U.N. Chief Guterres Tells Russia, Ukraine to 'End This Absurd War'

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres demanded Russia and Ukraine end their “absurd war” as soon as possible on Tuesday, asserting the war was “unwinnable” and peace talks were “inevitable.”

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and has occupied its Crimean peninsula since. It has also supported two separatist groups in the eastern Donbas region in an ongoing war since them. In February, Russia recognized the two groups as the sovereign governments of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” and asserted that those “states” had requested Russian military aid to fight Ukraine. Russian troops have been assaulting most of Ukraine’s largest cities since that declaration on February 24.

The government of Ukraine has engaged Russia directly in the war and, as of press time, successfully prevented Russia from seizing the capital, Kyiv. Russia has made minor territorial gains but largely failed to meet international expectations for military success against the much smaller Ukrainian military.

The United Nations has played a minor, at best, role in the conflict. When Russia first launched its war – declaring that Ukraine as a state was “completely created by Russia” – it held the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, which allowed it to block any response to the military campaign. While the United Arab Emirates (UAE) currently controls that body, netiher it or any other U.N. agency has acted to successfully limit the intensity of the war between the two states.

Guterres told reporters on Tuesday that Ukraine and Russia both had “enough on the table” to reach a peace agreement.

“This war is unwinnable. Sooner or later, it will have to move from the battlefield to the peace table. This is inevitable. The only question is: How many more lives must be lost?” Guterres asked, according to a report published by the United Nations. “How many more bombs must fall? How many more Mariupols must be destroyed? How many more Ukrainians and Russians will be killed before everyone realizes that this war has no winners – only losers?”

“What I said from this podium almost one month ago should be even more evident today. By any measure – by even the shrewdest calculation – it is time to stop the fighting and give peace a chance,” he concluded. “It is time to end this absurd war.”

Guterres also warned that, given the outsized roles that both Ukraine and Russia play in supplying wheat and fertilizer to the world market, the war is fueling “skyrocketing food, energy and fertilizer prices threatening to spiral into a global hunger crisis.”

The U.N. report did not indicate that Guterres suggested the United Nations take any particular action to facilitate the end of the war.

U.N. member countries and agencies have repeatedly attempted, and failed, to address the war. The Security Council initially took up the issue in February, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale assault on Ukraine, but failed to take action as Russia held the presidency of the Council. The platform did allow Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador to tell his Russian counterpart to “go straight to Hell” and demand that Russia lose its position in the United Nations entirely, but the U.N. did not act upon thta request.

The U.N. General Assembly also held an emergency session that resulted in no significant action.

In March, another United Nations organization, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), issued a ruling demanding that Russia immediately cease its invasion of Ukraine. The ICJ is a platform for states to bring court cases against each other – only states, not individual people or corporate entities, can be plaintiffs and defendants there – with no enforcement mechanism. Russia simply ignored the ruling, which found that Russia’s false accusations of genocide against Ukraine had violated the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Putin himself accused Ukrainian forces of “genocide” once against last week during a rally at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium to commemorate the colonization of Crimea.

“It is to save people from this suffering, from this genocide — this is the main, main reason, motive and goal of the military operation that we launched in the Donbass and Ukraine, this is precisely the goal,” Putin said of the current war.

Russian officials, including Putin, insist that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “neo-Nazi” and that the Ukrainian government is an illegitimate “Nazi” entity. Zelensky has addressed the accusation directly, noting that he is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust.

“They tell you that we’re Nazis. But how can a people that lost eight million lives to defeat the Nazis support Nazism? How can I be a Nazi?” Zelensky said in a speech to the Russian people shortly after Putin announced his invasion of Ukraine. “Say it to my grandfather, who fought in World War II as a Soviet infantryman and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine.”

Zelensky compared the Russian invasion to the Holocaust during a speech this weekend to the Israeli Knesset, a comparison that outraged lawmakers and other officials.

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