Getting from Jakarta to Kyiv is not a straightforward journey. Making the trip when Ukraine is a war zone is even more complex.
Yet Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president and host of the G20 summit next week, not only embarked with his wife on an 11-hour overnight train journey to Ukraine’s capital from Poland in the middle of a war to personally deliver an invitation to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy — he also squeezed in the G7 summit in Germany and a trip to Russia to invite Vladimir Putin to Bali as part of a five-day diplomatic drive this summer.
In office since 2014, “Jokowi”, as he is known in his country, had seldom been seen on the world stage. But his determination to pull off a successful G20 on the tropical holiday island has propelled the former small-town furniture maker, known for his outsider-style politics, away from his customary reticence.