Melnyk speaks about his first protest at UN over disagreement with Russian narratives

He said this in a comment to Ukrinform.

"For the first time in my career, I had to make my first public protest at the UN: I demonstratively stood up from the front row and, as a sign of protest, left the General Assembly Hall," Melnyk said.

According to him, this happened on January 27, at the moment when the organizers gave the floor to Russia's Permanent Representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, after the speeches by the permanent representatives of Israel and the United States. The reason why the ambassador of a "terrorist state that, in these freezing winter days, continues to kill Ukrainians en masse" was given the floor is more than shocking, Melnyk said.

"Allegedly, the Russian Federation has a mandate to represent the Soviet Army that liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp," the diplomat said.

Melnyk said he had sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, "in which I expressed my outrage that, 81 years after the defeat of German Nazism, it is Russia – which is waging a modern-day war of extermination against the Ukrainian nation – that is being given the completely undeserved right to monopolize the victory."

In the letter, he noted that the decision to allow the Russian representative to speak "de facto on behalf of the former Soviet Union – a state that ceased to exist 35 years ago – is, to put it mildly, deeply questionable." He stressed that no state has a moral or historical right to monopolize the memory of World War II or the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Melnyk reminded Guterres that "Ukrainians are among the largest groups of victims of World War II, having lost up to ten million people." At the same time, Ukrainians were also true liberators of the continent from Nazism, paying an incredibly high price for this, he said.

According to Melnyk, he said in the letter that granting the UN rostrum to a representative of the Russian Federation is an insult to more than six million Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the Red Army and, through their lives and self-sacrifice, liberated Europe from Nazism. "More than three million Ukrainian soldiers were killed," he added.

Melnyk also recalled the contribution of Ukrainians to the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. "It was the soldiers of the 100th Lviv Division of the First Ukrainian Front who were the first to break through to the camp and, under the command of Anatoliy Shapiro from Poltava, broke open the gates of this most horrific death camp," the diplomat said.

He expressed outrage at Russia's attempts to monopolize victory in World War II. "This gesture was a real spit in the face of millions of Ukrainians who today are suffering from no less barbaric Moscow aggression," he said.

It is unfortunate that "even today, within the walls of the UN, few want to acknowledge this historical heroism of Ukrainians, and instead we are confronted with neo-imperial Russian narratives," the diplomat said.

According to Melnyk, instead of listening to Nebenzya that day, he met with Ukrainian Jews who had survived the Holocaust. "They were no less shocked than I was and firmly spoke out against Russia's desecration of the sacred truth about the Holocaust," he said.

A delegation of Ukrainian Jews who survived the Holocaust and their descendants "unanimously appealed to the UN Secretariat that next year their many long-forgotten voices should be represented from the high UN rostrum by the ambassador of Ukraine," he said.

Ukrainians and the international community commemorated the victims of the Holocaust on January 27.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by a UN General Assembly resolution of November 1, 2005.