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The Indonesian President, Joko Widodo, confirmed Friday that he has invited Ukrainian President, Volodymir Zelensky, to the G20 leaders’ summit to be held next November on the island of Bali to which his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin also plans to attend.
“In a conversation yesterday I invited President Zelensky to attend the G20,” Widodo said during a speech after Zelensky himself affirmed he had received the invitation the day before.
Widodo also revealed that Putin thanked him for the invitation received as president of a G20 member country, and confirmed his attendance at the summit organized by the Asian country on November 15 and 16.
The Indonesian president, who said he had spoken the day before with both Zelensky and Putin, declared that they discussed the requests for arms aid by the Ukrainian leader, but stressed that the Indonesian Constitution and its foreign policy principles “prohibit arms aid to other countries.”
“However, I declared the disposition of Indonesia to deliver humanitarian assistance,” he added.
Widodo, who insisted on the need for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Ukraine, also stated that “Indonesia is prepared to contribute to the peace effort.”
Despite the pressure received from countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia for Putin to be vetoed at the summit that brings together the 20 largest economies in the world, Indonesia has so far maintained the invitation of the Russian president.
Finance officials from the European Union (EU), the United States, France and Canada, among other countries, walked out of a G20 meeting last week in Washington as protest against Russia’s presence and its invasion of Ukraine.
The representatives left the meeting that was held in a hybrid format in the U.S. capital just as Russian Finance Minister, Anton Siluanov, began to speak.
Russia had been previously expelled from the group of industrialized economies the past decade, then known as the G8 and renamed G7, after its invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.
