Zelenskyy's comments post PM Modi's departure from Ukraine cause unease

A source in New Delhi told DH that the comments by the president after the departure of the prime minister from Kyiv on Friday were not in sync with the spirit of the visit.

New Delhi: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns from Kyiv, certain comments made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about India’s relations with Russia has caused unease in New Delhi.

After Modi left for New Delhi following his meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday, the president of the East European nation told journalists in Kyiv that he had taken up with the prime minister the issue of India’s purchase of oil from Russia.

He went on to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin had shown his lack of respect for India as he had got a hospital for children in Ukraine attacked when Modi had been visiting Moscow last month.

Zelenskyy on Friday also raised the issue of the Russian Army recruiting citizens of India as members of its support staff and sending them to the battlegrounds in Ukraine.

A source in New Delhi told DH that the comments made by the president after the departure of the prime minister from Kyiv on Friday were not in sync with the spirit of the visit.

India may convey its displeasure to Ukraine through diplomatic channels in a day or two.

Zelenskyy even suggested that India could host the next Summit on Peace in Ukraine. He, however, later added the rider that the next summit could be hosted only by any of the nations, which had endorsed the declaration of the first summit held in Switzerland in June.

Putin is spending the billions of dollars Russia is earning from energy exports to India and other countries to fund his military aggression against Ukraine, said Zelenskyy. He suggested that if India stopped buying oil from Russia, it would hit Putin’s war economy hard and make it difficult for him to continue to fund the military operations in Ukraine.

After Russia launched its ‘special military operations’ in Ukraine in February 2022, raised its oil import from the former Soviet Union nation, notwithstanding the US and EU sanctions on India. Imports from Russia rose from less than 1 per cent to almost 40 per cent of total oil purchases by India after the conflict started.

“Now, it's not like there's a political strategy to buy oil. There is an oil strategy to buy oil. There's a market strategy to buy oil,” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told journalists in Kyiv after the prime minister’s meeting with the president of Ukraine. Today, big suppliers like Iran and Venezuela, who used to supply India, are constrained from operating freely in the markets. I think it is a factor which needs to be taken into account,” he said, confirming that Zelenskyy had taken up the issue with Modi.

Modi travelled by train from Warsaw to Kyiv and had a meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday. It was the first visit by a prime minister of India to Ukraine since the establishment of diplomatic relations. The visit was also significant as it came six weeks after Modi travelled to Moscow, where his hug with Russian President Vladimir Putin prompted the Ukrainian President to express his disappointment on X. The United States too expressed disappointment over the “symbolism and timing” of the prime minister’s visit to Russia.

Modi had told Putin that it was heart-wrenching to see innocent children getting killed in the conflicts. During his meeting with the Russian president in Moscow on July 8 and 9, the prime minister had also reiterated India’s position that dialogue and diplomacy were the only way to end the conflict, and the solution would not come in the battleground.

He reiterated the same during his meeting with Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Friday.

The prime minister’s visit to Kyiv after his tour to Moscow was an attempt by New Delhi to signal that it would continue to seek a strategic balance between India’s decades-long ties with Russia with its relations with the United States and the rest of the West.