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We are at war with US-Nato, not Ukraine – Russian ambassador
Russian Ambassador to Uganda, Vladlen Semivolos during the interview in Kampala on March 3, 2023. PHOTO/ ABUBAKER LUBOWA
What you need to know:
February 24 marked one year since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched “a special military operation” – an all-out invasion – on its former Soviet territory Ukraine by sea, land and air. The Ukrainians pushed back hard unexpectedly, and one year on a full blown war that has sucked in several European countries and the United States is raging. The Russian Ambassador to Uganda, Vladlen Semivolos told Sunday Monitor’s Frederic Musisi that while they are open to dialoguing, Ukraine is being used as a pawn on the chessboard.
What President Putin called “a special military operation” – one we thought would take a short while – is now a raging war with undercurrents of World War III. What are we to make of this state of affairs?
First of all, it remains a special military operation, not an invasion, which has very clear objectives; the major ones being to de-militarise Ukraine to the point of the not posing a military threat to Russia, and secondly to de-nazify Ukraine, which means to get rid of Nazis in this country.
Third is to get Ukrainians to establish laws that will be protecting the Russian population living in Ukraine, because the number of Russians living in Ukraine is almost the same as the Ukrainians themselves. Ukraine, as you know, received its statehood in 1991 when USSR fell apart, but before that it was a republic in the Union; it was an integral part of the union before it became a country itself.
In 2014 when the Western countries like France and Germany deceived the then government of President [Viktor] Yanukovych in Kyiv; they promised him that all problems he had at the time will be resolved in peaceful ways, with the help of the United States.
This is what added kerosene to the fire, then we saw an uprising sponsored by Western countries and we saw a coup that removed Yanukovych and they installed their government that was anti-Russian. At that point Ukraine with help of Western countries started to become anti-Russian, closer to our border.
US President Joe Biden makes surprise visit to Kyiv
The government of [President Volodymyr] Zelensky, which started off with slogans of good relations with Russia, then started preparing Ukrainians for war. First by declaring that they want to join North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) – which as you know is an anti-Russian formation – that was supposed to be dissolved many years ago.
So in effect if Ukraine was to join Nato, in case they launched a nuclear missile it would be able to reach Moscow in three minutes without us having enough time to respond. We have tried to have a security agreement with Western powers on the security structure in the European area but they declined, but we continue to see Nato expansion to our borders. So Ukraine was being prepared to be a military fist against us.
It is common knowledge that Moscow was jolted by the removal of President Yanukovych and also didn’t warm up to Zelensky right from the start. Your explanation, notwithstanding, is it safe to say Ukraine war is a proxy war between Moscow and the Nato alliance?
US President Joe Biden (right) walks next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) as he arrives for a visit in Kyiv on February 20, 2023. PHOTO | AFP
As I’m trying to explain, this is not a purely Russia-Ukraine conflict. The West/Nato is saying they are not part of the conflict but you have seen Western/Nato leaders saying this is our war and we have to win it and if Russian wins it we will have a different architecture of the world. From the Russian angle, we are fighting for a multipolar architecture where the voice of each country is heard. On the other hand, they are fighting for an architecture where they remain the masters and dominant voice. The idea of the West is to dominate; like how they come to Uganda and start lecturing you on LGBT, human rights, and democracy. We think the composition of the world should be multipolar.
Be that as it may, in the last 10 years, Russia has invaded Georgia, Crimea, and now Ukraine. Isn’t it safe for one to think that President Putin is still basking in the glory days of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)?
No, no… You don’t have information about Georgia. Let me explain what happened in that case; you know there was a breakaway of the Abkhazia territory in the southeast. This is a very old problem in Georgia. The people of Abkhazia are very different from Georgians, and each of these communities lived in their areas for centuries. During the USSR, they lived together because there was no borders but when the Union broke apart all the conflicts among communities became visible. So on August 8, 2008, Georgia started to shell the areas seeking to breakaway and started an invasion. They went ahead to attack Russian peacekeepers stationed there, and that called for our response; we waited for one day thinking it will end, they kept on going and going and they hard to be stopped.
So, it is Russia’s thinking that all its former Soviet territories are required to keep good neighbourliness with Moscow? You keep telling us you don’t meddle in affairs of sovereign states to justify closing eyes to the ills of our government, but there you are, continuously poking in affairs of former USSR states
Our foreign policy is to have good relations, if possible, with any country in the world. Since the establishment of our country, we want to promote frank, beneficial and mutual relations with all countries, or at least that is the general idea. One historian once said that Russian statehood has been around for 2,000 years and much as we lived in harmony we know what war, conflict and suffering means. As you know, we lost 27 million people in the war with Europe, led by the Germans. All countries – Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain – had Nazi battalions that we fought. So even today we are at war with the entire Europe. Back then there was no presence of Americans, now we have them on the battleground.
Granted. The result of those wars was birthing the covenants of the League of Nations, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, and eventually the UN Charter, which led to the multipolar world we live in now. In all those documents, invasion of a sovereign state by another is forbidden therein and Moscow is guilty on this
This is not an invasion. This is an act of preventing a wide-scale war. To take you back a bit, in 1941 President [Joseph] Stalin did not believe from various corners telling him that the Germans were about to launch an invasion. Some intelligence even mentioned the exact time Germany planned to invade, but Stalin did not believe because he thought that because USSR had a non-invasion pact with Germany then, so it would be respected. When the invasion happened we were unprepared and that is why in a couple of months we lost half of our European territory. So we will never make that mistake again. So in 2020 when we saw that Ukraine was planning attacks on the Donbas areas, soon the war would be at our border.
After one year of fighting, isn’t it time to give peace a chance, or at least chart a plan?
Good point. We are ready for peace and negotiations and interactions. But, first of all the peace talks with Kyiv started when they were trying to resolve the issue by themselves. We had a number of talks in Turkey but as we understand they received messages from abroad telling them to stop it. Because as it seems the West is ready to fight us in Ukraine until the last Ukrainian. Well, we are ready for this. We have all the resources, might and possibility.
The Ukrainians pulled out of the negotiations and it is on record, their leaders saying they are not interested in talking to us, from 2014 until now. In any case, we want to talk to the people in-charge – the people in charge are not in Kyiv.
The people in charge of this are in Brussels, Washington, and London. Ukraine for us is a battlefield where the US and Europeans are testing us how long we can hold on; we can hold on forever.
But it is not what we intend to do, we are ready for talks, especially on the security architecture in Europe, and most importantly relations with the US. Ukraine is nothing serious to us; it is about a new world order.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. PHOTO/ FILE
Your deputy chairman of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, has floated the idea of Moscow pushing back the borders even as far as the Poland – a Nato member – frontiers. A day or two earlier, US President Joe Biden who was in Warsaw vowed to defend “every inch” of Nato territory if it was attacked. Doesn’t this sounds like prelude music for World War III?
He (Medvedev) said it in another way; that the more the West brings armaments in Ukraine they give us no other alternative than to move forward. This only prolongs the conflict.
So in summary, this is a renewal of the Russia-US Cold War rivalry? I hazard tensions haven’t been this high since the collapse of USSR in 1991?
Actually, it is not rivalry I would say. Because we are fighting; we are losing people, they are losing people. They have brought people from Poland, there are French, Germans, Americans, name it, and we are teaching them a lesson. Now they are arming Ukraine more and more, what do you think will happen?
It also seems that things aren’t moving well for you. Your forces have been severally pushed back, you have resorted to forced recruitments, you are forcing prisoners to enlist, and then have turned to this shadowy group-Wagner
It is going completely according to plan. Do you know what is happening on the frontline; we are grinding, burning them down and destroying whatever they bring to us. Now they are sending in tanks.
What you call forceful recruitments are not forceful. Besides that, Wagner is one of the key players on the ground; they have an arrangement. If a person serving time in prison would like to enlist as part of the Wagner, after serving on the frontline their sentences are commuted; call it one paying their debt. But have you seen what the Ukrainians themselves are doing; they are simply hijacking men on the streets and forcibly taking them to the front.
Russia enjoys cordial relations with Africa, but since the first vote at the UN General Assembly last March we have seen many countries voting against Moscow, a handful abstaining, and very few siding with you on the veto vote?
Do you know what and how much pressure has been used by Western countries on African countries to vote that way? We understand the African countries that voted against us and are very thankful for the objective position taken by other countries like Uganda and we respect that position.
Like Martin Luther once said: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” Clearly Russia, a superpower, is the aggressor here and almost all African countries have been through a lot of suffering by powerful countries, so what does objectivity have to do in such situation?
Well, this small country Ukraine has been prepared by the West to wage war against us. We are not the aggressor. I would like you to know that Russia doesn’t start wars; we try to avoid military conflict. It is not our philosophy. Our country is the largest in the world; we have vast resources, and we feel much comfortable behind the iron curtain. Can you imagine that after the sanctions by the West now we are the largest producer of grain in the world? Before that we were importing wheat; we didn’t know our potential. So the West is envious of us, and they have been for years.
Some pundits say Russia’s foreign policy under Putin has been hard line – unseen before, perhaps since Stalin – basking in the glory of USSR, which is never going to be again
We are still a country like we are, but we still live in the glory of our predecessors. Russia was formally the Russian Empire, so Russia has always been an empire but one which didn’t have problems with the rest, unlike Western empires – the British Empire which did so many evil things in Africa and Asia. Our past is the Soviet Union and it’s not like we are trying to go extend our boundaries to what it was. We are comfortable with what we have.
Fair enough, now with all the atrocities committed during the Ukrainian war, that should never have happened in the first place – the deaths, untold suffering, destruction, name it -- don’t you think it is imperative that Russians and whoever else is implicated in violation of international law should be held accountable?
What you are saying is exactly what the West is pronouncing. But for purposes of fairness, let us start by holding the United States accountable in Vietnam, then in Libya, and Iraq. Let us ensure accountability from the beginning, then we progress to this one.
Don’t you think that your actions, both Russian and the West, are putting a big test on multilateralism? The UN has so far succeeded in preventing a large scale war, but so far all indications are that the world is deeply and dangerously divided
As for the multipolar world, it is our idea. That is why we honour and are in favour of strengthening the systems of the UN. We are totally against this ideology promoted by Western countries that we should live by rules that should selectively apply; it is okay for them to do something and criminal for others to do the same.
We favour having a strong international body to take decision on how to handle problems because what we are seeing now is the UN is siding with the United States. Bottom line is that the future architecture of the world should be multipolar where all countries have a say, not this one where we have leaders and followers. Uganda, Russia, and United States have the same voice in international politics and we want to see that respected. The current world order is not working; that is why we have some neo-colonialism, and we are strongly against that.
