US and others blast Russia at emergency UNSC meeting

The United States and allied nations denounced Russia on Monday at an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting over the Ukraine crisis, calling Moscow’s recognition of two separatist regions and the deployment of Russian troops to them a blunt defiance of international law that risks war.

The unusual late-evening meeting of the Council, requested by Ukraine, quickly turned into a diplomatic rebuke of Russia and the actions announced earlier Monday by President Vladimir Putin.

“Russia’s clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unprovoked,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American UN ambassador, told fellow diplomats. Ridiculing Putin’s assertion that Russian forces had been deployed as peacekeepers, she said: “This is nonsense. We know what they really are.”

Thomas-Greenfield said Putin was “testing our international system, he is testing our resolve and seeing how far he can push us all.”

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The representatives of France and Britain issued similar denunciations. “Russia is choosing the path of confrontation,” said France’s ambassador, Nicolas de Rivière. Britain’s ambassador, Barbara Woodward, said: “Russia has brought us to the brink. We urge Russia to step back.”

Secretary-General António Guterres of the United Nations, who has said that he believed the crisis would be resolved without military force, sharply criticised the Russian actions.

“The secretary-general considers the decision of the Russian Federation to be a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and inconsistent with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” Guterres said in a statement.

Russia, which holds the presidency of the 15-nation Security Council for the month of February, was obliged to schedule the meeting. But as a veto-wielding permanent member, it can block any action at the meeting that other Council members may propose.

The request for the meeting was announced hours earlier by the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba. Ukraine is not a member of the Council.

The request came as Putin recognised the two breakaway enclaves in eastern Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk, which could help lay the groundwork for Russian military forces to pour into Ukrainian territory.

“I officially requested UNSC member states to immediately hold consultations under article 6 of the Budapest memorandum to discuss urgent actions aimed at de-escalation, as well as practical steps to guarantee the security of Ukraine,” Kuleba wrote in a Twitter post.

The Budapest Memorandum refers to a 1994 agreement under which Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, former republics of the collapsed Soviet Union, gave up their stockpiles of Russian nuclear weapons from the Cold War era and joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in exchange for security guarantees. The efficacy of the agreement has long been called into question, however. Ukraine and Western nations have said Russia grossly violated the agreement in 2014 by seizing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Guterres’ spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told journalists earlier Monday that the United Nations was allowing for the “temporary relocation” of some nonessential staff and dependents in Ukraine, where the organisation has about 1,500 employees, mostly of Ukrainian nationality, and nearly 1,200 dependents. Of the employees, he said, roughly 100 are in the two eastern breakaway regions.