President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s address to the UN security council came at a crucial moment for the United Nations as well as Ukraine. Russia’s illegal war of aggression, and the collective failure of the other 192 member states to stop it, represents the biggest crisis for the UN since Iraq in 2003. This visceral threat to the organisation’s authority – practical, legal and moral – is one from which it may not recover.
The principles enshrined in the 1945 UN founding charter, primarily aimed at upholding peace between sovereign states, have been torn up by the Kremlin. Repeated pleas by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, for an immediate end to hostilities are ignored. And the humanitarian laws of war are being brutally disregarded, as the multiple crimes committed in Bucha, Mariupol and across Ukraine show.
