News Desk
KYIV: Ukraine on Monday demanded Russia’s removal from the United Nations (UN), where Moscow, as a permanent member of the Security Council, can veto any resolution.
“Ukraine calls on the UN member states … to deprive the Russian Federation of its status as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and to remove it from the UN as a whole,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
The foreign ministry statement said that Russia “illegally occupies the USSR’s seat in the United Nations Security Council” since the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union.
“From a political and legal point of view, there can be only one conclusion: Russia is a usurper of the Soviet Union’s seat in the United Nations Security Council,” the foreign ministry added.
Ukraine terms Russian membership illegal
“Thirty years of its illegal presence in the United Nations have been marked by seizures and wars of other countries’ territories,” the foreign ministry said in its statement.
The UN Security Council’s five permanent members have veto power over UN resolutions.
The Ukrainian foreign minister said it was no longer taboo to discuss Russia’s global role in the event it is defeated in the full-scale war it launched against Ukraine in February.
Russia is one of five permanent members — in addition to the United States, Britain, France, and China — of the UN Security Council, giving it the right to veto any resolutions. The powerful 15-seat body can take numerous steps to deal with global crises, including the authorization of military action, approving changes to the UN Charter, and imposing punitive measures such as sanctions against individual states.
Russia has for weeks been accused of violating international law by targeting water and power sources in Ukraine as temperatures fell. Kyiv has called the attacks, carried out with missile and drone strikes, acts of “energy terror” intended to deprive the population of heat during winter and break the will of the Ukrainian people.
