A Russian missile strike lights up the sky over Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 24, 2026. Russia’s intensified attacks on Ukrainian civilians demand a greater international commitment to the Responsibility to Protect principle, writes Matteo Mecacci. (Shutterstock/Sodel Vladyslav)

The Responsibility to Protect: If Not Ukraine, Then Where?

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As Russia intensifies attacks on civilians, defending Ukraine has become a test of whether the international commitment to protect civilians still carries practical meaning.

At the 2005 World Summit “The Millennium Development Goals: Five Years Later,” every UN member state affirmed its “Responsibility to Protect” civilians—known as R2P. The summit not only declared that “each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” The “international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the [UN] Charter, to help to protect populations.”

The idea and language of protection is thus, in principle, familiar in international diplomacy. Yet, putting R2P into practice is not. To be sure, R2P is not a new, freestanding authorization to use force; the UN Charter still governs coercive collective action. But the principle is broader than military intervention and no less important.

Writing from Kyiv, it is hard to ignore how much Russia’s aerial campaign against Ukraine has changed over the last few months. Air-raid alerts no longer divide neatly between dangerous nights and relatively normal days. Now, they interrupt work, schools, public services, shopping malls and public transport, end briefly and begin again. Civilian life is increasingly organized around the expectation that attacks will come.

The numbers confirm this. In the latest available week, Kyiv experienced 56 air-raid alerts lasting more than 87 hours—over 12 hours per day on average. Across September, alerts lasted 242 hours and 40 minutes, one-third of the entire month. Kyiv continues to function, but it is now a capital living under near-continuous pressure, with some services........

© The National Interest