Britain blocks the UN webcast of the Russian meeting on Ukraine

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Britain blocked the United Nations webcast of an informal Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Wednesday at which Russia’s child rights commissioner – who the International Criminal Court wants to arrest on war crimes charges – is due to speak. .

The meeting will focus on “evacuating children from the conflict zone” and Russia said on Tuesday that Commissioner Maria Lvova Belova would take part. Such meetings do not take place in the Security Council chamber and all 15 council members must agree to be allowed to be broadcast online by the United Nations.

The Hague-based International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lvova Belova, accusing them of illegally deporting children from Ukraine and illegally transporting people to Russia from Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.

“You should not have a platform for the United Nations to spread disinformation,” a spokesman for Britain’s mission to the United Nations in New York said in a statement. “If she wants to report on her actions, she can do so in The Hague.”

Moscow has not hidden a program under which it has brought thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, but it is presenting it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and abandoned children in the war zone.

“Russia will henceforth block the UN webcast of all such meetings, citing the British censorship clause,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, wrote on Twitter.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya told reporters last month that the informal meeting of Security Council members scheduled for Wednesday was planned long before the ICC announcement and was not intended as a refutation of the charges against Putin and Lvova Belova.

Diplomats said it was rare for a United Nations webcast to be blocked. However, last month China blocked the UN webcast of an informal Security Council meeting convened by the US on human rights abuses in North Korea.

Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Grant McCall

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