In an unforgettable scene, broadcast live around the world, Sergiy Kyslytsya, then Ukraine’s permanent representative to the United Nations, berated his Russian counterpart Vassily Nebenzia as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Kyslytsya interrupted Nebenzia’s prepared speech to an emergency session of the Security Council, shaking his telephone at him: “Call Putin, call [Russian foreign minister Sergey] Lavrov to stop this aggression.”
Then he warned: “There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador.”
The outburst was high drama, great television, and it made Kyslytsya famous.
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Three-and-a-half years later, he has amended his warning to say that war criminals make a stopover at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
In June, Kyiv and the Council of Europe signed an agreement to establish the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine.
Kyslytsya returned to Kyiv as first deputy foreign minister last February, after five years as UN ambassador. He has since taken part in negotiations with Russia in Istanbul in May, June and July and he accompanied Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the White House on August 18th.
On Friday, Lavrov, who has been Russia’s foreign minister for 21 years, poured cold water on Donald Trump’s hopes for bilateral and trilateral summits involving himself and the presidents of Russia and Ukraine. “There is no meeting planned,” Lavrov told NBC News.
The network sought a riposte from Kyslytsya. “I read the transcript of Lavrov before I was interviewed and saw nothing whatsoever different from what the Russians have been saying for more than three years,” he tells The Irish Times. “If there is a division of labour in Moscow, then Lavrov is the bad cop.”
In negotiations, Kyslytsya has found Lavrov to be “the most toxic part of the Russian establishment”.
In a post on X dated August 24th, Kyslytsya quoted Canada’s ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae: “We know the Russians are lying when their lips start moving.” Lavrov and Russia have moved from lies to “pure bullshit”, Kyslytsya wrote.
Lest anyone accuse him of vulgarity, Kyslytsya reminds me how “it was Trump who said the Russians were bullshitting him. I was not the first one to Tweet about bullshitting. The copyright belongs to Mr Trump”.
Mudslinging aside, neither a Putin-Zelenskiy summit nor a ceasefire is imminent.
The next two important events for Ukraine will be the unveiling of a European plan to provide security guarantees to Ukraine and the UN General Assembly next month.
At the August 18th meetings, the US president appeared to have adopted Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s all-or-nothing demand for a final peace agreement without a prior ceasefire. Kyslytsya says Trump “was not that categorical ... From what I understood, Trump was saying, ‘You want to get a ceasefire? Get a ceasefire. But what I am interested in is the soonest-possible peace deal’”.
“So for us, if somebody doesn’t like the definition of ceasefire, it’s fine for us to call it ‘stop the killings’, a truce or whatever,” Kyslytsya says. “It’s not about names. It’s very hard to imagine you can negotiate in good faith if your capital and your cities are being hit with ballistic missiles.”
The Russians opposed a ceasefire in the Istanbul negotiations. “They said, literally, ‘No ceasefire until you withdraw from occupied Russian territories’,” Kyslytsya says. “They meant the oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which they invaded and declared part of their territory according to their constitution.”
In a change hailed by US vice-president JD Vance as “significant concessions”, Russia now demands that Ukraine withdraw completely from the 25 per cent of Donetsk it still holds, but appears to have dropped its demand for the rest of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
In his last visit to the Oval Office, Zelenskiy showed Trump on a map that most of the territory seized by Russia in Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk combined) was taken in 2014, not since the 2022 full-scale invasion. The British ministry of defence estimates it would take Russia four-and-a-half years to seize the rest of Donbas.
“The overwhelming percentage of territories in that [occupied] red belt in the east and in the south were not invaded since 2022, which means that Putin is bullshitting when he says he is very successful in advancing on the front,” Kyslytsya says.
“If you look at the map of Luhansk region, you see a very small piece of land, 1 per cent of the oblast, which is not invaded so far. If Putin cannot invade this little piece of land in three-and-a-half years, how can he tell Trump he is advancing successfully?
“In the last 1,000 days, he managed to invade about 1 per cent of Ukrainian territory. At this rate, it would take him 99 years to take all Ukraine.”
It would be illegal and unacceptable to Ukrainians for Zelenskiy to hand over territory that Russian does not occupy, Kyslytsya says.
There is, however, an understanding that Ukraine will lose for the foreseeable future much or all of the 20 per cent of its territory which Russia already occupies. “As president Zelenskiy said publicly and in meetings, we are ready to discuss territorial issues, but the beginning of such a discussion should be the contact line,” Kyslytsya says.
To many observers, the recent flurry of diplomacy surrounding the Ukraine war appears to have been nothing more than an optical illusion. Kyslytsya insists the peace process is real and says there has been progress.
“The most important development in recent weeks is America has confirmed they would be part of the security guarantees,” he says. “The fact that the Americans said on several occasions, including in the Oval Office, that they will participate is a game-changer ... The US remains the most important piece of this puzzle.”
The plan for security guarantees is advancing, Kyslytsya says. Heads of state and government, foreign ministers, national security advisers and militaries consult almost daily. “At the end of the day, the Russians will be compelled to stop this war if they see the allies have the ability to deter the recurrence of future aggression.”
Kyslytsya would not be drawn on which countries will send troops, the number of troops involved or their rules of engagement. The US may provide intelligence, reconnaissance, command-and-control and air defence capabilities to enable European-led ground troops and a no-fly zone, the Financial Times has reported.
The Ukrainian diplomat has visited Ireland many times, for work and for pleasure. He wears silver Celtic rings, purchased in Galway, and adorns his pet terrier with a green ribbon on St Patrick’s Day.
Ireland, Kyslytsya says, “is very poetic. It has wonderful literature and music. There are similarities with the history of Ukraine: hundreds of years of colonial occupation; fighting for your language and identity; the experience of famine”.
He hopes that Ukraine will be admitted to the European Union by the end of the decade. Putin and Trump exclude the possibility of Ukraine joining Nato, but Kyslytsya has not given up. “I don’t think all Nato members are ready to agree with the Russian narrative that Russia has a right to dictate to any country what alliances it has a right to join,” he says. “We should not prejudge the future.”
