Unease over Ukraine, no annual summit with Russia

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, December 10

The annual summit between India and Russia will not take place this year, with officials assigning no reason for a decision they said was taken some time back.

They, however, rejected western media reports that this was because Russian President Vladimir Putin had issued several threats about the use of nuclear weapons.

Other sources said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had already interacted with Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Trade Minister Denis Manturov in the past three months.

In September, PM Modi had met Putin in Tashkent, where he had made the “this is no time for war” remark.

Anyway, the bread and butter of diplomacy with Russia is carried out by two ministerial-level inter-governmental commissions, with the non-military meeting during Jaishankar’s recent visit to Moscow.

The sources admitted that not holding the annual India-Russia summit may send signals of a rift between the two countries, but felt that both sides could “live with it”.

India had sent signals about its distaste for armed hostilities between Russia and Ukraine much before Putin began the “Special Military Operation” on February 24.

The last India-Russia joint statement in September 2019, before the war began, made no reference to Ukraine despite attempts by Kremlin to push in its version. In fact, just before he met Putin in Vladivostok in 2019, PM Modi spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and discussed the exchange of high-level visits.