Indonesia Ready to Facilitate Biden-Putin Meeting at G20 Summit
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13 October 2022 16:58 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Indonesia is ready to facilitate all bilateral meetings at the G20 Summit in Bali next month. This includes facilitating a meeting between the presidents of the USA and Russia, Joe Biden and Russia's Vladimir Putin.
"If there is a request to facilitate the meeting [between Biden and Putin]. We have prepared for it," Co-Sherpa G20 Indonesia Dian Triansyah Djani said in a press conference at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Jakarta, Thursday, October 13.
The G20 Summit with a face-to-face format will be held in Bali, Indonesia, on November 15 and 16, 2022. At the same press conference, Foreign Affairs Minister Retno Marsudi said that so far all of the G20 member countries and invitees have expressed their willingness to participate.
The discourse to have Biden and Putin meet at the G20 Summit first emerged when Moscow indicated it was ready to open room for negotiations, as long as the relevant parties approached first. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview with state television on Tuesday, October 11, said that Russia was willing to negotiate the peaceful terms of Ukraine's war with Turkey and the US.
According to Lavrov, Russia will never refuse to have Putin and Biden meet at the G20 summit. Moscow would even seriously consider it if there was an earnest invitation.
However, it was confirmed that Joe Biden will not meet with Putin in Bali next month. When asked about the issue on Wednesday, October 12, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that Biden had no intention of meeting his Russian counterpart.
"The president strongly believes that the Russians need to take the serious offer that we put forward on the table, or make a serious counter-offer to negotiate, but in good faith," Jean-Pierre said as reported by Politico, October 12.
For the G20, Biden had advised Indonesia not to invite Putin and instead bring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine is not a member of the G20.
Indonesia, as the chair of the G20 this, is still inviting Russia because of the membership precedent. Although Ukraine is not a G20 member, its war with Russia and the impact it has on the world's economy have shown the country's role on the global scale. And so President Joko Widodo has directly invited Mr. Zelensky to attend the G20 Summit in Bali.
DANIEL AHMAD
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