UN Secretary-General António Guterres has arrived in Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine.

UN Deputy spokesman Farhan Haq disclosed this at a press briefing in New York on Wednesday.

“He will join President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a meeting hosted by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday. He will go on to visit Odesa and then Istanbul in the following days,” he said.

During his visit, the UN chief will stop by one of the three Ukrainian ports involved in the framework of the Black Sea Initiative to export wheat grain.

Before the start of the conflict in February, Ukraine was exporting up to six million tonnes of grain a month.

However, the war triggered grain shortages, leaving African countries among the most heavily impacted.

On Tuesday, as the first humanitarian boat under the Initiative left for the Horn of Africa, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley, said getting the Black Sea Ports open is “the single most important thing we can do right now.”

“It will take more than grain ships out of Ukraine to stop world hunger, but with Ukrainian grain back on global markets, we have a chance to stop this global food crisis from spiralling even further,” he stated.

Before returning to New York, Mr Guterres will stop in Istanbul, Turkey, to visit the Joint Coordinating Centre, the mechanism that supports the implementation of the UN-brokered Black Sea Initiative on grain exports.

This is the second call Mr Guterres made on Ukraine after the Russian invasion began on February 24.

The secretary-general first flew to the country at the end of April when he visited the devastated outskirts of the capital, Kyiv and met with President Zelensky and other high-ranking officials. 

(NAN)