A week before the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin's UN ambassador claimed that the West is driven by its determination to destroy Russia and declared: “We had no choice other than to defend our country defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future.” Western ambassadors shot back, accusing Russia of using a Security Council meeting it called on lessons learned from the failure to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists that began in 2014 to justify what France's U.N. Ambassador Nicolas De Riviere called “the unjustifiable” Russia's invasion of its smaller neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022.