The United States has eavesdropped on the conversations of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and other UN officials, according to a report by The Washington Post, citing leaked classified intelligence documents obtained by the newspaper.

Guterres expressed to United Nations officials and world leaders his "outrage" at being denied the opportunity to visit Ethiopia's war-torn region of Tigray, The Washington Post reported Monday, citing four documents, two of which have not been previously reported. .

Guterres, according to one of the documents dated February 17 and seen by the newspaper, wanted to confront Ethiopia's representative to the United Nations, Taye Atski Selassie Amde, after the country's foreign minister, Demiki Mekonnen, sent a letter to Guterres rejecting his planned visit to Tigray amid peace negotiations.

Another document obtained by the newspaper revealed that Guterres was "not happy" about having to travel to Kiev to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in early March. While the document did not provide a reason for the secretary-general's unwillingness, the newspaper quoted a UN diplomat as saying that weeks of tiring international travel on commercial flights was the reason.

The hundreds of pages of classified documents that led to the arrest of a US Air National Guard member for allegedly disclosing classified national defense information without authorization prompted the US to speed up a damage assessment and restrict access to classified information to some employees of the Department of Defense.

Other documents published by US media recently showed that the United States also spied on allies such as South Korea, Israel and Ukraine.

Asked by Xinhua at an event at the Brookings Institution on Monday to comment on allegations of US espionage efforts and on how Washington can assuage concerns expressed by its allies, Democratic House Representative Abigail Spanberger declined to comment on "anything that has been leaked." specifically.”

The congresswoman, who worked before becoming a deputy as an operations officer in the CIA, praised the US administration's commitment to "protecting the information we collect and our commitment to protecting the information that (US allies) collect and provide to us."