Sergiy Kyslytsya also denounced the Russian president’s decision to put nuclear forces on special alert as “madness.”
Amid rapidly escalating fears of global nuclear war, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin should follow in the footsteps of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Echoing the condemnation of anti-war activists worldwide, the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called Putin’s Sunday decision to put Russian nuclear forces on special alert “madness.”
“If he wants to kill himself, he doesn’t need to use [a] nuclear arsenal. He has to do what… the guy in Berlin did, in a bunker,” the ambassador said.
During his U.N. speech, Kyslytsya did not name the notorious German leader, who consumed cyanide and shot himself in the head on April 30, 1945, just days before Germany surrendered to Allied forces.
Kyslytsya also gained global attention last week for his remarks during a U.N. Security Council meeting chaired by his Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya.
“There is no purgatory for war criminals; they go straight to hell, ambassador,” the Ukrainian told Nebenzya.
In response, the Russian ambassador claimed that “we are not carrying out aggression against the Ukrainian people—this is against that junta, that seized power in Kyiv.”
Following several war crime allegations against Russia over the past week, Karim A.A. Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced Monday that he has “decided to proceed with opening an investigation into the situation in Ukraine, as rapidly as possible.”