Dmytro Kuleba made the announcement in a Facebook post on Monday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Kuleba wrote, as quoted by PAP: “Russia has usurped the place of the Soviet Union in the UNSC. We have made an important step today. Ukraine has initiated a process designed to expel Russia from the UNSC and the UN itself."
He said that Ukraine had officially explained why it regards Russia’s presence in UNSC and the UN in general as illegal.
According to the government in Kyiv, “31 years ago, the Russian delegation in fact started to occupy the Soviet Union’s place in the UNSC,” Kuleba added.
He stated: “Russia has no statutory grounds for this ... It has violated the statute by … simply substituting the nameplate that says ‘The Soviet Union’ with one that says ‘The Russian Federation.’”
According to the Ukrainian foreign minister, Russia’s entry to the UN took place in violation of "paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the UN Charter," which sets out the procedure for admitting new countries to the organisation, the PAP news agency reported.
Ukraine calls for Russia’s expulsion from UN
Meanwhile, in a separate statement issued on Monday, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said that “in December 1991, the appeal of the Russian Federation regarding the intention to continue the membership of the USSR in the UN had to be properly considered by the Security Council and the General Assembly in accordance with Article 4 of the UN Charter.”
It added that “this was the legitimate path taken, inter alia, by the newly formed UN member states Czech Republic and Slovakia after the UN member state called ‘Czechoslovakia’ ceased to exist.”
The Ukrainian foreign ministry went on to state: “Ukraine calls on the member states of the UN to resume the application of the UN Charter in the context of the legitimacy of the Russian Federation's presence in the UN, to deprive the Russian Federation of its status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and to exclude it from the UN as a whole.”
Tuesday is day 307 of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, facebook.com, mfa.gov.ua