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The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, appeared in Moscow on Tuesday to meet with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. There, they discussed the war in Ukraine and, after the meeting, the enormous discrepancies on the versions of both parties about what has been happening on Ukrainian soil since February 24 were revealed.
“It is absolutely clear that there are two different positions on what is happening in Ukraine.” This is how António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, assessed the conversation he had on Ukraine with President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday in Moscow.
Guterres, who also experienced moments of tension in his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, confirmed that Russia treats the armed conflict in the neighboring country as “a special military operation.”
However, “according to the UN, the Russian invasion in Ukraine is a violation of the territorial integrity of a country that contradicts the statutes of the UN,” said the president of the multilateral organization in his meeting with the press after the meeting with the politicians. of the Kremlin.
“We consider that the territory of Ukraine was invaded,” Guterres defended during his meeting with Putin.
Putin’s version
The Russian president, citing Kosovo as an example, defended the right to self-determination of peoples. Furthermore, he stressed that he had “personally read all the documents of the UN International Tribunal.”
“I perfectly remember the verdict of the International Court, which stated that a certain territory of a State is not obliged to request permission to declare its sovereignty from the central authorities of the country”, Putin wanted to emphasize, adding: “if this precedent exists, the republics Donbass could also do it. For our part, we received the right to recognize them as independent states” and subsequently give them military aid “.
“We had the right to do it in full compliance with article 51 of the UN statutes,” the Russian president concluded, referring to the self-proclamation of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics.
Mariupol’s “tragic” situation
During the meeting between the Russian president and the UN secretary general, the humanitarian issue was also discussed in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been besieged by Russian troops for weeks.
This Tuesday, Putin gave the green light, “in principle” for the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross to continue with the evacuation of civilians.
“You say that Russia’s humanitarian corridors do not work. Mr. Secretary General, you have been misinformed. They work,” Putin said, noting that between 130,000 and 140,000 civilians have recently left Mariupol.
Putin described the situation there as “difficult and even tragic”, but wanted to stress that “there are no more war actions” and Azovstal, the steel plant where nearly a thousand civilians and an undetermined number of Ukrainian combatants took refuge, “is totally isolated.
“The Ukrainian military is obliged to release them, because otherwise they would be acting like ISIS terrorists,” Guterres said of the civilians.
In addition, he added that the situation in Mariupol is “a crisis within a crisis”, where “hundreds of thousands of civilians require humanitarian aid, many need to be evacuated”.
The secretary general of the multilateral organization also showed the UN’s commitment to “mobilize all of its human and logistical resources to save the people in Mariupol.”
Guterres proposed a Contact Group and warned of the consequences of the war
Despite the notable differences in positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, António Guterres wanted to build bridges to favor, hypothetically, a dialogue between Russia and Ukraine.
The instrument for this would be the creation of a Contact Group to “search for the possibilities of opening safe humanitarian corridors with a ceasefire to guarantee that they are really effective” in the areas where the fighting is currently taking place on Ukrainian territory.
The UN president’s visit to Moscow before kyiv aroused criticism from Western sectors, although he insisted that his visit was “exclusively linked to saving lives and alleviating suffering.”
Guterres defended his presence as a “messenger of peace” and noted that the consequences of the war in Ukraine are also being seen in the rest of the world.
“The catastrophic acceleration in food and fuel prices that has already taken place over the past year is causing considerable suffering among hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable people around the world,” the secretary-general concluded, warning of the grievances which is already leaving the conflict and which will be seriously postponed if an early solution is not reached.
With information from EFE
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