Under pressure weaknesses can show. Weakness within the peace and security mandate that ‘we the peoples of the United Nations’ gift to the UN Security Council has again been darkly illuminated. This, when last week the UN Member State of Ukraine introduced a motion to the Security Council ‘deploring’ Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Ukraine is a Sovereign Member State of the 193 UN General Assembly ‘family of nations’ as is Russia. The stark irony is that, by rotation, Russia just happens to hold the Presidency of the SC at this time.

The Security Council vote condemning Russian State aggression was lost because Russia, using its veto entitlement, as one of the UN SC ‘permanent five’ voted against. Many ask ‘how can that be allowed?’. UN Charter Article 27.3. states ‘…… that. In decisions under Chapter VI (Pacific settlement of disputes), a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting’. Despite the surface clarity of this rule Russia’s veto stood because the UN member states, both at foundation and now, ie ‘we the people’, have failed over 75 years to deliver a Security Council that works in a way that satisfies reasonable and rational expectations to deliver inter-national peace and security – as the UN Charter opening ‘Purposes and Principles’ provides.

In acute, visible contrast to the dangerously compromised functions of the Security Council, the UN General Assembly of 193 Member States voted to demand that the Russian Federation stop its offensive in Ukraine and withdraws all troops. 141 States voted in favour, five against (including Russia) and 35 abstentions in the first emergency session of the General Assembly for 25 years. The legally non-binding motion was carried by well over the required two-thirds majority sending the clearest message out into the world and pointedly to the 15 Member Security Council …..

It is worth recalling that Russia, then the USSR, was expelled in December 1939 from the League of Nations, the predecessor of today’s UN, because of its invasion of Finland just two weeks before. Russia could not be re-admitted to the League so the UN replaced the League in October 1945 and included Soviet Russia as one of the five, newly nuclear weaponised, permanent, veto wielding member states – along with China, France, UK and US – as so it is today.

We, UN Association – Shropshire, along with so many others, question the veto, the permanence of the five ‘Great Powers’, the construct and application of the SC and the basis of its rules and practices – some of which have no legal basis, only political. Our obligation is to agree, propose and drive forward alternatives that deliver peace and security both inter-nationally and intra-nationally.

This is for later. For now, of course, we stand by Ukraine in all ways we can and reflect most encouragingly how the more free world is mobilising in so very many imaginative ways to pressure the Russian leadership to cease their illegal aggression. We must succeed; aggression must not.

John Crowe,

Co-oordinator, for and on behalf of, UNA – Shropshire.