UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Russia this morning to attend the BRICS summit being held in Kazan, local authorities announced today on their Telegram account.

Guterres, who was welcomed by the speaker of the parliament of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, Farid Mukhametsin, will talk today “with a large number of leaders participating in the summit”, the UN said yesterday, Tuesday.

The Kremlin has indicated that the UN secretary-general will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin tomorrow, Thursday, and they will mainly discuss the war in Ukraine.

This will be the first bilateral meeting between the two men since April 2022, two months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

In Kazan “the secretary general will repeat his well-known positions on the war in Ukraine and the conditions for a just peace based on the charter and decisions of the UN and international law”, underlined yesterday Farhan Haq, one of the representatives of Guterres.

Guterres, who has repeatedly appeared available to play a mediating role in resolving the conflict in Ukraine, has repeatedly stressed that Russia’s 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 had emphasized again in February.

For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine assessed on Monday that Guterres made a “wrong choice” by agreeing to move to Kazan. “All it does is damage the reputation of the UN,” he wrote in X.

With this BRICS summit, Putin seeks to demonstrate the failure of the Western policy of sanctions and isolation of his country. Yesterday he met with many dignitaries, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Brics group counted in 2009 when four members (Brazil, Russia, India and China) were established. In 2010 it was joined by South Africa and this year by four more countries – Ethiopia, Iran, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.