UNITED NATIONS, August 18. /TASS/. The Kiev government is hushing up its military failures in the Kupyansk area, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky has told a Ukraine-themed meeting of the UN Security Council.
"The Russian military have made significant advances in the Kharkov region and are preparing to liberate Kupyansk," Polyansky said on Thursday. "While keeping the population silent about this disadvantageous dynamic, the Kiev regime has nevertheless announced forced evacuation of 37 settlements, including Kupyansk itself. This is not surprising: a significant part of the local population feels sympathy for Russia and would prefer to wait for the arrival of Russian troops."
At the same time, the Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed, the Russian diplomat continued.
"For three months now, we have been watching the agony of the Kiev regime in the context of Ukraine's so-called strategic counter-offensive, which, according to Western propagandists, was supposed to bring a military victory," he said. "The entire NATO military machinery was thrown in for this purpose, spending billions of Western taxpayers’ money. But as the famous saying goes, it was just ‘a mountain in labor.’"
He added that even military equipment supplied by the West was unhelpful in this regard.
"The only result of the Ukrainian counter-offensive that even the West had to recognize, was tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who were killed and hundreds of items of costly Western equipment that were destroyed," he said. "The world saw clearly that this equipment was not 'unique and inviolable' for Russian weapons. What’s more, in many cases it cannot compete even with Soviet equipment manufactured 50 years ago.".