Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used his time at the UN General Assembly to present his case against Russia. He said that the Twentieth-Century fear of nuclear war allowed restraint and a certain level of disarmament. “The Third World War was seen as a nuclear war, a conflict between states on the highway to nukes.” He says that this should not be the only strategy for peace, giving his own nation as an example. “Ukraine gave up [the world’s] third largest nuclear arsenal. The world then decided Russia should become a keeper of such power. Yet, history shows it was Russia who deserved nuclear disarmament the most, back in the 1990s. And Russia deserves it now – terrorists have no right to hold nuclear weapons.” But worse than nuclear weapons are the other “weapons” Russia has crafted: food, energy, children.
On food, Zelenskyy claimed that Russia was depriving the world of food as a sort of blackmail to force Ukraine to give up territory. On energy, Zelenskyy made the stunningly strange claim — in the context of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines — that Russia has “weaponized oil and gas to weaken the leaders of other countries.” And now, “Russia is weaponizing nuclear energy. Not only is it spreading its unreliable nuclear-power-plant construction-technologies, but it is also turning other countries’ power plants into real dirty bombs. Look what Russia did to our Zaporizhzhia power plant – shelled it, occupied it and now blackmails others with radiation leaks.” The idea that Russian nuclear power plants are turning into dirty bombs across the world is laughable. He repeated his claims that Russia is committing a “genocide” by taking Ukrainian children: “hundreds of thousands” in the estimate of the Ukrainian president.
