The United Nations General Assembly adopted a draft resolution by a majority of votes at its special session on Monday to create a mechanism for providing reparations in favor of Ukraine, Interfax reports.
The draft resolution was supported by 94 states, 13 voted against it, including Russia, China, Belarus, and Cuba, and another 74 countries abstained, among them the United Arab Emirates, Serbia, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Brazil, and Armenia.
It is a non-binding document. In particular, it recommends that the assembly's member countries create a register to record damage caused to Ukraine during hostilities.
Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya, for his part, said that the draft resolution "is unable to withstand any judicial criticism", calling it "an attempt to legalize something that cannot be legalized from the point of view of existing international law."
"We have no doubt as regards the source from which money will be taken for the so-called restitution of damage. The West is making every effort to give at least some appearance of legitimacy to its actions in order to start spending the sovereign assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars that have been frozen, but, as a matter of fact, have been stolen from the Russian Federation. They have wanted for a very long time to unfreeze them, but not in order to return them to their rightful owner, not in order to spend them on assistance for Ukraine, but in order to finance their permanently growing deliveries of weapons to Kiev and the repayment of its debt for the weapons that have already been supplied," Nebenzya said.
By this vote at the UN General Assembly, Western countries want to create "a screen for this overt robbery", the Russian permanent representative said, adding that neither any mechanisms nor the UN General Assembly can annul the sovereign immunity that state assets possess in accordance with international law.
"Thus, the West wants to draw out and to further worsen the conflict and plans to use Russian money for it. It needs this decision of the [UN] General Assembly as a screen for this overt robbery. Such a scenario will only lead to an escalation of tensions and instability across the world. At the same time, the beneficiaries will be Western military corporations, which have already earned billions of dollars by delivering weapons to Ukraine," Nebenzya said.
