The German chancellor has warned China against arming Russia with weapons, as western foreign ministers repeatedly clashed with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, at an ill-tempered meeting of the G20 in New Delhi, India.
Olaf Scholz told the German parliament: “My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to urge the withdrawal of Russian troops. And don’t deliver any weapons to the aggressor Russia.”
China has repeatedly denied suggestions it might arm Moscow, but the US administration has recently said that cooperation between China and Russia might soon include the supply of lethal arms.
Speaking in the Bundestag while foreign ministers gathered in India, Scholz mounted one of his strongest defences against Germany’s support for Ukraine. He said: “A dictated peace against the will of the victims is out of the question.”
Efforts by India, this year’s chair of the G20, to steer the Ukraine issue off the agenda largely failed as western politicians used the opportunity of Lavrov’s presence at the conference to demand Russia bring the year-long war to an immediate end.
Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, in a video address, had urged all sides to focus on points of potential agreement. “[The] financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, terrorism and wars – clearly shows that global governance has failed,” he said.
He suggested the G20 focus on the issues on which they could agree rather than those on which they disagreed. Admitting the foreign ministers were meeting at a time of deep global divisions,” he said, “we should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can.”
India has refused to condemn Russia at the UN security council and has boosted its imports of Russian oil. Modi has offered himself as a potential peacemaker in the conflict.
But his call for the G20 to focus on how to tackle issues such as climate change were largely ignored as the west sparred with Lavrov.
Lavrov, according to Russian media accounts, claimed the west was turning the work on the G20 agenda into a “farce” and said western delegations wanted to shift responsibility for their economic failures on to Moscow. He accused the west of seeking to bury the Black Sea grain initiative, the deal that has kept Ukrainian grain flowing out of the Black Sea ports often to developing countries facing acute food shortages and inflation. Russia and the west have been involved in a growing propaganda war to convince the global south that the knock-on effects of the war should be blamed on their adversary. Just over 40 nations at the UN – many in Africa – have refused to back resolutions calling for Russia to end the invasion.
Meeting Lavrov in person for the first time since June 2022, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said: “We 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”. He also urged China not to supply arms to Russia: “It cannot publicly present itself as a force for peace while, in one way or another, it continues to fan the flames of the fire that Vladimir Putin lit.”
But the most caustic remarks were made by Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister and a Green politician, who has marked herself out as the fiercest critic of Russia inside the German coalition government.
She said: “Unfortunately, one G20 member prevents all the other 19 from focusing all their efforts on these issues the G20 was created for.” Addressing the Russian minister directly, she said: “It is good that you are here in the hall to listen. Stop the war. Not in a month or a year, but today.
“Because every family that loses a father, a brother, a mother, a child loses a whole world.”
Baerbock pointed out that there are different perspectives on the war in Ukraine among the G20 members. “But what unites us all is that there is not a single place in the world where the Russian war has had positive consequences.”
