Can Russia Be Expelled from the UN? — An Essay by Kateryna Opanasenko

I. Legal Grounds for Expulsion and Their Institutional Constraints

The mechanism for expelling a UN member state is set out in Article 6 of the Charter: the General Assembly may expel a member that has “persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter,” but only upon the recommendation of the Security Council. The grounds for applying this provision to Russia appear obvious: armed aggression against a sovereign state is a direct and egregious violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state. General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1 of March 2, 2022, supported by 141 states, explicitly characterized Russia’s actions in these terms — and this is not rhetoric but the official position of the majority of the organization’s members.

Yet this is precisely where the legal logic runs into a structural dead end. Article 27(3) of the Charter requires that Security Council decisions on non-procedural matters be adopted with the concurrence of the permanent members. Expulsion of a state is, beyond any doubt, a non-procedural matter. Russia therefore holds the right to veto its own expulsion. This is not a loophole or an oversight by the Charter’s authors — it was a deliberate architectural decision of 1945, reflecting the actual balance of power among the victors of World War II: the system was built to manage conflicts among great powers, not to punish one of them. The five permanent members received the veto precisely because without it they would never have signed the Charter.

Separately worth noting is a question that almost never surfaces in public debate: is Russia even the legitimate successor to the USSR’s seat on the Security Council? In 1991–1992, it “inherited” that seat automatically, without any vote in the General Assembly, in a process whose legal soundness remains a subject of serious academic discussion to this day. Article 23 of the Charter explicitly names the permanent member as “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” not its successor state. A number of scholars, including Gráinne de Búrca and Jean d’Aspremont, point out that this “silent” transfer of the seat lacked proper legal formalization and was based more on political agreement than on a legal norm. Yet this argument, however intellectually compelling, has a substantial practical flaw: no major power has an interest in a precedent that would destabilize the principle of succession in international organizations. It thus remains a powerful argument in doctrine, but an ineffective instrument in real-world diplomacy.

II. Structural Barriers to Implementing Article 6

Even if one imagines a hypothetical expulsion procedure without veto rights — a scenario sometimes discussed in academic circles as a theoretical construct — the real-world political obstacles prove equally insurmountable. As of 2024–2025, a significant portion of the so-called “Global South” — India, Brazil, South Africa, most African and Latin American countries — either abstained from unequivocal condemnation of Russia or openly maintained neutrality. China has consistently blocked any steps aimed at isolating Moscow, seeing in the preservation of the current UN architecture its own strategic interest: the same mechanisms protect it from international pressure over Taiwan and Xinjiang. In such an environment, even a hypothetical General Assembly vote on expulsion would not secure the required two-thirds majority.

There is another dimension to this problem — less obvious, but no less important. Expelling Russia would set a precedent with unpredictable consequences for the entire system. Which state would be next? Who would define “persistence” in violating the Charter, and by what criteria? Would the same logic apply to the United States over its intervention in Iraq, to Saudi Arabia for its role in the Yemen conflict, or to the very initiators of expulsion — depending on how the balance of power shifts in the future? Most member states, even those that genuinely sympathize with Ukraine, do not want to create a weapon that may one day be turned against themselves, driven by an institutional logic of self-preservation that any realistic strategy must take into account.

III. The Impossibility of Expulsion as a Diplomatic Instrument

And here lies the most non-trivial conclusion. If expelling Russia is impossible either legally or politically, does raising the question serve any purpose? The answer is yes — and here is why.

The very fact that the question of expulsion is being raised — at the level of the General Assembly, in academic discussions, in the statements of democratic leaders — performs an independent and entirely real function. It legitimizes the narrative of Russia as a structurally incompatible element of the international legal order. This is what international relations theory calls “delegitimization pressure”: the gradual erosion of an actor’s symbolic status without physically removing it from the institutional space. Russia remains on the Security Council, but an ever-growing part of the world now perceives its presence there not as a source of legitimacy but as evidence of the system’s dysfunction — and that is a fundamentally different thing.

This opens three concrete strategic directions for Ukraine that do not require the legally impossible act of expulsion, yet achieve a similar result through other mechanisms. First, systematic documentation and public presentation of every instance in which Russia uses its veto to block humanitarian or legal initiatives — turning each such veto into documented public proof of its incompatibility with the role of “guarantor of peace,” subsequently used in diplomatic communications and legal proceedings. Second, active promotion of Security Council veto reform, including through the “Code of Conduct” of the ACT group and the French-Mexican initiative on the voluntary non-use of the veto in cases of mass atrocities, which has already been endorsed by more than 100 states. Third, continued strengthening of the General Assembly’s role as an alternative platform of legitimacy through the “Uniting for Peace” procedure (Resolution 377A), which already demonstrated its effectiveness in the first months of the full-scale invasion and allows the paralyzed Security Council to be bypassed in critical situations.

IV. Conclusion

The answer to the question “can Russia be expelled from the UN?” is unambiguous: no, under current institutional conditions this is impossible. Article 6 of the Charter remains a dead letter, blocked by the very architecture of the system it was meant to protect. But this impossibility does not represent a defeat for Ukraine. It is a diagnosis that Ukraine, better than anyone, is capable of delivering to the world and wielding as a diplomatic argument.

Full-scale aggression has exposed a fundamental contradiction: a state that systematically destroys the international legal order simultaneously serves as its guarantor under the Charter. It is precisely this awareness of the contradiction — not the illusion of a quick legal fix — that should form the foundation of Ukraine’s strategy at the UN. Rather than expending diplomatic capital on a campaign with a legally foreseeable outcome, Kyiv could focus on making Russia’s presence on the Security Council as costly as possible in symbolic and reputational terms, turning each session, each veto, each statement into yet another piece of evidence in the case Ukraine is making before the entire world.

The question “can it be expelled?” ultimately gives way to a more fundamental and more productive one: what kind of UN would make such a thing impossible in principle? And that is no longer a question of law, but a question of the future architecture of the world order. Ukraine — as the state paying the highest price for its defects — should be among those who design that architecture, not merely wait for its reform to arrive.

Author: Kateryna Opanasenko, Educational and Research Institute of International Relations, International Law, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv