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 in the streets of Moscow because the war is in Ukraine. It would make sense to start with Ukraine.
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 inopportune, given that both sides are heavily invested in the battle in the two large eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, collectively known as the Donbas, and the Ukrainian army is receiving more heavy weaponry from the US than at any other point in the fighting.
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“We want to see Russia diminished to the point where it can’t do the kind of things it did in invading Ukraine,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said after meeting with Zelenskiy on Monday.
Nato, according to Lavrov, has become a legitimate target as a result of the supply of this equipment.
More than half of the US military aid to Ukraine since the war began – $1.9 billion – has arrived in the last two weeks. Over 60% of US military funding to Ukraine since the crisis began has arrived in the last month: $2.3 billion.
The Guterres mission’s greatest chance is to make progress on ceasefires to let people flee confined cities and to begin laying the basis for how the big countries can maintain Ukraine’s neutrality once the conflict has finished.
Guterres revealed his mediation effort after receiving a letter from more than 200 former UN officials begging him to intervene.
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, the secretary general should have gone to Moscow to ask Putin if he was sincere 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 Russia the same question.
“Then he should have gone to the major capitals like Pretoria, Brasilia, New Delhi, and Ankara and demanded that they support peace.”
According to article 99 of the charter, the secretary general’s duty is to bring to the attention of the security council any problem that, in his opinion, threatens the maintenance of international peace and security.
“It’s not enough to simply 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, thousands 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 chance 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 averting war’s horrors?”
“There are millions of people around the world hoping Guterres will speak truth to power in Moscow and make a passionate but calculating plea in a way no one else can with Putin, and which would be a big part of the SG’s work anyhow.”
