Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to partition Ukraine under the guise of a “peacekeeping” operation is an aggressive violation of international law, according to the United Nations’s top official, as American and international observers brace for “tidal waves of suffering” to flow from the invasion.
“But in the present situation, one thing is clear: The decision of the Russian Federation to recognize the so-called ‘independence’ of [the] Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and the follow-up, are violations of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and inconsistent with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.
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“I am also concerned about the perversion of the concept of peacekeeping,” Guterres told reporters late Tuesday. “When troops of one country enter the territory of another country without its consent, they are not impartial peacekeepers. They are not peacekeepers at all.”
That statement presented a direct challenge to the justification that Vladimir Putin offered when he announced that Russian troops would proceed openly into the Donbas region of Ukraine, where Russian proxies have declared that they will carve out a new state from the country. Putin is portraying that operation as a mission to end a civil war, as he has tried to hide the fact that Russian troops have been fighting against Ukraine for the last eight years.
Guterres’s contradiction infuriated Russian officials in Moscow. “To our great regret, the U.N. secretary-general whom you are representing turned out to be susceptible to pressure by the West and recently made several statements incompatible with his status and his authority under the U.N. charter,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday during a meeting with a more junior U.N. official.
American officials touted Guterres’s assessment while warning that Putin plans to “recolonize” the lost territory of the Russian empire.
“President Putin gave us the clearest indication of his intentions on Monday, when he asked the world to travel back in time by more than a hundred years, before the United Nations even existed, to an age of empires,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “He asserted that Russia can recolonize its neighbors. And that he will use force — he will use force — to make a farce of the United Nations.”
Lavrov complained that Guterres had not demanded that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky implement a stalled peace deal known as the Minsk Agreements, which Russian officials have interpreted as requiring Ukraine to rewrite its constitution in a way that would curtail Kyiv’s relationship with Western allies while endowing Russia’s proxies with expansive influence over Ukraine’s foreign policy.
Guterres, however, faulted Putin for delivering “a death blow” to those agreements. Ukrainian officials have maintained that they would proceed with the implementation of the deal, especially the holding of elections in the disputed territory, if Russian forces withdrew from the district.
“The principles of the U.N. charter are not an a la carte menu. They cannot be applied selectively. Member states have accepted them all, and they must apply them all,” he said.
Putin has warned Zelensky that any effort to resist the loss of the Donbas region will result in a “bloodbath,” while Western officials suspect that the Kremlin chief intends to expand the war to the rest of Ukraine. U.N. officials fear a humanitarian catastrophe and refugee crisis.
“Even before this latest escalation, 2 million people in Ukraine needed humanitarian assistance,” Guterres said Wednesday. “If the conflict in Ukraine expands, the world could see a scale and severity of need unseen for many years.”
Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador, suggested that “as many as 5 million more people” could soon be driven from their homes. “And because Ukraine is one of the world’s largest wheat suppliers, especially for the developing world, Russia’s actions could cause a spike in food prices and lead to even more desperate hunger in places like Libya, Yemen, and Lebanon,” she said. “The tidal waves of suffering this war will cause are unthinkable.”
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Guterres warned that Putin’s decision risks bringing suffering upon Russia as well. “This is high time for de-escalation. This is high time to return to dialogue and negotiation,” he told reporters. “I think the present crisis will be, in the end, terribly detrimental both to Ukraine and to the Russian Federation.”
