Mr Russia goes to the U.N.

Video Transcript:

The to international peace and security. We agenda is adopted. In accordance with rule 39 of the council's provisional rules of procedure, I invite Mrs. Izumina Kami-Tu, a high representative for this element affairs, to participate in this meeting. It is so decided. The Security Council will now begin its consideration of item 2 of the agenda. I now give the floor to Mrs. Izumina Kami-Tu. Thank you, Mr. President, distinguished members of the Security Council. I am aware that the Russian Federation has submitted documents regarding allegations of biological weapons programs in Ukraine. As I informed the Security Council last Friday, the United Nations is not aware of any such biological weapons program. I would also like to note that the United Nations currently has neither the mandate, nor the technical or operational capacity to investigate this information. As I previously informed the council, the relevant instrument of international law is the 1972 Bionage Go-Weapons Convention, or BWC, which effectively prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons. The Russian Federation and Ukraine are both states' parties to the Bionage Go-Weapons Convention. Mr. President, the Bionage Go-Weapons Convention contains several measures to which concerned state parties can have recourse in order to address situations in which they have concerns or suspicions about the activities of their peers. Pursuant Article 5 of the Convention, its state's parties undertake to consult one another and to cooperate in solving any problems. Such consultation and cooperation can take place on a bilateral basis between the concerned state parties, or it can be undertaken through appropriate international procedures. One such international procedure that has been elaborated within the framework of the Bionage Go-Weapons Convention is the convening of a consultative meeting. Other possibilities for addressing concerns between state's parties also exist under Article 5 of the Convention, as well as under Article 6. As I mentioned last week, the BWC needs to be operationalized and institutionalized to ensure it is properly equipped and resourced to face future challenges. The Convention's upcoming 9th Review Conference presents the ideal opportunity for its state's parties to comprehensively strengthen the Convention. The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs stands ready to support any procedures under the Bionage Go-Weapons Convention that state's parties may decide to use. Mr. President, turning to the issue of the safety and security of Ukraine's nuclear power facilities, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported that, according to the Ukrainian authorities, all safety systems at the Zaparizha nuclear power plant remained fully functional as of yesterday, following the site's loss of connection to a third external power line, linking to the National Electricity Grid. Although officials from Russia's state nuclear power company were present at the facilities in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian staff continued to operate deepland. The Chernobyl power plant remains connected to the National Electricity Grid, following the reconnection on 4th of March. However, Ukrainian operators and guards have not been able to rotate for three weeks now. The IAEA has reported that, according to the Ukrainian authorities, eight of the country's 15 reactors remained operating. I understand that, regarding nuclear safeguards, the IAEA is still not receiving remote data transmission from its monitoring systems installed at Chernobyl, but such data was being transferred to IAEA headquarters from the other nuclear power plants in Ukraine. I take this opportunity to reiterate the sector's general support for efforts by the IAEA to establish a framework on the safety and security of Ukraine's nuclear facilities and urge all parties to work towards this end. This is the precedent. I wish to also highlight the terrible toll this conflict is having on civilians. The civilian casualties continue to rise. As of 16 March, the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights had recorded 232 civilian casualties, including 780 killed of whom 58 were children. The actual number of casualties is beneath the much higher. Most of these casualties are caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide area impact. These include attacks using heavy artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, ballistic and cruise missiles and air strikes. I also want to reiterate that attacks directed as civilians are prohibited by international humanitarian law. We must find a diplomatic solution to this war to put an end to the violence. A sector general Gutera said, and I quote, we need an immediate succession of hostilities and serious negotiations based on the principles of the UN Charter and International Law. We need peace for the people of Ukraine, peace for the world. We need peace now. I thank you very much for your attention. President, first of all, allow me to express condolences to the representative of Ireland following the loss that they suffered. This is obviously a loss to the Irish mission and for all of us. Please accept our condolences. We have always said during Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, information was discovered regarding the implementation of the Ukrainian authorities with the support and the direct supervision of the US Ministry of Defence of dangerous projects as part of the military and biological programme. Its activity was carried out in the territory of Ukraine, the centre of Eastern Europe, and in the western borders of Russia, which created a real threat for the biosecurity of our country and the whole region. A week ago, on a request of the Russian Federation, there was the first security council meeting held on this topic. Here we asked our western colleagues, the series of questions, but they haven't yet responded to them. The representative of the US wasn't able to explain how the statements of the American officials about how there was allegedly no US controlled biolaboratories on Ukraine, how that tallies with the fact that the president of documentary proof of this kind of cooperation between Kiev and Washington. I'd recall here we're talking about a agreement signed in 2005 between the US Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, which clearly sets forth support for the Pentagon to joint biological research, applicable to dangerous pathogens located in facilities on Ukrainian territory. Although the American delegation can't and does not want to respond to our questions, but they are, as much as the Russian Defence Ministry, is assisting what materials were received from Ukraine by laboratories about the implementation of military biological programmes of other the US and their NATO allies on Ukrainian territory. Over the last week, new details have come to light, which allow us to stake that the components for biological weapons were being created on the territory of Ukraine. The implementation of the aforementioned American Ukrainian agreement in 2005, and comments on which we're still waiting for from the US representation has been going falsely in my head for all these years. However, from the document we can see that the American colleagues were not helping as they claimed the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, but rather the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. The Docks Security Council document that we distributed this morning, you see in that material you can see the so-called to-technical assistance plan for certain recipients of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. I recommend you to look at this document very carefully. It confirms direct funding and supervision of the Pentagon. It's defense threat reduction agency of military and biological projects in Ukraine. The overall quantity of the funding was $32 million and money went directly to the following laboratories from the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine. In key of the 10th Regional Health Epidemiological Department of the Central Health Epidemiological Department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence in Odessa, the 27th Regional Health Epidemiological Department of the Central Epidemiological Department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence in Levov, the 28th Regional Health Epidemiological Department of the Central Epidemiological Department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence in Harkov, the 108th Regional Department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence Epidemiological Department. I'd like to draw your attention to one another vitally important point. The Rep. of the U.S. State Departments continue to muddle the information and assert that the U.S. allegedly does not operate in any biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine, but the facts show otherwise. According to the plan that I mentioned for technical assistance, the donor is the U.S. Ministry of Defence. They established the task and the workload with as part of the project on Ukrainian territory, and they said, fought a list of the necessary equipment and delegated significant authority to an affiliated contractor company, Black and Vitch, with cooperation with Ukrainian bodies of authority. The recipient of American Assistance was the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and they were allowed timely access for Pentagon and contractor staff to laboratories on Ukrainian territory in order to carry out work as part of these projects and also to provide access to these facilities. Along with Pentagon staff foreign scientists to the projects themselves included implementing, was implemented not by the Ukrainian scientists but with their participation. But simply, the Ukrainian authorities gave the Pentagon carpalance on the territory of Ukraine to carry out dangerous biological experiments that the American contractors at the same time was free to go to tax break under Ukrainian legislation. So what did the Ukrainian scientists receive in return? Are the Ukrainian people free, travel to international conferences based on expenses for food and accommodation as established by for U.S civil servants? This kind of compensation is carried out, is that the compensation provided for working alongside dangerous biological science? This is not to be noble assistance to Ukraine that the American representatives talk about. This is cynical use of its territory and population for dangerous research which Washington does not carry out on its own territory. So it doesn't run a risk of hurting its own people. We are not, when we surprised, if similar facts about activities supervised by the U.S. appear in laboratories in other regions of the world too, we call on countries who provide their territory for carrying out this kind of experiments to the Pentagon to carefully study the contracts for their cooperation with the U.S. on in the biological domain. We fully support require the question from China to the U.S. to share the data of the activity of the 360 laboratories under American control around the world. Going back to Ukraine, this biolaboratories in Kiev, a desolative oven, hardcoff were selected by the U.S. different risk reduction agency not by chance. They were the those who implemented the UP8 project focused on studying pathogen of Congo Kramiophila, leptosporosis and antiviruses. We believe that the interest of the military biologists of the U.S. is specifically in those pathogens is linked to the fact that they have they are naturally present both in Ukraine and in Russia and so that their use could then be dressed up as a natural outbreak of these diseases. On the basis of in the laboratory in Harkov, there's also the P781 project to study transmission to humans of diseases through back work on this was done alongside the infamous Lugara Center in Tbilisi. In this context, separate attention should be paid to the Pentagon's choice of carrying out work the contractors chosen to carry out work in Ukraine, the Black and Veatch company. It is not just any old company for more than 100 years it's been working for the American Army and has built for the Army military bases including a laboratory in Los Alamos to develop nuclear weapons. Transmissions research into human transmission of diseases through back in Ukraine in bio-laboratories was systemic. Has been happening as a minimum since 2009 with the direct oversight of specialists from the USA. During the implementation of these projects six families of viruses were identified including coronaviruses and three types of pathogenic bacteria. The pathogens from the plague, brosolosis and lactose paroxys. These are the most attractive option to use in order for infection because they are resistant to medicine and they spread very quickly from animals to people. As part of the Flu Fly Away project the Harkov Institute of Veterinary Medicine studied Wild Birds as a vector to transmit avian flu. At the same time they assessed the ways in which the transmission process could become uncontrollable, caught by economic damage and create the risk to food security. Documents show the involvement of the Harkov Institute in the work to collect strains of avian flu viruses which have high epidemiological potential and could cross the species barrier. The Russian Ministry of Defence also has more and more new documents about these transfer samples of blood serum of Ukrainian citizens to the territory of third countries, including to the UK, Georgia and Germany. The analysis of the information gives us grounds to say that the Ukrainian specialists were not informed about the potential risks of transfer of biological materials and are kept in the dark and don't have a real idea about the real objectives of the research being carried out. I am not surprising if according to the contract documentation that I mentioned earlier, they are simply playing a secondary role. We also have new data about attempts to destroy biological materials and documentation in the laboratories in order to quickly wipe the traces of the implementation of the military and biological programs. We know that during the activities to destroy this, the Veterinary Medicine Laboratory in Heleba Darsk town, the citizens of Ukraine and the staff working there weren't even allowed into the building. This laboratory cooperates with the Melchnekov Scientific Research Institute in a desert where research is carried out into pathogens of the plague, anthrax, cholera and tuleremia. In attempts to wipe the traces of biological waste from the laboratories in Heleba Darsk, these waste was taken 120 kilometers towards the western border, towards Tarutana and Barrazino. The Russian Ministry of Defence has recorded all of this, these information, to carry out a legal assessment further down the line. The emergency, urgent destruction of documents in the Hearths and Biolabob or a tree, we believe that the reason for this rush was the wish to hide from Russian specialists information about an outbreak in 2019 in Hearths and of Dero-Philoreitis as a disease which is spread by mosquitoes. The four cases of infection of this disease were identified in February, which is not usual for the life cycle of these insects, even to bearing in mind the incubation period for the disease. At the same time, we are aware that in April 2019, the representative of the Pentagon visited the local health institutions where they learnt of the results of the epidemiological research and they were able to copy the medical documentation, have any to snap up any fakes which are provided by the U.K. Ukrainian authorities with the support of their western bankers, the western media expressing doubts as regards of a liability of the material that the Russian Ministry of Defence has published. I'd like to draw your attention to the following. The documents that we found have a signature, a real signature of officials from the US, particularly many of them are signed by the head of the Ukrainian Office of the Threat Reduction Agency, Joanna Winterall. This is a Pentagon staff member and a well-known in non-proliferation circles. Before Ukraine, she supervised a destruction of chemical weapons in Libya. If journalists really are interested in verifying the documents that we provided, then I propose that you ask her directly. Is that really her signature? I'd like to underscore once again that here we're talking not simply about the US and Ukraine's violation of the biological weapons convention. We're actually talking about that there is more and more proof that at the centre of Eastern Europe, until the very last minute there was a dangerous military biological activity being carried out. The consequences of which at any time could spread beyond the country and even into the region. The scale of casualties, including amongst the population of Ukrainian, of European countries in this case, in this scenario, it is hard to imagine. Coronavirus, isn't could be nothing compared with this. We're also concerned by the Threat already exists. For example, in 2018, those living in Lugansk and Donets, there was a shop spike in case of tuberculosis caused by a new multi-resistant strain. During this month outbreak, recorded in the region, in the present, more than 70 cases of infection were recorded, which quickly became lethal. This doesn't look like coincidence and conclusion. Like to comment on the statement made by the representative of the UN Secretary of State, but the Secretary does not have information about the implementation of military and biological programs on the territory of Ukraine. In line with this BWC, State's parties provide the UN information about facilities and biological activities carried out, which are talking about confidence-building measures, which are published in order to monitor information, but convention since 2006, which was when these projects started, including the projects UP4, UP8 and P781. The US and Ukraine has been deliberately keeping quiet about this in their reports, despite the clear military and biological purposes of this. This is why Russia, for many years, has been calling for a strengthening of the BWC regime and to adopt a legally binding protocol to the convention, which allows to create an effective mechanism of verification and include in reporting from State's party's information on military biological activities carried out abroad. For 20 years, the US has been blocking this kind of work, refusing to provide this kind of information. It did one other question, which the representatives of the US have time and time again been not providing us with. All of the facts I look at today on the 11th of March are only the tip of the iceberg. Minister of Defence is receiving more and more material and we are analysing that we will continue to keep the international community informed about the unlawful activity carried out by the Pentagon on Ukrainian territory. Thank you for your attention. Mr. President, we thank you as Jean-Chamitsu for providing us the same information as last Friday on this matter. We heard nothing new from the UN Department of Disarmament Affairs of the United Nations because there is nothing new. We take issues of weapons of mass destruction very, very seriously. But still there needs to be an issue. Mr. President, we heard last Friday and it was repeated here. The United Nations is not aware of any alleged program in Ukraine in consistent with international treaty obligations, including on chemical or biological weapons. So what are we doing this morning? What are we talking about here? For non-existent chemical weapons programs in what Ukraine developed in non-existent laboratories and financed by non-existent programs? Russian claims and listened to the statement remain unverified, unsubstantiated, uncooperated and not independently verified. In a word, not credible. It is hard not to think then and believe that today's meeting comes as a last-minute replacement out of an easy pick-up drawer is therefore a loss of time and abuse of the council. We are afraid to find ourselves in the best case scenario with an attempt by Russia to try to shift attention from its crimes and the stalling invasion to, by sowing fear with the dreadful prospects of chemical warfare or at the worst, given Russia's track record of accusing others of the recircums that they have been perpetrating, including in attempted assassinations and poisoning of its own citizens. Russia intends to use this information tactics as a pretext for further escalation and possible use of chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. We have seen more than once that the more the invasion stalls, the deadlier the missile attacks and bombardments become. This is the real issue and the serious one. Let's remind ourselves, colleagues, that Russia has been saying one thing and doing its opposite, that Russia is blatantly breaking international law and whenever they speak about Ukraine, they are just distorting reality. Claims need to be properly and fully investigated and we know how this is and can be done. Russia should first agree to an immediate cease-fire throw of the territory of Ukraine. It should withdraw all necessary forties within a radius of 40 kilometers of suspected locations, ask that the UN Security Forces secure 40 kilometers of radius to allow diagnostic research teams to conduct proper investigations. Instead, we have the impression that Russia speaks to itself. Dear colleagues, with a sole exception of Russia, everyone around this table, everyone without exception. As well as 140 members of the UNGA have been clear on the absolute necessity to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine to stop the war, to protect civilians and to deal with issues and concerns not by bombarding indiscriminately, not by killing innocent people, not by destroying a country, not by wrecking economic havoc to the entire world, but through negotiations and through diplomatic channels and mechanisms. This is what needs to be done. This is what Russia should be doing, not abusing the councils with pop-up subjects of convenience trying to create the illusion of truth out of repeated lies in Bomakha's words. Kalomnie Kalomnie, Lohaslanda, slander, something will always stick. The world looks to the Security Council and for good reason, for hope and solutions as the budget responsible for peace and security. It should not be abused for propaganda and irrationality. And I thank you. I thank the representative of Albania for his statement and give the floor to the representative of the USA. Thank you, Mr. President. And thank you, high representative Nakameesu, for joining us today to repeat what you gave us exactly what you gave us last week. And last week we heard from the Russian representative, a Tareed, a bizarre conspiracy theories. This week we're hearing a whole lot more where that came from, things that sound like they were forwarded to him on a chain email from some dark corner of the internet. President Biden has a word for this kind of talk, Marlaki. As I said one week ago, Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories, not near Russia's border, not anywhere. There are only public health facilities, proudly, and I say proudly supported and recognized by the U.S. government, the World Health Organization and other governments and international institutions. In fact, it is Russia that has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law. It is Russia that has a well-documented history of using chemical weapons. It is Russia who is the aggressor here. It was Russian operatives who poisoned Alexei Navalny and Sergey and Yulia Skripal with nerve agents. It is Russia that continues to support the Assad regime in Syria and shield it from accountability when the UN and the OPCW have confirmed that Assad has recently used chemical weapons over the past several years. Let's not forget why we are really here today. We are here because Russia knew its cynical ploy to pass in a culp-escalpatory resolution had failed. This meeting is the result of their isolation on this council and on the world stage. We're not buying what they're selling. Literally, our figure should be. And I will reiterate the United States' deep and serious concern that Russia's calling for this meeting is a potential false-flag effort in action. Russia has repeatedly, repeatedly accused other countries of the very violations it plans to perpetrate. We continue to believe it is possible that Russia may be planning to use chemical or biological agents against the Ukrainian people. We aren't going to dignify Russia's disinformation or conspiracy theories, but we will continue to sound the alarm and tell the world where we think Russia is heading. And we will remind the world that Russia has repeatedly, repeatedly lied to this council over recent weeks. Despite all the evidence we could see with our own eyes, it told us that it was not going to invade Ukraine, that it was engaged in war games, that it was interested in diplomacy. I ask the Russian PR, where are the 100,000 troops who were sitting on the Russian side of the border now? Sadly, I think many of them have given their lives in this senseless, unconscionable war against the Ukrainian people. Russia lied to its own people as well, shutting down media to try and hide the truth. And I will not repeat the slurs and false accusations that Russia has hurled against the Ukrainian people and the United States repeatedly at this table. But we know that Russia's disinformation is a sign of its desperation. That's the truth, and we will continue to ensure the world sees it and hears it. Thank you, Mr. President. That's good moment. I thank the representative of the United States for her statement and give the floor to the representative of Ireland. Well, I only have a minute left. Let me ask you, does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons? Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces. Should they approach? I'm sure you're aware that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out there all kinds of information about how they have uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to release biological weapons in the country and with NATO's coordination. If there's a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside of Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100 percent would be the Russians that would be behind it? There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they're planning to do themselves.