Russia was not Missed in Bali, But It Loomed Large – Pavel K. Baev

---

Global governance was
tested at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia on November 15-16 by the urgent
need to produce responses to many problems – from food insecurity to natural
disasters caused by climate change – and the outcome could be marked as
satisfactory. Multiple divisions were negotiated by 16 state leaders, three
foreign ministers, two leaders of the European Union and ten invited guests with
various success, but no embarrassing failures were registered. The most
demanding and also the most divisive of the agenda items was the war in
Ukraine, and the joint
statement asserts that most participants strongly
condemned the Russian aggression, while noting that there were “other views”. The
dissenting views remained unspecified, but they can be deduced from the fact
that China voted in the UN General Assembly against the recent
resolution compelling Russia to pay
reparation to Ukraine (as did 12 other states, and certainly Russia), while Brazil,
India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabi, and South Africa abstained (the
resolution passed with 94 votes for and 73 abstentions).

President Vladimir
Putin announced his decision
not to travel to Bali at the last
decently possible moment, but facing severe criticism from the majority of the elite
club and only lukewarm support from others was never an appealing prospect. Ukraine’s
President Volodymyr Zelensky in his virtual presentation addressed the summit
as G19, and this deliberate
slight highlights the plain fact that
Russia is the central part of the war problem, but refuses to indicate any
readiness for becoming a part of the solution. Moscow sticks to the absurdly
maximalist goals in its discourse on the rationale for the brutal war (which is
still officially defined as a “special military operation”), and the massive
missile strike on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure timed to the summit
session devoted to deliberations on bringing the war to an end, proved that bona
fide peace
negotiations would become possible
only after the Russian leadership would begin to internalize the defeat.

The withdrawal
from Kherson has set a key landmark on the road to this defeat, and Putin was
understandably reluctant to meet his international peers with this heavy setback
in his luggage. He could have also suspected that leaving Moscow when the shock
of this pre-determined military disaster was still fresh was rather too risky. It
was left to the top brass to explain to the Russian public the necessity of
this “difficult
decision”, but nobody is in doubt where the
responsibility for keeping the Russian grouping that long in the strategic trap
on the west side of the River Dnipro ultimately lays. The obvious idea was
spelled by Aleksandr Dugin, an ultra-conservative proponent of eschatological Eurasianism,
who suggested
that an autocrat responsible for endangering and failing to protect Russia’s
territorial integrity became useless and expendable. Few among the Russian
elites share Dugin’s vision of an approaching Armageddon, but the series of painful
defeats makes it impossible for Putin to trust the loyalty of even the closest
courtiers.   

Neither can Putin count
on the “friendship without limits”, which he has carefully cultivated with
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is clearly disappointed in Russia’s miscalculated
decision to make the war with Ukraine – and in its failure to bring it to a
satisfactory conclusion. The Kremlin has learned that Beijing will provide some
propaganda-political backing for its war-making, but no material support is
forthcoming, so the hopes are pinned on the steady or, even better, sharp rise
of tensions in the China-US competition, so that Russia would become a more
valuable ally to its mighty neighbor. The meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden
in Bali was a hard blow to such hopes, as the two
leaders agreed in the course of three
hours long conversation to manage the disagreements carefully and avoid
unnecessary quarrels.

Putin’s presence
in the background of this pivotal conversation could have been awkward, but his
no-show revealed rather than concealed Russia’s irrelevance for most other
important discussions in the G20 format. Food insecurity is a theme of great
concern for the Global South, and Russia’s only contribution is to prolong the
“grain
deal”, from which Putin would gladly
withdraw because the Ukrainian export of wheat and corn annoy him, but Turkey
and the UN act as resolute guarantors. Nuclear non-proliferation is another
topic of concern, and Russia’s expanding military ties with Iran seriously
aggravate the problems pertaining to Tehran’s nuclear program. Overall,
Moscow’s pronounced course on dismantling the world order, decried as unfair
and neo-colonial, may find some support in various radical political fringes,
but cannot answer aspirations of responsible stake-holders. World order is
constantly evolving under pressure of various crises, and at this G20 summit it
was reinforced against the challenge of violent disorder unleashed by Putin’s Russia.

---

To cite this work: Pavel K. Baev, “Russia was not missed in Bali, but it loomed large ”, Panorama, Online, 22 November 2022, https://www.uikpanorama.com/blog/2022/11/22/pb-2/

---

Copyright@UIKPanorama. All on-line and print rights reserved. Opinions expressed in works published by the Panorama belongs to the authors alone unless otherwise stated, and do not imply endorsement by the IRCT, Global Academy, or the Editors/Editorial Board of Panorama.