In New York yesterday, Russia’s UN Ambassador, Vasiliy Nebanzia, chaired a meeting of the UN Security Council convened under the “Arria Formula"–an informal meeting which must be convened by a member of the UNSC–to discuss Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem. On this occasion, Nebenzia said the 2014 Maidan coup “triumphed after a very questionable bloodbath bringing to power a lot of extremists, criminals and revisionists who from the very outset formulated their political agenda in a way that immediately put Russian-speakers to the fringes of the society demanding from them to renounce their identity and historical mindset or to face prosecution, violence or even death.”
Nebenzia called particular attention to the May 2014 incident in which neo-Nazi gangs set fire to the trade union building in Odessa, killing more than 40 people trapped inside. “For the residents of Odessa it was never a secret that the attackers were armed members and supporters of the ... ‘Maidan Self-Defense’ and ‘Pravyi Sektor’ [Right Sector—ed.] extremist groups,” Nebenzia noted. “Nevertheless, for seven years the call of the UN Secretary-General for conclusive investigation remains unheard by Kiev and the perpetrators are yet to be brought to justice.”
Nebenzia brought a number of witnesses to testify to the horrors of life under neo-Nazi dominance in Ukraine, among them a former police official from Odessa, two witnesses to that and other brutalities by neo-Nazis in Ukraine, a witness to the near daily shelling of residential areas on the Donbass, and a political activist forced to leave Ukraine due to death threats. Nebenzia said it was necessary to bring forward this testimony, “because without knowledge of what this country is living through after the Maidan coup you will never be able to understand what really happened and why this crisis in Ukraine is far from over unless the West adapts a different approach towards Ukrainian nationalists and far right, the same approach, by the way, that it displays towards radicals and extremists in Europe and the US.”
