Brasília: French President Emmanuel Macron said G20 members will have to agree before Russian President Vladimir Putin is invited to the group’s November summit in Brazil.
“The point of this club is that there must be a consensus with the 19 others. That will be a job for Brazilian diplomacy,” he said during a joint press conference in Brasilia with his counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
If such a meeting can be “useful, it has to be done,” Macron said, although he warned that division on the issue could scuttle any Russian invitation.
Brazil, the current chair of the G20 group – which accounts for 80 percent of the global economy – has opposed US efforts to isolate and punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, arguing that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Western countries share a stake. out of guilt for the war.
Putin missed last year’s G20 summit in the Indian capital of Delhi, avoiding potential political fallout and any risk of criminal arrest under the International Criminal Court (ICC) order.
In September 2023, Lula said that “there is no way that Putin would be arrested if he attended the summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Shortly after, he backtracked, saying that the justice system, not his government, would decide on Putin’s eventual arrest.
