The organization’s headquarters should be in the Russian resort city of Sochi, the foreign minister has said
The United Nations headquarters should be moved from New York to the Russian Black Sea city of Sochi, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has suggested.
The UN headquarters – the seat of both the Security Council (UNSC) and the General Assembly (UNGA) – have been in midtown Manhattan since 1951, having been moved there not long after the organization’s founding in 1945.
“The best thing would be to move the UN to Sochi,” Lavrov said at the Forum of the Future 2050 in Moscow on Monday.
“[Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin, by the way, suggested this, and seriously suggested it. But then he yielded to [US President Franklin] Roosevelt – first Long Island, then New York, Manhattan,” the foreign minister said.
He acknowledged, however, that the change would be extremely difficult to make.
“All these structures have grown deep roots,” both in terms of real estate and “in the form of personnel,” Lavrov said. “Especially after permanent contracts were introduced, the personnel bought apartments, houses.”
The sudden shift would be “scary to even imagine,” he added.
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Lavrov previously referred to Stalin’s suggestion in the wake of a diplomatic scandal in which Washington denied visas to a senior Russian diplomatic delegation ahead of a UNGA session in 2019, during Donald Trump’s first presidency.
Russia is one of five permanent members of the UNSC, alongside China, the US, UK, and France. All five have the power to veto any resolution put before the council. The ten non-permanent members are elected by the UNGA to serve two-year terms.
Moscow has argued for the expansion of the roster.
India, Brazil, and representatives of Africa should have joined the UNSC as permanent members long ago, Lavrov said.
“This is necessary to ensure representativeness, the representation of the world majority,” Lavrov said last year, arguing that Western nations are over-represented at the UN.
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