(Brasilia) French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that an invitation from Russian head of state Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit in November in Brazil should be the subject of consensus within the club of the most industrialized countries.
“The meaning of this club is that it must be consensual with the 19 others, it will be the work of Brazilian diplomacy,” he said during a joint press conference with his counterpart. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brasilia.
“If there is an appointment that can be useful, it must be done. If it is a meeting that is not useful and creates division, it should not be done,” he added. We must be “at the service of peace and the common interest”, he insisted.
Emmanuel Macron recalled that he himself had asked himself the question of inviting Vladimir Putin to the G7 Summit in France in August 2019, but that due to lack of consensus, he had given up on it to invite him to a separate meeting a few days previously at his summer residence in Brégançon (south of France).
“The situation was less serious, but anyway, the war had started and Crimea had already been taken and I did not have the consensus of the others. Some told me: “If you invite them, I won’t come, it’s going to be a problem,” he said.
Since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine in February 2022, the question of the presence of the master of the Kremlin has arisen at each G20 summit. He ultimately did not attend those organized in Indonesia in 2022 and in India in 2023.
The Russian president is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) which accuses him of war crimes for the deportation of Ukrainian children.
Lula had first assured that Mr. Putin would receive an invitation to go to the G20 in Rio and that there would be “no reason for him to be arrested”, before changing his mind.
At the end of the New Delhi summit in September 2023, he finally declared that it would be up to his country’s justice system to decide on the arrest of his Russian counterpart if he went to Rio, while saying he hoped that “By then, the war will be over.”