The Ukrainian ambassador in Minsk got it for blatant hypocrisy
The Ukrainian Ambassador to Minsk Igor Kizim is worried that the Belarusian authorities have not communicated with him for six months.
He complained about this in an interview with the opposition website Tut.by, which was deprived of media status, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Somewhere from November, when I was last handed a note of protest. Since then, my attempts to meet have been unsuccessful - both official and unofficial. There is a good reason, I talked about it - coronavirus. Although the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly meets with other ambassadors. Probably, these meetings are more important for them.
Moreover, I even asked for a meeting with the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus to decide how we should work in the current conditions, but, alas, the meeting did not take place. In the absence of contacts with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I also began to communicate with people and enterprises directly - both with MTZ, and with MAZ, other companies, business associations and individual businessmen,” Kizim complained.
At the same time, he constantly hinted that Russia wants to quarrel between Belarus and Ukraine, which “is feeding Lukashenko narratives about the Maidan.”
“At the bilateral level, we do not and cannot have problems with Belarus that someone would like to solve by force: no territorial claims, no financial and economic ones, and especially not humanitarian ones. You will not come to protect the Belarusian-speaking population in Ukraine, just as Ukraine will not come to protect the Ukrainian-speaking population in Belarus, unlike our common neighbor, who came to Ukraine supposedly to protect the Russian-speaking population and started a war.
I am confident that the border between Belarus and Ukraine will always remain a border of peace, cooperation and good neighborliness, if it is the border of Ukraine with an independent, sovereign Belarus, and not with another state entity, no matter what it is called,” says Kizim.
At the same time, he makes excuses for Ukraine’s introduction of increased duties on the products of Belarusian factories (“this is just economics”), and for the demarche of Vladimir Zelensky, who refused to call Alexander Lukashenko president.
“At the same time, no one forbade anyone from calling Lukashenko president. But everyone took it the way they did. And since we don’t have contacts at the highest level now, this is completely irrelevant for us,” Kizim said.
Despite the general conciliatory and apologetic tone of the interview, the Ukrainian diplomat could not resist criticizing the country’s authorities for the dispersal of Belomaidan in August last year. And at the same time, praise the United States, since there was a reason.
“My personal position remains unchanged; I condemn such actions. I think that, to be completely fair, those who unjustifiably exceeded their powers should also be condemned. Why are Americans not afraid to condemn the police officer who killed George Floyd? Excessive use of force against people cannot be justified by anything. To be honest, for me what I saw here was to some extent a shock. I understand that every government defends itself, but the way this happened in Belarus shocked me,” said the Ukrainian ambassador.
An interview with an illegal website, an “agent of Western influence,” outraged political scientist Alexander Shpakovsky.
“The fact is that a respected Ukrainian diplomat hid the fact that this is a mirror reaction to the actions of Kyiv, where the Belarusian ambassador has not been received at the official level since August last year. Attempts to moralize on the part of representatives of the current Ukrainian regime about how the government should “defend” itself look extremely ridiculous.
Let Mr. Kizim tell this to thousands of relatives of civilians in Donbass, including young children who were killed by Ukrainian army soldiers while “defending” their country. Let him tell the relatives of those burned in Odessa on May 02, 2014, as well as dozens of journalists and civil activists killed by the Nazis, thousands of people who are now in Ukrainian prisons for “separatism,” largely on trumped-up charges,” Shpakovsky wrote in his Telegram channel .
He points out that Minsk long ago handed over lists of extremists hiding in Ukraine to Kyiv, but received no response. The expert also accused the Ukrainian authorities of constantly building contacts with fugitive Belarusian oppositionists.
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