STATEMENT

by H.E. Mr. Dr. Andrii Melnyk, LL.M.,

Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Ukraine

to the United Nations

at the Security Council meeting on

“Maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine”

(28 May 2026)

Mr. President,

Distinguished Members of the Security Council,

I thank the Chinese Presidency for convening this meeting and express my gratitude to the delegations of Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, and the United Kingdom for supporting Ukraine’s request.

I’m especially grateful to the Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for your presence today in this Chamber. It is a powerful signal that Russia’s war of aggression will remain as a priority on the agenda of the UN and will not disappear until Ukraine has restored its territorial integrity.

I’m grateful to the distinguished briefer Secretary General Antonio Guterres and ASG Khaled Khari for clearly demonstrating once again to this Council a new, shocking level of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine by committing outrageous war crimes and crimes against humanity against the civilian population.

These testimonies and these horrific facts will form part of the evidence that will underpin future trials against Russian war criminals and help endure accountability for their every atrocities committed in Ukraine.

Mr. President,

Before proceeding with my statement, I feel compelled to set the record straight regarding yet another propaganda narrative just promoted by Russian representative today and repeatedly over the past few days concerning the so-called incident in Starobilsk, a fake story that is already collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

At last Friday’s emergency meeting, Mr. Nebenzia told this Council of “86 students aged 14 to 18,” and repeatedly referred to “sleeping children,” “minors,” and the “deliberate killing of minors.”

I was listening very attentively to his passionate speech. I always listen to you, Mr. Nebenzia. Unlike you, I’m not scrolling my smartphone to demonstrate disrespect.

The Russian representative used the word “children” 15 times when speaking about Starobilsk last night. Today, Mr. Nebenzia mentioned poor children 5 times at least.

He even invited two UN bodies specifically mandated to protect children’s rights – UNICEF and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.

Yet the very next day the Russian Federation’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a list identifying the twenty-one alleged victims by name and date of birth. A list – it must be stressed - that has not been independently verified.

According to that list, every single individual named was an adult. Remarkably, not a single one was a child.

In other words, the same institution that sends the Russian representative to sit in this Chamber has, through its own documentation, refuted his central claim.

This tells us everything we need to know about the credibility of Starobilsk fake legend.

It also exposes Moscow’s willingness to exploit children’s rights and misuse UN institutions in the service of its propaganda.

What is perhaps most striking is that Russia expects the world to take its accusations on faith, while its own version of events starts falling apart the very next day as it is presented.

On 22 May, Mr. Nebenzia told this Council that "the Ukrainian army used four fixed-wing drones."

Just four days later, at the press conference on 26 May, the same representative of Russia told reporters that "16 UAVs targeted the same location in three successive waves."

So, as we see, the imaginary number of alleged drones suddenly quadrupled in 4 days.

I could continue deconstructing and dismantling the endless stream of Russia’s shameless lies, but I value precious time of Council members far too much to devote any more of it to this exercise.

Mr. President,

The Starobilsk narrative is a textbook example of cynical Russia’s propaganda, a construct so evidently fabricated that it is effectively stitched together with white threads of lies and drawn out of thin air.

We are seeing yet another attempt by the Russian Federation, and by the broader machinery of Putin’s system of disinformation, to cynically invent and construct a new victimhood narrative.

Through a mixture of falsehoods, manipulations, and deliberate distortions, Russia is trying to fabricate yet another myth of Starobilsk portraying itself as an alleged “victim” of this war.

Let us be absolutely clear: we can not allow this to happen.

Because this is not about the victims of war. The sole responsibility lies with a single individual — Mr. Putin — and the military monster he commands.

What is being pursued instead is something far more dangerous: an attempt to manufacture Moscow’s justification for an ongoing act of brutal aggression against Ukraine or for the so called “retaliation”.

And we have seen this pattern before like fabricated myths about the 2014 tragedy at the Trade Union House in Odesa, or cynical narratives about an alleged “people of Donbas” supposedly targeted by Ukrainian forces, both fake constructs, that Moscow keeps recycling over and over again.

All of this has been instrumentalized by a cynical propaganda apparatus to justify Russia’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the mass killings and indiscriminate strikes against civilian populations that we witnessed in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities last Sunday.

To be frank, watching the sheer zeal, the almost theatrical determination with which the Russian representative at the UN beats his chests and bends every possible effort to manufacture this new Russian myth of alleged victimhood is deeply disturbing.

I want to reiterate once and for all: the Armed Forces of Ukraine target only legitimate military objective in full accordance with international humanitarian law. We never target civilians.

Mr. President,

Let me now turn back to my statement.

The night from May 23 to May 24 in Kyiv, my native city, was, without exaggeration, a true Armageddon for its residents.

It was the most devastating assault the Ukrainian capital has endured since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Waves of Russian deadly missiles and drones struck the city with a new appalling level of brutality leaving no doubt about Mr.Putin’s true intention — not military necessity, but maximum terror inflicted on the metropolis and Ukraine’s peaceful citizens.

I am raising this issue with the members of this Council also with deep personal pain.

As you know, my own family lives in Kyiv. They, too, went through that hellish night of Russian barbarism unleashed by Mr. Putin and his bloody henchmen dressed in military uniform.

Thanks God, my mother and father in law, my 10 year old niece survived this horror.

But survival is not something we Ukrainians can take for granted.

It is difficult to convey how absurd this reality sounds in the 21st century in the very heart of Europe, in one of its most beautiful European capitals with over three million inhabitants.

On Sunday, Russian armed forces carried out one of the largest and the most terrifying combined attacks on Ukraine’s civilians and civilian infrastructure, using 54 cruise missiles, 32 ballistic missiles, including 2 Kinzhal air-launched missiles as well as 3 Tsirkon hypersonic missiles.

In addition, over 600 Russian attack drones were employed against civilian population. Many of them were Shahed type drones, the same Iranian-designed deadly weapons that have shown their destructive power in the Middle East and Gulf region used by Iranian armed forces.

Over one hundred people were injured across Ukraine and at least four civilians were killed.

Severe damage has been reported across all districts of Kyiv, affecting a wide range of civilian objects.

352 residential buildings were among the hardest hit, including high-rise apartment blocks, private houses, many of which sustained fires, structural damage, or partial destruction.

A whole section of a residential building on Dekhtiarivska Street was demolished from the first to the fifth floors.

The family of our friends lived in that building, thankfully they survived the strike, but lost their apartment and all their possessions.

The Chornobyl Museum was completely destroyed by a direct missile strike. It had been reopened less than a month earlier following reconstruction, marking the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster.

The Russian barbaric barrage also struck a number of other Ukrainian cultural instututions, including the National Art Museum of Ukraine, it is our Louvre or Metropolitan Museum, the National Philharmonic Hall, the National Music Academy, the Kyiv Municipal Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Yaroslav the Wise National Library, the International Center for Culture and Arts, the "Ukrainian House” Center.

The historic architectural landmarks of our capital, including the Contracts House and the Central Postal Station building, were also damaged.

19 schools and educational institutions in Kyiv were severely affected by Russian air strikes, including the historic campus of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy",  one of the oldest national universities alongside a public food market, shopping malls, office centers, and warehouses.

Russia targeted the free press in Ukraine, damaging the offices of prominent international and domestic media outlets, including Germany’s Deutsche Welle and ARD, the Ukrainian Independent Information Agency (UNIAN), and several digital news platforms.

The blasts struck the building the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a unique architectural masterpiece erected in 1939, that sustained damage for the first time since the Second World War.

The Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Odesa, Poltava, Sumy, and Zhytomyr regions were also targeted by Russia in that fateful night of May 24.

Mr. Presidents, Colleagues,

Allow me to reiterate once again that, despite Russia’s constantly repeated claims that it does not allegedly target Ukraine’s civilian population, even the main Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov a few days ago openly admitted that this is a pure lie.

In one of his recent broadcasts, this Kremlin mouthpiece acknowledged that, over the past weekend, Russia carried out indiscriminate strikes against Kyiv and that its military command makes no distinction between military and civilian targets because, as he literally put it, Russian bombs and missiles “have no eyes.”

For years, Mr. Putin has been shamelessly lying that Russian troops only strike military objectives.

Yet now, even its own official propaganda machinery finally concedes that Russia does kill indiscriminately.

And now we hear something even more revealing.

These threats are no longer voiced only by Russia’s military command.

They are now being openly articulated by the Russian Foreign Ministry itself that turned into the most aggressive and brazen megaphone of war in human history, even trespassing the Third Reich.

We are told, explicitly, that Russia only strikes what it calls, and I quote, “decision-making centers” and “command posts”.

So let us throw a closer look at the results of the latest massive missile attack on Kyiv.

One of the sites completely destroyed was the famous Lukianivka fruit and vegetables market, an ordinary marketplace near the neighborhood where my family and I lived for years.

So is Mr. Putin waging a war against Ukrainian tomatoes? Maybe Cucumbers or Parsley?

Mr. President,

Now, let us throw a closer look at the tremendous cost of this latest brutal missile and drone strike on Kyiv.

Based on open-source calculations the price that Mr. Putin has paid for this last barbaric attack is about 360 million US dollars.

Just imagine this scale of absurdity. This figure reflects only the value of the weapons used in a matter of hours.

When translated into real-life terms inside the Russian Federation, the scale becomes even more astonishing.

According to official Russian construction cost benchmarks, this sum could finance approximately 35 modern schools, or 12 fully equipped modern hospitals.

In other words, the value destroyed by Russia in just one single night attacking the very first McDonalds cafe in Kyiv (by the way it was already reopened) could have been converted into many decades of public investment in social infrastructure, dozens of schools educating a few generations of children, and hospitals providing essential medical care.

360 million USD is comparable to the entire annual budgets of such medium-sized Russian cities as Kursk, Bryansk, or Belgorod.

Mr. President,

At our previous meeting, I reminded Council members that around 35 million people in Russia still do not have access to proper sanitation and sewerage services, a striking reality for a country that claims “great-power” status.

Had the Kremlin chosen to invest 360 million US Dollar it wasted in this one single night strike on fruit markets in Kyiv, in its own people in Russia, that amount would have been sufficient to build a state-of-the-art sewerage and wastewater treatment system for a city of 300,000 residents.

Moreover, in human terms, with the average Russian pension of roughly 260 US dollars, this amount would cover the annual pensions of 110,000 pensioners.

Instead, Mr. Putin decided to invest 360 million US Dollar into missiles that launched in one night against a European capital and destroying a vegetable market and a coffee shop which reopened the next morning, as we just heard.

Mr. President,

Now we know that Russia has also deployed a medium-range ballistic missile system known as “Oreshnik,” which is capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

It was used primarily as an instrument of intimidation against the international community.

Let me also highlight the sheer absurdity of this action.

The cost of a single Oreshnik missile is around 50 million US dollars.

Russia launched at least two of them. One reportedly lost its course and fell on temporarily occupied territory in the Donetsk region.

The other reached the area near Bila Tserkva, just outside Kyiv, where it detonated in the air.

And if one assumes that the intended target was a so-called “decision-making center,” then the result of this “precision strike” was the destruction of a few old garages in a garage co-op, as well as an old fence on the outskirts of Bila Tserkva.

This is yet another clear illustration of how Mr. Putin is recklessly squandering billions of dollars on weapons that achieve no military effect, while these enormous resources could have been used for the benefit of his own population. But who cares about the ordinary people in Russia?

Mr. President,

We are closely monitoring Russia's activities aimed at further involving Belarus in aggression against Ukraine. This is another disturbing issue that I would like to turn the attention of this Council.

The Lukashenka regime has effectively surrendered its sovereignty, allowing its territory, military infrastructure, and airspace to be used by Moscow.

Under growing Kremlin pressure, Belarus is being pushed toward deeper involvement in the war, including through mobilization measures, deployment of advanced missile systems, and nuclear-related exercises, thereby posing an unprecedented threat to European security.

Ukraine hopes that Belarus will not start an invasion from its soil, but there should be no doubt that Ukraine will defend itself in strict accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Any attack from the north will trigger an immediate and decisive response and the regime in Minsk will face devastating consequences.

We therefore urge the Security Council to increase pressure on both Moscow and Minsk to prevent this new escalation of war.

Mr. President,

To conclude, first, Ukraine calls on its European and American partners to multiply their air defense assistance at least tenfold. The alarming new scale of Russia’s aerial terror requires a response of an entirely different magnitude. We need to better protect the skies over our cities and save civilian lives.

Second, we once again urge all UN Member States to take robust unilateral measures to deprive Russia’s war machine of its financial lifeline. Every loophole that remains open, every sanction left unenforced, and every source of revenue left untouched enables the Kremlin to prolong its war of aggression.

Third, I would like to appeal to the members of this Council — an appeal I have repeated at every single meeting for the past year:

it is time for the Security Council to pass a resolution demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, as well as the release of all prisoners of war and all unlawfully detained civilians under an “all for all” exchange formula.

And last but not least, it is time to find an elegant but effective way to deprive Russia of its permanent seat of this Council which it obtained or better say, hijacked under very dubious legal grounds.

Mr. President,

Russia is bending over backwards to portray itself as the victim of a war that it alone chose to start.

The Kremlin is desperately trying to shift attention away from its aggression and to present the consequences of its own criminal actions as somebody else’s responsibility.

The reason for Moscow’s panic is clear. Ukraine’s deep strikes against legitimate military targets are not only changing the dynamics on the battlefield.

They are inevitably eroding Russia’s economic ability to sustain its criminal war machine.

So I would like to give an advice to Mr. Nebenzia, traditionally in Russian:

«Не бомбите и не бомбимы будете» Из народного послания к болотянам.

Don’t bomb and you will not be bombed in return.

I thank you.