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“IT’S JUST GREAT TO SEE YOU”: That was U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking to China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping as they headed into a long meeting in Bali, Indonesia, their first in years. The pair sought to reassure the world that lines of communication are open between them as the G-20 summit kicks off.

Nearly all official communication had ceased between Washington and Beijing since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August trip to Taiwan, a visit that infuriated the Chinese. Biden said this morning that while he viewed the 21st century as a rivalry between the U.S. and China, he sought “competition, not conflict.”

France’s Emmanuel Macron is among the leaders who will meet Xi on Tuesday, though only for 20 minutes.

WELCOME TO THE G-19

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is a no-show, and now the group risks veering into the territory it had to navigate in the Trump-era —being unable to agree on a summit communique. Per POLITICO’s team on the ground in Indonesia, President Joko Widodo is working behind the scenes to convince Western countries to tone down their criticism of Russia. He wants European, American, Canadian, Australian and Japanese officials to show “flexibility” so that Russia and China can sign the summit joint declaration.

Russian foreign minister taken to hospital: That’s the claim of Indonesian authorities — which have no obvious reason to lie about it, though the Russian foreign ministry denies that Sergey Lavrov is anywhere but his hotel.

INTERVIEW — AMANDA BENNETT, CEO, U.S. AGENCY FOR GLOBAL MEDIA

Just as the U.S. government funnels billions of dollars of weapons and other forms of aid to Ukraine, the agency tasked with spreading information about the U.S. abroad is shoveling tons of information to the country, and Russia too.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Amanda Bennett told Daniel Lippman the organization is rebuilding its ranks of journalists, and has increased its reach in 2022 — and a lot of that has gone toward content on or for Ukraine.

USAGM faced numerous controversies during the last year of the Trump administration under the leadership of Michael Pack. He accused some employees of being foreign spies, decapitated the agency’s leadership, and was accused of misusing his office.

Ukraine fuels expansion: The globally focused Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which focuses on European countries with relatively low press freedom, have poured correspondents into Ukraine to cover the war and hired a couple dozen journalists locally in Ukraine.

In the fiscal year ending September, VOA signed 50 new affiliates and 280 new distributors in countries near Russia including Estonia, Lithuania, and Moldova — just as media outlets in those countries were dropping Russian propaganda network RT.

Between Russia’s February invasion and late October, web and social media videos VOA and RFE/RL have been viewed nearly 6 billion times, triple the numbers from the year before.

Overall, the agency estimates that 11 million Russian adults consume news from RFE/RL, while VOA reaches around 1.8 million Russians every week. Both VOA and RFE/RL have active channels on Telegram, one of the few services in Russia that isn’t censored.

Tech too: The agency’s Open Technology Fund is helping to fund three VPNs to cope with a huge surge in demand from Russian users. OTF-supported VPNs supported more than 8 million Russian users in September, up from around 300,000 in January.

Bennett’s view: “The Ukraine invasion, more than any other national, international event that we’ve seen in the last decade really shows the power of information and that information played a huge role in how things unfolded,” said Bennett, who also headed Voice of America in the Obama administration.

“The truthful information that there was an invasion going on, that simple fact that that was happening, to make that available and increasingly available to people who want to know about it, even in places that are blocked, that’s incredibly important because otherwise the only picture that they get is the one that’s designed to make it look like something else that someone else wants them to see.”

Not without risk: Bennett, a former head of Voice of America, said the safety of its journalists in Ukraine is the agency’s biggest challenge. One RFE/RL journalist, Vira Hyrych, was killed in late April when a Russian missile struck her apartment building in Kyiv.

WHERE TO JOIN GLOBAL INSIDER 

What’s next for America’s defense? Post-midterms and pre-defense spending boom, POLITICO is hosting a summit Nov. 16 to dig into China and Russia strategy, weapons of the future, cyberdeterrence and space frontiers. Join us in-person in D.C. or online.

Milken Middle East / Africa Summit: POLITICO will feature coverage in Global Insider and Digital Future Daily newsletter from Wednesday through Friday.

UNITED STATES — REPUBLICANS EDGE CLOSER TO HOUSE CONTROL: GOP candidates have won or are leading in 221 seats. If they maintain those leads, they will secure the same small edge that Democrats now have in the House. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is hoping to be confirmed as the Republican nominee for speaker on Tuesday. The most conservative members of the caucus want the vote delayed.

UNITED STATES — TRUMP VS. PENCE: Former President Donald Trump still plans to launch his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday, the same day former Vice President Mike Pence releases his autobiography, “So Help Me God.”

CHINA — ZERO COVID POLICIES ARE AN EXCUSE FOR MAXIMUM CONTROL: More from Times of London.

TRANS-ATLANTIC RELATIONS — NEW MORNING CONSULT TRACKER 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains the most important influence on trans-Atlantic favorability in 2022, according to a new tracker poll from Morning Consult.

Support for energy sanctions against Russia is on a downward trend. “Republicans are more skeptical of energy sanctions than Democratic or independent voters, but are about in line with the most hawkish European countries,” the company said.

American respondents increasingly favor “friend-shoring” — relocating key manufacturing to friendly countries and say they’re willing to pay a bit more for supply chain security.

CLIMATE CORNER 

EU PUTS PRESSURE ON CHINA TO PAY UP: With the world’s top emitters (most of them rich nations) under fire for not helping protect the countries suffering the worst effects of climate change, the EU’s top climate envoy Frans Timmermans had some strong words for China, which has for decades maintained that it is a developing country. “You cannot continue, when you’re responsible for approximately 30 percent of global emissions to say, ‘well, yes, but I’m a developing country so I don’t feel a financial responsibility,’” Timmermans told reporters in Brussels before heading to the U.N. climate conference in Egypt today. That chimes with what Timmermans’ American buddy John Kerry was saying in the lead-up to COP27.

GLOBAL ‘CLIMATE SHIELD’ LAUNCHED: A $200 million insurance program designed by Germany and backed by the G-7 launched Monday with the goal of helping people in some of the world’s poorest countries deal with climate-fueled disasters.

The funds can go toward livestock and crop insurance, property insurance, credit guarantees and social protection systems, and initial beneficiaries will include Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, the Philippines and Senegal.

Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s finance minister and the chair of the group of vulnerable country finance leaders known as the V-20, called the scheme “long overdue.”

Reality check: The new scheme is a drop in the ocean of climate costs. V-20 governments claim that the 55 most climate-vulnerable countries have lost $525 billion in the past two decades due to climate change.

IS A TRILLION DOLLAR GLOBAL CLIMATE PLAN NEEDED? Compared to a little insurance plan, or even the $369 billion in climate projects funded by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, there’s something much bigger on the table at the global climate talks: the Bridgetown Agenda, proposed by Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados. Mottley’s proposal centers on a massive expansion of low-interest loans from multilateral development banks.

The proposal is gaining some traction: It’s backed by Macron, and — in broad terms — by the leaders of the IMF and World Bank.

Read more of POLITICO’s COP27 coverage here. 

CRYPTO RECIPES: The Crypto.com exchange has a new plan to put distance between itself and investors worried about the collapse of rival exchange FTX: publishing an audited proof of reserves.

WAR CRIMES — A TRIAL, 79 YEARS LATER: Nearly eight decades after his alleged Nazi war crimes, a 97 year-old German man may be about to stand trial for the execution of Soviet prisoners. The message to Russian war criminals in the current war in Ukraine is clear: Prosecutors will keep looking until they find you.

REINVENTED: The former Rita Carpenter, known for a Playboy photo shoot and as ex-wife of ex-Rep. John Jenrette (D-S.C.), is now Her Serene Highness the Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi. Ariel Levy, for the New Yorker, brings you this tale of reinvention from Rome.

RESTRAINED: Sebastian Smith, an AFP White House reporter who is serving as the pool reporter today for the White House press pack at the G-20 summit, reports on the Biden-Xi photo op: “Right at the end as we were being ushered out, the pool TV producer called out to President Biden, asking whether he would raise human rights during the talks. Instantly, a man from the Chinese side (he was wearing a white Covid mask with a Chinese flag on it) yanked the producer backwards by the backpack. She lost balance without falling and was pushed toward the door. Two White House staff members intervened saying the producer should be left alone.”

KLEPTOWATCH

TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL BLOCKED AT G-20: The NGO is calling on top leaders to “confront cross-border corruption and unite against the threat of kleptocracy.” But those leaders won’t be reading a billboard reading “G20, #StopKleptocrats.” The organization said that the advertising agency that owns the billboard rejected the booking because it lacked a “positive message” about the summit, in line with government requirements for a summit that is “orderly, disciplined and full of sense of responsibility.”

MOVES

Chris Meagher, the new Pentagon spokesperson, gave his first interview to POLITICO’s National Security Daily.

Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer is leaving France’s military Strategic Research Institute to be French ambassador to Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.

BRAIN FOOD

POLITICAL RISK EXPERTS FAIL TO KEEP UP WITH REALITY: The world has changed a lot this century, but people who market themselves to large companies as experts in political risk are failing to see changes in the global risk calculus, argues one of those experts, Tina Fordham.

PANDEMIC TERRORISM RISK IS OVERLOOKED: MIT’s Kevin Esvelt — who showed how CRISPR gene-editing technology can be used to drive a species to extinction — says we don’t have a serious plan to counter the risk of a deliberately released virus causing a pandemic.

NEW RAT PACK: Japanese researchers have demonstrated that rats can dance to music.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt, Jonathan Lemire, Sara Schonhardt, Karl Mathiesen, Melissa Merz and producer Jesse Naranjo.

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