President Volodymyr Zelensky 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 General Assembly, and were encouraging President Vladimir V. Putin’s expansionary aims.
“It not only ignores the interests and the suffering 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 Mr. Zelensky also using meetings at the United Nations and in Washington on Thursday to seek approval to strike deeper into Russia with Western missiles, Mr. 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 United Nations 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.
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,” said Mr. Gowan.
By contrast, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan set the tone early by devoting much of his speech on 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.”
Versions of that were repeated in many speeches.
President Gabriel Boric Font of Chile said that the international community was often accused of double standards in the face of human rights violations around the world. “I refuse to choose between the terror of Hamas or the genocide carried out by Netanyahu’s Israel,” he said, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “We have no reason to choose between barbarities — I choose humanity.”
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. American 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,” said Mr. Akufo-Addo. “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.
In the Ukraine war, Mr. Zelensky said that Russian missile attacks targeting his country’s energy infrastructure, as well as Russia’s continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest, would leave Ukrainians in the cold this winter and could unleash a nuclear disaster that could affect nations in Europe and beyond.
Mr. Zelensky said that he had met with the leaders of at least 10 countries and expected to encounter more. He was scheduled to travel to Washington on Thursday to meet with President Biden and other officials to present what he has advertised as a new, undisclosed “victory plan.”
Details of the plan have been scant, but in statements before traveling to the United States, Mr. Zelensky said it includes enhancing Western security guarantees for Ukraine, increasing military aid and securing further financial support.
The post Zelensky Warns U.N. Against Ceding to Russia’s ‘Insane’ Desire for Land appeared first on New York Times.