(UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)   UN Secretary-General António Guterres visits Irpin in Ukraine April 28, 2022

By   Gary    Raynaldo     DIPLOMATIC   TIMES

UNITED  NATIONS  –  NEW  YORK  –  Even as the Secretary General of the UN visited Ukraine on Thursday  and walked the streets of its war-torn capital city Kyiv, a Russian missile strike exploded in the central part of town.  Two days earlier,  the UN Secretary-General met with Russian President  Putin, in Moscow where Putin agreed in principle to UN, and Red Cross involvement in evacuating civilians in Mariupol.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack, which came shortly after Zelensky met with Gutteres, an attempt to “humiliate the UN.”   Guterres visited sites of suspected war crimes in Ukraine on Thursday, where he condemned the “evil” acts committed against civilians and urged criminal accountability. Guterres urged Russia “to accept to cooperate” with the ongoing investigation launched by the International Criminal Court, the ICC.   The UN chief’s visit to the Kyiv suburbs of Borodianka, Bucha and Irpin comes nine weeks since the Russian invasion began. 

While observing destroyed buildings in Borodianka, northwest of Kyiv, the Secretary-General called the war  “evil” and “an absurdity” in modern times. 

“I must say what I feel. I imagined my family in one of those houses that is now destroyed and black.  I see my granddaughters running away in panic, part of the family eventually killed. So, the war is an absurdity in the 21st century. The war is evil.”

-UN Secretary-General Guterres

UN  Secretary-General António Guterres (right) meets with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, April 28, 2022. (UN Photo Eskinder Debebe)

“Civilians always pay the highest price”  in War :    UN Secretary-General 

Secretary-General António Guterres (centre) visits residential neighborhoods of Irpin, in Ukraine’s Kyiv Oblast April 28, 2022.  (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe) 

UN Chief Visits Mass Burial Ground  at Church of St. Andrew

UN  Secretary-General António Guterres (centre in the back) visits Bucha, in Ukraine’s Kyiv Oblast. He visits a mass burial ground at the Church of St. Andrew. ( UN Photo /  Eskinder Debebe)

While on his visit in Irpin, where Guterres  surveyed the destroyed Irpinsky Lipki residential complex, he said 

the  “horrific scenario demonstrates something that is unfortunately, always true: civilians always pay the highest price.  They were paying the highest price for a war for which they had not contributed at all. And this is something everybody should remember, everywhere in the world.”

UN rights chief, Michelle Bachelet said that she had been “horrified” by images showing the bodies of dead civilians lying in the streets of Bucha, and in improvised graves.