BLINKEN CONFRONTS RUSSIAN COUNTERPART
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he demanded Thursday that Russia end its war on Ukraine when he and his Russian counterpart held the first private, face-to-face exchange between a U.S. Cabinet member and a top Kremlin official since the invasion.
The unscheduled encounter with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, at an international conference in New Delhi showed that the Biden administration saw a need to re-establish in-person diplomatic contacts with Moscow so the two governments can discuss the war as well as issues beyond it.
Blinken said at a news conference Thursday night that in addition to calling for Russia to halt its “war of aggression” in Ukraine, he told Lavrov that Russia should return to the New START nuclear arms control treaty it withdrew from last month and comply with its terms. And he once again urged Moscow to free Paul Whelan, an American citizen who the State Department says is wrongfully imprisoned on espionage charges.
The meeting with Lavrov, which lasted less than 10 minutes, occurred on the sidelines of a gathering of diplomats from the Group of 20 nations representing the world’s largest economies. In the morning, Blinken said in a session that was also attended by Lavrov and Qin Gang, China’s foreign minister, that countries had to continue to call on Russia to “withdraw from Ukraine for the sake of international peace and economic stability.”
At the G-20 meeting, Russia and China, its strongest partner, blocked the foreign ministers from issuing a consensus communiqué at the end of the conference, arguing against lines that criticized Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Instead, the group released a lower-level statement that reflected the fact that 18 of the 20 nations condemned the invasion.