Seventy-five years ago, as The Ukrainian Weekly was going to press with its issue dated June 9, 1945, a press dispatch from San Francisco reported on the veto deadlock during negotiations that would eventually create the Security Council of what was to become the United Nations (then known as the United Nations Conference on International Organization). At the San Francisco Conference, the vast majority of the delegates supported the initiative of the United States for freedom of discussion. Opposing this was the Soviet delegation, representing the sentiments of its leader, Joseph Stalin, who supported a veto demand in the Security Council.
“Anyone can readily see,” the dispatch said of the Soviet delegation that claimed to represent Ukraine, “that if Stalin has his way in this respect, the Ukrainian people will be the chief sufferers as a result, as then they will be deprived of the only peaceable means left them of improving their lot under Soviet or any other foreign domination and of striving to win for themselves true national sovereignty in place of the fiction of one that they now possess.”