Russia interrupted the meeting on Tuesday April 13 at the start of a Security Council videoconference on Kosovo by demanding that the flag of this country, appearing behind its representative, be removed, an incident unprecedented at the UN since start of the pandemic.
Read also: Covid-19: diving into videoconferences between Jean Castex and his ministers
"
Eight out of the 15 members of the Security Council do not recognize Kosovo as a country,
" said Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, in support of his request.
He clarified that Russia had no objection to the representative of Kosovo, the head of diplomacy Donika Gervalla, speaking in the meeting as is customary.
Security Council videoconferences are not formal meetings and during the last session on Kosovo the emblem of this country was already behind the representative of Kosovo, retorted a diplomat serving in respect of the United Kingdom.
The chairman of the session, Vietnamese Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy, immediately asked for the session to be suspended for closed-door consultations to resolve the problem, which lasted three quarters of an hour.
When the public session resumed, Dang Dinh Quy said that the videoconferences were informal and that the wallpapers did not affect the flow of the sessions.
For more than a year, due to the pandemic, the highest UN body has only worked mainly through videoconferences.
During physical sessions in his traditional room at the UN headquarters in New York, the representatives of the countries concerned speak without their flags appearing beside them.
Former predominantly Albanian Serbian province, Kosovo proclaimed its independence in 2008, not yet recognized by Serbia, represented on Tuesday by its head of diplomacy, Nikola Selakovic and also invited to speak to the Security Council, nor by Russia.