UNITED NATIONS, January 27. /TASS/. Russia’s Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, on Monday leveled sharp criticism at Western members of the UN Security Council for unscrupulous diplomacy in what concerns developments in Ukraine.
His tough remarks came as a response to a statement by the U.S. ambassador, Samantha Power, who rebuked Moscow for blocking a Security Council resolution on the shelling of residential areas in the southeastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
The resolution was turned down, as the U.S. and British delegations insisted on appending it with an item that would denounce the words of Alexander Zakharchenko, the Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, about the start of an offensive on Mariupol. UN Secretary General had discerned an encroachment on the Minsk accords in them earlier.
“We always denounce the situations where innocent people die and we were ready do this in Mariupol’s case, too, but the failure to do it was a result of unscrupulous diplomacy on behalf of some of our partners,” Churkin said.
“That’s the method they’ve used many a time since the outset of the Ukrainian crisis,” he said. “They like to insert the formulations clearly unacceptable for one member of the Security Council.”
He made a reminder to the Western members of the Security Council they had not issued a single condemnation of man-hateful statements coming out of Kiev.
“And why did you pick on just one claim of a leader of self-defence forces?” Churkin asked them. “Why were we supposed to condemn it at once?”
“Unless you picked on it in an absolutely unscrupulous way, the condemnation of events in Mariupol would have been passed within minutes, the way it was with the statement on Volnovakha, which was submitted by the Lithuanian delegation and which we adopted at once,” he said.
Russia always insists on scrupulous and unbiased investigations of similar tragic cases, Churkin said. He called attention of the diplomats to the bizarre manner, in which the monitors of the European security organization OSCE organized their work in Mariupol to draw a hasty conclusion that the artillery strike had been delivered at the city from the northeast and the east.
“We believe in this case the monitors showed improper conduct,” he said. “A group of monitors led by a U.S. member of the mission popped up, took a brief look at the scene and immediately made a public statement,” Churkin said. “This runs counter to the techniques that are coordinated with and traditional for the OSCE.”
“Once again, we could see a misuse of tragic events for self-serving political purposes,” he said.
Ambassador Churkin said somewhat earlier in the course of his speech that the Kiev government had used the tragedies of the past few days the shelling of a passenger bus in the township of Volnovakha and gunfire at residential districts in Mariupol - as a ploy for fanning hysteria.
“Charges against the (East-Ukrainian) self-defence forces are churned out instantaneously and one gets an impression they are always prefabricated,” he said. “But as soon as a yet another propaganda ploy has done its job, Kiev immediately loses interests in fanning or investigating it any further.”
“It’s all the more so that the information, which surfaces up some time after the most resounding incidents, sometimes fully contradicts the stuff circulated immediately in the wake of one or another event,” Churkin said.