U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a brief and seemingly awkward chat with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 summit Thursday. In a conversation lasting about 10 minutes—the first face-to-face encounter the two have had since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year—Blinken urged the Kremlin to work toward a peace deal in Ukraine and called for the release of U.S. captives, according to a State Department official. The exchange reportedly went poorly enough that Blinken walked away not expecting any changes in Russia’s stance anytime soon. Russia’s Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, stressed that the brief encounter did not represent any kind of “negotiations” and that Blinken had been the one to initiate the conversation.
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