Statement of the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva Ambassador Gennady Gatilov at the Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, 14 May 2024

Unofficial translation

Dear Mr. President,

Dear colleagues,

For many years now the representatives of the «collective West», primarily the European Union and the countries which associate themselves with the EU, have been multiplying unfounded and absurd accusations against the Russian Federation at the Conference on Disarmament. Numerous delegations compete with each other in eloquence, trying to blame Russia for both the deterioration of the international security and for the weakening of the system of international treaties on arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation.

All these much-repeated and replicated accusations are untenable from a legal, factual and historical points of view. Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, is well aware of its responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Our State always takes a constructive position and has initiated negotiations on new arrangements. Even in the current challenging environment we are making every effort to remain within the legal framework and to maintain the necessary level of predictability and security.

At the same time the Russian Federation does not exist in a vacuum, it has to defend its national interests and react to provocative actions of other countries that take openly hostile and aggressive stance towards our State. By pursuing a blatantly anti-Russian course, our opponents are trying to restructure the international security architecture according to their own models and to put it at the service of their narrow group or individual interests, contrary to the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the international community.

Having said that, I would like to note that the formation of international security, its maintenance at a proper level, as well as its possible imbalance are the result of constructive or, on the contrary, destructive actions of any State that seeks to occupy a prominent place in international relations. Therefore I propose to turn to the recent history and to consider the roots that caused the current crisis in international and regional security, primarily European security. It is necessary in order to clarify once and for all who is the true creator of the world’s increasing political and military tensions, growing mistrust, the arms race, the cessation of the operation of international treaties and the paralysis of the most important multilateral disarmament fora, including the Conference on Disarmament.

Mr. President,

The first major shock for the whole world and, above all, for Europe after the end of the Cold War took place in 1999 when NATO, upon orders from Washington, committed military aggression against Yugoslavia in the very center of Europe. It was then that the alliance’s declared “defensive” status was lost forever as a result of such an unprovoked and inhuman action against a sovereign State undertaken without the authorization of the UN Security Council and which claimed the lives of over 3,000 civilians alone. The exact number of those killed during the operation has not yet been established. The use of depleted uranium munitions during the bombing and shelling of Serbian cities led to soil contamination and a multiple increase in cancer among the population, which continues to kill people a quarter of a century after the NATO aggression.

The next significant milestone on the way of undermining strategic stability and international security was the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the ABM Treaty in 2001. It was done with the tacit consent of Washington’s European satellites, or even with their direct support. Such withdrawal violated the fundamental principle of strategic stability, which provided for an inseverable link between offensive and defensive strategic weapons, and also created the preconditions for changing the decades-old balance of power and starting a missile arms race in Europe and around the world.

In 2008 at the NATO summit in Vilnius it was decided to integrate into the alliance Ukraine and Georgia, countries once close to Russia that share historical, cultural and civilizational roots with it. At the same time extensive military development programs were launched on the NATO’s eastern flank for the purpose of so-called “containment” of Russia. In the European theater of operations (according to the Pentagon terminology) US and NATO military infrastructure began to appear nearby Russian borders. This blatantly violated the understanding reached after 1991 on the non-expansion of NATO to the East. Our counterparts cynically claimed in that regard that their previous assurances were “verbal” and therefore non-obligatory to them.

It should be noted that the expansion of NATO took place at a time when Russia was trying to establish partnering relationships both with the whole alliance as well as its separate members. Moreover, the absorption of new States into NATO took place under the pretext of protecting them from a so-called threat from the East. The following and well-known thesis was used for this purpose: countries have the right to choose how to ensure national security, including identifying allies and joining political-military blocs. However, now active supporters of NATO enlargement shyly conceal that in addition to the open anti-Russian propaganda campaign, certain unscrupulous methods were used towards potential members of the alliance, or rather to their political and military establishment. In fact, those countries had no other choice but to formalize their membership in NATO.

Looking back, it can we said with full confidence that it was exactly the West, not Russia, that gradually closed the “window of opportunity” for a fruitful and comprehensive cooperation in order to solve pressing problems of regional and global security.

Judge for yourself. The US allies in NATO did not support any of Russia’s initiatives to create a common and indivisible security space in Europe. They refused to adapt the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. They supported Washington’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and then from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which, according to the Europeans themselves, was one of the foundations of the European security. Moreover, they rejected the idea of creating a collective European missile defense system with Russian participation, “scuttled” the Treaty on European Security, did not discuss the draft agreement on the Russia-NATO relations, avoided providing legal guarantees that their missile defense system would not be directed against Russian strategic nuclear forces, and did not accept our proposal of a mutual moratorium on the deployment of intermediate and short range missiles. This list could be continued. I have mentioned only the most illustrative examples.

We made our last attempt in December 2021, when two draft treaties on security guarantees to Russia were handed over to Washington and Brussels. Their key elements, quite reasonable and justified, were the cessation of NATO expansion and the non-deployment of strike weapons systems near Russia’s borders, as well as the return of the military capabilities and infrastructure of the bloc in Europe to the parameters of 1997. But our balanced and constructive proposals were rejected.

Mr. President,

The most illustrative in this context is the Ukrainian crisis, which became the culmination of the anti-Russian line of the “collective West”. The pumping of Zelensky’s regime with weapons, the accelerated strategic development of Ukraine’s territory by the de-facto nuclear NATO alliance, and the open unwillingness of Western States to talk about security guarantees forced our country to launch a Special Military Operation (SMO). I will not outline the entire historical and political background of the Ukrainian conflict. It is well known: Russia has all political, legal, moral and ethical grounds to seek the protection of its national interests, to ensure the security of its compatriots in the territory of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic who have turned to the Russian Federation for help. The legal basis for such actions, as well as the goals and objectives of the SMO were duly and timely communicated to the international community.

The behavior of Western countries since the beginning of the SMO is indicative. Instead of working on a peaceful settlement and seeking ways to recreate a European security architecture, NATO countries are stubbornly waging a “proxy war” against our country, providing weapons, military equipment, as well as large-scale funding to the corrupt Kiev regime.

The statistics of weapons and military equipment supplied to Ukraine is impressive. Since the beginning of the Special Military Operation until March 2024, the Kiev regime has received 785 tanks, 266 multiple rocket launchers, 844 artillery systems of 155 mm caliber, 93 artillery systems of 152 mm caliber, 278 artillery systems of 122 mm caliber, 251 surface-to-air missile systems, 30 airplanes and 91 helicopters. The main donors are the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, France, Sweden, etc. Additional packages of financial assistance are being agreed upon, which in total has already reached hundreds of billions of US dollars.

There is no need to say that this assistance to the Kiev regime not only encourages it to commit new war crimes and confirms its impunity, but also leads to the prolongation and aggravation of the conflict. The lack of proper control over the transfer of weapons and military equipment leads to the proliferation of weapons, facilitates their access to the black market and other conflict zones, and, as a consequence, exacerbates terrorist threats. The bloody terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall on 22 March is a clear example of this.

Western countries have now launched the process of signing bilateral agreements with Ukraine on security guarantees. Such documents, by the way, are purely declarative in nature, since the US and its allies are certainly not ready to take any obligations towards Ukraine. However, the defenders of the “Ukrainian sovereignty” are persistently trying to create a propaganda veil and feed the Kiev regime’s imaginary hope for solidarity support from Europe and the West as a whole.

The goals of the Europeans are clear. As the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell stated, the West is “fighting not for Ukraine but against the Russian Federation”. Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren, echoing him, labelled the support for Ukraine as a “cheap way” for NATO to fight against Russia. Consequently, the catastrophic losses among Ukrainians on the battlefield are of no importance to the “collective West”, as they are just “expendable material” to achieve its geopolitical goals.

At the same time, against the backdrop of the Ukrainian crisis, NATO has finally pulled the European Union under itself, turning it into its economic and political backbone. If earlier some experts were speculating about the possibility of achieving some kind of “strategic autonomy” for the EU, today we can state that this organization is ideologically developing, if you will, exactly in the opposite direction. It has completely lost its political subjectivity and turned, so to say, into an “overseas territory” of the United States. On 10 January 2023 the EU-NATO declaration explicitly stipulated the subordinate position of the European Union. It is understandable: as we all know, the corporations of the US military-industrial complex have long controlled the elaboration and implementation of the US foreign policy. We observe the same trend in Europe today.

Needless to say, the unprecedented growth of military expenditures in European countries since the end of the Cold War and the multiple increase in military-industrial production in the EU are fundamentally at odds with the UN sustainable development goals. Only Ukraine alone, this bankrupt and corrupt country, has received more than 200 billion US dollars from Western countries over last two years. By comparison, the European Union has earmarked less than 80 billion US dollars for a period of seven years for social and economic support to the countries of the global South and East.

Mr. President,

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is increasingly being used as a tool for hybrid warfare. Its members pursue the policy of sanctions and freezing funds, carry out intelligence activities, psychological operations and cyberattacks, and are involved in actions to undermine and disrupt the governance of sovereign States. As we have convincingly proved above, hybrid warfare with the stated purpose of inflicting “strategic defeat” has also been unleashed against the Russian Federation.

NATO’s Strategic Concept, adopted at the Madrid Summit in June 2022, named Russia “the most significant and direct threat to security, peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area”. The alliance, trying to justify its existence, has long ago assigned to the Russian Federation the role of its “adversary” which needs to be “contained”.

Finland joined the alliance in 2023, and Sweden – in March 2024. The situation in the North of Europe has changed radically: the formerly peaceful and quiet region is turning into a space of geopolitical rivalry and military confrontation. At the end of 2023 Finland, Denmark and Sweden signed bilateral defense cooperation agreements with the United States, under which US troops will be deployed in the region. They are authorized to operate there under their own laws and are not subject to local authorities.

In addition to the US missile defense systems already deployed on the territory of Romania and Poland, which by definition pose a direct threat to the security of the Russian Federation, Poland now declares its readiness to deploy US nuclear weapons on its territory.

And all this is happening against the background of cynical calls for Russia to “de-escalate the situation” in Europe.

I would like to emphasize that Russia has never threatened any NATO country. On the contrary, it is NATO that is moving its military capabilities towards our country and creating direct threats to our security.

Mr. President,

It is absolutely clear to us who is really responsible for the degradation of European security and the aggravation of conflicts around the world, as well as who is preventing the elaboration of new effective instruments in the sphere of arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation. The current state of affairs in the field of regional and global security is nothing but the product of a well-planned, well-considered, uncompromisingly implemented foreign policy course of the “collective West”, which has set itself against the rest of the world.

It is obvious that Western delegations can repeat as much as they like the same unsubstantiated accusations against Russia and other “undesirable” States, but they are unable to rewrite history and thus cannot close the eyes of the international community to their own deeds which are detrimental to international security.

We are convinced that despite the current international turbulence Western States will sooner or later, we of course would like it to be sooner, cease their rampant anti-Russian campaign and realize the imperative of establishing an equitable and mutually respectful dialogue. This approach will be a necessary precondition for the formation of a system of multilateral international legal disarmament instruments that would be capable of responding to current and future challenges and threats. We should start by reducing tensions and restoring at least a minimum level of trust among the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Russia, for its part, is open to any constructive diplomatic efforts, but only if and when the countries of the “collective West” and NATO are ready to do so. Above all, the latter should demonstrate their contractual capacity not by word but by deed and stop their vicious attacks on the sovereignty and economic viability of our State.

Thank you for your attention.