Antonio Guterres arrived in kyiv on a peace mission to meet Zelensky after seeing Putin

The Secretary General of the UN, Anthony Guterresarrived in kyiv this Wednesday on a peace mission to meet tomorrow, Thursday, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyafter visiting Russia yesterday, “for a logistical issue”, despite the fact that the order of the visits was not to the liking of the Ukrainian president.

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“The order of the visits was a logistical issue. The letters were sent to the two Governments from New York; Russia responded earlier and when those from Ukraine arrived, this visit was scheduled,” Saviano Andreu, spokesman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the humanitarian arm of the United Nations, told Efe.

Guterres entered into Ukraine on the morning of this Wednesday across the border through Poland and continued by car to the capital, kyiv, escorted by UN security and Ukrainian military, as Efe was able to verify.

On his drive to kyiv, the top UN leader made a stop along the way at a gas station in Wog, a municipality located about 150 kilometers from Lviv, as well as a second one in Zhytomyr, about 140 kilometers from kyiv.

António Guterres will not only see President Zelensky and his Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba but will also meet with the staff of UN agencies to discuss “how to optimize humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine”, although for the moment no revealed which place he will visit on the ground.

There has been no communication between the UN and the Ukrainian government following Zelensky’s complaint that the UN head of state visited Moscow first. The head of the Ukrainian government recalled that it was his country that was receiving the attack and considered that it was not fair for Guterres to meet Putin first.

The OCHA spokesman explained to Efe that his trip to the two countries is “a peace mission.” The UN, he has said, works so that “the terror and horror in the areas that are being bombed end as soon as possible” and so that “humanitarian aid can reach the people who need it.”

“There are many parts of Ukraine that we cannot reach, for example Mariupol, or Kherson. It is urgent that an agreement be reached with humanitarian corridors and that the people who need it can be evacuated,” added the spokesman for the UN humanitarian branch.

“The war has caused a number of dead, displaced and an unimaginable level of human suffering. We have 25 percent of the population of Ukraine that needs humanitarian aid because of the war”, added Saviano Abreu.

As he said, after the “Moscow agreements”, the UN is already preparing and coordinating so that these evacuations and the entry of humanitarian food are possible and take place as soon as possible, and he has hoped that they can bear fruit after the meetings that will take place tomorrow in Ukraine.

The Russian President, Vladimir Putinadmitted yesterday that the situation in the Ukrainian city of Mariupolbrutally besieged for weeks by the Russian Army, is “tragic”.

Guterres yesterday proposed the creation of a Contact Group with Russia and Ukraine to “search for the possibilities of opening safe humanitarian corridors with a ceasefire to guarantee that they are really effective” in the areas of Ukraine affected by the fighting.

This is Guterres’ first trip to the two war-torn countries since mid-February, when Russia launched troops into eastern and northern Ukraine, sparking Europe’s largest refugee movement in decades.

The UN As a whole, it has been questioned during the war in Ukraine due to the inability to stop it or even achieve a truce or an agreement for “humanitarian corridors”, mainly due to the right of veto that Russia has in the Security Council as one of its permanent members.

Source: Elcomercio

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