UNITED NATIONS, July 22. /TASS/. Russia views the post of the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina as vacant, Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy said on Thursday at a meeting of the UN Security Council after a joint Russian-Chinese resolution on Bosnia and Herzegovina was voted down.
The resolution suggested ending the high representative mandate on July 31, 2022. At the same time, the two countries agreed to back the election of German diplomat Christian Schmidt to this office until the time specified but with a condition that his powers will be limited and confined to the functions that were previously endorsed by the Security Council documents on peaceful settlement. However, the proposal did not clear the voting threshold in the UN body as only Russia and China backed it.
"We warned that any attempts of our colleagues to bypass the Security Council in this process are not just illegitimate but also dangerous," Polyanskiy said. "Therefore, the post of the high representative remains vacant. There isn’t and cannot be any other legal grounds to interpret what happened.".