UN General Assembly: – In the same room with the enemy

The crises are evident when world leaders meet this week to attend the seventy-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

There they will discuss, among other things, the consequences of climate change, the growing disparity between rich and poor, and solutions to wars – including Russia’s war of invasion against Ukraine.

The meeting lays the foundation for what will be on the global agenda for 2024.

As usual, there is great international interest surrounding the meeting.

However, there is very little excitement about what will happen when the Security Council meets to discuss on Wednesday.

Russia and Ukraine are on the agenda

The Security Council will meet, on Tuesday, in the well-known Horseshoe, under the oil painting by Per Krohge, to discuss threats to international peace and security.

It was Russia that requested this meeting, where, among other things, the issue of Western arms supplies to Ukraine will be addressed.

However, most of the tension is related to the open discussion on the Ukrainian war on Wednesday.

There, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are expected to sit in the same room.

Last year, the latter used his speaking time to claim that Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine have been disenfranchised for years. He also used the Nazis, fake coups, and fake referendums as arguments to justify the importance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After coming under heavy fire against the West, he left the meeting in a hurry.

– “It is very telling of the way Russia is behaving,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Sture told NTB after the meeting.

He also doesn’t have very high expectations this year.

– Last year, when there was a Security Council meeting on Ukraine, Lavrov arrived three minutes before his speech and left the room after he delivered it. So there was no reason for a direct meeting. He says: We will see how the situation will be this year.

-Just fasten your seat belts

The director of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Iver B. Neumann told Dagbladet that if the two sides wanted to start peace negotiations, there was a possibility that it would happen in some back-room meeting during the UN meeting.

He still believes that the possibility of this happening this time is small, because the situation appears at least as deadlocked as it was after the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March last year.

– It is not clear on the battlefield. With more clarification, I think it would be easier to get something done.

The big picture now is that Ukraine is trying to achieve a military breakthrough, to no avail. Russia believes that time is on its side, as there are fears that Trump will become president and that Ukraine will lose support.

He says that the Security Council meeting is important for the two countries for different reasons.

– Russia is waging an aggressive war that they want to explain. They want to build a bloc that challenges what they believe is the Western liberal world order.

Ukraine is the smaller and weaker party militarily, and will receive help from the West. The director explained that the United Nations would be a model interface for presenting their legitimate complaints about the way things are going.

The central issue is the question of winning the battle over reality. He explains that this is important in all wars.

It is believed that Zelensky will continue to argue that the ongoing war is a war of aggression, and remind the United Nations that the founding charter of the United Nations itself is to defend the country’s sovereignty.

– Will he ask for more weapons?

-He needs all the help he can get, so this might happen. It is at least certain that he will ask for support of various kinds.

Last year, Lavrov spent most of his speaking time attacking Ukraine. Newman believes the same could happen this year.

– It wouldn’t surprise me. Putin said that Zelensky is a Jew who glorifies Nazism and covers up for those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine, which is a rather crude claim, he says and continues:

– When President Lavrov can say something like this, there are no limits to what can come. Here it is only necessary to fasten your seat belts.

Peace talks in Oslo

In August, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he thanked Norway for its support and that he wanted to hold peace talks in Oslo.

The desire to hold the talks in Norway came after it became known that Jonas Gahr Sture confirmed that Norway would provide F-16 aircraft to Ukraine. Zelensky described the contribution as historic.

There is currently no formal meeting planned between the Ukrainian president and Storr during this week’s UN meeting, but the prime minister says he will meet his delegation.

No specific time has been set for any talks in Oslo.

– There is nothing new in this matter. “We’ll hear from them when we meet with them, and we’ll see what happens,” Storr says Monday.