You are forgiven if you’ve forgotten that the United Nations General Assembly meets this week. Many world leaders who have appeared or addressed the assembly in recent years decided to be somewhere else this time. President Biden is scheduled to attend the G-20 Summit in New Delhi, India, although it’s possible that Jill Biden’s Covid-19 diagnosis might change those plans. United Kingdom prime minister Rishi Sunak isn’t going, either. No Xi Jinping of China — Xi won’t be attending the G-20, either — and no Vladimir Putin of Russia, who almost never attends the gathering in New York.
Regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations has largely said the right things but it has had little or no impact on the facts on the ground. The U.N. has called for ending the war in Ukraine and demanded Russia’s immediate withdrawal from the country; Russia has ignored those calls. The U.N. has issued all of the appropriate denunciations of Russia’s abandonment of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, with little consequence.
The U.N. has no way to enforce its demands, edicts, and recommendations, and thus it is background noise to this awful war. Many countries have denounced Russia’s unprovoked aggression, but Putin and his regime care very little about sternly worded communiqués or impassioned speeches given in New York. It is now boilerplate language for members of the administration to boast that Russia is “diplomatically isolated.” That’s preferable to Russia having a lot of diplomatic allies, but it doesn’t have much effect on the war.
The Ukrainians I spoke to over the past two weeks want the war to end as quickly as possible, but no one, and I mean no one, is interested in sitting down with Russian representatives and making concessions, particularly territorial concessions, to Moscow. Urging the Ukrainians to begin peace talks is asking them to find a way to compromise with the men who raped their grandmothers and granddaughters. That is not a metaphor. This is why the cries of those who say they want “peace” are ignoring the reality of the present situation. No one is interested in talks right now, certainly not the Russians, and the Ukrainians have seen too many of their countrymen suffer the brutal consequences of war crimes to be in any state to hash out a deal. Maybe that will change someday, but not anytime soon.
If Putin and the Russians stopped firing their guns, the war would end immediately. If the Ukrainians stopped firing their guns, independent Ukraine would end immediately.