Welcome to this program. My name is Glenn Dyson. I'm joined by Alexander McCurice from the Duran.

And our guest today at UN in New York is Dimitri Bolanski, who serves as first deputy permanent representative of Russia to the United Nations.

Welcome, sir.

My pleasure. Glad to see him.

Yeah, it's a great privilege to have you on us.

I think most people are very unfamiliar with Russia's position.

I always said that at least during the Cold War, we're familiar with Moscow's perspective, but these days there's very little understanding, largely because of the censorship of Russian media,

but also from personal experience, I can say, any efforts to even explain Russia's position

can very easily result in censorship and cancellation.

So I think it's a great privilege and opportunity for people to become more familiar with the Russian perspective. So we have a few

topics we really wanted to discuss. So I thought we just jump into it. We can start with,

I guess, the most pressing problem, which is the conflict in Ukraine. As, well, diplomacy,

obviously, has failed completely,

resulting in war and little efforts to end it.

I was just wondering, how did we end up here?

And how do you see the undermining of diplomacy?

And has all paths to peace, solar resolution been exhausted at this point?

Well, Glenn, you absolutely right.

Diplomacy has failed and you know that there is a rule.

Then when diplomats stop talking, then the military men and the cannons start speaking, and that's what we see right now.

I think that this crisis was looming for many, many years, evidently at least from the illegal

anti-constitutional coup in Kiev in 2014. But my perception is that it started looming even earlier

...