Day 373: G-20 Summit Again Ends With No Agreement Over Ukraine

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Facts

• Repeating the outcome of last year's summit in Indonesia, a meeting of G-20 foreign ministers ended on Thursday without consensus on the war in Ukraine. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the foreign minister of India — this year's host — said there would be no joint statement because of 'divergences' on the issue 'which we could not reconcile as various parties held differing views.'¹
• America's Antony Blinken and Russia's Sergey Lavrov both exchanged blame with each other over the lack of agreement but they still held a 10-minute discussion on the summit's sidelines — their first face-to-face interaction since the beginning of the war.²
• According to a US official who briefed reporters on their discussion, Blinken said Washington’s support for Ukraine would continue for 'as long as the war continues.' He also called for Moscow to reverse its decision to suspend participation in the New START nuclear treaty, as well as demanding the release of Paul Whelan, a former US Marine imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage.²
• However, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of Russia's foreign ministry, said she discussed the Blinken exchange with Lavrov who said the matter of Whelan was not raised. 'Everything that was said yesterday in the State Dept., that Blinken expressed concern about the situation around the US citizen, was a lie,' Zakharova said. 'Unbelievable behavior of the US administration.'³
• Meanwhile, on the ground, Russia appears to be closing in towards its objective of capturing the Donetsk city of Bakhmut. Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner PMC, said on Friday that his fighters had 'practically surrounded' the city. A day earlier, he also published a video that showed fighters raising the Wagner flag over a heavily damaged building in the east of Bakhmut.⁴
• Ukrainian officials said two civilians were killed and five more were injured in Russian attacks on the Donetsk region over the past day. Meanwhile, one civilian was reported killed in the Kharkiv region while one civilian was killed and 12 others were injured in attacks on Kherson. The death toll from an earlier attack on the Zaporizhzhia region has risen to 5 people; pro-Russia officials also said one civilian was killed and another was injured in Ukrainian attacks on Donetsk.⁵

Sources: ¹Associated Press, ²Independent, ³Tass (a), ⁴Tass (b) and ⁵Ukrinform.

Narratives

• Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by Associated press. The US and its allies must continue to call on Russia to end its war of aggression and withdraw from Ukraine for the sake of international peace and economic stability. Unfortunately, Russia marred the G-20 meetings with its failure to accept responsibility for its illegal invasion.
• Pro-Russia narrative, as provided by Tass. The US launched multiple wars in faraway places — including Iraq, Syria, and Libya — to protect its supposed national security interests. When Russia does the same on its territorial border, after 10 years of warning that this would end badly, America pretends to care about international sovereignty. This is blatant hypocrisy.

Predictions