The G20 finance ministers meeting in Bangalore, India, on Friday 24th and Saturday 25th February ended in failure, once again highlighting the fault lines between member states over the issue of the war in Ukraine.
China and Russia are blocking Western ambitions to agree on a clear statement on the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Moscow and Beijing rejected two paragraphs on the war. The meeting ended without a joint communiqué.
On the eve of the G20, Germany, France and the UK called for member countries to accept an explicit reference to Ukraine. Bruno Le Maire had pointed out that it was impossible to question the Bali declaration of November 2022 in Indonesia, in which leaders declared that “most G20 member states strongly condemn the war in Ukraine have”. “We will resist any decline,” said the French Minister for Economic Affairs, as did his German counterpart Christian Lindner. At the beginning of his visit to India on Saturday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz also called on the G20 not to let up the pressure on Russia and to continue to send “a strong message”.
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“Different assessments of the situation”
At the end of the Bangalore meeting, India was content to publish a “summary” and “a Presidential Outcome Document” acknowledging the disagreements. Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told reporters that the prepared statement contained two paragraphs from the Bali Statement, which were denied by Russia and China.
The first paragraph states that “most members strongly condemn the war in Ukraine” and that “there were different points of view and different assessments of the situation and the sanctions”. A second emphasized “the need to enforce international law and the multilateral system to maintain peace and stability” and considers “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons to be impermissible”.
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China and Russia did not sign, arguing that their role was to “handle economic and financial issues.” In a statement released in Moscow, Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused the West of “destabilizing” the meeting by trying to impose a “dictate”.
Speaking to the press in Bangalore, Spain’s Vice-President and Economy Minister Nadia Calvino regretted, without naming a name, that certain “positions” within the group were “less constructive” than those in Bali.
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