Guterres travels to Ukraine for trilateral meet, Turkiye to inspect JCC

Anjali Sharma

GG News Bureau

UNITED NATIONS, 17^th August. UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Tuesday has announced that the Secretary General Antonio Guterres will travel to Lviv on Thursday to attend a trilateral meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkïye and the Ukrainian leader.

He is invited at the at the invitation of President Volodymyr Zelinskyy of Ukraine, according to a note issued by the spokesman’s office in New York

Mr. Dujarric told reporters that the Secretary-General will then go on to Odesa, where he will visit the port that is one of the three being used as part of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

He will visit the Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul before returning to New York, JCC is set up to implement the initiative, Spokesman Dujarric stated.

He stressed that this initiative is part of a deal that also includes the facilitation of Russian grain and fertilizer exports on to the global market.

Guterres had a phone call with Sergey Shoigu, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation on 15 August to discuss the conditions for the safety operations of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, according to the read out issued by spokesman’s office in New York.

They have also exchanged views on the fact-finding mission in relation to the Olenivka prison incident. And have discussed the United Nations’ initiatives in order to facilitate the exports of Russian food and fertilizers, the read out stated.

The read out stressed that in the past few days, there have been repeated comments by various Russian officials accused the UN Secretariat of having either cancelled or blocked a visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

Mr. Guterres in the read out clarified a few points. First, the IAEA is a specialized agency that acts in full independence in deciding how to implement its specific mandate.

The read out said that the UN Secretariat has no authority to block or cancel any IAEA activities.

He said that the UN is in close contact with the IAEA, the UN Secretariat has assessed that it has in Ukraine the logistics and security capacity to be able to support any IAEA mission to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant from Kyiv, should both Russia and Ukraine agree, the read out concluded.