Chinese and Russian leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will attend November’s G-20 summit on the resort island of Bali, a longtime adviser to the Indonesian president said Friday.
Andi Widjajanto, former Cabinet secretary and unofficial adviser to President Joko Widodo, who is known as Jokowi, told Reuters the two leaders would join the summit.
“Jokowi told me that Xi and Putin are both planning to attend in Bali,” Widjajanto, who heads the National Resilience Institute, told Reuters.
On Thursday, Widodo told Bloomberg News that both leaders had given him their assurances. Indonesian presidential officials did not respond to requests for confirmation of the report.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. A Kremlin spokesperson declined to comment to Bloomberg, but another official familiar with the situation told the news agency that Putin planned to attend.
The trip would be Xi’s first outside China since January 2020, when he visited Myanmar.
U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to attend the G-20 summit, but the White House has not said whether he will meet Xi.
Chinese officials are reportedly making plans for a November meeting in Southeast Asia between Xi and Biden, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council reiterated that Biden did not think Putin should attend “as he wages his war against Ukraine.” But if Putin did, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Indonesia has invited, should do likewise, the spokesperson said.
As head of the G-20 this year, Indonesia has faced pressure from Western countries to withdraw its invitation to Putin over his country’s invasion of Ukraine, which his government calls a “special military operation.”
Widodo has sought to position himself as mediator between the warring countries. He has in recent months traveled to meet both the Ukrainian and Russian presidents to call for an end to the war and seek ways to ease the global food crisis.
This week, Widodo said both countries have accepted Indonesia as a “bridge of peace.”
Source: Voice of America