UN has turned turtle on Ukraine War Analysis by Foreign Policy

According to a recent Foreign Policy piece, a paralyzed Security Council and a toothless General Assembly can’t come to grips with Russia’s challenge to the international order. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The mood is anything but diplomatic here at the moment. High-level envoys attending sessions marking the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been at loggerheads.

Even as Ukraine celebrates the overwhelming goodwill expressed for it last week by the UN General Assembly, a contentious session of the UN Security Council on Friday revealed fault lines within the organization’s main peacekeeping mechanism. This is the same Security Council that, one year ago, couldn’t come together to condemn the Russian invasion even as tanks rumbled across the Ukrainian border because of a Russian veto—during a late-night session chaired by Russia, no less. One year on, things haven’t gotten better. Given the inevitability of a Russian veto, the Security Council didn’t consider a resolution at Friday’s ministerial-level meeting marking the war’s anniversary. Russia and China didn’t even send their foreign ministers.

If the Security Council is meant to be the common ground for diplomacy, it’s become no-man’s land. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, were conspicuous by their absence. Russia’s UN ambassador and China’s deputy UN ambassador were left to carry the torch opposite Antony Blinken, the United States secretary of state; the U.K.’s foreign minister, James Cleverly; and French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.

Before the meeting of the 15-member Security Council got underway to mark the war’s anniversary, Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, objected to the number of foreign ministers who were permitted to speak and to the fact that Ukraine’s representative would approach the microphone before the council members. When Ukraine’s foreign minister requested a moment of silence to honor the war’s victims, the Russian representative pointedly demanded another moment of silence for all of the victims, saying that “all lives are priceless,” prompting the audience to get to its feet a second time. For once, Russia’s ambassador didn’t need to bang a shoe to make a point.

While there is an actual war going on in Ukraine, with Russia continually shelling Ukrainian cities and shelters, Russian diplomats are trying to short-circuit the world’s diplomatic fuse box. Russia has asked the Security Council to investigate unsubstantiated claims that the United States has operated weapons biolabs in Ukraine; invited an Orthodox Christian church official to tell the council that Moscow would not put up with “a malicious, Russophobic, anti-Christian dictatorship” on its borders; and requested a briefing by Roger Waters, once the frontman for Pink Floyd, who told the council that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked.

“A lot of this is being done for an audience outside of New York,” said Richard Gowan, the UN director for the International Crisis Group. “These claims fall flat here, but they sort of expand out there on social media.”

This trend culminated last week with Russia’s UN ambassador telling the Security Council that Moscow distrusted the ongoing investigations by Denmark, Sweden, and Germany into the explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022. Several Security Council members questioned why Russia had called the meeting while there was no new information.

Longtime UN watchers say that criticism of the institution misses the point. “The world is not a big democracy. The key is to find some shared common ground,” said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Common ground has been tough to find recently in Turtle Bay, the neighborhood around the UN’s Manhattan headquarters. Western diplomats say that Russia has made an art of bureaucratic foot-dragging. They believe the Russian goal over the last year has been to draw out discussion of the war in Ukraine and other loosely related tangents in order to foster an impression that too much of the council’s time is being devoted to the conflict.

“Each time we ask for a meeting on Ukraine, they do as well as a matter of policy,” said Nicolas de Rivière, the UN ambassador for France, one of five nations that hold permanent seats on the Security Council, alongside China, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. “My Russian colleague told me repeatedly, you can ask for meetings. I will do the same.”

When Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, briefed the Security Council about coordination between the EU and the UN during an annual session that was scheduled so he could be present for the Ukraine war anniversary on Feb. 24, Russia’s ambassador lamented that relations between Moscow and Brussels had plunged into “an abyss beneath rock bottom.” Later that day, Borrell characterized the Russian ambassador’s remarks as a grotesque and paranoid representation of the European Union having “more to do with psychiatrics than with politics.”

Beijing, which has moved closer to Moscow since the war began and abstained from the most recent General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine, was more successful at putting its own spin on the proceedings by releasing what it called a 12-point peace plan on the eve of the war’s anniversary. Critics quickly pointed out that China referred to the “Ukraine crisis” without mentioning the Russian invasion. The foreign ministers of the three Baltic nations expressed skepticism on their way into Friday’s meeting of the Security Council. “I would not consider that a peace plan,” said Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign affairs minister. “I would consider that as something of a proposal for a new world order even, where the might is right.”

Borrell was more nuanced. “A plan is not a set of considerations; it is something that you can implement,” the veteran diplomat said. China’s top diplomat had visited Moscow earlier in the week, and Borrell pointed out that he had not gone to Kyiv. “So my advice to the Chinese, if they want to be credible and not be considered one-sided, they should go to Kyiv.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba noted that the Chinese foreign minister had briefed him on the key elements of their proposals at the Munich Security Conference several days earlier, but that Kyiv had only received the final version the night before the Security Council meeting.

Ever since Russia’s veto of the condemnation of its own invasion, the real action on Ukraine has moved down the hallway. The 193-member General Assembly resoundingly approved a resolution similar to the one last year against Russia’s war in Ukraine, with 141 members voting against Russia last week and only six countries voting with it: Belarus, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Syria. But General Assembly resolutions are like public opinion polls. They do not carry the weight of resolutions by the Security Council, which has the power to impose economic sanctions, deploy peacekeeping forces, or authorize military action by coalitions of member states.

To be sure, Security Council reform has been debated for decades. Most proposals involve expanding the council. India, Japan, Brazil, and Germany have frequently been cited as potential candidates for new permanent seats. A group of nations opposed to this idea has long been circulating a rival proposal, known as “Uniting for Consensus,” which calls for increasing the number of elected members, who do not have the right to veto resolutions, while lengthening their terms and allowing them to run for reelection. Other proposals involve reforming the right to veto, which can right now only be exercised by the five permanent members.

But Ukraine has begun calling for Russia’s expulsion. Kyiv’s exasperation with the Security Council gridlock spilled over in a video address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in April 2022, when he challenged the council to either “remove Russia as an aggressor” or “dissolve” itself. Kyiv has been arguing that Russia usurped the permanent seat of the Soviet Union after its breakup in 1991, although the UN Charter still refers to the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Since then, Russia has exercised its veto more than any other permanent member of the Security Council.

Many UN watchers say that after three decades, Russia’s assumption of the Soviet Union’s permanent seat has become accepted customary law. “Nobody squeaked when we passed the Security Council baton to Russia,” said Thomas G. Weiss, a political science professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who worked at the UN in the 1970s and 1980s. “It was just a relief that there was not going to be global chaos in what was left of the Soviet Union.”

It’s a conversation that Ukraine’s Kuleba understands is not the most comfortable for the organization. He nevertheless reiterated it during Friday’s ministerial session. “I do not see the words ‘the Russian Federation’ in the UN Charter,” he said, seated across the Security Council’s horseshoe table from the Russian ambassador.