The United States has joined Russia, Israel, Belarus and North Korea in refusing to blame Vladimir Putin for illegally invading Ukraine.
The UN General Assembly approved a Kyiv-backed resolution condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine this evening, with 93 countries voting in favor and 18 against.
Every EU country except Hungary backed the proposal, while 64 countries including China abstained on the vote.
Kyiv’s three-page resolution demanded Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine immediately and for Moscow to be held accountable for war crimes.
It claimed the ongoing invasion had ‘persisted for three years and continues to have devastating and long-lasting consequences not only for Ukraine, but also for other regions and global stability.’
But the resolution was rejected by the US, who lodged their own counter-proposal which called for an end to the three-year-long war while refusing to acknowledge Russia as the aggressor in the conflict.
The US proposal also received 93 votes in its favour after EU amendments changed the wording to condemn Russia. The US later abstained on the vote while Russia voted against it.
The drama comes just days after Donald Trump launched a scathing personal attack on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him a ‘dictator’ and falsely claiming that Ukraine had started the war.
Trump later walked back some of his rhetoric and conceded that ‘Russia attacked, but they shouldn’t have let him attack,’ while continuing to call for Zelensky to step down.
Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Mariana Betsa said her country is exercising its ‘inherent right to self-defense’ following Russia’s invasion, which violates the UN Charter’s requirement that countries respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other nations.
‘As we mark three years of this devastation — Russia’s full invasion against Ukraine — we call on all nations to stand firm and to take … the side of the Charter, the side of humanity and the side of just and lasting peace, peace through strength,’ she said.
US deputy ambassador Dorothy Shea, meanwhile, said multiple previous UN resolutions condemning Russia and demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops ‘have failed to stop the war,’ which ‘has now dragged on for far too long and at far too terrible a cost to the people in Ukraine and Russia and beyond.’
‘What we need is a resolution marking the commitment from all UN member states to bring a durable end to the war,’ Shea said.
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