The Secretary General of the UN António Guterres, who arrived in Kyiv this Wednesday on a peacekeeping mission to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday, after a visit to Russia “for logistical reasons”, although the order of the visits did not please the Ukrainian President.
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“The order of the visits was a logistical problem. The letters were sent from New York to the two governments; Russia reacted earlier and when the Ukrainians arrived, this visit was planned,” Saviano Andreu, spokesman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN’s humanitarian arm, told Efe.
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Guterres entered Ukraine via the Polish border on Wednesday morning and continued his journey to the capital Kyiv by car, escorted by UN security forces and the Ukrainian military, Efe was able to verify.
On his drive to Kyiv, The Supreme Leader of the United Nations stopped at a gas station in Wog on the wayone parish located about 150 kilometers from Lviv, and a second in Zhytomyr, about 140 kilometers from Kyiv.
António Guterres will not only see President Zelensky and his Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, but also will meet with staff from UN agencies to discuss “how to optimize humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine“, although at the moment it has not been announced which place he will visit on site.
There was no communication between the UN and the Ukrainian government after Zelenskyy’s complaint that the UN chief had visited Moscow first.
The Ukrainian leader recalled that his country was a victim of the attack and felt it was not fair that Guterres met Putin first. The OCHA spokesman told Efe his trip to the two countries was “a peace mission”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met UN Secretary-General António Guterres in Moscow.
There are many parts of Ukraine that we cannot reach, for example Mariupol or Kherson.
The UN is working to ensure that “the terror and horror in the bombed areas end as quickly as possible” and “humanitarian aid can reach the people who need it”.
“It is urgent that an agreement is reached with humanitarian corridors and that people who need them can be evacuated,” added the spokesman for the UN Humanitarian Aid Department.
“The war has caused a series of deaths, displacement and an unimaginable level of human suffering. We have 25 percent of the population of Ukraine who need humanitarian aid because of the warSaviano Abreu added.
As he said, the United Nations is already preparing and coordinating after the “Moscow Accords” so that these evacuations and imports of humanitarian food are possible and take place as soon as possible, and he hopes that they can bear fruit after the meetings that take place tomorrow in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin conceded that the situation in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which has been under a brutal siege by the Russian army for weeks, is “tragic”.
Guterres proposed setting up a contact group with Russia and Ukraine to explore ways in the fighting-hit areas of Ukraine to open safe humanitarian corridors with a ceasefire to ensure they are truly effective.
This is the first trip Guterres has made to the two countries locked in a war since mid-February.when Russia sent its troops against eastern and northern Ukraine, triggering the largest refugee movement in Europe for several decades.
The UN as a whole has been questioned during the Ukraine war for its inability to stop it or even reach a ceasefire or agreement on “humanitarian corridors”, largely because of the veto power that Russia has as one of them in the Security Council that of its permanent members.
EFE
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