India engaging Russia and Ukraine to see if there is something it can do to initiate talks between them: Jaishankar

NEW YORK: India has been engaging both Russia and Ukraine to see if there is something it can do that would hasten the end of the conflict and initiate serious negotiation between them, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said.

"We believe that wars are not the way of settling disputes. We don't believe that a solution is going to come from the battlefield," Jaishankar said during an interaction at an event titled ‘India, Asia and the World’ hosted by Asia Society and the Asia Society Policy Institute here on Tuesday.

Responding to a question on what is India going to do to help solve the conflict, Jaishankar said, “We think at some point there will be a negotiation, and such a negotiation has to obviously include the parties. It cannot be a one-sided negotiation.

"And from those assessments, we have been engaging both the Russian Government and the Ukrainian Government in Moscow and in Kyiv and in other places to see whether there is something we can do which would hasten the end of the conflict and initiate some kind of serious negotiation between them.”

He added that this is a kind of exploration that India has been doing. “It’s not that we have a peace plan. We are not suggesting anything. We are having these conversations and sharing these conversations with the other side. My sense is both sides appreciate it,” he said.

Jaishankar pointed out the several engagements that the Indian leadership has had with Moscow and Kyiv in recent months.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in New York on Monday before the Indian leader wrapped up his three-day visit to the US that included his participation in the Quad Leader’s Summit and his address to the UN’s Summit of the Future.

The meeting between Modi and Zelenskyy was their third in a little over three months. Modi had met the Ukrainian leader in Kyiv last month, just weeks after he had met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in July. In June, Modi held a bilateral meeting with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the G7 Summit in Italy. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval also visited Russia earlier this month.

“So we think if these conversations are helpful, and there's something we can do, and there are not that many countries and that many leaders today who have the ability or the willingness to engage both Moscow and Kyiv at the same time, I think we could make a contribution,” Jaishankar said.

He added that certainly, there is a widespread feeling in many parts of the world that the sooner the conflict ends, the better it is for the global economy and society.

Responding to a question on India’s relations with Russia, Jaishankar said, “As Russia today turns more towards Asia because of its current tensions with the West, for us there are certain economic complementarities here which come before. So there is today, I would say, a kind of a geopolitical case for the relationship, a military security case, economic one as well.”

“Now, how do you reconcile this with a growing relationship with the US? I would even say the growing relationship with Europe because that relationship is also growing,” Jaishankar said, underlining that it's a multipolar world where different poles deal with each other.

“We are no longer in a world where the relationships are exclusive. Every country wants to get the best out of the international order in the most effective way it can. So it requires a certain amount of care, and I would say, perhaps dexterity to manage it.

“But it has to be done because it's not feasible to expect that big countries constrain their options and don't deal with other countries, not because of their interest, but because somebody else has a problem with those countries,” he said to a round of applause from the audience.

Jaishankar added that for India, "our history, after independence, we've never really had anything other than a positive experience with the Soviet Union and then with Russia.”

He noted that during the period of the Cold War, when the US and Western countries “generally tended to prefer, at least in our region, dictatorships like Pakistan, we actually had a 40-year period where the West was primarily arming Pakistan and we turned to the Soviet Union as a military partner.”

He said India and Russia have a long defence and security relationship other than the strategic and geopolitical equations.

Pointing to the nature of the Indian economy, Jaishankar said the country is a large natural resources consumer, and “for us, the natural resource exporters of the world hold a very special significance”, adding that it could be Russia, Australia, Indonesia, countries of the Gulf for energy requirements.