“A slap in the face”, “a blow to international relations”, “a shame”. Ukraine protests and expresses serious concern on the day that Russia assumes the presidency of the Security Council of the United Nations, a body which on paper should guarantee international peace and security, and which for a month will be directed by a country whose leader is waging a conflict on Europe’s doorstep and is subject to an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes. The last time Moscow presided over it was in February 2022, just as it launched the invasion of Ukraine.
ANSA Agency
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russian Federation’s presidency at the UN Security Council which begins today demonstrates the “complete failure of such institutions”. UNIAN brings it back. (HANDLE)
For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky it is a “failure of the institution”, while his Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba speaks of a “slap in the face of the international community”, urging the current members of the Council to oppose any Russian attempt to “abuse it “. Despite the protests of the Ukrainians, the United States has affirmed that it cannot prevent Russia, a permanent member of the Council, from taking on this role, mostly procedural, but with a strong symbolic value. In an interview with Tass, the Russian ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia called the idea of depriving Moscow of the right to preside over the Council “simply absurd”, underlining among other things that an exclusion would be impossible without changes to the Charter of the ‘un.
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Changing of the guard at the Russian embassy in Rome (ANSA)
The Italian permanent representative at the UN Security Council, Ambassador Maurizio Massari, recalled that “the monthly rotating presidency is in the rules of the UN Security Council” and that, in any case, “the importance of the Russian month in the overall equation should not be overestimated of the Ukrainian conflict”. The change at the Glass Palace comes at a time when Moscow’s winter offensive in the Donbass is reportedly yielding only “marginal successes at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties”, observed British intelligence, which spoke of a “failed project “. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the significant increase in the production of weapons, “including conventional and high-precision ones”, in order to achieve the objectives of the special operation. “Ukraine is unlikely to be able to expel all Russian forces from its territory within this year”, then warned the chief of the US joint staff, Mark Milley, in an interview with Defense One, recalling at the same time that Moscow “has failed” strategically and operationally and “is now also failing tactically”. The amount of armaments that Kiev will receive in the coming months could certainly weigh on future war scenarios. According to German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, NATO countries plan to send two battalions of German Leopard 2 tanks and four battalions of Leopard 1 tanks to Ukraine for a total of 160 tanks by 2023. This – according to the Ukrainian media – represents about half of the 300 requested by Kiev for the planned spring counter-offensive. Meanwhile Zelensky spoke for an hour on the phone with French President Emmanuel Macron who will be in China in the coming days to meet his counterpart Xi Jinping. The two spoke in detail about the situation on the ground, where civilian casualties are counted every day. The count of Ukrainian children who have been killed since the beginning of the conflict is provided by the office of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General who spoke of 467 dead and another nine hundred injured. In most cases, these are minors who lived in the Donetsk region
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