Ukrainian president says justice must become new 'global rule'

By Burc Eruygur

ISTANBUL (AA) – Justice must become the new "global rule" to restore the international rules-based order, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday.

“Justice must become the new global rule supported by the global unity with sufficient force. Is it possible without the Global South? Definitely not,” Zelenskyy said in a virtual address at the 3rd Summit for Democracy in Seoul.

He argued that the key pillars of the international rules-based order are “weakened if not destroyed.”

“The world now bets more on force rather than the rules. But force and rules are not mutually exclusive. It’s not ‘either this or that.’ Without the force punishing the violation of the rules, the rules aren’t effective. And without the rules limiting the force, it goes mad and it is what happened with Russia,” Zelenskyy said.

“Every nation matters. And now, aiming for the just end of the evil Russian war against our nation, we want to give certainty to every nation that its security will be unbreakable,” he said, adding that this will be possible once the Ukraine war ends based on Kyiv’s terms.

He invited participants of the summit to join a global peace summit in Switzerland later this year, saying they have to “make the force that has gone mad come back to the rules and make the rules work again.”

“I believe that peace can be solid. But for it to happen, countries in the world have to be the co-authors of solid reliability,” he stressed.