The US and its European allies sparred with Russia on Thursday over the war in Ukraine and urged the Group of 20 (G20) nations to keep up pressure on Moscow to end a conflict that they said had destabilized the world.
“We must continue to call on Russia to end its war of aggression and withdraw from Ukraine for the sake of international peace and economic stability,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, according to prepared remarks shared with reporters after his address at the closed-door meeting.
“Unfortunately, one G20 member prevents all the other 19 from focusing all their efforts on these issues the G20 was created for,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the meeting, addressing Russia’s Sergei Lavrov, according to the German delegation.
President Vladimir Putin last week announced Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the latest START treaty, after accusing the West – without providing evidence – of being directly involved in attempts to strike its strategic air bases.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, speaking at a UN conference in Geneva, said the US had attempted “to ‘probe’ the security of Russian strategic facilities declared under the New START Treaty by assisting the Kyiv regime in conducting armed attacks against them”.
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said the war in Ukraine had hurt “almost every country on the planet, in terms of food, energy, inflation”.
“The G20 must respond firmly, like it did at the Bali Summit. The message at Bali was clear, as G20, we need to deliver solutions that protect the most vulnerable, instead of leaving them to suffer from Russia’s war,” Colonna said, referring to the November meeting of G20 heads of state and governments in Indonesia.
Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra told CNBC that Russia was solely responsible for the war and must continue to be sanctioned.
“A number of Western delegations turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian Federation,” Lavrov said according to a Russian statement.
“The West creates obstacles for the export of agricultural products of the Russian Federation, no matter how the representatives of the EU convince the contrary,” he said.
Lavrov also accused the West of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
In an inaugural address, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the foreign ministers to find common ground on global issues.
“You are meeting at a time of deep global divisions,” Modi said in a video message. “We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can.”
India, which holds the presidency of the bloc this year, has declined to blame Russia for the war and has sought a diplomatic solution while sharply boosting its purchases of Russian oil.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is visiting India, met Modi on Thursday and asked for his help in facilitating “just peace” in Ukraine.
The G20 is an economic grouping that includes the wealthy G7 nations as well as Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia, among other nations.
