Was he afraid of Baerbock’s replica? Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is leaving the G20 meeting in Bali ahead of schedule – and no longer hears the harsh criticism from his German counterpart. This castigates the “brutal war of aggression” and accuses Moscow of having “not a millimeter of willingness to talk”.
Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of not being interested in dialogue after he left the G20 meeting in Bali. “The fact that the Russian Foreign Minister spent a large part of the negotiations here not in the room but outside of the room underlines that the Russian government is currently not a millimeter willing to talk,” said the Greens politician on the Indonesian island.
Baerbock emphasized that Lavrov was not present when it came to the important question of how to deal with the global food crisis. “It is therefore all the more important that we, as the leading industrialized countries of the G7, are now jointly supporting the countries of the Global South, that we ensure that the people who are already suffering do not slide into a much, much deeper famine.”
The vast majority of representatives at the meeting had condemned “Russia’s brutal war of aggression” as the greatest current danger, said Baerbock and continued: “The appeal of all 19 states to Russia was very clear: this war must come to an end.”
Lavrov left the hall in the luxury hotel “Mulia” immediately after his speech and didn’t even listen to the comments of his critics. He then accused the West of preventing the transition to a peaceful solution to the conflict in Ukraine. If the EU and the US want Ukraine to win the battlefield, “then we probably have nothing to discuss with the West,” he said.
Unlike at the meeting of G20 finance ministers in Washington in April, the members of the G7 group of leading democratic economic powers did not want to leave the conference room this time. Russia should not be allowed to take the stage, Baerbock explained before the meeting. In the US capital, the finance ministers of the USA and Canada, Janet Yellen and Chrystia Freeland, had left the room when the Russian department head Anton Siluanov took the floor.
What Lavrov’s early departure means for the G20 summit on November 15 and 16 is still unclear. The presence of the Russian foreign minister in Bali was seen as a test run for a possible participation by Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin at the summit of heads of state and government also in Bali. Putin’s personal participation in the summit is still possible after Lavrov’s quick departure. In Moscow, commentators assumed that Putin would make the trip if he saw himself politically stronger than US President Joe Biden in the face of the war in November.
