"Let's try to consider what kind of world we are heading to if there is no accountability for just blowing up such vital infrastructure, international projects, which are not only in Russia's property, you know, but also in German property....So it's such a blatant, I would say, way that the US authorities were speaking about such a scenario. It's also astounding because, well it is not only a smoking gun, it's more than a smoking gun that they were giving to us from February last year," Dmitry Polyanskiy said.
"And we had this meeting of the Security Council, and we pointed out that any judge or any attorney would refuse to organize defense of such individuals if they are saying such things and making such confessions about their implication in this act of sabotage. And, of course, any jury would make a clear verdict of who is to blame," Polyanskiy added.
"As for Seymour Hersh's investigation, we really don't have any reasons not to believe him because of his reputation. This man is known for being an integral and honest investigator. And that's why we raised awareness of our colleagues in the Security Council for these new facts, trying to convince them that we need to have a fair and inclusive international investigation. There is a draft resolution presented by us that is being discussed now at the expert level proposing this kind of investigation to be conducted under the auspices of the UN. And our Western colleagues are resisting very much discussing this draft, claiming that the current national investigations by Denmark, Sweden, and Germany are quite enough. But the fact is that we are not being informed, contrary to what these countries claim, about the course of these investigations, and they can't be claimed to be transparent and open to us as a party that is concerned in this regard," the Russian UN ambassador emphasized.
"As for the information that was published by The New York Times, I heard some accounts about this. I think it only confirms the necessity of conducting an international investigation. On other occasions, I think our Western partners are queuing up, calling for international investigations on much more minor situations. And when it comes to the sabotage on Nord Stream to which US authorities have already de facto confessed several times, they are pursuing a different logic that we don't need an international investigation. Of course, they don't need it, because the results of any such open and really transparent international investigation are quite obvious for everyone. Again, I don't think that we need a world where the perpetrators [would not be held] to account, and such infrastructure projects would be threatened and blown up. This is a very dangerous place for all of us to live," the ambassador said.
"Today it's more and more clear for more and more people in the world, why we had no other choice but to start our special military operation a year ago. We did it first and foremost to put an end to this war in Donbass, which the Kiev regime has been waging against the civilian population there since 2014," Dmitry Polyanskiy said.
"We also wanted and continue to want to eliminate all kinds of threats that are coming from Ukraine to Russia. We want our neighbor to be peaceful and neighborly and ready for constructive relations, and not an anti-Russia, as the current Ukraine is being formed by its Western suzerains... We repeatedly said that we prefer to achieve all these tasks at the table of negotiations and we were ready for this in March and April last year. So the Ukrainian regime itself withdrew its own proposals that were forming a good framework for future negotiations... So far, everything that we hear from Kiev and its Western sponsors are nothing but ultimatums towards Russia. And that's why we have to continue our special military operation and to seek the achievements of its goals through military means," Ambassador Polyanskiy underscored.
"Life in Russia is normal, goods are in abundance... There is no food crisis, there is no energy crisis. The prices are not going up to the scale that we see here in the [United] States, for example, or in Europe. This is because we have been sanctioned actually from 2014 and we have made special efforts to reorient our economy, first of all, to be self-sustainable and self-reliable," he emphasized.