Kathrine Frich
Criticism has also come from the Senate.
Hosting an international summit always brings a long list of protocol headaches.
Organizers spend months deciding who gets a seat at the main table and who gets left out in the hallway.
This week, one high-profile arrival on American soil has sparked fierce anger across Washington.
Fury in Washington
As reported by the Kyiv Post and Russian state news agency TASS, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has landed in the United States for the G20 foreign ministers’ gathering in Atlanta on October 30 and 31. His trip happens just days after Russian strikes killed civilians across Ukraine, including 14 victims at a train station in Dnipro.
Even though Lavrov has faced American sanctions since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he was cleared to attend. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the diplomat plans to use the summit to attack Western trade restrictions and push for a multipolar world order, where power is shared among several nations rather than led by the West.
Lawmakers from both major parties quickly pushed back against the decision. On social media platform X, Republican Representative Don Bacon argued that the diplomat had no business being on American soil.
“Lavrov should not be allowed into the country. As long as Putin is waging war against Ukraine and bombing cities, Russian leaders should not be welcome in any of these forums. They are leading a country excluded from the international community,” Bacon wrote on X, as cited by the Kyiv Post.
Calls to wake up
Criticism has also come from the Senate, just days before voters head to the polls for the November 3 midterm elections.
Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joined 13 bipartisan senators in writing a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to bar Vladimir Putin and other sanctioned Russian officials from American G20 events.
“Donald Trump needs to wake up. He needs to understand that courting Vladimir Putin is not good for America,” Shaheen told CNN during an October 8 interview.
Who made the list
According to a State Department guest list cited by the Kyiv Post, Lavrov will sit alongside top diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Canada, and the European Union.
Meanwhile, American officials stated that Ukraine was left off the guest list to keep the event strictly for formal G20 members, while South Africa was also excluded over tensions with Washington.
The Atlanta talks come ahead of three-way meetings between Washington, Kyiv, and Moscow set for November in Abu Dhabi. After that, Trump will host the December 14 and 15 G20 Leaders’ Summit at his Doral resort in Miami, where the Kyiv Post notes Putin has also received an invitation.
