Russia accused Ukraine at the UN’s top court Thursday of destroying a key dam with artillery strikes, and accused Kyiv of telling judges “blatant lies”. Moscow urged the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to reject a case brought by Kyiv over Russia’s alleged backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine and the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“Ukraine has declared that Russia blew up the large dam at Nova Kakhovka. In fact, it’s Ukraine that did it,” Russian diplomat Alexander Shulgin told the court in The Hague.
“The Kyiv regime not only launched massive artillery attacks against the dam on the night of June 6, but it also deliberately raised the water level of the Kakhovka reservoir to a critical level” by opening sluice gates at a hydroelectric plant beforehand, he said. Kyiv says Russia blew up the dam in Russian-held southern Ukraine, causing huge floods and a number of deaths.
Ukraine opened its formal arguments at the ICJ on Tuesday in a case that it first filed in 2017, branding Russia a “terrorist state” whose support for rebels was the precursor for Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
It says Russia breached a UN treaty on terrorism funding and wants Russia to pay reparations for attacks, including the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, in which 298 people died. Kyiv says Moscow’s treatment of the Crimean Tatar minority and Ukrainian speakers in occupied Crimea breaches an international convention on racial discrimination.
But Shulgin, Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, accused Ukraine of “blatant lies and false accusations against the Russian federation, even to this court.”
Repeating allegations made by Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to justify last year’s invasion, Shulgin accused the Ukrainian government of being “neo-Nazis”. This regime rose to power on the back of a violent coup in 2014 on the shoulders of nationalists who were the direct descendents of the Nazi collaborators in World War II,” Shulgin said.
Source: eNCA
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