The United States and key Western allies accused Russia on Friday of using Iranian drones to attack civilians and power plants in Ukraine in violation of a 2015 UN Security Council resolution and international humanitarian law.
In a letter to the Security Council on Wednesday, Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya accused Iran of violating a Security Council ban on the transfer of drones capable of flying 300 kilometers (about 185 miles).
"Ukraine and its Western sponsors are trying to promote another piece of fake news about Iran allegedly supplying unmanned aerial vehicles to Russia in breach of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231," he noted, according to TASS.
According to Nebenzya, Western countries are trying to exert influence on the UN Secretariat. "The US went even further and in a letter openly demanded that the Secretariat conduct an investigation, though the Secretariat is not authorized to do that," the Russian envoy stressed. "We expect that the Secretariat will explicitly demonstrate that it does not intend to follow these instructions from the Westerners in breach of the UN Charter and will not carry out any investigations," Nebenzya said.
Russia expects that the United Nations Secretariat will confirm that it will not conduct an investigation into the origin of drones in Ukraine, Nebenzya said.
"We expect exhaustive confirmation from the Secretariat that it does not intend to follow, in violation of the UN Charter, those instructions from Westerns and will not be carrying out any investigations. Provided that in order to appease the Western capitals the UN experts do engage in some kind of a pseudo-investigation groundlessly invoking the provisions of Resolution 2231, we can revise the whole range of our relations with the UN Secretariat whose impartiality can no longer be spoken of in this case," he said.
Russia and Iran are strongly rejecting allegations related to drone supplies. The two countries’ diplomats reiterated statements on the matter at a closed meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
Iranian Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani said Wednesday that he “categorically rejected unfounded and unsubstantiated claims that Iran has transferred UAVs for the use (in) the conflict in Ukraine.” He said that unnamed countries are trying to launch a disinformation campaign to “wrongly establish a link” with the UN resolution.
The Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN has also circulated a letter among Security Council members, which stresses that the UN Secretariat has no mandate to investigate the alleged use of Iranian UAVs in Ukraine.
No mandate has been given to the UN Secretariat by the Security Council for "investigation" in the context of Resolution 2231 on Iran’s nuclear issue, the letter stressed. Allegations about the opposite from representatives of the Secretariat are "deliberately misleading", the document said.
It said that the United Nations Secretariat may carry out an investigation into the alleged use of Iranian drones in Ukraine only after it has a mandate from the UN Security Council, but there was no such decision.
"The note by the President of the Security Council <…> of January 16, 2022, <…> clearly says in its paragraph 2 that it is the Security Council itself who is responsible for the monitoring of the implementation of the resolution 2231," the letter says.
"No such decision has been adopted by the Council with regard to the request of Ukraine stated in its letter circulated in the Security Council," it says.
ZZ/PR