UN chief pushes for cease-fire in Ukraine

UNITED NATIONS－UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is continuing to push for a halt in hostilities in Ukraine even though a Russian UN envoy said a cease-fire is not a good option at the moment, a United Nations spokesman said.

"We continue to call for a ceasefire or some sort of pause. The secretary-general did that, as you know, just last week. Clearly, that didn't happen in time for (Orthodox) Easter," said Farhan Haq, a deputy spokesman for Guterres.

"Ultimately, the end goal is to have a halt to fighting and to have ways to improve the situation of the people in Ukraine, lessen the threat that they're under, and provide humanitarian aid (to) them."

Guterres was on his way to Moscow from Turkey. He was scheduled to have a working meeting and lunch with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday, and will be received by President Vladimir Putin. Guterres then will travel to Ukraine and meet with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, and will see President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday.

Before his trips to Moscow and Kyiv, Guterres made a stopover in Turkey, where he met President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the Ukraine issue.

Haq said the secretary-general is making the trips because he thinks there is an opportunity now.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia's first deputy permanent representative to the UN, said on Monday that now is not the time for a cease-fire.

"We don't think that cease-fire is a good option right now. The only advantage it will present is that it will give Ukrainian forces a possibility to regroup and stage more provocations like the one in Bucha," he said.

Call for evacuation

For the Ukraine side, Kuleba urged the UN chief to press Russia for an evacuation of the besieged port of Mariupol, calling it something the world body is capable of achieving.

Kuleba told The Associated Press in an interview he was concerned that by visiting Moscow on Tuesday before traveling to Kyiv, Guterres could be vulnerable to falling into a Kremlin "trap" in the conflict.

The United Nations said on Tuesday that the worsening situation in Ukraine forced it to more than double its aid appeal for Ukraine.

"Over $2.25 billion is now required for needs inside Ukraine," the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said in a statement.

In other diplomatic developments, Moscow on Tuesday said it was expelling three diplomats from Sweden after Stockholm expelled three Russian diplomats over the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia's foreign ministry said it summoned the Swedish ambassador to Russia and "strongly protested" the expulsion of Russian diplomats and Sweden's "military support to the Kyiv regime".

In developments on the battlefield on Monday, five railway stations in central and western Ukraine were hit, and one worker was killed, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, head of Ukraine's state rail authority. The bombardment included a missile attack near Lviv, the western city close to the Polish border that has been swelled by Ukrainians fleeing the fighting elsewhere around the country.

In a separate development, an armed man opened fire in a kindergarten in Russia's central Ulyanovsk region, leaving at least four people dead, regional authorities told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday. Four bodies have been confirmed, while another source told news agency TASS that two children were killed in the attack.

The shootings come as a warning issued from the UN atomic watchdog. International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi said on Tuesday that the level of radiation at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site is "abnormal".

Xinhua - Agencies