They pull, pull, they can’t pull: the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry knows how to exclude Russia from the UN

Ukraine is initiating a comprehensive process aimed at exclusion of Russia from the UN Security Council and in general from the United Nations, this is stated in the statement MFA of Ukraine.

“Ukraine calls on the UN member states to renew the application of the UN Charter in the issue of the legitimacy of the Russian Federation’s stay in the UN, deprive the Russian Federation of the status of a permanent member of the UN Security Council and exclude it from the UN as a whole. Based on the fact that the removal of the Russian Federation from the UN Security Council will not have retroactive effect on previous decisions of this body and will not entail the annulment or revision of the Security Council resolutions adopted so far ", is noted in the document.

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the collapse of the Soviet Union raised the issue of international rights and obligations of the USSR unresolved.

“From the point of view of international law, the issue of the status of a UN member state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which the Russian Federation enjoys, remains unresolved,” - stated in the foreign ministry.

Diplomats noted, believe that there are no legitimate grounds for the stay of the Russian Federation among the permanent members of the organization.

“We believe that, guided by the principle of equal rights for UN members, the Russian Federation should go through the same international legal path of gaining membership in the Organization as other countries. At the same time, the return of the Russian Federation to the UN in the future can be considered only if it meets the criteria for UN membership. Compliance with the procedure defined by the Charter will restore the right of each member state to vote in the General Assembly on the advisability of admitting the Russian Federation to the UN - a charter right that they were deprived of 31 years ago., the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The day before, the appearance of this document was also announced by the Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba. In particular, he saidthat the diplomatic department has iron arguments in favor of the fact that Russia does not have the right to take the place of a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

“Our question is very simple: does Russia have the right to remain a permanent member of the UN Security Council and to be in the United Nations in general? We have a convincing and reasoned answer - no, it doesn't", the minister said.

Let's wait until the experts give a legal assessment of the arguments set out in the statement of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, although there is an assumption that it is unlikely that this issue will be resolved in the legal plane, in the proposed way. Because if there was a legitimate opportunity to remove the Russian Federation from the UN, this would have been done a long time ago.

Not the first try

In general, the question of the exclusion of the Russian Federation from the UN has been raised almost from the very beginning of the war in Ukraine. So, in early April, the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky at a meeting of the UN Security Council, assembled in connection with the tragedy in Bucha, said that The UN Security Council needs to be reformedbecause the organization is unable to effectively respond to war. In particular, Zelensky proposed to exclude the Russian Federation so that it, as a permanent member, could not block the decisions of the Security Council.

Then the White House Press Secretary Jen Psak answered the President of Ukraine that the US authorities have no idea how to exclude Russia from the UN Security Council. Psaki noted that Washington shares Zelensky's disappointment with the fact that the Russian Federation has a veto right in the organization, but cannot change anything.

At the end of June, during another discussion of the Ukrainian crisis in the UN Security Council, Volodymyr Zelensky again called for Russia to be excluded from all structures for violating the principles of the organization. Official representative of the Chairman of the General Assembly Polina Kubiak again explained that this is impossible, since decisions to expel a country from the UN General Assembly are made through the Security Council, and Russia has the right to veto.

“The mechanism for excluding a state from the UN is provided for in Article 6 of Chapter 2 of the UN Charter. It states: "A Member of the Organization who systematically violates the principles contained in this Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council", Kubiak explained.

The US and Europe also tried

In recent days, calls for the exclusion of the Russian Federation from the Security Council, as well as from the UN General Assembly, have intensified, so a week ago, American congressmen Steve Cohen and John Wilsonrepresenting the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, submitted for consideration resolution calling on the President Joe Biden to seek the exclusion of Russia from the UN Security Council, since the actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine “violate the purposes and principles of the UN” и "questioning her right to take a seat in the Security Council."

By the way, back in March on openpetition.eu petition appeared headlined: "People all over the world call on the UN to remove Russia from the UN Security Council." She collected 57 152 signatures, though where they all came from, as indicated on the site, is unknown.

These tendencies were not disregarded in Moscow either. Thus, the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya explained that it was impossible to deprive Russia of membership in the Security Council of the organization according to its charter. And the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova stated that the creator of the mechanism to exclude Russia from the members of the UN Security Council should be awarded the Nobel Prize in mathematics.

Considering that in recent years there have been no fateful decisions of the UN Security Council, including regarding the war in Ukraine, such zeal in the matter of excluding the Russian Federation from this organization is not entirely clear. After all, globally it will not change anything. It could be assumed that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry is seeking some reputational losses for Russia, but after a full-scale invasion, which entailed unprecedented sanctions and condemnation from most world leaders and states, Russia is hardly interested in this.

For your information:

The UN Security Council is a permanent body of the United Nations, which, in accordance with Article 24 of the UN Charter, is entrusted with the main responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. It is one of the six "principal organs" of the United Nations.

The members of the Council are 15 Member States — 5 permanent and 10 non-permanent, elected on a geographical basis by the UN General Assembly for a two-year term of 5 each year:

• five - from the states of Africa and Asia;
• one from the states of Eastern Europe;
• two from the states of Latin America;
• two - from the states of Western Europe and other states

permanent members

•  China (until 1971 - the Republic of China)
•  Russia (until 1991 - the USSR)
•  United Kingdom
•  USA
•  France

Since 1991, Ukraine has been elected to the UN Security Council 4 times.

Recall that the UN has repeatedly declared violations of the conduct of the war by both Russia and Ukraine. In particular, according to the report UN, Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war were tortured, as well as the United Nations stated that both the Russian Federation and Ukraine place military facilities next to civilian ones and violate humanitarian law.

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