Politics

Guterres to travel to Kyiv after meeting Putin next week

United Nations, Apr 23 (EFE).- The United Nations secretary general will travel to Kyiv next week, a day after his trip to Moscow, his spokesperson announced Friday.

“The Secretary-General will visit Ukraine next week. He will have a working meeting with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and will be received by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Apr. 28,” António Guterres’ spokesperson said in a statement.

“He will also meet with staff of UN agencies to discuss the scaling up of humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine,” the statement added.

In a tweet on Saturday, Guterres said that he would be meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy in their respective capitals in the coming week.

“We need urgent steps to save lives, end the human suffering and bring about peace in Ukraine,” he added.

Hours before the announcement of Guterres’ trip to Kyiv, his spokesperson had said that the UN official would travel to Moscow on Tuesday, where he would have a “working meeting and lunch” with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and be received by Putin.

This will be Guterres’s first trip to the two countries that have been at war since mid-February, when Russia launched an assault against eastern and northern Ukraine, triggering the largest refugee movement in Europe in decades.

A week ago, the secretary-general had urged Kyiv and Moscow to declare a four-day truce for Orthodox Easter, observed this year on Sunday, Apr. 24 but he received no response from Russia.

The UN as a whole has been called into question during the war in Ukraine due to its inability to stop the war or even achieve a truce or an agreement for humanitarian corridors mainly due to Russia’s veto power in the Security Council as one of its permanent members. EFE

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