Belarus

Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates,

For 79 years now our countries have gathered in this hall to convey their truth, exchange best practices, and support important initiatives. And all of this under the motto – to make the world a better place.

But is the world really becoming better? More predictable, safer, more stable?

Among us are old-timers who remember the times when the UN platform played its own special role in this. We – the younger generation – know this, unfortunately, only from textbooks.

Back then – many years ago – the UN Charter was something immutable, a genuine guarantor of compromise solutions oriented toward the future. Many still remembered the victims and horrors of World War II, and no one wanted a repetition of that terrible tragedy. Therefore, together we formed a unique instrument for the collective resolution of disputes and for strengthening the architecture of international cooperation.

Yes, as history has shown, the instrument is not perfect in every respect. Just like all of us. But undoubtedly it is the best that the world has had before and has now.

Not all issues, even those on which unambiguous decisions were reached, have been brought to fruition, and they still bleed to this day. For example – Palestine. Where today a real humanitarian catastrophe has been unleashed and tens of thousands of civilians are dying.

But this does not diminish the achievements of the last century. The colonial system was broken. Many peoples gained their hard-won right to independent development. Points of economic, industrial, and financial growth emerged on all continents. Entire regions began to emerge from the shadow of hunger and epidemics.

The UN's peacekeeping activities were able to prevent bloody conflicts or contribute to their cessation. The blue color of the UN was everywhere problems were successfully resolved for the sake of development.

But what has happened today? Why did we need to create a Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter? Why are we today forced to defend a document that already has supreme legal force for everyone? Why can we not fully utilize the UN's tools to restore order in the world?

Because a number of countries do not live by the norms prescribed by the Charter. And they do not intend to. Because living by international law is, for them, akin to slow extinction.

Yes, from this podium they invoke the Charter. However, not in a universal sense, but only as applied to their own selfish interests and claims. And often with regard to others.

I remind you – the universal law of the UN gives everyone, without exception, equal rights to development and equal, non-discriminatory access to common goods, technologies, and resources.

But is such an approach acceptable to the West? No.

Their main interest is preserving dominance on the planet and ensuring the well-being of their elites. For the sake of this, entire peoples and other people's resources are exploited, and the development of the rest of the world is held back. The age-old principle of "divide and rule" is applied everywhere, which, in essence, forms the basis of all military conflicts of our time.

All the principles of the UN are cast onto the farthest "shelf" when it comes to the so-called "vital interests" of the United States and its closest satellites.

But if any state dares to pursue policies in the interests of its own people or attempts to throw off the yoke of external control over its resources, the West suddenly remembers all the conventions, paragraphs, and even the most trivial footnotes to them.

And most importantly: the entire arsenal of illegal sanctions and pressure is applied against the "apostate." This is the nature of all the so-called "color revolutions," which lead only to suffering and upheaval for ordinary people. This is the West's path. This is their recipe for a new world. This recipe, by the way, is generously "seasoned" with NATO weapons.

Just think about it! Today, about 40 countries with a population of two and a half billion are under illegal unilateral restrictive measures imposed by the United States and the European Union. Moreover, many have lived under such conditions for decades, and freedom-loving Cuba – for more than half a century.

This instrument grossly violates entire sections of international law and the UN Charter. It illegally slows sustainable development, undermines food and energy security, restricts access to world markets, and violates the right to freedom of movement.

It also boomerangs back on ordinary people in the initiating countries themselves. We see how, in EU states neighboring us, the population complains about constantly rising prices for energy and food, as well as social upheaval.

So what is the outcome? Today, from the point of view of the collective West – and this information is taken from American sources – 72 percent of the planet's population lives in what they call "autocracies." And about twenty years ago, this figure, according to their own estimates, was 46 percent. So has the West's policy of forcing the world community to live by their templates been successful? The answer is obvious. Clearly not.

Overall, another trend is also evident – the free countries of the Global South do not accept sanctions, interference in their internal affairs, or the "democratization" imposed on them. They want to develop on the basis of their own historical traditions, their own understanding of the world, and in the interests of their own peoples.

And today this is already the Global Majority, in the depths of which new ideas and projects are being born – exclusively peaceful ones – in the interests of the entire world community, and not against anyone.

These are the Chinese initiatives – "One Belt, One Road" and the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative put forward by President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping. This is the Belarusian-Russian idea of a Charter on Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. This is also the Indian initiative of the "Voice of the Global South" summits, and many others.

To one degree or another, all these projects are aimed at forming an international community of a shared destiny for the entire planet, and not the destiny of the so-called "golden billion." After all, we have only one planet, albeit in all its diversity, which enriches all of us.

This is also our path. The path of our President Aleksandr Lukashenko and our people. At its foundation are respect, trust, sincerity, reliability, and responsibility. Incidentally, in response to the latest package of illegal sanctions, Belarus responded with openness and unilaterally abolished the visa regime for citizens of all EU countries. Thousands of EU citizens have already taken advantage of this, visited our country, and were not disappointed.

If there were greater trust in the UN today, most global peace initiatives would be born and developed within the Organization itself, rather than outside it. And the world would not once again be threatened with division into political and economic blocs.

A few words about the conflict potential on the planet.

We have all grown accustomed to third-rate fiction works and YouTube videos. We are being trained into this simplistic style of receiving information, made to forget the truths that many well-known humanists and writers once wrote down.

In this regard, I will deliberately turn to three American writers in order to draw certain parallels with contemporary events.

In the first case – a quote from the work "Cabbages and Kings" by the beloved O. Henry: "Tiny, opera-bouffe nations play at government until one fine day a silent warship glides into their waters and says: Don't break your toys!" An American warship...

In the second case, I will recall Graham Greene with his "The Quiet American" in the person of a CIA officer under the cover of the US Embassy in Vietnam, who sought some "third force" in order to organize a coup in that country through a series of terrorist attacks and bring pro-American forces to power.

And finally, I will mention Kurt Vonnegut ("A Man Without a Country"), who could never understand why the United States and Great Britain needed, at the very end of World War II, when everything was already clear anyway, to level the city of Dresden with carpet bombing, burying more than a hundred thousand old people, children, and women under the rubble. We know why – to instill fear for the future.

This looks very much like what we see today in many places in the world. Both the "third force" and provocations, and a metaphorical American warship – only bigger, and not just one.

This is precisely why we need a strong and impartial universal international organization, capable of guaranteeing a balance in the world in which no single country or bloc of countries can subordinate the UN's tools to serve its own selfishness at the expense of the world majority.

A strong organization would not have allowed Ukraine to fight to "the last Ukrainian" for the sake of transnational capital and the interests of the collective West.

And if everyone, like neighboring Belarus, realized what is actually happening in the conflict zone and what it threatens, and truly wanted to stop the bloody confrontation between two brotherly peoples, then Ukraine and Russia would long ago have been not on the battlefield but at the negotiating table. In this context, initiatives such as the Brazilian-Chinese peace plan are very timely. However, no project will succeed without Russia's participation. Nor can there be a new security architecture in our region without Belarus's participation.

Meanwhile, NATO continues to build up its military potential many times over on our western borders. Tens of thousands of soldiers and thousands of pieces of equipment. We are seriously concerned that this "game" could spiral out of control and lead to the expansion of the conflict to a regional or even global scale, with catastrophic consequences for all. There is enough nuclear weaponry in Europe. Therefore, escalating tension is a direct path to a third world war.

Ten years ago, Minsk became the site of productive negotiations to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.

We continue to offer our peacekeeping efforts even now, because we know and understand Russians and Ukrainians better than anyone. And we will do everything in our power to achieve peace on the long-suffering Ukrainian land. We are more interested in it than anyone else!

And for general information: through our border with the EU alone, more than 250,000 Ukrainians have moved to Belarus since the conflict began. Recently, the figure has been 12–15 thousand per month. These are official numbers. People do not flee to the "aggressors" from the so-called prosperous Europe.

Incidentally, this number is many times greater than the number of refugees crossing our border into the EU.

The shameless "pushing back" of migrants into Belarus is yet another dirty page in the book of European "democracy." Thus, on our border with the EU, the military personnel of certain European Union countries beat and torture thousands of refugees from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East with impunity. Dozens of them have been killed, a fact that, incidentally, has been documented by independent international sources. Many have been buried without even their personal data being recorded.

Incidentally, the Council of Europe quite recently unequivocally condemned such actions. It also criticized Poland's new law expanding the scope for the legal use of firearms by Polish military personnel against refugees.

This is how "enlightened Europe" greets those fleeing the horrors and upheavals that have resulted from the policies and interference of the collective West in the sovereign affairs of foreign countries.

These actions constitute a flagrant violation of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. All the facts have been meticulously recorded and will soon be forwarded to the relevant international bodies. Although these bodies themselves should have addressed this issue long ago.

Therefore, we are concerned about the path we see for strengthening the foundations of the UN.

First. The UN must free itself from the dictates of individual states suffering from a sense of permissiveness and their own exceptionalism. The UN belongs to all of us.

Secretariat staff must remember that, upon becoming UN employees, they work in the interests of the entire Organization, not to please the countries of their citizenship, and therefore must be objective, impartial, and independent.

Second. The Organization must work to support regional processes, since regionalism is a key reality of today. We are witnessing the constant strengthening of regional integration processes in various corners of the planet. Associations of Global Majority countries are gaining momentum in their activities. These are BRICS, the SCO, the CIS, the EAEU, the African Union, ASEAN, and many others. Why – I have already explained above. The UN needs to "integrate" into these processes, facilitating their development and coordination.

Third. Last year, Western countries staged a dirty campaign to prevent the election of Belarus's candidacy to the Security Council.

They were so afraid of our honest voice in this body. However, even outside the Council, we will speak directly and openly on the entire range of world problems. Moreover, we will continue to insist on a fair reform of the Security Council, because the voice of the Global Majority countries in the Council is also our voice.

Therefore, we believe that the urgent need of the day is reform of the UN Security Council through the inclusion of large developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These countries are at the forefront of the main global problems. They know better than others how to resolve wars and conflicts in the developing world. And their weight in world affairs today is far greater than it was 80 years ago.

Fourth. The UN must state its principled position on the unacceptability of unilateral measures. We have every right to expect the Organization to provide serious and objective assessments of the negative impact of sanctions on sustainable development processes. Moreover, we believe it necessary to place the UN's work on countering illegal sanctions on a systemic basis. All such cases must be given a principled, objective assessment.

Fifth. The UN must be used as a platform for effectively addressing constantly growing transnational threats.

Belarus has always been committed to a collective approach to solving common global problems. Migration, pandemics, natural disasters, human trafficking, hunger, and many others.

Outside the walls of this hall there is a timer that, in real time, precisely counts the funds spent on armaments. Trillions of dollars! And this is only what the UN knows about.

Let the countries of the "golden billion" direct these trillions not toward unleashing and fueling ever more wars and conflicts, but toward solving issues that are vital to human life. Many global problems would then be solved immediately. The UN would receive the resources for development that it so badly needs today, and the world would finally see the willingness of those who call themselves hegemons to bear responsibility for solving global problems, rather than creating them.

And furthermore, the UN must be the voice of states and must not be diluted by various non-state structures. After all, it is the member states that make decisions in the Organization that affect the fates of all people on the planet, and it is they who bear full responsibility for their implementation.

Mr. Chairman,

This year is very significant for the Republic of Belarus. Just recently we celebrated the 80th anniversary of our liberation from the fascist invaders.

This date became the starting point of a new history for our country – one of peace and creation. We are proud that we have built a socially oriented state where care for the individual is the most important priority of national policy.

Next year we will all together mark the 80th anniversary of the founding of the UN. In what state will the world approach this important date? In quarrels and conflicts?

That is precisely why the President of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, put forward the initiative to hold a global dialogue on security.

And we will continue to knock on the doors of "peace and creation," "security and development."

Since last year, we have been holding a representative international conference on Eurasian security in Minsk, designed to consolidate political, economic, and other processes across the space of Greater Eurasia in the interests of its states and peoples. This year it will take place on October 31. We invite everyone.

We must once again fill the lungs of the UN with the spirit of San Francisco, which gave life to our Organization.

We are convinced that this is vitally necessary today. Necessary in the interests of all people on the planet.

Thank you for your attention.