Almost the entire UN General Assembly condemns Russia, but will history?

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been widely condemned over his contribution to the special session of the UN Security Council in New York that was convened on Thursday 22 September. A veteran of diplomacy and foreign affairs, Mr Lavrov arrived 90 minutes late to confirm his contempt for a meeting that he knew had already tried and condemned Russia before it began.

This blanket and unthinking automatic condemnation of Russia has been the case not since February 24 2022, when Moscow began its military campaign in Ukraine, but ever since the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of this historic event, Russia was regarded in the West as a vanquished enemy, used as a laboratory for a vast experiment in free market despair. After the country had the temerity to recover from this disastrous decade in the 1990s, and began to assert its rights as a sovereign power, it became viewed as a deadly foe that needs to be vanquished in the name of Western, even world, civilization.

Sergei Lavrov and the rest of the Russian delegation arrived at the UN Security Council meeting with this history deeply etched in their minds and in their hearts, which told in the…