For Attacking the United Nations and other Crimes, Russia should be Expelled
When you boil it down to its basics, Vladimir Putin, president-fuhrer of Russia, attacked the United
Nations.
UN Secretary-General António
Guterres had invited himself to visit Putin in the naïve hope that he could
convince the Russian despot to cease his war with Ukraine. Guterres described
his conversations with Putin as “very useful.”
The UN leader boasted: “First of all … it was possible to
tell President Putin the same things I say in New York or I’ll be able to say
here in Kyiv, which means that the Russian invasion is against the charter of
the United Nations, is a violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and
that this war must end as quickly as possible.”
He felt he had to travel 4,667 miles to tell Putin something
that he, President Zelenskyy, President Biden and other rational
national leaders have been saying for 65 days.
After bidding Putin “do svidaniya,” Guterres departed for
Kyiv for a publicly announced meeting with the Ukrainian President. Among other
results, Kyiv wanted the UN to help create a green corridor for innocent
citizens to leave besieged Mariupol. Zelenskyy again described Russia’s actions
in his country as genocide, a term that is being heard more often as it
pertains to the Russo-Ukraine War of 2014-22.
Putin apparently not wanting to share the limelight with his
foe decided to express his disapproval and disregard for the office of the UN
Secretary-General by launching two rocket strikes at the Ukrainian capital. The
two blasts hit the central Shevchenko district of Kyiv, with three people taken
to hospital with injuries. With the presence of the UN leader in the Ukrainian
capital, any missile attack against Kyiv and Ukraine is at the same time an
assault against the United Nations.
Guterres also visited several sites where Ukraine accuses Russia
of committing war crimes. In the town of Borodyanka, north-west of Kyiv, Guterres
spoke to reporters in front of buildings that had been destroyed by strikes and
shelling. He said the site made him imagine what it would be like for his own
family, calling the war in Ukraine an “absurdity in the 21st Century.” Absurdity?
Is that all that responsible diplomat could say? Illogical, silly, ridiculous?
Guterres made a passionate plea to save thousands of people
in Ukraine’s southern city of Mariupol, which has been virtually destroyed by
weeks of heavy Russian bombardment. The heroic defenders have pledged to fight
to the last patriot. “Mariupol is a crisis within a crisis,” he said. “Thousands
of civilians need life-saving assistance, many are elderly and in need of
medical care, or have limited mobility. They need an escape route out of the
apocalypse.”
Crisis within a crisis! Apocalypse! Guterres is creating
more buzz words.
However, surprisingly, the UN Secretary-General made sense
when he criticized the UN Security Council for not doing enough to save
Ukraine. The quick answer is that all actions are blocked by permanent member
Russia, the invader, aggressor, occupier, killer, rapist and evil empire.
Guterres said the council had failed to prevent or end the
war in Ukraine. This was “a source of great disappointment, frustration and
anger,” he said. “Let me be very clear: [it] failed to do everything in its
power to prevent and end this war.”
Undoubtedly, due to this slap in the face, the United
Nations is facing the biggest crisis of its entire history after UN Security
Council permanent member Russia deliberately and shamelessly launched
airstrikes at Kyiv while the UN Secretary General was visiting the city.
The UN can take a step in the direction of recovering its
integrity and punishing the offender by moving to expel Russia from the
international body and all of its agencies and programs, none of which can
tolerate being tarnished by its association with a global criminal like Russia.
The United Nations is a befuddling hall of contradictions
and doublespeak. The Russo-Ukraine War of 2014-22 showed that one of the
international body’s founding members – Russia – a conspicuous aggressor and
invader, transgressor of international law and order in contradiction to the UN
Charter, is regularly seen seated around the table of the five permanent
members of the Security Council that possess the power to stop discussions
about potentially beneficial resolutions dead in their tracks while the council
itself does not offer security to anyone, for example another founding member
Ukraine. The UN Secretary-General said as much.
Ambassador Sergiy
Kyslytsya in his usually acerbic remarks about Russian aggression against
Ukraine challenged the Russian Ambassador Vassily
Nebenzia, who was holding the rotating presidency of the Security Council,
to stop the war against Ukraine which had just begun. When the Russian said he
couldn’t, the Ukrainian official replied, pointing to a cell phone:
“Call Putin, call (Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey) Lavrov to
stop aggression,” Kyslytsya implored in his speech fully in English. And at the
end of his address, he warned all Russians: “There is no purgatory for war
criminals. They go straight to hell, Ambassador.”
Kyslytsya said Nebenzia should surrender the Security
Council presidency over to a “legitimate member.”
In that exchange two months ago and since then, Kyslytsya
not only ridiculed Nebenzia for his country’s war against Ukraine, but also accused
Moscow of lies and deceit. He has been known for caustically asking his fellow
delegates a school yard riddle about the telltale signs that someone is lying.
Russians, he said, move their lips. As for Russian deception, Kyslytsya said
Moscow pledges are worth as much as the hole of a New York pretzel.
The Ukrainian official also reminded the UN administrative
structure and member-states when the Russian Federation was accepted as a
member-state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He asked to be shown “where
the General Assembly welcomes the Russian Federation to this organization. It
would be a miracle if the Secretary was able to produce such decisions. There
is nothing in the Charter of the United Nations about … As a sneaky way to get
into the organization.”
Yes, you read that correctly, the Russian Federation, as a
new state with a new name, never applied for UN membership, was never accepted,
and was never welcomed. It was never accepted to serve as a permanent member of
the UN Security Council – the Soviet Union held that seat.
As a global outlaw, much like Germany, the successor of Nazi
Germany, Russia would have had to wait at least 28 years before it would be
accepted into the United Nations. Germany became a member on September 18,
1973.
In an article titled “Modern-day Piracy: How Russia Seized
the USSR’s Seat in the UN” in the September 2019 edition of The Ukrainian Quarterly, former
Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the UN Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko questioned how Russia became a legitimate
member of the United Nations. Everyone
overlooked that in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, membership of this
state in the United Nations was to automatically cease and the Russian
Federation was to undergo the process of joining the UN in the same way as any
hopeful member-state. Moscow didn’t abide by this.
“Referring to these allegations, a number of delegations, in
particular Ukraine, have repeatedly drawn the attention of the UN Secretariat and
other member-states to the unlawfulness of Russian Federation’s membership in
the Organization,” Yelchenko pointed out.
“Russia does not use its seat as a permanent member to
maintain international peace and security, as envisaged in the UN Charter, but
rather as political cover for its international armed conflicts, particularly
in Georgia and Ukraine. Therefore, it is not necessary to speak of the
fulfillment of the obligations of the Russian Federation under the UN Charter.”
And today, it is waging a brutal war against UN founding
member Ukraine, where Russia is destroying cities, forests and waterways,
indiscriminately killing innocent civilians and raping children.
And yesterday Moscow shot two missiles at the UN Secretary-General.
Indeed, not the best traits of a UN member-state or
permanent member of the Security.
Russia should be given an eviction notice by the UN and unceremoniously
thrown out on to First Avenue.
