A group of 20 ministers will be meeting on Friday at the G20 summit in Bali. The group will meet with the US Secretary of State to push the world’s top economies in pressuring Russia over its Ukraine invasion. Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State will seek to reinitiate dialogues with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.
Meanwhile, the US Secretary will be shunning a direct meeting with the Russian Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. The meeting will be more based on calling G20 members to back a UN initiative to re-open sea lane blocked by the war as it is affecting the business trade rather than blaming Moscow for causing global food and fuel crisis across the globe.
“You’ll see that we will have an ability as necessary to make clear Russia’s responsibility for some of the very problems that the G20 is going to be tackling,” a senior US official said Thursday.
This meeting is an opening for the leaders present for the summit on the Indonesian resort island in November that endeavoured to focus on global recovery caused by the covid-19. However, the interest now has been shifted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as it created a hindrance in global markets, and skyrocketed food prices.
Blinken and Lavrov last met in Geneva, Switzerland in January. In Geneva, the US diplomats did warn Russia that if it invaded Ukraine it will have to face enormous fallouts, yet on 24 February it invaded Ukraine.
The meeting will make Blinken and Lavrov face each other for the first time since the war started.
Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov later joined other ministers to begin meeting with the US intending to gain support from the top global economies in pressuring Russia on its Ukraine invasion.
“It clearly cannot be business as usual when it comes to Russia’s involvement and engagement in enterprises like the G20,” a senior US official said ahead of the meeting.
To open the meeting on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, Retno Marsudi, Foreign Minister of Indonesia, addressed the war directly.
“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not the battlefield,” Marsudi said, with Lavrov in the room.
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