Russia is one of five countries with veto power in the United Nations Security Council.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
The UN deputy secretary-general has told CNBC that there will be “lessons learned” from the war in Ukraine.
Speaking on Wednesday after the UN’s announcement”2022 Sustainability Report Funding“ Amina Mohammed said the Russia-Ukraine crisis was “a huge shock to the system.”
Asked if the world could do more to prevent war before it started, Mohammed said “the hindsight is a 20-20 vision.”
“Of course, there are things we should have done to prevent war, but perhaps that will be the lesson learned again, when the Security Council, the General Assembly leaders will look back and say, ‘what have we done, and make sure we prevent the next war, the next pandemic’. This is all we’re learning. I think history tells us that. we’re not good learners when it comes to that,” she said.
“I think this is unthinkable, unthinkable that we’re going to have a war like this in Europe, you know, 75 years later, I think that’s a huge shock to the system. So I hope that the learnings will find a way to make us more accountable for the inclusion of checks and balances so that this never happens again and we are working hard towards peace.”
Mohammed, who previously served as Nigeria’s Minister of the Environment, is also the chair of the Global Crisis Response Team for Food, Energy and Finance, set up by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to review the collaboration. broader impact of the Ukraine war on “the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Trip to Moscow
Mr. Guterres traveled to Moscow this week to meet President Vladimir Putin for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine. He also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday in Kyiv. Russia is one of five countries with veto power in the United Nations Security Council.
Guterres has agreed with Putin on an evacuation route from the besieged city of Mariupol, but his trip comes amid criticism that the UN Security Council has played only a limited role in the crisis. Russian-Ukrainian crisis.
Real, Zelenskyy called for reform in a fiery speech to the Council in April. Mohammed said this is an issue that Security Council member states have been struggling with “for a very long time”.
“And I think they’re going to continue to work on that, and there are conversations and decisions that will be made to see how one can do better than what we can do and come up with the controls.” check and balance to protect [U.N.] Regulations. That is the most important thing. The Charter promises people that we will not see a war again like we did in World War II,” she said.
Mohammed became the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations in 2017 and is reappointed in January 2022.
When asked how she thinks an organization like the United Nations is relevant to today’s world, she said she understands the outside frustration with it.
“If we don’t have the UN today, we’ll have to recreate it tomorrow. It’s the global town for our global village. We’re so interconnected today that it will. unchanged,” she said.
“And we needed a space where we could come in and we could talk about our issues, our human rights, our growth, our conflicts, and you know, some days we’re going to have a big voice and some days it’s not very big. Some days we’ll move, some days we won’t, but the most vulnerable countries need this space.”
‘Major financial split’
Mohammed, who is also the chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, recently presented the “Sustainable Development Financing Report 2022” – a joint effort from Financial Interagency Task Force on Development, including more than sixty United Nations Agencies and international organisations.
The report highlights a “major financial divide” after the pandemic, with poorer countries unable to raise enough capital or borrow enough to invest, leaving them unable to invest in sustainable development or response. with crisis.
“We are facing countless crises, climates, pandemics, and now wars in Ukraine, and the financial part of this is really just to demonstrate that today the recommendations of these How the past year was even more necessary. And friend Mohammed said: ‘It will be found that some of these recommendations speak to the landscape around the financial divide that we see in the world today.
“A lot of the recommendations are about access to finance, about better tax systems, about tackling illicit financial flows, but also about growing debt awareness and growing crises. worse than it.”
Mohammed initially joined the United Nations in 2012 as a special adviser to former Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and led the process of setting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and formulating the Development Goals. Sustainable Development.
She said she was “extremely worried” about the current global financial situation and “there is not enough recognition that the urgency and scale of the investments that need to be made right now, will be happen.”
