Paulo Rangel stresses Guterres’ could have attended Ukraine peace summit
Portugal’s minister of state and foreign affairs, Paulo Rangel, has said that the presence in Russia for the BRICS summit of the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, “was not a happy formula.”
Speaking yesterday in a joint parliamentary hearing of the committee on budget, finance and public administration and the committee on foreign affairs and Portuguese communities and European affairs – as part of the committee stage of the 2025 budget bill – Bruno Ventura of the PSD (social democrat party) questioned Rangel about Guterres’s trip to Kazan, Russia, for the summit of the BRICS leading emerging economies at the end of October, when he had not attended the peace summit organised by Ukraine in Switzerland last June.
“I’ve been a great supporter of the secretary-general of the United Nations,” said the minister of diplomacy, arguing that the fact that Mr Guterres “didn’t go to the Zurich conference and then went to the BRICS meeting is something that creates problems.
“It wasn’t a happy formula,” he went on, but “I am and will be at his side, as I have been in the past.”
Indeed, even his comments now, are “not a criticism”, Rangel stressed.
The UN secretary-general “has to maintain relations with any party, even the most problematic ones, but there are many ways of doing it and giving signals.
“You either go all out or you have to have some criteria…”
During the same hearing, in response to Socialist Party (PS) member João Paulo Rebelo, who denounced “campaigns to discredit the United Nations and its secretary-general,” Rangel was even more forthcoming: “Do I think (Mr Guterres) should have gone to the Zurich summit? I think he should have. I would have preferred him to have gone.
“I’m very comfortable, because I’ve always defended the secretary-general,” he added.
“I don’t criticise the fact that he went to the BRICS,” he reiterated, but: “It would have been good if there had also been such a gesture with Ukraine.”
Guterres’s trip to Kazan – during which he met with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin and was photographed, as many remarked, looking disarmingly obsequious – prompted criticism from multiple quarters, including the government in Kyiv, which then refused to allow the him to visit Ukraine.
LUSA
