USA defended this Thursday the importance of maintaining direct contacts with Russia to express their positions, such as the brief meeting that the Secretary of State had, Anthony Blinkenwith the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrovin India.
The two met this Thursday for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in a brief eight-minute meeting in which Blinken conveyed to Lavrov the United States’ support for Ukraine and in which he urged Russia to remain in the New START anti-nuclear treaty and release American Paul Whelan.
“We are not so naive as to believe that the brief meeting between Secretary Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov will change Russia’s behavior, but it was important that the Russian Federation listened to us,” State Department spokesman Ned Price declared at a press conference.
The official stressed that the United States will always convey its interests to Russia. “very clearly so that there are no misunderstandings” on matters of great importance to the world.
In this sense, he recalled that since the beginning of the invasion there have been contacts between different levels of both governments when necessary.
Price declined to confirm whether it was Blinken who asked to see Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in New Delhi, something Russian Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has assured.
The spokesman for US diplomacy clarified that “it was not a bilateral meeting”, but “a fairly brief meeting in which the secretary took the opportunity to clearly and directly convey the messages that are important to the United States.”
Lavrov and Blinken had not had any personal meetings since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
The leader of US diplomacy had indicated on Wednesday from Uzbekistan, before traveling to India, that he did not plan to meet with his Russian counterpart and that he would not meet with his Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, either.
Price claimed that Blinken did not meet Qin in New Delhi because he already had a “long conversation” two weeks ago in Munich with Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CCP).
However, he explained that in the coming weeks there will be new calls and rapprochements between US and Beijing diplomacy.
Source: EFE
Source: Gestion
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