Following are Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski's remarks to the United Nations Security Council on Friday.
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I am amazed at the tone and content of the Russian Ambassador's presentation.
And I thought I could be useful by correcting the record. Ambassador Nebenzya described Kiev as a client of the West. In fact, Kiev is struggling to be independent of anyone.
He calls them a criminal Kiev regime. In fact, Ukraine has a democratically elected government.
He calls them Nazis. Well, the president is Jewish, the defense minister is Muslim and there are no political prisoners.
He said that Ukraine was wallowing in corruption. Well, Alexei Navalny has documented how honest and honest his own country is.
He blamed US neo-colonialism for the war. In fact, in the 19th century, Russia tried to exterminate Ukraine again under the Bolsheviks, and now it is the third attempt.
He said we were prisoners of Russophobia. “Phobia” means irrational fear. Yet we are threatened with nuclear annihilation almost daily by the former president of Russia and Putin's propagandists. I tell you that it is not irrational – when Russia threatens us, we trust him.
He said we deny Russia's security interests. Not true. We only started rearming when Russia began invading its neighbors.
He even said that Poland attacked Russia in World War II. What is he talking about? It was the Soviet Union that attacked Poland together with Nazi Germany on September 17, 1939. They even held a joint victory parade on September 27th.
He says Russia has only ever repelled aggression. What were the Russian troops doing at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? Have you been on a topographical excursion? The truth is that every time Russia was invaded, it invaded ten times.
He says it is a perfidious proxy war by the West. My advice is: don't fall into the West's trap. Withdraw your troops to international borders and avoid this western conspiracy.
He also says that there was an illegal coup in Kiev in 2014. I was there. There was no coup. President Yanukovych murdered hundreds of his compatriots and was removed from office by a democratically elected Ukrainian parliament, including his own party, the Party of Regions.
And finally he says that we in the West are somehow trying to convince Russia that it can never be defeated. Well, Russia didn't win the Crimean War, it didn't win the Russo-Japanese War, it didn't win World War I, it didn't win the Battle of Warsaw, it didn't win in Afghanistan, and it didn't win that Cold War not won.
But there is good news. After every failure there were reforms.
Such demagoguery is unworthy of a permanent member of the Security Council. But what the ambassador has achieved is to remind us why we resisted Soviet rule and what Ukraine is now resisting.
At that time they failed to subdue us. They will not be able to subdue Ukraine and us now.