‘He’s a spokesperson for the Devil’: Ukraine’s ambassador on facing down Russia at the United Nations
On the evening of 23 February, as nearly 200,000 Russian troops were massed at the border with Ukraine, the United Nations Security Council called an emergency meeting to address an apparently imminent invasion.
By the time Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, began to speak to the chamber, the war had already begun. The 52-year-old diplomat put aside his prepared speech and spoke directly to his Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya, urging him to call his superiors in the Kremlin and tell them to stop the aggression against Ukraine.
“There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador,” he concluded.
Looking back on that moment now, four months into the war, Mr Kyslytsya has no regrets about the language he used.
“I had to expose the zero level of morality of Putin’s regime and his envoys around the world,” he tells The Independent at the Ukrainian mission to the UN in New York. “The Russians often try to project an image of being morally above the decaying collective West, and everything associated with it, but it’s not true.”
Video of Mr Kyslytsya’s rebuke was shared far and wide in the following days, even as Russian troops began their assault. His speech, which eschewed the usual diplomatic niceties of the global body, captured the shock and anger felt not just by Ukrainians, but around the world, at the invasion.
Today, Russia continues to push its advance in the southeastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Despite early successes against a far larger and more sophisticated army, Ukraine is struggling to hold its ground.
Here at the United Nations, far from his homeland, Mr Kyslytsya has waged his very own war. In his speeches to the Security Council and General Assembly, the Kyiv native has appealed to the moral conscience of his allies and shamed Putin’s representatives on the world stage.
He has frequently attacked Mr Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, comparing him to the Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop. When asked what he believes motivates his counterpart, Mr Kyslytsya is direct.
“His situation is very miserable,” he says. “The Russian diplomatic service traditionally consists of two major blocs: they are either generations of Soviet, communist, diplomatic families, or more than half are basically representatives of the many intelligence and secret services of the Russian Federation. They have no way to freely express their opinions.
“Nebenzya himself is probably about to retire. So if he defects and stays in the West, who is he? And what is he? He’s nobody; he wouldn’t even earn his living. So he basically has nothing to lose.”
Does he pity the 60-year-old Russian ambassador, in some small way, for this unenviable position?
“It’s not about pity,” Mr Kyslytsya says. “We are seeing a scale of the human tragedy such that it’s not even in my way of thinking to express any pity for him. He is the spokesperson of a devil.”
Mr Kyslytsya was deputy foreign minister in 2014 and held the role when Russia annexed Crimea that same year. He spent years rallying support to counter Russian aggression against Ukraine, before moving to the US to take up his current role in February 2020, just at the outbreak of the pandemic.
He is no newcomer to the US, however. Before becoming a career diplomat, Mr Kyslytsya spent time studying in Kansas as a young man, a place he says reminded him of his homeland.
“You can travel for hours and see the yellow fields of sunflowers and the blue sky, which is basically the Ukrainian national flag,” he says.
Here in New York, he has made the most of his platform to draw attention to Ukraine’s plight, frequently making the headlines for his striking speeches. In one of them, to the General Assembly in late February, Mr Kyslytsya read aloud what he said were text messages between a Russian soldier and his mother, taken from the phone found on his body after he was killed in action. In another, responding to Vladimir Putin raising the threat of nuclear war, he said of the Russian president: “What a madness. If he wants to kill himself, he doesn’t need to use a nuclear arsenal. He has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in May 1945.”
He carries with him a copy of the UN Charter, from which he frequently reads aloud the rules and regulations that guide member countries. Citing the rules in that charter, Mr Kyslytsya has repeatedly called for Russia to be banished from the Security Council altogether.
“I often need to remind people that in my opinion, and in the opinion of many legal experts, Russia continues to occupy illegally the seat of the Soviet Union in the Security Council,” Mr Kyslytsya says, turning to a bookmarked page in the charter.
