As originally reported on Fox News (yes, they do occasionally report on real news), Russia has finally been kicked off the governing body of the UN organization charged with enforcing the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997:
Russian President Vladimir Putin faced another overlooked setback on the international stage, a new report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) highlights.
In a blow to Russian influence and prestige, members of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ousted Russia for the first time ever from the body’s 41-member Executive Council while electing Ukraine to fill one of three open seats in the OPCW’s Eastern European Group.
The report, titled "For Russia, A Year of Setbacks at the OPCW," notes that the challenge ahead is for the United States and its allies to hold Russia accountable for its violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the treaty that established the OPCW to ensure its implementation.
The continued possession and stockpiling of chemical weapons by Russia received far too little focus, the report argues. Moscow remains an OPCW member despite openly trying to assassinate its enemies with chemical weapons, including Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison colony and had been poisoned numerous times in the past for being the main political opponent of Putin.
"Navalny's tragic death should galvanize action by Western governments across the international organization space. The ideal place to start is the OPCW and penalizing Putin for his original chemical weapons attack on Navalny," Andrea Stricker, deputy director of FDD’s Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program and author of the report, told Fox News Digital.
Now if we can just get the UN General Assembly to strip the Russian Federation of its Permanent Seat on the Security Council, we might finally succeed in turning the UN into a potentially useful international organization that really could stop wars of aggression in the future.