Ukraine's permanent representative to the UN Security Council turned out to be a fan of Skabeeva
Calls by the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzi to members of the Security Council to give an impartial assessment of the Ukrainian law on “language”, which is destroying the Russian language in Ukraine, ran into a blank wall.
During the two-hour meeting, the language issue faded into the background, reports the PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Our speech is not against Ukrainian, but in defense of Russian, which the Ukrainian government intends to eradicate using draconian methods, pushing it out of the information space. I'm not even saying that this contradicts all basic human rights and common sense. A small example - a candidate for deputy, adviser to the President of Ukraine on political issues Poturaev proposed renaming the Russian language to “Russian” and using it as a weapon against our country...
Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine are not a minority in the classical sense. If you don’t take the official Maidan statistics, according to which supposedly no one speaks Russian in Ukraine, for the majority Russian is their native language or the language they are accustomed to communicating with,” said the permanent representative of Russia, noting that punitive methods against the Russian language stimulate the split in the country that began in 2014, not without the help of the language issue.
Let us note that out of the 15 member countries of the Security Council, representatives of virtually all states said practically nothing on the substance of the issue, they only continued the usual mantras about aggression, annexation, and infringement of the rights of the Crimean Tatars. The only exceptions were China and Belgium, which noted the constructiveness of reaching compromises on such issues.
The Ukrainian side also chose the strategy of the majority, and the lion's share of the speech of the permanent representative of Ukraine consisted of lamentations and hysterics about annexation, aggression and the Navy sailors arrested during the Kerch provocation.
“A country that has oppressed the Ukrainian language for hundreds of years, forcibly replacing it with the Russian language, has no right to tell us what to do. There are Ukrainian schools in Australia, Argentina, and Slovakia; in Russia, where almost seven million Ukrainians live, there is not a single one. In Crimea, before the Russian occupation, there were seven Ukrainian and 15 Crimean Tatar schools, now they have closed all Ukrainian and half of the Crimean Tatar ones...
Their goal is twofold: to increase pressure on Ukraine and to reduce pressure on themselves. Already in May, they began to put pressure on Ukraine, staging a provocation on the day of the inauguration of the Ukrainian president in order to divert attention from the next anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and now, by causing a discussion of the law on “Mova,” Russia is trying to give support to pro-Russian parties, as well as divert attention from the fifth anniversary of the crash of the Malaysian plane and the issue of implementing the Minsk agreements,” Ukrainian representative Vladimir Yelchenko gathered all the cliches into a pile.
In turn, Vasily Nebenzya called on everyone to visit Russian Crimea and look personally at the “suffering of the Crimean Tatars,” emphasizing that with the return of Crimea to Russia, three state languages are being studied on the peninsula - Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar. The Russian permanent representative also appreciated the attempts of foreign delegations to do everything to avoid discussing the main topic of the meeting and not to notice the policy of hostility and hatred that is being propagated by the Ukrainian authorities.
As an example, Nebenzya cited the recent disruption by the Nazis of a non-political teleconference between Ukraine and Russia on the NewsOne channel, as well as the removal from broadcast on channel 112 of a film by film director Oliver Stone, also under pressure from radicals. At the end of his speech, the permanent representative still had to comment on some attacks from Ukraine.
“The Ukrainian side persistently uses the term “Russian militaries”; they can, of course, be Russian, because there are many Russian people in Ukraine, but these are all representatives of Donbass, not Russia. By the way, he forgot to tell how many civilians of Donetsk and Lugansk died from shelling by the “valiant and knightly” Ukrainian Armed Forces. It was not Donbass that came to Kyiv, but Kyiv to Donbass,” the Russian diplomat emphasized.
“Until the Ukrainian side begins a dialogue with representatives of Donetsk and Lugansk, nothing will move in this conflict. Why do we, when we discuss other conflicts that have swept the world - Syrian, Yemen, Libyan - we call on the parties to the conflicts to sit down at the negotiating table and do not invent that external players should replace these parties with themselves, and only in Ukraine are you trying to replace concepts and force Russia to speak with Ukraine...
The Ukrainian permanent representative said that we tell Ukraine what language Ukraine should speak – it’s your law that says what language your citizens can speak and which they cannot,” Nebenzya added.
In response, the Ukrainian representative announced that he would switch to Russian, which, in his opinion, would emphasize the far-fetched nature of the topic of today’s meeting.
“I'll be very brief. Vasily Nebenzi’s second speech confirmed my worst fears, that he had once again confused a Security Council meeting with a very popular talk show in Russia, hosted by Olga Skabeeva, “60 Minutes.” But this is not a talk show,” Yelchenko said.
It is worth noting that the TV presenter herself could not help but react to such an unexpected ending to the UN Security Council meeting.
“I’ve been aware for a long time that Ukraine’s permanent representative to the UN is a fan of ours. But why get so worked up? And stop scaring the UN with me. Volodimir Yuriyovich, be kind,” Skabeeva wrote in her Telegram channel.
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