UNGA 2026 LIVE Updates: The 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) begins its high-level debate in New York on Tuesday, with the Iran war, Russia-Ukraine conflict and artificial intelligence among the key issues facing world leaders.
US President Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and French President Emmanuel Macron are among those set to address the assembly.
The UNGA also comes as the United Nations grapples with funding and diplomatic challenges following cuts to US contributions and withdrawals from several international bodies. It will be the final UNGA for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whose term ends in December.
The high-level UN General Assembly (UNGA) debate begins on Tuesday, 22 September, with nearly 130 heads of state and government expected to address world leaders in New York. The debate will run until Saturday, 26 September, and resume on Monday, 28 September. There will be two daily sessions, broadly from 6:30 pm to 12:15 am IST and 12:30 am to 6:30 am IST the following day.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will open the proceedings, followed by UNGA President Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh. Brazil traditionally speaks first, followed by the US as host country. Donald Trump is expected to address the assembly at around 7:15 pm IST on Tuesday.
Trump at UNGA: What to expect
US President Donald Trump is set to address the UN General Assembly on Tuesday at 7:30 pm IST, speaking at a turbulent moment shaped by the war in Iran, economic uncertainty and growing concerns over the impact of artificial intelligence.
His administration has also reduced US financial support for the United Nations, raising fresh questions about Washington's relationship with the organisation.
The annual gathering takes place at UN headquarters in Manhattan, New York, the organisation's main centre for international diplomacy. The complex, built between 1949 and 1952, is owned by the UN and is treated as international territory.
What is on the UNGA agenda?
The 81st UNGA session carries the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all”. Key meetings during the week will cover climate action, development, sea-level rise, pandemic preparedness, racism and nuclear disarmament.
Beyond the formal agenda, world leaders are expected to discuss the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, artificial intelligence and the UN's funding pressures. Diplomats will also closely watch the race to replace Guterres, whose term ends on 31 December.
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US President Donald Trump has rejected concerns that the Iran war has depleted American munitions stocks. In a Truth Social post ahead of his UN address, Trump said the US has “more munitions than we could ever possibly think of using” and is replenishing supplies at unprecedented levels.
However, reports citing Trump administration officials have pointed to shortages of key weapons, including missile interceptors. A US Defence Department inspector general report also said missile use in Iran had caused “strategic inventory shortfalls” and exposed bottlenecks in munitions production.
The US and Iran have been at war since February, when Trump and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Tehran has since blockaded the Strait of Hormuz and targeted US forces, while Washington has retaliated with strikes and sanctions.
With the US and Iran locked in a continuing conflict, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is travelling to New York on Tuesday to attend the UN General Assembly. His visit marks a rare instance of an Iranian leader entering US soil while the two countries are at war. Before leaving Iran, Pezeshkian referred to the US as the “enemy” in remarks carried by state media.
Continuing his remarks, Guterres said global power is being reshaped in three main ways: 1) among states, with new “centres of economic, political and technological influence” emerging; 2) increasingly shifting to private corporations and individuals; and 3) from humans to machines, including through the development of “autonomous weapons”.
Guterres said the world’s institutions and systems are not yet equipped to handle these transformations.
Opening his last speech at the UN General Assembly as UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has said that “the fault lines in our world are widening”, saying that we are moving towards a multipolar world where “trust is frayed”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “the fault lines in our world are widening”, as he listed ongoing crises from war to climate change to disruptions from artificial intelligence.
“These are not separate crises,” said Guterres. “These are chapters of the same story. The story of power. Who has it? Who is denied it?”
The General Assembly officially started on September 18, but the General Debate – where world leaders gather in the UN’s General Assembly Hall to hear each other speak – starts today.
The debate runs through Saturday, September 26, and resumes on Monday, September 28, as no sessions are held on Sunday.
It takes place in two daily sessions: from 9am to 2:45pm local time (13:00 GMT to 18:45 GMT) and from 3pm to 9pm (19:00 GMT to 01:00 GMT the next day).
The General Debate of the UNGA’s 81st session has now begun.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is set to brief the UN Security Council remotely on Wednesday alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a meeting focused on the future of artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported.
Other speakers include AI expert Yoshua Bengio, UN AI panel co-chair, and Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue. Altman’s attendance was previously reported by Reuters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he would use his speech at the United Nations this week to defend Israel's military actions against the Palestinians, while accusing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas.
Netanyahu's comments were in response to remarks by the New York mayor, who told CNN on Monday that Netanyahu was a "war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people".
Netanyahu is slated to speak at the UN's General Assembly on Thursday.
"I'm coming to the UN," Netanyahu said in a brief video statement. "I'm going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I'm going to tell the truth about you (Mamdani)."
Trump's foreign policy, particularly the Iran war, comes as Republicans face questions about retaining control of both chambers of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. His administration has indicated that Trump will use his UN speech to argue that his leadership has helped address complex global challenges.
Ambassador Mike Waltz, Trump's chief envoy to the UN, said the President would highlight how his administration had confronted problems around the world. Trump is also expected to reiterate his longstanding criticism of the United Nations over its handling of conflicts, climate change and migration.
After his UNGA address, Trump is expected to meet British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, as well as Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodríguez. He will also hold talks with leaders and senior officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, focusing on the Iran war and recent Iran-backed attacks on Saudi Arabia.
US President Donald Trump is set to address the UN General Assembly on Tuesday at 7:30 pm IST, speaking at a turbulent moment shaped by the war in Iran, economic uncertainty and growing concerns over the impact of artificial intelligence. His administration has also reduced US financial support for the United Nations, raising fresh questions about Washington's relationship with the organisation.
Sayantani Biswas is an assistant editor at Livemint with seven years of experience covering geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations and global power dynamics. She reports on Indian and international politics, including elections worldwide, and specialises in historically grounded analysis of contemporary conflicts and state decisions. She joined Mint in 2021, after covering politics at publications including The Telegraph. <br> She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (2019), with a specialisation in postcolonial Latin American literature. Her research examined economic nationalism through Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. She also writes on political language, cultural memory and the long shadows of conflict. <br> Biswas grew up in Durgapur, an industrial town in West Bengal shaped by migration, which drew families from across India to the Durgapur Steel Plant. As the only child in a joint family, she spent years listening—almost obsessively—to her grandparents’ testimonies of struggle, fear and loss as they fled Bangladesh during the Partition of 1947. This formative exposure to lived historical memory later converged with her training in Comparative Literature, equipping her to analyse socio-economic structures and their reverberations. <br> Outside the newsroom, she gravitates towards cultural history and critical theory, returning often to texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As a journalist, she is committed to accuracy, intellectual rigour and fairness, and believes political reporting demands not only clarity and speed, but historical depth, contextual precision, and a disciplined resistance to spectacle.
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