Inter Milan reaches Champions League semifinals after eliminating Bayern Munich 4-3 on aggregate

Milan (AP) — Former Bayern Munich defender Benjamin Pavard scored against his old club to help Inter Milan to a 2-2 draw against the German team on Wednesday, sending the Nerazzurri through to the Champions League semifinals 4-3 on aggregate.

It was Pavard’s first goal for Inter, after the France international joined from Bayern in 2023.

“There’s certainly a lot of emotions as it’s my first goal, moreover it’s at San Siro," said Pavard, who last scored almost exactly two years ago to the day. “So there were a lot of emotions but I had to stay in the match, I couldn’t think of the goal, I had to remain focused.”

Harry Kane had leveled the quarterfinal early in the second half but Inter swiftly turned the game around with goals from Lautaro Martínez and Pavard on a blustery night in Milan.

Eric Dier headed in the equalizer on the night, in the 76th minute, to set up a nervy finale.

Inter will face Barcelona in the semifinals. It beat the same opponent in the final four in 2010 on its way to winning the Champions League and securing the treble under José Mourinho

Simone Inzaghi’s men are in contention to repeat that feat this season.

“We’re not putting limits on ourselves," Pavard told broadcaster Amazon Prime. "We have a great team, we have really great players, with staff that have been working well for two years.”

The other semifinal pits Paris Saint-Germain against Arsenal, which won 2-1 at Real Madrid on Wednesday to advance 5-1 on aggregate.

Inter had stunned Bayern last week, winning 2-1 to inflict the German team’s first home defeat in the competition in almost four years.

Bayern coach Vincent Kompany said he had “some regrets” over the two legs, with his team missing a number of chances and thus missing out on the possibility of lifting the Champions League trophy in its own stadium on May 31.

“The hard reality is that we’re not going to play the Champions League final at home,” Kompany said. "That's the hard reality. We can't change it. The other side is the performance side. We know we did enough to win these two games.”

It was a wet and windy night at San Siro and the gusts caused some misplaced passes.

The visitors had a few early opportunities, with Pavard charging down an effort by Michael Olise and Alessandro Bastoni timing a sliding tackle to perfection to also deny Olise, who had gone clear on goal.

Inter managed to slow things down after the frantic start and began to have opportunities of its own.

Hakan Çalhanoğlu went closest in the 33rd minute with one of his trademark shots from distance that flew just wide of the right upright.

There was panic in the Inter area moments later and Bayern’s first-leg goalscorer Thomas Müller had a shot charged down by Matteo Darmian and Leroy Sané saw the follow-up saved by Yann Sommer.

However, Bayern broke the deadlock — and leveled the quarterfinal — seven minutes into the second half.

Inter failed to properly clear a cross and the ball came out to Leon Goretzka, who fed Kane and the England forward steadied himself before firing past Federico Dimarco and into the far bottom corner.

But Inter equalized just seven minutes later. Lautaro — Inter’s all-time leading scorer in the competition — miscontrolled a corner but was quickest to react and managed to bundle it into the bottom left corner.

The Argentina World Cup winner leapt onto the advertising hoardings in front of the Inter fans and stretched out his arms.

There were even more rapturous celebrations three minutes later when Pavard headed in another corner.

The Inter fans were in for a nervy final 14 minutes, however, as Serge Gnabry’s cross found Dier at the byline, and his header strangely looped into the far top corner from the tightest of angles.

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Bayern's head coach Vincent Kompany reacts during the Uefa Champions League soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at San Siro Stadium in Milan, North Italy, Wednesday April 16, 2025. (Spada/LaPresse via AP)

Inter Milan's Lautaro Martinez celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Inter Milan players celebrate at the end of the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Bayern's Harry Kane celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Bayern's Harry Kane, second left, celebrates with his teammates after scoring his side's opening goal during the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Inter Milan's Lautaro Martinez celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Inter Milan's Benjamin Pavard, left, celebrates with his teammate Lautaro Martinez after scoring his side's second goal during the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Inter Milan players celebrate at the end of the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Bayern's Thomas Mueller reacts at the end of the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Inter Milan's Lautaro Martinez celebrates after scoring his side's opening goal during the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Inter Milan's head coach Simone Inzaghi celebrates at the end of the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Bayern's Harry Kane reacts at the end of the Champions League quarterfinal second leg soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Inter Milan's Lautaro Martinez celebrates after scoring with teammate Benjamin Pavard, right, during the Champions League quarter final soccer match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich at San Siro Stadium in Milan, North Italy, Wednesday April 16, 2025. (Spada/LaPresse via AP)

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Against a backdrop of rising global tensions and energy market instability, governments from around 50 countries will gather Friday in Colombia’s Caribbean city of Santa Marta for a summit aimed at accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels.

The April 24–29 conference, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, will bring together ministers, subnational governments, academics and civil society groups to discuss how to move beyond oil, gas and coal while ensuring the transition is “just, orderly and equitable,” organizers said.

The meeting reflects growing frustration among some governments and advocates that decades of U.N. climate negotiations have failed to directly address fossil fuel production — the main driver of global warming — prompting the Santa Marta summit to push the issue outside formal talks.

Organizers say the gathering is intended to open space for a politically sensitive debate that has long been avoided in international climate negotiations.

“It is definitely a political space. We are opening a space for discussion that does not exist,” Colombia’s environment minister, Irene Vélez Torres, told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the summit.

Unlike formal U.N. climate negotiations, the meeting is not expected to produce binding commitments. Instead, officials say the goal is to generate a set of proposals and build coalitions of countries willing to move faster on phasing out fossil fuels.

“We’ve also seen climate action unfortunately fall down the list of government priorities,” said Claudio Angelo, head of international policy at the Observatorio do Clima think tank in Brazil.

Nations from Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, many of which play key roles in fossil fuel production or consumption, will attend. The United States and Saudi Arabia — two of the world’s largest oil producers — will not, underscoring divisions between countries pushing for a faster transition and those more closely tied to fossil fuel interests.

Under the Paris Agreement — the 2015 global climate accord — countries set their own emissions targets, meaning no international process can compel governments to phase out fossil fuels.

The summit is part of a broader push to move climate diplomacy beyond emissions targets and toward directly confronting fossil fuel production — a politically sensitive issue that has long divided countries.

Some advocates say new approaches are needed to close what they see as a major gap in global climate policy.

“Fossil-free zones turn global climate goals into concrete geographic decisions,” said Andrés Gómez of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, referring to proposals to designate areas where oil, gas and coal extraction would be off-limits, particularly in ecologically sensitive regions.

Indigenous leaders involved in the process say they are pushing governments attending the Santa Marta summit to adopt fossil-free zones as part of their transition plans.

“For Indigenous peoples, stopping fossil fuel extraction is not only a climate imperative — it is essential to defending our territories, our governance systems and our right to self-determination,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, a coalition of Indigenous and local community organizations representing millions of people across forest regions worldwide.

He added that governments must move “from commitments to implementation” by integrating fossil-free zones into national energy transition plans.

Analysis by advocacy groups shows that oil and gas concessions already overlap with vast areas of tropical forest and Indigenous territories, underscoring the scale of the challenge.

The conference comes at a time of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, including the war in Iran, which has disrupted global energy markets and threatened supply through the Strait of Hormuz — a critical route for roughly a fifth of the world’s oil.

The resulting price spikes are already being felt far beyond energy markets.

“Oil prices don’t just stay in energy markets — they move straight into people’s lives,” said Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and a leading climate justice advocate expected to attend the Santa Marta conference, speaking at a press conference ahead of the event.

“Impacts are hitting the most vulnerable hardest, as always, while oil companies reap windfall profits,” she said.

In her interview, Vélez said such instability should accelerate — rather than delay — the transition.

“The crisis — and let’s call it what it is — the war in the Middle East has triggered a global crisis,” she said. “In this case, I believe the movement should be toward radicalizing the green agenda and the transitions.”

Some analysts warn that supply shocks could push countries to increase fossil fuel production in the short term, even as they commit to long-term climate goals — highlighting the tension between energy security and climate action.

That tension is particularly visible in Latin America, where many economies rely heavily on oil, gas and mining exports even as governments position themselves as climate leaders. Colombia, one of the region’s top oil producers and home to roughly 6% of the Amazon rainforest, depends on crude exports for a significant share of government revenue and foreign income.

At the same time, Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s government has pledged to halt new oil exploration and push for a global phaseout of fossil fuels.

“Economic and fiscal dependence is a problem, and it is perhaps the main challenge we face,” Vélez said.

Financial constraints are also expected to shape discussions. Many developing countries face high levels of public debt and limited fiscal space, making it difficult to invest in renewable energy and other elements of the transition.

Civil society groups say that without reforms to the global financial system, these constraints will continue to slow progress.

“Moving away from fossil fuels requires, without a doubt, a careful economic and energy transition plan,” said Carola Mejía of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Economic, Social and Climate Justice.

Gabriella Bianchini of Global Witness said the stakes go beyond climate alone.

“As people everywhere suffer the consequences of oil-driven conflict, it’s never been clearer that the world needs to leave the fossil fuel era behind,” she said. “Santa Marta is a chance for governments and communities to grab the bull by the horns and take action toward a greener, more equitable and peaceful world.”

She added that while U.N. climate talks remain crucial, they have repeatedly struggled to deliver meaningful progress on fossil fuels.

“Santa Marta represents space for governments to work on the one plan we know will stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown: a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels,” Bianchini said.

Observers say a key question will be whether the meeting can produce a clearer political signal on an issue that has remained largely unresolved in global climate talks.

“If we think about it, the conference is that turning point where, collectively, we decide to be on the right side of history,” environment minister Vélez said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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