Another meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry took place yesterday in New York. It was their first meeting since Moscow’s official statement on carrying out air attacks on positions of the terrorists of Islamic State in Syria, and the third meeting on the platform of the current session of the UN General Assembly.
Such meetings make us think that it is too early to speak about the UN’s death.
Vladimir Lepekhin, a Zinoviev Club member, says that the UN has two functions: “The first function is a consolidation of the status quo after the Second World War. The second function combines all the states in dealing with the world’s issues. Regarding the second function, the organization is not effective. As for the first function, there are three stages: past, present and future projections.”
In the past, the USSR, as a counterweight, was represented there with its own position in the UN, that’s why there was no place for wars. Once this power, the Soviet Union, disappeared, conflicts began to appear, the expert said.
According to him, the 1990s was the second phase – “the stage of stagnation, conflicts inside the UN, a war of everyone against everyone." “The UN could not play its role, simply because there was a force with its own interests that was taking advantage of all of these conflicts, there was also a second force, which did not interfere in anything, and continues to engage with its internal problems, this is China, and gradually, the Soviet Union, which left or at Yeltsin’s call merged its functions. So the second stage was over,” Lepekhin is sure.
He believes that the third stage has started today: “Russia returns as a force, which says it has its own position. This means the UN is returning to those functions for which it was created, for which it was originally incorporated. So it turns out that no reform is now necessary for the United Nations, but it is necessary to understand that a force has emerged that is restoring the UN to its original function, which it has not been performing in the right mode for 20 years, simply because the most important element in the UN has left, and now it is revived.”
Lepekhin thinks that Russia is becoming a guarantor of those functions, or the provisions of the UN Charter, which exist in fact: “We should make the original function of the United Nations more efficient in terms of a more effective response to armed conflicts, we need to work in this direction.” The expert sets the CSTO as an example: “Nazarbayev took the initiative to strengthen the rapid reaction forces. The same is true for the United Nations, it is necessary to strengthen the contingent, grant some additional functions, and then, of course, the American, Russian and Chinese armed forces will have to fight more actively and effectively, for example, against terrorism.”
