The State Department announced late Thursday that Blinken would travel to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan before going to India for a meeting of the Group of 20 foreign ministers from the world's largest industrialized and developing countries, including China and Russia.
U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the prospects for Blinken having sit-down talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang or Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in New Delhi. But all three will be present in the Indian capital next week for the G-20 meeting. The State Department has said only that no meetings are scheduled.
And Wang, who has since been promoted, met with Blinken last weekend on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the first high-level talks since the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon and Blinken postponed a much-anticipated trip to Beijing. The broader G-20 meeting is expected to focus on food and energy security, especially for developing countries, which have been hit by fallout from the Ukraine conflict. In Bali, a number of nations that have not outright condemned Russia for the war expressed deep concern about its impact on the prices and supply of food and fuel.