The head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov confirmed, Thursday, March 2, that no joint statement will see the light of day at the end of a ministerial meeting of the G20 in India and castigated the Western countries for this failure.

"We are talking about good manners. Well, our Western counterparts have become very bad at it. They don't think about diplomacy anymore, they just blackmail and threaten everyone," Sergei Lavrov told reporters.

A sign of the divisions within the G20, the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken has warned that he does not plan to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov during the meeting of foreign ministers.

On the sidelines of this meeting, Sergei Lavrov spoke with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang, whose country has close ties with Moscow.  

The two men "unanimously rejected attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, to impose unilateral approaches through blackmail and threats", according to a press release from Russian diplomacy.

In front of his G20 counterparts, the head of Russian diplomacy castigated the "lewd behavior of a series of Western delegations, which turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce", according to the Russian public agency CASS.

"Consequences"

India wants its G20 presidency this year to focus on issues such as poverty reduction and global warming.

But the war in Ukraine has so far overshadowed other agenda items.

"We must all recognize that multilateralism is in crisis today," Narendra Modi said in a pre-recorded statement at the opening of the G20 foreign ministers' meeting.

"The experience of recent years - financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, terrorism and war - clearly shows that global governance has failed," he said, calling on the G20 to come together to overcome their differences.

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna called on the G20 to show a "sense of 'common responsibilities' and not fragmentation, systematic opposition".

Cereals and war of words

Thursday in India, the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken found himself for the first time since July in the same room as his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

Their last one-on-one meeting dates back to January 2022, a few weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The US secretary of state has demanded that Russia renew the agreement on Ukrainian grain exports, which expires this month.

This agreement sealed in July 2022 between the UN, Ukraine, Russia and Turkey has made it possible to limit the serious global food crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The meeting of G20 foreign ministers comes after that of finance ministers, who could not agree on a joint statement on Saturday due to differences over the conflict in Ukraine.

China and Russia are the only G20 countries not to have validated the paragraphs of the document referring to "the war in Ukraine".

Russia is also "not ready" to accept the content on Ukraine of the joint communiqué of the G20 diplomatic meeting, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said on Thursday.

With AFP

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