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”

(8 June 2026)

Madam President,

Dear Minister Valtonen,

Distinguished Members of the Security Council,

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

I also express my gratitute to the distinguished briefers Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo and Mr. Indrika Ratwatte, Acting Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs for their horrific evidence of new monstrous war crimes committed by Russia in the last week against Ukrainian civilians.

I will never tire of repeating that this horrendous evidence officially presented before this chamber will form part of future indictments and convictions.

Not only of every Russian commander and soldier responsible for these deplorable war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also of Russia’s top political and military leadership.

Madam President,

Before I move to my statement, I cannot let pass yet another torrent of fabrications, another stream of falsehoods, another flood of insinuations, another barrage of disinformation that has just been delivered by the representative of Russia today.

Though his script may change from time to time, but the

plot remains exactly the same: to weave a web of lies, deny the verified facts, distort and bend the truth, peddle fake narratives and distract from reality.

So today, Mr. Nebenzya has not suprised this Council and has not departed from his signature imprudent style of spinning yarns.

With an almost feverish intensity he keeps repeating his worn-out concoction of Starobilsk.

What we are hearing is a recycled tall tale that keeps looping back, like a broken record that refuses to stop.

As the new Russia’s victimhood myth of Starobilsk is being personally orchestrated Mr. Putin, the representative of Russia cannot escape its gravitational pull.

Thus, Mr. Nebenzya keeps repeating it with mechanical consistency, attempting to project new manufactured Kremlin storyline into this Chamber, as if repetition alone could turn this fiction into fact.

Even if the Russian representative were to submit to the Council yet another 100 letters complete with stages images and pseudo-testimonies, all this would not add a single ounce of credibility to a compeletely fabricated narrative of Starobilsk.

On the contrary, the more such cooked-up pieces of evidence are produced and circulated, the more this constructed story reveals itself as fully staged, and devoid of any evidentiary value exposing artificial nature.

No staged visits by Kremlin-appointed court journalists to Starobilsk, no carefully choreographed pseudo media pilgrimages, can replace one fundamental fact: there is no independent verification whatsoever of these entirely baseless, and frankly plucked-out-of-thin-air claims.

And this is all that members of the Security Council need to know about Starobilsk fake as well as all the other fake news accusing Ukraine like an alleged strike in Yenakiyeve. All Staged and unverified. Period.

Madam President,

Let me now proceed with my statement.

Just ten days ago, we met in this Chamber to address Russia’s unprecedented escalation of its war of aggression against Ukrainian civilians.

Since the beginning of June, the brutality of Russia’s attacks on the civilian population has once again set a grim new record of casualties and destruction.

During the night of June 1, and continuing into the morning hours of June 2, the Russian Federation launched one of the most extensive and devastating combined aerial attacks against Ukraine since the start of its full-scale invasion.

A total of 729 aerial attack assets were deployed, including 656 unmanned aerial vehicles and 73 missiles, among them 33 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 27 Kh-101 cruise missiles, 5 Kalibr cruise missiles, and 8 Zircon hypersonic missiles.

The scale and composition of this strike indicate a deliberate attempt to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defences and maximize damage across urban areas.

The primary direction of the attack was the city of Kyiv, which suffered the most severe consequences. In the capital, at least seven people were killed and around 80 were injured, including children.

Residential apartment buildings in multiple districts were damaged or partially destroyed, and fires broke out across the city. Critical civilian infrastructure, including medical facilities and utilities, was affected, leaving parts of the city without electricity.

In Dnipro, one of the hardest-hit cities, at least 16 people were killed, including children and an emergency responder, more than 40 people were injured.

A multi-storey residential building was partially destroyed, with civilians trapped under the rubble during rescue operations. Extensive damage was recorded to residential buildings, civilian infrastructure, and public facilities.

In Kharkiv, as well as in other regions — including Poltava, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Chernihiv — Russian strikes caused severe injuries to civilians, damage to residential buildings, and disruption to infrastructure.

Across Ukraine, during this latest heinous attack, more than 20 people were killed and over 120 were severely injured, including many children.

Homes, hospitals, schools, warehouses, and energy infrastructure were damaged or destroyed, worsening the widespread impact on civilian life.

Russian terror against civilians is ongoing and relentless. On 3 June, nearly 200 drones attacked Ukraine; on 4 June, another barrage of almost 300 drones followed; and on 5 and 6 June, again more than 200 drones were launched each single day.

Even while we are meeting here today, innocent people in Ukraine are paying with their lives. Just as this meeting got underway, a brutal Russian drone strike on the city of Zaporizhzhia killed two civilians at a bus stop and 24 persons injured.

No diplomatic language can adequately describe the cruelty of such criminal acts. No military necessity can ever justify this barbarism

Madam President,

Let me turn the attention of the Council to the recent report of the Secretary-General that has blacklisted Russia’s armed and security forces as credibly suspected of committing rape of other forms of conflict-related sexual violence.

What a shame! What a shame for this inglorious Russian army and the so called law enforcement agencies that are nothing else but a gang as rapists. Any ancient horde of barbarians was more human than today’s Russia’s troops.

For Ukrainians, these outrageous crimes are not new. They have been systematically documented since Russia’s occupation of Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014.

What has fundamentally changed now is that these appalling facts have now been independently verified and officially recorded by the United Nations.

Let me quote from this report to give the Council a feeling of a country with which you must share this table:

“The human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine verified 310 cases of conflict-related sexual violence, including rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, affecting 280 men, 26 women and 4 girls, perpetrated by Russian armed and security forces, including the Federal Penitentiary Service, the Russian armed forces and the Federal Security Service” End quote.

Madam President,

The official response of Mr. Nebenzya to this independently verified deplorable evidence which shocks human conscience followed the same shameless pattern as in the fake story of Starobilsk:

deny everything, distort the facts, attack the messenger, openly discredit Secretary General and undermine a monitoring system established by this Council.

In a press conference last week Mr. Nebenzya found the report biased. He found it poorly structured and formalistic, to use his own words. He asserted that the report failed to demostrate the systemic nature of the aleged violations.

Well, the Russian representative seems to be a demanding literary critic, though a rather selective one, given that Russia’s government openly refused to cooperate with Special Representative USG Pramilla Patten and denied access

Mr. Nebenzya, let me quote again from the SG Report:

“Of the 310 cases documented, 232 cases (74.83 per cent) involved multiple forms of sexual violence, while 195 cases (62.9 per cent) involved multiple incidents of sexual violence, which was often used to punish or humiliate, or extract confessions from, prisoners of war and civilian detainees.

A male prisoner of war was raped with a knife by Russian armed forces upon capture in 2022, and subsequently subjected to repeated sexual violence, including forced nudity, beatings and electric shocks to the genitals”. End quote.

Mr. Nebenzya, at what percentage shall the pattern of war crimes related to sexual violence become systematic, according to Russia’s high standards of turturing innocent people?

Dear members of the Council,

How long are we going to tolerate these unacceptable attacks of Russia on the legitimacy of the Secretary General, his Special Representative and the whole UN system as such as long as his independent reports do not fit into Moscow’s propaganda machinery?

May I make a creative suggestion:

if Russia feels uncomfortanble with all the decisions of the General Assembly demanding unconditional withdrawals of its troops or better to say of its war criminals from the Ukrainian soil, if Russia rejects independent reports of relevant UN bodies exposing Moscows barbaric policies, maybe it is time to say goodbye and get out of the UN?

As we all know, the Russian Federation was never properly admitted to the UN. So I do not think that anyone in this Chamber will be shedding tears when Russia finally slams the door and leaves.

Every single day the Russian representative is spitting in all our faces with his constant lies, while we too politely pretend that it is just falling rain.

Madam President,

Let me remind the Council, that Russia’s armed forces have already been listed three consecutive times in the Secretary-General’s reports on Children and Armed Conflict.

Now Russia is listed under both flagship Security Council protection mandates — CAAC and conflict-related sexual violence.

This designation cannot remain just a symbolic exercise. A military force that has been blacklisted by the Secretary-General for conflict-related sexual violence cannot be a contributor to any operations under the UN flag.

Russia’a personnel shall be banned from UN peacekeeping and police missions.

Madam President,

Moreover, while Russia fabricates baseless accusations on ZNPP, it continues to endanger nuclear safety in reality.

On the night of 6 to 7 June, a Russian drone struck a building at Ukraine’s Centralised Spent Fuel Storage Facility in Kyiv region, located within the Chornobyl area. This facility is used for the long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel from Ukrainian nuclear power plants.

The strike caused a fire covering approximately 40 square meters, which was extinguished by Ukrainian emergency services. This was an attack on critically important nuclear infrastructure. Let us be clear: this was not incidental — this was a deliberate and extremely dangerous act.

Although radiation levels remain within normal limits, the incident demonstrates a further escalation in Russia’s reckless behavior, which has long crossed all acceptable boundaries.

Madam President!

Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to peace. On 4 June, the President of Ukraine addressed an open letter to Putin, signaling the need to end this war and expressing readiness for direct negotiations.

Ukraine has proposed a concrete path forward: a meeting of the two leaders on neutral territory.

What we heard in response from Mr. Putin, was NYET. Again and again.

Rather than showing readiness to start direct negotiations to end this senseless war, the Russian president declared during St. Peterburg economic forum that Russia was thriving and that its economy was flourishing stronger than ever.

Ironicaly, Mr. Putin did so against the backdrop of black smoke billowing from critical military facilities near St. Petersburg that had been struck by Ukrainian armed forces just hours earlier. The symbolism was hard to miss.

We should better listen to the whining of Russian officials, the same people who for years lectured everyone about the supposedly unmatched resilience of Russia’s economy and mocked sanctions as ineffective.

Now these very same figures are openly sounding the alarm and nervously looking for an off-ramp before the situation deteriorates even further.

Russia’s Minister of Economic Development Maksim Reshetnikov recently admitted that the country is facing a “difficult situation,” while Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned about growing risks of budget deficit. Russian MP Renat Suleimanov openly acknowledged that the Russian economy may not withstand a prolonged war against Ukraine.

Squealing in unison, they now sound less like confident representatives of a “fortress economy” and more like accountants at a collapsing pyramid scheme trying to locate the emergency exit before the lights go out.

Analysts agree that Russia’s economy is approaching a point of structural stagnation. After years of wartime overheating, growth forecasts have now fallen toward roughly 1 percent.

Inflation remains around 15 percent despite interest rates being pushed to nearly 20 percent. Reserve funds are being rapidly depleted. Budget deficit in the first quarter of 2026 alone exceeded $50 billion, overcoming the official target for the entire year. Oil and gas revenues, the backbone of the Russian budget, declined by roughly 40 percent in the first months of 2026.

For the last four years, Russia sustained itself through its “deathonomics” – economic model that relied on war, militarization, and death itself as key drivers of economic activity.

The Kremlin is now spending $10 billion annually on military recruitment bonuses alone, while monthly compensation for death in combat can reach approximately $200,000 per soldier.

Dying at the front has effectively become more financially rewarding than a lifetime of civilian work.

Yet this model is showing growing signs of exhaustion: recruitment costs are rapidly increasing, inflation and labor shortages are worsening, civilian sectors continue to stagnate and ever larger parts of the economy are being consumed by war.

So in the reality, Russia’s economic situation is approaching a critical point despite the fact that its leadership continues to project forced optimism

On the battlefield Ukraine could liberate in May 100 sq km more than Russian troops were able to advance. For the second consecutive month.

Madam President,

First, and I will reiterate the point I made at our last meeting, Ukraine calls on our partners to scale up their support, particularly in the field of air defence, at least tenfold, better twentyfold.

The most effective way to protect innocent lives today is to ensure that Ukraine has sufficient capabilities to intercept missiles and drones that Russia launches against our cities. Today. Not tomorrow. Not next month. Not next year.

Second, we urge all members of United Nations to move beyond fragmented measures and adopt truly coordinated, comprehensive sanctions against Russia’s war machinery.

The target is clear: Russia’s military-industrial complex, which continues to manufacture the missiles, drones, and other weapons used to terrorize Ukrainian civilians on a daily basis. Every remaining channel through which critical technologies and components continue to reach Russia must be shut down.

Third, I once again appeal to the members of the Security Council to place on the table, without further delay, a draft resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, as well as the release and exchange of all prisoners of war and all civilian detainees under the “all-for-all” formula.

Such a step could serve as an essential confidence-building measure and would contribute to establishing a more conducive environment for launching genuine negotiations in the near future aimed at achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.

Madam President,

To conclude I want to address the Russian representative with words from a famous Soviet cartoon which perfectly capture the current mood in the Russian population that increasingly faces dire consequences of the boomerang of its barbariab war:

"Эх, жизнь моя жестянка, да ну ее в болото".

Oh, my life is miserable, let me throw it into the swamp

I thank you.