Zelenskyy presents UN with strategy for ending war

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday presented what he called a peace formula to the United Nations General Assembly. In his speech, Zelenskyy thanked many world leaders for supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia. He also thanked the more than one hundred countries he said supported his plan for ending the war, which he said was based on a plan he first debuted in the fall 2022.

What’s in the Ukranian peace formula? Zelenskyy presented the following points to the United Nations Wednesday:

• Security must be restored at nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

• Russia must stop destroying Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

• Ukraine’s food security must be ensured.

• Russia must return all captured soldiers and forcibly deported civilians to Ukraine.

• Russia must respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

• The Kremlin must withdraw its soldiers from Ukrainian territory.

• The world must hold accountable all those who committed war crimes during the conflict.

• The war’s destruction of the environment and nature in Ukraine must end.

• Russia must not engage in a second or third phase of its invasion of Ukraine.

Did Zelenskyy say anything else to UN leaders? Zelenskyy told world leaders in a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday that Russia had violated the UN charter in a myriad of ways since it began the war in Ukraine. He warned that Russia would not stop the war on its own. The rest of the world needed to force it to stop the conflict, Zelenskyy said.

What has Russia had to say? Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov categorically denied that Moscow was violating the UN charter, according to Russia’s state-run news outlet TASS. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of using Ukraine as a proxy to provoke the war with Russia, according to an interview he did with TASS. Lavrov accused the United Nations of staying silent on Ukraine’s alleged attacks against civilians in the Kursk region of Russia and blamed it for whitewashing other crimes allegedly committed by Zelenskyy’s administration.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift about how the UN this week accused Russian authorities of routinely torturing prisoners and civilians in Ukraine.