Students at Seton Hall got to talk about the war in Ukraine with none other than the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who visited campus for a World Leaders Forum.
Thomas-Greenfield recalled getting word that the war had started while in an emergency Security Council meeting, where she was talking about the 100 thousand troops Russia had put at the Ukraine border.
“As I raised this in the Security Council my Russian counterpart said, ‘It’s our country, we have a right to put our troops wherever we want to.’ And I remember saying to other people in the council, ‘How would you feel if he had 100,000 troops on your border?’”
Thomas-Greenfield answered questions from students in the School of Diplomacy, who of course wanted to know if a negotiated settlement is possible:
“We continue to support the Ukrainians who are meeting on a regular basis with the Russians, the French, the Turkish, others have engaged with the Russians to bring them to the negotiating table,” she said. “They clearly do not want to negotiate. They want to destroy Ukraine.”
Even so, she said it’s possible that diplomacy will prevail.
“We still think that a diplomatic end, I won’t call it a solution because the devastation of the war is there, but a diplomatic end to this is possible. But in the meantime we’re ratcheting up pressure on the Russians,” she said.