Source: United Nations (video statements)
Briefing a Security Council session on maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo said four years since the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “the violence is worse than ever,” and noted that “since February 2022, the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified that 15,364 civilians, including 775 children, have been killed in Ukraine.
DiCarlo said, “over the winter, damage to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure brought the country’s energy grid to the brink of total collapse,” as “60 percent of gas production capacity has been destroyed, and all the country’s power stations damaged, leading to persistent disruptions in electricity, heating and water across the country.”
She noted that the Russian Federation “has also reported attacks impacting civilians and civilian infrastructure,” including over the weekend of 14 to 16 March, when local authorities reported “the largest Ukrainian drone attack targeting Moscow to date.”
Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, for his part said, “strikes on energy and other vital infrastructure are cutting civilians off from the basics of survival.”
Fletcher said, “tens of thousands of families across the country are left in the dark and cold for weeks on end. These attacks reflect a sustained pattern of damage to the systems on which civilians depend to survive, with humanitarians increasingly stepping in to fill the gaps left by the deterioration of essential services.”
Fletched stressed that despite “immense challenges and the risks to humanitarian operations, and our people, help is getting through.”
He said, “in January alone, we and our partners reached nearly one million people with food, cash assistance, medical care, shelter and protection. Over a cruel, cold winter, around 100 humanitarian organizations supported more than 1.6 million people. And in recent days, our interagency convoy reached the frontline community in the oblast of Kharkivska, delivering help to some 500 residents in an area with no pharmacies and limited availability of basic services.”
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya told the Council that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “is literally flabbergasted by the spotlight shifting from Ukraine and his own heroic persona, over to the situation surrounding the escalation in the Middle East, a situation which objectively needs the close attention of the international community.”
Nebenzya said, “instead of showing concern for his own people, his own country, he’s trying to remind his Western sponsors of how useful he is at any cost. Otherwise, God forbid, the money his regularly pocketed and put into the pockets of his associates will flow from Ukraine to the Gulf, which is far from Ukraine.”
He said, “clearly, what’s more important for Kyiv today is to be involved in any war, rather than seek a path to peace back home statement.”
Ukrainian Ambassador Andrii Melnyk for his part said, “the Kremlin is not just providing Tehran with intelligence support, including satellite imagery and other crucial data that facilitate targeting of US military assets across the Middle East, there is, moreover, enough evidence that Russia is now transferring modernized Shahed type drones to Iran, drawing on its own production capabilities based on licensed Iranian designs. The same Shahed drones that Tehran was sending to Moscow since the beginning of the war, 2022, to murder Ukrainian civilians, are now produced in Russia and sent back both to destroy oil and gas infrastructure as the backbone of the economy in the Gulf state, and to kill American soldiers.”
Melnyk said, “this axis of evil between Moscow and Tehran constitutes an enormous threat to international security.”
He said, “their military cooperation is truly alarming. The United States and the international community must take this threat seriously and act before it is too late. With those Russian drones the Tehran regime will be capable of waging this war for a very long period, destabilizing not just the region, but the whole global economy.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Melnyk said, “demands that Ukraine abandon without a fight territories in the Donetsk region that Moscow have failed to occupy over 12 years of its aggression” and is “turning such ultimatums into preconditions for negotiations,” and is “deliberately obstructing the peace process.”
He said this was “one of the biggest stumbling blocks on the way to a peaceful resolution.”