Yelchenko at UN: Ukraine could not violate Russian border, because Crimea is not Russia

Ukraine's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Volodymyr Yelchenko has reminded the Russian delegation to the UN Security Council that the international community did not recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea so Ukraine could not violate the Russian state border there during Sunday's incident in the Black Sea.

He made such a statement at an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council on Ukraine on Monday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"I would like first to express my dismay at the attempt of the Russian Federation to manipulate the agenda of the Security Council and to have a meeting convened under a deceiving title 'violation of the borders of the Russian Federation'," Yelchenko said at the beginning of his speech.

In this regard, he stressed that, according to international law, Crimea and respective territorial waters are the territory of Ukraine temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation. "Hence, there are no Russian borders in the area where the incident happened. I repeat - there are no state Russian borders around the Crimean peninsula," he said.

He stressed that the Russian interpretation of the events was, as usual, invented by Moscow to mix reality with fiction, "with an ultimate goal of misinforming, misleading and confusing the listener."

He said that Russia's claims about the violation of the Russian border by Ukrainian naval ships are "an outright lie" that was invented "just to cynically shift all the responsibility on the Ukrainian side, consciously manipulating the facts and ignoring the evidence."

As reported, after a new act of armed violence in the Black Sea on November 25, the Ukrainian side initiated an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Monday.