All members condemned the referendums, although four abstained from voting in favor of the resolution that Russia vetoed.
“Choosing neutrality in the face of a situation of injustice is choosing the side of the oppressor,” South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, stoned. That is why the four countries that abstained yesterday from supporting the resolution condemning the false referendums held in four regions of Ukraine to justify its annexation to Russia then hastened to justify their abstention with the argument that “it does not contribute to facilitating a halt to the negotiated fire”, said China, Brazil, India and Gabon in their interventions.
It did not matter, the resolution would not have gone ahead even with the unanimous vote of all the members other than Russia, 14, because the country led by Vladimir Putin has a permanent seat and the right to veto in the highest UN body. His representative, Vasily Alekseevich, accused the US and Albania, authors of the resolution, of having set a trap for him by forcing him to use his right to veto “to be able to say later that we abused him.” The reality is that the invasion of Ukraine has exposed the weaknesses of the multilateral organization, whose cardinal sin is those five permanent seats occupied by Russia, the US, China, France and the UK.
If its existence has always meant the immobility of the organization in the face of the world’s great problems, the presence of Russia, which occupies the seat of the former Soviet Union, is even more controversial. The Ukrainian ambassador recalled that in 1991 the UN skipped all protocols for joining the organization at the request of then Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who described it “as a simple name change.”
It was not, because countries like Ukraine, which had broken away from the Soviet arm, were forced to follow the regulatory protocols without the slightest possibility of acquiring the privileges granted by the permanent seat of the Security Council.
If that was “just a name change”, said Boris Yeltsin himself, Russia wants the same thing to be said now about the return of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson to its orbit. It is, recalled the British ambassador, James Kariuki, the largest annexation of territory that has been carried out since World War II (90,000 square kilometers, or 15% of Ukraine). Something that, traditionally, “has been associated with the most terrifying chapters in history,” she evoked.
For the US, it represents a direct attack on the fundamental principles of the UN Magna Carta, and therefore on the institution itself, since according to it “any annexation of one state or territory by another, as a result of the threat or use of force is a violation of the principles of the Magna Carta and international law,” paraphrased US Ambassador Linda-Thomas Greenfield. To the Brazilian accusation that the condemnation resolution had been “hasty”, without giving the member countries time to debate it and negotiate its language, the US representative limited herself to saying that “what has been hasty is the illegal annexation of the territory Ukrainian”. No one, not even China or India, defended Russia on this point.
Washington now intends to take its resolution to the plenary session of the UN General Assembly, a much more democratic body in which its 193 countries vote, which is not binding, but which, by manifesting itself, will make Russia’s isolation in the world even more evident .
Ukraine, which arrived at the meeting with the news of 30 dead and 88 wounded in another attack on a checkpoint in Zaporizhia, went even further and called for “the cancer” that Russia represents in the Security Council to be removed, before that “it will metastasize and annihilate the entire organization.”