According to a news report about the UN General Assembly meetings this week, “the leaders of four of the five countries that hold permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council are expected to skip the annual event, which draws heads of state and government from all over the world.” Biden is scheduled to speak on Tuesday. CBS reports: “He’s expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the Assembly.”
ALFRED DE ZAYAS, alfreddezayas@gmail.com, @AlfreddeZayas Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18. He is the author of ten books including Building a Just World Order, 2021.
He said today: “Refusing to negotiate peace is a crime against peace and a crime against humanity.
“The Object and Purpose of the United Nations is ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’ … But it seems that the United States and NATO need war to keep their economies running and perpetuate their unipolar world fantasies. “The Preamble of the UN Charter commits all States ‘to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.’ “This is not possible when Western States practice a ‘culture of cheating’ e.g. breaching the commitment that NATO would not expand one inch eastward. Already in 1997 U.S. Ambassador George Kennan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled ‘A Fatal Error,’ in which he warned against NATO expansion, because it would be perceived as an existential threat by many countries, including Russia and Belarus — and ultimately by China. “U.S. Professors John Mearsheimer, Richard Falk, Jeffrey Sachs, Stephen Kinzer, Dan Kovalik repeatedly condemned the coup against the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and installing a rabidly anti-Russian government in Kiev. The legislation adopted by the Putsch-cabinet violated article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits incitement to hatred and violence. Predictably, the Russian-speaking peoples of Ukraine felt menaced and held referendums to express their wish to secede pursuant to the right of self-determination all peoples stipulated in UN Charter articles, 1, 55 and Chapters XI and XII, further strengthened in article 1 ICCPR. This is the crux of the Ukrainian crisis. There is zero evidence that Russia had any plan to attack Ukraine in 2014. It did so in 2022 after eight years of trying to solve the Donbas crisis peacefully and the systematic breach of the Minsk agreements by Ukraine. …
“It is nonsense to pretend that the war was ‘unprovoked.’ It was a result of the 2014 coup and the non-stop shelling of Russian populations in Donbas. “Article 2, paragraph 3, of the UN Charter commits all member States to settle their differences by peaceful means. Russia tried it. Ukraine and its masters refused. Even the peace mediation by Turkish President Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Bennett were rebuffed by NATO. The world needs a cease fire today. Let’s start rebuilding.”