One of the questions long-time watchers of the United Nations like myself kept asking as the Ukraine crisis unfolded was what the UN Secretary-General, the able former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres, was doing. When the Americans were crying themselves hoarse about an imminent invasion for weeks before it actually happened, did the Secretary-General seek to use his “good offices” to resolve the crisis? Did he send an emissary to Moscow to find out its intentions and understand its irreducible demands, then have the same person try in Kyiv to get Ukraine to agree to the terms of a compromise?
Hardly inspiring
While such efforts do not necessarily have to be public, there was no evidence of any “shuttle diplomacy” conducted by the UN Secretary-General. Indeed, there seems to have been no high UN official sent in the couple of months preceding the Russian invasion to either capital, nor even to Washington DC or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels. Unlike the legendary U Thant, who intervened between Moscow and Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (albeit through telegrams rather than travel), Secretary-General Guterres seems to have limited himself to earnest exhortations to Russia to observe the peace it had already violated when he spoke. The implication that when a Permanent Member is a belligerent, the UN is reduced to helplessness, is inaccurate. The Secretary-General can act. In 1998, when the United States was about to bomb Iraq, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan unilaterally undertook a trip to Baghdad (I was with him) to stave off the resort to war.
