(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with his Russian counterpart on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in India on Thursday, and said afterwards he had urged Moscow to end its “war of aggression” in Ukraine and reverse its decision to suspend participation in the New START arms control treaty.
Blinken told reporters he had also pressed Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to free Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine serving a 16-year prison term in Russia after being convicted of spying.
Lavrov’s ministry described Blinken’s comments on the discussion as “PR and self-promotion.”
It was the first in-person exchange between the two since Russia invaded Ukraine. Blinken and Lavrov last met in Geneva a month before the invasion began and spoke by phone last July. Although they have been in same room – at G20 meetings in Bali in July and November and in the U.N. Security Council chamber in September – no direct interaction occurred.
Blinken told the press that in addition to the appeals on New START and Whelan, he had urged Russia to “end this war of aggression, engage in meaningful diplomacy that can produce a just and durable peace.”
He said the U.S. stood ready to support Kyiv in efforts to end the war diplomatically, on the basis of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “10-point plan for a just and durable peace.”
“President Putin, however, has demonstrated zero interest in engaging, saying there’s nothing to even talk about unless and until Ukraine accepts – and I quote – ‘the new territorial realities,’ while doubling down on his brutalization of Ukraine,” Blinken said.
(First put forward in a virtual address to the G20 summit in Bali last fall, Zelenskyy’s 10-point proposal includes a Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory, something the Kremlin has ruled out.)
Russia played down the significance of the Blinken-Lavrov meeting, with the TASS state news agency characterizing it as “a quick word” between the two, requested by Blinken “when their paths crossed.”
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, speaking to Russian television after Blinken’s comments to the press, said they amounted to “PR and self-promotion.”
“They are well aware that the American people are asking what the Biden administration has done in the field of bilateral relations and the problems that it has created,” she told the Rossiya 1 channel. “Blinken needs to show something to the people, and he has nothing to show except to catch Lavrov along the corridor.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to get into details on who requested the conversation, which he described as a “brief encounter,” eight minutes long.
“The Russians may be trying to make some hay and to delve into some inside baseball or inside diplomacy. We are just not going to engage in that,” he told a daily briefing. “What we want to make clear is precisely what the secretary said, why he said it, and we make no apologies for that.”
‘We do not feel isolated at all’
The G20 foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi were unable to agree on a joint communique, largely due to differences over Ukraine, although the Indian hosts did produce a “chair’s summary.”
That summary included two paragraphs which both Russia and China refused to support.
While the first dealt directly with the war and referred to demands for a full and unconditional Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, the second paragraph rejected by Russia and China dealt with broader principles – including those purportedly supported by Moscow and Beijing, such as defending the U.N. Charter, and the inadmissibility of the threat to use nuclear weapons.
Blinken at his press briefing made the point that all 18 other G20 members had been in agreement.
“If there are going to be an outlier country or two, when you have 18 of the 20 agreed on what needs to be done and committed to working together to do it, again, that is effective multilateralism in action,” he said.
Lavrov – not for the first time – rejected the notion that Russia was isolated over the war in Ukraine.
“We do not feel isolated at all,” TASS quoted him as telling reporters in Delhi. “The way I see it, the West is isolating itself, and this awareness will dawn upon it soon.”
“Not a single developing country – except perhaps one or two – has joined sanctions against Russia.”
He accused the West, driven by “neocolonial habits and ambitions,” of trying to “subjugate the global economy” to its own interests.
At the G20 meeting, Lavrov said he wanted to “apologize to the Indian chairmanship and our colleagues from the countries of the Global South for the improper behavior of some Western delegations that turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, in an attempt to shift the blame for their economic failures primarily to Russia.”
Lavrov, who held talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang on the margins of the G20 meeting, said Moscow and Beijing have “far-reaching plans” and a “busy foreign policy agenda,” in light of their role as a “stabilizing factor in the system of international relations.”
In addition to China, several other non-Western members of the G20 have been loath to side directly against Russia over the Ukraine war.
Most notably, India and South Africa abstained in all six U.N. General Assembly resolutions adopted over the past year critical of the invasion. Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia abstained in two of the votes, and Mexico in one of them.
The G20 members are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United States, and the European Union.