UN Secretary General António Guterres attends a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, 4 July 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE / SERGEI SAVOSTYANOV / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN POOL
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has condemned UN Secretary General António Guterres for his alleged acceptance of an invitation to meet with Vladimir Putin at this week’s BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan.
“The UN Secretary General declined Ukraine’s invitation to the first Global Peace Summit in Switzerland. He did, however, accept the invitation to Kazan from war criminal Putin”, the ministry wrote on X, condemning Guterres’s plans to attend the summit as a “wrong choice” that it said did not “advance the cause of peace” and only damaged the UN’s reputation.
The UN has not yet confirmed Guterres’s attendance of the summit, with a spokesperson telling journalists in New York on Monday that details of the secretary general’s travel plans would be shared “later on down the line”.
Earlier on Monday, the Kremlin said Guterres would meet with Putin on the sidelines of the summit on Thursday to discuss the “Middle East crisis and the situation around Ukraine”, as well as the ongoing work of the UN.
If confirmed, Guterres’s attendance of the summit would be his first visit to Russia since April 2022, just two months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when he met with Putin and Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov for “frank discussions” he said highlighted the stark divide between Western and Russian perspectives on the conflict.
Billed by Putin aide Yury Ushakov as the “largest foreign policy event ever held” in the country, this year’s annual BRICS summit opens in the city of Kazan in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan on Tuesday evening.
Over 30 world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, are expected to attend the summit as Putin attempts to project an image of unity in the face of Western isolation, with Russia reportedly planning to pitch a new international payment system that would allow it to bypass sanctions and challenge the dominance of the US dollar.