“If you’re feeling useless today, imagine the UN”, says a joke that has been shared on social media in recent days, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine last Thursday (24).
“UN meeting to issue another note of repudiation,” said a tweet about the extraordinary General Assembly convened this Monday (28) to discuss the war.
The perception that the United Nations has not had the strength to stop Russia from attacking Ukraine has increased even more after Moscow vetoed an anti-war resolution in the Security Council last Friday (25) – which was expected.
After all, what can the UN really do to prevent Russia from invading the neighboring country?
Experts say that the channel for this is, in fact, the Security Council, in which Russia, along with the US, China, France and the UK, has veto power. With the instrument blocked by the Kremlin, the effectiveness of the response decreases, but the body is still important, say analysts interviewed by the sheet.
Of all the UN bodies, the only one that has the capacity to impose its decisions on the rest of the member states, explains the professor of international relations at UFMG Dawisson Belém Lopes, is the Security Council, a body founded in 1945 and composed of 15 members, ten of them rotating and five permanent – ​​the latter have veto power.
The original idea was that decisions would be taken jointly, and the veto would only be used as a last resort.
“The principle was that the five winners of the Second World War should walk together, and that this condominium management of international politics was the only way to make things work. of Nations [espécie de precursora da ONU, formada ao fim da Primeira Guerra]which was not able to prevent the Second World War”, he says.
With the Soviet Union concerned about the possibility that the UN could be used by Western countries against the communist bloc, permanent members of the Security Council were given the possibility to veto decisions of the group. But right away there was a kind of diplomatic maneuver, recalls Lopes, when in 1950 the Soviet Union barred a proposal for US military action in the Korean War — since the communist north of the peninsula was aligned with the Kremlin.
“There was an unavoidable obstacle in the Security Council, and the US maneuvered and took the debate to the General Assembly, which cannot force other countries to comply with its decisions, but has a very strong symbolic power. And the United States then sent troops with a cloak to legitimize the United Nations”, he says.
It is this role of legitimacy that can still be expected from the UN in the case of the war in Ukraine, says Carlos Gustavo Poggio, professor of international relations at FAAP. “It is extremely important not because the General Assembly is going to take any concrete action, but because it will illustrate Russian diplomatic isolation, which is a problem from an image point of view, and show the invasion’s lack of legitimacy.”
The professor exemplifies with the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003, in the absence of the Security Council, which had not approved the measure. “They did it without the UN because they had the power to do so. But the cost was high, it spread anti-Americanism around the world, the situation was very bad for the United States. If they had acted with the UN, they would have had much more legitimacy”, he says.
It was precisely during an emergency board meeting last Wednesday night (23) in New York that Russian President Vladimir Putin went on TV to announce an operation in the border region, which soon turned into a total invasion of the neighbouring country. Almost as a provocation, he ignored a speech by UN Secretary General António Guterres, at the opening of the meeting, who just before the invasion had cried: “Stop your soldiers, give peace a chance, too many people have died.”
Adriana Erthal Abdenur, executive director of the Cipó platform, which studies issues of climate, peace and governance, says that Russian actions weaken the UN’s peace mechanisms, but that there are a number of other measures that the UN can take – and already is taking— in relation to Ukraine.
In addition to the political pressure of a global condemnation of the Russian invasion, the United Nations must play a leading role in helping the victims of the war, by activating, for example, mechanisms to deal with refugees, says the doctor from Princeton University.
It can also create a commission to investigate violations committed in the war, as well as assign a special envoy to support mediations and negotiations.
There is also the Russian threat of the use of nuclear weapons – the UN has mechanisms to try to prevent such attacks. The agency could also, further on, play an important role in monitoring a ceasefire, as it is still considered an impartial actor.
“For all the flaws of the United Nations system, it is ultimately the UN that member countries are looking to, because it is a legitimate universal space where conflicts can be resolved, or, in certain circumstances, prevented”, says Abdenur.
Abdenur recalls that, although the world has seen large-scale conflicts, especially in the developing world, since the foundation of the UN the world has not yet witnessed a third world war. And quotes Dag Hammarskjöld, former secretary general of the body: “The UN was not created to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell.”
