Russian diplomat at UN resigns, slams Moscow’s ‘aggressive war’

A veteran Russian diplomat to the UN Office at Geneva says he handed in his resignation before sending out a scathing letter to foreign colleagues inveighing against the “aggressive war unleashed” by President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Boris Bondarev, 41, confirms his resignation in a letter delivered this morning at the Russian diplomatic mission after a diplomatic official passed on his English-language statement to The Associated Press.

“For twenty years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on Feb. 24 of this year,” he writes, alluding to the date of Russia’s invasion.

The resignation amounts to a rare — if not unprecedented — public admission of disgruntlement about Russia’s war in Ukraine among the Russian diplomatic corps, at a time when Putin’s government has sought to crack down on dissent over the invasion and to quell conflicting narratives from the government line about how the “special military operation” — as it’s officially known in Russia — is proceeding.