Ukraine submits a petition to exclude russia from the UN Security Council

Ukraine is filing a petition to expel russia from the UN Security Council. According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba, russia has no right to be in the UN.

Source. An official statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine made on Monday, December 26.

Details. “The russian federation has never gone through the legal procedure to be admitted to membership and therefore illegally occupies the seat of the USSR in the UN Security Council. From a legal and political point of view, there can be only one conclusion: russia is an usurper of the Soviet Union's seat in the UN Security Council,” the statement reads.

“The right of the russian federation to be a member of the UN in general is also questionable, as it does not meet the basic criterion of membership in the Organisation. Paragraph 1 of Article 4 clearly states that membership in the UN is open to all peace-loving states.

“The actions of the russian federation are contrary to the “peacefulness” concept. Three decades of its illegal presence in the United Nations have been marked by wars and seizure of other countries' territories, forceful change of internationally recognized borders, and attempts to satisfy its invasive and neo-imperial ambitions.

Ukraine is now suffering from a full-scale invasion of the russian federation,” the Foreign Ministry said, also mentioning russia's armed aggression in other countries – Georgia, Chechnya, Africa, etc.

“At the root of all these crimes is not only the russian federation's policy of inciting conflicts, but also its systematic blocking of the decisions necessary to resolve them,” the statement says.

Ukraine calls on the UN member states to resume the application of the UN Charter on the issue of the legitimacy of the russian federation's stay in the UN, to deprive russia of the status of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and to expel it from the UN as a whole, the Foreign Ministry notes.

Mr. Kuleba also assessed that world diplomacy had ceased to consider the issue of russia's future as a taboo after its failures in Ukraine.

“These issues are not yet discussed at press conferences as well as in public statements of heads of states and governments, but at a lower level they are already asking what russia should be like so that it no longer threatens peace and security,” the Ukrainian minister said.

In mid-December, US Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen and his Republican colleague Joe Wilson introduced a resolution calling on US President Joe Biden to “limit russia's privileges in the UN Security Council”.

Experts in international law note that this initiative is purely political, as the procedures that could lead to the exclusion of russia from the UN Security Council cannot be implemented at the moment. In order for this to happen, russia itself – one of the five permanent members of the Council along with the United States, China, the United Kingdom and France – must agree to it.