UN, February 13. /TASS/: The UN Secretariat would welcome a summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and China), UN Secretary General’s official spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Wednesday.
"We would welcome any meeting of Security Council permanent members which we hope would lead to increased cooperation between those five countries in the Security Council," he said, answering to a question from TASS.
At the same time, Dujarric did not reply to a question of whether the Russian side requested the UN Secretary General to organize such a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s high-level week in September.
Speaking at the World Holocaust Forum on January 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested organizing a summit of the leaders of Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain in 2020 to discuss world affairs. He said such a meeting could be held "in any country and at any point on the globe the counterparts find convenient." Moscow, in his words, is ready "for such a serious discussion" and plans to send corresponding messages of these countries’ leaders without delay.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that China and France had already supported the initiative. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on February 6 Russia had not yet received responses from the United States and the United Kingdom.
Pyotr Ilyichev, director of the Russian foreign ministry’s international organizations department, told journalists on Tuesday organizing a meeting of this kind on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September is "what comes to mind," but added that no concrete agreements have so far been reached and none of the options has been looked at so far.
