俄乌战争：打破联合国骆驼背的最后一场危机？（英）

SPECIAL© 2022 Observer Research Foundation. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, archived, retained or transmitted through print, speech or electronic media without prior written approval from ORF.The Russia-Ukraine War: The Last Crisis to Break the UN Camel’s Back?Lakshmi M Purino. 190M A Y 2 0 2 22The United Nations (UN) has recently been plagued by several crises—the COVID-19 pandemic, the Taliban’s return in Afghanistan, and the Ukraine war—that have tested its ability to deliver on humanity’s projects of peace and security, sustainable development, human rights, and humanitarian response. Indeed, its actions and inactions in the Ukraine war have triggered an existential dilemma. India must use this moment of creative destruction in the world order to push for the reinvention of the intergovernmental organisation into a more democratic, impartial, and technically excellent ‘UN 2.0’. AbstractAttribution: Lakshmi M Puri, “The Russia-Ukraine War: The Last Crisis to Break the UN Camel’s Back?,” ORF Special Report No. 190, May 2022, Observer Research Foundation. 3global organisation like the United Nations (UN) reflects the seminal challenges and achievements of its times. In 2020, on the organisation’s 75th anniversary, UN Secretary-General António Guterres identified some of the challenges and achievements that currently confront the organisation. Averring that the world had a surplus of multilateral challenges and a deficit of multilateral solutions, he regretted that the UN lacked scale, ambition, and teeth. He noted that institutions with authority, such as the UN Security Council (UNSC), do not have the appetite to bite, indicating a lack of political will and unity of purpose among the member states. Additionally, he urged the member states to strive to preserve the great achievement of having gone so many years without a nuclear conflict or a military confrontation between the major powers.1 As it attempted to recover from the systemic hammer blows caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the lightning takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the end of the much-vaunted ‘War on Terror’ in August 2021 left the UN picking up the pieces of human rights and humanitarian crisis. Now, the ongoing Ukraine war—the first real European conflict since the Second World War that has put the major Western powers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia on the path of direct confrontation—is proving to be a new litmus test for the UN. As an organisation created after the Second World War by the victors and charged with the task “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,”2 will this be the crisis that breaks the proverbial camel’s back? IntroductionA4The UN is a little more than the sum of its member-states’ volition and power dynamics, especially of the ones that matter most—the largest budget contributors and the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC; the US, the UK, and France are th