António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, has been to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to position the UN at the centre of Ukrainian mediation efforts.
Ukraine has chastised Guterres for not paying a visit to Kyiv first and for failing to intervene firmly before Russia invaded on February 24. Prior to travelling to Ukraine, he will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
“To go to Russia first and then to Ukraine is absolutely incorrect,” Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelenskiy, told reporters in Kyiv on Saturday. “This edict is devoid of both justice and logic. There are no dead on the streets of Moscow because the fighting is in Ukraine. It would make sense to visit Ukraine first, to witness the people and the effects of the occupation.”
According to some of Zelenskiy’s advisers, Guterres does not have the authority to speak to Russia on their behalf.
The timing of the visit appears unfavourable, given that both sides are highly engaged to the combat in the two major eastern areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, known collectively as the Donbas, and the Ukrainian army is getting the most heavy armoury from the US than at any time in the campaign.
After meeting with Zelenskiy on Monday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated, “We want to see Russia degraded to the point where it cannot conduct the type of atrocities it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Lavrov, for his part, claims that the delivery of this equipment has made Nato a legitimate target.
More than half of the US military aid to Ukraine since the war has arrived in the last two weeks, totaling $1.9 billion. More than 60% of US military aid to Ukraine during the war has arrived in the last month: $2.3 billion.
The greatest chance for the Guterres mission is to make headway on ceasefires to allow civilians to flee confined cities and to create the framework for how the big countries can maintain Ukraine’s neutrality once the combat has stopped.
Guterres began his mediation attempt after more than 200 former UN officials sent him a letter imploring him to intervene and warned that the UN was being marginalised to the point of extinction in the issue.
One of the letter’s signatories, Franz Baumann, a UN assistant secretary general until 2015, told the Guardian that previous secretary generals recognised they had a role outside of the security council to protect the UN charter, and that the letter was written by UN patriots to defend the UN’s honour.
He said that before the war began, the secretary general should have gone to Moscow to ask Putin if he was serious when he said that Russia’s troop movements on Ukraine’s border did not pose a threat to the country’s integrity, and that if he didn’t get a satisfactory answer, he should have gone to the Winter Olympic ceremonies in Beijing to ask the same question of Russia and China when they met.
“Then he should have gone to the major capitals like Pretoria, Brasilia, New Delhi, and Ankara and demanded that they back peace.”
According to article 99 of the charter, the secretary general’s responsibility is to bring to the notice of the security council any problem that, in his judgement, threatens the preservation of international peace and security.
“It’s not enough to just condemn something,” he remarked. “He doesn’t appear to understand that it is his obligation to speak on behalf of the charter.”
Baumann mentioned Kofi Annan’s travel to Baghdad before the Gulf War in 1998, as well as Boutros Boutros-visit Ghali’s to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in 1993.
“It is really significant for the long-term credibility of the UN that the SG is now visiting,” Andrew Gilmour, another signatory to the letter and a former UN assistant secretary general for human rights until 2019, said. According to what I’ve heard, hundreds of UN employees, both current and former, have been waiting for Guterres to visit the afflicted nations in recent weeks. Yes, there’s a slim possibility Guterres will succeed, and it would absolutely not be his fault if he doesn’t.
“Not being scared to fail is a critical leadership quality for a UNSG — after all, who cares about one’s self-esteem when it comes to avoiding war’s horrors?”
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