Russia’s Strange Statement at the UN Security Briefing Ahead of 1,000 Days of Russia’s Full-Scale War on Ukraine

In his statement, Nebenzya put forward some rather bold accusations, including the claim that the UK masterminded a “staged” provocation in Bucha, arranging corpses on the streets to falsely blame Russia for atrocities. He also took a peculiar turn, suggesting that Britain actually “invented” concentration camps.

This is his strange statement in full.

“There is certain symbolism in the fact that it was our British colleagues presiding over the Security Council this month, who forced through today’s meeting, timing it to coincide with the 1000-day mark since the Ukrainian crisis reached its hot phase. Once again, we had the opportunity to see that, for you and your colleagues, this is nothing more than a media opportunity to demonize Russia and to label it with terms that your Western colleagues predictably repeat.

In your country, the UK, Russophobia has been a state policy long before 2022. Please allow me to remind you that, while preparing for today’s meeting, you missed yet another media opportunity that holds much more importance in the context of the Ukrainian crisis than the date you chose. Last Friday, on November 15th, it marked exactly 950 days since former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited Kyiv. There, he, and we now know for a fact, dissuaded the Kyiv regime from signing a peace agreement with Russia, which had already been finalized and would have stopped the hostilities at the time. We were very close to peace. As a goodwill gesture, Russia even withdrew its troops from northern Ukraine, including areas near Kyiv.

In other words, 50 days after the start of the special military operation, when the losses among the Ukrainian armed forces were still not significant, the hostilities had every chance of ending—if not for the interference of the British Prime Minister, who convinced Zelenskyy to continue fighting. He promised Western support and weaponry, leading him to believe he could inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.

The British Prime Minister and his allies were clearly invested in such a defeat. To justify this shift to the Ukrainian public, British special forces and media participated in staging a cruel provocation in Bucha. After the Russian forces’ withdrawal, corpses were brought and arranged in the streets, yet the real cause of death was never explained to us, despite repeated requests.

In other words, it turns out that the UK pushed the Kyiv regime towards its inevitable defeat, precipitating its decision to continue confrontation with Russia. Ukraine will long remember that, due to the actions of your country, it is now in a terrible economic state. It has lost much of its army and material, as well as at least four regions, in addition to what was lost in 2014 when Crimea left Ukraine. Ukrainians have long stopped wanting to fight. The Ukrainian army has not known what a volunteer looks like for two years now. The Kyiv regime has banned men from leaving the country, and they are being drafted from the streets using firearms and thrown into a senseless meat grinder.

The eastern front of the Ukrainian armed forces in Donbas is collapsing. You know very well the rate at which our army is progressing. To maintain Western support, the Zelenskyy regime launched a senseless incursion into the course cobblers and tried to capture and mine the course in NPP, which resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of troops. This misadventure was a fatal error, accelerating Ukraine’s defeat. No matter how much Western weaponry is provided, they will not be spared from that defeat.

The initiators of today’s meeting, as a matter of transparency, should have told us about the astronomical profits the UK received over the three years of military support to Ukraine. How, on the blood and tragedy of Ukrainians, your own manufacturers became wealthy, and your Ministry of Defence disposed of old material that had to be used up in any event. Additionally, it would have been good to address the corruption accompanying this and its scale, something we can only guess. Ukrainian media themselves say that after Donald Trump’s election victory, there was panic among the Ukrainian elite—not because the US might revise assistance to Ukraine, but because the new administration might audit the assistance already provided. This is far more frightening for Zelenskyy, as a considerable portion of the assistance is stolen or pocketed by him and his entourage.

Take into account the amount of military assistance provided by the UK since 2022—approximately $9.7 billion. Given that, we can say that your country has certainly contributed to the corruption in Ukraine. We will likely never see an investigation by British authorities, because in such cases, investigations are designed to avoid accusing oneself.

Mr. President, for those familiar with the history of the UK, its long-term interference in Ukraine has been clear, culminating in the actions I’ve just mentioned. This is nothing new. The UK has long relished in sowing discord between neighboring countries, supporting one against the other—a practice it has perfected over centuries. All of your former colonies can attest to this. By the way, out of 193 UN member states, only 22 can boast that their territory has never been invaded by or fought with Great Britain. My country is not an exception; the last such invasion was a British intervention following the 1917 revolution, when various predators tried to tear Russia apart. But we prevailed, grew stronger, and now face another indirect intervention by NATO members, including the UK, fighting Russia in Ukraine.

This is how we view not only the continued supply of weapons and intelligence to the Kyiv regime, but also the presence of British instructors and mercenaries—hundreds of them already eliminated—and the attempts to bring UAV, missile, and sea drone manufacturing specialists to Ukraine. We understand that, in the 21st century, the UK finds it difficult to leave Ukraine and Russia alone because the DNA of the colonizers who wreaked havoc across Asia, Africa, and Europe for centuries is deeply ingrained in you. We know that the British Empire brutally suppressed the resistance of its colonies for hundreds of years, using forced assimilation, racial discrimination, and disregarding human values and the rights of peoples. The peaceful citizens of colonized countries paid with their lives and freedom for the imperial ambitions of Britain.

Suffice it to recall the ethnic cleansing in Ireland, where only 850,000 of the 1.5 million people survived after British conquest. During the Second Boer War, the British invented concentration camps, where civilians were driven to ensure they wouldn’t aid the Boer army. How many people perished there, no one knows, because the British didn’t consider indigenous people human and didn’t document their losses among Africans. We do know, however, that in Kenya, after the Mau Mau rebellion, mass prosecutions occurred, resulting in 300,000 deaths, 1.5 million people placed in camps and enslaved. In India, British colonialism led to enormous damage, and a famine engineered by them caused the deaths of 15 to 29 million people.

The consequences of the actions of former colonizers continue to be felt worldwide. Though colonial empires are a thing of the past, their methods—pressure, manipulation, and interference—are still employed in new ways: blackmail, sanctions, overthrowing disfavored regimes, or fomenting revolutions. One such victim of revolution was Ukraine in 2014.

I say all of this to demonstrate that there is no moral right to accuse or blame my country. We are removing the neo-nationalist and neo-Nazi threat from our borders. No one has the right to intervene until the threats—such as the absorption of Ukraine into NATO, discrimination against Russian-speaking peoples, and the glorification of Hitler’s accomplices—are removed. Until then, our special operation will continue, with its goals to be achieved either diplomatically or militarily, regardless of whatever peace plans or schemes are being developed in the West to save the actor-turned-entertainment figure Zelenskyy and his clique.

And independently of the militarist agony of the democratic administration, which has suffered a humiliating defeat in the presidential election and lost the trust of most of its population, we now see them issuing, according to mass media, suicidal permissions to Zelenskyy to use long-range weapons to strike inside Russia. Perhaps Joe Biden, for many reasons, has nothing left to lose. But we are astounded by the short-sightedness of the leadership in the UK and France. They are playing into the hands of the exiting administration and dragging not only their countries but all of Europe into large-scale escalation with drastic consequences. This is something our former Western countries should think very hard about. Also, those thinking about freezing the front lines need to consider the Minsk agreements rejected by Ukraine and its Western mentors. Don’t waste your time. We no longer have any confidence in that. We will only accept decisions that remove the root causes of this crisis and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

As for defeating Russia on the battlefield, I suggest you abandon that idea. Europe has tried this several times, and the outcome of each such attempt is well known to you.

I thank you.”