The war in Ukraine and its worldwide consequences are always in the German Foreign Minister's luggage, even when she travels halfway around the world to Indonesia, Palau and Japan.

Russia doesn't just kill with bombs, but also through the targeted exploitation of dependencies and through hunger as a weapon, the minister said before she left.

The people in Mali and Niger felt this just as much as they did in Lebanon, Argentina or India.

Johannes Leithauser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The consequences of the Russian aggression also determine the foreign ministers' meeting of the G-20 countries, which Annalena Baerbock is attending this Friday on the Indonesian island of Bali.

"Food and energy security" is the title of one of the two working sessions at which the ministers of the world's 20 most important industrialized and emerging countries gather - the other is entitled "Strengthening multilateralism".

"We all have an interest in international law being observed and respected," said Baerbock, thus making clear the effort to come up with a common standpoint against Russian aggression at the G-20 meeting - also with countries like South Africa or India, to which their own nutritional or economic issues have so far been much closer than the issue of perpetrators and victims in a European war.

And the minister even formulated the claim that the G20 meeting, which will probably remain without an official final declaration, will at least make it clear during its course that "we will not simply leave the stage of the meeting to Russia".

Because the Russian leadership announced that they want to enter this stage;

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has confirmed his attendance.

After the start of the attack on Ukraine, the host country Indonesia made no attempt to sanction Russia and exclude Russia from the G20 circle - such an attempt could not have hoped for the unanimous approval of the other 19 member countries, which, apart from the western G -7 industrialized countries also include the five largest emerging economies (Brics) Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as well as Egypt, Argentina, Australia, the European Union, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey.

What to do if Putin attends?

Conversely, Western considerations of boycotting the G-20 round in the event of Russian participation were quickly put aside.

Two weeks ago, the German Chancellor was still vague during the G-7 summit meeting under the German presidency: whether he would travel to the G-20 summit meeting, which is also taking place in Bali in November, would only be decided shortly beforehand.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had already issued the slogan that it was better to sit at a table with Putin and constantly read him the riot act.

Shortly thereafter, Scholz also swung to this attitude;

Meanwhile, Putin said he would like to be part of the G20.

The conference of G-20 foreign ministers will thus become a kind of dress rehearsal for how the Russian presence on the international stage should be dealt with in the future.

The group of participants thus becomes a topic for consultation itself;

how to react to allegations and accusations by Russian representatives in this round requires preliminary discussion and agreement among the other members of the body.

Incidentally, the security issues to be discussed in the G-20 circle go far beyond the current war in Ukraine.

Host country Indonesia's Indo-Pacific region is itself an area of ​​rising self-confidence and tension.

According to the German Foreign Minister, the international order there faces "immense challenges".

The previous federal government had already officially directed its foreign policy attention to this regional world of states for the first time and formulated an "Indo-Pacific Strategy" which - without explicitly addressing China's role - is to be understood as a declaration of intent on how the economic and security policy development of the region should also be strengthened in relation to China.

The frigate Bayern undertook a tour of the region in 2021 as the first German warship in decades to symbolically announce greater German attention.

And the threats to the stability of this area include not only China's military threats, for example towards Taiwan, but also the consequences of global climate change, which threaten the very existence of many small states.

In order to shed light on her dramatic worries about the future and to demonstrate that she is serious about the claim of her "climate foreign policy", the Green Foreign Minister Baerbock flew to Palau on Saturday, an atoll in the western Pacific between the Philippines and Indonesia , which is doomed to sink as sea levels rise.