Russian President Vladimir Putin and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will mainly discuss Ukraine the day after Thursday in Kazan, during their first bilateral meeting since April 2022, the Kremlin announced yesterday, Monday.

“In addition to the UN activity, they are expected to discuss issues of current affairs, in particular the crisis in the Middle East and the situation in Ukraine,” according to a statement from the Russian presidency.

As of this stage, the UN has not officially confirmed—nor denied—that the meeting will indeed take place.

Asked about this during a briefing of accredited editors at the international body’s headquarters in New York, Mr Guterres’ deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, limited himself to saying that there would be “announcements” about the Secretary-General’s schedule “later”. .

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry ruled last Monday night that Mr. Guterres is making the “wrong choice” because he did not accept the invitation to a peace summit but agreed to travel to Kazan. “All it does is damage the reputation of the UN,” he argued via X.

This will be Antonio Guterres’ first visit to Russia since April 26, 2022, two months after the start of the war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has dubbed a “special military operation.”

He had then met in the Russian capital with Vladimir Putin, who had assured him that he expected a “positive” outcome in the peace negotiations that were taking place at the time between Moscow and Kiev.

Since then, the two belligerent countries have stopped all formal negotiations and their positions seem increasingly irreconcilable.

Mr Guterres, who says he is willing to act as a mediator, has nevertheless repeatedly stressed that the annexation of Ukrainian territories “has no place in the modern world”.

“The war in Ukraine remains an open wound in the heart of Europe,” he said in February.

Ever the subject of broad Western sanctions, Russia aims to demonstrate this week in Kazan that its policy of isolation and the imposition of punitive measures against it by the West in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine are failing.

On the sidelines of the BRICS summit, Mr Putin is expected to hold some fifteen bilateral meetings — including with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Indian President Cyril Ramaphosa, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s President Massoud Pezeskian and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Pending an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in March 2023 over the deportations of children from Ukraine to Russia that Kiev blames Moscow for, Vladimir Putin was forced to miss the previous summit, in South Africa, in August 2023. He also avoided traveling to India for the G20 summit in September of the same year. On Friday, he announced that he will not travel to Brazil on November 18 and 19 for this year’s G20 summit.