Russia and China failed to veto a resolution that blatantly blamed the victim rather than the aggressor in the war against Iran. Joe Lauria reports.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Neither Russia nor China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Wednesday that turned the tables on the war, falsely identifying Iran as the instigator of hostilities.
The resolution’s preamble expressed “grave concern at the recent escalation of violence in the region, particularly the missile and drone attacks launched by the Islamic Republic of Iran against” the Arab Gulf states and Jordan “which targeted residential areas and civilian objects, resulting in civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.”
The operative paragraphs say the Security Council:
- Condemns in the strongest terms the egregious attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran against the territories of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan and determines that such acts constitute a breach of international law and a serious threat to international peace and security;
- Demands the immediate and unconditional cessation of these hostilities and all provocations, threats, and the use of regional proxies by Iran;
- Calls upon all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to refrain from any further actions that could escalate the situation;
- Affirms the inherent right of the affected States to individual or collective self-defence in response to these attacks, in accordance with Article 51 of the Charter;
An earlier draft of the resolution by Bahrain read, “Condemns in the strongest terms the unprovoked and egregious attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran …”
Russia, China, and some non-aligned members of the council strongly objected to the audacious accusation against Iran of an unprovoked attack given that Israel and the U.S. were the ones who conducted an unprovoked attack on Iran.
Iran is defending itself by firing on the countries hosting U.S. bases involved in the aggression in a effort to get it to stop.
Bahrain and the G.C.C. countries agreed to remove “unprovoked” but added, “determines that such acts constitute a breach of international law and a serious threat to international peace and security.”
The demand that Iran stop using its proxies to help defend itself is egregious.
This resolution brings further shame on the Security Council after its endorsement last November of the genocidal Trump/Kushner takeover of Gaza.
Wednesday’s resolution passed by 13-0-2, with Russia and China abstaining. Either of the two veto-wielding powers could have killed it.
China said the sovereignty of the Gulf states must be respected, but the resolution “does not fully reflect the root cause and overall picture of the conflict in a balanced manner.”
After its passage, a Russian draft resolution was put before the Council. It was a reasonable, neutral measure calling for an end to the war:
“Recalling Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations, which prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State,
Expressing its deep concern over the current military escalation in the Middle East and beyond,
Mourning the tragic loss of life throughout the ongoing hostilities in the region,
- Urges all parties to immediately stop their military activities and refrain from further escalation in the Middle East and beyond;
- Condemns in the strongest terms all attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, and calls for their protection, underscoring the obligations of all parties under international law, including international humanitarian law;
- Underlines the importance of ensuring security of all States in the region of the Middle East and beyond;
- Strongly encourages all parties concerned to return to negotiations without any further delay and to make full use of political and diplomatic means.”
The Russian draft failed to get the required nine votes, garnering only 4 in favor, 2 against and 9 abstentions. Russia, China, Pakistan and Somalia voted in favor. The U.S. and Latvia voted against.
Russia’s Abstention
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya at U.N. Security Council on March 11, 2026. (CBC screenshot from U.N. TV feed).
Inside the Security Council chamber after the vote, Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian ambassador to the U.N., said:
“The Russian Federation abstained in the vote on the draft resolution tabled by Bahrain because it is extremely unbalanced and does not serve the purposes of maintaining international peace and security. … Russia deems unacceptable any strikes on the territory of Arab States in the Persian Gulf, in particular on civilian infrastructure there. …
However, it would be impossible and unfair to talk about attacks on countries in the region without regard for the root causes of the current escalation, namely the aggression of the US and Israel against Iran.
To our deep regret, the resolution that has just been adopted is framed precisely in such a biased and one-sided tone. It muddles up the cause and effect. If someone who is not well versed in international affairs reads this resolution, they will inevitably get the impression that Tehran, willingly and out of malice, conducted an unprovoked attack on Arab countries.
At the same time, the attacks against the territory of Iran itself, let alone those who are behind them and carrying them out, are not only not condemned in the document but simply left out. And the Security Council has just signed off on this.”
Though Nebenzya said Russia deemed Iran’s retaliatory attacks on the Gulf states “unacceptable,” he went on to explain how the U.S. was using the territory of those states for its attacks against Iran, despite denials from the Gulf Arab countries and the U.S.
That made Russia’s abstention even more perplexing.
Nebenzya said:
“[The resolution] does not mention the fact that the authorities in Tehran have repeatedly emphasized that their retaliatory actions are directed not against the countries in the region, but against U.S. military facilities and infrastructure located on their territory, and are legitimate targets within Iran’s right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
We can’t but note that Washington, through its aggressive actions, has essentially set up the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The U.S. ignored the repeated requests of Arab States not to use their territory to conduct military operations against Iran.
According to the information we receive from open sources, the U.S. is actively using its permanent military bases for this purpose, first and foremost those deployed in the monarchies of the Persian Gulf: and these bases are being used not for defensive or reconnaissance purposes, but rather for offensive ones.
On Feb. 28, the official website of the US Central Command (CENTICOM), citing its head Adm. Brad Cooper, reported that high-precision weapons had been launched against Iranian territory not only from air and sea, but also from land. Obviously, this could only be the reference to the territory of countries neighboring Iran.”
Asked at a media stakeout after the vote about the disappointment to Iran and its supporters that Russia’s absention had caused, Nebenzya, somewhat defensively, said:
“There are many disappointments in the world on many issues. We recognized that the Gulf countries suffers … not just the American bases located in these countries, but the civilians and the civilian infrastructure, which we do not appreciate at all, and we understand the sentiment of the Gulf countries. But the problem is that, as I said, the cause of the consequences in the resolution are put upside down.”
TRANSLATION: This whole catastrophe is the fault of Israel and the U.S. but we want to stay on the good side of the billionaire Gulf Arabs who were dragged into this, so we abstained.
As Iran is a BRICS member whose most powerful members are Russia and China, it was at the very least a lack of solidarity with a fellow member, Iran. Moscow and Beijing’s abstention is another crack in the BRICS wall after the split between India and Russia over New Delhi’s open support for Israel.
Asked what kind of help to resolve the war that Russia is contemplating giving — which Vladimir Putin mentioned to Donald Trump in a phone call on Wednesday — Nebenzya said: “Help is not appeasement. We are calling a spade a spade. But we are ready to help to get out of the dire situation the whole region and [that] the United States itself got itself into.”
Asked why neither resolution named the perpetrators — Israel and the United States — the Russian envoy said:
“Two things: First, there is a convention in the Security Council … that no permanent member will ever veto, will ever vote against itself in a resolution that mentions its name. That’s life. You may laugh at it but this is how it works. Secondly, we proposed amendments that didn’t mention the name, but offered solutions. So we didn’t violate either the convention or the essence.”
UPDATE and CORRECTION: An earlier draft of the resolution by Bahrain read, “Condemns in the strongest terms the unprovoked and egregious attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran …”
Russia, China, and some non-aligned members of the council strongly objected to accusing Iran of an unprovoked attack given that Israel and the U.S. conducted the unprovoked attack on Iran.
Bahrain and the G.C.C. countries agreed to remove “unprovoked” but added, “determines that such acts constitute a breach of international law and a serious threat to international peace and security.” An earlier version of this article mistakenly reported that the word “unprovoked” remained in the resolution that was adopted.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
The UN has lost all is sense of shame ; how could it allow it’s Security Council to become the oral whore of Zionism and that too for gratis ! Only China’s framing of its own response within the overall perspective provided a token consolation.
If I may, the UN was founded and designed to primarily serve the interests of those who prevailed following WWII. Thus, we have the Security Council whose membership is tightly controlled and within which lies all the power. This includes the Veto for the permanent five members. All nations are consigned to the General Assembly where there is no veto. On top of this imbalance and absence of any semblance of democracy, flawed as it is, there is the abuse of power exercised by the United States. It is no accident that 135 countries signed onto this resolution that bears no relationship to facts, but is rather a compendium of lies intended to cover over the fact that it was the US and Israel who attacked Iran. It is the US military bases surrounding Iran that were positioned to completely destroy that country and were thus targeted.
It is repugnant to witness the U.S. Ambassador residing as President of the Security Counsel during this charade. There is probably no country that can match the horrendous record of violations of International Law, Humanitarian Law, the UN Charter and its own Constitution. There is no other country that has imposed its military on other countries through the placement of over 800 military bases on foreign soil. Many of them in the Middle East.
That the statements made by the majority of Ambassadors did not once refer to the fact that it was the US and Israel who, together, provoked Iran. In the midst of negotiations killed its leadership.
One can ask: what threats was the US able to make to 135 countries in order to defeat the credible and constructive Russian Proposal while voting in favor of and then verbally promoting the lies and fabrications upon which it rested?
If participants in any organization have no intention of abiding by the agreements inherent in that membership, the organization is unable to function as intended. This is what we are witnessing, led by the United States for years and years and years. It is among the ultimate abuses of power exhibited by a country of pretense.
The UN always was and always has been the United Nations Kangaroo Court. Biased from day one.
It has become, with the leadership and financing of the United States, an example of exactly how not to maintain a peaceful world.
It will never function as a body to further the business of Peaceful Coexistence such are the conditions of our now very polarized world. Thanks to Israel and the unfettered hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. Government unexplainably lavishes on this rogue state.
We, we true Americans need not become material support for genocidists. Our government has already committed the crime of getting involved in exactly that fashion. I for one, am totally livid the U.S. has conducted it self in this unacceptable manner. Anyone who is in agreement with genocidal maniacs needs professional help from both lawyers and psychiatrist.
The madman at the helm of the Department of Defense is a person who has openly professed the idea of show no quarter and give no quarter, evidently without understanding he did not and does. not speak for large majority of Americans especially the members of the military. By stating what was / is on his mind, whatever little he possesses, he has most certainly signed the death warrants of all American military members who might become enemy prisoners in the future. In my book he deserves the death penalty himself for saying such a thing.
This guys bullshit is unfathomable.
It is also true that economic sanctions harm civilians and their lives for strategic regime change motives of inhumane aggression.. This leads to further the interests of warfare and is also an existential threat to world wide civilization in this age.
It has been clear for awhile that the UN is impotent, if not a collaborator. But the fissures in BRICS is a new concern. What does solidarity mean today? What does sovereignty mean if the countries the US military bases occupy are vassal states? As a professor of “Predictive History” said, there is no way of predicting the outcome because there has never been a war like this. However, it IS predictable that US hegemony will never be the same.
From what I have read, the whole war was started by two men attempting to avoid humiliation or worse stemming from revelations of their private lives. The distraction, unloading their problems on an innocent bystander – Iran – is so morally outrageous, their respect for human life so lacking, that words fail to convey the hideousness and callousness of their disrespect for human life – worthy of monsters not real human beings. What is the matter with countries judging the matter? Are they willfully blind?
The UN is a complete joke and serves no purpose other than supporting ‘the establishment’. No-one takes any notice of it so what is the point of the UN ? Time to close it down, along with NATO. At least the USA and Israel are honest about what they are doing, unlike the UN that seems to exist in a fantasy bubble.
And, shame on Russia and China, lacking the backbone to even veto a complete lie.
The UN is a complete farce! What a joke!
The Russian foreign minister Lavrov reportedly said some years ago that the Russian Federation has “no ideology.” This is the result. The ANC in S. Africa remembers fondly the tremendous help they received from the USSR even in its dying days. Whether one supported the USSR or not, it had an ideology that embodied “internationalism.” in its core I remember when the Soviet foreign minister Primakov ordered to to turn around his plane enroute to Washington when US attacked Iraq in 1991. The global south is desperate for some leadership in these dark days, yet none could be found. The much ballyhooed BRICS looks more like a house of cards.
Joe – You nailed it.
This however would seem to give cover to Russia and China for the ISR, over the horizon encrypted radar, A/D, and other assistance, etc., that they have been providing to Iran ‘under the radar’, so to speak.
Both Russia and China are seeing their antagonists weakened during this war, and both will benefit after the war ends.
It is a terrible cost that is being sustained by the Iranians, and the citizens of all of their neighbors (Gaza & West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen- and including Israeli citizens- and the economic consequences will be heavy for those impoverished Global South nations, but what alternative was there to stop the cancer of Israel’s expansionism by genocide and savage war of aggression, and the active participation in it by the US, UK, NATO and EU, (and its facilitation and enabling by the Arab Gulf States)?
The UN has already been so compromised and corrupted by the West that it has almost become irrelevant now for a war without rules initiated by the West- and its authority will only be re-established if those who, until recently relied on its Charter and international law, prevail.
All the more shame on Russia and China for stabbing Iran in the back by abstaining (again an abstention when they should have vetoed!) and breaking up BRICS.
Iran will not forget this. Russia and China cannot be trusted upon within BRICS. They and the West are playing games and divide up the world.
India is in Israel’s camp. What is BRICS worth?
What unfolded at the Security Council this week is not merely a diplomatic misstep — it is another demonstration of how far the world’s most powerful states have drifted from justice, truth, and responsible leadership.
The resolution’s use of the word “unprovoked” is not just inaccurate; it is a deliberate inversion of reality. Iran acted under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter after suffering attacks on its own territory by the United States and Israel — attacks that the resolution pointedly refuses to acknowledge. To condemn Iran while erasing the actions that triggered its response is to participate in a political fiction that serves power, not peace.
Russia’s ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, correctly identified the core problem: the resolution “muddles up cause and effect.” Yet Russia’s abstention — despite recognizing the resolution’s bias — reveals the deeper tragedy of our moment. Even states that see the truth are unwilling to stand firmly in it when geopolitical convenience or regional relationships are at stake.
This is not solidarity. It is not leadership. It is the quiet accommodation of injustice.
The Gulf states were indeed placed in an impossible position by the United States’ use of their territory for offensive operations — a fact Nebenzya himself acknowledged. But to abstain rather than oppose a resolution that misrepresents the entire chain of events is to allow the narrative to be rewritten in real time, at the expense of international law and the people who suffer its violations.
The Russian draft resolution — balanced, lawful, and focused on de-escalation — was rejected by the very powers now insisting on a distorted account of events. That rejection speaks volumes. It shows that the issue is not peace, nor legality, nor civilian protection. It is the preservation of impunity for the United States and Israel, whose actions cannot be named because of an unwritten convention that permanent members never vote against themselves.
This is precisely the problem.
When the Security Council cannot speak the truth because the truth is politically inconvenient to its most powerful members, the institution ceases to function as a guardian of peace. It becomes an instrument of selective morality.
Iran is being blamed for defending itself against unlawful and aggressive actions. The states responsible for initiating this dangerous escalation are shielded from accountability. And those who could have upheld the Charter chose instead to step aside.
The world deserves better than this choreography of half-truths and strategic silences. It deserves leaders who act with integrity, not calculation. Until that changes, the Security Council will continue to fail in its most basic duty: to uphold peace through truth, not through the distortions of the powerful.
“The Gulf states were indeed placed in an impossible position by the United States’ use of their territory for offensive operations”
And that by their own doing in hosting the bases in the first place. Why were they needed, one has to ask. From whom were they “protecting” those states.
>>… the issue is not peace, nor legality, nor civilian protection. It is the preservation of impunity for the United States and Israel, whose actions cannot be named because of an unwritten convention …>>
Bravo!
When I first read about 100 protesters found to be carrying automatic weapons in Iran, I said to myself & posted on VK that I’d be willing to bet that those weapons were provided by the Us; as, the US has used underhanded actions to destabilize govts., previously & Control the country’s Resources. I’m an American ; but, never before this, distrusted my govt. more. since Trump took Control. His Ego rules him & the very wealthy man behind him {who wants no publicity} and been called The Heretic, knows exactly how to feed it.
Shame on both Russia and China. When the moral leadership needed to establish a fair and just multi-polar world was called for they stepped back and played real-politic. We all shed a tear.
The UN no longer has the words aggression and injustice in its dictionary.
The UN has been Controlled by the most powerful people, for decades. They often make contradictory statements & do ansolutely nothing but, incite.
An educational article; thanks!
Those evil Iranians provoked us by having their young school girls stand under our missiles. How could we not massacre an entire people after such an outrageous attack upon our sacred missiles. We have iron-clad evidence that the head of a young school girl actually put a dent into the metal of the missile head before the missile exploded in self-defense against such an attack.
WHAT the hell ! WHY did Russia and China do this ?????
That is a bloody good question.
Shameful dereliction by Russia and China.
You’re right. They should hang their heads in shame for Supporting Anything the US is Taking on by Murdering Innocents for Destabilizing their govt. & Control of Resoyrces!
I am guessing but hasn’t the US lifted the sanctions against Russia supplying oil to India, China and others? Also, the removal of the sanctions is likely to endure for some time considering the possibility of no capitulation on behalf by any the three main antagonists (US, Iran and Israel) due to the damage this conflict is causing to the world economy.
I believe Trump has offered a bribe to Russia and Chin to abstain and for Russia not to use its veto..
Jack
The last sentence short and sweet and to the point .