Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko used his United Nations General Assembly platform on Sept. 29 to urge international unity and support for Ukraine against Russia's war. Poroshenko also campaigned for the international body to limit and gradually end veto rights of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council in cases of mass atrocities. He also asked for his nation to get a non-permanent seat on an enlarged Security Council next year.
Read the full speech transcript here
See the video of the speech here
Most of Poroshenko’s remarks were aimed at Russia, which said has abused its veto powers twice since 2014 to block resolutions involving Ukraine.
The first veto came during international condemnation of the fake referendum in March 2014 that led to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula following the Kremlin’s military invasion.
The second veto from Russia came earlier this year in blocking an international tribunal to investigate the July 2014 shooting down of the Malaysian MH17 civilian airliner, killing 298 people on board.
“Moreover, the establishment of an international peacekeeping operation which could lead to the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine and stop the bloodshed had been also blocked because of the potential threat of Russia’s veto,” Poroshenko said.
Poroshenko also had a brief meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama on Sept. 28. According to the president’s official website: “Obama reiterated support for Ukraine and the efforts of President Petro Poroshenko aimed to protect territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. In the course of the conversation, President Obama emphasized that the United States would continue to support Ukraine in implementing reforms and finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict.”
In his speech to the General Assembly, Poroshenko reminded the global audience that Ukraine is under attack from Russia, which had pledged to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for Kyiv surrendering the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons arsenal.
“Russia conducted open and unprovoked aggression against my country” with its invasion and annexation of Crimea, Poroshenko said. Then it intensified its aggression by attacking the eastern Donbas region of the country.
“Despite the fact that until now Russia refuses to officially admit its direct military invasion, today there is no doubt that this is an aggressive war against my country,” Poroshenko said. “To mislead the world community, Russian leadership orders to take off insignias of its military servicemen and identification marks of its military equipment, to abandon its soldiers captured on the battlefield; to cynically use mobile crematoriums to eliminate traces of its crimes in Ukrainian soil. I would like to stress: it is neither a civil war not an internal conflict.Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia in the Crimea and Donbas region constitute approximately 44,000 square kilometers.”
The goal of Russia’s war, Poroshenko said, “is to force the Ukrainian people to give up its sovereign choice to build a free, democratic, prosperous European state. All this takes place against the backdrop of traitorous rhetoric about brotherly peoples, common history, related languages and ‘predestined’ common future.”
Instead, Poroshenko said that Russia wants to revive its imperial past and urged the General Assembly not to be fooled by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conciliatory statements over the last few days about wanting to establish an “anti-terrorist coalition” internationally.
“Cool story!” Poroshenko said sarcastically, “but really hardly to believe. How can you urge an anti-terrorist coalition if you inspire terrorism right outside your front door, if your policy is war through puppet governments. How can you speak of freedom of nations, if you punish your neighbor for this choice. How can you preach respect for all if you don’t have respect for anyone.”
Poroshenko reminded the audience of 8,000 Ukrainians dead, including 6,000 civilians “at the hands of the Russian-backed terrorists and occupiers” and that another 1.5 million people were forced to flee their homes.
The Ukrainian president also said that his nation “is not only the hybrid war that Russia has unleashed” in former Soviet territory, noting that Russia for decades has “deliberately created belts of instability” in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia, in Moldova’s Transdnistria region and in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.
Not content with regional instability, Poroshenko noted that “the Kremlin goes further” by sending military assistance to Syria, where it wants to prop up the Bashar al-Assad regime.
“What and who is next?” Poroshenko asked.
To counter Russia’s threat, international security organizations including the UN need to be strengthened, he said. “We must recognize that in the 21st century our organization lacks an effective instrument to bring the aggressor-country to justice, which has stolen the territory of another sovereign state,” he said.
Ukraine’s demands are simple, he said.
“Full access of OSCE monitors to all occupied territories, withdrawal of the Russian military forces, military equipment as well as mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine, restoration of full control by Ukraine over the state border with Russia must be secured,” Poroshenko said. “Freedom, peace, respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity – Ukraine doesn’t demand more.However, it will not settle for less.”
He also called for strengthening the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court in the fight against terrorism.
“Making the jurisdiction of these institutions universal is a core element of overcoming the impunity of actual violators as well as their patrons – the regimes whose national policy has become the mass-production of terror,” he said.
Poroshenko called for an international day to commemorate victims of terrorism.
He also called for Russia to release of Nadya Savchenko, a former Ukrainian soldier, and Oleg Sentsov, a Crimea filmmaker. Both of them were captured by Russian forces on Ukrainian soil last year and remain political prisoners in Russia.
“Ukraine needs solidarity and assistance, which is a powerful instrument against aggression and injustice,” he said. “Ukraine will prevail because truth is on our side, but we will do it much faster if we feel support from the international community.”
Aside from the Russian war, Poroshenko asked for a special session of the General Assembly next April to mark the 30th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant explosion and the environmental damage that still needs to be cleaned up.
