Delegates arrive on the venue in Bengaluru where a gathering under India’s G20 Presidency has begun on Feb. 22, 2023.
Manjunath Kiran | AFP | Getty Images
Finance chiefs of the world’s largest economies strongly condemned Moscow for its war on Ukraine on Saturday, with only China and Russia itself declining to sign a joint statement.
India, which as chair of the Group of Twenty (G20) economies was hosting a gathering in town of Bengaluru, was reluctant to lift the difficulty of the war but Western nations insisted they might not back any end result that didn’t include a condemnation.
The shortage of full consensus amongst G20 members meant that India resorted to issuing a “chair’s summary” through which it simply summed up the 2 days of talks and noted the disagreements.
“Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed that it’s causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the worldwide economy,” it said, citing disruption of supply chains, risks to financial stability and continuing energy and food insecurity.
“There have been other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions,” it said, referring to measures put in place by the US, European countries and others to punish Russia for the invasion and starve it of revenues.
The end result was much like that of a G20 summit in Bali last November when host Indonesia also issued a final declaration acknowledging differences. The G20, formed over 20 years to tackle economic crises, has increasingly struggled to succeed in consensus amongst members.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen earlier told Reuters that it was “absolutely obligatory” for any statement to sentence Russia. Two delegates told Reuters that Russia and China didn’t want the G20 platform for use to debate political matters.
Russia, a member of the G20 but not of the G7, refers to its actions in Ukraine as a “special military operation”, and avoids calling it an invasion or war.
India has kept a largely neutral stance, declining accountable Russia for the invasion, in search of a diplomatic solution and sharply boosting its purchases of Russian oil.
China and India were among the many nations that abstained on Thursday when U.N. voted overwhelmingly to demand Moscow withdraw its troops from Ukraine and stop fighting.
Besides the G7 nations, the G20 bloc also includes countries reminiscent of Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.
Debt negotiations
On the sidelines, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held a gathering on Saturday with the World Bank, China, India, Saudi Arabia and the G7 on restructuring debt for distressed economies, but there too there have been disagreements amongst members, said IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.
“We just finished a session through which it was clear that there’s a commitment to bridge differences for the good thing about countries,” Georgieva, who co-chaired the roundtable with Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, told reporters.
One delegate told Reuters that some initial progress was made, totally on the language around the difficulty, but restructuring was not discussed intimately.
Yellen said there have been no “deliverables” from the meeting, which was mostly organizational.
Further discussions are planned across the time of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings in April.
Pressure has been constructing on China, the world’s largest bilateral creditor, and other nations to take a big haircut in loans given to struggling developing nations.
In a video address to the G20 meeting on Friday, Chinese Finance Minister Liu Kun reiterated Beijing’s position that the World Bank and other multilateral development banks must also take part in debt relief by taking haircuts.
