Ahead of the council of foreign ministers meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Goa on Friday, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar had a one-to-one engagement with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang.

The focus, Jaishankar said in a tweet, “remains on resolving outstanding issues and ensuring peace and tranquillity in the border areas” while maintaining that they had a “detailed discussion” on the “bilateral relationship” which has been eclipsed for three years now by the Galwan clash that left 20 Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of Chinese troops dead.

Apart from bilateral issues, the two ministers discussed SCO, G20 and Brics at the meeting which went on for over an hour. There was no official readout from either side till late in the night.

This is the second time in two months that Qin and Jaishankar are meeting in a bilateral format; the earlier instance being on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Delhi in March.

Although there have been regular high-level contacts between India and China over the past few months — the latest being at the defence ministers’ level on the sidelines of the meeting of SCO defence ministers in the national capital last week — there has been no progress on disengagement at two major points of ingress by China’s People’s Liberation Army in 2020: Depsang and Demchok. Another significant bilateral engagement that Jaishankar had during the day was with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

According to Jaishankar, they reviewed bilateral, global and multilateral cooperation besides discussing issues pertaining to G20 and Brics.

The meeting was preceded by a Reuters report which said that the two countries had suspended efforts to settle trade in rupees.

Officials on both sides said this was incorrect. A Russian official was quoted by ANI as stating that “there’s no change in bilateral developments; it’s wishful thinking by western news agencies”. Indian government sources said the report was not correct.

The issue of including Ukraine on the G20 agenda is likely to have come up in Jaishankar’s bilateral engagements with Qin and Lavrov. Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, who arrived in Goa in the afternoon, held his own bilateral engagements but India was not on the list.

In his departure statement in Pakistan, Bhutto-Zardari had said: “My decision to attend this meeting (SCO CFM) illustrates Pakistan’s strong commitment to the charter of SCO. During my visit, which is focused exclusively on the SCO, I look forward to constructive discussions with my counterparts from friendly countries.”