Germany has rejected a proposal by US president Donald Trump to allow Russian president Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7), according to DW.
“We need Russia to solve conflicts such as those in Syria, Libya and Ukraine,” German foreign minister Heiko Maas told the Rheinische Post newspaper in an interview published on Monday. Russia was expelled from the G7 in 2014 after its annexation of Crimea.
German reaction comes after President Trump said on Saturday that he planned to postpone the annual Group of 7 summit of world leaders until September and that he wanted to invite Russia to rejoin as part of an alliance to discuss the future of China.
Mr. Trump told reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force One on his way back from Florida, where he attended the launch of the SpaceX rocket, that he also planned to invite South Korea, Australia and India to the meeting to discuss China’s future.
“I don’t feel that as a G7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” Mr. Trump said, according to a pool report of his remarks. “It’s a very outdated group of countries.”
The United States currently holds the presidency of the Group of 7 industrialized nations, which also includes Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Canada and Italy.
Still, as the host president, Mr. Trump is allowed to invite whoever he wants, said New York Times on Tuesday. And by making Russia one of four countries he said he wants to invite, it means that Russia would be a guest, the way it was before it formally joined the group in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Trump at one point described the theoretical gathering as the “G10 or G11,” which would mean making those countries members — something he cannot do on his own. He said he had had conversations with the leaders of those countries.
At one point Mr. Trump suggested he would host the summit in September, possibly around the time of the United Nations General Assembly, which is slated to begin Sept. 15 in New York, a city that is scheduled to begin its first phase of reopening from coronavirus shutdowns on June 8. At another point, Mr. Trump mused that he might schedule the summit for after the November general election./argumentum.al
