MOSCOW, Russia
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Russian President Vladimir Putin met one-on-one Tuesday for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the United Nations said they agreed on arranging evacuations from a besieged steel plant in the battered city of Mariupol.
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| Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, speaks to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during their meeting in the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, April 26, 2022 |
U.N. spokesman Stephane
Dujarric said the Russian leader and U.N. chief discussed “proposals for
humanitarian assistance and evacuation of civilians from conflict zones, namely
in relation to the situation in Mariupol.”
They also agreed in principle,
he said, that the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red
Cross should be involved in the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel
complex where Ukrainian defenders in the south-eastern city are making a dogged
stand.
Discussions will be held with
the U.N. humanitarian office and the Russian Defence Ministry on the
evacuation, Dujarric said.
During the meeting, which the
U.N. said lasted nearly two hours, Putin and Guterres sat at opposite ends of a
long white table in a room with gold curtains bordered in red. No one else was
at the table.
Guterres criticized Russia’s
military action in Ukraine as a flagrant violation of its neighbour’s
territorial integrity and urged Russia to allow the evacuation of civilians
trapped at the steel mill.
Putin responded by claiming
that Russian troops have offered humanitarian corridors to civilians holed up
at the plant. But, he said, the Ukrainian defenders of the plant were using
civilians as shields and not allowing them to leave.
The sprawling Azovstal site
has been almost completely destroyed by Russian attacks, but it is the last
pocket of organized Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol. An estimated 2,000
soldiers and 1,000 civilians are said to be holed up in fortified positions underneath
the wrecked structures.
In an interview with The
Associated Press on Monday ahead of Guterres’ visit, Ukrainian Foreign Minister
Dmytro Kuleba noted the failure of other foreign officials who visited Moscow
to achieve results, and he urged the U.N. chief to press Russia for an
evacuation of Mariupol. “This is really something that the U.N. is capable to
do,” Kuleba said.
Guterres flew to Rzeszow,
Poland, from Moscow late Tuesday and was met by Polish President Andrzej Duda.
He is to go to Kyiv for meetings Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy and Kuleba, and his meeting with Putin is expected to top the agenda.
Many analysts have low
expectations for Guterres’ diplomatic foray into the Ukraine war. But U.N.
deputy spokesman Farhan Haq was unusually optimistic Monday ahead of the Moscow
meetings, telling reporters Guterres “thinks there is an opportunity now” and
“will make the most” of his time on the ground talking to the leaders and see
what can be achieved.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine
on Feb. 24, Guterres has accused the Russians of violating the U.N. Charter,
which calls for peaceful settlement of disputes.
He also has repeatedly called
for a cessation of hostilities, most recently appealing unsuccessfully last
Tuesday for a four-day “humanitarian pause” leading up to the Orthodox Easter
holiday on Sunday.
The U.N. crisis coordinator in
Ukraine, Amin Awad, followed up Sunday by calling for an immediate halt to
fighting in Mariupol to allow an estimated 100,000 trapped civilians to evacuate.
Guterres said at a news
conference after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier
Tuesday that safe and effective humanitarian corridors are urgently needed to
evacuate civilians and deliver aid.
To deal with “the crisis
within a crisis in Mariupol,” he proposed coordination between the U.N., Red
Cross, and Ukrainian and Russian forces to enable the evacuation of civilians
who want to leave “both inside and outside the Azovstal plant and in the city,
in any direction they choose, and to deliver the humanitarian aid required.”
The U.N. chief also proposed
establishing a Humanitarian Contact Group comprising Russia, Ukraine and the
United Nations “to look for opportunities for the opening of safe corridors,
with local cessations of hostilities, and to guarantee that they are actually
effective.”
Dujarric made no mention of a
broader evacuation of civilians from Mariupol or Guterres’ Humanitarian Contact
Group, but getting civilians out of the steel plant would be an important step.
On Saturday, a Ukrainian
military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women
and children holed up underground in the plant, some for as long as two months,
said they longed to see the sun. - AP
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