The streets around the UN headquarters are bustling and heavily policed during leaders’ week, with regular shutdowns as world leaders move around in motorcades.
French President Emmanuel Macron filmed giving Trump a call from behind a barricade on Wednesday after his vehicle was stopped to make way for a US presidential motorcade.
Peters said the jammed streets were “an awful place” to be and if he’d known he would get stuck a second time, he would have made different arrangements.
“There was a possibility [of speaking to Trump] and in this business, being in this country, way out in the southwest Pacific called New Zealand, you take every chance you possibly get. You don’t blow anything.”
Peters has held several bilateral meetings in New York and heard Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speak at the fifth annual Crimea Platform Summit.
He reiterated New Zealand’s position that the UN Charter prohibits the use of force to change internationally recognised borders and any attempt to annex occupied territories is illegal.
“The reason New Zealand continues to play its part, despite our distance from the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, is that we recognise that a violation of sovereignty anywhere is a violation everywhere and that respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty remains critical to the future of international peace and security,” Peters told the summit.
Speaking afterwards, Peters said Zelenskyy had expressed Ukraine’s gratitude for the support it had received from other countries.
Peters said while the UN was never going to stop the conflict, it was a good sounding board for countries to air their positions and there was no doubt in this conflict as to who was in the wrong.
Asked if there was any scope for New Zealand to offer more support to Ukraine, Peters said he could see the Government doing more at a practical level.
Deploying troops on the ground, however, was an entirely different matter that would require serious consultation, he said.
Peters also sat down with his Canadian counterpart Anita Anand in just one of a series of bilateral meetings he’s having on the sidelines of leader’s week.
The minister said the pair had similarities, with Anand born in Nova Scotia and one side of Peters’ family hailing from there, and he wanted to see both countries working much closer together.
“We made a commitment that we’re going to step up our arrangements and our association and our collective work together.”
“Honestly, if you look at the Five Eyes countries, the country that we’ve least dealt with is Canada and I can tell you from experience it’s because of far too many political appointments rather than career experts in the job, and we’re setting out to correct that.”
Peters didn’t have specifics in terms of increased co-operation, but said New Zealand would increase its consultation with Canada and scope out further projects both countries could work on together.
“Countries like Canada and New Zealand need to do more together. We are very, very similar in so many ways.”
Peters will deliver his speech in the general debate on Saturday morning (NZT), when he will set out New Zealand’s position on Palestinian statehood.
– RNZ
