This year’s United Nations General Assembly has been transformed into a war summit by the US and European imperialist powers, who have turned an institution whose charter prohibits aggressive war into an arms convention.
The event, which began Tuesday and featured a genocidal tirade by US President Donald Trump in which he threatened to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic of Iran, was capped Wednesday by the remarks of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he demanded the military defeat of Russia, boasted of the Russian dead and praised the series of arms deals concluded at the UN summit.
Zelensky seemed to take Trump’s genocidal speech as a baseline, adding to it a call for unrestricted war against a nuclear-armed state.
Russia, Zelensky said, “could never have imagined that Ukrainian long-range drones would one day reach its factories … thousands of kilometers from our borders.” He added: “No Russian admiral expected that we would be able to sink Russia’s pride cruisers.”
On September 9, in an attack Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces called a record, Ukraine struck gas-condensate plants in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets region, nearly 3,000 kilometers from the border.
Zelensky pledged to make the coming winter “painful for Russia.” Boasting that Russia had “lost control of its diesel oil industry,” a phrase he took from a social media post Trump published Monday, Zelensky added: “It is hard to imagine a more humiliating loss for a country that has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and takes so much pride in its oil exports.”
This was a reference to the long-range strikes Ukraine has carried out against Russia, using weapons funded, often directly provided and targeted by the NATO powers. Ukraine attacked Rosneft’s Kuibyshev refinery in Samara and a Bashneft refinery in Bashkortostan with drones overnight Monday into Tuesday. On September 18, the European Union paid out €3.3 billion for Ukrainian drones and missiles from its €90 billion loan to Kiev.
The French company Safran developed the guidance system of Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile, which Zelensky said Sunday was used in the attack on the Moscow region on the night of September 19-20. The Financial Times reported on July 30 that, according to Ukrainian officials, intelligence from the United States and France had helped Ukraine locate Russian air defenses and route its drones around them.
Justifying attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure, Zelensky declared: “Our target is Russia’s ability to finance this war … Russia’s revenues must remain a target.”
Zelensky likened Russia to a plague carrier, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “patient zero” and declaring that “patient zero must be stopped.” He recalled his speech to the General Assembly a year earlier: “I said that we are living in a time when weapons decide who survives. And I’ve said if a nation wants peace, it must work on strong weapons.”
Zelensky said “the Russian army lost 248,964 people on the battlefield” between January and August, “killed and badly wounded,” adding: “We have an archive of drone videos, videos showing thousands and thousands of Russians losing their lives in kill zones.”
Zelensky boasted of the arms deals concluded at the UN summit: “Today, I signed a drone deal, serious drone deal with Finland, and this is significant. Also today, I signed a security agreement with Australia, and drones are part of it too. And we are preparing drone deals with Canada and with other countries as well.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged 60 million Australian dollars in new aid, including A$45 million in military equipment, and the Australian news agency AAP reported Wednesday that the agreement includes plans to “jointly produce air-defence measures, missiles and drones.”
After Zelensky met Trump on Tuesday, his office said he thanked Trump for the work of US and Ukrainian teams “on launching Patriot interceptor production in Ukraine.” Zelensky told reporters that Trump was “positive about the licenses” to produce the missiles in Ukraine, the Kyiv Post reported Wednesday.
After Zelensky met French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, his office said the two were ready to secure more Franco-Italian SAMP/T air-defense systems and missiles for Ukraine, “using the financial resources available through the European Union loan,” which sets aside €60 billion for the military in 2026 and 2027.
Several NATO allies who addressed the General Assembly Wednesday spoke in the same terms. “We need to collectively force Russia into peace in Ukraine,” Estonian President Alar Karis said. Romanian President Nicușor Dan said, “[W]e must deter the Russian threat, and unfortunately we can only do that by increasing military spending.” He added that Romania backed NATO’s target of raising military spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product and would reach 3.7 percent this year.
At Trump’s meeting with Zelensky on Tuesday, a British reporter asked point-blank about the prospect of war between Britain and Russia. “A lot of people in the UK are very worried about the mood music from the UK and other European leaders about the inevitability of direct conflict between us and Russia,” the reporter said. “Can you stop that happening?”
Trump and Zelensky gave the reporter no serious answer, but the answer came in the form of Zelensky’s speech. The NATO powers have used the UN summit to massively expand the war with Russia, setting the world on the course for an increasingly direct clash between nuclear-armed states.