United Nations
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is planning to meet Russian President
Vladimir Putin this week and Ukrainians are not happy. Expressing Ukraine’s
disapproval of the meeting, Igor Zhovka, deputy head of the office of the
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that the UN chief was “not really”
authorised to speak on behalf of the Ukraine government.

“This is not good
idea to travel to Moscow. We did not understand his intention to travel to
Moscow and talk to President Putin,” the Ukrainian official told NBC News during
an interview. “Any peace talks are good if they end with the result. I really
doubt if those peace talks organised by secretary-general of the UN would end
up with any result,” said Zhovka.

Meanwhile, on
Sunday, Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told CBS that he was unsure about
whether Guterres’ meeting with Putin signalled any diplomatic breakthrough. “So
many leaders of countries of civilised world, international organisation tried
to have this negotiation. But it seems that the Russian Federation and Putin
are not interested in this negotiation,” Shmyhal said.

Condemning Russia
in the strongest words, the Ukrainian prime minister said Moscow is “interested
in the genocide of Ukrainians.” “They are interested in creation of a migration
crisis in Europe and the world. They are interested in creation of food crisis,
energy crisis. So they do just these things, and we don’t know…I’m not sure
they are capable to hold these negotiations in a proper way.”

Antonio Guterres,
the former Portuguese prime minister, has a busy week ahead. He will first be
visiting Turkey and meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Guterres will next be going
to Russia where he would meet Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and will be
received by Vladimir Putin, according to a statement put out by the UN.

After his Russia
visit, Guterres will travel to Ukraine where he will be received by President
Volodymyr Zelensky. The UN chief’s visit to Ukraine follows a scathing
criticism of the global peacekeeper by Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksii
Reznikov in a Wall Street Journal op-ed where he accused the United Nations of
being “an enabler of Russian war crimes.”