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.