British Journalist Steve Sweeney addresses the security Council of the UN on Monday 12 Feb 2024, giving his eye witness testimony and putting the case for the people of Donetsk and Lugansk:
I am speaking to you from the city of Donetsk. In the background I can hear the familiar sounds of artillery fire, the blasts from the heroic air defences working to keep the people safe, the blasts from incoming – often western-supplied missiles, alerts from the menace of drones that strike fear into the residents here.
We hear these sounds are because of the failures of the Minsk Agreements. These accords should have been the framework that brought peace to the region, an end to aggression and the suffering of the civilian population.
It was hard to sell the accords to the people here. They had to be persuaded to stay within a federated Ukraine, with more autonomy, with the rights to speak Russian, for many their mother tongue, with the right to practice their traditions and culture without fear.
But they accepted it. They believed the guarantees offered by France and Germany along with the Kiev government. Time has proved they were wrong to do so. We know now that France and Germany had no intention of abiding by Minsk 1 or 2 – we heard from the horses mouths themselves.
The failure of Minsk is also your failure. Nations not united and a Council that provides no Security. This is how the people see you when I spoke to them, on which I will expand later.
As we know, before February 2022 there was a road to peace, and a road to war. Unfortunately many of the most powerful nations on the planet chose the latter. They brought war to some of the world’s poorest people and in the most brutal way imaginable.
This conflict didn’t start in February 2022 for the people of Donbass. It started back in 2014 when the Ukrainian government launched airstrikes on its own people in Lugansk. When armed neoNazi militias controlled the streets, killing at will and with impunity.
The failure of Minsk has real life consequences – with homes, hospitals and infrastructure destroyed as thousands dead as a result, deaths that could have been avoided.
Behind the statistics are people with families, people who are loved, people with names. Like Lyudmila, Natasha, Viktoria and Irina. – killed in a terror attack the Kievsky district of Donetsk city a few weeks ago.
Ukrainian forces fired western-weapons into a busy marketplace, 27 people were massacred. Old men and women selling homemade items at the side of the road, women baking bread.
Of course I expect the usual platitudes, that Russia is responsible for the killings, that it is the aggressor. Stock answers, superficial, but an insult to the memory of the dead and an insult to those living under constant shelling with western-supplied weapons.
The dead don’t have a voice, but the living do. And they are not afraid of Vladimir Putin, they are not afraid of Russia – who they see as protecting them from a potential genocide, the same that you are failing to stop in Gaza. They are afraid of you, of the member states sitting around this table who instead of talking about peace, about security, about an end to conflict…agree more money and more arms to Ukraine to rain down on their communities.
But in the space of a few weeks we saw 27 killed in a marketplace, 28 in a bakery in Lisichansk, three killed outside a busy supermarket, next to the busiest thoroughfare in Donetsk – the scene of which me and my team came under fire from – we saw an attempt to strike the Palace of Culture when people were gathered there for an event, with an emergency worker, Nikita Danilov, killed.
These are deliberate acts of terror, designed for maximum casualties and to break the will of the people. But these are not simply Ukrainian acts of terror, these are western-sponsored war crimes, and they are committed here on a daily basis.
I found remnants of the missile used in the attack – these are usually used to take out air defences or the like – and it was made in the United States, with an expiry date of 31st March 1991! Out of date stocks being rushed to the frontline. This was just a week after an AGM-88 HARM crashed into a babushka’s living room on the 9th floor of an apartment block, She was killed as her daughter and granddaughter slept in the room next door.
Among the blood and the rubble I saw a children’s tiara, dress up shoes, a colouring book. The impact on children cannot be understated 230 killed and 846 wounded since the conflict began.
Drones are now also more of a menace – 97 shot down over Donetsk city and Makeevka in just three days. In January 966 drones were taken down over Donetsk, Makeevka and Gorlovka with 200 attacks prevented.