Russia’s top diplomat the United Nations said his country is not looking to cozy up to America, but does want a civil relationship that is free from the sorts of accusations the Trump administration has made lately.
“We are not particularly keen to be friends with you,” Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia said Monday afternoon through a translator. “We are not begging to be friends with you. What we want from you is really nothing, it’s something that is normal: civilized relations, which you arrogantly refuse, disregarding elementary, basic courtesy.”
Nebenzia directed those remarks at Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., during an emergency meeting of the Security Council convened in response to the latest alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. The comment was a response to Haley’s recent remark that “Russia’s never gonna be our friend,” a particularly biting rejoinder offered as Nebenzia accused the United States of trying to justify an attack on Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“And you are misguided if you think that you have friends,” Nebenzia continued in his remarks to Haley. “So-called friends of yours are only those who cannot say no to you, and, this is the sole criterion for friendship in your understanding. Russia has friends and unlike yourselves, we do not have adversaries. We do not view the world through that prism.”
Haley made the remarks last week during an event at Duke University. “Russia’s never gonna be our friend,” she said Thursday, in comments widely covered by Russian media. “Having said that, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to work with them. But we work with them when we need to, and we slap them when we need to. That’s just the way it needs to be.”
Days later, President Trump and leading Western allies are blaming Assad — and, by extension, his supporters in Russia and Iran — for a chemical weapons attack that humanitarian monitors say killed dozens of civilians and harmed hundreds of others.
“This is about humanity, and it can’t be allowed to happen,” Trump told reporters Monday. “If it’s the Russians, if it’s Syria, if it’s Iran, if it’s all of them together, we’ll figure it out.”
Nebenzia, however, maintained that terrorists on the ground in the Damascus suburb had stockpiled supplies necessary to create their own chemical weapons. “The staged nature of this action is something about which there is no doubt,” he said.
The dispute, he argued, is part of a broader effort to organize international hostility against Russia.
“A broad arsenal of methods is being leveraged — slander, insults, hawkish rhetoric, blackmail sanctions, and threats to use force against the United States,” Nebenzia said. “Russia is being unpardonably threatened. The tone with which this is being done has gone beyond the threshold of what was acceptable even during the Cold War.”
