Vladimir Putin to not attend G20 summit in India in September

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not travel to New Delhi to attend the 18^th G20 summit, which will be hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 9 and 10.

Putin is not planning a trip to New Delhi to attend the G20 summit next month, Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in Moscow on Friday. “The main emphasis is now on the special military operation,” he added, referring to Russia's war in Ukraine.

It is still not clear if Putin will join Modi and other G20 leaders through video-link during the summit. He virtually attended the last G20 summit held at Bali in Indonesia in November 2022 as well as the annual conclave of the BRICS leaders held at Johannesburg in South Africa earlier this week.

Putin is the first foreign leader to convey his decision against physically attending the G20 summit to be hosted by Modi.

President Joe Biden of the United States, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia are among the ones who have so far confirmed their plans to travel to New Delhi to participate in the summit in person.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has already cast its shadow over India’s G20 presidency. None of the G20 ministerial meetings New Delhi hosted in the past few months could result in a consensus on outcome documents, as Russia and China objected to paragraphs, which condemned Russia’s war against Ukraine and referred to its impact on the global economy.

India had to issue chair’s summaries at the end of the meetings. Uncertainty now looms large over the joint communiqué to be issued after the summit on September 9 and 10.

Putin had decided against physically attending the BRICS summit in Johannesburg from Tuesday to Thursday – in view of the arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 17 for allegedly scheming to deport children of Ukraine to Russia.

He took part in the summit virtually, while his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov travelled to Johannesburg to attend the conclave.

South Africa is a signatory of the 'Rome Statute', the treaty governing the ICC, and it would have come under pressure from the US and other western nations to execute the arrest warrant against the Russian president had he travelled to the country to attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. Putin’s decision to participate in the summit virtually saved South African president Cyril Ramaphosa from a diplomatic predicament.

India, unlike South Africa, is not a signatory of the 'Rome Statute' and hence, would have had no obligation to execute the arrest warrant issued against the president of the former Soviet Union nation even if he had decided to come for the G20 summit.

Ever since Russia launched its 'special military operations' in Ukraine on February 24 last year, India has been drawing flak for not joining the US and other western nations in condemning the former Soviet Union nation for its aggression against the East European country. New Delhi has refrained from criticising Moscow, apparently in view of India’s deep Cold War-era ties with Russia. India also took into account its decades-old dependence on Russia for defence equipment, including high-tech military hardware.

While New Delhi has been maintaining strategic balance in its ties with Moscow and Washington DC over the past couple of decades, Modi’s meeting with Biden in the White House on June 22, however, added new momentum to the India-US ties, particularly in the fields of defence as well as critical and emerging technologies.

With Washington DC keen to make New Delhi less reliant on Russia for military hardware, the Modi-Biden meeting saw the US agreeing to remove regulatory barriers to defence industrial cooperation with India.

Modi, however, called Putin a few days after returning from his state visit to Washington DC, signalling that India would continue to maintain the strategic balance in its ties with Russia and the US.