Meetings of leaders this week in Asia were a chance to take stock, and the war was a roadblock in the way of other discussions at the G20 summit where hosts Indonesia wanted to focus on climate and related issues of energy and food security.
Significant developments are creating new ones. Fresh from getting two elections out of the way, Trump’s successor Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping used the meeting in Bali to take some heat out of the relationship between Washington and Beijing.
After months of heightened rhetoric and some military posturing over Taiwan, there was a reset for Biden, whose party avoided its worst midterm scenarios, and for Xi, further bolstered by a new ruling mandate.
The language and tone between the two became more conciliatory and the powers plan regular lower-level talks. It appeared overall to be an effort to manage the countries’ ongoing geopolitical competition in a more stable way.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stayed away from the G20 summit but his foreign minister sat through uncomfortable sessions with leaders. There was a combined G20 statement against any nuclear conflict, sparked by Russia’s threats as Moscow suffers battlefield setbacks.
China has refrained from publicly criticising Russia over the conflict, simply saying it should end. But in contrast to Putin, Xi has not been isolated and China’s leader is catching up with a number of Western leaders in person for the first time in three years.
During the summit, a potentially fraught situation involving Nato and the Ukraine war emerged.
Just days after Ukraine soldiers entered Kherson with Russian troops having withdrawn to the eastern side of the Dnipro River, Moscow on Wednesday unleashed another barrage of missile attacks across Ukraine, striking cities, targeting infrastructure, and knocking out power.
On the same day, two people in Nato-member Poland near the border with Ukraine were killed in an incident that clearly highlighted the potential for escalation. Leaders at the G20 were given a scary glimpse of how Nato could be drawn into a conflict with a nuclear power.
The fact that a Soviet-era Ukrainian air defence system is believed to have been responsible, straying off course while attempting to shoot down Russian missiles, shouldn’t obscure the bigger picture.
“Those innocent people would not have been killed if there had been no Russian war against Ukraine,’’ Poland’s UN Ambassador Krzysztof Szczerski told the Security Council.
Russia is culpable as the invader and the aggressive force that keeps trying to recklessly inflict harm, even though it has been unable to achieve its original objectives. It has instead lost about 55 per cent of the territory initially gained.
Russia has previously fired missiles at Lyiv near the Ukraine western border. There has also been dangerous shelling around a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Moscow’s strategy to damage Ukraine’s energy network punishes civilians as winter nears. Using missiles and drones to attack cities is a terror tactic. Areas that Russian forces have occupied and left have yielded evidence of war crimes.
Ukraine has been pushing Western countries to send more air defence systems to combat the mass aerial attacks. While its backers have said military support will continue as long as necessary, there are difficult decisions ahead. Hanging over the war is whether Ukraine tries to retake Crimea, if it can, and how Russia would respond.
The US has been publicly applying pressure Ukraine to put its territorial gains to work in negotiating an end to the conflict. From Ukraine’s point of view, there’s still a large strip of its territory occupied and outstanding questions of future defence and reparations.
During a video address to the G20 before the incident in Poland, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented a list of proposals on how the war could end. Ukraine’s terms include that Russian troops leave all of Ukraine. He wants an international conference to “cement key elements of the postwar security architecture” and prevent a recurrence of “Russian aggression”.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said on Thursday that Kyiv would be operating from a position of strength to achieve a “political solution”. Milley had previously said that a military victory is impossible for either side. The official US line is that it’s up to Ukraine to decide when to negotiate.
The G20 summit opened up the possibility of whether Xi could be persuaded to use his influence with troublesome ally Putin. Could better relations between the US and China help bring an end to the war?
French President Emmanuel Macron said: “I am convinced China can play, on our side, a more important mediating role in the coming months, to prevent in particular a stronger return of ground offensives in early February”.
Different leaders are seeing the same window of opportunity for compromise.
