As of Saturday, the UN’s top guarantor of peace and security will be presided over by a hostage-taking, war-mongering, nuclear-aggressive country — and that is no April’s fools joke. 

Moscow’s delegation to the United Nations this week has been preparing for its month-long presidency of the body’s security council, which officially begins April 1. 

Also this week, Russia announced an agreement with Belarus to deploy nuclear arms and ballistic missiles next door to Ukraine; widened the deadliest war at the heart of Europe since the UN’s establishment; and arrested an American reporter on flimsy charges.

“Let him go,” President Biden said Friday, when asked about Russia’s arrest on Wednesday of a Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, on flimsy espionage charges. It was unclear whether America is holding any convicted Russian war criminal to trade for the reporter, as it did in February in the case of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who had been held in a Russian prison on what appeared to be overblown drug charges. 

Perhaps Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest was meant as a signal that even non-Russian reporters would not be allowed to publish articles critical of that country. “Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone” was the headline on his most recent dispatch. 

“Fight for Bakhmut Becomes Moment of Truth for Wagner Founder,” was another headline on a recent article by Mr. Gershkovich. When he was arrested at Yekaterinburg, a thousand miles away from Moscow, he was reportedly working on an article about that shady mercenary army and its boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is waging a major battle in Ukraine on behalf of President Putin. 

“Thuggish leaders keep doing thuggish things if they think they will pay no price,” the Journal wrote in an editorial on the arrest.

Meanwhile, the president of Moscow satrap Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, said on Friday that Russia, which has already decided to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, could if necessary put intercontinental nuclear missiles there too.  

Mr. Putin’s “willingness to sacrifice strategic stability to achieve his goals in Ukraine is a risk to this council’s agenda regarding the maintenance of international peace and security,” America’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, told the Security Council, which was convened to discuss Russia’s latest nuclear threats. 

Mr. Wood pointed to a “disturbing trend of Russia’s reliance on nuclear weapons and provocative nuclear rhetoric to intimidate those prepared to help Ukraine provide for its legitimate self-defense.”

He wasn’t alone. “President Lukashenko has made no secret of his wish to see Russia base nuclear weapons in Belarus,” Britain’s ambassador, James Kariuki, told the Security Council. “We urge him to stop enabling Russia’s reckless and escalatory actions.”

The Security Council “has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” according to the UN Charter. The council’s presidency rotates among its 15 members on an alphabetical basis. Although the position has no far-reaching executive powers, as its title suggests, a council president steers its agenda.  

“Isn’t it telling that tomorrow, on the anniversary of the Bucha massacre, Russia will assume the Presidency of the UN Security Council?” Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania said in a joint statement Friday. “This is shameful, humiliating, and dangerous to the credibility and effective functioning of this body.” 

In early March, the Ukrainian UN ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, wrote, “If Russian missiles hit your cities will you let it preside over you in the Security Council?” A year ago, shortly after the Russian invasion, he launched a campaign to undo Russia’s UN status, arguing that the process of handing over the Soviet Union’s council seat to the Russian Federation was tainted.

That hand-off was quietly conducted during Christmas week 1991, at the top of the UN headquarter building on Manhattan’s First Avenue. There were no consultations or a vote. Yet, several UN officials have told the Sun that because no country raised an objection at the time, undoing that process is by now impossible. 

The Russian presidency “really does sound like a perverse #AprilFool prank,” a former UN deputy secretary-general, Mark Malloch Brown, tweeted Friday. He noted that Moscow’s status as one of five veto-wielding permanent council members is the source of its power at the UN, rather than its assumption of the rotating presidency. 

Now the president of the George Soros-founded Open Society, Mr. Malloch Brown says though that calls for Russia’s removal from the council, while understandable, “could distract from efforts that are likely to have more impact.” Ultimately, he writes, “a Ukrainian victory — certainly the best hope for a just and sustainable peace — may also be the way to remove #Russia from the Council.”

For a veteran UN cheerleader like Mr. Malloch Brown to acknowledge that facts on the ground, including battlefield victories, are more consequential than Turtle Bay deliberations, is no less than astonishing.

Russia’s retaking of the council’s presidency at the same time that it flouts all rules and norms established by the UN since World War II is yet another step in that body’s descent into irrelevancy. Not one nuclear-laced missile will be withdrawn and no unfairly detained hostage would be freed by its deliberations and votes.