Russia’s unprovoked, barbaric war on Ukraine has forced the world to confront many unsettling questions. One of the most important is: Where is multilateral diplomacy when you need it?
That’s according to an oped by Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, published by The Hill.
“What is the purpose of having an array of rather costly international organizations and fora when they do not fulfill their two key tasks — preventing wars and stopping them once they erupt? It’s not the first time the world is asking these questions,” Kuleba wrote.
“Can the rule-based world survive if a country occupying a seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (i.e. one of the five countries tasked with protecting the world) tramples upon it in the most demonstrative, outrageous manner?” he went on to ask.
The minister recalled that over the past year, Russia has invaded a neighboring country, attempted to annex its territory, systematically shelled residential areas, obliterated entire cities and villages, raped, looted, committed genocide and implemented probably the largest campaign of forcible transfer of children in modern history.
“Russia didn’t just breach peace — it tore it to shreds,” Kuleba stressed.
Reflecting on history, Kuleba reminded that the UN was founded in 1945, when most of Europe and many other parts of the world laid in ruins. The organization’s mission includes protecting common rules that ensure that bigger and stronger countries do not invade smaller ones, do not annex their territory and do not carve them up, the foreign minister noted.
“The rule of law was supposed to replace the principle of ‘might makes right.’ For that to happen, the nations of the world agreed to give five powerful nations a special responsibility to uphold international peace and security. Those five were the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China,” wrote Kuleba.
The top diplomat referred to them as “the judges of the world” with solemn responsibility to ensure peace and cooperation. He underlined that “one of the judges has gone rogue” by unleashing a war on Ukraine and challenging the world’s very existence instead of safeguarding international peace, becoming an aggressor instead of being a protector, and becoming a disease instead of being a cure.
Kuleba recalled that this is not an isolated instance as Russia put itself above and beyond rules a long time ago — by attacking Georgia in 2008, by threatening Moldova, by illegally annexing Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, by meddling in U.S. domestic politics, by weaponizing energy and information, by inculcating its own population with the ideology of militarism and imperialism, by systematically using illegal drugs in international sports, by sending its Wagner mercenaries to destabilize and exploit Africa.
The oped asks if the world needs a “judge” like that: “The scope of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, its cruelty and disregard for humanity, make this one of the most pressing questions facing humankind.”
Not only did Russia invade its neighbor in a manner that brought back memories of World War II but it also tried to “freeze to death” the entire Ukrainian nation by attacking its power and heat generation during the winter of 2022-23. Moreover, it threatens to use nuclear weapons, and its state-owned media preaches genocide of the Ukrainian people, Kuleba wrote.