Russia sees no point in reviving the G8 format. As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, for Moscow the G8 format is a thing of the past

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For Russia, the G8 format is a thing of the past, said in an interview with Interfax Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov . “We don’t see the need to revive what is left in the past,” he said, answering the question of whether Moscow is ready to resume work in this format.

“This is a repetition of what has been done, there is no element of novelty here, so Russia’s participation in the Group of Eight, in my opinion, is a completely irrelevant issue,” Ryabkov noted.

According to him, Russia over the past two years has seen that “efforts to practically solve a number of important international problems have largely moved from the G7 format to other formats with full Russian participation.” “We state this as a given, as a fact, and I think that this is indisputable from the point of view of our colleagues,” said the deputy foreign minister.

At the same time, he recalled that the “Group of Eight” “ceased to exist on the initiative of our Western colleagues.”

Russia participated in the G8 (including Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, USA, France and Japan) from 1997 to 2014. Participation was suspended after the annexation of Crimea to Russia.

On April 10, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on the eve of the meeting of the G7 foreign ministers in Hiroshima, said that he would like to see the revival of the G8 format . “I would like to hope that the G7 does not remain a permanent format, we must create conditions for a return to the G8,” the German publication Zeit quoted Steinmeier as saying.

At the same time, Steinmeier noted that the preconditions for Russia’s return to the G8 could be Moscow’s contribution to resolving the conflict in Ukraine and Moscow’s playing a constructive role in establishing peace in Syria.

Later, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that Russia is not ready to “pay” for returning to the G8 and attempts to force Moscow to do so are “baseless.”

Zakharova recalled that Western politicians, when raising the issue of Russia’s return to the G8, cited the implementation of the Minsk agreements as conditions, “despite the fact that the main responsibility for this clearly lies with the Kyiv authorities.”

Moscow said there is no point in resuscitating the G8