Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has flown to the Indonesian resort of Bali for the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, which will be overshadowed by tensions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The G20 summit will be held until Friday in the host country Indonesia, which has struggled this year to balance hosting a global summit hit by geopolitical pressure with a global food crisis triggered by war.

The Nusa Dua region of Bali, where the summit was held on Thursday, was heavily guarded, with foreign diplomats flocking to the tropical island for the meeting.

Speaking ahead of her arrival in Bali, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Russia could not be allowed to use the G20 meeting as a platform given its war in Ukraine.

“It is in our interests to ensure that international law is respected and observed. This is the common thread,” Baerbock said in a statement.

The summit will see the first face-to-face talks between President Putin’s long-serving foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and some of Russia’s biggest critics since the invasion of Ukraine in what Moscow calls a “special military operation.”

Lavrov has arrived in Bali and plans to meet some of his G20 counterparts during the summit, but ministers including Baerbock and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken have ruled out meeting Lavrov, Russian news agency TASS reported.

In the G20, Western countries have accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine and imposed sanctions, while other countries such as China, Indonesia, India and South Africa have responded more silently.

Some European and American officials stressed that the Bali summit would not be “business as usual”, and a spokesman for Germany’s foreign minister said the G7 would coordinate a response to Lavrov in Bali.

At the April G20 financial meeting in Washington, senior officials from the UK, Canada and the US left Russian representatives.

Despite early discussions of boycotting the G20 meeting, analysts say the West appears to have decided that giving up its say over Russia would be counterproductive.

The two-day meeting discussed energy and food security, with Russia accused of sparking a global food crisis and fuelling inflation by blocking Ukrainian grain shipments. Russia has expressed its willingness to facilitate unimpeded grain exports.