A missile to the heart of the UN

The United Nations (UN) was born with a pacifist vocation on 24 October 1945 as the result of a great multilateral effort to prevent the demons of ambition from dynamiting world peace and turning the globe into a pasture of devastation with wars of all kinds of calibre.

Its purpose as a mediator between conflicts has been undermined over the years, and while it began with great impetus in a spirited world in need of healing after the devastation of the Second World War, it was soon confronted with multiple disagreements - especially over borders - that have led to new wars. 

People have continued to kill each other for all sorts of reasons: religious, cultural, ethnic, minority issues, border pretexts; and for seizing each other's natural resources, defensive tactics or geopolitical balance. 

It is not even a hundred years old, and during that time - at least - there have been at least 30 armed conflicts ranging from small to large, from perpetual to hostile, between nuclear powers such as those between India and Pakistan, or China and India. 

In the chimera of our reverie as human beings, new generations believed that the world would never again be brought to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe like the one caused by the Second World War. No one believed in 2022 that one day they would hear a country's president live on air ordering his Defence Minister to put his nuclear deterrent forces on alert, as dictator Vladimir Putin did a few days ago. 

No one even imagined that, in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of a biological war, we would hear US President Joe Biden talk about the possibility of a Third World War.

When I see live the bombs in Ukraine and the trail of dead, I think that these people began the month of February going about their usual lives, each one trying to solve their problems and that the young people were only studying and the older ones working. A man has destroyed their dreams.

I was always shaken and tortured by the idea that one man could unleash so much fury, evil and destruction until he consumed country after country, as Adolf Hilter did, and that there was no chain of command to prevent him from taking over the state and becoming an absolutist totem and that nobody, nobody, absolutely nobody around him could stop him from continuing the maelstrom of destruction. They did not stop him.

That's what the UN was created for, to stop, to slow down, to prevent. The Pentagon says that from 24 February to 17 March, Ukraine has been hit by 900 missiles launched by Russian troops. 

That is almost 41 missiles per day, two missiles per hour falling on Ukrainian territory, killing civilians, destroying infrastructure, turning into horror what until a little more than a month ago was a normal city, a normal country, a normal life with its vicissitudes... but a life.

This invasion, publicly announced on 4 December by The New York Times on the basis of US intelligence services, has ended up by delivering a hypersonic missile to the UN, which, agonised and incapable, watches helplessly as an emulates of Hitler, in the 21st century, ignores institutions and organisations, tramples international bodies and tramples international treaties and laws underfoot.

Putin has already earned a place in the dustbin of history alongside other tycoons who like him dared to destroy people's hopes; to annihilate lives, to cause pain, death and irrational suffering. Because war is irrational, it is stupid, it is Belzebuth and his acolytes. 

It is also arrogant because it destroys institutions, the Kremlin dictator will end up burying the UN by ignoring its designs, ignoring the recommendations for dialogue and ceasefire declared not only by António Guterres, head of the United Nations, but endorsed by 141 countries. A majority is astonished because Putin does not stop. 

This is perhaps the current problem that must not be repeated in the future. If the pandemic has taught us great lessons for prevention, Putin's atrocious action should also teach us a dry lesson: the UN must have the capacity to stop a conflict, the blue helmets must be a military peacekeeping force capable of ending a war. The Security Council as it is conceived is not functional. 

The mechanisms of prevention, containment and peacekeeping must be reformulated. Establish a broad criteria for sanctions in which everyone joins in, not just a few countries in the West, and this ends up being a world with two visions between the West and the others. Above all, we must prevent a madman or a psychopath from pressing the nuclear button. The future of humanity cannot depend on one man, that is irrational.