MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Russia takes over the rotating UN Security Council presidency

Moscow will however not sponsor from the UN any action regarding Russia's war with Ukraine

Russia took over the United Nations Security Council rotating presidency on Saturday promising to act as an honest broker, Moscow's First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said on Telegram. He added that all attempts to provoke Russia are doomed to fail. “Unlike our former Western partners, we play fair in the international arena and we do not promote double standards,” he added.

Moscow plans to focus on three issues: multilateralism, violation of arms export agreements, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and will not propose any meeting regarding the Ukraine crisis, Russia's representative to the UN body Vassily Nebenzya said in an interview.

In addition to the issues regularly dealt with by the Security Council, regardless of which country holds the presidency, Russia will put on the table on April 10 the question of “the risks arising from the violation of agreements regulating the export of arms and military products,” it was also reported.

According to Nebenzya, many arms-exporting countries “openly flout their own national legislation, as well as international agreements designed to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands,” thus criticizing the supply of arms from Western countries to Ukraine, which is at war with Russia.

For Nebenzya, as a result of this breach of arms export agreements, “international black markets have been flooded with untraceable weapons that pose a serious threat. This is a pressing issue, and we intend to discuss it with a wide range of UN member states,” he added.

“It is serious, it is real, it should not be underestimated,” pointed out Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who is to preside over two meetings. On April 24, he is to chair a Security Council meeting on “effective multilateralism in defense of the principles of the UN Charter.”

“We call on UN members to look beyond the present moment and present their vision of how we could build a truly multipolar world through joint efforts, in which the interests of all states would be guaranteed,” Nebenzya noted.

On April 25, Lavrov will chair another Russian-sponsored meeting addressing the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said watching Russia head the Security Council, regardless of its mere formal role, was “a bad joke.”

“Russia usurped a seat, is conducting a colonial war, its leader [President Vladimir Putin] is a war criminal claimed by the ICC for kidnapping children,” Kuleba said on Twitter. He also insisted Russia had illegally inherited its Security Council seat from the Soviet Union. Nebenzya argued Russia was the legitimate continuator of the USSR, “a subject of international law that inherited not only the rights and obligations of its predecessor but also its own legal character” and called attempts to deny it “cheap demagoguery.”