Russia‘s UN envoy accused the UN Secretariat on Wednesday of “institutional bias” over its handling of Ukraine-related reporting, saying the world body has taken sides in the conflict and can no longer serve as an honest broker.
Vassily Nebenzia held a news conference at UN Headquarters in New York, where he demanded access to materials the secretariat used to level accusations against Moscow and questioned the legal framework applied to Russia in the process.
“We’re asking for access to the materials on which the secretariat itself relied when it leveled grave accusations against the Russian Federation. As the member state targeted by those accusations, we have every right to verify the material, assess its credibility, and test its validity,” he said.
Nebenzia said Russia’s request to scrutinize the sources behind those accusations had been rejected on confidentiality grounds, while unverified Ukrainian sources were accepted without question.
“Confidentiality is invoked not to protect justice, but to prevent scrutiny, and this is again not impartiality. This is not transparency. This is not the proper administration of justice. It is a selective treatment, it is institutional bias, it is discrimination,” he said.
The Russian envoy said the UN Secretariat has disqualified itself from playing a constructive role in resolving the Ukraine crisis. “The UN Secretariat has divorced itself from the possibility of being instrumental in resolving the crisis in Ukraine by taking sides basically,” he said.
Asked about the Bucha events specifically, Nebenzia said Russia would continue pressing the issue despite expecting no change from the current UN leadership.
“We’ll continue to knock on the door,” he said, adding that the episode “unfortunately, became a watershed in the whole conflict.”
Following the Russia-Ukraine peace talks in 2022 in Istanbul, Russia announced it would withdraw its forces from the Kyiv region as a gesture of goodwill.
After the Russian army left the city of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities claimed they found numerous bodies of civilians on the streets, some with their hands tied, and accused Russia of killing them.
Russia denied the allegations, insisting that its forces did not target civilians, implying that the incident was staged by Ukraine following their retreat.
