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Russia accused the West on Tuesday of whipping up tensions over Ukraine and said the US had brought pure Nazis to power in Kyiv as the UN Security Council held a stormy and bellicose debate on Moscow’s troop buildup near its southern neighbour.
According to AP report, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield shot back that Russia’s growing military force of more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders was the largest mobilization” in Europe in decades, adding that there has been a spike in cyberattacks and Russian disinformation.
And they are attempting, without any factual basis, to paint Ukraine and Western countries as the aggressors to fabricate a pretext for attack, she said.
The harsh exchanges in the Security Council came as Moscow lost an attempt to block the meeting and reflected the gulf between the two nuclear powers. It was the first open session where all protagonists in the Ukraine crisis spoke publicly, even though the UN’s most powerful body took no action.
Although more high-level diplomacy is expected this week, talks between the US and Russia have so far failed to ease tensions in the crisis, with the West saying Moscow is preparing for an invasion. Russia denies it is planning to attack. It demands pledges that Ukraine will never join NATO, a halt to the deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders and a rollback of the alliance’s forces from Eastern Europe. NATO and the US call those nonstarters.
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused the Biden administration of whipping up tensions and rhetoric and provoking escalation.
You are almost pulling for this, he said, looking at Thomas-Greenfield. You want it to happen. You’re waiting for it to happen, as if you want to make your words become a reality.
He blamed the US for the 2014 ouster of a Kremlin-friendly president in Kyiv, saying it brought to power nationalists, radicals, Russophobes and pure Nazis, and created the antagonism that exists between Ukraine and Russia.
