At a meeting of the UN general assembly on Thursday, 93 members voted in favor of the diplomatic rebuke while 24 were against and 58 abstained.
This met the required threshold of a two-thirds majority of the assembly members that vote yes or no, with abstentions not counting in the calculation.
“War criminals have no place in UN bodies aimed at protecting human rights,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted in response. “Grateful to all member states which … chose the right side of history.”
The US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, had launched the effort to suspend Russia from the 47-member human rights council with the world still recoiling from images of mass graves and corpses strewn in the streets of Bucha following Russian soldiers’ retreat.
Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s UN ambassador, introducing the resolution before the 193 members of the general assembly, said Russia has committed “horrific human rights violations and abuses that would be equated to war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
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