LONDON: As G7 leaders gathered at the start of a two-day meeting in Bavaria on Sunday, they joked about their muscles and whether to remove their jackets and mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin for his shirtless horseback photoshoots during the 2000s.
It was a brief moment of levity in a string of major international conferences almost back-to-back. First EU leaders met in Brussels, then the G7 in Germany followed by the NATO summit in Madrid, all three events designed to showcase Western unity after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the other side of the world, meanwhile, China last week chaired a largely virtual meeting of BRICS emerging nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), with Kremlin and Chinese media contrasting the 3 billion people represented by those nations with the 770 million in the G7.
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