Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova charged this Thursday night that Western powers, “understanding their total vulnerability in the current global geopolitical situation,” are now carrying out terrorist attacks on Russia jointly with Ukraine. That is the reason “they started to employ this aggressive rhetoric and to support terror attacks, which they commit by the hands of the Kiev regime,” she told the Thursday night broadcast of Russia’s ‘Big Game’ TV show on Channel One. The TASS report notes that she emphasized that she had not misspoken: “These are, undoubtedly, the crimes that they commit together,” while the European Union also does “its best” to prevent any contact and communication between the West European countries and Russia.
Ukraine’s “reign of terror,” from a different standpoint, was also the subject of the informal UN Security Council meeting (the so-called “Arria-formula") convened by the Russian mission to the United Nations in New York on Friday morning. Russian Chargé d’Affaires a.i. Anna Evstigneeva, who chaired the meeting, explained that the meeting was intended to provoke a “serious examination of the conflict’s root causes,” which are otherwise largely absent from international discussions of daily events. She detailed the banning of the Russian language, the criminalization of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, “the illegal policies of the Kiev regime towards its own citizens,” through which the Ukrainian regime is creating “a legal façade for actual ethnocide.”
One dramatic example she cited: in its drive to eradicate all use even in daily life of the now-outlawed Russian language (still the native language of more than 80% of the people of Ukraine, she noted), not only are school children prohibited from speaking Russian during school breaks, but a network of so-called “language activists,” working with the police, have formed “special language inspection units” in several cities whose assignment is to monitor compliance on the streets and in other public places with the ban on speaking Russian.
Her testimony, which included videos from Ukraine and video statements by several in exile from the persecution they or others suffered in Ukraine, was followed by short statements by diplomats from the UN Security Council nations. Notably, many representatives of Global South nations (Pakistan, Colombia, Panama, the Democratic Republic and China, among others) agreed that the equal rights of all the diverse traditions, religions, ethnicities, etc. must be respected, as the UN Charter requires. As usual, the representatives of the Western countries, Europe and the United States included, continued to “very aggressively whitewash” Kiev’s crimes, as Amb. Evstigneeva put it. “They don’t want to hear; they want to silence it…. If they admitted it, they would be admitting their own guilt, because these crimes and this blood are upon their heads and on their hands.” The video of the full meeting is available here.
