/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KV5TKXRTFQLR25RNUPOSO4SHBY.jpg?fit=%2C&ssl=1)
Just hours after Volodimir Zelenski presented his handbook for “a path to peace” to G-20 leaders on Tuesday, bombing has intensified in Ukraine and a massive explosion is being investigated very close to the Polish border with Ukraine, already in NATO territory, which killed two people. Moscow has stepped up its massive attacks against residential areas in several cities, including Kiev, and against important energy infrastructure. Not even Joe Biden or Xi Jinping, old acquaintances from vice presidents, who on Monday spoke face to face for the first time as presidents, without escaping the cordiality of gestures on both sides. They are joined on this crucial issue by the majority of heads of state and government gathered in Bali for the G-20 world summit, which Zelenski rightly called G-19 in his videoconference speech. Russia is excluded from the international community and Putin is the only one absent from an important meeting for economic recovery, climate change mitigation and international cooperation that reduces the possibility of new wars.
It is hoped that China will be at the center of this heartbreaking international debate against war and against the nuclear threat. The attitude adopted by the countries that play the impossible equidistance between the aggressor and the attacked probably depends on the fact that the war in Ukraine is beginning to see the light of its end. They contrast the attention and deference to Xi Jinping with the growing vacuum caused by the Kremlin and its only representative in Bali, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a fleeting presence at the summit and avoided at meetings and family photos by part of the vast majority of representatives of democracies.
Like other summit participants, the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, encouraged Xi Jinping in their bilateral meeting to exert his influence on Moscow to stop the war. Ukraine has been the main issue of another Sánchez bilateral, this one with Narendra Modi, the chief executive of India and the first president with talks with Moscow who has publicly expressed his unease about the invasion. Nothing will be more decisive than the mention of war in the communiqué being negotiated behind the scenes and which will emerge today from the summit, but the great war of the 21st century that must be avoided is one that could be forged around the fierce competition between the United States and China . Between Beijing’s annexationist claims on Taiwan and Washington’s guarantees to the democratic regime in Taipei is the point of friction present in all its harshness in the meeting between Xi and Biden, marked as a red line by Xi and indicated by Biden as the reason for the “coercive and increasingly aggressive reactions” endangering peace and stability.
Biden arrived in Bali to meet Xi under the sign of an unexpected success in the midterm elections, read as a challenge to the authoritarian temptations of Trump practiced by Xi himself. There have been no restrictions on the now recovered dialogue, so much so that Biden has been able to evoke the terrible state of human rights and Xi, on his part, the politicization and exploitation of economic, commercial and technological relations as weapons, in direct criticism of both Washington and Moscow. The climate change between China and the United States is the most tangible outcome of the meeting: a complete economic and financial disconnect with China would lead to disaster, not only economic, but also social, environmental and probably political.
