The war in Ukraine has been mobilizing the forces of diplomacy for more than two months. Emmanuel Macron, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and so many others have attempted mediation to put an end to the fighting. In this conflict, the UN appears powerless, like its Secretary General Antonio Guterres. It was Tuesday April 26 in Moscow, and will be Thursday in kyiv, but Wednesday is “Lost in translation”. Lost. There is nothing on his agenda, as if he needed a day to digest his meetings with Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
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He finally appears on the ground, perhaps because he feels that his institution, a glass tower in the middle of Manhattan, is an ivory tower from which he must descend but from which there is not much to shoot. The UN General Assembly may well put a first resolution to the vote in early March: 141 countries out of 193 Member States have expressed their opposition to the war. A second resolution was adopted at the end of March: 140 countries then condemned the invasion of Ukraine, without further effect.
As for the Security Council, it is purely and simply paralyzed because it escapes no one that one of the permanent members of this council is none other than Russia. She is irremovable and by definition holds the right of veto. It is therefore not tomorrow that this body considered central will decide to send blue helmets to the shores of the Black Sea. It is hard to see how Vladimir Putin would agree to shoot Grad missiles in the foot like this.
Diplomacy is there to prevent war and it is up to soldiers to end it. That’s kind of what’s happening: the fighting has taken over, the UN is struggling to exist. It is therefore the military organizations that are taking over the file. The proof during the day on Tuesday. As Antonio Guterres politely listened to Vladimir Putin swear to Saint-Basile that he cared about the fate of civilians in Mariupol and continued to do everything possible to find a negotiated solution to the conflict, you had a great rout on the biggest American base installed in Europe.
NATO was not officially in charge, but it’s just like. All its members were there with a dozen other countries. At the end of the meeting, it was Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of Defense, who gave concrete steps to give impetus to arms deliveries to Ukraine. Faced with the void left by the UN and with his allies, Lloyd Austin arrives a bit like federal police officers arriving at a crime scene in the movies saying: “FBI, we’re taking over the case!”
The diplomatic aspect aside, the UN has demonstrated efficiency and even a certain agility. Its specialized agencies are very present in the field. The World Food Program is able to provide in-kind assistance to more than three million people. Unicef and UNHCR are assisting the five million refugees who have fled and the seven million internally displaced in Ukraine. An appeal for emergency funds for an amount of 1.7 million dollars has been launched, the fund is filling up visibly. It’s even listed on the UN website: “Priority to the protection of civilians.” As if the organization had understood that diplomacy was useless in this case. At least for now. It’s as if there was a sign on the door of the New York headquarters: “Here, we treat the evils, not the origin of the evil.”