Better unemployment and probable exile than more shame. A top Russian diplomat stationed at the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva announced Monday that he is stepping down because of his disagreement with Moscow’s “invasion” of Ukraine. Boris Bondarev, adviser to Russia’s permanent mission to the UN, has slammed the door: “The aggression unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and indeed against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also perhaps the most serious crime against the people of Russia”.
There was no comment from the Russian permanent mission to the UN on this resignation, a rare public admission of disgust that the attack on Ukraine has caused among the diplomatic corps.
As a general rule, diplomats at Russian embassies spent the months of December, January and February saying publicly that thinking of Russia attacking Ukraine was nonsense. Beginning on February 24, they went on to argue that the Russian incursion had been inevitable. But Bondarev said enough. As he confessed to Reuters: “I went to the mission like any other Monday morning, I sent my resignation letter and I left.” “I started imagining this a few years ago, but the scale of this disaster has led me to do so,” he said, referring to the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24. Bondarev worked in the area of arms control. From today on his LinkedIn profile, he has the job search badge.
Asked if some colleagues thought the same, he explained: “Not all Russian diplomats are warmongers. They are reasonable, but they have to keep their mouths shut.” He believes that his case could become an example, although there are no guarantees. “If I get prosecuted … then even if other people want to go on, they won’t,” he told the AP.
According to his version, he raised his reasons against the invasion to high-level embassy staff on several occasions. “They told me to keep my mouth shut to avoid ramifications,” she said. His powerful statement is written in English. He claims to have emailed it to some 40 diplomats.
Ukraine had urged Russian diplomats to resign at a Human Rights Council debate in March. This new dissident announced his departure first thing in the morning. “I studied to be a diplomat and I have been a diplomat for twenty years,” wrote Bondarev, who spoke fondly and bitterly of the Russian Foreign Ministry: “It has become my home and my family. But I just can’t share this anymore. bloody, stupid and absolutely unnecessary ignominy”.
Bondarev does not expect others to follow his lead. “I’m afraid I’m the only one.” “With a letter Z they have crossed out all the hopes and prospects of a prosperous free society in our country,” he laments in his text. “Those who conceived this war want only one thing: to remain in power forever, to live in pompous and insipid palaces, to sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, to enjoy unlimited power and total impunity.”
A Ukrainian court has sentenced a Russian soldier to life in prison for killing an unarmed civilian in the first war crimes trial following Russia’s February 24 invasion.
kyiv has accused Russia of atrocities and brutality against civilians during the Russian incursion into Ukraine. But until this month no judicial process had been opened. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old tank commander, is guilty of killing an unarmed civilian.
Shishimarin himself pleaded guilty last week to shooting the 62-year-old man in the head in the village of Chupajivka in northeastern Ukraine. It happened on February 28. The Russian soldier was given the order to shoot the grandfather from a car. Apparently they wanted to prevent him from communicating the position of the Russian detachment.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova says she has registered more than 10,000 possible war crimes. “To this day, we have more than 13,000 cases (under investigation) on war crimes alone,” Venediktova said in an interview with The Washington Post. Russia has denied targeting civilians or engaging in war crimes while carrying out what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
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