How the UN can expel Russia and stay relevant

Members of the US Congress rightly have been asking how countries that value security and freedom might remove Russia from the United Nations Security Council. In fact, it’s not impossible, as some have argued; or even unprecedented.
In 1990, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and tried to wipe that country from the face of the earth, the Security Council took action. The Council demanded that Iraq immediately withdraw and, when Iraq refused, authorised the use of force to expel the aggressor.
The Security Council today, by contrast, has not so much as censured Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine poses a far greater threat to international peace and security.
That’s because, of course, Russia’s veto in the Council blocks any meaningful
action there. And yet this is existential for the UN as well: Whatever credibility the institution has to maintain peace and order in the world will be lost if it cannot respond to Russia’s atrocities and aggression against Ukraine.
When the Allied Powers in World War II drafted the UN Charter, they agreed that their five leading members would hold permanent seats on the Security Council and that each of the five would hold a single-country veto over proposed Council
resolutions on substantive
matters. Russia holds the permanent seat allocated in 1945 to the USSR Rescinding Russia’s credentials to sit on the Council would not be easy, but, with sufficient resolve, the UN could do it.
Precedent exists for rescinding a country’s credentials, or at least transferring them to another government. Among the original members of the UN in 1945, China was represented at the UN by the Nationalist Government. However, from 1949 onward, the Nationalist Government ruled only Taiwan, the Communist People’s Republic having taken over mainland China. The Soviet Union and other allies of the People’s Republic argued that it was an anomaly that Taiwan’s government remained at the UN. On October 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly — where no one country wields a veto — gave China’s permanent Security Council seat to the People’s Republic of China. From 1971 onward, Taiwan’s government has had no seat at the UN.
If, as the Soviets argued, the presence of Taiwan’s government at the UN was an anomaly, surely Russia’s presence on the Security Council is a travesty. Membership in the UN as a whole requires that the member be a “peace-loving state.” The Security Council is supposedly responsible for keeping international peace. The presence of Russia on the Council is not only morally repulsive, but the veto hobbles the Council in the face of Russia’s aggression, rendering it useless.
To rectify this, the General Assembly should vote to strip Russia of its credentials to sit on the Council. This would be a much more modest step than the Assembly took in 1971 when it threw Taiwan out of the UN completely. Unlike China, Russia has only one government. However, there is another government to which the General Assembly might transfer Russia’s Security Council credentials — namely, Ukraine’s. In a quirk of the early UN, the USSR obtained not one but three UN General Assembly seats. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, though not mentioning the millions of his own citizens he killed there, noted that Ukraine and Belarus, then both Soviet republics, had sustained terrible losses in the fight against Nazism. The western Allies consented to those two republics each holding a separate UN seat.
As a result, though Ukraine and Belarus gained independence only in 1991, they are both “original members” of the UN. When the USSR fell, the former republics agreed that Russia would inherit the international rights of the Soviet Union, as well as the USSR’s key strategic assets, including the nuclear arsenal, space launch facilities, and military and naval basing rights across most of the former territory of the Union — along with the USSR’s seat on the Security Council.
Russia gained enormous advantages from this agreed transfer of rights and assets. The republics, including Ukraine, gained a promise that Russia would respect their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia now has torn the bargain to shreds. It would be both fair and legal for the General Assembly to declare that the assignment of the old Soviet seat at the Council is now void. As an act of good faith, the Assembly might even declare that the transfer of the Security Council seat is a type of entrustment, pending a future date when Russia commits itself again, in word and deed, to the principles of the UN Charter. This means complete withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory and the transfer of substantial sums to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine on which Russia’s illegal invasion has wrought destruction and untold suffering. Of course, it’s hard now to imagine a time when Ukraine will feel those conditions have been met; there would need to be some process established for Russia resuming its seat. One possibility would be a special committee, which the General Assembly could establish for that purpose in its transfer resolution.
The General Assembly has shown surprising resolve against Russia. On March 2, the Assembly voted 141 to 5 to “deplore…in the strongest terms” Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. That is
well over the two-thirds majority required for expulsion decisions.

—Bloomberg

Thomas D Grant served as senior adviser for strategic planning in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation at the US Department of State. He is the author of “Aggression Against Ukraine: Territory, Responsibility, and International Law”