Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, yesterday took advantage of his participation in the G20 ministerial meeting in New Delhi to hold his first face-to-face meeting with the new head of Chinese diplomacy, Qin Gang, who, he said, assured him that “China wants peace and will do everything in its power to bring it back”.
During his address to the rest of the G20 foreign ministers, Albares made “a new appeal, exactly like last week at the UN General Assembly and at the UN Security Council, for peace in Ukraine, for peace to return to Europe,” Albares told the press at the end of the meeting.
“On this occasion, I did so in the presence of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov,” before whom “I condemned Russia’s illegal, unjust and unjustified aggression against Ukraine and stressed that, beyond aggression against Ukraine, this is a threat to multilateralism and to the most basic principles of the UN Charter: sovereignty, territorial integrity, sovereign equality of States,” he continued.
Albares also spoke about “the global economic consequences of this aggression, which has generated an energy crisis and a humanitarian crisis”, and assured his counterparts that “Spain has increased its official development aid” and has approved a new Development Cooperation Law “which includes the objective of 0.7% of GNI in development aid by 2030”. “In this way, everything we are doing for Ukraine is not done to the detriment of other areas that also need it, such as Africa, specifically the Sahel, or Latin America,” he added. The minister also addressed “other global phenomena, such as the fight against terrorism, new threats or cybersecurity”, and made “a defense of multilateral solutions to global challenges”.
On the other hand, Albares held bilateral meetings with some of his counterparts present in New Delhi, such as Mauro Vieira, from Brazil; Annalena Baerbock, from Germany; AK Abdul Momen, from Bangladesh; Faisal bin Farhan, from Saudi Arabia; and Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, from Turkey, to whom he reiterated “Spain’s condolences and solidarity with the Turkish people after the devastating earthquake.”
Meeting with Qin Gang
In any case, the highlight of the bilateral meetings was the one with his new Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, who took office last December 30 and with whom he discussed the “different activities” that can be carried out “in the framework of the 50th anniversary of Spain-China relations”.
“I have also asked him to use all the knowledge, all the ascendancy, all the good relationship he has with Russia so that the Russian soldiers withdraw from Ukrainian territory and return within their borders,” he stated. Qin’s response, he assured, was that China “wants peace, exactly as we do, and that it will do everything in its power to bring peace back,” while “I have reiterated to him that it has to be a peace within the UN Charter.” “The important thing is that China is clear about the idea and the need for peace, we are talking about a country that is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and that has a relationship and an ascendancy over Russia that is evident, and the Chinese Foreign Minister has told me that he is in this line of favoring peace,” he added.
In his statements to the press, Albares took it for granted, and this was subsequently demonstrated, that it was going to be practically impossible to reach a consensus on a joint statement by the 20 G20 foreign ministers. “Unfortunately, the intervention of the Russian foreign minister has been within the Russian narrative, denying the illegality of this war and not listening to all those of us who call for peace for Ukraine and a return of Russian soldiers within the borders of the Russian Federation; therefore, I see it difficult at this time that there can be a consensus in the form of a communiqué,” he specified.
In fact, Lavrov and Qin held a meeting yesterday in New Delhi on the margins of the G20 meeting, at the end of which they accused Western countries of “interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and imposing unilateral approaches through blackmail and threats,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Meanwhile, U.S. sources reported that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a brief meeting with Lavrov yesterday (the first since the start of the war) in which he reiterated the U.S. commitment to Ukraine and urged Russia to reverse its decision to suspend the New START nuclear treaty.
