Boris Bondarev, adviser to the Russian mission to the UN in Geneva, has resigned from his post in protest at the war unleashed by President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Bondarev announces his decision in a statement posted on LinkedIn and calls the invasion of Ukraine “not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia.”
It would be the first senior diplomat to resign in protest against the invasion since there is no record of any other public resignations in the Russian diplomatic corps in the last three months.
The Russian representative to the United Nations assures at the beginning of his letter that he worked at the Russian Foreign Ministry since 2002 and became an adviser to the Russian mission at the UN office in Geneva in 2019.
In his words, “during the 20 years of my career, I have seen different turns in our foreign policy, but I have never felt as ashamed of my country as on February 24 of this year”, the date when Putin launched the so-called “operation special military” in the neighboring country.
Bondarev believes that “the war of 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 worst crime against the people of Russia.” “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 displacement to the entire Russian Navy. Enjoy unlimited power and remain in total impunity. At the altar of this, they are willing to lay as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died for this reason alone,” says the Russian diplomat.
The Russian foreign official believes that, during these 20 years, all of them with Putin at the head of the Kremlin, “the level of lies and lack of professionalism has increased in the Foreign Ministry and, in recent years, the situation has become simply catastrophic. Instead of unbiased information, objective analysis and lucid forecasts, there are propaganda clichés in the spirit of the Soviet press of the 1930s”, in the midst of the terrible purges launched by the communist dictator, Joseph Stalin.
Bondarev states that “the system is built in such a way that it deceives itself (…) and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov well illustrates the degradation of the entire system. In 18 years, he has gone from being a professional and qualified intellectual, appreciated by all his colleagues, to a person who makes contradictory statements and threatens the world, including Russia, with the nuclear arsenal ». In his opinion, “today the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not dedicated to diplomacy. It is dedicated to warmongering, lies and hatred. The Russian diplomat concludes by pointing out that “I cannot continue to participate in this insane, bloody and senseless shame.”
