The United States and Russia bitterly attacked one another over the Ukraine disaster in a diplomatic brawl Monday on the UN Security Council, in a session replete with acidic exchanges that would have been lifted from the Cold War period.
The Americans, backed by their Western allies, accused Russia of endangering peace and destabilizing international safety by massing greater than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, whereas Kremlin diplomats dismissed what they referred to as baseless and hysterical US fear-mongering geared toward weakening Russia and frightening armed battle .
“The situation we are facing in Europe is urgent and dangerous,” US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated in her opening remarks to a televised assembly of the Council that Russia had sought to forestall. “Russia’s actions strike at the very heart of the UN charter.”
Her Russian counterpart, Vassily Nebenzia, stated it was the Americans who had been the provocateurs, “whipping up tensions and provoking escalation,” as he insisted that Russia had no plans to invade Ukraine.
“You are almost pulling for this,” he stated, Thomas-Greenfield. “You want it to happen. You’re waiting for it to happen, as if you want to make your words become a reality.”
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya addresses the United Nations Security Council Jan 31, 2022. (AP)
The assembly of the 15-nation Security Council, requested by the United States final week, had not been anticipated to supply any diplomatic breakthrough: The Council is thought extra for its failures to avert armed conflicts quite than success in stopping them.
Still, the assembly represented the highest-profile area for the 2 greatest nuclear navy powers to sway world opinion over the escalating tensions involving Ukraine.
As diplomats sparred on the United Nations, behind-the-scenes efforts to resolve the disaster accelerated, with President Emmanuel Macron of France talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the cellphone Monday for the second time in 4 days.
The Kremlin stated the 2 leaders had mentioned Ukraine in addition to Putin’s calls for for “security guarantees” that would come with a legally binding halt on NATO enlargement to the east. They agreed to remain in contact by cellphone and to “work promptly on the possibility of holding an in-person meeting,” the Kremlin stated.
US officers stated Monday that they had acquired a Russian response to Washington’s proposal, made final week, to defuse the Ukraine disaster. But a State Department official wouldn’t element the response, saying the Biden administration didn’t need to negotiate in public
On Tuesday morning, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is predicted to talk by cellphone with Russia’s international minister, Sergey Lavrov.
But even because the diplomats on the Security Council emphasised the necessity for a peaceable decision, the tone of the rhetoric between the Russian and American envoys instructed the rift between the 2 sides over Ukraine, and the specter of navy pressure, remained acute.
Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya attends a gathering of the UN Security Council on the scenario between Russia and Ukraine. (Reuters)
In Ukraine itself — the place many have been unnerved by the fixed drumbeat of menacing information about Russian navy manoeuvres, cyber-sabotage and disinformation — the nervousness has been compounded by tons of of bogus bomb threats. The threats, probably instigated by Russia, had been meant to sow panic and worry, Ukrainian officers stated. The variety of faux bomb scares in January, they stated, was six instances the extent of final yr.
Ukraine appealed to Moscow to deescalate the scenario.
“Russia announced several times they do not want war,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s international minister, stated in a video briefing for reporters. “Russia can prove those words by immediately decreasing its military, political and economic pressure on Ukraine. It can abandon ideas of destabilizing the situation inside Ukraine with invented protests, cyberattacks and efforts to disrupt normal life.”
The tensions surrounding Ukraine, a former Soviet republic of 44 million that has just lately drifted towards the West, have been smouldering since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 after a Russia-friendly authorities in Ukraine was ousted.
The tensions have escalated sharply in latest months and introduced US-Russian relations to their lowest level because the Cold War ended three many years in the past.
The United States and its NATO companions say Russia’s troop deployments to Ukraine’s borders in latest weeks are a part of Putin’s effort to enlarge his county’s sphere of affect in Eastern Europe. The Kremlin has accused the NATO alliance of threatening Russia and has demanded that it by no means admit Ukraine as a member.
The Biden administration has vowed to reply with crippling financial sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, elaborated on that risk Monday, saying the administration had developed “specific sanctions packages” to strike at Russian “elites” and leaders “in or near the inner circle of the Kremlin,” ought to Putin order an invasion.
The Security Council assembly adjourned after two hours with no motion taken. Nebenzia pointedly left the assembly earlier than it was over, as Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, was talking.
Thomas-Greenfield advised reporters afterwards that she was upset by the Russian response on the assembly.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield attends a gathering of the UN Security Council on the scenario between Russia and Ukraine. (Reuters)
“We called for this meeting to allow the Russians to give us an explanation of what their actions are,” she stated. “They didn’t give us the answers that any of us would have hoped that they would provide.”
Still, the Biden administration stated it regarded the assembly as an necessary show of the resolve of the United States and its allies to confront Russia over the navy risk at Ukraine’s borders.
“If Russia is sincere about addressing our respective security concerns through dialogue, the United States and our allies and partners will continue to engage in good faith,” President Joe Biden stated in a White House assertion. “If instead Russia chooses to walk away from diplomacy and attack Ukraine, Russia will bear the responsibility, and it will face swift and severe consequences.”
The assembly had the Cold War atmospherics of the offended debates that when punctuated Security Council classes throughout the tensest faceoffs between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Immediately after the Council convened, the Russians misplaced a procedural problem to even holding the assembly. Nebenzia of Russia accused the Americans of fomenting “unfounded allegations that we have refuted.” He stated no Russian troops had been in Ukraine, questioning the fundamental premise of a gathering he described as “megaphone diplomacy.”
Thomas-Greenfield countered that many non-public diplomatic conferences had been held about Russia’s navy buildup and it was “now time to have a meeting in public.” She requested different members how they might really feel “if you had 100,000 troops sitting on your border.”
The Council voted to proceed with the assembly, with solely Russia and China objecting. Though each are everlasting members of the Council, together with Britain, France and the United States, they can’t use their veto powers to dam a gathering.
Russia’s navy buildup on Ukraine’s borders, Thomas-Greenfield stated, mirrored “an escalation in a pattern of aggression that we’ve seen from Russia again and again.” While she emphasised Washington seeks a peaceable final result, she stated that if the Russians invaded Ukraine, “none of us will be able to say we didn’t see it coming.”
Nebenzia, in his remarks, stated the United States and its Western allies had manufactured a disaster to weaken Russia and drive a wedge between it and Ukraine.
He stated the United States had been behind the 2014 change of presidency in Ukraine that had pushed a pro-Moscow management from energy and had put in “nationalists, radicals, Russophobes and pure Nazis.”
Nebenzia additionally sought to attract an analogy to the false American proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that preceded the 2003 US-led invasion of that nation, including that “what happened to that country is known to all.”
He strengthened a Kremlin message that it’s the West that has concocted the disaster, regardless of the massing of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders. The Russians have additionally seized on latest complaints by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that the Americans are needlessly sowing “panic.”
Putin, who has not spoken publicly about Ukraine since December, maintained his silence.
Kuleba, Ukraine’s international minister, advised reporters that his authorities was coordinating diplomacy with its allies, partly by a tactic he described as a “parade of visits” by international dignitaries to Kyiv — the idea being that Putin can be much less prone to order an assault if a international chief had been on the town.
Just this week, Ukraine plans to host visits by Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland and Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands.
Still, Kuleba cautioned, the string of visits was no assure of restraint by Russia, saying: “Who knows what is in Putin’s head?”
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
