In mid-November, the heads of state and government of the 20 most important industrialized and emerging countries will meet on the Indonesian island of Bali. Russia’s President Putin is expected at the summit, as is US President Biden. The Kremlin can imagine a personal conversation.
The Russian leadership is open to a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden. If Washington were to offer a meeting at the G20 summit, Moscow would consider it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Russian state television. According to him, the Kremlin would also be prepared to “listen to any proposals for peace talks” – for example, mediated by Turkey. However, he could not say in advance where this process would lead, Lavrov explained. He then further qualified that there had been no proposals to get in touch with the USA.
The G20 meeting of the heads of state and government of the twenty most important industrialized and emerging countries is planned for mid-November on the Indonesian island of Bali. US officials, including Presidential National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, have said the United States is open to talks, but Russia has refused. “That’s a lie,” Lavrov said. “We have not received any serious contact offers.”
US President Biden and Russian President Putin have only met once in person since the US Democrats took office in January 2021: In the summer of 2021, the two heads of state met in Geneva. After the three-and-a-half-hour conversation, the Kremlin chief announced a “dawn of trust.”
Ukraine is convinced that Russia has no genuine interest in peace talks. “The Russian leadership is only looking for a military solution,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the UN Security Council in New York in September. He accused Russian diplomats and his Russian counterpart Lavrov of an “extraordinary level of lying”.
Direct talks between Russia and Ukraine broke down at the end of March. After the annexation of four Ukrainian regions by Russia at the end of September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that he was open to talks with Russia, but not with Putin.
