New York, September 25, 2024 – The exercise of the veto by some members of the UN Security Council, which has authority over matters of peace and security, has prevented the UN from stopping the war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an address to the annual session attended world leaders.
Five of the 15 council members – the US, UK, Russia, China and France – are permanent members with power to veto any decisions by the body. Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, an escalation of the war between the two countries that started in 2014, the council has sought to end the war but those diplomatic efforts were terminated by a veto.
UN leaders have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter and acknowledged that the council is paralyzed by the veto and division among its members.
“Unfortunately, at the UN, it’s impossible to truly and fairly resolve matters of war and peace because too much depends in the Security Council on the veto power,” the Ukrainian leader to the UN General Assembly session. “When the aggressor exercises veto power, the UN is powerless to stop the war.”
Zelenskyy said there would be “the best opportunity for peace” if there is no veto power in the Security Council.
“When some propose alternatives, half-hearted settlement plans – so-called ‘sets of principles’ – it not only ignores the interests and suffering of Ukrainians, who are affected by the war the most, it not only ignores reality, but also gives Putin the political space to continue the war and pressure the world to bring more nations under control,” he said.
Zelenskyy urged the UN to restore nuclear safety in his country, prevent energy from being used as weapons, ensure food security, bring home captured soldiers and civilians deported to Russia, uphold the UN Charter and Ukraine’s right to territorial integrity and sovereignty and withdraw Russian troops from his country.
He said Russia cannot defeat his people on the battlefield and is targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with deliberate attacks on power plants and the entire energy grid.
“As of today, Russia has destroyed all our thermal power plants and a large part of our hydroelectric capacity. This is how Putin is preparing for winter – hoping to torment millions of Ukrainians…this winter, forcing Ukraine to suffer and surrender.”
Zelenskyy said that while attending UN meetings in New York he has met with leaders of India, Guatemala, Japan and Italy, Türkiye, Finland, Canada, Paraguay, Slovenia and Germany to seek support to end the war and will continue meeting other leaders. “These are different parts of the world and various political ways of life, but they share the same understanding – peace is needed, and it must be a real, just peace,” he said.
UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine – The council held a high-level session on September 24, at which Zelenskyy said the war against his country “will end because the UN Charter will work. It must work,” adding that Russia has no legitimate reason for making Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea complicit.
The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said at the meeting that Ukraine has become an “aggressive, Russophobe, neo-Nazi wasp nest”, seeking to join “the militarist block of NATO,” as reported by UN News.
“Today we hear multiple calls for a political and diplomatic solution, based on the UN Charter,” Nebenzia said, but without overcoming the legacy of what Moscow calls the Maidan coup of early 2014, ridding the country of nationalism, Nazism and other discrimination – in keeping with Article 1.3 of the Charter – “there could be no settlement.”
UN News reported that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken as saying that the full-scale Russian invasion was a “textbook example of a threat to international peace and security” of the type that the Security Council was established to prevent.
He told diplomats around the Council’s horseshoe-shaped table that the question was not what President Putin of Russia would do next in the war: “We already know that Putin will continue to wager an unjust war.”
The question, he said, was how members of the UN Security Council “can end Putin’s war and reinforce the international rules and rights that make all our nations safer and more secure”.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China said he had noted the Ukrainian president’s words, but the prospect of peace is still far away.
Every day it drags on, brings more suffering to the people “and more volatility to the world”.
China’s proposal is to realize the extent of the crisis “and cool down the situation”. There should be three principles at play: no expansion of the battlefield, no escalation of fighting and no further provocations by any of the parties. He said the more that weapons are sent to the battlefield, the harder it will be to achieve the goal of a ceasefire.
“This is the reality that we must face up to,” he said. ”All parties must abandon the cold war confrontation mentality.” Dialogue and negotiation are the only way to end the war and peace talks are essential.More and more countries in the Global South are coming together to support a peaceful settlement, he added.
(By J.Tuyet Nguyen)
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