In their first face-to-face meeting since the invasion, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken encouraged his Russian colleague to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine on the sidelines of G20 negotiations on Thursday.
At the summit of the world’s top officials in New Delhi, Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov briefly addressed the audience. Moscow and China objected, preventing the summit from reaching a consensus final statement.
‘I informed the foreign minister what I together with so plenty of others stated this past week at the United Nations, and what a lot of G20 foreign ministers stated today,’ Blinken told the newspaper. ‘Stop this aggressive war and participate in genuine diplomacy that can build a just and permanent peace.
Lavrov rushed out of the last session Blinken and Lavrov had together, a G20 summit in Bali in July, as per Western diplomats.
Since Moscow conquered Ukraine in February 2022, when America firmly backed Kyiv and led international attempts to ban Russia, there had been no high-level face-to-face talks between the US and Russian administrations until Thursday.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian diplomatic mission, attempted to downplay the importance of the encounter by telling the state-run news outlet RIA Novosti that Blinken had started it and that it had been brief.
During the second G20 session, Lavrov “talked to him while standing,” she claimed. “No serious discussions or meetings occurred.”
No Joint Declaration
The G20 conference on Thursday came to an end without issuing a unified statement, making it the second time in as many weeks that the group’s summit has failed to produce a consensus.
Lavrov said the gathered delegations that Western delegates had disrespected the efforts made by the Indian hosts to seek consensus on other matters by trying to use Russia as a pretext for their own inadequacies.
“I would really like to apologize to the Indian presidents and to our friends from nations of the global South for the outrageous actions of some Western delegates, that have transformed the G20’s agenda into a farce,” Lavrov stated, as per a Russian news agency TASS.
Russian demands for an inquiry into the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline the year before caused talks over the joint statement to break down, the foreign minister told a news conference through an interpreter.
Russia and Western nations have traded allegations of guilt for the blasts in September.
Experts said there was little indication that the meeting between Lavrov and Blinken, despite its seeming significance, would herald the end of the war.
Nobody has been persuaded by what they have stated to believe that this issue is approaching a meaningful or serious conclusion. We appear to be in for a lengthy journey, according to professor Harsh V. Pant of King’s College London.
Despite the G20 summit’s conclusion without a formal joint statement, it was clear from the announcement that China had joined Russia in rejecting the bloc’s demands that Moscow end the conflict in Ukraine.
