Testing Obligatory Abstention with a Conservative Chapter 6 ICJ Referral

It's 7:53 PM Eastern on Thursday and I am struggling to close down about a hundred open search tabs between my smartphone and my desktop. In short, it feels like I am in a deep but potentially creative backlog. Let me start with a further thought on the Russian Federation. President Trump has acknowledged that sanctions might not be the best way to proceed with Putin, and it looks like Trump is sending Witkoff to Russia in a smart move to explore alternatives (cf. Trump says Witkoff will travel to Russia, affirms plans for new sanctions | CNN Politics). It occurs to me in this context that the US mission to the UN in New York might want to consider floating a Chapter VI resolution at the UN Security Council that builds on resolution 2774 of February 2025. Such a resolution might recommend a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine by 1 September 2025 and further refer the dispute to the ICJ without condemning either side. The resolution might also agree to suspend ICC prosecution of Putin for as long as the Russian side maintains the ceasefire.

I've had a chance to read the abstract and first few paragraphs of Revitalizing the obligatory abstention rule in the UN Security Council: an interpretation of the Proviso in Article 27 (3) of the UN Charter | Journal of Conflict and Security Law | Oxford Academic. I agree that "the obligatory abstention rule is still legally valid and that a draft resolution could serve as the basis for determining who the parties to a dispute are." I think the resolution I have just proposed would do the job. I think I disagree, on the other hand, with Germany's criticism of the Russian veto at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on 26 April 2023. Germany asserted:

Moreover, in abusing its veto to advance its own interests in the context of its war of aggression in Ukraine, the Russian Federation violated paragraph 3 of Article 27 of the Charter of the United Nations, which states that a party to a dispute shall abstain in the voting.

Here Germany may have overreached. If the UN Security Council accuses Russia of a war of aggression against Ukraine, this rather implies that the Council is doing so under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But Russia is under no obligation to abstain from a vote on a Chapter VII allegation according to Article 27 as the UN Charter stands now.   

To the extent the UN Charter doesn't allow for member suspension in a situation in which a P5 Member commits a violation at the Chapter VII level and then relies on its veto power to block peace enforcement action, the UN Charter is clearly suffering from a design flaw. Whether the Charter is practically irreformable as a result, and therefore doomed to end in failure, is an open question for those of us with a mixture of faith and doubt in the future of UN reform.