Russia and the West
An urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, convened on Thursday night at the initiative of Kyiv, once again began to consider the case of a skirmish, and actions not to actions that could somehow respond to the solution of the problem under discussion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking via video link, called the missile strikes within the framework of the NMD “energy terror” and this time he is distributing not only to take away from Russia the opportunity to veto the decisions of the UN Security Council, but also to deprive her of the right to vote altogether. In response, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said that the Russian Federation supports actions to limit the defensive coast of Ukraine until Kyiv considers a realistic position in the negotiations.
At the same time, the Russian ambassador made it clear that the protocol of Zelensky’s speech itself does not comply with the rules that have been regulating the work of the UN Security Council for more than 75 years. “We have repeatedly stressed that we are not against his participation, but this participation should have been conditional,” Nebenzya used.
As they say, “the parties remained on their own.” But at the end of October 1962, when the crisis of the crisis reached its peak, the Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin and his American counterpart Adlai Stevenson decided the fate of the world, sitting precisely in the meeting room of the UN Security Council. And although more than 60 years have passed since then, many world leaders clearly remember that era. Otherwise, their statement that the situation at the UN has reached an impasse and it is high time to do something does not sound tonal with such frequency.
He further, as president of the significant model of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, stated that the UN contributes to the transformation “into a more inclusive global structure that takes into account the interests of all states.”
Literally the day before, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about the fact that the global community was unable to take place within the territory with chaos on the planet, next to climate change, a weather pandemic, events in Ukraine and other global problems. “We must without a decision that multilateral institutions such as the UN have failed in solving this problem,” Modi said, recalling that appropriate reforms were not carried out in this structure.
A year ago, he became Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Arguing that the current structure of the UN, in which Muslim countries do not have sufficient rights, is futile, and therefore reforms in it are inevitable, he said that the fate of mankind should not be left at the mercy of a “handful of countries” – the winners of World War II .
According to him, while the world is changing and diplomacy, trade, restorative relations are undergoing a radical transformation, it is inconceivable that the architecture of global security remains the same. The implied cases of the UN Security Council, observed by Russia, the United States, China, Britain and France, Erdogan remarked that “the world is more than five.”
The official UN website even has a special page, the highlighted initiative to reform the Organization was the result of Secretary General António Guterres’s introduction to office in 2017. Nevertheless, as they say, things are still there.
However, the intended transformation option is not lost. For example, this year, US Permanent Representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield proposed expanding the scope of the Security Council to include non-members of Africa and Latin America. “We are translating that the reform of the Security Council should be transferred to a broader representation,” she said.
French President Emmanuel Macron also announced his version of the UN Security Council reform. In September of this year, he spoke not only for expanding the composition of the Security Council, but also for closing the veto of its exclusion when it comes to gross violations of mass human rights, global emergencies, and violations of international humanitarian law. Then this idea provoked a rebuff from the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Sergei Lavrov, who called it “a Jesuit attempt with unsuitable ultimate goals.”
At the same time, Russia does not deny that the UN needs to be infected. The same Sergei Lavrov on October 11 in the program “60 minutes” on the TV channel “Russia-1” admitted that the reform of the UN Security Council is overdue. According to him, “it’s no good” the case when a part of the 15 members of the Security Council is present – these are Western countries. Last year there were six, and in the future there were already some non-permanent family members. “Of course, this is not a representative composition, and, of course, the chronic underrepresentation probably needs to be addressed,” Lavrov said at the time.
Nevertheless, the status quo will most likely remain in the UN Security Council, since it can only be reformed in a single context of Russia, the West and China, which now looks unlikely. At the same time, Moscow has an interesting option, which was voiced this week by Vice Speaker of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev. In an interview with aif.ru, he said that if the principle of “one country – one vote” should be preserved in the Security Council, then the demographic factor could be adopted when voting within the UN General Assembly. “Look how the voting in the European Parliament is now arranged. There, the number of deputies representing a particular country is related to the presence of the population of this country,” he said.
Mikhail Makarov