The Security Council transfers to the General Assembly the condemnation resolution that Russia vetoed

The United Nations Security Council met this Sunday, for the fourth time in a week, to vote on an extraordinary call for the General Assembly to be held this Monday.

The 193 member countries will discuss the resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine that was vetoed by the Russian ambassador at the Council meeting on Friday.

The result of the plenary vote, which is expected to be favorable to condemning the Kremlin and demanding the immediate withdrawal of troops, however, is not binding.

The UN General Assembly has only met in special session ten times in the organization's 70-year history;

this Monday will be the first in four decades.

As it was a procedural vote, neither Russia nor the other four permanent members of the Security Council (China, the USA, France and the United Kingdom) could assert their right of veto.

On Friday, Russia exercised it while China abstained, along with India and the United Arab Emirates, two non-permanent members of the organization's top executive body.

Eleven of the 15 Council members voted in favour.

Identical result to the one that threw the meeting of this Sunday.

The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, took advantage of the speaking time that followed the vote to urge Russia to tone down its "dangerous rhetoric about nuclear weapons".

"This is another chilling and unnecessary step that threatens everything," said the diplomat;

"We will not allow such an atrocity."

The meeting ended with a speech by Sergiy Kyslytsya, the Ukrainian ambassador -invited as an involved party, because the country does not have a seat on the Council-, who without taking his eyes off his Russian counterpart, Vasili Nebenzia, said: "In the life there is always room to make decisions, to be a human being or to choose evil”, expressly referring to the head of the Russian delegation at a UN climate conference in Paris,

This Sunday's meeting has been convened at the request of the US and its allies, led by Albania, as diplomatic sources advanced last week, after the fiasco of the initiative brought to the Council.

The idea that Washington and its partners were considering is that the General Assembly could adopt a text similar to the one vetoed on Friday by Russia.

Assembly resolutions, however, carry less weight.

“Bearing in mind that the lack of unanimity of its permanent members at meeting 8,979 [held on Friday] has prevented [the Council] from exercising its primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, decides to convene a special emergency session of the General Assembly to examine the issue contained in the agenda of meeting 8,979″, says the text of the Security Council.

Monday's meeting will focus on organizational and procedural issues, while the debate and adoption of the resolution will take place on Tuesday, according to EU diplomatic sources at the UN.

France will also propose this Monday at another meeting of the Security Council a draft resolution to guarantee access to aid for the Ukrainian population.

After a previous meeting, on Wednesday, which was blown up by the Kremlin's announcement of a "special military operation in Ukraine", the text of the resolution that Russia vetoed on Friday underwent last-minute modifications and amendments, in an attempt to garner support , like the one in Brazil, which was unknown until the end.

The draft called on Russia to back down, cease the use of force and withdraw its forces from Ukraine "immediately, fully and unconditionally," as US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield stressed.

Also to revoke the recognition of the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, where the conflict began in April 2014. Among the amendments introduced, the main one was the replacement of the word "condemn" with "deplore".

But beyond the numerical result of the votes, and checking who is on whose side, the object of most of the criticism for the inaction or impotence of the UN in this conflict is the survival of the old system of the right of veto, a relic of the Cold War.

In addition to Ukraine's continued calls to expel Russia, as an aggressor country, from the Security Council and to consider membership in the organization, the veto mechanism is the biggest obstacle to coordinated action.