Aha Dua Permata: Putin to join Western leaders in G20 summit

Monday, 20 November 2023

Putin to join Western leaders in G20 summit

Russian President Vladimir Putin
©Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov

President Vladimir Putin will take part in a virtual G20 summit on Wednesday that has been organized by India, Russian state media channel Rossiya-1 reported on Sunday.

The Russian leader had skipped the 'Group of 20' summit in New Delhi in September, as did Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Next week, a virtual G20 summit will be held and Vladimir Putin is expected to attend,” the national broadcaster reported, adding that the event may be “the first occasion in a long time” that the Russian president and Western leaders would co-participate.

Putin was not invited to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit held earlier this week in San Francisco. According to Marat Berdyev, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large and a senior official at APEC, the US said that, as host of the event, “it was not going to invite a number of leaders due to the fact that they are subject to sanctions restrictions.”

In October, Putin attended a Belt and Road forum in China, where he personally met with a European leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, for the first time since Russia’s simmering disputes with Ukraine turned to fighting in February 2022. Following this, ambassadors to Hungary from NATO member states held an unscheduled “emergency meeting” in Budapest.

Putin did not attend the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) economic summit in South Africa in August, despite being invited, due to an arrest warrant having been issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

In March, the ICC issued an ‘arrest warrant’ for the president, stating that he was “allegedly responsible for war crime” and formally accusing him of abducting Ukrainian children. Moscow has dismissed the allegations as false and called the ICC politically compromised. Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against the ICC’s chief prosecutor and the judges who ruled against Putin.

The ICC decision became the first time an international court issued an arrest warrant for the leader of one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.