President Zelensky, addressing the United Nations today for the first time since the Ukraine war began, compared Russia’s horrors in his country to those perpetrated by the Islamic State and challenged the UN Security Council to act on the crisis or “dissolve yourselves altogether.”

In a video-streamed speech, Mr. Zelensky detailed horrors Russia has been committing in Ukraine, including looting, rape, torture, and mass executions. “This is no different from what ISIS is doing, but here it’s done by a member of the Security Council,” he said. 

At the end of his accusatory speech, Mr. Zelensky asked to share with Council members a short video depicting the horrors of war. As if to prove his point, the council’s technicians failed at first to mount the video. The glitch was later fixed, but only after several of the Council members delivered speeches. The gap distanced the video from Mr. Zelensky’s speech. 

America’s ambassador to the world body, Linda Thomas Greenfield, called for a united front to join her proposal to expel Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. A vote on that proposal at the General Assembly is expected Thursday. “Given the growing mountain of evidence, Russia should not have a position of authority in a body whose purpose is to promote respect for human rights,” Ms. Thomas Greenfield said. 

She failed, though, to mark that a significant number of the 47 countries with a seat on the rights council should not, by her own logic, have that authority either. They include some of the globe’s worst violators of human rights, who have for years sought to not to address their own problems but to focus on violations, real or imagined, committed by Israel. 

Mr. Zelensky spoke of a much higher truth about the goings on at the United Nations. “Where is the security that the UN Security Council needs to guarantee?” he asked, putting the question more pointedly than it has been put in recent memory. “It is not there.” The “lofty goals set in San Francisco in 1945,” he added, “have not been achieved.”

The Ukrainian president warned that the war has created a global shortage in wheat and other staples that Russia and Ukraine produce and in which they dominate markets. That, he said, is a threat to international peace and security, which the Security Council is meant to guarantee. 

Additionally, Mr. Zelensky called for a trial for war criminals. “Anyone who has given criminal orders will be brought before an international tribunal, just like Nuremberg,” he said.

Yet, establishing such a tribunal would have to be done by America and its European partners, bypassing traditional institutions like the International Criminal Court in the Hague. After Nuremberg, international tribunals for crimes committed in Bosnia or Rwanda were established by the UN Security Council. In this case Russia is expected to veto the establishment of a tribunal to try war criminals in Ukraine. 

Addressing the Council, the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, said his office will begin gathering evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. 

The Zelensky speech’s most potent challenge was when he called on the Council members to treat Russia not as a “privileged” member, but as the enemy of peace and security. Unless you are ready to “remove Russia” so that “it cannot make decisions on its own war,” he said, “the UN can simply close down.” 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in one of the most devastating demarches of his presidency, “are you ready to close down?”

Russia’s envoy at the United Nations addressed Mr. Zelensky, calling him “Vladimir Aleksandrovich.” The Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said the Ukrainian’s initial campaign for the presidency was based on a vow to seek peace with Russia in the Donbas region.

“Those ideas failed,” Mr. Nebenzya said, “and now you call [the people of] Donetsk and Luhansk subspecies.”

Like other Kremlin officials, Mr. Nebenzya tried to advance the idea that Ukrainian “Nazis” have killed their own people in Bucha and elsewhere. “You simply prefer not to notice Ukrainian Nazis, but unfortunately they are there,” he said, insisting that “we are not acting like the Americans in Iraq and Syria, razing cities to the ground, because we have pity” on “our brothers,” the Ukrainians. 

No other member bought Moscow’s version of events. Then again, other than the move to expel Russia from the human rights body in Geneva, no council member addressed Mr. Zelensky’s concerns about the entire system’s failure to act while his country is being cruelly attacked by a powerful neighbor. 

At the UN the “current security architecture does not provide security,” Ukraine’s ambassador at the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, told reporters after the session. There needs to be “a very thorough discussion on that after the war.”