We are meeting at a difficult and dramatic moment. Crises are growing, and the international security situation is deteriorating rapidly. Instead of honest dialogue and compromise, what we have is disinformation, coarse statements and provocations. The West’s policy is undermining trust in international institutions as bodies designed to reconcile different interests, and in international law as a guarantee of fairness and of the protection of the weak against arbitrary acts. We are witnessing negative trends in a concentrated fashion at the United Nations, which arose from the rubble of German fascism and Japanese militarism and was established to promote friendly relations and prevent conflicts among its members.
Issues relating to the future world order are being decided today, as any unbiased observer can clearly see. The question is whether that world order will have a single hegemon that forces everyone else to live by its infamous rules, benefiting it alone, or whether we will have a democratic and fair world, free from blackmail and intimidation of anyone deemed undesirable, a world without neo-Nazism and neocolonialism. Russia is resolute in choosing the latter option, and together with our allies, partners and like-minded countries, we call for working to make it a reality. The unipolar model of global development serving the interests of the one per cent, who for centuries fuelled its excessive consumption at the expense of the resources of Asia, Africa and Latin America, is receding into the past. Today, with the emergence of sovereign States that are ready to defend their national interests, an equal, socially oriented and sustainable multipolar architecture is taking shape. However, Washington, and the Western ruling elites that have fully submitted to its rule, view those objective geopolitical processes as a threat to their dominance.
The United States and its allies want to stop the march of history. Having at some point declared victory in the Cold War, Washington elevated itself almost to the level of God’s messenger on Earth, free of constraints and with a sacred right to act with impunity wherever and however it wants. Any State could be declared its next target, especially if it has somehow displeased the self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We all remember the wars of aggression that were unleashed far from American shores and on far-fetched pretexts in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of peaceful civilians. Were the West’s legitimate interests really at stake in even one of those countries? Were there bans there on English or other languages of NATO’s member States, or on the Western media or culture? Were Anglo-Saxons declared subhuman and heavy weapons used against them? What became of the United States’ adventurism in the Middle East? Has it improved the human rights situation or the rule of law? Has it stabilized the socioeconomic situation or improved people’s welfare? Name one country where life has changed for the better as a result of Washington’s interference by force.
In its attempts to revive a unipolar model under the banner of a rules-based order, the West has established dividing lines everywhere based on the notion of confrontation between blocs and the spirit of “either you are with us or against us”. There is no third option or possibility for compromise. In a continuation of its irrational policy of expanding NATO eastward and bringing NATO’s military infrastructure close to the borders of Russia, the United States now wants to subjugate Asia. At the NATO summit in June in Madrid, the self-proclaimed defensive alliance declared the security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions indivisible. Closed frameworks are being created under the banner of Indo-Pacific strategies that undermine the entire open and inclusive regional architecture that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has built over decades. On top of that, it is playing with fire regarding Taiwan, going so far as to promise it military support.
The notorious Monroe Doctrine is clearly becoming global in scope. Washington is trying to make the entire world its own backyard. Its tool for coercing those who disagree is illegal unilateral sanctions, which for many years now have been used in violation of the Charter of the United Nations as an instrument of political blackmail. The cynicism of that practice is obvious, since the restrictions affect civilians, preventing their access to basic goods, including medicines, vaccines and food. One such egregious example is the United States’ blockade of Cuba, which has gone on for more than 60 years, and whose lifting an overwhelming majority of the General Assembly has been demanding urgently for decades. The Secretary-General, whose duties include facilitating the implementation of the General Assembly resolutions, should of course give that issue special attention.
The Secretary-General also has a special role to play in mobilizing the efforts to overcome the food and energy crises that have resulted from the uncontrolled printing of money in the United States and the European Union (EU) during the pandemic, as well as the EU’s irresponsible and unprofessional actions in the hydrocarbon fuel markets. Defying elementary common sense, Washington and Brussels have compounded the situation by declaring an economic war against Russia, and the result has been higher prices globally for food, fertilizer, oil and gas. We welcomed the Secretary-General’s efforts to help broker the Istanbul agreements of 22 July, but those agreements have to be implemented. So far, most of the ships carrying Ukrainian grain have not been directed to the poorest countries, and the financial and logistical obstacles to Russia’s exports of grain and fertilizer imposed by the United States and the EU have not been completely removed. We have pointing out for weeks that 300,000 tonnes of fertilizer are being held up in European ports and have proposed shipping them free of charge to the African countries that need them, but the European Union has not responded.
Official Russophobia in the West has taken on unprecedented and grotesque dimensions, with some unhesitatingly declaring their intention not just to defeat Russia militarily but to destroy and dismember it — in other words, to wipe off the world map a geopolitical entity that has become too independent. How have Russia’s actions over the past decades actually encroached on its opponents’ interests? Could it be that they cannot forgive the fact that Russia’s position made the military and strategic detente of the 1980s and ’90s possible? Or is it that we voluntarily dissolved the Warsaw Treaty Organization, thereby depriving NATO of its raison d’etre? Or that contrary to positions in London and Paris, we supported German reunification unconditionally? Or withdrew our armed forces from Europe, Asia and Latin America, and recognized the independence of the former Soviet republics? Or believed Western leaders’ promises that they would not expand NATO eastward by an inch, and when the process started, we agreed to basically legitimize it by signing a Founding Act between Russia and NATO? Did we perhaps encroach on the West’s interests when we warned that bringing its military infrastructure closer to our borders was unacceptable?
Western arrogance and American exceptionalism became especially destructive after the end of the Cold War. As long ago as 1991, Paul Wolfowitz, then the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, in a conversation with NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark, acknowledged openly that
“[wjith the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity.... And we’ve got five, maybe ten, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us.”
I am sure that one day we will learn from someone’s memoirs how the United States built its policy on Ukraine, but Washington’s plans are already obvious even now.
Could it be that they simply cannot forgive us that at the request of the United States and the European Union we supported the agreement reached between the-then President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and the opposition on resolving the crisis of February 2014, which was guaranteed by Germany, France and Poland — and was then trampled on the next morning by the ringleaders of the bloody coup, humiliating the European mediators? The West simply threw up its hands and looked on in silence as the putschists began bombing eastern Ukraine, where people refused to accept the results of the coup, just as they did when its organizers elevated the Nazi accomplices who took part in the brutal ethnic cleansing of Russians, Poles and Jews during the Second World War to the rank of national heroes. Were we supposed to stand idly by in the face of Kyiv’s policies imposing a total ban on the Russian language and on Russian education, media and culture, demanding that Russians be expelled from Crimea and declaring war on the Donbas — whose residents the Kyiv authorities, then and now, in the words of their most senior officials, have pronounced to be not people but mere creatures? Perhaps Russia was interfering with Western interests when it played a key role in stopping the hostilities unleashed by Kyiv’s neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine and then insisted on the implementation of the Minsk package of measures — which was adopted unanimously by the Security Council in February 2015 but then killed by Kyiv with the direct involvement of the United States and the EU?
For many years we have repeatedly offered to agree on the rules for coexistence in Europe based on the principles of equal and indivisible security, as affirmed at the highest level in documents of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. According to those principles, no country can seek to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of others. The last time we proposed making those essential agreements legally binding was in December 2021 and we were met with an arrogant rejection.
The Western countries’ unwillingness to engage in talks and the Kyiv regime’s continuing war on its own people left us with no choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics and launch a special military operation to protect the Russian and other residents of Donbas and eliminate the threats to our security that NATO has been consistently creating in Ukraine on what amounts to our borders. The operation is being carried out in accordance with the treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance reached between Russia and those republics on the basis of Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. I am certain that any self-respecting sovereign State conscious of its responsibility to its own people would have done the same in our place.
The West is having hysterics over the referendums in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya oblasts of Ukraine, but the people there are merely responding to the Kyiv regime’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who in an interview in August 2021 advised all who considered themselves Russian to leave for Russia for their children and grandchildren’s sake. That is what the residents of those regions are doing now, and they are taking the lands where their forefathers lived for centuries with them. It is very clear to any unbiased observer that for the Anglo-Saxons, who have completely subjugated Europe, Ukraine is merely expendable material in their fight against Russia. NATO has declared that our country poses an immediate threat to the United States’ quest for total dominance and that China is a long-term strategic challenge. At the same time, the collective West, led by Washington, is sending an intimidating message to every other country, without exception, to the effect that anyone who dares to disobey may be next.
One of the consequences of the crusade that the West has declared against regimes it does not favour is that multilateral institutions are declining at an ever-increasing pace as the United States and its allies turn them into tools for realizing their own selfish interests. That approach is being embedded in the United Nations, the Human Rights Council, UNESCO and other multilateral associations. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has been virtually privatized. There are fierce attempts being made to undermine efforts to set up a mechanism within the Biological Weapons Convention to ensure the transparency of the hundreds of military biological programmes that the Pentagon has around the world, including along Russia’s borders and throughout Eurasia. Irrefutable evidence discovered on Ukrainian territory has shown that they are far from harmless.
We are seeing a huge policy aimed at privatizing the United Nations Secretariat and introducing a neo-liberal discourse into its work that ignores the cultural and civilizational diversity of today’s world. In that connection, as the Charter requires, we call for attention to be paid to ensuring the equitable geographic representation of Member States within the structures of the Secretariat so that no one single group of countries can dominate it. An intolerable situation has developed around Washington’s failure to meet its obligations, as the host country, under the Agreement between the United Nations and the United States of America regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, to provide normal conditions for the participation of all Member States in the work of the United Nations. The Secretary-General has corresponding obligations under the Agreement, and any failure to act on them is unacceptable.
Various countries’ efforts to undermine the prerogatives of the Security Council are of course a matter of concern. There is no question that the Council, and the United Nations in general, should adapt to current realities. We see opportunities for making the work of the Security Council more democratic but only — and I want to stress this — by expanding the representation of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. India and Brazil are particularly notable as key international players and worthy candidates for permanent membership in the Council, as long as Africa’s presence is enhanced at the same time.
Today it is more important than ever that Member States unambiguously reaffirm their clearly stated commitment to the purposes and principles of the Charter as a first and essential step towards restoring their collective responsibility for the fate of humankind. That was the precise purpose of the establishment, in July 2021, of the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations, which was co-founded by Russia and already includes a couple of dozen countries. The group aims to ensure strict compliance with the universal norms of international law as a counterweight to pernicious unilateral approaches. We urge everyone who shares that position to join. In that context, the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, as well as the BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN have considerable positive potential.
Despite their aggressive imposition of their understanding of democracy as a model for the social organization of all countries, our Western colleagues are categorically unwilling to be ruled by the norms of democracy in international affairs. The situation with Ukraine is a very recent example of that. Russia has expounded the basis for its position in detail for the past several years, and the West has expressed its disagreement with it. It should then be up to the other members of the international community to decide what position to take and whether to support one side or the other or remain neutral. That is usually what is done in democracies when opposing politicians make their case to try to win popular support. But the United States and its allies give no one the freedom to choose. They threaten and arm-twist anyone who dares to think independently. They use threats to force others to join sanctions against Russia. That has not worked very well for them, but it is obvious that these kinds of actions by the United States and its satellites are a far cry from democracy. They amount to a dictatorship, pure and simple, or at least an attempt to impose it.
We get a strong impression that Washington and its servant Europe are trying to preserve their vanishing hegemony through exclusively forbidden means. Illegal sanctions are routinely used instead of diplomatic methods against strong competitors, whether in economics, sports, the information space, cultural exchanges or general interactions among people. Indeed, the problems that representatives have encountered in obtaining visas for international events in New York, Geneva, Vienna and Paris also constitute attempts to eliminate competition and insulate multilateral discussions from alternative points of view.
I believe firmly in the importance of defending the United Nations and ridding it of anything confrontational or alien so that we can restore its reputation as a platform for honest discussions aimed at balancing the interests of all Member States. That is the approach that guides us in our efforts to promote our national initiatives within the United Nations.
It will be vital to achieve a comprehensive ban on the placement of weapons in outer space, which is the aim of the Russian-Chinese draft international treaty now under review in the Conference on Disarmament.
Defending cyberspace deserves special attention, including the negotiation of an agreement within the Open-ended Working Group on security of and in the use of information and communications technologies 2021-2025, as well as drafting a universal convention within the Special Committee on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes. We will continue supporting the Office of Counter-Terrorism and the other counterterrorist entities within the United Nations. We will also continue to help promote dynamic ties between the United Nations and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Eurasian Economic Union in order to coordinate our efforts across greater Eurasia.
Russia calls for stepping up efforts to settle regional conflicts. We believe we should prioritize overcoming the impasse in establishing an independent Palestinian State, restoring statehood in Iraq and Libya, which has been destroyed by NATO’s aggression, neutralizing the threats to Syria’s sovereignty, establishing a sustainable process of national reconciliation in Yemen and tackling NATO’s devastating legacy in Afghanistan. We are working to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for Iran’s nuclear programme in its original form, and to bring about a just and comprehensive resolution of the problems on the Korean peninsula. The multiple conflicts in Africa demand that we resist the temptation to play a geopolitical zero-sum game there and instead consolidate external players in support of the African Union’s initiatives. We are concerned about the situations in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the United States and the EU are stubbornly seeking to undo the international legal framework set forth in Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) and the Dayton Peace Agreement.
In times of change, people tend to rely on and find solace in the wisdom of predecessors who endured similarly challenging hardships. The former Secretary- General Dag Hammarskjold, recalling the horrors of the Second World War, said that “[t]he United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” Those words have never been more relevant. They call on all of us to assume our individual and collective responsibility to create the conditions needed to ensure that succeeding generations develop in safety and harmony. For that to happen, everyone will have to demonstrate political will. We are ready to work in good faith and strongly believe that the only way to ensure the stability of the world order is through a return to the roots of United Nations diplomacy on the basis of the key principle of true democracy, which is respect for the sovereign equality of States.