While trying to grasp global developments after one year of the special military operation in Ukraine, it is important to establish the sequence of cause and effect. Among the precursors to the present crisis are the events of November 2013, when students in Kiev loudly demanded that the legitimate president Viktor Yanukovich should return to signing the Association Agreement with the EU and curtail cooperation with Russia. Those protests led to the unconstitutional violent coup in Ukraine in 2014, when the extremely nationalistic government came to power with the support of the collective West.
Right after the coup that brought to power this neo-Nazi regime, the Ukrainian legislation banned everything that had to do with the Russian language, totally cancelling it across Ukraine. The OSCE, the Council of Europe and other international reputable organizations did nothing to stop this, despite our callings.
Along with banning everything related to Russia, the Kiev regime launched a so-called antiterrorist operation in the southeast of Ukraine. According to the UN statistics, 12 thousand people were killed in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022, mostly in Donbas. The blame for the killings of civilians lies entirely with the Kiev regime. Despite the Kiev atrocities in Donbas, Russia was trying to resolve the issue peacefully - that is why the Minsk Agreements (unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council resolution) were created in order to keep Ukraine united through providing a special status to its south-eastern territories.
At the same time, over the past 30 years, Moscow has been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception or pressure and blackmail, while the Alliance continued to expand despite our protests. Our last attempt in December 2021 similarly bore no fruit. The United States did not change its position, being reluctant to consider Russian concerns, while pursuing its own objectives.
In these circumstances on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin informed the Russian citizens about the decision to carry out a special military operation in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, with permission of the Parliament, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified on February 22.
Vladimir Putin accurately defined the goals of the military operation - to protect people who, for eight years, had been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime, to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as to bring to trial those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.
It is fundamentally erroneous to think
that events in Ukraine happened suddenly.
The Ukrainian issue is the result of numerous
events that have taken place in that area over
the past 30 years, one of which is the coup d'état
in Kiev in 2014
Today it is not Ukraine that we are not dealing with, but the Kiev-NATO conglomerate headed by the USA where Ukraine serves as a buffer between the West and Russia, an instrument of armed struggle against our country. On the other hand, the collective West is functioning as a home front, HQ and arms supplier, backed by the American military industrial complex, which is largely profiteering from the ongoing conflict.
The United States and its NATO allies may consider it a failure if Russia and Ukraine come to an agreement on peace and start to re-establish good-neighborly relations. The Westerners have invested too much efforts and resources to divide our countries and people imitating commitment to the Minsk agreements, while gaining time to pump the Kiev regime with arms. This, in particular, was disclosed by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was directly involved in drafting the Minsk agreements. France and Ukraine ex-presidents, Hollande and Poroshenko, followed Merkel in confessing to Russia’s deliberate deception. Even Zelensky admitted that he had stopped the implementation of the Minsk agreements.
The West has only its own benefit in mind, ignoring the needs of other countries, easily breaking its own promises. A vivid example - the Istanbul Agreements of July 22, 2022, intended to normalize food and fertilizer supplies from Russia and Ukraine as a response to the worsening food crisis. In practice, eight months after the signing, only one part of the package – export of Ukrainian food – is being implemented, while progress on the Russia-UN Memorandum on promoting Russian agricultural exports is tending towards zero. The reason is the continued Western sanctions, which, despite all the empty declarations by Washington, Brussels and London, still extend to food and fertilizers. It is necessary to recognize, that grain is delivered not to hungry and poor countries, but to the EU market and then resold to third states with benefit. The West and NATO received almost 10 times more grain as part of the deal last year than the starving African countries. That makes all the talk about helping the poor people of Africa and Asia nothing but idle chatter.
Moscow will keep on providing food to the most vulnerable countries. In January and February 2023, the volume of wheat supplies from Russia almost doubled compared to the same period in 2022 and reached 6.1 million tons. To Bangladesh only, our country delivered last year more than one million tons of agricultural and food products, including 920 thousand tons of wheat. Russia also remains a guarantor of world energy security and a reliable supplier of energy resources.
The goals of the special military operation will be fulfilled by the Armed Forces of Russia despite the pumping of the Kiev regime with sophisticated western weapons and calls from the US and NATO to defeat our country strategically. The past year has taught the Russians valuable lessons and united them in the fight against the common enemy.
By H.E. Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the People’s Republic of Bangladesh Alexander Mantytskiy
