US secretary of state Antony Blinken has met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov for the first time since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
Blinken and Lavrov spoke for about 10 minutes on the sidelines of a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi on Thursday, according to a state department official.
The official said Blinken told Lavrov that Washington would support Ukraine for as long as it took and that Russia should reverse its recent decision to suspend participation in New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the two powers.
Blinken added that Moscow should release detained American citizen Paul Whelan, who has been imprisoned in Russia since 2018, according to the official.
In comments quoted by Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency, Maria Zakharova, the country’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said there were no official negotiations and that Blinken had requested the meeting.
Thursday’s acrimonious gathering of foreign ministers ended without a joint communique.
Instead, India, which holds this year’s G20 presidency, released a “chair’s summary and outcome document”. This referred to previous conclusions about the war but added that Russia and China did not agree to them.
“There were differences on the Ukraine issue which we could not reconcile between various parties,” Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said after the meeting. “We found that positions were very far apart. We tried very hard, we were not the only country who tried . . . But we were not able to bridge the gap.”
Russia said it and China had criticised attempts “to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries” through “blackmail and threats”.
A senior EU official said the gulf between western nations and Russia and China had widened since global leaders met for a G20 summit in Bali last year, which Russian president Vladimir Putin did not attend. “The situation is a lot worse,” the official said.
G20 finance ministers meeting in Bangalore last weekend also failed to sign off on a concluding statement.
India has remained neutral over the war while calling for a peaceful resolution.
It has also sought to use its G20 presidency to focus on issues it said were of greater concern to many developing nations, such as food and energy security, climate change and debt distress.
“India’s G20 presidency is trying to provide a voice to the global south,” the country’s prime minister Narendra Modi said as he introduced the meeting. “We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to get in the way of those that we can.”
India’s foreign minister also met China’s foreign minister Qin Gang on Thursday. The two countries have been locked in a multiyear border stand-off that has led to numerous clashes between troops, most recently in December.
Additional reporting by Anastasia Stognei