Amid high-flown pledges to forge “a new beginning in multilateralism” and empower the United Nations to “deliver a better future for people and planet”, the bumpy passage of the organisation’s so-called pact for the future delivered a sobering reminder of its current travails.
After months of negotiations to ensure the pact was smoothly approved by consensus among the UN’s 193 member states, Russia tried to derail it in a move that would have soured last weekend’s “summit for the future” and hopes of injecting some optimism into this week’s high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.
“No one is happy with this pact,” Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Vershinin told the summit, as he proposed a last-minute amendment and called for adoption of the pact to be postponed.
He was probably right that no country was entirely happy with the whole 42-page document, each of its 56 broad commitments and all its language on issues spanning climate change, artificial intelligence, reproductive rights and arms control.
But as it turned out, only six other states – Iran, Belarus, Syria, Nicaragua, Sudan and North Korea – were unhappy enough with the pact to back Russia’s bid to stop it.
The Republic of Congo, speaking for 54 African states, tabled a motion to shelve Russia’s amendment; 143 nations supported that move and the pact was approved.
It was a rare and embarrassing diplomatic misstep by Russia at the UN, where it positions itself as a principled defender of the “Global South” – the same developing countries that threw out its attempt to block the pact for the future.
In trying to play spoiler with a treaty that bolsters sustainable-development and climate-change goals, Russia overestimated its influence with the Global South and showed that its main aim in much UN business is to attack anything that it can frame as a ploy by the US-led West to dominate world affairs and meddle with sovereign states.
Vershinin said the content of the pact had been “dictated ... mainly by western countries” in a process that had “cynically sacrificed” the UN charter “to one group of countries whose interests had been carefully safeguarded for all these months”.
“Never before have we witnessed such despotism on the UN platform,” he claimed, calling for changes to the pact that would defend the “principle of non-interference in matters within domestic jurisdiction of a state.”
“The amendment is not about ignoring the aspirations of the Global South but, on the contrary, about protecting them from the future pressure by the collective West,” Vershinin argued.
After states of the Global South resoundingly quashed Moscow’s gambit, they were derided as a cowardly “herd” by Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, who said his country distanced itself from consensus on the pact.
“The UN trampled on its own principles to please a group of delegations from the ‘beautiful garden’ that usurped negotiations from the outset,” he said on social media.
“And the majority from the ‘jungle’, like a herd, simply didn’t have the guts to protest and stand for their rights. And it will be the one which will bear the consequences.”
From the corridors of the UN to the battlefields of Ukraine, Russia portrays itself as bravely trying to hold back the forces of a venal and aggressive “collective West”.
In diplomacy Russia wants to see Africa, Latin America and India win representation on an expanded UN Security Council, but not any western states or their allies around the world, and not at the expense of the Kremlin’s veto.
“Developing countries are underrepresented in the Security Council, so ... we support India and Brazil’s interest and legitimate aspiration to be included in the Security Council,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said this week.
“It is also necessary to satisfy African hopes. There are shared collective positions in Africa which we respect,” he added. “The Security Council does not need any additional members from the western group ... Additional western players joining the Security Council ... such as Germany and Japan, will simply expand and bolster injustice.”
In security matters, Russia wants the UN to play a stronger role in constraining US allies such as Israel, but refrain from trying to end the war in Ukraine, documenting Russian atrocities through its human rights bodies, and discussing nuclear disarmament.
In finance, Moscow broadly supports Global South states in seeking debt relief and reform of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, western-dominated institutions that Russia says the US uses to subdue and manipulate poorer countries; the Kremlin also hopes that weakening the so-called Breton Woods institutions would erode the US dollar’s global influence and boost trade in other currencies such as the Chinese yuan.
“I remember perfectly well how in the 1990s, US emissaries at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were repeating like a mantra not to be afraid of the dollar,” Lavrov said.
“Where is all of this now? Now [many countries] are either running away from the dollar or those who got too deeply involved in that system are trying to gradually reduce their dependency.”
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