Tag: Student Essay Contest 2026

Prepared by: Myroslav Andriiovych Mykhalchyn, fourth-year student of the Faculty of Law at the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”

“The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save it from hell”
— Dag Hammarskjöld

The modern architecture of collective security, established in the aftermath of World War II, is currently undergoing profound destabilization. Russia’s full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine has catalyzed an existential crisis within the United Nations, exposing the functional incapacity of the Security Council (SC) in the domain of international peace maintenance. The situation in which a permanent SC member acts as the direct perpetrator of aggression while wielding the veto to block resolutions aimed at restoring another state’s sovereignty reflects a critical erosion of the Organization’s legal norms.

Author: Oleksandr Lyashevskyi, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Can Russia be expelled from the UN? This painful question has troubled diplomatic, legal, and other leading circles of Ukrainian society for years. After centuries of overt attempts to destroy the Ukrainian people and national identity, more than a decade of direct terror, and the systematic dismantling of the foundations of international law, state sovereignty, and Ukraine’s territorial integrity, this aggressor state continues to evade accountability for its lawlessness by occupying a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council — and by systematically shielding its own crimes with the veto, paralyzing the just functioning of the global international security system.

Author: Kardash Nikita Serhiyovych, State University of Trade and Economics

The contemporary crisis of international law is not merely a consequence of military aggression — it is the logical result of prolonged neglect of the fundamental procedural norms upon which the architecture of global security rests. The question of whether the Russian Federation can be removed from the United Nations typically runs into the procedural deadlock of Article 6 of the Charter, where the permanent Security Council member’s veto transforms the accountability mechanism into a legal absurdity. Yet analysis reveals that the core problem lies not in the complexity of the expulsion procedure, but in the defectiveness of Russia’s very presence within the Organization.

Hromyk Karyna Olehivna
Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University

The question of the Russian Federation’s presence in the United Nations today extends far beyond the realm of political discourse, demanding a fundamental reassessment of the very terminology and legal nature of this state’s membership. In current legal frameworks, the conventional term “expulsion” is not entirely accurate, as it implies stripping rights from a subject that legitimately acquired them. With respect to the Russian Federation, however, we are dealing with an entity that never underwent the legitimate membership acquisition procedure prescribed by the UN Charter. The fundamental contradiction lies in the fact that at least several states may claim the Soviet Union’s legacy within the UN structure — notably Ukraine and Belarus, which were de jure founding members of the organization back in 1945, possessing separate representation from the union center and their own ratified documents.

Author: Danyiil Burdelnyi, Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University

In March 2022, the Russian Federation committed atrocities in Bucha that became a horrifying symbol of Russia’s impunity and the failure of the United Nations international security system — specifically the UN Security Council. The Security Council was entrusted with the primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, and was granted special powers to that end in the area of peaceful dispute resolution and the taking of measures in response to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.