As tensions between Russia and Ukraine grew, the UN Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting on Ukraine late Wednesday night, the second this week and the fourth since January 31.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, called on the international community to help the country through imposing sanctions on Russia, using diplomatic levers to exert pressure on Moscow, and assisting Kyiv with its defence.
¡°Ukraine has requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council due to the appeal by Russian occupation administrations in Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia with a request to provide them with military assistance, which is a further escalation of the security situation,¡± Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted earlier in the evening.
The Security Council, the UN's main crisis-management body, has the authority to impose binding peacekeeping commitments on the 193 UN member nations. The council's structure has largely remained constant since its establishment in 1946, sparking debate among members about the need for revision.?
In recent years, the council's capacity to respond to significant conflicts and crises often stymied by members' competing interests, such as Syria's civil war and the most recent ¡ª the Russia-Ukraine issue, has been questioned widely.
The UN Security Council aims to peacefully resolve international conflicts in accordance with Chapter VI of the UN Charter (the foundation text of the organisation, describing the goals and values that were agreed upon in 1945), which allows the council to request that parties seek resolution through discussion, arbitration, or other peaceful measures. If that fails, Chapter VII of the UN charter gives the Security Council the authority to adopt more proactive measures, such as imposing sanctions or approving the use of force "to maintain or restore international peace and security."
Tensions have risen between Russia and France, the United Kingdom, and the United States since Russia's intervention in Ukraine in 2014, raising concerns that the body is less capable of defusing crises. Given that Russia has used its veto power nearly twenty times to reject resolutions aimed at holding the Assad administration accountable for atrocities documented by UN sources.
Barbara Woodward, the British ambassador to the United Nations, urged the Security Council to demand that Russia halt all military action, condemn aggression against a sovereign state, and defend Ukraine's territorial integrity, as well as to remind Russia of its obligations under the UN¡¯s Charter. This is essentially impossible, given Russia's veto authority over council decisions.
The UN Security Council now finds itself in a difficult situation ¡ª The United Nations Security Council is presently in a tricky position: it was established after WWII to prevent another conflict, including permanent members with ¡®veto power¡¯ that is provoking a new crisis in Ukraine.
The UN Security Council's five permanent members, chosen after World War II, have veto power. The drafters agreed that the proposed resolution or decision would not be approved if any of the permanent members voted against it.
If a permanent member does not agree with a proposed resolution but does not want to cast a veto, it can choose to abstain, allowing the resolution to pass if it receives the needed nine positive votes.
After Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014, a similar scenario played out. China, which also has a veto, abstained in the Security Council, while 13 other countries voted in favour of the resolution. Russia exercised its right to veto.
The right of veto was created by the Charter's crafters to ensure that the World War II winners spoke with a single voice on matters of war and peace, rather than giving each of them the ability to block any resolution they desired.?
The authors of the Charter expected that the victor nations would, on the whole, be willing to agree on suitable action - but experts indicated shortly after WWII ended that they were not willing to agree at any point.
According to a report published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the right of veto thus had a very detrimental role during the East-West conflict, and the criticism of this Charter clause ¨C which has remained to this day ¨C was perfectly justified.
Since the conclusion of the Cold War, the right of veto has been invoked only on rare occasions. The same study argues that the power is no longer relevant. Permanent members now threaten to use their veto, more or less quietly, to guarantee that Security Council resolutions are framed in accordance with their preferences or to prevent them from being put to a vote at all.
While addressing to all U.N. members on Wednesday about the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict, Kuleba also addressed a challenge to the narrower U.N. Security Council, whose rotating presidency is held by Russia and which holds a veto on binding decisions. "If a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council succeeds in breaking literally every rule," Kuleba stated, "other actors will be motivated by him and follow his pattern."
Putin's measures to bring separatists in eastern Ukraine under Moscow's authority have garnered no support from members of the United Nations Security Council.
Many members expressed their disapproval with Russia's violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity. Ukraine, the US, five European countries, and Mexico gathered in a rare evening session to condemn Putin's decision earlier Monday to recognise the independence of the separatist areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, which have been at conflict for eight years, and instruct his forces to "maintain peace" there.
Russia, which is holding the Security Council's rotating presidency this month, had hoped for a closed session, but diplomats said they agreed to an open session under pressure from Western and other members.
For the month of February, Russia takes over the rotating presidency of the Council. Although this is primarily an administrative role, it does entail meeting scheduling, thus some diplomats warn that Russia might block any attempts by council members to request further discussion on Russia's activities.
According to officials, the council was already scheduled to debate Ukraine in the following days as a part of their regularly planned meeting on the Minsk agreements, which were supported by the council since 2015.?
So far, Western diplomacy at the United Nations during the latest military build-up has mostly focused on accusing Russia of breaching the UN Charter in order to gather support ¨C should they require it ¨C within UN members.
According to diplomatic sources, the US and Albania will submit a draft resolution to the UN Security Council, aimed at condemning Russia's recent actions in Ukraine.
"The resolution would benefit from a favourable 'momentum' at the United Nations," a European official told AFP,¡± where a significant majority of nations criticised Russia's actions during an hours-long General Assembly conference on Wednesday."
The Security Council would publicly denounce Russia's decision to recognise two breakaway areas of Ukraine as independent, according to the draft text of the resolution acquired by AFP.
The Council's "support to the sovereignty (and) independence of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders" would also be reaffirmed. The resolution will first be presented to the 15-member UN Security Council, where it will almost certainly fail due to Russia's veto power.
It might then be presented to the entire United Nations General Assembly, where no country has a veto and resolutions are non-binding.
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