The 193-member United Nations General Assembly began meeting on the crisis in Ukraine on Monday ahead of a vote this week to isolate Russia by deploring its “aggression against Ukraine” and demanding Russian troops stop fighting and withdraw.
The General Assembly will vote this week on a draft resolution similar to a text vetoed by Russia in the 15-member Security Council on Friday. No country has a veto in the General Assembly and Western diplomats expect the resolution, which needs two-thirds support, to be adoptedWhile General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, they carry political weight.
French U.N. Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere said: “No one can avert their gaze, abstention is not an option.” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he hoped the talks would “produce not only an immediate halt to the fighting, but also a path towards a diplomatic solution.He described Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision on Sunday to put Russia’s nuclear deterrent on high alert as a “chilling development,” telling the General Assembly that nuclear conflict is “inconceivable.”
“If he wants to kill himself he doesn’t have to use a nuclear arsenal, he has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in 1945,” Kyslytsya told the General Assembly, referencing Adolf Hitler’s suicide.