YouSaid · the spoken record

Bowes

lines on the record: 23
first: 2023-06-29
most recent: 2023-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: un-security-council

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It is incumbent on all here that have any influence to convey the reality of the conflict to their own people in order to avoid the increasingly dangerous spiral of escalation that leads us further towards the absolutes, at the expense of compromise. I owe it to the men and women and children who I met in the conflict zones, with whom I had the privilege to speak, to convey the reality of increased militarization in the region. I urge the Council to seek accommodation and peace and to respect the democratic mandate of those who have expressed it. Settlement will come, and it is my absolute belief that it is up to those in Washington D.C. and London, now fuelling the conflict with endless escalatory military aid to Ukraine, to decide where and when that settlement occurs, either at the negotiating table or on the battlefield.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“I visited the town of Shebekino and a large displaced persons centre that the Government is providing to tens of thousands of ordinary civilians who had to flee their homes due to the indiscriminate shelling of civilian targets. I stood with an 83-year-old woman as she asked me what she had done to deserve a high-explosive Ukrainian drone to target her home in a civilian terror attack in Voronezh. I saw those villages burning. I heard the artillery strike, and I have to tell the Council that weapons being supplied by NATO and its allies to Ukraine are being wilfully used to target civilian populations on a daily basis in Donbas, Lugansk, Belgorod — all miraculously invisible to the western media.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“Yet that was enough to mount to sustained and significant threat to the British State. As I have mentioned many times, more weapons were handed out over a period of days to civilians in Kyiv in the context of the Ukrainian conflict than these numbers themselves. They are absolutely minuscule, but they demonstrate the potential for a relatively small armed group on either side to exert disproportionate influence in any post-conflict period, which could lead to the collapse of any accommodation or agreement. It is the proliferation of those weapons that potentially could lead to decades of instability, not only in other parts of Europe and further afield, but in Ukraine itself. Finally, and to wind up, I recently spent some time in the city of Belgorod, which has come under sustained attack from Ukrainian artillery and drones.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“It does not take vast numbers of weapons to cause significant civil strife and lead to severe local and potentially national escalation of conflict. In my own country, British forces colluded with loyalist paramilitary gangs through the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s to terrorize and murder hundreds of innocent civilians over decades with relatively minuscule amounts of weaponry — actually less than hundreds of firearms. The Irish Republican Army was able to mount a serious threat to the British State itself with relatively small amounts of weapons and explosives. Thousands were killed and injured during a decades-long conflict sustained by a relatively small arsenal of weaponry. When the Irish Republican Army decommissioned its arsenal, it was found to have only 1,000 rifles, 2 tons of Semtex explosive and seven surface-to-air missiles.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“The attackers carried Zastava M70 assault rifles, which had been previously deactivated and reactivated for the attacks. The M70 is a Serbian copy of the Kalashnikov rifle, the most common weapon — now circulating in the tens or hundreds of thousands in Ukraine. It is a lethal and capable weapon — easy to use, easy to conceal and, in the wrong hands, capable of delivering catastrophic destruction and firepower. Unfortunately, given the huge scale of saturation of Ukrainian society with such weapons, it is absolutely inevitable that significant numbers of those weapons have been and will continue to be sold on the black market to the highest bidders, particularly in a society racked by conflict, societal breakdown and the ensuing lawlessness that brings.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“I do not need to cite the various INTERPOL reports in that connection or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who suggested that there are Western anti-tank weapons now on the borders of Israel in the hands of the enemies of Israel. I will not quote those because they are widely known and have been mentioned by other briefers. That leads to my next point, which I am anxious to make, regarding the potential destructive power of every single military-grade weapon in the wrong hands — the unthinkable destruction a single anti-aircraft weapon could have on the periphery of any European airport. We have all seen the tragic consequences of the brutal terror attacks at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015, where 130 innocent civilians died and 416 were injured.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“In one an incident alone, six kilometres from the centre of Kyiv, thousands of weapons were distributed to anybody willing to carry them. Some 18,000 portable assault weapons, rifles and pistols with ammunition were handed out to untrained civilians within days of the Russian intervention. That was confirmed to the British Broadcasting Corporation by Vadym Denysenko, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry adviser. It is impossible to imagine or even speculate as to the volume of illicit and official small arms now circulating in the country, which is experiencing catastrophic levels of dysfunction and destruction, criminality and corruption.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“In fact, when we look into that transfer, we see that those Howitzers were unserviceable or in varying states of readiness and ended up being scrapped or used for spare parts. The haphazard distribution of small arms across the country is probably just as disturbing, if not more so, in the context of the Ukrainian conflict. Long before the Russian military operation in Ukraine began last February, various reports were highlighting the dangers to civil society of the widespread distribution of small arms and ammunition across the country. Max Blumenthal has referred to some of those reports. In February 2022 Ukrainian authorities, remarkably, began to distribute tens of thousands of assault weapons, rifles, grenades and millions of rounds of ammunition to the general population.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“The same thing has happened with M-777 Howitzers, which were a much-vaunted game-changer in the long line of much-vaunted game-changers that were going to turn the tide of the war in Ukraine, according to Western media. Instead, the M-777 Howitzer has become a sitting duck for Russian loitering munitions. We have verifiable evidence that over 100 of those units have been destroyed in the field in Ukraine. By the way, the Pentagon report also says that at least one of the M-777 Howitzers was in such bad shape that it would have killed the operators trying to use it. That is in the Inspector General’s report that was concluded in March 2022. Similarly, Britain’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has announced the planned transfer of AS-90 Howitzers in Ukraine to great fanfare: “We stand with Ukraine”.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“The Italian Defence Ministry had stated that the vehicles had been decommissioned many years ago, but Ukraine had asked for them to be overhauled and put into operation anyway, given the urgent need for a means to face Russian aggression. A Pentagon Inspector General’s report released last May also illustrates some of these serious issues. An American unit was supposed to ship 29 high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles — a very small amount of equipment — to Ukraine from a depot in Kuwait. The cost of that action bears no remote link to any sort of strategic imperative whatsoever. By the time it actually arrived in Poland, only three of the vehicles were actually battle-worthy. The tires were rotten and had to be replaced at huge cost, basically choking up the whole supply chain.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“That information is from a landmark piece of work done by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in Rhode Island, United States of America, as part of its “Costs of War” research project on the Afghan misadventure. Those vast sums would suggest to the novice taxpayer that Ukraine is receiving high-technology supplies, but in a reflection of the poor quality of Western donations and the brutal battlefield attrition rate, as much as 30 per cent of Kyiv’s arsenal is under repair at any given time. That, again, is according to a source reported by The New York Times in a separate article. It also suggests that a recent delivery of 33 self-propelled Howitzers donated by the Italian Government were basically good only for scrap.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“The European Union and other States have also contributed tens of billions into what we know to be one of the least regulated States on Earth when it comes to control of corruption and institutional accountability. In addition, Ukraine has spent billions of dollars of its own money on the private arms market — possibly the most difficult area in which to ascertain any kind of transparency. It is worth recalling that, over the 20-year period of the United States intervention in Afghanistan, the United States Department of Defense paid various companies about $108 billion in contracts for work performed in the country, with one third of that contract spending remarkably going to undisclosed recipients — domestic and foreign businesses that are not uniquely identified in the publicly available contracting databases.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“Two of the individuals involved in the purchasing of that equipment, according to The New York Times, said that as of early spring, hundreds of millions of dollars had been paid, including to State-owned companies, for arms that never materialized. Volodymyr Havrylov, Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister, said: “We did have cases where we paid money and we did not receive”. I would like to point out again that some of those contracts are with State companies, according to The New York Times. It is very important that we try to show the sheer scale and volume of weapons flooding into Ukraine since last year. The United States alone has committed well over $40 billion worth of military aid to the Kyiv Government.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“A recent The New York Times article outlined how profiteering and incompetence have further complicated the chaotic landscape in Ukraine when it comes to the flood of heavy and light weapons into the country. According to that article, “Ukraine has paid contractors hundreds of millions of dollars for weapons that have not been delivered, and some of the much-publicized arms donated by its allies have been so decrepit that they were deemed fit only to be cannibalized for spare parts”. Or, indeed, they have been scrapped. The Ukrainian Government has revealed documents that show, as of the end of last year, Kyiv had paid arms suppliers more than $800 million for contracts that went completely or partly unfulfilled.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“In one case, Germany replaced 40 BMP- 1A1s — one of the oldest versions of that Soviet troop carrier — for the Greek army, with 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles through a Ringtausch programme, the Soviet air armour then being forwarded to Ukraine. The same type of deals have been widespread regarding the hasty requirement to feed Ukraine’s Soviet-era artillery, such as the Grad multiple launch rocket system, with post-Soviet States in Eastern Europe offering hundreds of thousands of rounds of artillery and rockets to the country in return for replacement systems. Surely the morality of that is deeply questionable. Of course, there is one fiscal beneficiary — and that is of course the NATO military-industrial complex, of which the United States is by far the biggest player globally.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“The ideology that an increasingly depleted Ukraine can indeed defeat Russia on the battlefield in eastern and southern Ukraine, somehow reclaim Crimea and subsume an unwilling ethnic Russian population back into a chaotic and essentially failed State governed from Kyiv is a delusion. The quality of some of the equipment that the United States has urged its smaller NATO allies to donate to Ukraine is at best repairable and at worst outright lethal — not to the Russian defenders, but to the Ukrainian operators. Several of those incentive deals have been done to entice NATO countries to dump all their vehicles into a desperate Ukraine on the promise of replacement with better, or at least younger, equipment.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“All of that occurs with no meaningful air support, let alone air supremacy, which Russia commands with its in-depth air defence systems and a large fleet of modern multi-role fighters. The idea that those assaults, which are essentially amounting to suicidal full-frontal attacks on in-depth prepared defences, are allowed to continue is, in my view, deeply cynical and, I would suggest, sinister. No modern NATO military strategist or senior officer would suggest that those manoeuvres are anything but an inhumane ticket to tragedy when commanding their own troops, yet when it comes to the young Ukrainian men mounting those assaults being decimated, they are silent. They accept the Ukrainian Government’s ban on reporting from the front lines on the vast losses in men and material that evoke scenes more similar to the Somme or Passchendaele.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“They are attempting to advance in close order in daylight across minefields into pre-zeroed artillery kill zones, often in 30-year-old second-rate NATO-supplied armoured personnel carriers, like the United States M-113 — a lightly armoured steel box that first entered service in 1960 and is a veteran of another United States foreign policy disaster, namely, the Vietnam War. They may be accompanied by a handful of German Leopard tanks, many of which are decades old and grossly unsuited to the Ukrainian steppes, or maybe by what are supposed to be mine-resistant vehicles, all of which have been shown now to be exceptionally vulnerable to Russian anti-tank warfare systems and attack helicopters, and the brutal reality of in-depth Russian minefields.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“On the front lines, meanwhile, military progress for the now serially depleted Ukrainian military is undeniably strategically insignificant, particularly in the context of the long-vaunted and publicized counter-offensive, where all qualified and objective independent and non-aligned analysts must agree that Ukraine is failing to achieve even the necessary initial breakthroughs against well-prepared and well- resourced Russian lines of defence. It is very interesting to hear the paid expert contributors in Western media encouraging an almost perverse stiff-upper-lip look- the-other-way attitude when faced with the undeniably brutal losses that Ukraine has undeniably suffered. Those young men dying in their thousands are, in my considered view, the most foremost victims of the perpetual escalation in military aid to Ukraine.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“It goes on to cite serious concerns regarding Government corruption and crimes involving violence or the threat of violence targeting persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities — which I presume includes the Russian- speaking minority in the east of the country — and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community. It is into that cauldron that the Western Powers are pouring incalculable volumes of weapons and munitions and money.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“I would like to cite the United States 2019 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, published by the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. This is a shocking report that maintains that unlawful and arbitrary killings and torture are widespread, as is the abuse of detainees by law enforcement personnel. It also mentions, “harsh and life-threatening conditions in prisons and detention centers; arbitrary arrest and detention; substantial problems with the independence of the judiciary; restrictions on freedom of expression, the press, and the internet, including violence against journalists, censorship, and blocking of websites”. Control of the press is widespread.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“It is critical that the reality of the situation is seen for what it actually is. That is indeed the very real escalating concern of NATO planners and their political funders, particularly in the ever-hawkish Anglosphere, The same geostrategic reality also, of course, drives the seemingly perpetual escalation of military aid to Ukraine. All of that is despite the tens of billions of dollars of weapons in various states of operability already being delivered to a country that the United States has described, as recently 2019, as endemically corrupt and, in many sectors of society, essentially lawless. It is crucially important that we are clear as to the kind of country to which such vast amounts of weapons are being delivered.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source
“Mr. Bowes: Despite well more than a year of frenzied and what is now recognized as a loosely regulated supply of incalculable numbers of weapons to Ukraine, sources within the country still maintain that it needs an escalating volume of heavy and light weapons and ammunition to conduct its operations. It is now also glaringly apparent that what began as NATO supporting a Ukrainian military that it had built since the beginning of the civil war in the east in 2014 has in real terms become a proxy conflict in which Ukraine supplies manpower with ever-diminishing operational capability to support a de facto NATO operation in order to prevent a Russian military victory in Ukraine, and thereby avert the potentially terminal impact such a victory would have on the operational, political and reputational survival of NATO itself.”
2023-06-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9364 (2023) · source