THURSDAY, MAY 26 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
war in ukraineBY MISSY RYANWhen Russian President
Vladimir Putin announced his
invasion of Ukraine in February,
diplomats gathered at the U.N.
Security Council responded by
evoking lofty principles of global
order and solemnly urging him to
stand down.
Ukraine’s representative to the
United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya,
hurriedly revised remarks he had
planned to make to the council.
Glaring across the chamber at his
Russian counterpart, Kyslytsya
demanded the official, diplomat
Vasily Nebenzya, phone his supe-
riors in Moscow to appeal for an
end to the offensive.
“There is no purgatory for war
criminals,” he told Nebenzya with
a withering look replayed repeat-
edly around the world. “They go
straight to hell, ambassador.”
Three months after Russia’s
assault began, thousands of
Ukrainians have been killed and
millions more forced from their
homes. As Russian forces concen-
trate their fighting power on the
country’s east, there are few signs
that Putin will soon abandon his
goal of controlling much of
Ukraine.
Diplomatic observers believe
the failure of the United Nations,
with its mandate to keep the
global peace, to do more to halt
the fighting in Ukraine is rooted
in rules embedded at the body’s
founding. Decades ago, global
powers emerging victorious from
World War II endowed the Secu-
rity Council with the power to
issue binding decisions while
also granting its five permanent
members — the United States,
the United Kingdom, France, Chi-
na and the Soviet Union, succeed-
ed by the Russian Federation in
1991 — the power to block such
moves.
“The U.N. is at one level the
great leveler, where all states are
sovereign equals,” said Richard
Gowan, U.N. director at the Inter-
national Crisis Group. When it
comes to conflicts in Afghanistan
or Somalia, where the interests of
the United Nations’ biggest play-
ers don’t collide, Gowan said, the
Security Council has used its heft
to make a difference. “But when it
comes to a big-power conflict like
this, the structure of the U.N.
always means that it’s going to be
a place for theater rather than for
serious diplomacy,” he said.
Kyslytsya, who carries a dog-
eared copy of the U.N. charter in
his jacket pocket, said it is up to
the permanent members aside
from Russia to rectify the coun-
cil’s failings. It’s also in the inter-
est of those countries, including
the United States, he said, to stick
to the existing rules.
“The United Nations doesn’t
come from Moses. It’s a man-
made institution,” Kyslytsya said
in an interview. “What we have
today is a result of a very long
sequence of events where all of us
to this or another extent are
guilty.”
Kyslytsya arrived at the United
Nations in February 2020, just as
the coronavirus pandemic de-
scended upon New York. In his
previous role as Ukraine’s deputy
foreign minister, he had helped
Ukraine navigate the global re-
sponse to Russia’s 2014 annexa-
tion of the Crimean Peninsula
and the entrenched separatist
conflict that kicked off in
Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
During his time at the United
Nations, Kyslytsya has been
known for brandishing unusually
colorful, Twitter-ready language
to berate Russia over its actions
in Ukraine. He has avoided the
often leaden diplomatic boiler-
plate to capture the attention of
his superiors back in Kyiv, the
capital, and a larger global audi-
ence.
In Ukraine and much of Eu-
rope, he said, “they’re sick and
tired of what is called U.N. gibber-
ish.”
After the Russian Embassy in
London posted a tweet saying
that Russia’s goal in the war was
to prevent a Ukrainian invasion,
he urged Russian diplomats there
to call Britain’s mental health
hotline.
In one powerful moment in the
General Assembly, Kyslytsya held
up printed copies of what he
described as text messages be-
tween a Russian soldier deployed
in Ukraine and his mother, mo-
ments before the soldier was
killed.
“Alyosha, how are you doing?
Why has it been so long since youresponded?” the soldier’s mother
asks, according to Kyslytsya’s re-
marks.
“Mama, I’m in Ukraine. There
is a real war raging here,” the son
replies, in his final exchange be-
fore his death. “I am afraid...
Mama, this is so hard.”
Kyslytsya’s success in elevating
Ukraine’s perspective at the Unit-
ed Nations is part of a larger
Ukrainian communications
strategy — often featuring Presi-
dent Volodymyr Zelensky, a one-
time television star, in late-night
videos or employing wrenching
imagery of victims of Russian
violence — that has helped Kyiv
secure greater external support,
including an increasing array
and quantity of Western arms.
Analysts compare the defiant
strategy of Ukraine, which has a
much smaller military than Rus-
sia and none of its nuclear clout,
in challenging Russia at the Unit-
ed Nations with what occurred
during the Cold War when newly
independent nations challenged
their erstwhile colonial rulers at
the international body.
“ That actually is why the U.N.
is such a potent political theater,
because this is where the combat-
ants meet face to face,” Gowansaid.
Kyslytsya has also argued — so
far unsuccessfully — that Russia
should be removed from its Secu-
rity Council seat because it im-
properly inherited the Soviet
Union’s place after the Cold War.
Amid the fiery exchanges at the
Security Council, he said he and
Nebenzya, despite their common
language and shared Soviet
youth, have never spoken beyond
exchanges in official settings.
U.N. experts say that Neben-
zya, now the face in New York of
Putin’s widely condemned cam-
paign, was well-liked by his U.N.
peers before the war.
“He was known as someone
who would berate you publicly,
and privately share a lot of vod-
kas” with fellow diplomats, Gow-
an said. It’s unclear how much he
and other Russian diplomats
knew about Putin’s plans ahead
of time. Russia’s U.N. mission did
not respond to a request for an
interview with Nebenzya.
Kyslytsya and other diplomats
note that the United Nations has
played an active role in other
ways, providing humanitarian
aid and helping to document
events during the war. U.N. Secre-
tary General António Guterres,who Kyslytsya said failed to take
strong action in the lead-up to the
war, visited Kyiv as Moscow
launched missiles in April and
later helped negotiate the evacu-
ation of civilians from the be-
sieged city of Mariupol.
Ukrainian diplomats have also
worked, with the help of Wash-
ington and other backers, to
build a coalition against Russia at
the United Nations. In March,
after Russia blocked a Security
Council resolution condemning
the invasion, 141 nations voted in
support of a similar measure at
the General Assembly, which in-
cludes all member states but does
not have the same power to pass
binding resolutions.
In April, the General Assembly
suspended Russia from the U.N.
Human Rights Council in an-
other symbolic rebuke. That
same month, Ukraine garnered
support for a resolution calling
for the protection of civilians and
humanitarian workers in the war,
quashing a competing resolution
by South Africa that Kyslytsya
said failed to acknowledge Rus-
sia’s role in creating the crisis but
instead ascribed the problems to
“some extraterrestrials [who]
landed a UFO somewhere doingsome ugly things.”
Support for Ukraine has not
been unanimous at the United
Nations. China, which has her-
alded its friendship with “no
limits” with Russia, has repeated-
ly abstained in votes seeking to
hold Moscow accountable.
A large group of countries,
including India, the United Arab
Emirates and some Latin Ameri-
can nations, have appeared to sit
on the fence, condemning the
invasion but abstaining from Eu-
ropean- and U.S.-backed votes. A
majority of African nations and
the entire Persian Gulf region sat
out the Human Rights Council
vote, voicing discomfort at the
move by Ukraine and its support-
ers to punish Russia before full
investigations were complete.
A U.S. State Department offi-
cial, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity under agency rules,
said Washington and its allies are
successfully isolating Russia, no
matter its ability to stymie Secu-
rity Council moves.
“For us, the test of the global
response was never going to be
whether there was a U.N. resolu-
tion” compelling Russia to with-
draw, the official said. “It was
going to be whether the world is
mobilizing to respond to what
Russia has done, whether people
are stepping up to support
Ukraine, whether we and our
closest allies are united in terms
of our response. And, of course,
you’re seeing all of that happen.”
Russia is not the only perma-
nent member of the Security
Council that has made regular
use of its veto power. The United
States has blocked dozens of reso-
lutions that criticized close ally
Israel.
Louis Charbonneau, U.N. di-
rector at Human Rights Watch,
said in an interview that the
Security Council would ideally
have been able to pass resolu-
tions to halt the war, but even
that may not have altered the
course of the devastation.
“There’s no world government
to enforce Security Council deci-
sions, so if Russia, a country with
a huge cache of nuclear weapons,
wants to ignore the General As-
sembly, what’s to stop it from
ignoring a legally binding Secu-
rity Council resolution?” he said.To diplomatic observers, ongoing war highlights flaws in U.N. system
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
S ergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s representative to the United Nations, attends a Feb. 23 meeting of the U.N.
Security Council. Ukraine is “sick and tired of what is called U.N. gibberish,” he said in an interview.‘Capehart’Friday, May 27 at 11:00 a.m.Washington Post associate editor JonathanCapehart talks to Nussbaum, President Biden’s
former speechwriter, about writing speeches fora divided nation and the most consequentialspeeches in history that were never given.To register to watch, visit
wapo.st/capehartmayor scan code below with
a smartphone camera:Jeff NussbaumAuthor, “Undelivered: The Never-HeardSpeeches That Would Have Rewritten History”Listen wherever podcasts are available.@POSTLIVE #POSTLIVE