NEW DELHI (AP) – Top diplomats from the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations (G20) ended their contentious meeting in New Delhi yesterday with no consensus on the Ukraine war, India’s foreign minister said, as discussions of the war and China’s widening global influence dominated much of the talks.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said there were “divergences” on the issue of the war in Ukraine “which we could not reconcile as various parties held differing views”.
“If we had a perfect meeting of minds on all issues, it would have been a collective statement,” Jaishankar said. He added that members agreed on most issues involving the concerns of less-developed nations, “like strengthening multilateralism, promoting food and energy security, climate change, gender issues and counterterrorism”.
China and Russia objected to two paragraphs taken from the previous G20 declaration in Bali last year, according to a summary of yesterday’s meeting released by India. The paragraphs stated that the war in Ukraine was causing immense human suffering while exacerbating fragilities in the global economy, the need to uphold international law, and that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible”.
Host India had appealed for all members of the fractured Group of 20 to reach consensus on issues of particular concern to poorer countries even if the broader East-West split over Ukraine could not be resolved. And while others, including United States (US) Secretary of State Antony Blinken, chose to highlight their roles in addressing world crises, the divide was palpable.
Last week, India was forced to issue a chair’s summary at the conclusion of a G-20 finance ministers’ meeting after Russia and China objected to a joint communique that retained language on the war in Ukraine drawn directly from last year’s G-20 leaders summit declaration in Indonesia.
Yesterday’s talks began with a video address to the foreign ministers by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He urged them not to allow current tensions to destroy agreements that might be reached on food and energy security, climate change and debt.
“We are meeting at a time of deep global divisions,” Modi told the group, which included Blinken, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and their Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, saying their discussions would naturally be “affected by the geopolitical tensions of the day.”
“We all have our positions and our perspectives on how these tensions should be resolved,” he said. “We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can.”
In a nod to fears that the increasingly bitter rift between the US and its allies on one side and Russia and China on the other appears likely to widen further, Modi said that “multilateralism is in crisis today”.
