16 January 2025
Mr. President,
I will have to interrupt the dull anti-Russian mantras of the Western members of the Security Council. Well, we are gathered together here today precisely to listen to those mantras, even though all this is nothing but a “tick the box” exercise needed to somehow keep alive the illusion that the Ukrainian issue remains in the focus of the Security Council. In reality, the Ukrainian issue today boils down to just a few points, which really deserve the attention of our colleagues, specifically given the fact that these are the points that our Western colleagues have not uttered any single word about.
So, since our last meeting, the situation of the Ukrainian armed forces on the battlefield has significantly deteriorated. Ukraine itself acknowledges that in the last 10 days alone, the Russian army has liberated 8 towns, including the most important stronghold of the Ukrainian armed forces, Kurakhovo. The eastern front was also broken through in a number of other places, several hundred Ukrainian soldiers and foreign mercenaries were surrounded and taken prisoners, and hundreds of units of military hardware were destroyed. Such large cities as Pokrovsk (which is going to become Krasnoarmeysk soon), Toretsk (soon it will become Dzerzhinsk) and Chasov Yar are about to fall. In some areas, Russian troops have almost reached the borders of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast.
Ukrainians are increasingly reluctant to fight for Zelensky’s corrupt clique and Western geopolitical interests. The data on the number of deserters have already been repeatedly voiced by us in this chamber. According to the Ukrainian Ground Forces Command, more than half a million people are declared wanted for evading mobilization. Zelensky’s office is, of course, trying to conceal the scope of these developments, but nevertheless, from time to time, new facts are leaking to the media allowing us to draw conclusions about what is really going on. For example, at the beginning of the year journalists reported that Ukraine opened an investigation on charges of “desertion” against the 155th separate mechanized brigade “Anne of Kiev”, equipped and trained in France. 1700 servicemen of this brigade (out of 2300) went AWOL soon after they were sent to the front. And this is an elite unit! So what can we say about men who are caught on the streets only to be thrown to the bloodbath as cannon fodder with little or no training! It is no surprise that people use the earliest opportunity to surrender, and the main danger for them is the “barrier troops” of Ukrainian nationalists who are shooting in the back those who want to retreat.
The Kiev regime’s puppeteers in Washington are, of course, unhappy about this situation, as they worry that their multi-billion-dollar investment in the anti-Russia project and weaponry they supplied may turn out to be useless, and the Kiev regime is likely to ingloriously collapse, just as the pro-American regime in Afghanistan did in 2021. Ignoring the outcry of ordinary Ukrainians who do not want to be sent to a senseless meat grinder by forced mobilization, they are now insisting that the expired Ukrainian stage actor lowers the conscription age in the country from 25 to 18. And doing so, they disregard the opinion of experts who say that many men in this age bracket have already left Ukraine and that this measure will not help obtain the needed number of those destined to die.
The former actor Zelensky himself is doing his best to make his masters believe that his regime is still capable of fighting. Pretending not to mention the continuing collapse of the Eastern Front, he is throwing all the Western-trained reserves into the Kursk Oblast, where the Ukrainian troops, although suffering huge daily losses, still control less than a third of the territory they captured last August. The other day he undertook yet another extremely unsuccessful attempt at a counteroffensive there, but the Ukrainian armed forces were pushed back, and they lost thousands of soldiers and hundreds of units of Western-supplied equipment.
What is left for the leader of the Kiev junta in this grim situation? Well, he is trying to win new “media victories” by attacking objects in Russia’s territory with drones and Western long-range missiles. The effectiveness of these massive attacks is close to zero, but some damage is done by the wreckage. Furthermore, there is continued shelling of peaceful Russian territories, civilians are dying there. For example, early this year, as a result of a targeted and deliberate strike by a Ukrainian drone on the Donetsk-Gorlovka highway, a freelance correspondent for Izvestia, Alexander Martemyanov, was killed, and other Russian reporters were wounded. Donetsk and Belgorod Oblasts are regularly being shelled; currently, however, the Ukrainian armed forces’ artillery does not reach these territories and the nationalists have to use only missile systems.
What stands out in this string of attacks by the Kiev regime is the January 11 strike on the compressor station of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in the Krasnodar Region. Let me recall here that the day before, the expired Ukrainian president refused to extend the contract for gas transit through Ukraine to Europe, which is a tangible step towards further disruption of the economic potential of the old continent. We have every reason to believe that the attack on the Turkish Stream infrastructure was prompted by Washington and London, who seek to hook the EU on expensive LNG from the US. Let us not forget that it is these two countries that are impeding an unbiasied international investigation into the terrorist attack on Nord Stream pipelines of September 2022 – the conclusions are painfully clear.
Mr. President,
The desire of the sponsors of the Kiev regime to save their collapsing anti-Russian project at any cost has so far prevailed over any common-sense ideas about the need to find a peaceful solution to the Ukrainian conflict and to eradicate its root causes (and even certain Western politicians are increasingly voicing such ideas). However, the rhetoric of the United States and its satellites in this regard has significantly changed recently. Initially they were talking about the need to ensure Ukraine’s victory, then – about their willingness to support the Kiev regime “as long as it takes,” then – about the inadmissibility of Russia’s victory. And today they say about the need to ensure strong negotiating positions for the Ukrainian sinking ship.
This makes the Ukrainian actor nervous, and his entourage is openly talking about the need to have some large-scale tragedy, which could bring the support from the Western public back to Ukraine. Thus, they are likely to plot some heinous provocation, like Bucha which was basically the main pretext in April 2022 for Zelensky and the British to bury Russian-Ukrainian agreements we nearly reached. Usurper Zelensky is nervous not about the obviously inevitable defeat of Ukraine but about the danger of fresh elections and the possible audit by the new administration of the aid provided to Ukraine, which will inevitably expose the scope of corruption in the country. That is why he has recently spared no effort to provoke Russia by striking various targets on our territory and seeking to trigger a large-scale response. But he will be disappointed, Russia is still not responding to his provocations and continues striking only objects related to Kiev’s military capabilities. There are tragedies caused by falling drone debris on civilian facilities, since Ukrainian air defense systems – as we have already repeatedly pointed out – are deployed in residential areas in violation of IHL. But these tragedies hardly suffice to send shockwaves around the globe, which the Kiev leader is seeking. There are persistent rumors in Kiev that the regime, along with its British mentors, is preparing a major bloody provocation, for which Russia will be blamed. Given this, the most popular slogan in Ukrainian social networks today is as follows – “flee Ukraine before it is too late.”
And Ukrainians are fleeing the “Zelensky concentration camp,” – this is what the country is being called now by the citizens after the former comedian canceled any elections there. Potential soldiers are fleeing the training grounds in Western countries, politicians are fleeing, members of the Verkhovnaya Rada are fleeing, as well as Supreme Court judges, diplomats, and athletes. Thus, at the beginning of the year, the Ukrainian mass media reported that among those who left the country were Aleksandr Poklad, deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), Aleksandr Ruvin, former director of the Kiev Research Institute of Forensic Medicine, and Igor Cherkasky, former head of the financial monitoring service. Today, Ms. DiCarlo told us about alleged tortures against Ukrainian servicemen – she cited the information that is being meticulously gathered and provided by various entities and commissions used by the Western and Ukrainian propaganda machine for their purposes. But please listen to what was being said by former Rada deputy Mr. Artem Dmytruk about the torture he underwent. SSU officers tortured him in 2022, attempting to get evidence from him and confessions of high treason. The primary accusation against him was that he spoke in defense of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
So let me quote some of the horrifying things he mentioned, everything is available online: “I was pushed down on the cold and wet floor, I heard moans and screams of my friends nearby; a little bit further away – the screams and moans of other people and the horrible sounds of torture…I was beaten severely…they tried to gauge my eyes out…I lost consciousness several times and fell from the chair, and when I came to my senses I was tortured again.” They threatened to execute or maim him. After that, he was transported to the gym of the Odessa SSU office, and there he was forced to say loudly and clearly on camera that he would never again criticize Vladimir Zelensky and head of his office Andrey Yermak. In addition to that, they were trying to make him a SSU agent to fight the dissent against Zelensky. Mr. Dmytruk is not the only politician who claimed that there are “SSU concentration camps” in Kiev – we also heard about such camps from another Rada member, Aleksandr Dubinsky. According to what he said, more than 300 people were put through such SSU concentration camps, they were tortured there so that to obtain evidence against US President-elect Donald Trump and use this evidence to influence the election campaign in the USA.
These are very interesting confessions, aren’t they? They can help you understand what the American journalist Gonzalo Lira had to go through – he was arrested in August 2023 and tortured to death; he died in the dungeons of SSU prison a year ago, on January 12, 2024. And you can imagine what 70-year-old human rights activist Elena Berezhnaya (still unbroken by the Zelensky clique) had to endure – a month ago she was sentenced to 14 years in prison after months of torture in SSU dungeons because she came to the UN to speak out about human rights violations by the Kiev regime. I am not even mentioning the torture that Russian POWs are actually subjected to in Ukrainian prisons.
Let me put the following rhetorical question to my Western colleagues – how does this all correlate with the narrative you are advancing about the flourishing democracy in Ukraine? We have never had any illusions about that; we have always been well aware of what has been transpiring in that country since the anti-constitutional coup of 2014, which was supported by the United States and its satellites. Unlike you, we can tell the truth and we don’t have to be hypocritical, as for example our British colleagues do. At their informal “Arria formula” meeting on January 13, they brought dyed-in-the-wool Ukrainian Nazis to New York, one of them has a tattoo of the German Totenkopf Division, which was convicted in the UK for killing 97 British POWs in 1940.
Mr. President,
I would like to conclude my statement today by quoting what US Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio said at yesterday’s Senate hearing: “Ukraine’s problem is not that it is running out of money, but that it is running out of Ukrainians.” Let me add: the problem is also that the people of Ukraine do not want to fight for the person who usurped power in the country and turned it into a concentration camp. The sooner our Western colleagues realize this, the better for them and for Ukrainian citizens themselves.
Thank you.