— Ch. 1 · The 1945 Charter Agreement —
Russia and the United Nations.
~2 min read · Ch. 1 of 5
Chapter V, Article 23 of the UN Charter appeared in 1945. It listed five nations as permanent members of the Security Council. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics held one of these seats alongside China, France, Britain, and America. This arrangement established the Soviet Union as a founding power with veto authority. The text specified that fifteen total members would serve on the council. Five of those spots were reserved for the great powers who had won World War II. The language did not anticipate the collapse of any member state decades later.
December 1991 Diplomatic Shift
Eleven members of the Commonwealth of Independent States signed a declaration on the 21st of December 1991. They agreed that Russia should take over the USSR membership in the United Nations. A letter from President Boris Yeltsin reached Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar just before Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. Ambassador Y. Vorontsov transmitted this request to the UN headquarters. No other nation objected to the transfer of the seat. Boris Yeltsin personally took the Russian Federation's place at a Security Council meeting on the 31st of January 1992. The European Community noted satisfaction with this decision in their own Declaration of the Twelve published on the 23rd of December 1991.