Russian Diplomat: Nothing New in UK PM’s Remarks, London Bypassed UN Many Times

TEHRAN (defapress)- Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stressed that statements by British Prime Minister Theresa May on the admissibility of military operations without the authorization of the UN Security Council, where Russia can veto such proposals, contain nothing new.

News ID: 72869

Date: 04 October 2018 - 23:50

"From London's official point of view, military operations are permissible without the authorization of the UN Security Council, [so] there is nothing new in May’s statements. Here the problem is something quite different. Her predecessors had to blush, find excuses and apologize to the international community for these military operations without the UN Security Council’s authorization, which they deemed possible and permissible to conduct," the diplomat told reporters at a press briefing on Thursday, TASS reported.

She recalled that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for the fact that the UK took part in the illegitimate Iraq war in 2003.

"From the standpoint of many people in the West, these actions are admissible, but later they attempted to justify themselves, while the whole world is trying to stave off their destructive consequences," Zakharova noted.

The UN Security Council has 15 members, including five permanent ones, which have the power of veto. These are Russia, the UK, China, the United States and France. By applying this right, each of these countries can block any UN Security Council resolution regardless of how many votes were cast in favor of any document. Moscow calls its Security Council veto right the cornerstone of the UN’s architecture, and without that, it would lose its stability.

The spokesperson also said a recent decision by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to reinstate Russia into the global organization prompted Britain to stoke another anti-Russian smear campaign employing false accusations.

Last month, the world’s governing anti-doping body announced its decision to reinstate the membership of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), which had been suspended since late 2015.

"As soon as Russia was reinstated into this sports organization, Great Britain, a trusted ally of the United States, which has been mercilessly drowning us, rushed for help," Zakharova added.

"A new wave of fake news, accusations and statements at different levels broke out," she stated, noting that "for instance, the British Foreign Office, which as it turns out now is specializing on security issues in the sphere of IT technologies, recently came up with a series of mind-boggling statements in their ‘highly-likely’ fashion on the involvement of the so-called GRU (Military Intelligence Service) in cyber attacks around the globe, even against WADA’s servers".

According to Zakharova, it is an obvious attempt to link the WADA situation to the already hyped-up cases of the Skripals, Salisbury and Amesbury.

"Without any analysis whatsoever we see that everything - the GRU, cyber spies, Kremlin hackers, WADA - has been poured and mixed into a single bottle of perfume, perhaps in a Nina Ricci bottle of perfume," the Russian diplomat stated, adding that "it is simply a hellish perfume mixture".

"Our British colleagues have a rich imagination that knows no boundaries," Zakharova continued, saying that "I wish I can have a look at the one making all this up. They are simply the ‘Andersens’ [Danish author of fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen]".

"Perhaps, they judge by themselves and describe what they themselves do, but this is totally unbecoming of a country, which claims to be playing one of the leading roles in the world," Zakharova added.

The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman said US intelligence deliberately stoked a provocation by leaking information on the Russian embassy’s bank transactions.

"I would like to point out the data leaks to the BuzzFeed website, which contained financial information on Russian diplomats who work in the United States," she specified. "We have on numerous occasions provided this data and pointed out to the US that such incidents are unacceptable," Zakharova stressed.

"There is no doubt that US intelligence agencies deliberately staged a provocation," she went on to say, adding that "we never got any clarification from the State Department as to how it could have happened and whether anyone had been held accountable for this".

The BuzzFeed website earlier publishedconfidential information about the bank transactions of the Russian embassy in the US.

Message end/