JAKARTA - The 193-member UN General Assembly began holding meetings on the crisis in Ukraine on Monday, ahead of a vote this week to isolate Russia by deploying its "aggression against Ukraine", demanding Moscow's forces stop fighting and withdraw.
The General Assembly will vote this week on a draft resolution, which is similar to the text Russia vetoed in the 15-member Security Council on Friday. No country has veto power in the General Assembly and Western diplomats expect the resolution, which requires two-thirds of the support, to be adopted.
While General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, they carry political weight. The United States and its allies see the move at the United Nations as an opportunity to show that Russia is isolated because of its invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
The draft resolution already has at least 80 co-sponsors, diplomats said Monday. More than 100 countries will speak before the General Assembly votes.
French Ambassador to the United Nations, Nicolas de Riviere said: "No one can take their eyes off them, abstaining is not an option."
Meanwhile, ceasefire talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials failed to make a breakthrough on Monday.
UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said he hoped the talks would "result in not only an immediate cessation of fighting but also a path towards a diplomatic solution."
He described Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision on Sunday to put Russia's nuclear deterrent on high alert as a "terrible development", telling the General Assembly that a nuclear conflict was "inconceivable."
Guterres also warned of the conflict's impact on civilians, saying it could be Europe's worst humanitarian and refugee crisis in decades.
"Although Russian strikes were reported to have mostly targeted Ukrainian military facilities, we have credible reports of residential buildings, critical civilian infrastructure, and other non-military targets sustaining severe damage", he said.
Separately, Ukraine's UN Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya described President Putin's order to put Russia's nuclear forces on alert as "insane."
"If he wants to kill himself, he doesn't have to use nuclear weapons, he has to do what people in Berlin did in a bunker in 1945", Kyslytsya retorted to the General Assembly, referring to Adolf Hitler's suicide.
Russia's UN Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said Russia's actions in Ukraine were being "distorted." He told the General Assembly: "Russian soldiers do not pose a threat to Ukrainian civilians, do not open fire on civilian areas."
To note, Russia has called its actions in Ukraine a 'special operation' which it says is not designed to occupy territory, but to destroy the military capabilities of its southern neighbor and capture what it considers dangerous nationalists.
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Yesterday, UN aid chief Martin Griffiths briefed the UN Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine. France has said it plans to submit a draft council resolution on access to aid and protection of civilians.
"The scale of civilian casualties and the damage to civilian infrastructure, even in these early days, is alarming. Civilian children, women, and men have been injured and killed", Griffiths told the council.
Meanwhile, UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said his agency plans to host up to 4 million refugees in the coming days and weeks.
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