Fractured East-West relations over Russia’s war in Ukraine and increasing concerns about China’s global aspirations are set to dominate what is expected to be a highly contentious meeting of foreign ministers from the world’s largest industrialized and developing nations this week in India. The increasingly bitter rift between the United States and its allies on one side and Russia and China on the other appears likely to widen further as the top diplomats from the Group of 20 gather in the Indian capital on Thursday. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and their Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov will all be in attendance and battling for support from non-aligned members of the group. While they will all be in the same room together, there was no sign that Blinken, who spent two days in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan warning Central Asia about the threat Russia poses before traveling to Delhi, would sit down with either of them. As it has at most international events since last year, the split over the war in Ukraine and its impact on global energy and food security will overshadow the proceedings. But as the conflict has dragged on over the past 12 months, the divide has grown and now threatens to become a principle irritant in U.S.-China ties that were already on the rocks for other reasons. A Chinese peace proposal for Ukraine that has drawn praise from Russia but dismissals from the West has done nothing to improve matters as U.S. officials have repeatedly in recent days accused China of considering the provision of weapons to Russia for use in the war. Those accusations have exacerbated the already poor state of affairs between the world’s two largest economies over Taiwan, human rights, Hong Kong and the South China Sea that took another hit last month with the U.S. discovery and then shoot-down of a Chinese surveillance balloon over American airspace that resulted in Blinken postponing a much-anticipated trip to Beijing. A hastily arranged meeting between Blinken and China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on the margins of the Munich Security Conference two weeks ago yielded no tangible results. And recently renewed U.S. suggestions that the COVID-19 pandemic could have been the result of a Chinese lab leak have made the situation worse. On Tuesday in Kazakhstan, Blinken again warned China against transferring lethal military equipment to Russia, saying there would be significant consequences for such actions. “China can’t have it both ways when it comes to the Russian aggression in Ukraine,” Blinken said. “It can’t be putting forward peace proposals on the one hand while actually feeding the flames of the fire that Russia has started with the other hand.” Read more: G20 foreign ministers’ meet in Delhi: Momen to hold meetings on the sidelines In the meantime, Moscow has been unrelenting in pushing its view that the West, led by the U.S., is trying to destroy Russia. Ahead of the meeting, the Russian Foreign Ministry slammed U.S. policies, saying that Lavrov and his delegation would use the G-20 to “focus on the attempts by the West to take revenge for the inevitable disappearance of the levers of dominance from its hands.” Read more: Blinken warns Central Asia of dangers from war in Ukraine “The destructive policy of the U.S. and its allies has already put the world on the brink of a disaster, provoked a rollback in socio-economic development and seriously aggravated the situation of the poorest countries,” it said in a statement. “The entire world is suffering from the cynical revelry of illegal sanctions, the artificial breakup of cross-border supply chains, the imposition of notorious price ceilings and, in effect, from attempts to steal natural resources.” The antagonism has left G-20 host India in the unenviable position of trying to reconcile clearly irreconcilable differences. The meeting is particularly crucial for India’s hopes to use its chairmanship of the group to leverage its position on the global stage and adopt a neutral stance on Ukraine in order to focus on issues of importance to developing nations like rising inflation, debt stress, health, climate change and food and energy security. “I think those are equally important issues to focus on, of course along with the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” said Indian Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra, the most senior bureaucrat in the foreign ministry. Read more: Modi urges G20 finance leaders to focus on ‘most vulnerable’ But just last week, India was forced to issue a chair’s summary at the conclusion of the G-20 finance ministers meeting after Russia and China objected to a joint communique that retained language on the war in Ukraine drawn directly from last year’s G-20 leaders summit declaration. India hopes to avert a repeat of that, but prospects appear dim. “We will see how it goes forward. It is a repetition of the Bali declaration,” said Indian foreign ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi. “Obviously, we stand by that declaration. Our prime minister was there. There is no question of not agreeing with that text. We are with that text.” So far, though, India has refrained from directly criticizing Russia, its major Cold War-era ally, while increasing imports of Russian oil, even as it has increasingly faced pressure to take a firm stand on Moscow. India has also abstained from voting in UN resolutions that condemn the Ukraine invasion. “India’s messaging has been clear and consistent: It’s not about to criticize Russia, but it strongly opposes the war and supports all efforts to bring it to an end,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director at the Wilson Center think tank. “The West would prefer it go further, and Russia would prefer it say less, but each side has accepted New Delhi’s position, and India’s relations with both sides have remained strong throughout the war,” he said.    

Even if a Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn’t happen in the next few days, the crisis is reaching a critical inflection point with European stability and the future of East-West relations hanging in the balance. A convergence of events over the coming week could determine whether the stalemate is resolved peacefully or Europe is at war. At stake are Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture and long-agreed limits on the deployment of conventional military and nuclear forces there. “This next 10 days or so will be critical,” said Ian Kelly, a retired career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Georgia who now teaches international relations at Northwestern University. The Biden administration on Friday said an invasion could happen at any moment, with a possible target date of Wednesday, according to intelligence picked up by the United States, and Washington was evacuating almost all of its embassy staff in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Read:Biden warns Putin of ‘severe costs’ of Ukraine invasion A phone call between President Joe Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Saturday did nothing to ease tensions. Biden and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, spoke on Sunday. Even before the latest U.S. warnings and diplomatic moves, analysts saw this as a critical week for the future of Ukraine. “Russia and the United States are approaching a peak of the conflict of their interests regarding a future shape of the European order,” Timofei Bordachev, said head of the Center for European Research at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “The parties may take action against each other that will go much farther than what was considered admissible quite recently,” he said in a recent analysis. In the week ahead, Washington and NATO are expecting Moscow’s formal response after they rejected its main security demands, and major Russian military drills in Belarus, conducted as part of a deployment near Ukraine, are to end. The fate of the Russian troops now in Belarus will be key to judging the Kremlin’s intentions. At the same time, the Winter Olympics in China, often cited as a potential deterrent to immediate Russian action, will conclude Feb. 20. Although U.S. officials have said they believe an invasion could take place before then, the date is still considered important. And an important international security conference is taking place in Munich next weekend, with Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and top European officials planning to attend. Putin has warned the West that he will not back down on his demand to keep Ukraine out of NATO. While Ukraine has long aspired to join, the alliance is not about to offer an invitation. Still, he contends that if Ukraine becomes a member and tries to use force to reclaim the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, it would draw Russia and NATO into a conflict. His foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has asked Western nations to explain how they interpret the principle of the “indivisibility of security” enshrined in international agreements they signed. The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it would not accept a collective response from the European Union and NATO, insisting on an individual response from each country. Seeking to counter NATO’s argument that every nation is free to choose alliances, Moscow has charged that NATO violated the principle and jeopardized Russia’s security by expanding eastward. “Russia’s bold demands and equally blunt U.S. rejection of them have pushed the international agenda toward the confrontation more than ever since the height of the Cold War,” Bordachev said. He argued that closer relations with China have strengthened Moscow’s hand. “Whatever goals Russia could pursue now, it can plan its future in conditions of a full rupture of ties with the West,” Bordachev said. Russian officials have emphasized that negotiating a settlement over Ukraine depends squarely on the United States and that Western allies just march to Washington’s orders. In the past, Russia had sought to build close contacts with France and Germany in the hope that friendly ties with Europe’s biggest economies would help offset the U.S. pressure. But those ties were strained by the poisoning in 2020 of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who spent five months in Germany convalescing from what he described as a nerve agent attack he blamed on the Kremlin. Russia has denied its involvement. More recently, Russian officials have criticized the position of France and Germany in the deadlocked peace talks on eastern Ukraine, holding them responsible for the failure to persuade Ukrainian authorities to grant broad self-rule to the Russia-backed separatist region, as required by a 2015 agreement. In a break with diplomatic rules, the Russian Foreign Ministry last fall published confidential letters that Lavrov exchanged with his French and German counterparts in a bid to prove their failure to help make progress in talks. Read: Putin, Biden plan high-stakes phone call in Ukraine crisis Speaking after the latest fruitless round of those talks, Kremlin representative Dmitry Kozak bemoaned the failure by French and German envoys to persuade Ukraine to commit to a dialogue with the separatists, as the agreement stipulated. Despite the tensions with both Paris and Berlin, Putin spent more than five hours talking to French President Emmanuel Macron last Monday and will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday. Putin said he was grateful to Macron for trying to help negotiate a way to ease the tensions and said they would talk again. Moscow also just reopened a window for diplomatic contacts with Britain, hosting the foreign and defense secretaries for the first round of talks since ties were ruptured by the 2018 poisoning in Britain of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Lavrov’s meeting with Liz Truss was frosty, but British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace’s talks with Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, appeared more businesslike, with the parties emphasizing the need to maintain regular contact to reduce the threat of military incidents.