US to Invite Russia to Attend 2023 APEC Meetings in San Francisco: State Department

Russian and U.S. flags before talks between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman at the U.S. Mission in Geneva, Switzerland, on Jan. 10, 2022. Denis Balibouse/Reuters

The United States plans to invite Russia to attend meetings of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) bloc, which will be hosted by the United States next year, despite deteriorating relations between the two, a senior official has said.

U.S. State Department senior official for APEC, Matt Murray, told a media briefing in Singapore on Monday that the nation, “as good stewards of APEC,” will invite Russia, a member of the 21-country bloc, to attend the meetings which are set to take place in November 2023.

“We want to be good stewards of APEC. So we’ve invited Russia to participate, just as we have any other economies,” he said, according to The Straits Times. “We’ve informed our Russian counterparts that we would abide by the rules and regulations in the United States when it came to facilitating their participation.”

Murray did not say whether or not Russian President Vladimir Putin would attend next year’s APEC meeting.

The APEC intergovernmental forum was established in 1989 with the goal of promoting regional economic integration.

Its 21 member economies include Australia, China, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, and the United States. Members collectively account for nearly half of all global trade and more than 60 percent of the world’s GDP.

According to its official website, APEC members “collaborate on the shared goal of creating a more open, resilient, sustainable, and peaceful future for the people of the world’s most dynamic region.”

APEC Members Stage Walkout

Vice President Kamala Harris said in November that the city of San Francisco will host the APEC meeting next year after it was hosted in Thailand this year.

“Our host year will demonstrate the enduring economic commitment of the United States to the Indo-Pacific,” Harris said in a statement released by the White House.

“President [Joe] Biden and I look forward to welcoming APEC Leaders to San Francisco next year and to a successful meeting where we will promote economic growth and prosperity for the American people, and people throughout the Indo-Pacific region,” Harris said.

At this year’s APEC meeting, which was held in Bangkok in May, APEC issued a joint statement in which they condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for a “complete and unconditional withdrawal from the territory of Ukraine” by Moscow.

“Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy – constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity, and elevating financial stability risks,” the statement read. “There were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions.”

Representatives from the United States and a string of other countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia, walked out of an APEC meeting in Bangkok in protest of Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Reuters contributed to this report.