Can Russia Be Expelled from the UN? — Essay by Dmytro Fialkovskyi

The Veto Mechanism as a Structural Barrier

UN membership is governed by the UN Charter, whose Article 6 provides for the expulsion of a member state in the event of systematic violations of the organization’s principles. The expulsion procedure has a critical limitation, however: the General Assembly may adopt such a decision only upon the recommendation of the Security Council. This means that any attempt to expel a state that is itself a permanent member of the Security Council runs into an insurmountable institutional barrier — the veto.

The veto is not an incidental technical rule; on the contrary, it was deliberately embedded by the founders of the UN in 1945 as a condition for the participation of the great powers in the organization. Without this guarantee, the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom simply would not have joined the collective security system. The veto was, at the time, a compromise enabling major actors to participate in the new collective security framework. That is precisely why reforming this mechanism is so difficult: any attempt to limit the veto is perceived by permanent members as an encroachment on the terms of their original participation in the organization.

Russia has already demonstrated its readiness to exercise this right in its own defense on multiple occasions. In February 2022 and February 2023, it vetoed Security Council resolutions condemning the aggression against Ukraine. The mechanism provided by the Charter for responding to violations of international law thus proves useless precisely when the violator is a permanent Council member — this is not a coincidence, but a structural flaw in the system.

Attempts to reform this system are equally doomed to failure within existing procedures. Any amendments to the UN Charter require ratification by all permanent members of the Security Council — including Russia itself. The vicious circle is obvious: the mechanism that needs reforming simultaneously prevents its own transformation. An additional factor is China’s position: it traditionally supports the principle of state sovereignty and effectively acts as Russia’s silent ally in blocking inconvenient decisions, fearing a precedent that could one day be applied against itself.

The Question of the Legitimacy of Russia’s Succession from the USSR

There is, however, a direction that remains outside the focus of most discussions and is the most promising — specifically, the question of the legitimacy of Russia’s very status as a permanent member of the Security Council. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation assumed the USSR’s seat at the UN without the formalized vote required by the Charter. In December 1991, President Yeltsin sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General notifying him that Russia was continuing the USSR’s membership, and this letter was simply noted — without any decision by the General Assembly or the Security Council. This contrasts sharply with the standard procedure for admitting new members, which requires a Council recommendation and an Assembly vote.

A legitimate question arises here: if Ukraine and Belarus were separate UN members as far back as 1945, why did Russia automatically inherit the permanent member’s seat on the Security Council? The legal basis for this is far weaker than is generally assumed. The approach was driven by the political expediency of the moment rather than by clear legal logic, and it left open the possibility of challenging this status.

Characteristically, the UN acted on a fundamentally different basis in other cases of succession. When China’s seat on the Security Council passed from Taiwan to the PRC in 1971, it was accompanied by a full vote of the General Assembly (Resolution 2758). When independent Bosnia and Herzegovina emerged in 1992, it went through the standard procedure for admission to the UN. Russia in 1991 went through neither of these procedures. This contrast is fundamental and demonstrates that the 1991 precedent was not a norm but an exception, dictated by geopolitical concern for stability at the moment of a nuclear superpower’s collapse.

Alternative Instruments of Influence

None of the alternative mechanisms is a full replacement for direct expulsion, and it is important to acknowledge this honestly. General Assembly resolutions carry no binding legal force. Challenging the succession is a lengthy and politically complex process. Restricting the right to vote meets resistance in the interpretation of the Charter. The cumulative effect of these instruments, however, lies not in solving the problem at a stroke, but in the gradual delegitimization and destabilization of Russia’s position — transforming it from a full guarantor of the international order into a violator who is merely tolerated because procedural constraints prevent removal. This effect can be described as cumulative: each new instrument would reinforce the previous one.

While the succession question remains the subject of a long-term political and legal struggle, more realistic instruments for short-term response also exist. One of them is the “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, known as General Assembly Resolution 377(V), first used during the Korean War in 1950. It allows the General Assembly to convene an emergency session and recommend collective measures in cases where the Security Council is blocked by a veto. This mechanism was invoked in March 2022, when 141 states voted for Resolution ES-11/1 condemning Russian aggression. While Assembly decisions carry no binding legal force, they build powerful political consensus and deprive Russia of the ability to present its position as acceptable to the international community.

Another instrument could be the restriction of Russia’s right to vote on matters in which it is a direct party to the conflict. Article 27(3) of the UN Charter stipulates that a state that is a party to a dispute must abstain from voting in the peaceful settlement of that dispute. Although this provision is interpreted narrowly and rarely applied in practice, consistently advancing it as a legal argument could undermine the legitimacy of Russia’s position in specific procedures.

Conclusion: A Two-Track Approach

Having analyzed the institutional structure of the UN, one can reach an unambiguous conclusion: the formal expulsion of the Russian Federation from the organization is practically unfeasible under existing international law. The key constraint remains the veto mechanism in the Security Council, which renders the Charter’s intended sanction instrument a fiction in cases where the violator is itself a permanent Council member.

At the same time, this does not mean there is no way forward. The most promising approach is a two-track one: in the long term, one avenue is the consistent challenging of the legitimacy of Russia’s succession from the USSR, which never received proper legal formalization; in the short term — maximum use of General Assembly mechanisms and the argument for restricting the voting rights of a party to the conflict. The problem lies not so much in a lack of political will among member states as in the structural features of the international governance system. Yet it is precisely these structural features that also point to its vulnerabilities — and that is where levers of influence are worth seeking.

A practical step that states can take right now is the formation of a coalition that officially challenges the legitimacy of Russia’s succession from the USSR by requesting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. Such an opinion will not be binding, but it will create a legal precedent and force the international community to publicly take a position on the matter. This step — transferring the debate from the political to the legal sphere — is precisely what is capable of changing the rules of the game in the long run.

This essay was submitted to the all-Ukrainian student essay competition #UnRussiaUN, organized by the Pylyp Orlyk Foundation.