STATEMENT

by Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the UN

Аndrii Melnyk at the UN Security Council meeting on “Maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine”


(9 December 2025)

 

Madam President,

Distinguished Members of the Security Council,

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to the Slovenian Presidency — Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon — for convening today’s meeting devoted to Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine.

I also wish to thank the briefers Ms. Gotohand, ASG Msuya for their presentations and especially Ambassador Lovrenčič for your testimony.

Regrettably, the three months that have passed since I last had the honor of addressing this distinguished Council have not brought any relief to my country.

On the contrary: the situation for Ukrainians has deteriorated dramatically – as Russia intensified its terror campaign of strikes against residential areas and critical civilian infrastructure. These acts of state terrorism not only lead to hundreds of civilian casualties but put the lives of millions on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

If you recall, during my previous appearance before the Security Council, I invoked the play Waiting for Godot by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett.

We implored this body not to fall into a state of endless expectation — not to wait for manna from heaven, for miracles, for better circumstances, or for someone else to act — but instead to adopt a resolution mandating an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire.

Tragically, nothing has changed. Or rather, the only thing that has changed is the scale of Russia`s brutality which brings sufferings to millions of Ukrainians. Yet I will return to Samuel Beckett later in my remarks.

Now I wish to reiterate — with absolute clarity — that Ukraine continues to expect this Council to adopt this long-overdue ceasefire resolution. The full and unconditional ceasefire here and now would not only bring an end to the bloodshed but might also serve as a first step toward rebuilding the minimum degree of mutual trust required to launch genuine, credible peace negotiations. And Ukraine has been standing ready for such step for months. It is Russia who repeatedly rejects it.

Madam President,

At our previous meetings in this chamber, Ukraine has always presented the grim catalog of attacks carried out against my country — the waves of ballistic and cruise missiles, the swarms of drones, the artillery barrages, the thousands of glide bombs that fall with mechanical regularity upon our cities and towns.

Day after day, night after night, they take innocent lives and devastate civilian infrastructure.

I will not recite new figures today. Experience shows that these numbers, however painful for Ukrainians, rarely move this Council to act properly – Russia sits on the table and continues to undermine its work.

Those figures have become a kind of desolate arithmetic, cruel statistics of war absorbed without reflection, noted here without consequence. What is an unbearable tragedy for us is perceived elsewhere as little more than the routine ledger of a distant conflict.

Instead, I wish to focus on a question that carries far greater weight: why is Russia still able to wage this brutal war against Ukraine?

Why, nearly four years after launching its full-scale military invasion, does Moscow retain the material, financial, and political means to continue striking Ukrainian cities and killing civilians?

And why does the international community still tolerate it?

The main reason Russia is still able to continue its war against Ukraine, producing weapons, missiles, and drones that murder our children every day, is quite simple.

Russia earns all the money to fund its war by exporting its energy resources: oil, gas, and coal.

In fact, if one looks at the data, the figures are no less shocking than the daily toll of civilian lives lost in Ukraine. The scale of revenue flowing into Russia is staggering, and it directly fuels the machinery of war that continues to devastate my country.

Madam President,

Russia earned roughly 270 billion US dollars from the export of its fossil fuels last year. What is even more striking is how concentrated these revenues are.

Three countries alone account for approximately 75 percent of this income.

These countries, which serve as Russia’s biggest energy customers, are no secret to anyone in this Chamber, I guess.

For those who are still not aware, just Google it.

If we place the numbers of energy imports side by side with Russia’s military budget last year — estimated at around 145 billion US dollars — the picture becomes unmistakably clear:

the purchases of Russian energy by just three biggest consumers exceeded by far the entirety of Russia’s annual defense spending.

In other words, due to the absence of UN-mandated sanctions — an absence ensured, of course, by Moscow’s abuse of veto in this Council — a number of states are effectively sustaining Putin’s war machine through their growing imports of Russian oil, gas, and coal.

They keep on providing the Kremlin with the financial oxygen that ignites the fire of war.

Madam President,

Of course, each of major importers of Russian fossil fuels will readily present arguments explaining why increasing their deliveries of Russian oil and gas is essential — even a noble undertaking — for the economic and prosperity of their nations.

Yet this stance is profoundly hypocritical.

Because on the other side of that coin lies an undeniable truth: the very revenues they justify as engines of development are the same funds that allow Russia to continue financing its barbaric war of aggression against Ukraine. These are the same funds that allow Russia to kill civilians and to erase towns from the surface of earth.

That is why Ukraine welcomes decisive steps taken recently by the United States of America aimed at targeting the largest Russian energy companies. We are confident that, in the months ahead, this pressure will have a tangible impact. Any reduction in Russia’s ability to sell its energy resources strikes directly at its war chest.

This is not an abstraction. It is a direct link between every dollar that flows into the Russian budget today and the missile that falls tomorrow on an apartment building in Kyiv. That is precisely the reason why Ukraine appeals to all our partners to align with this approach. We call upon the European Union, the United States of America, and all other peace-loving countries to introduce massive secondary sanctions against all those countries who support Russia’s war-making machine.

The broader the coalition of states that refuse to subsidize Russian aggression through energy imports, the sooner this war will come to an end. Once the flow of this dirty money begins to dry up, Putin will be the first to seek a ceasefire. His war depends on cash. As simple as it is. Cut the revenue, and his house of cards collapses. This is why every effective sanction, every halted oil shipment, every contract not renewed truly matters.

Distinguished Members of the Council,

In Russian folklore, there is a villain called Koschei the Deathless. He hides his source of life inside a very tiny needle, a single, fragile point on which his power depends. Russia’s war engine has its own “needle”: the petrodollars from energy exports. As long as that needle remains intact, the Kremlin believes itself immortal, untouchable, capable of endless expansion.

But once we break it — once the flow of oil and gas money is curtailed — the illusion of Russia’s invincibility will vanish like dew in the Sun. Just like in the old tale, the moment the needle snaps, the monster loses its power.

Madam President,

Ukraine would like to commend the recent peace efforts of the United States, especially the very intensive shuttle diplomacy of the last few weeks. We count on the strength and mastery of US diplomacy, which could bring to an end the bloodiest war on the European soil since 1945.

Ukraine reaffirms its readiness for concrete steps to restore a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.

But let me be clear: our territory and our sovereignty are not for sale. We are not at a Christmas bazaar. We are not at the infamous Cherkizovsky market. Russia wants Ukraine to capitulate as we just heard. Russia wants us to surrender. My reply to you would be: «Дырку от бублика получите, а не Украину». You will get just a hole of a bagel.

Distinguished Members of the Council,

To conclude, let me again refer to Samuel Beckett.

In his play Endgame, the world has already collapsed, yet its characters cling to empty motions as if mere repetition could restore normality.

The protagonists speak, they argue, but nothing changes.

They circle endlessly around the same gestures, the same rituals, the same illusions of control.

It is a portrait of humanity after catastrophe, trapped not by physical ruins but by a deeper paralysis of will.

Samuel Beckett shows us that the true end begins not with destruction, but with the quiet surrender to inaction.

And here, in this chamber, that warning feels unbearably close. For almost twelve years, Russia’s brutal war of aggression has ravaged a sovereign nation, devouring lives in real time.

Cities have been erased, children orphaned, millions displaced, and yet this Council often behaves as if it were Beckett’s stage.

Too often it moves as if on rails laid long ago, circling through procedures, returning to familiar debates, allowing Moscow to continue killings behind the mask of institutional blockade.

Samuel Beckett teaches us that the final defeat comes when we accept the absurdity as normal — when we grow accustomed to injustice and inhuman suffering. We cannot afford a Council that resembles a stage, a theater where catastrophe is acknowledged but not confronted.

To end this terrible war demands more than eloquence.

It requires the one thing Beckett’s play refuses its characters: the courage to act before inaction becomes complicity, before history decides that this Council, too, has eventually reached its own endgame.

I thank you for your attention.