The United Nations will look to expand its aid to Ukraine, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on July 9 during his visit to Kyiv.
“We want to do better and to do more with respect to the humanitarian situation,” the Portuguese-born diplomat said during a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Guterres was the second of three high-level officials that were scheduled to come to Kyiv on July 9.
The UN secretary general met with Poroshenko shortly after the Ukrainian president had bid farewell to visiting U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Tillerson had traveled to Kyiv from the G20 summit in Hamburg, and later in the day left for Turkey.
After the meeting with Guterres, Poroshenko will next greet NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, who arrives late on July 9 on a two-day visit to Kyiv.
Guterres and Poroshenko discussed the war in the Donbas during their meeting, as well as Guterres’s plans to reform the UN. The conversation lasted around 30 minutes longer than originally planned.
“There was an open exchange of opinions on potential paths to strengthening organizations devoted to regulating the situation in the Donbas, especially on humanitarian issues,” Poroshenko said.
Ukraine currently has a seat on the U.N. Security Council, as part of a two-year rotation.
Guterres, a former prime minster of Portugal and longtime U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has said that he intends to reform key U.N. institutions as part of his tenure as secretary general, by improving coordination between agencies.
“We fully support the approach of the general secretary of the United Nations to the reform of the organization,” Poroshenko said.
But the secretary general himself did not offer any specific views on bids to change Ukrainian legislation and enforce the rule of law.
“I’m not here to say what reforms the government should be conducting,” Guterres said. “We’re following with a lot of interest the reforms that should be made, we’re available to the Ukrainian government to support this process.”
Guterres did not say whether he would name a special envoy to deal with humanitarian and political issues surrounding the Ukraine crisis.
But the top diplomat added that he wanted to “express solidarity to all those Ukrainians that are suffering because of the recent events that have caused 1.7 million people to be displaced in the country.”
“It is not a forgotten situation,” he said.
