Meeting with UN Secretary-General-designate António Guterres

Meeting with UN Secretary-General-designate António Guterres

Vladimir Putin met with Secretary-General-designate of the United Nations António Guterres at the Kremlin.

November 24, 2016

15:50

The Kremlin, Moscow

 

Meeting with UN Secretary-General-designate António Guterres.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Guterres, welcome to Moscow.

This is not your first time in our country. We met back in 2000 when you were the prime minister of Portugal, and then several other times.

I would like to take this opportunity to personally congratulate you on your election to the important position of UN Secretary-General. This is a very responsible and complex job.

Russia, as one of the founders of the United Nations, has always supported its leading and central role in international affairs and has been in favour of it taking on a greater role in resolving conflicts and upholding human rights.

We are in constant touch with your predecessor, who will transfer his authority to you in January 2017, and we look forward to establishing a similar constructive dialogue with you.

Welcome.

UN Secretary-General-designate Antonio Guterres (in Russian): Thank you very much.

(In English.) President Putin, it is a great pleasure for me to be back.

As you very kindly remembered, I had a chance to meet with you at the time of the EU-Russia summit, but also the Russian-Portuguese summit that you asked us to have after the EU-Russia summit. Also, as a High Commissioner for Refugees, I had not only the pleasure and the honour to meet you but also to have very important, constructive and effective relations with your government that is something that I will obviously never forget.

I fully recognise decisive role of the Russian Federation not only in the UN but in all aspects of international relations. And I would say that an absolutely fundamental condition for me to be able to be useful to the international community is to be able to have a very constructive and positive dialogue and relationship with the Russian Federation.

We live in a world with multiple threats from the multiplication of new conflicts, the old conflicts that never die, from the spread of a new form of global terrorism to all challenges related, from climate change to food insecurity and to many other threats to the wellbeing of mankind.

I am a strong believer that global problems only can have global solutions, that there is no way a unilateral approach can solve them and I am a strong believer in the role of multilateralism. But I know that the role of the United Nations Secretary-General is not to be the leader of the world. It is a much more modest one. I will have plenty of things to do just to make sure that the machine is able to work much better than in the past. But looking at the enormous challenges in peace and security, I would like to have to offer my good services and as an added value to what necessarily is the leadership of the member states.