The United Nations said on Saturday evening, “The Secretary-General will travel to Ankara, Turkey, where he will be received by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 25.”
Guterres is then scheduled to travel to Moscow on Tuesday and then to Kyiv to try to negotiate an end to the Russian offensive.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized Guterres’ “illogical” decision to visit Moscow on Tuesday before coming to Kyiv.
“It is a mistake to go to Russia first and then to Ukraine,” he said, expressing his regret for “the complete lack of justice and logic in this arrangement.”
“The war is in Ukraine. There are no corpses on the streets of Moscow. It would be logical for him to go first to Ukraine to see the people there and the repercussions of the occupation,” he added.
Turkey is trying to mediate an end to the conflict in Ukraine, as it hosted meetings between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul, and another meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in Antalya.
Ankara is currently seeking to organize a summit in Istanbul between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, despite Turkey’s admission that the possibility of similar talks is still low.
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