Our meeting is drawing to a close, and I am now perhaps within my rights, as doyen of the Security Council, to welcome our new United States colleague, Ambassador Nikki Haley. From time to time we may have differences on particular issues, but her efforts will greatly influence the Council’s ability…
We are grateful for today’s briefings, which painted a disturbing picture of the ongoing events and suffering of the people of eastern Ukraine.
What has basically been happening is quite obvious. Kyiv is attempting to use clashes it has itself provoked as a pretext for a complete refusal to impleme…
The Middle East and North Africa region is still experiencing a systemic multilevel crisis. There have been ongoing, bloodthirsty terrorist attacks and other attacks, including the murder of the Russian ambassador in Ankara, Mr. Karlov. There have been explosions in Turkey and Egypt, and the tragedi…
Sweden has begun its two years of labour on the Security Council by taking the Chair of the presidency at the very start. We wish it every success. We are sure that in the conduct of our work the land of Dag Hammarskjöld, Olof Palme and Jan Eliasson will exemplify the excellent foreign policy tradit…
I did not intend to speak here today, as it seems to me that resolution 2336 (2016), which we have just adopted, speaks for itself. But as all members of the Security Council have spoken it would probably be odd, to say the least, if one of the sponsors of the resolution and a member of the Council …
The Russian delegation, I am sure like many others in the Chamber, was puzzled by the process that unfolded around today’s resolution 2334 (2016). While the resolution has been worked on for many months, the apparent haste surrounding its adoption does not promote its ends.
For many years, our coun…
I understand that this is the final statement of my colleague from New Zealand in the Security Council, and I do not want to spoil his swan song. However just for protocol, just for the record, we do not agree with a number of the arguments he put forth. What is particularly unacceptable is the conf…
I would first like to express my deep appreciation to the President of the Government of Spain, the Secretary-General, the members of the Security Council, every Member of our Organization and the staff of the Secretariat, who have voiced their outrage and sympathy over the terrorist act that killed…
We are following the security situation in Afghanistan very closely. We are concerned about its sudden and growing deterioration, especially in the north of the country, in which the Taliban has recently become increasingly active. The elimination of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mansoor, has led to a …
We note with regret that the situation in the Middle East and North Africa continues to be tense and explosive. Over the past few years the situation in the Israeli-Palestinian track has continually worsened. Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been de facto frozen. After the complet…
We welcome the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain, Mr. Alfonso Dastis Quecedo, who is presiding over this meeting of the Security Council, and we appreciate the convening of this open debate on the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and on resolution 1540 (2004). We …
I would like to make a brief but important clarification in response to the President’s appeal: maybe I was not correctly interpreted, or maybe I did not say clearly enough what I meant in my statement. The fact is that the agreement you referred to, that you called for — our removal of the fighters…
My statement will be made up of four small parts.
The first is that propaganda, disinformation and psychological warfare are not new concepts. A new phenomenon, exacerbated by what we are seeing in the Syrian conflict, is the spread of fake news. In such fabrications, they stoop to using images of …
Russia highly values the role of the United Nations in strengthening international cooperation in sport, as that contributes to overcoming inter-ethnic and interreligious strife, while strengthening mutual understanding among nations and achieving harmony among civilizations.
Sport has an enormous …
As far as I am concerned, the discussion ended somewhat unexpectedly for me when you took the floor in your national capacity, Sir. I wanted to say a few words after the voting as well. I will be brief, since we have discussed the situation in Syria many times, including just recently. We have alrea…
This is not the first time we have seen this. Secretary of State John Kerry has been working with our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, to reach a concrete result. But whenever they near an agreement, somebody undermines it. Sometimes that effort originates in Washington, D.C., from the D…
The vote you have called today, Sir, on a draft resolution (S/2016/1026) on the humanitarian situation in Syria violates the Security Council’s rules of procedure, since the draft resolution was put into blue only at 11.20 a.m. this morning and cannot be voted on before tomorrow morning, in accordan…
Rightly or wrongly, humanitarian issues have recently increasingly become a subject for the Security Council’s attention. We think that it is now high time to hold a substantive discussion on the Middle East and
North Africa and organize a thematic debate on the topic of the catastrophic consequenc…
It is an honour for me, in my capacity as President of the Security Council for the month of October, to address the General Assembly in order to convey the recommendation of the Security Council for the appointment of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
At its 7782nd meeting, held in priv…
This is the sixth year that the Syrian people have endured a terrible tragedy. In 2011, in Washington, D.C., and various other Western capitals, the decision was made to continue reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa, a process that had started with the criminal invasion of I…
