United Nations Without General Secretary? Not Impossible Anymore
14:18 07.10.2026 (Updated: 14:20 10.10.2026)
© Sputnik / Sergey Guneev
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Let us imagine something unimaginable, like United Nations without a new Secretary General. The term of Antonio Guterres expires at the end of December, and the process of election of his successor has started as early as in April. So what now? Nothing, to put it simply.
Early October – late September brought some alarming news on that matter. Media started leaking all kind of information and ideas on that matter, and not all of these leaks look credible, if you take them all together.
As an example, Reuters reported that Ms. Rebecca Greenspan, the current Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), is now the most likely candidate for the post of UN Secretary General.
That lady from Costa Rica leads the race, winning in the fourth (!) preliminary vote of the UN Security Council which took place on September 29. Ten members of the Security Council expressed their support for her. Three more opposed, and two representatives did not express their position. The candidate from Guyana, Caroline Rodriguez-Birkett, and the head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, received eight votes each in support.
I’m sorry to say, all that means exactly nothing in the complicated procedure of selecting a honest and truly neutral top diplomat of the world community. What matters is a candidate getting no veto from any of the Security Council’s permanent members (Russia, USA, China, Great Britain and France). And here there are leaks, coming from the Russian diplomatic sources among many others. It looks like there is no candidate that has not been blocked by this or that permanent member. Which means that, at the moment, there is a theoretical chance that there’ll be no General Secretary at all.
The best compilation of information in Russia comes from the Izvestia daily. Every bit of that info comes with a provision that the real position of Russian diplomacy remains highly confidential. Anyway, it seems, Izvestia says, that among the seven applicants there is no one who would suit all permanent members of the UN Security Council. Leaders of the trial votes come and go, but the end result is not even near.
So what do we have here? No candidate, as of today, looks suitable for real election until the permanent members of the "five" come to an agreement. And election of the UN General Secretary is needed for these “five” coming to all kind of agreements on a frightening bulk of problems, threatening the whole world.
There is at least one simple example to show how complicated things are right now. What Russia can do, is to block election of an openly anti-Russian head of the organisation. Other powers are powerless to do anything else. But, in any case, is there anyone among the current seven candidates who could be called “Russia’s candidate” (and, so, get himself blocked by others)?
One may suspect Mr. Rafael Grossi, an Argentinian, being the one, at least because he made several trips to Russia recently, in his current capacity as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But his visits became a laugh of the town, since most of them were about Ukraine’s incessant shelling and other attacks on the Zaporozhye nuclear power station.
I’ll say it again: Ukraine is striking, again and again, a nuclear power station, and anyone can imagine the scale of a catastrophe that may ensue, ravaging all Europe. And the IAEA director would not say out loud who is doing that. Does the world need a UN Secretary General like that?
Not that the origin of drones and artillery shells is a mystery. You can see them in the air or hear the telltale sound coming from the Ukrainian side. You do not need any special equipment to prove it. Zaporozhye, or at least the Eastern part of that former Ukrainian province, has voted at the 2022 referendum to join Russia, and the vote in favor of that was even more energetic than in, say, Donetsk region, where regular Ukrainian shelling of civilians have started in 2014. The power station is in Russian territory ever since that time. An idea of Russians bombing every week, if not every day, nuclear reactors on their own territory is beyond imagination. So who does it?
But, still, Mr. Grossi is saying that he is going to the station site and sending his staff there “not to assign blame, but to stress that one cannot target nuclear stations anywhere”.
So what will happen if there is no General Secretary out there? Maybe there will be no Secretariat, either. And here we have another story, about the current state of the UN bureaucracy after two terms of Mr. Antonio Guterres of Portugal.
Says Mr. Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia: “It goes without saying that the Organisation needs to be adapted to the new reality, including by reforming the Security Council to include additional representatives from Asia, Africa and Latin America. No Western seats can be provided. We cannot allow this because the West is already overrepresented in the UN Security Council. We wish for the UN to become a centre for aligning the interests of all states as prescribed by the Charter. The UN Secretariat could certainly make its constructive contribution. But the current team, led by Antonio Guterres, is incapable of implementing the main requirements of the Charter that serve as the very foundation of the United Nations. They promote partial approaches, double standards and essentially serve Western states. If you look at the composition at the top of the Secretariat, the seven or eight posts that are most significant for the functioning of the UN and its system are held by nationals or subjects of NATO member states”.
The battle is not just for a compromise candidate at the head of the UN. It is about the fate of the whole organisation and its future functioning. Anyone to suggest a wise idea about it? We habitually turn to India for wisdom. So let me quote some recent ideas in the Indian media.
I had a honor of meeting Ambassador Anil Trigunayat, currently of the Vivekananda International Foundation. So, I was happy to read his recent remarks in Indian media, like: “the crass and consistent unilateral actions by the very arbiters of the so-called rules-based order have been instrumental in its demise and increasing ineffectiveness leading to its irrelevance”.
And so? And so, India has “embarked on its UNSC campaign both for the non-permanent seat for 2028-29 and for fundamental reforms of the UN and other international organisations”.
Dear Anil, why not say it openly: so far, without that fundamental reform – no new General Secretary and, maybe, no UN itself (for a while).
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
