There you go again – Russia's war on Ukraine and the UN's bungling

In Camelot's End, Jon Ward recreates the 1980 presidential debate between the incumbent Jimmy Carter and his challenger, Ronald Reagan. In the first of the three debates, Carter accused Reagan of campaigning "against Medicare" earlier in his career. Reagan, knowing his medium, was too smart to put substance ahead of style. He paused, smiled, looked askance at Carter and said with a practised chuckle, "There you go again." Ward says it was the "equivalent of a boxer knocking out his opponent with a feather."

During the ongoing Russian invasion of its neighbour, Ukraine, the world's biggest bureaucracy, the United Nations held a Security Council meeting to enforce sanctions against the aggressor. The resolution aimed to direct Moscow to immediately stop its attack on Ukraine and withdraw all troops. Out of the 15 current members, comprising five permanent and ten non-permanent, 11 voted in favour of the resolution, China, India, and United Arab Emirates abstained, and Russia, of course, vetoed. As Ronald Reagan would have quipped, ''There we go again.'' The United Nations failed again in its pursuit to stop, ironically, one of its own permanent members to not embark on an avoidable war.

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It is tragic that not one of the 193+ UN members has sent their forces to aid Ukraine. This is not a war that surprised anyone, and it is ironic that the United Nations called for its series of closed-door meetings in windowless rooms when the attacks were already on. It had all the time to assemble its negotiators to try and stop this naked aggression. US President Joe Biden was right in calling out the threat posed by Vladimir Putin, and political analysts (including yours truly) had predicted long before that such an attack was coming. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, hiding behind hubris, said, "the United Nations was born out of war to end war. Today, that objective was not achieved. But we must never give up. We must give peace another chance." The one thing Guterres can do promptly is to exercise his executive powers to hasten the UN reorganisation. The world cannot afford the bungling by the world's largest collection of bureaucrats unable to stop a war.

The history

There are three crucial periods we need to reflect on to decipher the situation today and to understand Vladimir Putin's fascination for Ukraine. Until 1991, Ukraine was part of the USSR, when Putin was climbing the KGB ladder. That year, the USSR fell apart, and Ukraine, among other countries, became an independent country. The country had always been viewed as part of Russian cultural hegemony, inhabiting the likes of Nikolai Gogol and as an extension of Russia.

Another significant year was 1999, when Vladimir Putin ascended to power after Boris Yeltsin. From the beginning of his tenure, first as the prime minister and subsequently as Russia's president, Putin has been vigilant about his legacy. Russia, we must note, measures greatness with territorial expanse and not with the economic development of its people. The third important year is 2014, which saw the unseating of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. He had declined fervent appeals for Ukraine's greater integration with Europe, resulting in widespread violent protests in Kyiv and other major cities. Yanukovych had to ultimately relinquish his post and take refuge in Moscow. He was, through his reign (three terms as the prime minister and a single term as the president between 2002-14), seen as Moscow's man. Putin took Yanukovych's removal as a personal affront to his leadership, and as a western conspiracy to thwart the expanse of his ambition. In the ensuing months, thousands of Ukrainian citizens were killed by the ''rebels'', who also went on to shoot down Malaysian Airlines 17, perhaps accidentally. Since 2014, over 14,000 of its citizens have been killed, Crimea has been annexed, and several parts of Ukraine are in Russian control.

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Thomas Friedman, a noted political commentator, says the only person in the world who knows what will happen next is Vladimir Putin. He may be correct, but it is unthinkable in the 21st century that the fates of thousands of lives hang on the whims of a single tyrant. Just when we have graduated to the thinking that the world has left its set of wars behind, here comes the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. The lesson of this aggression has been that when any country's turn comes to face such an eventuality, the world powers will deliberate, try to pass resolutions, make appeals, while the invaded country's citizens will die, be separated from their families and its economy ruined for decades. In a one-man against the world contest, it's clear who has prevailed. In this scenario, being non-aligned amounts to being on the side of the aggressor.

I hail the leadership of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is taking on the Russian military and fighting alongside his countrymen. The fact that he refused the American offer to evacuate as his country burns is one for the ages. He will be remembered long after this war is over. Someone rightly quipped on Twitter that situations like this make a leader out of a comic, which Zelensky was earlier in his career – and in some cases, comics out of self-congratulatory leaders in other parts of the world.

Analysts say this will not end well for Putin; I sure hope so. I am confident I am joined by millions in this prayer.

(The author is a former Chief of Communications with UNICEF in New York, where he worked for more than a decade.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.