Reports about the severing of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Kyiv is a hoax, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said.
“I have not spoken about the diplomatic relations at all either in public or at Security Council sessions, so this sort of a hoax has no basis,” Churkin said in an interview with the Saturday News with Sergei Brilev television program which was broadcast in Russia’s Far East region.
Such rumors might have been prompted by my answer to a question after the SC’s Thursday session, he said. “One of the reporters asked why foreign minister Lavrov did not meet with the Ukrainian foreign minister in Paris, and I answered that we believe the current Ukrainian authorities are illegitimate so we refrain from contact with them on political topics at the political level,” the Russian ambassador said.
We are not talking to Ukrainian colleagues because they have not contacted Russian diplomats, he said. “They themselves asked for a Security Council session to be held, without explaining to us what they are doing it for,” Churkin said.
“But we have no ban on such communication. The political level is the level of the foreign minister, we have no ban or restrictions with regard to a possibility of communicating with Ukrainian diplomats. The same is true about our foreign ministry: at the working level, it continues communicating with Ukrainian colleagues without any problem,” the Russian ambassador to the UN said.
