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KYIV — “Namaste!” Ukrainian officials said as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi exited a train in Kyiv on Friday.
Modi arrived in Ukraine on the eve of the country’s Independence Day to deepen cooperation between India and Ukraine, and to push for a peaceful resolution to the war between Kyiv and Moscow.
Ukraine doesn’t just want any old peace deal, though.
Kyiv wants India to join its vision for “a just peace,” aimed at concentrating a global effort around pushing the Kremlin to end its full-scale invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement Friday.
But India — currently one of the largest trade partners of Russia, a major purchaser of Russian oil, as well as provider of about 16 humanitarian aid packages to Ukraine — keeps stating it remains neutral and calls for peace, but not the “just peace” that Kyiv wants.
“A peaceful solution to the conflict is best for humanity,” Modi said Friday. In a joint statement published later, the leaders said India and Ukraine both support upholding principles of international law, including the U.N. Charter, such as respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of states.
While in Kyiv, Modi signed several agreements, deepening cooperation with Ukraine in pharmaceutical, agrarian, humanitarian and cultural areas. He also met with Indian diaspora representatives, visited the Mahatma Gandhi monument, met with Ukrainian diplomatic officials and hugged Zelenskyy, just like he hugged Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow a month ago.
That first hug dealt a blow to Ukraine’s diplomatic relations with India, as Modi visited Moscow and embraced Putin the day Russian forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Although Modi called on Putin to stop the war and said a solution could not be found on the battlefield, Zelenskyy was disappointed by Modi’s coziness with the Russian leader.
“It is a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day,” Zelenskyy wrote, referring to the deadly Russian attacks last month.
Kyiv hopes that India could become one of the possible intermediary countries that would help to achieve an enduring peace with Russia, based on the 10 points of Zelenskyy’s peace formula.
“We are looking for concrete discussions, we need to look to the future. We want India to join the communiqué of the Switzerland peace summit and to discuss the long-lasting strategic interests between India and Ukraine,” Andriy Yermak, head of the president’s office and Zelenskyy’s main foreign policy official, told India Today a day ahead of Modi’s visit to Ukraine.
India was one of the few countries that showed up to the peace summit in Switzerland but did not sign the meeting’s final communiqué.
“We hope that India will try to put political pressure on Putin to stop the aggression against Ukraine, so that India clearly shows that it is not on the side of the aggressor, but on the side of justice and a just peace, and not the pacification of the aggressor,” Oleksandr Merezhko, head of the foreign relations committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told POLITICO.
“It is difficult. Unfortunately, economic interests sometimes prevail over values and principles,” Merezhko added. “But we have to work. We will be helped in this by the USA and the EU, which have an influence on India.”
