Russia has no business at the G20

So indignant is Vladimir Putin about calls from Scott Morrison and others to exclude Russia from the G20 summit in Bali that Russia’s government-owned news agency, Tass, is highlighting Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin’s comment that no G20 member had the right to exclude other states. “The G20 is an important platform for international economic co-operation,” he said. “Russia is an important participant in it. None of the participants has the right to deprive others of this status.” Given the refusal of the civilised world to trade or deal with Russia economically during its illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, there is no point in its participation. As US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said this week, “It cannot be business as usual for Russia in international institutions.” The world’s leading industrialised nations made a similar call in 2014 when US president Barack Obama, British prime minister David Cameron and other leaders pared back the G8 to the G7, excluding Russia after its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

China’s comments confirmed what has been obvious throughout the Russian invasion – that it sees nothing wrong with a powerful, heavily armed state launching an unprovoked attack on a smaller neighbour, putting civilians in the frontline, displacing 10 million people from their homes and creating Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, in which 3.5 million Ukrainians have fled their homeland.

In a telling comment to Dennis Shanahan in an exclusive interview with The Weekend Australian on Saturday, Russian ambassador Alexey Pavlovsky said the world was experiencing a “crucial point in international relations” that was about much more than Ukraine: “It is about a model of world development in international relations.” He could say nothing optimistic about Australia’s relations with Beijing or Moscow. That suggests the key players in what the Prime Minister described as “the arc of autocracy” are intent on creating a “transactional world, devoid of principle, accountability and transparency” in which “state sovereignty, territorial integrity and liberty are surrendered for respite from coercion and intimidation, or economic entrapment dressed up as economic reward”.

A month after Mr Putin launched his “special military operation” to “demilitarise and denazify Ukraine” on February 24, US President Joe Biden has warned Mr Putin to expect catastrophic consequences if he uses chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. NATO would respond, Mr Biden said, and “the nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use”, with the decision to be triggered at the time. NATO has announced it is strengthening its chemical and nuclear defences and activating additional defences to prepare for any Kremlin escalation of the conflict along NATO’s eastern flank. A chemical attack could contaminate territory owned by NATO allies, prompting members to invoke article five, under which such an attack “shall be considered an attack against them all”.

In his interview in English, Mr Pavlovsky was an articulate advocate for Russia, claiming, falsely, “it is clear that the West is set to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”. The West wants Russia to stop the war, and peace for Ukraine. The ambassador’s views suggest a chasm between the world view of free nations such as Australia and that of Russia, which makes any short-term end to the brutal war unlikely, unfortunately.

The “true roots of the situation”, Mr Pavlovsky claimed, was the “existential threat” to Russia from “NATO expanding to our borders … in a couple of years we could have missiles, probably bearing nuclear warheads, close to our doorstep with a flying time to Moscow of three to five minutes, which would mean the end of Russia as an independent state because no state can exist at gunpoint”. Russia, however, not Ukraine or NATO, was the aggressor in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and it is the aggressor in the current war. The ambassador’s insistence that “the rules of engagement for the Russian army in Ukraine are very strict and they prohibit intentionally and deliberately targeting civilian targets” and that he has not seen reliable evidence of Russian troops acting otherwise is preposterous. It flies in the face of the tens of thousands of civilians attacked and the destruction of residential and shopping areas in Mariupol, Kyiv and Kharkiv. While the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had their problems, Australia has never been the aggressor in warfare of the kind unfolding in Ukraine.