Resolutions on the Ukraine war: Trump and Putin join forces at the UN
British UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward told the Council that there should be no equation between Russia and Ukraine. "If we want to find a path to sustainable peace, the Council must be clear about the origins of the war," she said. It is important to convey the message that aggression does not pay. On Thursday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will travel to Washington for talks with Donald Trump.
The UN General Assembly had previously passed two different, non-binding resolutions. The first, introduced by Ukraine, demanded the territorial integrity of Ukraine and condemned the Russian war of aggression. 93 states voted in favor - significantly fewer than in previous years. 18 states, including the USA, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, Hungary, Israel, Niger and Sudan, voted against, 65 abstained.
The United States abstained from voting on another draft resolution, which it had originally introduced itself, but which, at the initiative of the European Union, had also been supplemented with demands for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. This draft also received a majority of 93 votes.
Ultimately, the US always voted with Russia on the anniversary of the invasion - a first, but one that was hardly surprising after the obvious twists and turns that the Trump administration had made clear around the Munich Security Conference . On the Russian side, however, the US position was met with great praise: the US stance was to be assessed as balanced and positive. The Russian UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzia spoke of "constructive changes" in the US position. Nebenzia said in the UN Security Council that the resolution was "not ideal" but "a starting point for future efforts to find a peaceful solution".
On the same day in Washington DC, French President Emmanuel Macron was received by US President Donald Trump - and both tried to make the deep rifts between the European and US positions appear as less dramatic as possible. "Our focus is to achieve a ceasefire and ultimately lasting peace as quickly as possible. My meeting with President Macron was a very important step forward," Trump said during a joint press conference on Monday in the White House.
Macron had previously signaled Europe's willingness to secure a possible ceasefire with European troops. Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to this, Trump later explained, and had spoken to him specifically about it.
However, the Kremlin immediately denied this: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred to the position of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an interview with the state-run Russian news agency Tass - who had described the presence of peacekeepers from NATO countries as unacceptable last week. His deputy Alexander Grushko called such a deployment a step of escalation.
Moscow and Washington said that the European states would initially not be involved in the US-Russian talks announced as the next step. They wanted to build trust - and at some point the Europeans would be included.
Meanwhile, pressure from the USA is growing on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi to sign a contract that would give the USA access to a large part of Ukraine's natural resources as compensation for the aid it has provided. Trump puts the US aid provided at over 300 billion US dollars - official figures are much lower. When Trump announced in Macron's presence that the Europeans had only given all the aid in the form of loans, Macron, despite his desire for harmony, felt compelled to tell the president that this was not true.
Meanwhile, a debate has broken out in the European Union about how to deal with the 200 to 300 billion US dollars of Russian assets frozen in Europe. While some states are in favor of confiscating the assets directly and paying them directly to Ukraine - a step that is also legally controversial - the larger EU countries France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are against it. They argue that the EU needs access to the funds as a bargaining chip with Russia if it is to sit at the table.
Until now, it had often been assumed that the frozen Russian assets would be used to rebuild Ukraine after the war. According to a recent study by the World Bank and others, the cost of this is estimated at around 506 billion euros.
taz
