Zelensky: ‘War Crimes Must Be Punished’

UNITED NATIONS—It’s no small feat to steal a show as big as the annual September gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Yet even in this rarefied sphere, many VIPs will be angling to catch up with one man. For a fleeting moment, dignitaries will be able to have a quiet word or a snap quick selfie with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky without having to take a 10-hour train ride through an active war zone.

For his part, Zelensky arrived in New York with a small entourage and a big agenda, hoping to garner multilateral support for Ukraine’s ambitious peace plan and perhaps even his government’s cherished goal of establishing a special tribunal to try Russian President Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression.

“For the first time in modern history, we have a real chance to end the aggression on the terms of the nation which was attacked,” Zelensky said in his much-anticipated turn at the U.N. General Assembly’s famous rostrum today. Speaking in English, he told the assembly that “while Russia is pushing the world to the final war, Ukraine is doing everything to ensure that after Russian aggression, no one in the world will dare to attack any nation. Weaponization must be restrained. War crimes must be punished.”

With a Ukraine delegation including Zelensky’s wife and foreign minister joining him in the assembly hall, and Russia represented by its deputy ambassador to the U.N., Zelensky made it clear that he didn’t believe promises would be enough to reassure Ukraine. “Evil cannot be trusted,” he said. “Ask [dead mercenary boss Yevgeny] Prigozhin if one bets on Putin’s promises.”

Putin is already facing charges in the International Criminal Court for the alleged unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine. But an independent tribunal for the crime of aggression has been among Kyiv’s goals since the early days of the war, and its diplomats were circulating a draft resolution for the U.N. General Assembly’s consideration as early as last October. Ultimately, the proposal was left out of the resolution that was supported by 141 member states in February in order to persuade more countries to sign on. 

Polish President Andrzej Duda has been more explicit than many of Ukraine’s allies in his support for the idea. He told the U.N. General Assembly today, “we support the idea of establishing an ad hoc special tribunal.” Then, foreshadowing Zelensky, he added, “The crimes must be accounted for, and the perpetrators punished.”

But Zelensky may need to use all of his powers of persuasion to win over new converts to the idea in New York. “I’m not sure he’s going to find that the fence-sitters are very receptive to the idea of a tribunal,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group. Zelensky might be arriving in New York with a stronger hand, Gowan said, if Ukraine’s slow-moving counteroffensive were further along. “It’s a lot harder to get other U.N. members to sign up to that sort of plan when they’re still very skeptical about how things are going to turn out on the battlefield.”

Moscow and Kyiv are locked in a diplomatic tussle for the hearts and minds of some traditionally nonaligned countries. For example, the foreign ministers of both countries recently made swings through African countries that have abstained in U.N. General Assembly votes about Russia’s war in Ukraine. Thomas G. Weiss, a CUNY Graduate Center political science professor and a longtime U.N. watcher, finds it baffling that more than 40 countries can still be sitting on the General Assembly sidelines. 

“In rhetorical terms, the one thing they can usually agree on is that colonization was not a great idea,” he said. “And yet they do not condemn this blatant return to empire.”

Some U.N. diplomats have been making the explicit connection between Russian aggression potentially leading to a revival of expansionist wars in other theaters. Linda Thomas Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., recently told FP Live, “If Ukraine loses this war and Russia gets away with what they’re doing in Ukraine, it’s a signal to others in the world that they can do exactly the same thing.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said that his emphasis this week would be on revitalizing the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, which are 17 goals intended to reduce global poverty and inequality by 2030. They were set in 2015 and are way behind schedule. The secretary-general said that a political declaration of support could yield a “quantum leap in the response to the dramatic failures that we have witnessed until now.” 

But he was pessimistic about the outlook for making any progress toward peace in Ukraine during the U.N.’s big week. “I would love to have a chance to be able to mediate peace talks,” he said. “But I think we are far from that being possible.”

The secretary-general expressed somewhat more hope of reviving the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the U.N.’s only relative success since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022—that is, until Moscow walked away from the deal this summer. Guterres will meet this week with delegations from Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, the three countries involved in the now-collapsed deal to allow some grain shipments to ship safely from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. But the mood here isn’t too hopeful, and Gowan doubted that the deal would be revived with the U.N. at its center. He thought there might be a better chance of a tacit arrangement, with Turkey facilitating shipments and “the Russians turning a blind eye to at least some Ukrainian grain exports.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday that Russian attacks on Ukrainian grain infrastructure had destroyed some 280,000 tons of cereals, enough to feed millions.

The real sparks may fly on Wednesday, when both Zelensky and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are expected to speak to the U.N. Security Council. It’s been a little more than a year since Ukraine’s president challenged the council during a video appearance to either remove Russia so that it couldn’t veto decisions about its own aggression, or to “dissolve yourselves altogether.”

Wednesday’s session on Ukraine will feature plenty of speakers, but likely little real progress on the issues that matter most. “The geopolitical situation may be the most complicated since the founding of the U.N. Charter after the Second World War,” said a senior diplomat, who preferred not to give a name in order to speak freely, last week. “We are in a different era since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, which is the worst breach of the charter since it was adopted.”

Zelensky may find it challenging to get the fence-sitters to pick a side, let alone convince Russia to forswear its aggressive war. His representatives at the U.N., though, have been doggedly trying to prepare the ground. Last week, at a screening of the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, about Russia’s relentless siege of the Ukrainian port city last year, Ukraineian U.N. Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya said, “I wish the entire Russian mission were here to watch this film.”