All members condemned the referenda, although four abstained in favor of the resolution that Russia vetoed.
“Choosing neutrality in a situation of injustice is siding with the oppressor,” South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu said stoned. That is why the four countries that yesterday abstained from supporting the resolution condemning the false referendums held in four regions of Ukraine to justify the annexation of Ukraine then hastened to justify their abstention with arguing that “it does not help facilitate a cessation of the negotiated fire,” China, Brazil, India and Gabon said in their interventions.
It didn’t matter, the resolution would not have been passed even with the unanimous vote of all members except Russia, 14, because the country led by Vladimir Putin has a permanent seat and veto power in the highest UN body. His representative, Vasily Alekseevich, accused the US and Albania, authors of the resolution, of setting a trap for him by forcing him to use his 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 the 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 major problems of the world, 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 accorded by the permanent seat of the Security Council.
If that was “just a name change”, Boris Yeltsin himself said, Russia now wants to say the same about the return of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson to his orbit. It is, recalled British Ambassador James Kariuki, the largest annexation of territory carried out since World War II (90,000 square kilometers, or 15% of Ukraine). Something traditionally “associated with the most terrifying chapters in history,” he recalled.
For the US, it is a direct attack on the fundamental principles of the UN’s Magna Carta, and thus on the institution itself, as they say “any annexation of one state or territory by another, as a result of the threat or use of of violence is a violation of the principles of Magna Carta and international law,” paraphrased US Ambassador Linda-Thomas Greenfield. On Brazil’s charge that the sentencing resolution had been “hasty”, without giving Member States time to discuss it, debating and negotiating the language, the US representative limited himself to saying that “what has been hasty is the illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory.” No one, not even China or India, defended Russia on this point.
Washington now plans to submit its resolution to the plenary session of the UN General Assembly, a much more democratic body in which the 193 countries vote, which is not binding, but which, by manifesting itself, promotes the isolation of Russia in the world will make even bigger clear.
Ukraine, arriving at the meeting with the news of 30 dead and 88 injured in another attack on a checkpoint in Zaporizhzhya, went even further, calling for the removal of “the cancer” that Russia represents in the Security Council before “it will metastasize and destroy the entire organization.”
Source: La Verdad
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