Blinken, Lavrov speak amid war of words over Ukraine at G20 meet
Blinken reiterates support to Ukraine for as long as it takes
Lavrov blames West for global political and economic crises
Updated 02 March 2023
Reuters
NEW DELHI: The United States and its European allies sparred with Russia over the war in Ukraine at a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi on Thursday, with the rival sides each accusing the other of destabilising the world.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a brief encounter on the meeting’s sidelines during which Blinken urged Russia to reverse its decision on the New START nuclear treaty, a senior US official said.
Blinken also told Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine to defend itself for as long as it takes, the official said. The two spoke for less than 10 minutes in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“We always remain hopeful that the Russians will reverse their decision and be prepared to engage in a diplomatic process that can lead to a just and durable peace, but I wouldn’t say that coming out of this encounter there was any expectation that things will change in the near term,” the US official said.
Blinken, the official added, wanted to “disabuse the Russians of any notion that our support (for Ukraine) might be wavering or the support from our allies and partners might be wavering.”
The Russian foreign ministry said Lavrov and Blinken spoke “on the move” but did not hold negotiations or a meeting, Russian news agencies reported.
News of the exchange came at the end of the day-long G20 meeting which was overshadowed by the Ukraine war.
The United States and its European allies urged the Group of 20 (G20) nations to keep up pressure on Moscow to end the conflict, now in its second year.
Russia hit back, accusing the West of turning work on the G20 agenda into a “farce” and said Western delegations wanted to shift responsibility for their economic failures onto Moscow.
’PRESSURE RUSSIA’
“We must continue to call on Russia to end its war of aggression and withdraw from Ukraine for the sake of international peace and economic stability,” Blinken said in remarks released after his address at the closed-door meeting.
“Unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine,” Blinken said.
He was backed by his counterparts from Germany, France and the Netherlands.
“Unfortunately, one G20 member prevents all the other 19 from focusing all their efforts on these issues the G20 was created for,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the meeting, according to the German delegation.
Baerbock, addressing Lavrov, urged the Kremlin to return to full implementation of the New START nuclear arms treaty and to resume dialogue with the United States.
“The threat of nuclear weapons should be opposed,” she said.
President Vladimir Putin last week announced Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the latest START treaty, after accusing the West — without providing evidence — of being directly involved in attempts to strike its strategic air bases.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, speaking at a UN conference in Geneva, said the United States had attempted “to probe the security of Russian strategic facilities declared under the New START Treaty by assisting the Kyiv regime in conducting armed attacks against them.”
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said the war in Ukraine had hurt “almost every country on the planet, in terms of food, energy, inflation.” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra told CNBC that Russia was solely responsible for the war and must continue to be sanctioned.
’FARCE’
Russia’s Lavrov, however, blamed the West for the global political and economic crises.
“A number of Western delegations turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian Federation,” Lavrov said, according to a Russian statement.
He said the West had created obstacles to the export of Russian agricultural products.
He accused it of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
The G20 includes the rich G7 nations as well as Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia, among other countries.
India, which holds the bloc’s presidency this year, has sought to highlight the economic impact of the war as well as issues such as climate change and poorer countries’ debt.
But New Delhi’s efforts to bridge differences and produce a joint statement or a communique stumbled due to differences over the war. The meeting produced an “outcome document” instead.
India has declined to blame Russia for the war and has sought a diplomatic solution while boosting its purchases of Russian oil.
“There were differences on the Ukraine issue which we could not reconcile between various parties who held differing positions,” Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told reporters at the end of the meeting.
STOCKHOLM: Saudi-American scientist Omar M. Yaghi’s career has been shaped by a rare combination of intellectual audacity and personal history — a lifelong drive to push science beyond known limits, while never losing sight of its capacity to serve humanity.
In 2025, that journey culminated in global recognition when Yaghi became the first Saudi national to receive a Nobel Prize, and only the second Arab-born laureate to be awarded the chemistry prize, after the Egyptian-American scientist Ahmed Zewail in 1999.
Yaghi shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with British-Australian scientist Richard Robson and Japanese scientist Susumu Kitagawa.
After stints with Arizona State University, University of Michigan and UCLA, Yaghi joined UC Berkeley in 2012, where he currently holds the James and Neeltje Trett Chair. (AFP)
Together, the three were recognized for more than half a century of contributions to the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — porous, sponge-like materials with vast internal spaces capable of storing carbon dioxide or harvesting water from the air.
They will also share the 11 million Swedish krona (about $1 million) prize.
Once a niche academic pursuit, MOF science is now studied in more than 100 countries and applied at industrial scale, with uses ranging from climate change mitigation to addressing water scarcity.
Yaghi’s rise to the pinnacle of global science began far from elite laboratories. He grew up in a Palestinian refugee family of 10 children, living on the outskirts of the Al-Wehdat refugee camp in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
The family’s single-room home had no electricity. Water arrived only once a week — sometimes once every two weeks — prompting residents to rush to fill every available bucket before the next long wait.
“It’s not the poetic idea that because I had hardship with water when I was a child that I was determined to solve the problem,” Yaghi told Arab News.
“I was much more motivated by solving problems that the world didn’t really care about. That’s basic science, which is about going to the frontiers of knowledge and being brave enough to solve problems.
“Once you make that great discovery, then it leads to much more benefit than you would have achieved had you done it by initially answering the problems of society,” he said.
His childhood revolved around three defining spaces: the family home near Al-Wehdat, where livestock were raised; the butcher shop his father, Mounes, ran on King Talal Street; and the private Bishop’s School in the historic Jabal Amman district.
The Yaghi family originally came from Al-Masmiyya, a Palestinian village between Jerusalem and Jaffa that was depopulated and destroyed after being occupied by the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah in 1948.
In 2018, Yaghi made a homage visit to Al-Masmiyya, searching for specific locations preserved in family stories of life before the Nakba.
After displacement, the family settled in Amman, where Omar was born in 1965 and where his father built a cattle and butchery business that left a lasting impression on his son.
“This shop figured prominently in my life. There, I learned the power of a work ethic. I learned that when you have a transaction with other people, you should be honest, the power of honesty and of hard work,” he said.
Yaghi watched his parents work relentlessly to support their children’s education. His father rose before dawn and worked until after sunset, while his mother baked fresh bread, prepared meals, cared for the household, and tended the cows.
“I was shy and quiet. And had done my homework separately from the other kids, and didn’t play the games that they were playing, and it seems like I spent most of my childhood sitting in a corner, reading or writing, and observing what was happening around me,” he said.
Although the family was registered as refugees with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, his father opted against enrolling his children in UNRWA schools.
“We didn’t go to UNRWA schools because my father felt that he needed reporting on our performance in school on a regular basis,” Yaghi said. UNRWA provided reports only once a term — too infrequent for his father’s liking.
At Bishop’s School, Yaghi studied English and some French alongside mathematics and science, subjects the school emphasized strongly. “Math and science were topics that my father absolutely wanted to see us do very well at,” he said.
At the age of 10, a chance encounter with molecular drawings in the school library proved transformative. He was captivated by their beauty and mystery, later learning that these shapes formed the basic building blocks of all matter, living and non-living alike.
In 1980, aged just 15, Yaghi travelled alone to the US, enrolling at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York, where he studied English, science, and mathematics.
The family’s savings — nearly $9,000 — sustained him for about two years. To survive, he worked odd jobs in supermarkets and tutored fellow students in math.
Although he could read and write English, he soon realized he was unprepared for the speed and idiom of American speech.
He immersed himself in the language, watching news broadcasts and soap operas, speaking with classmates, reading at least one full newspaper story every day, and consulting a dictionary he had brought from Amman.
“Most words that were in the newspaper were not in this dictionary, but I managed to get at least a few new words,” he said. Within three to six months, he had mastered American English.
In 1985, he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the State University of New York at Albany. Five years later, he completed his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
After academic appointments at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and UCLA, Yaghi joined UC Berkeley in 2012, where he holds the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair.
He is also the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute and has taught students from 15 countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, China, and the UK.
In 1995, Yaghi coined the term “metal-organic framework” to describe crystalline structures capable of hosting guest molecules within their internal cavities while withstanding temperatures exceeding 300 degrees centigrade.
Four years later, he introduced MOF-5, now considered a classic in the field for its extraordinary internal surface area. By 2003, he had demonstrated that MOFs could be rationally modified — a breakthrough that unlocked their practical versatility.
James Stephenson, CEO of Promethean Particles, said MOFs are prized for their ability to capture carbon dioxide and harvest water, and for the precision with which they can be engineered for specific gases.
A single gram of MOF has a surface area of about 8,000 square meters, measured using the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller method. Stephenson often likens their structure to cages.
“If you think about a cage structure, and at every corner, there is a metal ion, and then the pieces that connect those are linkers. You can have almost limitless combinations of metals and linkers, and by changing them, you can create these cages in different sizes,” he said.
Promethean Particles has led industrial-scale MOF production since 2012 and, in 2022, pioneered their use for carbon capture at Drax, the UK’s largest power plant in North Yorkshire.
“MOFs are known for all this complexity, but really, it’s about the space inside them,” Stephenson said. “It’s about the holes that make them so different. Our approach is to make MOFs at large volumes, as cost-effectively as possible, with safe, abundant raw materials.”
The company already supplies a UK customer operating a MOF-based water harvesting machine. Stephenson says MOFs offer advantages over desalination plants, which are energy-intensive, immobile, and ill-suited to remote areas.
“Dewpoint machines have limitations today with regard to the conditions in which they can extract water from the atmosphere. So the potential for MOFs as a water harvest will allow us to provide access to water to more people,” he added.
According to the World Health Organization, 2.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safely managed drinking water, including 106 million relying on untreated surface sources.
Since 2018, Yaghi has increasingly pursued entrepreneurial ventures, founding Atoco to work on water harvesting and CO2 capture, and co-founding H2MOF for hydrogen storage and WaHa Inc. for water harvesting projects in the Middle East.
He said current energy-efficient MOF prototypes can produce 100 liters of water per day, with the potential to reach 2,000 liters.
“I’m very hopeful that this becomes a major contributor to the supply of water, not just in the arid regions, but also in regions of the world where there may be a lot of water, but it’s not clean,” Yaghi said.
His achievements have brought international recognition. He received the King Faisal International Prize for Chemistry in 2015, and in 2021 King Salman granted him Saudi citizenship for his contributions to reticular chemistry and nanomaterials.
He is also co-director of the KACST-UC Berkeley Center of Excellence for Nanomaterials for Clean Energy Applications and advises the KACST president.
“The Saudis have treated me very well, and they were very kind to confer Saudi citizenship on me. I collaborate with them. As a scientist, my only concern is solving a problem that serves humanity,” he said.
“I am very proud of my Palestinian origin. I was born and raised in Jordan. I became an American citizen. Americans have treated me very well,” he added.
Yaghi has donated a model of MOF-5 to the Nobel Prize Museum, where it will be displayed alongside Zewail’s “femtochemistry apparatus.”
That instrument illustrates Zewail’s technique of capturing chemical reactions within a femtosecond — a span to a second what a second is to 32 million years.
The donation puts Yaghi among hundreds of laureates who have contributed artifacts since the museum’s founding in 2001, marking the centenary of the Nobel Prize, established in 1901.
“I think first and foremost, a scientist is about answering questions that advance the state of knowledge,” Yaghi said.
“I like basic research very much because it allows you to be free in pursuing an intellectual challenge. When you solve an intellectual challenge, you end up providing a base for many benefits to society.”
