The US, the EU and other countries leave the G20 meeting in which Russia was present

Finance officials from the United States, the European Union (EU) and France, among others, walked out of a hybrid G20 meeting in Washington on Wednesday, protesting Russia’s presence and invasion of Ukraine, US sources said. Community and French.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; the French Minister of Finance, Bruno Le Maire, and the European Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, were some of the leaders who expressed their disagreement with Russia’s participation in the meeting and left the meeting when it was already started.

Specifically, Yellen and Gentiloni got up from their chairs just as the intervention of the Russian Finance Minister, Antón Siluánov, began, US and community sources explained.

For his part, Le Maire, who joined virtually, spoke during the meeting and then left because he had other meetings, French Ministry of Economy sources reported.

According to those sources, both Le Maire and his G7 counterparts said in their speeches that Russia should refrain from participating in the G20 meetings.

That opinion, however, is not shared by other countries in the club of the 20 largest economies in the world, such as China and Indonesia, which this year holds the rotating presidency.

Before the boycott of Russia, the Ukrainian Minister of Finance, Serhiy Marchenko, intervened, who was among the leaders who were absent from the meeting or turned off the cameras of the computers from which they were participating, detailed the US sources.

The meeting, which is being held behind closed doors, began at 10:00 local time in Washington (14:00 GMT) and it is scheduled that at 15:30 local time (19:30 GMT) the finance ministers will give a conference of press.

Several countries have already questioned Russia’s participation in the G20, as Russian troops continue to wage a war in Ukraine that has already claimed thousands of lives.

The US president, Joe Biden, stated at the end of March that Russia should be expelled from the G20 due to the invasion of Ukraine and pointed out that if this could not be done in Indonesia (host country of the next summit), Ukraine should be allowed to could attend the meetings.

The Kremlin has confirmed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intention to attend the G20 summit in Indonesia later this year and for now the host country has maintained its invitation to the Kremlin chief.

Russia was expelled from the Group of Eight most industrialized countries in the world (the G8) in 2014, after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, but it maintains its presence in the G20.