Andrey Podelyshev, is the Russian Ambassador to Nigeria, in an interview with select journalists in Annuj, he accused the European Union (EU) of using the Russia-Ukraine conflict to weaken and subdue his country. He argued that sustainable peace can only be achieved if Russia is provided with credible security guarantees. He also blamed EU sanctions for global shortages of food and essential products, particularly in Africa.
What is the current situation of the Russia- Ukraine crisis particularly the involvement of the European nations and the United States (US)?
Europe has been involved in this conflict but we can see that it has decided to use the Ukrainian conflict in favour of itself to subdue and conquer Russia.
There are other issues that we see differently with Europe but up to the collapse of the Soviet Union we at least tried to find some common grounds.
It is an open secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed issues at the beginning of 2000s with the former US President George Bush about the possibility of Russia joining NATO but we were not allowed to join NATO. So, Europe and the US decided to consider Russia as a rival country that should be competed with and conquered.
In the beginning of the presidency of Putin, there was a project that we tried to promote with Europe. We had difficult and very deep negotiations with Europe in different spheres particularly on economic, political and humanitarian issues.
We knew that we have different approaches to what democracy is and we had different understanding of what the traditional values are but we tried to negotiate and make a deal but we saw the unwillingness of European countries to make a deal in 2007/2008.
You could look up the speech of President Putin in the Munich Security conference in 2007 and you could see what is really disturbing us. We have completely different states of relations these days, but unfortunately Europe chose a path of confrontation and that was the disturbing part in our relations in 2007/ 2008.
So, what is happening now in Ukraine is what you might call a continuation of Europe refusing to partner with Russia. By the way, President Putin admitted in several interviews that at that time he was being very naïve when he tried to deepen relations between Europe and Russia. It is a very complicated issue that I hope we will address later.
There are reports that part of the reasons for the Russia-Ukraine Conflict was the issue of Protection of Russian-Speaking people in Ukraine. Can you talk us through that?
The very beginning of the Ukrainian constitution provides specifically that the rights of any language speaking population, particularly Russian speaking population, are to be respected and protected in Ukraine.
Of course we proceed from the constitution of Ukraine, that the rights of the Russian speaking population are respected and protected by the Ukrainian state and in Russia, the rights of the Ukrainians should be protected by the Russian state.
But the rights of the Russian speaking people in Ukraine are being violated and when we raised the issue the Ukrainian state ignored us. They tried to discriminate against the Russian speaking population. They do not want to hear us and they do not want to implement international law on Human rights and protection.
What will be the lasting solution to this protracted Russia- Ukraine conflict?
Ukraine is not a sovereign country now, which is unfortunate. Ukraine cannot talk on behalf of itself. The Ukrainian president cannot talk on behalf of Ukraine now; I just want to underline this. The US seems to understand the roots of this conflict much better than the EU and the EU. They are trying to be defiant but US President Donald Trump is trying to understand the issues and if the EU tries to do the same, we could fine a path to sustainable peace.
But right now, the EU are only talking about their own security and that of Ukraine, they don’t want to hear about the security of Russia. They are still talking about Ukraine joining NATO, which is one of the reasons for the conflict and this is unacceptable to us. If they could be talking about the security there should be security guarantees to Russia as well.
How does Russia respond to the concerns that the prolonged conflict is worsening food and energy crises especially in developing regions like Africa?
There are claims by some Western countries that Russia has lost its leading position in the exportation of food and fertilizers because of the crisis. However, the main problems are the sanctions against Russia. We are ready to provide African countries with fertilizers, grains and other products, but we cannot deliver them because the ships that should carry grains and fertilizers are insured in Western companies.
The problem is not that there are difficulties in receiving grains from Russia because of the war; the problem is because of the sanctions. But we are ready to deliver tens of millions of grains, food and other products to Africa and other parts of the world.
