Showdown looms at Security Council
NEW YORK/KYIV: Ukraine demanded the United Nations punish Russia for its invasion and strip it of its security council veto as a showdown loomed today when the UN Security Council meets over atrocities committed in Ukraine.
The Security Council meeting comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Russians to fight in Ukraine, moved to annex swathes of Ukrainian territory and threatened to use nuclear weapons.
‘‘A crime has been committed against Ukraine, and we demand just punishment,’’ President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told world leaders at the UN General Assembly yesterday.
Zelenskiy called for a special United Nations tribunal to impose ‘‘just punishment’’ on Russia and for Moscow to lose its Security Council veto.
The council has been unable to take any meaningful action on Ukraine because Russia is a permanent vetowielding member along with the United States, France, Britain and China. Today’s meeting will be at least the 20th time the Security Council has met on Ukraine this year.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will face his Ukrainian and Western counterparts, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, when UN Secretarygeneral Antonio Guterres and International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan brief the 15member Security Council.
Ukraine, the United States and others have accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine. Russia describes accusations of human rights abuses as a smear campaign.
On Wednesday Putin ordered Moscow’s first wartime mobilisation since World War 2, with plans to immediately start conscripting some 300,000 troops to fight on the frontline.
He cast the Ukraine invasion, that began in February and has left thousands dead, displaced millions and reduced towns to rubble, as a defining EastWest clash
Russia’s mobilisation may be the riskiest domestic political move of Putin’s two decades in power. It followed months of Kremlin promises it would do no such thing and comes as Russia faces a string of battlefield failures.
Russia and Ukraine carried out an unexpected prisoner swap yesterday involving almost 300 people, including 10 foreigners and the commanders who led a prolonged Ukrainian defence of Mariupol earlier this year.
The foreigners released included two Britons and a Moroccan who had been sentenced to death in June after being captured fighting for Ukraine. Also freed in the deal brokered by Saudi Arabia, according to a Saudi ministry, were three other Britons, two Americans, a Croatian, and a Swedish national.