Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vassily Nebenzia delivered a powerful statement to an emergency session of the UN Security Council yesterday, echoing the tough statement condemning the Israeli actions issued by the Russia Foreign Ministry earlier that day. “However, responsibility for what happened lies not only with [the Israelis] but also with its closest allies,” Nebenzia said. “This is a direct consequence of the connivance on the part of Western countries, which for months knowingly and methodically pumped up anti-Iranian hysteria both in the UN Security Council and in the IAEA Board of Governors. These states did not even try to come up with a constructive solution to the crisis surrounding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] and Security Council Resolution 2231 which endorsed it. They had a completely different objective, namely to exert pressure on Iran by any means possible, to paint it as the source of all evil in the region and baselessly present Tehran’s legitimate response measures—such as the use of the protective mechanisms under the JCPOA—as a violation of the non-proliferation obligations.”
Nebenzia reminded the Council “that all the problems having to do with the JCPOA began after the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the ‘nuclear deal’ in 2018, and due to the principled unwillingness of the U.K., France, and Germany to comply with the obligations they have under the JCPOA, including the obligations to create conditions for Tehran to reap material yield from lifting unilateral sanctions by the European Union that were in force until 2015.” He cited the resolution voted up by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday morning, June 12, as the “latest glaring example” of a document that is “completely divorced from reality and refers to some fictitious ‘threat to international peace and security’ allegedly posed by Iran’s nuclear program….
