UNITED NATIONS: The Kremlin's U.N. ambassador claimed that the West is motivated by its desire to destroy Russia and stated: "We had no choice other than to defend our country—defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future" a week before the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of its smaller neighbor on February 24, 2022, was accused of being justified by Russia, according to Western ambassadors. In response, Russia was accused of using a Security Council meeting to call on lessons learned from the failure to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists that started in 2014 to justify what France's U.N. Ambassador Nicolas De Riviere called "the unjustifiable."

The only international forum where Russia regularly engages Ukraine and its Western backers, the UN Security Council, on Friday shed light on the widening gap between the warring parties as the conflict enters its second year with no end in sight, tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, and new military offensives anticipated.

The conflict between Ukraine and the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk in the country's primarily Russian-speaking industrial east erupted in April 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea, and Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, accused Western countries, including France and Germany, of "holding back" on implementing the Minsk agreements that were mediated by the two nations.

In order to re-arm the Kyiv regime and get it ready for war against Russia in the name of your geopolitical interests, Nebenzia said, "You knew very well that the Minsk process for you is just a smoke screen."

Richard Mills, the deputy ambassador for the United States, charged that while other signatories, including France, Germany, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, "sought to implement them in good faith," Russia had broken "every single commitment it made" in the Minsk agreements.

According to France's De Riviere, Germany and his nation have worked "tirelessly" since 2015 to encourage intergroup dialogue. He emphasized that "the challenges encountered in putting these agreements into action can never be used as an excuse or as mitigating circumstances for Russia's decision to end the dialogue with violence."

De Riviere recalled that on February 17, 2022, exactly one year prior, Sergey Vershinin, Russia's deputy foreign minister, reiterated to the council that the Minsk agreements provided "the only international legal basis" for resolving the Ukrainian conflict and that any rumors of Russian military intervention were unfounded and the product of Western paranoia. After declaring Donetsk and Luhansk independent four days later, Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.

The only lesson to be learned from this, according to De Riviere, is that by attacking Ukraine, Russia unilaterally decided to put an end to dialogue and negotiation.

The Minsk agreements, whose main goal, let us recall, was the reintegration of some regions of Donetsk and Luhansk under full Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for broad decentralization, were shattered by one person's decision.

When we warned that Russia would be attacking Ukraine, she claimed that they had lied. Nebenzia attributed Ukraine's refusal to carry out the Minsk agreements to "a criminal policy by the Ukrainian leadership, which was goaded by the collective West."

After a year of fighting, he told the Security Council's Western members, "Obviously, we won't be able to live in the future the way we did." We no longer have faith in you, and we are unable to believe any promises you make, whether they have to do with stopping NATO from expanding into the east, pledging not to meddle in our internal affairs, or pledging to maintain peace," Nebenzia said. He declared, "You have demonstrated that it is impossible to negotiate with you."

Sergiy Kyslytsya, the ambassador for Ukraine to the United Nations, charged that Russia had broken the terms of the Minsk agreements. He used the Minsk memorandum of September 19, 2014, which ordered all military personnel, militia members, and mercenaries to leave Ukraine, as an illustration.

He declared, "Putin has shown once and for all that he is impossible to negotiate with."

Kyslytsya stated that the Ukrainian government implores "healthy forces in Russia, if there are any, to come to their senses and force Putin to implement the demands of the U.N. General Assembly to immediately cease the use of force and to withdraw Russian military forces from Ukraine."