On April 26 China, with India and Brazil, voted in the Cto declare their Brics partner Russia the aggressor in its war with Ukraine. That was a first.
They also dropped a big hint that they would like Russia to “respect” Ukraine’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence” and stop committing war crimes.
The fifth Bric, SA, declined to join them.
The same day China’s leader, Xi Jinping, spent almost an hour on the telephone with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
The UN vote, which went largely unreported until this week, came during debate on a wordy 10-page resolution bearing the vanilla title “Co-operation between the UN and the Council of Europe”, the latter an international organisation focused on human rights in Europe. Not to be confused with the EU, though there is considerable overlap.
The resolution’s 48 sponsors included most of the council’s members, including Ukraine, the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova — former satrapies of the Soviet empire — and the US, not a member but holding observer status. Russia was tossed out in March last year.
During debate on the draft the delegate from Senegal objected to what his government considered overly woke language on gender, but that would probably have been the only gripe had not paragraph nine somehow found its way into the “preambular” throat-clearing portion of the text.
It stated: “The unprecedented challenges now facing Europe following the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, and against Georgia before that, and the cessation of the membership of the Russian Federation in the Council of Europe, call for strengthened co-operation between the UN and the Council of Europe, notably to promptly restore and maintain peace and security based on respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of any state, ensure the observance of human rights and international humanitarian law during the hostilities, provide redress to victims and bring to justice all those responsible for the violations of international law.”
The Russian representative, as quoted in the UN-supplied summary of the debate, protested that this had “nothing to do with the topic” of the resolution. “Such politicisation is proof of Western countries’ willingness to damage the clout of regional organisations and cause a rift in the General Assembly which could have been avoided.” The Venezuelan delegate agreed and politely accused the resolution’s drafters of acting in bad faith.
SA, Robin to the Brics Batmen, could have contrived, like a number of other countries, to be out of the room when the votes were cast
After a motion to strip out paragraph nine failed by a vote of 81 to 10 (the latter being the usual basket of deplorables, including Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Belarus and, of course, Russia), the resolution was approved 122-5, with 18 abstentions. China, India and Brazil, silent during the debate, voted with the majority.
SA, Robin to the Brics Batmen, could have contrived, like a number of other countries, to be out of the room when the votes were cast. For whatever reason, it chose instead to stick around and formally abstain, broadcasting its independence.
It is unclear why it took days before even Ukrainian news outlets picked up on what had happened. Their tweets started to be noticed more widely on Monday, but as of this writing (on Tuesday), not a line had appeared in major US media.
China’s votes, with those of India and Brazil, cannot have been an accident, or based on a misunderstanding. This was not 1950, when the Security Council voted to repel North Korea’s Soviet-backed invasion of the South while the Russians were out of the room and unable to cast their veto. This time, the Russian representative knew exactly what was going on.
It can’t have been comfortable. The diplomatic cooking was being done right under the nose of his boss, Sergei Lavrov, who was in New York to chair a Security Council meeting. But there appears to have been nothing he could do to get the Bricsters — other than SA — in line.
Historic game
It can be argued, of course, that this was only a non-binding General Assembly resolution, just so much hot air. That would be naive. Paragraph nine was inserted with a purpose, and that purpose can only have been to get China and the others on record as blaming Russia for the war and calling for a peace “based on respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of any state”. That is, the invaded party.
If one assumes that Xi, who once called Vladimir Putin his “best, most intimate friend”, instructed his UN representative to vote the way he did on the very day Xi himself was talking to Zelensky for the first time since the war began, a possibly historic game would appear to be afoot.
The war in Ukraine has turned into a developed countries’ war-style meat-grinder. The Russians are said to have taken 100,000 casualties in the fight for Bakhmut. The butcher’s bill for Ukraine must be steep as well, and more slaughter is in the offing when the ground dries. Decisive victory is in the grasp of neither side, nor of their allies.
This is bad not just for the combatants but for the rest of the world. The collateral damage from Putin’s invasion is truly global. Xi aspires to the mantle the US assumed after World War 2, but to wear it on his own terms, reunification with Taiwan included. (Not, of course, to be confused with Putin’s Anschluss).
Leveraging an end to the war in Ukraine, then helping both sides recover with his own Marshall Plan, would help Xi realise his grandiose ambition to reshape the global order.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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