A group of more than 200 former senior officials of the United Nations recently wrote to the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warning him that unless he does more personally to take a lead in trying to mediate peace in Ukraine, the UN risks not just irrelevance but also its continued existence. The former staff members, including many former UN undersecretaries, reportedly urged him to raise his profile and be prepared to take personal risks to secure peace, saying that the UN is facing an existential threat due to the invasion of Ukraine by one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. A few days later, the secretary-general visited Russia and Ukraine. The main highlights of these trips were his meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as well as his visit to war-ravaged areas in Kyiv.

Maintaining peace is the raison d’être of the UN. In this connection, it is important to underline that the UN is, first and foremost, an intergovernmental body with two main legislative bodies, the Security Council and the General Assembly. Under Article 24, Chapter 5 of the UN Charter, the Security Council is responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. Under Article 99, the secretary-general may, at best, bring to the attention of the UNSC any matter which, in her/his opinion, may threaten international peace and security. This provision has rarely been used by the secretary-general, except in the Lebanon crisis of 1989, during which he called for an urgent UNSC meeting “in order to contribute to a peaceful solution of the [Lebanese crisis]”.

At a more practical level, the work and the agenda of the UN in the peace and security domain remain predicated on the prevailing power dynamics in the international system and, more importantly, among the permanent members of the UNSC. For multilateral action on an issue, apart from regional and local specificities, equity, or the interest of each P-5 member in that particular context, is still the main guiding framework to understand the Council’s take on the particular issue. With respect to Ukraine, the situation is more complicated as Russia, the aggressor in this case, enjoys a veto in the UNSC.

There are precedents available concerning similar structural impediments that made the role of the secretary-general central to averting the crisis. More specifically, it is the Good Offices role of the secretary-general that becomes important in this respect. Under Article 98 of the UN Charter, the secretary-general may take action himself or may appoint special representatives and envoys to carry out Good Offices and mediation on his behalf. The role is broadly defined and it entails bridge-building, mediation and promoting trust between rivals. Personal style and international context greatly influence the modalities and the practice of Good Offices.

Beginning with 1945, the year of its founding, there have been nine secretary-generals, including the present one. Six of them would have had 10-year tenures by 2027 when the present secretary-general completes his second term. During the 1962 Cuban crisis, the interim secretary-general, U. Thant, mediated between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The role was played with craftiness and creativity that allowed the two sides to adopt face-saving measures. This has been captured in many papers written after the release of declassified information.

From the early 1990s, the US’s dominance became unchallenged in the post-Cold War phase. It was revealed more directly when the then secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was denied the second term after the US vetoed his re-election. His term was coterminous with the imploding of the Balkans and the worsening situation in Rwanda and Somalia. Building on the UN-commissioned works by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the tenure of his successor, Kofi Annan, was marked by the infusion of concepts like the eight Millennium Development Goals. His Good Offices interventions were made visible by his zealous guarding of the autonomy of the institution. Annan tried to — unsuccessfully — prevail on the US administration not to attack Iraq on the false pretext of Baghdad amassing weapons of mass destruction. His own struggles with the US in the second-term, including personal ones, were the subject of public discussion.

From 2007 to 2016, the former South Korean bureaucrat and foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, influenced by his own experiences of the Korean War (1950-53) and the UN’s role during that phase, applied the Good Offices mandate with conspicuous absence of megaphone diplomacy. For instance, there was his success in procuring a life-saving humanitarian aid opening for the international community when Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar. The cyclone had reportedly killed more than 140,000 in Myanmar and uprooted the lives of 2.4 million people. The paranoid Myanmar military junta opposed Western humanitarian assistance fearing that this would be an excuse to enable regime change. On May 7, 2008, one of the P-5s reportedly called on the UNSC to authorize an international military intervention to secure access for relief aid under the principle of “Responsibility to Protect”. A direct meeting between the then secretary-general and the senior general, Than Shwe, of Myanmar assuaged the anxieties of the junta. An institutional mechanism called the Tripartite Core Group, consisting of three representatives each from the government, Asean, and the UN, was formulated for Post-Nargis Joint Assessment. This, consequently, created an opening for full-fledged humanitarian activity of the multilateral system.

In the current context, the present UN secretary-general, who had been prime minister of Portugal, is uniquely positioned to exercise his Good Offices mandate. Hailing from the region, he is well aware of the historical and the present-day context of the European-Russian relationship, particularly the politico-security aspect and the internal matrix of the contemporary Russian State. The secretary-general’s Good Offices on the ground, which requires consistency and calibration, can provide hope amidst the hopelessness regarding the cessation of hostilities by Russia and create a humanitarian opening for the safe evacuation of trapped civilians. The instrument of Good Offices is relevant in a context where the multilateral system is crying out for greater diversity, particularly in political decision-making structures and knowledge systems, as that alone will provide it with effective leverage to influence an outcome in such situations.