Monitoring Desk
NEW DELHI: US Top diplomat Antony Blinken said on Wednesday he had no plans to meet his Chinese or Russian counterparts at a G20 foreign ministers’ summit, as Ukraine and China tensions overshadow attempts by host India to strike unity among the world’s biggest economies.
The meeting in New Delhi on Thursday will be the first time Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Blinken have been under the same floor since a G20 summit in Bali last July.
“If Russia were seriously prepared to engage in meaningful talks necessary to end the aggression, of course, we would be the first to work to engage, but there is zero evidence of that,” Blinken told reporters ahead of Wednesday’s arrival in Delhi.
Last week, G20 finance ministers meeting in Bengaluru failed to agree on a joint statement after Russia and China sought to remove language on the Russian war with Ukraine.
But Washington was optimistic this week’s meeting would produce a declaration reflecting “the majority of the G20 continuing to stand with Ukraine against Russia’s war”, a State Department’s senior official said.
According to the Russian foreign ministry, Sergei Lavrov arrived late Tuesday in India and will use his G20 participation to lay into Western countries.
Fragile relations between US and China
Blinken also said he had no plans to meet China’s foreign minister Qin Gang on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
Blinken had a fiery encounter with Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi last month in Berlin after the United States downed a suspected high-altitude Chinese spy balloon over its coast on February 4.
The incident led Antony Blinken to cancel a rare visit to China, slamming the “unacceptable violation of international law and US sovereignty,” which “must never again happen,” the State Department said.
Beijing, which Washington’s stance on Taiwan has also angered, denies it uses spy balloons and says the airship was for weather research.
Wang Yi “urged the US to change course, acknowledge and repair the damage to China-US relations caused by its excessive use of force,” state news agency Xinhua reported.
Blinken warned Wang against providing military support to Russia’s faltering war effort. Beijing denies any such intention.
