder of Palestinian civilians by US weapons must stop. The delivery of humanitarian cargoes to the enclave must be ensured, the restoration of infrastructure must be arranged and, most importantly, the implementation of the legitimate right of self-determination of the Palestinians must be guaranteed, and they must be allowed to establish a territorially integral and viable state within the borders of 1967 with its capital in East Jerusalem, not in words but in deeds, “on the ground”.
Another blatant example of the use of terrorist methods to achieve political goals is the attack on Lebanon, in which civilian technology was turned into a deadly weapon. This crime must be investigated immediately. It is already impossible to ignore the numerous publications in the media, including in Europe and the United States, which prove the various levels of Washington’s involvement and, at the very least, its awareness of the preparation of a terrorist attack. We understand that the Americans always deny everything and do their best to erase the emerging facts – just as they did in response to irrefutable evidence of their involvement in terrorist acts against the Nord Stream pipelines. These pipelines, by the way, were a great example of the global cooperation of which the UN Secretary-General dreams. After their destruction, the competitiveness of the European Union in the global economy has been undermined for many years to the benefit of the United States. The West is to blame for concealing the truth about the organisers of many other heinous crimes, including a bloody provocation in Bucha, a city in the Kiev region, in 2022, and a series of poisonings of Russian citizens in the UK and Germany.
The UN Secretariat cannot remain aloof from efforts to establish the truth in situations that directly affect global security and must act impartially in accordance with Art. 100 of the Charter, acting impartially and avoiding the temptation to play into the hands of certain states, especially those who openly call for the world to be divided into a flowering garden and a jungle, or for a democratic table to be set for dinner and those on the menu instead of cooperation.
The ‘track record’ of those who demand that the rest of the world play by their rules should not be forgotten. The invasion of Afghanistan and the inglorious twenty-year presence of a well-known coalition there was accompanied by the emergence of al-Qaeda. The creation of the Islamic State was a direct result of the aggression against Iraq. The start of the war in Syria gave birth to Jabhat al-Nusra (now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), and the destruction of Libya opened the floodgates for terrorism in the Sahara-Sahel region and for millions of illegal immigrants in Europe. We urge all those who care about the future of their countries and people to be extremely cautious about the new plots of the inventors of these very rules.
Methods of political assassination, such as the one that took place yesterday in Beirut, which have almost become common practice, are of the utmost concern.
The tragic and unacceptable developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict, in Yemen, in the waters of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, in Sudan and in other danger zones in Africa reflect an undeniable fact: security can either be equal and inseparable for all, or there will be no security for anyone.
For years, Russia has been trying to make Washington, London and Brussels, overwhelmed by their own complexes of exclusivity and impunity, understand this seemingly simple truth in the context of European security. Although they initially promised not to expand NATO, and in 1999 and 2020 they left their signatures in official documents of OSCE summits under the obligation not to ensure their own security at the expense of others, in fact the North Atlantic Alliance has been carrying out geopolitical and military expansion in Europe for three decades, trying to establish its positions in the Trans-Caucasian region and Central Asia, creating direct threats to the security of our country. The same situation is happening in the Asia-Pacific region, where NATO’s infrastructure is creeping in and where military and political blocs are being created, undermining the inclusive security architecture under the auspices of ASEAN, in order to contain the People’s Republic of China and Russia.
At the same time, the West not only fails to seek the global cooperation called for by our Secretary-General, but in its doctrinal documents openly and harshly accuses Russia, China, Belarus, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Iran of creating threats to its dominance. The goal of the strategic defeat of Russia is declared there: just as London and Washington did in May 1945, when (before the end of the Second World War) they developed Operation Unthinkable to destroy the Soviet Union. This was kept a deep secret, but today’s Anglo-Saxon strategists do not hide their intentions. However, they expect to defeat Russia through an illegitimate neo-Nazi Kiev Regine, however they prepare Europe to fall in this suicidal affair. I will not dwell on the futility and danger of the very idea of trying to fight Russia’s nuclear power to victory.
Equally meaningless are the chants of Kiev’s Western masters that the infamous peace formula is the only viable basis for peace talks. Just as they support this doomed ultimatum, the West unreservedly invokes the UN Charter, which demands that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be guaranteed.
I would like to remind colleagues in the UN Secretariat, among others, that the Charter is not only about territorial integrity. The very first chapter of the Charter proclaims the obligation to respect the principle of equality and self-determination of peoples. This served as the international legal basis for the process of decolonisation (which is still ongoing, despite the opposition of the French, the British and other former colonial powers). And in 1970, the General Assembly unanimously decided in its Declaration that everyone must respect the territorial integrity of those states whose governments respect the right of peoples to self-determination and thus represent the entire population living in the territory concerned. I would like to stress that this was a unanimous decision of the UN General Assembly after many years of complicated discussions. There is no need to prove that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, who seized power in Kiev in February 2014 after a bloody coup supported by the United States and its allies, never represented the Russian population of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya.
To be continued…