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DENPASAR: When world leaders arrive for the G20 summit in Bali, they will be picked up by electric vehicles in a symbolic move showcasing Indonesia’s commitment to energy transition.
The upcoming summit will take place on Nov. 15 to 16, culminating Indonesia’s presidency of the group of 20 biggest economies and more than 200 working group meetings and side events held throughout the year.
The largest Muslim-majority nation and the world’s fourth most populous, Indonesia had focused its chairmanship of G20 on steering post-coronavirus pandemic recovery, energy transition, and digital transformation.
Hosting G20 events this year has also been an opportunity for the Southeast Asian country to promote its potential of becoming a regional hub for manufacturing electric vehicles — an industry the Indonesian government has been developing in recent years.
EVs are set to be the only mode of transportation during the summit in Bali, and the host country has prepared more than 1,400 vehicles — 962 electric cars, 454 electric motorcycles, and 36 electric buses — to shuttle delegates, journalists, and security personnel in and around the main venues.
“The Indonesian government is very serious about entering renewable energy, which includes moving toward using electric vehicles,” Adita Irawati, a transportation ministry spokesperson, told Arab News ahead of the summit.
One of the world’s emitters of carbon dioxide, Indonesia announced in October a new target to cut emissions levels by 31.89 percent on its own, which is a target more ambitious than its Paris Agreement pledge. It also hopes to achieve net zero emissions by 2060.
Irawati said the transportation ministry was committed to reducing exhaust emissions from fossil fuel-based vehicles and that the Indonesian government had set a goal to have 2 million EVs hit the country’s roads by 2025.
“We have also developed an ecosystem for electric vehicles, so that Indonesia is not only a market or consumer of electric vehicles, but also a producer of electric vehicles, because we have the natural resources producing components for electric vehicles,” she added.
Indonesia is the world’s largest miner of nickel, a crucial component for EV batteries. In August, it signed a deal with the world’s top EV producer Tesla for $5 billion worth of nickel products over the next five years.
The introduction of EVs during the G20 summit is seen as a symbolic step toward meeting Indonesia’s 2060 net zero emissions and a display of its potential to do so.
“It is a step in the right direction, and I am happy that Indonesia decided to show it to the world at the G20,” Agus Sari, environmentalist and chief executive of Landscape Indonesia, which focuses on sustainable landscape management, told Arab News.
“The use of electric vehicles during the G20 shows a symbol of the beginning of a transformation.”
BALI: Most of the leaders of the G20 who participated in the Bali summit have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demanded its unconditional withdrawal from Ukrainian territory in the final declaration.
The statement, issued on Wednesday, was the outcome of a challenging meeting that took place at a moment of geopolitical turmoil and fears of a global recession.
The war in Europe, which has fueled tensions among G20 members over a global surge in food and energy prices, was the most contentious issue during the leaders’ discussions.
“Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy,” G20 leaders said in their declaration.
“Recognizing that the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues, we acknowledge that security issues can have significant consequences for the global economy.”
The document was the first joint statement issued by the G20 since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February. Russia is a member state of the group.
G20 leaders said international law must be upheld and that the threat of the use of nuclear weapons was “inadmissible.”
The G20, comprising 19 states and the EU, accounts for over 80 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, 75 percent of international trade and 60 percent of its population. The group includes countries ranging from Brazil to Saudi Arabia.
President of host Indonesia, Joko Widodo, gave his “highest appreciation to all those who attended” the summit, noting that their “flexibility” gave way for the declaration to be formally adopted.
Widodo said after the closing ceremony that the bulk of the debate had focused on one paragraph on what was happening in Ukraine, adding that the discussions had gone late into midnight.
“The discussion on this was very, very tough and by the end, G20 leaders agreed on the content of the declaration, which was the condemnation of the war in Ukraine because it had violated country borders and integrity,” he said.
“We achieved the Bali declaration through consensus. We agreed that the war had a negative impact on the global economy.
“Global economic recovery would not be achieved without peace, and that is why at the opening remarks (of the session on Wednesday) I had…called for a stop to the war.”
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in a press conference held on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, singled out Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had canceled his participation in the Bali forum and was represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“The persistent threat to our security and global economic asphyxiation has been driven by the actions of the one man unwilling to be at this summit — Vladimir Putin,” Sunak said. “There is not a single person in the world who hasn’t felt the impact of Putin’s war.
“But in Indonesia this week, the rest of the G20 have refused to let Russia’s grandstanding and hollow excuse-making undermine this important opportunity to make life easier for our people.”
The schedule at the summit was disrupted by an emergency meeting on Wednesday morning, as G7 and NATO leaders met to discuss reports of an overnight missile landing that killed two people in Polish territory near Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden initially told allies that the missile was “unlikely” from Russia and later said that it was a Ukrainian air defense missile, according to a report from Reuters news agency.
The second day of the summit also saw G20 leaders dressed in white shirts, taking a break from negotiations and participating in a mangrove-planting event to signal efforts in addressing climate change.
The leaders have also committed to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius — which includes speeding up efforts to phase down unabated use of coal — and confirmed that they are sticking to the temperature goal from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
In the declaration, G20 members also said the world economy was facing “unparalleled multidimensional crises” that ranged from the war in Ukraine to a surge in inflation, which have forced many central banks to tighten their monetary policies.
“G20 central banks…are closely monitoring the impact of price pressures on inflation expectations and will continue to appropriately calibrate the pace of monetary policy tightening in a data-dependent and clearly communicated manner,” the document read.
G20 leaders have reaffirmed their commitment to avoid excessive currency volatility, recognizing in the declaration that many currencies have “moved significantly this year with increased volatility.”
Widodo officially handed over the G20 presidency to India at the end of the summit with a symbolic passing of a gavel at the closing ceremony.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country and Southeast Asia’s largest economy, has held the rotating G20 presidency since December last year and had adopted the theme “Recover together, recover stronger” in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences.
“I want to extend my congratulations to India, which will take over the next G20 presidency. The faith to safeguard and actualize global recovery and strong and inclusive growth will now be in the hands of the honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” Widodo said.
“I am certain that under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, G20 will continue to move forward. Next year, Indonesia is ready to support India’s G20 presidency.”
KYIV: Kyiv on Wednesday requested access to the site of a deadly blast in a Polish village after Western officials said the explosion there was likely caused by Ukrainian air defenses.
“Ukraine requests immediate access to the site of the explosion,” the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council, Oleksiy Danilov, said on Twitter.
He added that Kyiv was ready to hand over “evidence” of its allegations that Russia was responsible.
The Kremlin said earlier Wednesday Russia had “nothing to do with the missile blast.”
Ukraine has blamed Moscow but Western leaders said the missile was probably launched by Ukrainian air defense against a Russian barrage on Tuesday.
Danilov said he was “expecting information from our partners” leading to the conclusion that “it was a Ukrainian air defense missile.”
He asked for representatives of the Ukrainian border service and the defense ministry to be able to access the site and participate in a “joint examination of the incident.”
LONDON: Iran’s intelligence services have tried on at least 10 occasions to kidnap or even kill British nationals or individuals based in the United Kingdom regarded by Tehran as a threat, the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency said on Wednesday.
Ken McCallum, Director General of the Security Service known as MI5, said while at home Tehran was using violence to silence critics, its “aggressive intelligence services” were also projecting a threat to Britain directly.
“At its sharpest this includes ambitions to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime,” McCallum said in a speech at MI5’s headquarters.
“We have seen at least ten such potential threats since January alone.”
The British spy chief’s words echo similar remarks earlier on Wednesday from French President Emmanuel Macron that Iran was being increasingly aggressive toward France by detaining its citizens.
For its part, Iran has accused Western foes of stoking nationwide protests ignited by the death of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16 in the custody of the morality police.
“The current wave of protests in Iran is asking fundamental questions of the totalitarian regime,” McCallum said. “This could signal profound change, but the trajectory is uncertain.”
WARSAW: A missile that hit Poland was probably a stray fired by Ukraine’s air defenses and not a Russian strike, Poland and NATO said on Wednesday, easing global concern that the war in Ukraine could spill across the border.
Nevertheless, NATO’s chief said that Moscow, not Kyiv was ultimately to blame, for starting the war in the first place and launching the attack that triggered Ukraine’s defenses.
“This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.
NATO ambassadors were holding emergency talks to respond to the blast on Tuesday that killed two people at a grain facility in Poland near the Ukrainian border, the war’s first deadly spillover onto the territory of the Western military alliance.
“From the information that we and our allies have, it was an S-300 rocket made in the Soviet Union, an old rocket and there is no evidence that it was launched by the Russian side,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said. “It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.”
Stoltenberg also said it was likely a Ukrainian air defense missile.
Polish Prime Minister Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Warsaw might not need to activate Article 4 of NATO’s treaty, which calls for consultations when a member country considers its security under threat.
Earlier, US President Joe Biden said the missile was unlikely to have been fired from Russia.
The incident occurred while Russia was firing scores of missiles at cities across Ukraine, in what Ukraine says was the biggest volley of such strikes of the nine-month war.
Kyiv says it shot down most of the incoming Russian missiles with its own air defense missiles. Ukraine’s Volyn region, just across the border from Poland, was one of the many Ukraine says was targeted by Russia’s countrywide attacks.
The Russian Defense Ministry said none of its missiles had struck closer than 35 km (20 miles) from the Polish border, and that photos of the wreckage in Poland showed elements of a Ukrainian S-300 air defense missile.
Asked whether it was too early to say if the missile was fired from Russia, Biden said: “There is preliminary information that contests that. I don’t want to say that until we completely investigate it, but it is unlikely in the lines of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia, but we’ll see.”
The United States and NATO countries would fully investigate before acting, Biden said in Indonesia after meeting other Western leaders on the sidelines of a summit of the G20 big economies.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that some countries had made “baseless statements” about the incident, but that Washington had been comparatively restrained. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia had nothing to do with the incident, which he said had been caused by an S-300 air defense system.
In a tweet issued hours after the incident, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed it on “Russian missile terror.” There was no immediate Ukrainian response on Wednesday to the suggestions that it was a Ukrainian stray.
The missile fell on Przewodow, a village about 6 km (4 miles) from the Ukrainian border. A resident who declined to be identified said the two victims were men who were near the weighing area of a grain facility.
Some Western leaders suggested that whoever fired the missile, Russia and President Vladimir Putin would ultimately be held responsible for an incident arising from its invasion.
“They stressed that, whatever the outcome of that investigation, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is squarely to blame for the ongoing violence,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office said after a meeting between Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the summit sidelines.
Leaders at the G20 summit issued a declaration saying “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine,” although it acknowledged that “there were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions.”
Russia is a member of the G20 and Ukraine isn’t, but Zelensky addressed the summit by video link, while Putin stayed home.
Moscow launched Tuesday’s wave of missile attacks just days after abandoning the southern city of Kherson, the only regional capital it had captured since the invasion.