US concedes Russia won't be expelled from UN Security Council
In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday night, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the United States could not remove Russia from the U.N.'s most powerful body, the Security Council.
"They are a member of the Security Council. That's a fact. We can't change that fact, but we certainly can isolate them in the Security Council," Thomas-Greenfield told MSNBC.
That's separate from the push to remove Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council, which Thomas-Greenfield told NPR they hope to bring to the U.N. General Assembly for a vote as soon as Thursday.
"I know we're going to get" the necessary two-thirds majority, she told CNN.
Thomas-Greenfield also described what it was like in the room on Tuesday as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's graphic video finally played for the U.N. Security Council. She told MSNBC it was the first time she saw the uncensored video of the war's victims.
"We were all speechless. We had all seen various videos showing atrocities. But they all covered up the real, you know, the real people that were there - they were all blurred," Thomas-Greenfield said. "This was the first time I've seen that video without the bodies being blurred. And it was horrific. And there was silence in the room. I can tell you that people were horrified."
-ABC News' Conor Finnegan