UN speech
“Tanks don’t bring peace”: Baerbock condemns Moscow
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens). Photo: John Macdougall/AFP POOL/dpa
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When it comes to war or peace, nobody should be neutral, says Foreign Minister Baerbock. In her speech to the UN General Assembly, she also addresses her counterpart Sergey Lavrov.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has made an emotional appeal to the countries of the world to strongly condemn Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
“Today we all have to choose between peace and aggression, between justice and the will of the strongest, between acting and looking the other way,” said the Green politician on Tuesday evening at the emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. She accused Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of abusing Russia’s power as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
‘Your tanks won’t bring water. Their shells bring no food for babies. Their tanks bring no peace. Their tanks bring death and destruction, »said Baerbock to Lavrov. ‘You can fool yourself. But you will not fool us and not our population. And they will not deceive their own people.” For her speech, the politician traveled for the first time as a minister to the US east coast metropolis directly from a foreign ministers’ meeting in Poland – the plane went straight to the UN in Manhattan. She is scheduled to leave New York on Wednesday.
Baerbock spoke in English from the famous stage of the largest UN body – behind her UN Secretary General António Guterres, who had taken his place in the great hall on the East River for the speech. He heard the German Foreign Minister accuse Moscow of “lying” in a sharp tone: “You say you are acting in self-defense. But the whole world has watched as you spent months building up your troops to prepare for this attack.” While Russia has asserted that it wants to protect the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, it is apparent that Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin’s troops are bombing homes of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Appeal to Member States
Before her appearance, Baerbock had said that it was about making it clear that the world community did not accept aggressive war: “In a question of war and peace, nobody can be neutral”. You have to decide whether you’re on the side of the aggressor or on the side of “families, of children hiding in subway shafts from bomb and rocket attacks.”
In the hall, Baerbock then appealed to the representatives of the 192 other UN member states in the General Assembly to support an upcoming vote on Wednesday on a resolution directed against Russia. “When we go home after our vote, each of us will have to sit across the kitchen table from our children, our partners, our friends, our families. Then each of us has to look them in the eye and tell them what choice we made.” It is about nothing less than the life and death of the Ukrainian population, the security of Europe and the United Nations Charter.
Western states hope that when the General Assembly votes, as many of the 193 member countries as possible will condemn Russia’s war of aggression and thus make visible the global isolation of the Russian leadership. It is only the eleventh emergency meeting in more than 70 years – it has been decades since the last such meeting. The minimum goal is to beat the votes for a 2014 resolution invalidating a Russian referendum in Crimea. At that time, 100 member states had voted for the text.