West systematically prepared Ukraine for war against Russia — UN envoy

Western countries have been deliberately readying Ukraine for a war against Russia over many years, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya said at a special session on Ukraine of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday.

"Thanks to well-known revelations by a number of former Western leaders, now there is no doubt left that under the cover of the Minsk accords approved by the [UN] Security Council, the West was intentionally preparing Ukraine for a war against Russia," he said.

"With condonation and complicity of the Americans and Europeans, a truly authoritarian, despotic regime was being shaped and consistently armed in Kiev which has been systematically eliminating everything opposition-leaning and everything that could be linked to Russia in any way," the Russian diplomat pointed out. "In a country where the Russian language was native for the majority of the population and which for many centuries existed in the cultural unity with our country, such a policy essentially meant undermining society’s unifying foundations and imposing the Ukraine as ‘anti-Russia’ artificial paradigm," he explained.