The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, yesterday opened an extraordinary Security Council for the two years of war in Europe, with a request. “It is time for peace, simply peace,” he requested, alluding to Russia immediately ceasing the aggression and respecting the sovereignty of Ukraine.
However, the current situation is quite different from that of a year ago: Vladimir Putin is stronger.
Although within the framework of the UN a majority of countries continue to condemn the invader, Russia arrives on February 24 with more solidity on the battlefield, with a division in the United States that prevents financing of Kyiv’s war and at a time when which “I have recently heard about Ukraine’s fatigue,” as the American ambassador acknowledged in her speech at the General Assembly dedicated to this second anniversary.
He thus alluded to the idea that, from one year to the next, “our support and attention are failing.” He acknowledged that the emergence of another war front in the Middle East, Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has contributed to this circumstance. Faced with this element, in which the US has been isolated in its support for Israel, the ambassador stressed that “we cannot lose sight of Russia’s brutality.”
The Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, also accepted in a press conference, after participating in the Assembly, that the situation in Gaza has introduced a variant in the situation in Ukraine. “Many countries in the Global South sometimes see that there are two different measures” between conflicts. In fact, the UN uses the word war for Ukraine and operation with Israel. The Russian ambassador, Vasili Nebenzia, did not miss the opportunity to denounce “the hypocrisy” in the treatment of one conflict and another.
Guterres’ request was overshadowed by his own fear of “a nuclear accident.” Switzerland expressed its intention to organize a peace summit in the summer.
Guterres attended an extraordinary meeting of the Security Council, the executive arm of the UN, on February 24, 2022, in which he pleaded with Russia not to carry out the invasion plans. At that time, Ambassador Nebenzia announced that Putin had just launched the “special operation” to take territory belonging to Ukraine by force.
“Our world is in a chaotic moment,” Guterres lamented on Friday in that same room, two years after the start of a war that has left, according to his data, more than 10,500 civilians dead, including numerous children and women, more of four million displaced people or the use of power cuts or hunger as weapons of war. That is why he spoke of “a disturbing brutality” throughout these 24 months.
“Since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we have had two years of fighting, two years of suffering, two years of building up international tensions and straining global relations,” he said. There is no encouraging outlook in a totally inoperative UN.
