By Neil MacFarquhar and Farnaz Fassihi
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine urged the United Nations on Wednesday to prevent Russia from freezing the war as it is now, saying that the Kremlin “still wants even more land — more land, which is insane, and is seizing it day by day while wanting to destroy its neighbor.”
Those nations pushing to end the conflict were ignoring the wishes of the Ukrainian people, he said in an address to the U.N. General Assembly, and were encouraging President Vladimir Putin’s expansionary aims.
“It not only ignores the interests and the suffering of the Ukrainians, who are affected by the war the most,” he said, “It not only ignores reality, but it also gives Putin the political space to continue the war.”
With Zelenskyy also using meetings at the United Nations and in Washington on Thursday to seek approval to strike deeper into Russia with Western missiles, Putin issued his own riposte.
The Russian leader, who was not attending the U.N. meeting and often rattles the nuclear saber when he feels that Russia is facing setbacks in the war, suggested Wednesday that Russia should be able to respond with nuclear weapons if it were attacked by a state supported by a nuclear power. Ukraine falls into that category.
Issues of war and peace have dominated discussion at this year’s General Assembly. “The prospect of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah has heightened this sense of general fragility around the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director for the International Crisis Group.
Yet a yawning gap between Western capitals and the rest of the world over the wars in Ukraine and elsewhere has been starkly evident throughout the annual U.N. gathering. Leaders from the Global South nations have taken little note of Ukraine, while devoting far more attention to the humanitarian crises in the Gaza Strip and Sudan. They have also criticized the United Nations for its inability to halt the wars there and in Lebanon.
Many of them noted that the death toll of Palestinians in the nearly year-old war in Gaza has soared past 41,000, according to the Health Ministry there. In that light, the United States and other Western powers have been accused of hypocrisy by seeking broad condemnation of Russia for killing civilians in Ukraine while continuing to supply Israel with weapons.
On Wednesday evening, France’s foreign minister said that his country and the United States were working on a cease-fire proposal that would impose a 21-day pause in the recent deadly fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, hoping to avert a wider war and also bolster stalled negotiations in Gaza.
When the Security Council added an open discussion about Ukraine to its agenda at the last minute, about half the nations of the European Union spoke. But almost no country from the Global South attended the session, other than those that are rotating members of the council. “A lot of the non-Western members of the U.N. now let these Ukraine debates in the General Assembly and council wash over them,” Gowan said.
By contrast, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey set the tone early by devoting much of his speech Tuesday to criticizing the world body for doing so little to halt the crisis in the Middle East. “Not only children are dying in Gaza,” he said, “the United Nations system is also dying, the truth is dying, the values that the West claims to defend are dying, the hopes of humanity to live in a fairer world are dying, one by one.”
Russia, which has vetoed every attempt by the Security Council to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, made clear that it would not stop the war until the country was free from what Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador, called nationalism, Nazism and other discrimination. Among other false claims that Russia habitually makes against Ukraine, one is that Nazis dominate its government.
At the same time, the United States has vetoed three resolutions calling for a cease-fire in Gaza; Russia and China have vetoed a U.S.-backed resolution. U.S. and Russian representatives engaged in a verbal spat over the two wars at a special Security Council session, called to discuss the inability to resolve conflicts.
President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana, summarizing a theme broached by many leaders, said that the failure of the Security Council to stop the wars in Ukraine and Gaza underscored the need to change the structure, which gave the five main victors in World War II — the United States, Russia, China, England and France — veto power.
Africa, with 1.4 billion people, deserved a permanent voice on the council, he said. “Africa, Latin America and South Asia remain underrepresented, despite their significant influence on global affairs,” Akufo-Addo said. “This lack of representation undermines the legitimacy of the council’s decisions, and the use of veto power by a few permanent members often paralyzes its ability to act effectively during crises.”
In his speech, President Emmanuel Macron of France said that Germany, India, Brazil, Japan and two African countries should be added as permanent members, and that the right of veto should be limited to matters of “mass crimes.”
The composition of the Security Council has been discussed for years at the United Nations, but the glaring inability to do anything about recent conflicts has prompted many more leaders to openly criticize the world body.
World leaders and senior diplomats held a special session on the sidelines of the main meeting to discuss the civil war in Sudan, with many stressing the need to open aid routes and contribute more. “Sudan is a country which has been abandoned,” said Abderaman Koulamallah, the foreign minister of Chad, a neighboring country that has taken in millions of refugees, among them an estimated 11 million Sudanese. “Sudan is not Ukraine,” he said. “Sudan is not Gaza. Sudan has been abandoned.”
There were also side meetings on key international issues like climate change and development, but there was a sense that those issues had slipped down the priority list in the face of so many conflicts.
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