LONDON: Rishi Sunak, one of two candidates seeking to replace Boris Johnson as British prime minister, has called on the G20 to ban Russian President Vladimir Putin from meetings until Moscow ends the war in Ukraine, his spokesman said on Friday.
Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will attend the G20 summit in the resort of Bali this November, a longtime adviser to the Indonesian president said earlier.
“Our G20 partners and allies have a collective responsibility to call attention to Putin’s heinous behavior. It is not good enough to sit at the table with him when he is responsible for children being killed in their beds while they sleep,” a spokesman for the former minister said finance. Sunak said.
“We must send a strong message to Putin that he has no seat at the table until and unless he stops his illegal war in Ukraine.”
Polls show Sunak trailing current foreign secretary Liz Truss in the contest to replace Johnson, which ends on September 5. Truss’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As head of the G20 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”.
Indonesia also invited Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to attend the Bali summit.