UNITED NATIONS — The letter was already being drafted, Vassily Nebenzia said. The contents would challenge what Russia’s UN Ambassador described as a fundamentally corrupt process. But the promise of a written protest also revealed something the Russian diplomat likely did not intend: that Moscow has no procedural mechanism to remove itself from the list it now appears on for the first time, and is turning instead to counter-accusation as its primary instrument.
Speaking to reporters outside the UN Security Council chamber on Thursday, Nebenzia said Russia was “extremely disappointed” — and, in a phrase that drew immediate attention, “indignated” — by UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s decision to include Russian armed and security forces in his annual conflict-related sexual violence report. The listing, released publicly on May 29, placed Russia alongside 76 other parties across a dozen countries the UN considers credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for patterns of sexual violence in active conflict zones.
“We are extremely disappointed, and I would say indignated, by the clearly biased and politicized decision of the UN Secretary General to include the Russian armed and security forces in the list of parties responsible for acts of sexual violence,” Nebenzia told the stakeout.
The listing did not arrive without warning. In mid-2025, Guterres had placed both Russia and Israel formally “on notice” in his preliminary annual report — signaling that documented patterns of sexual violence in detention settings had reached the threshold for inclusion in the following year’s report. For Russia, the findings centred on treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians held in detention facilities; earlier monitoring by Human Rights Watch and UN investigators had recorded allegations of genital violence, forced nudity, and degrading interrogation practices across dozens of official and unofficial detention sites.
Russia did not engage with Pramila Patten, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and the report’s principal author, when she sought access to detained individuals and documentation. That non-engagement is itself noted in the report — it becomes part of the evidentiary record, not a gap that weakens the findings.
On Thursday, Nebenzia framed the problem differently. The criteria used to compile the listing were, in his characterisation, “superficial, poorly structured, and contain virtually no substantive evidences.” The data, he argued, could not be independently verified. The report’s suggestion of a “systemic” pattern, he said, was a conclusion that the underlying documentation simply did not support.
What Russia announced in response is the more telling development. Nebenzia said Moscow was preparing its own counter-report on what he described as Ukraine’s mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war — a document intended, by his framing, to demonstrate that the UN’s process operates with a selective view of who constitutes a victim. The move follows a pattern Russia has applied in other accountability forums: answer international documentation with competing documentation, force the debate onto parallel terrain, and deny the original report the status of an uncontested record.
Whether that counter-report will receive meaningful engagement at the UN remains unclear. Russia is a permanent Security Council member — a structural position that gives it veto power over Council resolutions but does not extend to reports issued by the Secretary-General under his own mandate. Guterres’s listing authority derives from General Assembly resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions on women, peace, and security; it is not subject to Council approval or veto. Russia has no formal mechanism to challenge the listing other than diplomatic pressure and public contention — which is precisely what Nebenzia was doing on Thursday.
Russia has for months been arguing that the UN Secretary-General position requires fundamental reform, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explicitly raising the question of whether a future Secretary-General might better serve a multipolar world order. Thursday’s stakeout added a sharper personal dimension: Nebenzia suggested the inclusion of Russia was designed not to document accountability but to “discredit Russia and conceal crimes committed by Ukraine” — a formulation that positions the UN’s own accountability infrastructure as a tool of Western information operations.
The report itself documents a sharp global increase in verified cases. Nebenzia has repeatedly used Security Council forums to push back against what Moscow characterises as politically motivated UN processes, but the conflict-related sexual violence report represents a different category of exposure: one that names Russian forces explicitly, connects them to a global accountability list, and will remain in the record regardless of what Moscow’s counter-report ultimately asserts.
Guterres’s second five-year term ends December 31. Whether his successor will revisit the criteria or methodology that produced the listing — or whether the listing, once made, simply becomes a permanent feature of Russia’s international legal exposure — is not yet answered. For now, the letter to the Secretary-General is being written. The counter-report on Ukrainian POW treatment is in preparation. Neither removes Russia from the list.
—Inputs from RIA Novosti, Sputnik.
