Starting Saturday, the Russian Federation will be president of the UN Security Council for a month. He gets leadership according to the rules: leadership rotates among fifteen members. Even the war in Ukraine has changed nothing, wrote the British daily Guard.

“Russia’s presidency on the UN Security Council on April 1st is probably a bad joke. Russia seized the place, fomented a colonial war, its leader a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court for kidnapping children. The world cannot be a safe place when Russia are on the Council,” wrote Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba twitter.

The last time Russia held the presidency was in February last year, just as President Vladimir Putin ordered the launch of a “special military operation”. Fourteen months later, tens of thousands of people are left alive as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During that time, Russian forces targeted the city’s infrastructure, and Putin was accused by the International Criminal Court in The Hague of mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

Under these circumstances, putting Russia at the head of an organization supposed to “maintain international peace and security” might seem like a cruel April Fool’s joke, notes The Guardian.

“Since April 1, they have reached a new level of absurdity,” said Serhiy Kyslycja, Ukraine’s representative to the Council. “The Security Council, as it is understood, is paralyzed and incapable of responding to the matters for which it is primarily responsible, namely preventing conflicts and then resolving them.”

Ukraine will no longer participate in the talks in April, except for “matters of vital national security interest.” While the embattled country is not currently a member of the body, Kyiv representatives frequently appear before the council to comment on war-related issues.

No member state has yet publicly decided to boycott the Russia-led negotiations. Nevertheless, it is expected that, for example, France, Great Britain or the US will show their disapproval of the current situation by reducing the diplomatic level of their representatives.

But diplomats at United Nations headquarters in New York pointed out that most of the Council’s meetings in April, like every other month, were filled with regular meetings and reports on UN peacekeeping missions around the world.

“It is important to protect the remaining work of the Council on other documents,” a European diplomat told a British newspaper. “We don’t want to disrupt the work the Council is doing elsewhere, because a Russian invasion will have a much broader impact on issues of peace and security around the world.”

Thomas Graham, a senior official at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American nonprofit, agrees. Which is for servers Euronews said that the importance of this position should not be overstated.

“The president of the board basically presides over the meetings and does a lot of the administrative work, but has very little power to influence the actual decisions that the council makes,” he said.

The Presidency of the Council gives the country the power to hold its own meetings, and Russia plans three. On April 10, he will hold a briefing on “risks arising from violations of treaties governing the export of arms and military equipment”, where he appears to intend to talk about US supplies to Ukraine and other countries in recent years.

At the end of the month, Moscow representatives will preside over two public debates on “effective multilateralism” and the situation in the Middle East. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov should direct these negotiations.

“Another significant event of the Russian presidency was the Security Council’s high-level public debate on effective multilateralism through defense of the principles of the UN Charter. The meeting will be chaired by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov,” said Russian diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

The last time a permanent Council member staged an unprovoked invasion was the US attack on Iraq. As The Guardian points out, the United States has not suffered repeated humiliation in the form of crushing defeats in the UN General Assembly vote.

About 140 of the 193 UN member states have repeatedly voted against Moscow in the past year. Only isolated countries such as Belarus, Eritrea, Syria and North Korea remain Russia’s only reliable allies (more details here).

Russia’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, denied that he felt like an outcast at the UN. “After all. We feel that the West is now behind the UN, because more and more countries understand our position,” said Polyansky. He added that the arrest warrant for Putin was “absolutely irrelevant to our activities.” The last time the Russian leader visited the UN headquarters was in 2015.

In the Security Council, the balance of diplomatic powers is less clear than in the General Assembly. Disputes between the five permanent members (US, UK, France, Russia, China) deepen. China regularly repeats Russia’s position on the Council.

The ten non-permanent members are elected by the General Assembly for a term of two years. Of the current group, Mozambique, the United Arab Emirates, and Gabon have remained generally neutral on the question of an invasion of Ukraine.

Polyansky said that Russia was starting to get closer to Brazil, which also entered this year’s Council. According to him, the so-called BRICS group, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and the Republic of South Africa, is coming together and another 20 countries reportedly want to join.

Richard Gowan, director of the UN’s International Crisis Group, said Brazil, under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “is making efforts to engage with Russia and position itself as a potential peacemaker in Ukraine.”

“I don’t think Russia has many close allies on the Council, but a lot of Council members really want to avoid getting involved in big power games,” Gowan told The Guardian. “There is a certain feeling that some members want to turn their attention to other crises than Ukraine, where the UN could do more.”

Graham assured that even the presidency would not bring Russia much benefit. “All members still have the right to speak at Council meetings and you can be absolutely sure that the US and European countries are not going to have anything positive to say about Russia and what it is doing in Ukraine or perhaps anywhere else in the world for that matter. “

“If Russia tries to get a speaker on the Council that the US and other countries deem inappropriate, there is a way they can, in procedural matters, with only nine votes, prevent Russia from doing some of the things it might want to do,” he added to Euronews.

No Security Council meeting on Ukraine is scheduled for April, but nine members can choose to put it on the agenda, or members can hold an informal meeting on the topic. The glaring deadlock in the Council and paralysis on the Ukraine issue have increased the importance of the General Assembly. However, few expected that the functioning of the Council would be reformed in any way.

However, the American representative at the United Nations, Linda Thomasová-Greenfieldová, was also against the impending situation. In his opinion, Russia should not become the chair state “because of what it did in Ukraine.” But the UN Charter “does not allow a change in the status of a permanent member,” he added to Euronews.

Instead, the Kyslycja scenario is threatening: everyone will get used to this new level of global hypocrisy. “It would be embarrassing,” added the Ukrainian diplomat.