US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke briefly on Thursday. They were the highest-level personal talks between the two countries since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
US officials said Blinken and Lavrov spoke for about 10 minutes on stage at the G-20 foreign ministers’ conference in New Delhi.
But there were no signs of any progress. The conference ended without reaching a consensus on the war in Ukraine.
At a news conference, Blinken said he had told Lavrov that the United States would continue to support Ukraine for as long as necessary and would press for an end to the war through diplomatic terms Kiev agrees to.
Still, with relations at a very low point, the very fact that the two men made contact showed that, at least for the moment, the high-level lines of communication between Washington and Moscow remain open.
“We must continue to call on Russia to end its aggressive war and withdraw from Ukraine for the sake of international peace and economic stability,” Blinken said.
He noted that 141 countries had condemned Russia at the United Nations on the first anniversary of the invasion.
However, several members of the G-20, including India, China and South Africa, chose to abstain on that vote and despite calls from top Indian officials to look beyond their differences on Ukraine and forge consensus on other issues, the foreign ministers were unable to do so or agree to a final communiqué.
India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said there were “divergences” on the issue of the war in Ukraine “which we could not reconcile because various parties had different views.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had earlier called on all G-20 members to reach consensus on issues of particular concern to poorer countries, even if the East-West divide over Ukraine could not be bridged. .
“We all have our positions and our perspectives on how these tensions should be resolved,” Modi said. “We must not let the problems we cannot solve together get in the way of the ones we can.”
China and Russia opposed two paragraphs taken from the earlier G-20 statement in Bali last year. Blinken lamented that “Russia and China were the only two countries that made it clear that they would not approve the text.”
