Chris

It’s clear by now that they believe they can act with impunity against any people or infrastructure they control. It is also clear by now that Russia is not the Soviet Union by any means. It does not have the resources to pursue and maintain a successful military operation where it is opposed by a force with Western equipment and training (and in Ukraine’s case, population-wide dedication to national survival).

Getting Russia off the UNSC would be a difficult proposition though. China would never agree to it and neither would Russia - and the UN charter is written in such a way that it can’t be changed without a supermajority that includes all five permanent members of the security council. The best opportunity would have been in 1991 when the USSR ceased to exist. An argument was made, and accepted, that Russia was the successor state. The politics of the time meant it was very unlikely to have gone any other way. And now we are where we are.