Post #3188

📆 On 25 November, the Moscow venue of the Valdai Club hosted a discussion dedicated to the outcomes of the #G20 Summit in Johannesburg (South Africa). Dmitry Birichevsky, Director of the Department of Economic Cooperation of the Russian Foreign Ministry, took part in the event. Key points from his remarks: • The summit in South Africa was the first-ever G20 summit on the African continent. For the second year now, the African Union has been a full-fledged member of the G20. Our South African colleagues sought to present the country as an informal leader representing the interests of the entire African continent and to draw the world’s attention to the challenges facing Africa. • Objectively, the global economy is undergoing fragmentation. On the one hand, this is a long-term process that did not start this year but several years ago, and it accelerated in 2022 against the backdrop of the West’s unlawful restrictive measures against Russia. These measures undermined logistics chains, financial payments, and the ability to export goods needed by the world as well as to import goods into Russia. • Despite the U.S. request to all delegations not to adopt the final declaration — claiming that “there is no consensus if the United States is not participating” — there were essentially no problems with it, and no one paid much attention to these calls. • Attention to the Ukrainian conflict was effectively diluted this year: the situation in Ukraine was not given a separate paragraph in the declaration, and the crisis was mentioned literally in a single line among others. #G20SouthAfrica