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JOHANNESBURG: UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he saw no appetite for peace from Russia in Ukraine after listening to a speech by Russia’s top diplomat at a tense Group of 20 meeting in South Africa on Thursday.
Lammy was speaking to reporters after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressed other senior diplomats in a closed-door session at the G20 foreign ministers meeting in Johannesburg.
“I have to say when I listened to what the Russians and what Lavrov have just said in the chamber this afternoon, I don’t see an appetite to really get to that peace,” Lammy said.
Lammy said Lavrov left his seat in the meeting room when it was Lammy’s turn to speak. No details of Lavrov’s speech were released.
The two-day G20 gathering on Thursday and Friday comes days after landmark bilateral talks between the United States and Russia over ending the war in Ukraine. Those talks sidelined Washington’s European allies and Ukraine, who weren’t involved.
US President Donald Trump has further upended the West’s position by criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and falsely blaming Ukraine for the full-scale invasion by Russia. The war’s third anniversary is next week.
“At the moment, we’ve had talks effectively about talks,” Lammy said. “We’ve not got anywhere near a negotiated settlement.”
In his own speech, which was released by the UK Foreign Office, Lammy criticized Russia for what he called “Tsarist imperialism.”
“You know, mature countries learn from their colonial failures and their wars, and Europeans have had much to learn over the generations and the centuries,” Lammy said, according to the transcript from the UK Foreign Office. “But I’m afraid to say that Russia has learned nothing.”
“I was hoping to hear some sympathy for the innocent victims of the aggression. I was hoping to hear some readiness to seek a durable peace. What I heard was the logic of imperialism dressed up as a realpolitik, and I say to you all, we should not be surprised, but neither should we be fooled.”
Lammy referred to Lavrov’s speech as “the Russian gentleman’s tired fabrications.”
Tensions at the meeting were underlined when a photo opportunity for the foreign ministers to pose together for pictures was canceled with no reason given.
The United Kingdom, France, Germany and the European Union have all pledged continued support for Ukraine and were expected to reinforce that position at the G20 meeting.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led those talks with Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week, was a high-profile absentee from the meeting. Rubio boycotted amid US tensions with host South Africa over some of its policies, which the Trump administration has labeled anti-American. The US was represented by Dana Brown, its acting ambassador to South Africa.
The G20 is made up of 19 of the world’s major economies, the European Union and the African Union. Others attending the meeting in South Africa included EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, who repeated France’s condemnation of Russia in an op-ed published by several media outlets.
The Russian Foreign Ministry did release details of a bilateral meeting Lavrov held with China’s Wang. Afterwards, Lavrov said Russia’s relations with China “have become and remain an increasingly significant factor in stabilizing the international situation and preventing it from sliding into total confrontation,” according to a statement from the ministry.
The G20 is supposed to bring developed and developing countries together to foster global cooperation. But the grouping often struggles to reach any meaningful consensus because of the disparate interests of the US, Europe, Russia and China. Cooperation was further undermined by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
South Africa holds the G20’s rotating presidency this year and in a speech opening the meeting, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that it was an opportunity for the G20 “to engage in serious dialogue” against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions and war, climate change, pandemics and energy and food insecurity.
“There is a lack of consensus among major powers, including in the G20, on how to respond to these issues,” Ramaphosa said.
Rubio’s decision to boycott and his pledge to also skip the main G20 summit in South Africa in November threatens to further undermine the G20’s effectiveness.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also said that he won’t attend a G20 finance ministers meeting in South Africa next week because of commitments in Washington, which many saw as another indication of Trump’s indifference to international collaboration in favor of his “America First” policy.

MANILA: Philippine police arrested more than 450 people in a raid on an allegedly Chinese-run offshore gaming operator in Manila, the country’s anti-organized crime commission has said.
Initial interrogations suggested the suburban site had been operating as a scam center, targeting victims in China and India with sports betting and investment schemes, the commission said after the Thursday raid, which saw 137 Chinese nationals detained.
“We arrested around five Chinese bosses,” commission chief Gilberto Cruz told AFP on Friday, adding they faced potential trafficking charges.
Banned by President Ferdinand Marcos last year, Philippine online gaming operators, or POGOs, are said to be used as cover by organized crime groups for human trafficking, money laundering, online fraud, kidnappings and even murder.
“This raid proves that the previous POGO workers are still trying to continue their scamming activities despite the ban,” Cruz said.
He previously told AFP that about 21,000 Chinese nationals have continued to operate smaller-scale scam operations in the country since the online gaming ban.
International concern has grown in recent years over similar scam operations in other Asian nations that are often staffed by trafficking victims tricked or coerced into promoting bogus cryptocurrency investments and other cons.
President Marcos has put POGOs at the center of recent campaign messaging in the run-up to May mid-term elections, framing predecessor Rodrigo Duterte’s alleged tolerance of the sites as evidence of a too-cozy relationship with China.
Thursday’s raid is the latest in a series of busts this year, including one in January that saw around 400 foreigners arrested in the capital, including many Chinese nationals.
The Washington-based think tank United States Institute of Peace said in a May 2024 report that online scammers target millions of victims around the world and rake in annual revenues of $64 billion.