Russia convened a meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC) under the so-called Arria-formula – where the topic is detailed by the nation calling the assembly. It brought up the subject “Disinformation and Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine.” The main address to the UNSC was given by the First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia’s delegation to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy. His speech – which comes across as a lecture on how Russia’s motivation, actions and accusations of war crimes following its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been willfully misconstrued. He alleged that Ukraine, the UK and the European Union (EU) have consistently resorted to disinformation of the most heinous kind to derail Moscow’s genuine efforts to bring about peace. His “evidence” was largely based on an “accurate review” of the events that allegedly took place in the Ukrainian city of Bucha while it was under Russian occupation three years ago. Moscow maintains, as it has done all along, that reports of atrocities carried out there were nothing but a “fabricated provocation.” What he termed the “Bucha Hoax” was used by Kyiv’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, with the encouragement of the UK’s Boris Johnson, “as a pretext” to undermine Russian Ukrainian peace talks in Minsk and Istanbul and sabotage “any future dialogue” with Russia. He added that during the talks (in March and April 2022) Russia, as a “gesture of good will,” decided to “voluntarily withdraw” from the northern regions of Ukraine, including the area north of Kyiv, where Bucha is situated. He “illustrated” his talk with maps, video clips and “witness testimony” which he said totally refuted the images that Ukrainian and international sources “fabricated,” following the Russian withdrawal, of executed civilians with their hands bound lying in the street and mass graves. He said that Ukraine had failed to provide “conclusive evidence” of the atrocities for which Russia is accused unlike the “definitive proof” he was providing. He added that Russia was “deeply troubled” by the role of certain UN officials in spreading these “unverified and unsubstantiated allegations,” singling out the “pretentious” December 2022 report by the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. He then took a swipe at the UN Secretariat for failing to provide Russia with any substantiated evidence as formally requested by its Prosecutor General’s Office in September and November 2024 and January and March 2025. He suggested that was because there is no “documented evidence” supporting the claims of atrocities in Bucha. Polyanskiy then briefed UNSC members on “first-hand information on the crimes of the Kyiv regime committed” during its “ill-fated” incursion into the Kursk region, in counterpoint to the Bucha accusations. Polyanskiy said massive quantities of Western military equipment was abandoned, areas were heavily mined, homes, animal carcasses, kids’ toys, and the bodies of fallen Ukrainians were booby trapped. Ammunition had been placed in civilian facilities including cultural centers, schools and kindergartens. He then accused “Ukrainian terrorists” of widespread looting and desecration of churches – smashing icons, destroying altars and church furnishings. He said, without providing the “definitive proof” he demanded in respect of Bucha, that liberated [Russian] citizens told of “horrifying acts of brutal torture, rape, murders, and other crimes committed by Ukrainians.” These “crimes” were because having suffered daily significant losses on the battlefield, the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime had resorted to “terrorist methods” to try to allow it to negotiate peace “from a position of strength” but which in reality, “demonstrated its impotence and, essentially, its demise.” He ended by saying, without any apparent irony, that a sustainable peace, must be built it on solid foundations and “not on lies and manipulations,” saying that Russia insists on addressing the root causes of the conflict that started not in February 2022, but eight years earlier, following “the anti-constitutional coup-d’état in Kyiv in February 2014.” He then categorized Ukrainian behavior as “animal cruelty and hatred towards everything Russian” that dates back to then. The full text of Polyanskiy’s diatribe can be seen in English here and in the original Russian here.