Following the latest barrage of missiles that rained on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure centers, and as Russia prepares to assume the presidency of the United Nations’s most prestigious body, Kyiv is doubling down on undermining Moscow’s legitimacy at the institution. 

In one of the most ferocious attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets in the yearlong war, Russia on Wednesday night launched at least 81 missiles and eight Iranian-made drones at energy infrastructure and cities across Ukraine, according to Kyiv officials. The overnight assault left residents of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other cities without electricity and heat. Dozens were killed. 

“If Russian missiles hit your cities will you let it preside over you in Security Council?” the Ukrainian UN ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, tweeted Thursday, tagging the accounts of all 15 council members. In his tweet, Mr. Kyslytsya posted the calendar of the rotating Security Council presidency for 2023, marking the month of April — when Russia is scheduled to take the helm — in blood stains.   

As the Sun first reported last year, Mr. Kyslytsya’s initial challenge to Russia’s UN membership came during a February 2022 Security Council session shortly after President Putin launched the Ukraine invasion. As it turned out, the Russian UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, presided over that session in his role as rotating president. 

“There is nothing in the Charter of the United Nations about continuity as a sneaky way to get into the organization,” Mr. Kyslytsya told the council at the time, much to his Russian counterpart’s chagrin.

“Rubbish,” was all Mr. Nebenzya could mutter when the Sun asked him later about the Ukrainian challenge. 

During the Russian attack on Wednesday night, the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, was at Kyiv for talks about a renewal of a soon-to-expire deal facilitating exports of Russian and Ukrainian grains. “The position of the United Nations, which I have consistently expressed, is crystal clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter and international law,” Mr. Guterres said. 

Yet, the secretary-general is yet to opine on Ukraine’s challenge to the legality of Russia’s inheritance of the Soviet Union’s UN seat.

As the USSR disintegrated, its last UN ambassador, Yuli Vorontsov, delivered a letter on Christmas 1991 to the UN secretary-general, Perez De Cuellar. In it, President Yeltsin asked to change his country’s name. 

As related by a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Yehuda Blum, Yeltsin wrote that “the membership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the United Nations, including the Security Council and all other organs and organizations of the United Nations system, is being continued by the Russian Federation.”

The letter was delivered to De Cuellar on December 24, 1991, when the entire UN system was off for the holiday. The secretary-general distributed the request among UN members, none of whom raised any objection to the new designation. Eleven countries were USSR members before it collapsed. Two of them, Ukraine and Belarus, had been UN members since its founding. The rest gained membership in 1992. 

Mr. Kyslytsya’s challenge might be valid in the sense that Russia inherited the Soviet UN seat without a vote being held. Moreover, Moscow assumed the coveted seat on the permanent Security Council, which allows its five members top powers, including the right to wield vetoes on council resolutions.

UN officials who spoke with the Sun on condition of anonymity countered that because no UN member objected at the time, and because Yeltsin’s letter was approved by the other Soviet republics, it would be impractical, even impossible, to reopen the case three decades later. 

Yet, the role of the Security Council, according to the UN Charter, is to determine and recommend or decide what to do about “any threat to peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” Russia’s Ukraine invasion clearly falls into all three categories, which is likely the reason that Mr. Guterres determined it had violated the charter. 

One of the towns Russia attacked Wednesday was Zaporizhzhya, where 13 people were found dead in an apartment hit by a missile. The town is also the site of Europe’s largest civilian nuclear plant. On Thursday the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, Rafael Grossi, said that following the attack the plant lost all off-site power for the first time since last November. 

The plant has lost outside power six times in the past, Mr. Grossi added. Such outages, he said, are as hazardous as “rolling dice.” If Zaporizhzhia continues to be hit, he said, “one day our luck will run out. We must commit to protecting the safety and security of the plant, and we need to commit now.” 

As a member of the Security Council, and even more so as one of its elite five, Russia is a top referee on matters of peace and security. Even so, it acts like a bear charged with maintaining the integrity of a honeycomb. Yet, unless Mr. Kyslytsya gets support from America and others, his odds of eroding the Kremlin’s UN powers are slim at best.