Russia’s newly appointed Permanent Representative to the UN Vasiliy Nebenzia met with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York City, Friday, as he officially took over the role from his recently deceased predecessor Vitali Churkin.
SOT, Vasiliy Nebenzia, Permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, (Russian): “Of course this whole situation and our bilateral relations do not add positive prospects for our cooperation. We are polite people, patient, as the president said yesterday. However, patience comes to an end and we were forced to take these measures, because nothing was moving. You know unprecedented unwarranted illegal sanctions were implemented against us. We have repeatedly warned that patience runs out and it happened now. It is the answer to what happened to us at the end of last year. Of course it does not add positivity in our relationship, but the task of diplomats, the profession is to build bridges. For the destruction of bridges there are different jobs. We will cooperate. Anyway, the members of the security Council, the UN is one big family. In the family anything can happen – disorders, misunderstanding, even hostility. Nevertheless, this is a family that needs to communicate with each other. Americans cannot live without us and we cannot live without them. It is objective reality. We need each other to maintain international security issues to find solutions for the those unprecedented problems that have appeared in the world on our eyes.”
SOT, Vasiliy Nebenzia, Permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, (Russian): “We repeatedly said that we did not have such relations with the United States that we have now, probably even in the years of the Cold War. I don’t know where there is the plinth, below which we cannot fall, but we are somewhere near the bottom now. We need each other, both us and United States, in a number of the most urgent issues of international politics.”