Russia’s foreign minister will lead the Russian delegation to the first G20 summit since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin was too busy to attend the summit.
In an interview earlier on Sunday, November 13, after the conclusion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, Lavrov chided the US over its actions in the region, which Russia and the West see as likely strategic geopolitical field of contention in the coming decades.
“The US and its NATO allies are trying to dominate this space,” Lavrov told reporters.
He said Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy is an attempt to bypass “inclusive structures” for regional cooperation and will be about “militarizing the region with a clear focus on containing China and limiting Russian interests in Asia-Pacific region’.
The US and Russia are not members of the 10-member ASEAN, but many major power leaders attended the talks ahead of the G20 summit.
The American president, Joe Biden, has already arrived in Bali, after taking part in the climate conference COP27 in Egypt, and then in the conference of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Cambodia.
On the sidelines of the G20 Summit, the American president is going to have a one-on-one meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at the center of which will be the war in Ukraine and the issues of Taiwan and North Korea.
