The West and Russia will face each other on Wednesday and Thursday during a meeting of foreign ministers from the G20 countries in Brazil, in the midst of a diplomatic crisis between this Latin American country and Israel over the war in Gaza.
Two years after the start of the war in Ukraine, American Secretary of State Antony Blinken must meet the head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov in this forum which is taking place in Rio de Janeiro.
But the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, will not be present at this first major meeting of the G20 year.
Since December, Brazil has held the presidency of this group, whose summit of heads of state will take place in November, also in Rio.
For Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the G20 “is the forum most likely to positively influence the international agenda”.
But his ambitions to mediate global crises appeared to have been compromised on Sunday, when he sparked a diplomatic storm by comparing the Israeli offensive in Gaza and the Holocaust. These comments led to his being declared “persona non grata” in Israel.
Arriving Tuesday evening in Brazil, the head of American diplomacy had a meeting Wednesday morning with Lula at the presidential palace in Brasilia. They did not make any statements to the press.
Diplomatic and military support for Israel, the United States, which on Tuesday vetoed a new draft UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, rejects accusations of “genocide” against Israel.
“If Lula was thinking of proposing peace resolutions during the G20, not only for the Middle East but also for Ukraine, I think that is no longer relevant,” Igor Lucena, a Brazilian specialist in international relations.
The outlook is also bleak for the conflict in Ukraine, on which G20 members are also divided.
Despite pressure from Western countries to condemn the Russian invasion, the group’s previous summit, in September in New Delhi, resulted in a vague final communiqué.
The text denounced the use of force, but without citing Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which maintains close ties with G20 members such as India and Brazil.
British Foreign Minister David Cameron, for his part, intends to take advantage of his presence at the G20 to denounce “Russian aggression” in Ukraine “directly” to his Russian counterpart, according to a press release from his ministry.
On Saturday, members of the G7, which includes the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Canada, all allies of Ukraine, are expected to discuss in a virtual meeting tougher sanctions against Moscow.
“Put out fires”
The opening session of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, which will take place at the Marina da Gloria site, a marina with breathtaking views of Rio Bay, is due to focus on Wednesday afternoon on ” international tensions.
The debates on Thursday morning are supposed to address a “reform of global governance”, a subject dear to Brazil, which wants to give more weight to countries of the South in institutions such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank.
“We have returned to Cold War levels in terms of the number of conflicts and their severity, which gives this subject a whole new urgency,” Mauricio Lyrio, a Brazilian diplomat involved in organizing the conference, said Tuesday. G20.
“Currently, we are just putting out fires […]. We must adapt the international system so that it allows the prevention of new conflicts,” he added.
The two other priorities of the Brazilian presidency of the G20 are the fight against hunger and global warming.
Bilateral meetings are also planned on the sidelines of the meeting in Rio, but a meeting between MM. Blinken and Lavrov seem unlikely in view of the tensions which followed Friday’s announcement of the death in prison of Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny.
Their last interview dates back to March 2023, during a G20 meeting in India.
Founded in 1999, the G20 brings together most of the world’s major economies, as well as the European Union and the African Union.
His vocation was initially mainly economic but he increasingly took up the burning issues of world news.