Business as Usual

Ukrainian President Zelensky spoke to the United Nations Security Council today, and from what I understand from what I've read, basically told them to either change the rules of how they operate, or pack it in.

Grandstanding, even when people agree with one's cause, is still grandstanding. The United Nations is incapable of holding the major powers of the world, and those they choose to shield, accountable, because that was a primary condition of it existing in the first place. Smaller nations could be forced to surrender some sovereignty to an international body; the major international players could not, and without them, their would be no effective United Nations in the first place. And so the decision was made that half a loaf was better than none, and the relatively toothless and ineffective body we have today was created.

Because this is the nature of accountability. Accountability always requires power to enforce it, and there is always a source of that power that is, therefore, more or less above accountability when it chooses to be so. The exact nature of how this works varies depending on the circumstances, but it's a nearly invariable constant.

I've always been of the opinion that sanctions are, generally speaking, somewhere between shouting "Stop! Or I'll shout 'Stop!' again" and a way of pressuring smaller nations that aren't in a position to really be either independent of global trade or severely impact it by their absence. The Russian government is not a position that it is forced to care what the rest of the world thinks of it. Once the threat of force to maintain the status quo was off the table, it seems likely that President Putin and his advisors felt that once they could change the facts on the ground (a.k.a., the borders and/or government of Ukraine) that the rest of the world would learn to live with the fait accompli. While the war doesn't seem to be going as well as the Russian government (and a lot of other people, for that matter) thought that it would, the fact remains that it's highly unlikely that the war ends before the Kremlin decides that it will end.

And it's likely that when the initial plan for the United Nations was drawn up, that the authors of that document understood that there would be days like this. They may have even intended it to be the case. Such is the nature of compromise, and the United Nations is a creation of compromise. President Zelensky can attempt to shame member nations with that understanding all he wants, but if such a tactic were viable, it likely wouldn't have been needed in the first place.