Dhaka: Bangladesh was “constrained” to abstain from the UNGA vote on Ukraine as it believes that the resolution lacked “intensive” diplomatic engagement and “dialogue” between the parties involved in the conflict, a government official said on Sunday.
“Bangladesh continues to remain concerned over the loss of civilian lives, the deteriorating humanitarian situation in conflict zone, and consequential socio-economic fallout around the globe and calls for cessation of hostilities,” the Dhaka Tribune quoted Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Seheli Sabrin as saying.
Bangladesh pursues a peace-centric foreign policy based on the principles of respect for all states, peaceful settlement of international disputes, and in line with principles of the United Nations charter, Sabrin said.
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Thursday that demanded Russia leave Ukraine. The resolution got 141 votes in favor, seven against while 32 countries abstained.
“We’re just sort of bracing for what comes next and hoping that we can help,” Roncone said.
A renewed cyber offensive could also expand the war into regions of Ukraine that Russia has been unable to take with physical force, deepening the conflict even as Kyiv bolsters its armies with new weaponry from NATO allies. Major attacks could even spill over into NATO allies.
Ukraine has done better than expected so far. While the Russian government and cyber criminal groups repeatedly attacked Ukraine through everything from government agencies to television stations to energy substations in 2022, Ukraine thwarted many of those and was able to recover from others quickly.
“They were better prepared, more resilient, more prepared to get networks that were successfully attacked back up and running quickly,” said Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of customer security and trust.
And fears that Russia would take down Ukraine’s energy grid or shut down military communications didn’t come to pass.
But Russia has now had months to prepare, learn and reconsider its strategy.
In February of 2022, Russian cyber forces didn’t have a lot of time to carry out sophisticated attacks, said Mark Montgomery, senior fellow on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Russian forces had the same level of warning about the invasion that those outside Putin’s inner circle had,” he said. “They had no time to plan — and they thought the war would be over soon anyway.”
In the ensuing months, Russian hackers resorted to attacks that were less sophisticated and easier to launch, such as crude data-destroying “wiper” attacks and distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm servers until they temporarily crash, said Ciaran Martin, former CEO of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and current Paladin Capital Group managing director. Martin described the attacks as “improvised, fast paced … quite harassing attacks on the Ukrainian infrastructure.”
Russia’s struggles throughout the year may have resulted from a failure to properly staff or train its cyber forces, said Jon Bateman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But as the war continues, Russia has time to adapt, Bateman said.
Russia could compensate for those shortcomings with “short bursts of intense [cyber] fires.” Timed right and properly coordinated with kinetic attacks — an admittedly tall order, qualified Bateman — “cyber operations could be really consequential.”
With added time Russia could also be planning more sophisticated attacks.
“I’d love to say we’re completely out of the woods, but I still have memories of the NotPetya attack years ago, and it’s not like they’ve stopped,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in an interview. He was referring to a 2017 Russian attack that used sophisticated malware to tunnel into Ukrainian networks across multiple industries and government agencies and caused an estimated $10 billion in damages worldwide.
And as Russia gets further backed into a corner, it may be less concerned in 2023 that a cyberattack would end up affecting countries outside Ukraine and prompt them to provide more military support to Kyiv.
Russia learned in 2017 that an attack targeted at Ukraine could spill into other countries, when the NotPetya hack spread to computer systems worldwide.That experience might have encouraged Russia to tightly control its digital offensive in the first year of the warr, said Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future.
“Why would he want to get NATO involved, if he’s invading a specific country?” Ahlberg said.
Now NATO is committing itself further in Ukraine. In recent weeks, alliance members have agreed to send main battle tanks to Kyiv — a threshold that seemed unthinkable at the war’s outset — and they are now weighing sending advanced fighter aircraft. And on Friday, the one year anniversary of the war, the U.S. announced an additional $2 billion tranche of long-term security assistance to Ukraine that will include ammunition and high-tech drones.
That said, Ukraine’s cyber defenses have held strong against an onslaught from Russia that is much bigger than many realized. Dutch intelligence disclosed this week that there have been many more Russian cyberattacks against NATO and Ukraine than have been made public — and that Ukraine has largely fended those off.
Still, officials in both the U.S. and Ukraine warn that success so far at blocking attacks shouldn’t be seen as evidence the threat is handled.
“We should not take our shields down,” Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters this month. “It is very unpredictable what is going on in that space.”
“We can say one thing for sure, for certain, that we won’t have fewer attacks this year,” Yurii Shchyhol, Ukraine’s top cybersecurity official, told POLITICO in January.
A year into the war, many officials have far more confidence in Kyiv’s ability to blunt Russian cyber attacks than they did before Russia invaded.
But knowing how much work went into securing Ukrainian networks, Microsoft’s Burt said cyberattacks — Russian or otherwise — could have a game-changing impact in future conflicts.
“Over history, when you’ve seen a new form of weapon deployed in a conflict, what you tend to see is that in the next major conflict that form of weaponry has been significantly evolved and advanced and has become more destructive,” he said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
US President Joe Biden and other officials during a virtual meeting with Xi jinping (Reuters)
Washington: There is no evidence that China would side with Russia in its war against Ukraine, US President Joe Biden has said.
“There’s no evidence of that so far,” Biden told reporters on Friday when asked if he is worried that China will side with Russia in the ongoing war.
Biden said that he had a long conversation with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping about this in the summer.
“There’s no evidence he’s done it yet,” said the US President.
The Pentagon told reporters that it has not seen China supplying lethal aid to Russia.
Pentagon’s Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder said that China, which clearly has advanced capabilities, munitions, has publicly declared its neutrality, to now take a side and essentially say “we want to be in the camp that’s looking to extinguish Ukraine as a nation”.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told MSNBC in an interview that the Biden Administration has made it clear to the Chinese that it should not get involved in this war in the sense of providing lethal weapons to the Russians.
They have been told that it would be a game changer and it would be something the US would have serious concerns about.
“They’ve not done that so far, and we hope that the message to them gets through,” she said.
“We haven’t seen them provide lethal aid to Russia yet but we also have noticed that they haven’t taken it off the table,” Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Friday.
If China sends Russia weapons, it could alter the fighting on the ground, tipping the fight in favor of Moscow — a reality the U.S. and its European allies have worked to avoid with hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons shipments.
The news comes after U.S. officials in recent days downgraded the classification level of intelligence on China’s thinking to share it with allies across the world, in an attempt to pressure Beijing to back off any plans to send weapons to Russia. Since then, officials inside the Biden administration have debated releasing that intelligence to the public, a third person familiar with the matter said. All of the individuals were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive national security matters.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the details of China weighing sending drones and ammunition.
The U.S. has previously warned China about sending lethal aid to Russia. In a meeting with China’s top diplomat at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he told Wang Yi that such a move would severely impair the diplomatic relationship between Washington and Beijing. Washington has sent other warnings in diplomatic conversations over the last several weeks, as POLITICO previously reported.
The National Security Council declined to comment on the record for this story.
“We have said publicly and privately that there have been indications that the Chinese were considering the potential lethal assistance but we’ve also said that we haven’t seen them make that decision or move in that direction,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the NSC said in a briefing with reporters Friday. “And we certainly don’t want them to.”
U.S. officials have for months tracked China’s shipment of non-lethal, dual-use items to Russia, Blinken said in a conversation with The Atlantic last week. He did not provide details of those shipments. Dual-use items could range from anything from laptops and telecommunications equipment to aircraft parts typically used for civilian purposes.
“There has been some … dual-use type support coming from quote-unquote Chinese companies, that almost certainly was approved by the state,” Blinken said.
The U.S. earlier this month sanctioned a slew of Chinese companies for supporting Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, including a satellite company, Spacety, that the administration says provided imagery to Moscow for use by the Wagner Group.
Alex Ward and Lara Seligman contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“China’s been trying to have it both ways — it’s on the one hand trying to present itself publicly as neutral and seeking peace, while at the same time it is talking up Russia’s false narrative about the war,” Blinken said. “There are 12 points in the Chinese plan. If they were serious about the first one, sovereignty, then this war could end tomorrow.”
Those comments echoed remarks from President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the day before. “My first reaction to it is that it could stop at point one, which is to respect the sovereignty of all nations … this was a war of choice waged by Putin,” Sullivan told CNN on Thursday.
The proposal itself falls short of what Beijing had promised. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi touted last week that the plan would include “important propositions” from Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping “conducive to a peaceful resolution of the conflict.” Instead it mostly restates Beijing’s existing positions on the war by linking it to the Kremlin’s “legitimate security concerns.”
The timing, however, is significant. The proposal comes after Blinken warned this week that China is considering providing lethal weaponry to Moscow to use against Ukraine.
And world leaders are coming out en masse to counter China’s messaging. Beijing’s peace proposal “doesn’t have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday. The EU would consider China’s proposals “against the backdrop that China has taken sides,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Beijing helped earn that distrust by abstaining from a United Nations’ resolution on Thursday demanding that Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine.
Beijing’s proposal doesn’t reference Russia as the conflict’s aggressor or demand that Putin stop the war. Instead it calls for Kyiv and Moscow to “exercise restraint” and says it supports “promoting talks for peace.” The Chinese government also distances itself from leading such efforts by limiting its participation to a hands-off “constructive role.”
“The Chinese are running up against the problem that their buddy Russia has a maximalist position [on Ukraine] and is not going to budge,” said Daniel Fried, former assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs and now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. “But instead of pushing the Russians, they’re coming up with mush.”
That rhetoric could have impact in other parts of the globe, said Alexander Gabuev, senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He argued that the U.S. and European officials lashing out at the proposal may not be its intended audience.
China can now market the plan in the global south as proof of Beijing’s dedication to peace and tell the U.S. and its allies “It’s your job to convince the Ukrainians [to stop fighting] — our mission here is accomplished,” Gabuev said.
The document’s publication means “China gets a PR victory upfront without doing anything,” Gabuev said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Penn is one of a growing chorus now urging Western countries to send Kyiv modern fighter jets ahead of an expected Russian spring offensive. Lawmakers from both parties are pressing the White House to transfer the jets, but President Joe Biden recently ruled it out — at least for now.
On Thursday night, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the fighter planes aren’t what Ukraine needs right now.
“From our perspective, F-16s are not the key capability for that offensive. It is the stuff that we are moving rapidly to the front lines now,” he said on CNN.
“F-16s are not a question for the short-term fight,” he added. “F-16s are a question for the long-term defense of Ukraine, and that’s a conversation that President Biden and President Zelenskyy had.”
But those pushing the jets aren’t giving up without a fight. Penn was actually one of the first people to call for sending modern fighter jets to Ukraine. As far back as April, he called for a billionaire to buy two squadrons of F-15 or F-16 aircraft for Kyiv. Since then, he has made the case — publicly in TV appearances and in private by pressing members of Congress — that the seasoned Ukrainian fighter pilots should get more advanced aircraft to better protect their homeland.
One of those lawmakers is Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who in the past has tweeted out messages lauding Penn’s support for Ukraine, including one linked to a video showing the Oscar winner giving one of his statues to Zelenskyy. “This is the best of American creative talent helping Ukraine,” Swalwell wrote in November.
A spokesperson for Swalwell confirmed that he has talked to Penn about the fighter jet situation. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
Penn said Biden’s recent trip to Kyiv to mark one year since the Russian invasion is “extremely encouraging,” but urged the administration to continue arming Ukraine, including with modern fighter jets.
“There’s no scenario where Ukraine loses this battle,” Penn said. “There’s a scenario where territory is taken, and Putin buys his way into fighting insurgents throughout a broken infrastructure of a broken country. But the Ukrainians are going to fight till the last drop of blood. And that drop of blood will be on our hands if we don’t faithfully equip them.”
The actor, whose documentary about the Ukraine conflict, “Superpower,” premiered on last week, was actually in Kyiv when Russian forces launched their attack one year ago. Penn recalled how in a meeting on the eve of the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to participate in the film.
“We went back to our hotel and closed our eyes for about two hours and all of a sudden, the missiles and rockets were coming in,” Penn said.
Despite the onslaught, Zelenskyy, who features prominently in “Superpower,” honored his promise and allowed Penn’s team in the next day to film. Penn stayed in the country for a few days before evacuating. He’s been back for a total of six visits, including most recently Feb. 13-14 to show Zelenskyy the final version of the film in person.
The Ukrainian president spoke to artists and filmmakers in a live video address at the opening of the Berlin International Film Festival on Feb. 16, where “Superpower” premiered.
While Zelenskyy was “clearly realistic” about the threat of an impending invasion when they met on Feb. 23, the Ukrainian head of state “could not possibly have known that he would so completely rise to the occasion of the actuality,” Penn said.
The next day, Zelenskyy was a changed man whose country was at war.
“It was immediately clear when he walked into the room on February 24th that we were witnessing the newfound embodiment of an historic courage and leadership,” Penn said. “The resolve was in his eyes; Zelenskyy wasn’t going anywhere.”
Penn is the latest celebrity to lend his fame to help Ukraine. This month, “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill told POLITICO that he plans to sell signed movie posters in order to raise money to send drones to Kyiv.
Over the past year, Penn has become versed in different fighter jets after many discussions with Ukrainian and American pilots on the urgency of upgrading Kyiv’s aircraft. He recently visited Washington, D.C., with a group of Ukrainian fighter pilots, who were there lobbying the Hill. There, he also met with members of the 144th Fighter Wing with the California Air National Guard, which has a 30-year state partnership with Ukraine.
The group discussed how the U.S. could train experienced Ukrainian pilots to fly the American-made F-16 in as little as three months. Penn was particularly struck by the pilots’ argument that the jets could help defend Ukrainian cities and military positions from Russian missile attacks.
“Some of the discussion related to training, fueling, maintenance and compatible munitions — holistic training — is a distraction. You have to force-multiply by dividing the specialization of skills among squadrons. Talk to the [California] National Guard,” Penn said. “It’s about bringing in specialty squadrons to get them up and flying effectively.”
‘It changes the dynamics,” he said, referring to modern fighter jets.
During Penn’s conversations with the Ukrainian pilots, it became clear to him just how outdated their military technology is. While they were in the U.S., they even attempted to buy helmets on Amazon, he said.
The average Ukrainian soldier doesn’t even have a direct communications line to call in an airstrike, Penn said, noting that they have resorted to using their cell phones.
But even with inferior technology, “It’s amazing how toe to toe the Ukranians have been able to defend themselves against those superior aircraft,” he said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Moscow: Warning Ukraine and NATO against an “provocation” in the Moldovan breakaway region of Transnistria, Russia on Friday said that any action that poses a threat to Russian peacekeepers or nationals there will be seen as an attack on Russia.
In a statement on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry, citing data from the Defence Ministry that Ukraine has amassed considerable numbers of military personnel, as well as hardware and artillery on its border with Transnistria, warned the “US, NATO member states and their Ukrainian underlings against any further adventurous steps”, RT reported.
While Russia favours “political-diplomatic” ways of resolving issues, “no one should have any doubt that the Russian armed forces will react appropriately to any provocation by the Kiev regime,” the statement read.
It stressed that it is determined to protect its citizens, peacekeepers, and military personnel stationed in Moldova’s breakaway region, and any actions posing a threat to their security will be viewed, according to international law, as an attack against the Russian Federation.
The report of a Ukrainian military buildup along the country’s border with Transnistria was issued by the Russian Defence Ministry on Thursday.
The territory on the left bank of the Dniester River proclaimed independence from Moldova in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Around 1,100 Russian soldiers are stationed in Transnistria as peacekeepers in order to monitor a 1992 ceasefire between Moldovan and local forces.
New Delhi: The FATF on Friday suspended Russia’s membership for its “illegal, unprovoked and unjustified” full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, an official statement said.
Russia’s actions were “unacceptably run” counter to FATF’s core principles that aims to promote security, safety, and integrity of the global financial system, it said.
One year after Russian’s illegal, unprovoked and unjustified full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, FATF reiterates its deepest sympathies for the people of Ukraine and continues to deplore the huge loss of lives and malicious destruction caused by Russia’s ongoing “brutal attack” on Ukraine, said the statement issued after the FATF plenary held in Paris.
“Strongly condemning” its “war of aggression” against Ukraine, the FATF said over the past year, Russia has “intensified its inhumane and brutal attacks” targeting critical public infrastructure, the statement said.
The global watchdog on terror financing said it is also deeply concerned by the reports of arms trade between Russia and United Nations sanctioned jurisdictions, and malicious cyber-activities emanating from Russia.
Russian’s actions unacceptably run counter to the FATF core principles aiming to promote security, safety, and the integrity of the global financial system and they also represent a gross violation of the commitment to international cooperation and mutual respect upon which FATF members have agreed to implement and support the FATF standards, it said.
“Considering the above, the FATF has decided to suspend the membership of the Russian Federation. The Russian Federation remains accountable for its obligation to implement the FATF standards.
“The Russian Federation must continue to meet its financial obligations. The Russian Federation will remain a member of the Global Network as an active member of the Eurasian Group on Money Laundering (EAG) and retain its rights as an EAG member,” the statement said.
The FATF said it will monitor the situation and consider at each of its plenary meetings whether the grounds exist for lifting or modifying these restrictions.
“The FATF continues to call upon all jurisdictions to remain vigilant of threats to the integrity, safety and security of the international financial system arising from the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine.
“The FATF reiterates that all jurisdictions should be alert to possible emerging risks from the circumvention of measures taken in order to protect the international financial system and take the necessary measures to mitigate these risks,” the statement said.
The FATF said it was expressing its sympathies to the people of Ukraine, who have “borne a terrible burden” at the hands of the Russia’s “war of aggression” and the FATF reflects the thoughts of the “entire international community” in hoping that this is the year that returns them to safety, peace, and prosperity.
“It happened that we were a lot of new foreign ministers,” Joly said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. The Liberal politician was four months into her foreign affairs role when Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
She was not the only new face around the G-7 table. “[Liz] Truss was new. [Annalena] Baerbock was new. I was new — and [Antony] Blinken had only a year.” An affinity grew between the three women British, German and Canadian foreign ministers on a personal level, she said, as they faced a cataclysm with no end date.
“We wanted to talk to each other … We also knew that this crisis would be potentially the first crisis we would be facing — so it would define a lot of our work,” Joly said. “There is no other option than victory.”
Support for Ukraine is a rare nonpartisan issue in Canada. Demographics help to explain Ottawa’s zealous response to a war 4,500 miles away.
Canada is home to 1.4 million Ukrainian-Canadians, making it a country with the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora community after Russia. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is arguably the country’s most prominent Ukrainian-Canadian.
Freeland, who serves double duty as federal finance minister, has called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “the biggest challenge to Canada’s national security since the Second World War.”
Trudeau’s government is especially motivated to do right by Ukraine to lock up support in the Prairie and the vote-rich Greater Toronto Area, regions where Ukrainian-Canadian population is highest. Opposition Conservative MPs, who represent many of the Prairie communities where Ukrainian immigrants first settled at the turn of the century and after the First World War, are incentivized to do the same.
Joly says the threat with the war is existential for Canada. “We’ve been the architect of many of the rules that we now know, that are our underpinning international rules-based order — I hate that word — but the international system.”
Top bloc decisions
The intelligence reports warning of a potential invasion started in December.
Joly said G-7 foreign ministers wanted the alliance to serve as a “coordination group” for Ukraine. The bloc, under Germany’s presidency at the time, would share diplomatic and military information and frank talks about Europe’s dependency on Russia for energy.
But organizing allies behind closed doors proved to be difficult work.
In early 2022, the alliance decided to declassify American intelligence. The strategy was intended to “bring everybody along and to inform our population regarding what information we had at hand,” Joly said, crediting the plan for creating trust and momentum among allies.
Declassification was a hard sell for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president feared a crush of declassified intelligence materials showing Russia’s plans would stoke mass panic and deliver his country premature economic collapse.
Defense talks eventually outgrew the G-7 “coordination group.” The alliance created a new forum at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany to house Ukraine Defense Contact Group meetings, which 54 countries are a part of now.
‘Very stressful’ early days
National Defense Minister Anita Anand was sworn into her role in October 2021, the same as Joly. Anand was thrown into briefings about global hot spots, she told POLITICO, including the buildup of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border and in Belarus.
Feb. 24, she said, “was a confirmation of events that we did not want to happen.”
She had been in Kyiv just three weeks earlier to meet with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov.
“The days were very stressful,” she said.
As a rookie minister in Trudeau’s Cabinet, Anand had been tasked with procurement; the pandemic transformed her into the chief purveyor of Covid-19 vaccines, rapid tests and personal protective equipment. The two years of wrangling equipment in a crisis came in handy a year ago. “I was used to being in an environment that was urgent and where our government needed to make very effective, but quick decisions,” she said.
Anand said her modus operandi then, and since, has been to speak directly with Ukrainians, and specifically Reznikov, about the country’s equipment needs.
Then, she said, she looks at Canada’s naval and armed forces inventory, decides what needs to be procured to outfit the Armed Forces of Ukraine “and then ensures we are providing the training that is necessary on the equipment that we’re providing.”
Ottawa sent the first of four Leopard 2 main battle tanks, and training crews, to Ukraine earlier this month as the war continued to ratchet up.
Canada isn’t a nuclear power but has found other ways to contribute including sanctions, paying out C$2 billion in loans to Ukraine and sending C$320 million in humanitarian assistance.
Canada has also taken in nearly 170,000 immigrants of Ukrainian origin while approving the temporary resident visa applications of more than half a million Ukrainian nationals and their families.
The country’s military budget is notoriously malnourished if NATO’s target, that members should spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, is the yardstick used to measure might. But Canada’s Operation UNIFIER mission, deployed in 2015 to Ukraine to train the country’s armed forces following the Crimean crisis, put Ottawa in a position of being an interlocutor for other nations figuring out how to support Ukraine.
“Many countries have come to Canada — and certainly this was the case at the beginning — to ask whether we had advice for them about how they can effectively help Ukraine,” Anand said.
Canada says it wants to help with efforts to rebuild Ukraine, but there are headwinds.
“Private capital will not be interested in investing in reconstructing cities if the geopolitical risk is still there,” Joly said. The statement leaves the door open for discussions about public funding for reconstruction in an era when cost-of-living anxieties debates over government spending have pierced domestic politics as a challenge for incumbent leaders.
The conversations about long-term security support for Ukraine are just beginning around the G-7 table.
“Even after the war, Russia will still be a very dangerous neighbor,” she said, offering a grim reality check. “Particularly if Putin is in charge.”
Somewhere during the past year, the words “finding a peaceful solution” dropped from Joly’s vocabulary.
Paul McLeary contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
United Nations: India has again abstained on a resolution calling for Russia to end the invasion of Ukraine that was adopted by more than two-thirds of the votes in the UN General Assembly in a snub to Moscow.
The vote on the resolution sponsored by Ukraine and more than 65 co-sponsors took place on Thursday, the eve of the first anniversary of the invasion, while simultaneously a roundtable sponsored by India’s mission to explore the concept of “Gandhian Trusteeship” for world peace was taking place next door.
Explaining India’s abstention, the country’s Permanent Representative to UN, Ruchira Kamboj, who rushed to the General Assembly chamber from that meeting, said that “we will always call for dialogue and diplomacy as the only viable way out”.
The resolution did not mention negotiations to end the conflict, but called for “diplomatic efforts to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine, consistent with the Charter”.
Kamboj asked, “Can any process that does not involve either of the two sides ever lead to a credible and meaningful solution”?
“While we take note of the stated objectives of today’s resolution, given its inherent limitations in reaching our desired goal of securing lasting peace we are constrained to abstain,” she said.
Kamboj invoked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s often-quoted statement that “this cannot be an era of war” and said, “Escalation of hostilities and violence is in no one’s interest. Instead, an urgent return to the path of dialogue and diplomacy is the way forward.”
The resolution was adopted by 141 votes, with seven against and 32 abstentions in the Assembly where 191 of its 193 members retain voting rights.
The resolution deplores Russia’s invasion and demands its immediate withdrawal for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace”.
It also demands the prosecution of crimes and justice for victims.
Earlier, two amendments sponsored by Russia’s close ally Belarus to gut the resolution were voted down, receiving only 11 votes for one and 15 for the other.
India abstained also on the amendments that sought to remove references to Moscow’s aggression and invasion and the demand for it to withdraw from occupied territories, while calling instead for an end to arms supply to Ukraine.
In a sideshow, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Munir Akram brought up Kashmir claiming that it had parallels to Ukraine, which the sponsors of the resolution ignore.
Pratik Mathur, a counsellor at India’s mission, said it was an “uncalled for provocation” that “is particularly regrettable and certainly misplaced at a time when after two days of intense discussions, we have all agreed that the path of peace can be the only path forward to resolve conflict”.
Kamboj said that despite the support of member states for diplomatic efforts to end the conflict and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ attempts to promote a comprehensive peace, “reports from the ground portray a complex scenario with the conflict intensifying on several fronts.”
The General Assembly took up the resolution in an emergency session because of the paralysis of the Security Council hobbled by Russia’s vetoes and it has brought to the fore demands for reforms, which India has been lobbying for.
India’s Permanent Representative to UN pointedly asked, “Has the UN system and particularly its principal organ, the UN Security Council based on a 1945 world construct not been rendered ineffective to address contemporary challenges to global peace and security”?
Only the five countries that were considered the winners of World War II were given veto rights in the Council.
Unlike Security Council resolutions, those of the General Assembly have no enforcement powers and only carry moral influence.
Thursday’s was the sixth resolution on Ukraine since the invasion that began on February 24 a year ago and India has abstained on all of them.
Kamboj said that India was concerned that the “conflict has resulted in the loss of countless lives and misery, particularly for women, children and the elderly, with millions becoming homeless and forced to seek shelter in neighbouring countries… economic reports of attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are also deeply concerning”.
India, for its part, was helping deal with its fallout in Ukraine and elsewhere, she added.
We are providing both humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and economic support to some of our neighbours in the Global South under economic distress even as they stare at the escalating costs of food, fuel and fertilisers, which has been a consequential fallout of the ongoing conflicta, she said.
