The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, will hold a meeting this Thursday with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, taking advantage of the celebration this week in New York of the UN General Assembly.
His spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, confirmed the meeting in an appearance before the press, in which he also expressed "alarm at the magnitude of the daily attacks, increasingly intense, against Kiev and other Ukrainian cities by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which are causing a record number of civilian casualties."
Likewise, he pointed out that Guterres "is also concerned about the increase in the number of civilian casualties" in attacks carried out by the Ukrainian Army on Russian territory, and reiterated that the Secretary-General condemns "in the strongest terms all attacks" against civilian populations committed by both sides in the conflict.
The highest official of the UN has insisted again on his call to Moscow and Kiev to put an end "immediately to this dangerous spiral of escalation" and, in this context, has asked to "double" the diplomatic initiatives aimed at urgently reducing tensions and achieving a ceasefire "immediate, total, and unconditional, as a first step towards a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in Ukraine."
It is also expected that Presidents Donald Trump and Volodimir Zelenski will hold a meeting this week on the margins of the United Nations meeting, a meeting that, as the U.S. president indicated this Sunday, "can change many things," while celebrating that "there is a diplomatic dynamic" surrounding the war triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago.