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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

> Russia didn’t gain military power to invade Ukraine from UN, it is in UN because it already possessed the military power.

Russia has no real military power, as the last 7 months have shown us. It was not even a founding member of the UN Security Council – the Soviet Union, a real world superpower, was.

> Now, you can say that UN failed to prevent the invasion and do its job, but expelling Russia means you’re left with no forum for dialogs and negotiations.

That's exactly my point: the UN failed to prevent the invasion, because the invading country had a veto right in all of its decisions.

Any dialogs or negotiations with Russia are an illusion of naive Western powers who don't understand how Russia really works: it doesn't care about or respect any international agreements it signs.

Source: I was born in the Soviet Union.

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> it doesn't care about or respect any international agreements it signs.

If it doesn't really care then I don't see how it's a failure of the UN.

The UN only works if its members are willing to allow it to work, the only power that the UN has is derived from the willingness of its members to cooperate.

It's a forum for discussion not the solution for everything bad in the world.

If Russia wasn't a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UN Security Council could have made decisions that prevented the invasion of Ukraine without any agreement from Russia.

What's the concept of the security council? Russia loses a war to Ukraine so it loses it's seat? Does it go to Ukraine? Or maybe it should go to Afghanistan because of the failed Soviet invasion.

The seat doesn't belong to Afghanistan nor to Russia, but to the USSR. Ukraine was as much a member state of the USSR as Russia. If the UN decides that Ukraine is a more legitimate representative of the USSR than Russia is, it can decide to let Ukraine fill the seat.

The seat obviously does belong to the Russian federation, as they have been sending representatives for thirty years and the other members have always recognized that representative.

Well, Taiwan also had a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, had been sending its representatives for more than 20 years, and other members had no objections. But one day that seat was taken away from them and given to China.

There was always objections since inception. ROC tried to exclude PRC from any UN representation (how turntables have turned), USSR protested exclusion of PRC in the 50s, host of "third world" PRC friendly nations petitioned for ROC to be replaced by PRC in the 60s. Was succession in 71 (76 for, 35 against, 17 abstain). Seeing how global south is indifferent about RU's invasion of UKR, doubtful there's going to be coordination to form plurarily bloc to vote RU out even if that's technically possible.

That's the thing: it does not. It literally, explicitly belongs to the USSR. Russia has been allowed to fill the seat by agreement. The article points out that that agreement could change, and gives an example where that has happened before.

>Russia has no real military power<

Russia has plenty of military power, it is just that Russia may not be able to handle its own military power.

The idea that Ukraine can resist the fully mobilized Russian Federation - military and industry is plain silly.

The reason that this has not happened so far is because the people at the top fear that putting the entire country on war footing will result in internal instability will be the end of those people.

The upcoming annexation may change all that.

> Russia has plenty of military power, it is just that Russia may not be able to handle its own military power.

For instance, like loosing more than 70% of all its tanks since the beginning of invasion[1]?

> The idea that Ukraine can resist the fully mobilized Russian Federation - military and industry is plain silly.

The idea that amateurs with zero military training could achieve more than 235,000 killed or wounded professional Russian soldiers achieved in the last 7 months sounds pretty unbelievable to me.

[1] https://www.minusrus.com/en

Unbelievable indeed, you may be interested in the numbers published by the Ukranian MoD:

https://www.mil.gov.ua/en/news/2022/09/29/the-total-combat-l...

The numbers are exactly the same – only the number of wounded Russian soldiers (175,740) is missing in your source.

(Maybe because Ukraine's Ministry of Defence is only counting complete "liquidations".)

>For instance, like loosing more than 70% of all its tanks since the beginning of invasion[1]?

According to the government it's at war against.

For the US this is the equivalent of listening to Baghdad Bob.

According to independent visual analysis Russia have lost roughly 1100 tanks, about half of Ukraines claims.

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

That’s still a huge amount of tanks to lose in 8 months. It’s no wonder they are cracking out the T62s already.

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