Sergey Lavrov: The UN Charter should be the legal basis for a multipolar world

Eighty years after the historic Yalta Conference, Russia’s long-serving chief diplomat reflects on its legacy

Eighty years ago, on February 4, 1945, the leaders of the victorious powers of World War II – the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom – met at the Yalta Conference to define the contours of the post-war world. Despite their ideological differences, they agreed to eradicate German Nazism and Japanese militarism once and for all. The agreements reached in Crimea were later confirmed and expanded at the Potsdam Peace Conference in July-August 1945.

One of the key outcomes of these negotiations was the creation of the United Nations and the adoption of the UN Charter, which remains the principal source of international law. The purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter are designed to ensure peaceful coexistence and the progressive development of nations. The Yalta-Potsdam system was based on the principle of sovereign equality: No state could claim dominance – all are formally equal, regardless of territory, population, military power, or other factors.

For all its strengths and weaknesses – still debated by scholars – the Yalta-Potsdam order has provided the legal framework for the international system for eight decades. This UN-centered world order has fulfilled its primary role: Preventing another world war. As one expert aptly put it, “The UN has not led us to paradise, but it has saved us from hell.” The veto power enshrined in the Charter is not a ‘privilege’ but a responsibility for global peacekeeping. It acts as a safeguard against unbalanced decisions and creates space for compromise based on a balance of interests. As the political cornerstone of the Yalta-Potsdam system, the UN remains the only universal platform for developing collective responses to global challenges, whether in maintaining peace and security or fostering socio-economic development.

It was at the UN, with the Soviet Union playing a pivotal role, that historic decisions laid the foundation for the multipolar world now emerging. A prime example is the process of decolonization, formalized in the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which the USSR initiated. For the first time in history, dozens of oppressed peoples gained independence and the opportunity to establish their own states. Today, some of these former colonies are emerging as centers of power in a multipolar world, while others are part of regional and continental integration frameworks.

Russian scholars rightly observe that any international institution is, above all, “a means of limiting the natural egoism of states.” The UN, with its complex rules codified in the Charter and adopted by consensus, exemplifies this.

The UN-centered order is an order rooted in international law – truly universal law – and every state is expected to respect this law.

Russia, like most of the international community, has always adhered to this principle. However, the West, still afflicted by a syndrome of exceptionalism and accustomed to acting within a neocolonial paradigm, has never been comfortable with a framework of interstate cooperation based on respect for international law. As former US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland candidly admitted, in her view the Yalta agreements were not a good deal for the US and should never have been signed. This mindset explains much of Washington’s post-war behavior, as American elites viewed the Yalta-Potsdam system as an inconvenient constraint.

The West’s revision of the post-war order began almost immediately, with Winston Churchill’s infamous 1946 Fulton speech effectively declaring a Cold War against the Soviet Union. The Yalta-Potsdam agreements were treated as a tactical concession rather than a binding commitment. Consequently, the fundamental principle of sovereign equality enshrined in the UN Charter was never fully embraced by the US and its allies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union presented the West with an opportunity to show prudence and foresight. Instead, intoxicated by the illusion of ‘victory in the Cold War’, then-US President George H.W. Bush proclaimed a new world order in 1990, characterized by total American dominance. This unrestrained unipolar ambition disregarded the legal constraints of the UN Charter.

Washington’s geopolitical maneuvering in Eastern Europe is one manifestation of this ‘rules-based order’ – the explosive consequences of which are now evident in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

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The multipolar era

In 2025, the return of a Republican administration led by Donald Trump has taken this revisionism to new heights. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently dismissed the post-war world order as obsolete, going so far as to suggest that even the so-called ‘rules-based order’ is no longer in line with US interests. His rhetoric, anchored in the ‘America First’ ideology, eerily echoes the chauvinistic slogans of the 20th century. Indeed it bears a disturbing resemblance to the Hitler-era slogan ‘Deutschland uber alles’, and the reliance on ‘peace through strength’ may finally bury diplomacy. Not to mention the fact that such statements and ideological constructs show not the slightest respect for Washington’s international legal obligations under the UN Charter.

However, this is no longer 1991 or even 2017, when Trump first stepped onto the ‘captain’s bridge’. Demographic, economic, social, and geopolitical conditions have irreversibly shifted. As Russian analysts note, “There will be no return to the old state of affairs.” The United States must eventually reconcile itself to a new role as one of many centers of global power, alongside Russia, China, and emerging powers in the Global South. In the meantime, it seems that the new US administration will make cowboy-like forays to test the limits of the existing unipolar system’s pliability and resistance to American interests. I am sure, however, that this administration will soon realize that international reality is much richer than the ideas about the world that can be used without consequences in speeches to domestic American audiences and its obedient geopolitical allies.

In anticipation of such a sobering up let us continue our painstaking work with our partners to create conditions for adapting the mechanisms for the practical establishment of interstate relations to the realities of multipolarity.The Yalta-Potsdam order remains the most reliable framework for international cooperation, embodying principles of sovereign equality, non-interference, and peaceful dispute resolution. Here it is appropriate to mention the Kazan Declaration of the BRICS Summit of 23 October, which reflects the unified position of the majority of the world’s states on this issue and clearly reaffirms “the commitment to respect international law, including the purposes and principles enshrined in the UN Charter as its inalienable and fundamental element, and to preserve the central role of the UN in the international system”. This is the approach articulated by the leading states that define the face of the modern world and represent the majority of its population. Yes, our partners from the South and the East have legitimate aspirations for their participation in global governance. Unlike the West, they, like us, are ready for an honest and open discussion on all issues. 

Russia’s commitment to international law

Our position on the reform of the United Nations Security Council is well known. Russia is in favour of making this body more democratic by increasing the representation of the world’s majority – notably states from Asia, Africa and Latin America. We support the candidacies of Brazil and India for permanent seats on the Council, while at the same time correcting the historical injustice against the African continent within the parameters agreed upon by Africans themselves. Allocating additional seats to the already over-represented countries of the collective West in the Council is counterproductive. Germany or Japan, which have delegated most of their sovereignty to an overseas patron and are also reviving the ghosts of Nazism and militarism at home, cannot bring anything new to the work of the Security Council.

We remain firmly committed to the inviolability of the prerogatives of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Given the unpredictable behavior of the Western minority, only the veto can ensure that the Council takes decisions that take into account the interests of all parties.

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The staffing situation in the UN Secretariat remains offensive to the world majority, where there is still a dominance of Western representatives in all key positions. Bringing the UN bureaucracy into line with the geopolitical map of the world is a task that cannot be postponed. The aforementioned BRICS Kazan Declaration contains a very clear formulation to this effect. Let us see how receptive the UN leadership, accustomed to serving the interests of a narrow group of Western countries, will be to it.

As for the normative framework enshrined in the UN Charter, I am convinced that it best and optimally meets the needs of the multipolar era. An era in which the principles of sovereign equality of states, non-interference in their internal affairs and other fundamental postulates, including the right of peoples to self-determination in the consensus interpretation, as enshrined in the 1970 UN Declaration on Principles of International Law, must be respected not in words but in deeds: all are obliged to respect the territorial integrity of states whose governments represent the entire population living on the territory in question. There is no need to prove that the Kiev regime after the coup of February 2014 does not represent the inhabitants of Crimea, Donbass, and Novorossiya – just as the Western metropolises did not represent the peoples of the colonial territories they exploited.

Attempts to crudely restructure the world to suit one’s own interests, in violation of the principles of the United Nations, can bring even more instability and confrontation to international affairs, up to and including catastrophic scenarios. At the present level of conflict, a thoughtless rejection of the Yalta-Potsdam system, with the UN and its Charter at its core, will inevitably lead to chaos.

The opinion is often voiced that it is untimely to talk about questions of the desired world order while fighting continues to suppress the armed forces of the fascist regime in Kiev, supported by the ‘Collective West’. In our view, such an approach is inadmissible. The contours of the post-war world order based on the constructions of the UN Charter were discussed by the Allies at the height of the Second World War, including at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers and the Tehran Conference of Heads of State and Government in 1943, at other contacts of the future victorious powers, up to the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945. It is another matter that the Western Allies had a hidden agenda even then, but this does not detract from the enduring importance of the Charter’s high principles of equality, non-interference in internal affairs, peaceful settlement of disputes and respect for the rights of every human being – ‘irrespective of race, gender, language or religion’. The fact that, as is now abundantly clear, the West signed these postulates in ‘disappearing ink’ and in the years that followed grossly violated what it had signed – be it in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya or Ukraine – does not mean that we should absolve the US and its satellites of moral and legal responsibility and abandon the unique legacy of the UN’s founding fathers embodied in the organisation’s Charter. 

God forbid if someone tries to rewrite it now (under the slogan of getting rid of the ‘outdated’ Yalta-Potsdam system). The world will be left without any common values at all.

Russia is ready for joint honest work to harmonise the balance of interests and strengthen the legal principles of international relations.

President Vladimir Putin’s 2020 initiative to hold a meeting of the heads of the permanent members of the UN Security Council with ‘special responsibility for the preservation of civilisation’ was aimed at establishing an equal dialogue on the whole range of these issues. For reasons beyond Russia’s control, progress has not been made on this front.. But we do not lose hope, even though the composition of participants and the format of such meetings may be different. The main thing, in the words of the Russian President, is ‘a return to an understanding of what the United Nations was created for and adherence to the principles set out in the Charter documents’. This should be the guiding principle for the regulation of international relations in the new era of multipolarity.

This article was first published by Russia in Global Affairs, translated and edited by the RT team