Russia conveys 'serious concern' over US activities in Asia-Pacific to India

Russia on Monday conveyed its unease over India’s growing strategic convergence with the United States in the Indo-Pacific region.

“We expressed our serious concern to our Indian friends over the US activity there (Asia-Pacific region) under the slogan of so-called Indo-Pacific strategies and the creation of closed bloc-type structures,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in New Delhi.

He, however, did not directly refer to India’s growing cooperation with the US in the Indo-Pacific region, where the two nations joined Australia and Japan to launch the Quad to counter China’s bid to expand its geostrategic influence.

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Lavrov and Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu were in New Delhi for the inaugural 2+2 dialogue with their counterparts in the Government of India – External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh.

“There was a useful and meaningful discussion on a variety of subjects, with the focus of attention on the situation in the Asia-Pacific Region, where elements of instability have been piling up for years and posing a threat to the universal, inclusive architecture of cooperation, which had taken shape there around the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),” Lavrov told journalists just hours before the summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He did not refer to the Quad, but criticized the AUKUS – a trilateral coalition launched by the US, Australia and the United Kingdom for development of joint military capabilities, sharing of defence technologies among its three partners, particularly to create a framework for the US and UK to support Australia in acquiring a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, in order to build a deterrent against an increasingly aggressive China in the Indo-Pacific region.

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Lavrov said that the launch of the AUKUS by the US, the UK and Australia had triggered some questions, like how much the cooperation among the three nations within the coalition would conform to the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Moscow has also been opposed to India’s cooperation with the US and its other partners in the Quad in the Indo-Pacific. Lavrov, himself, had in December 2020 called the Quad a ‘divisive’ and ‘exclusivist’ tool, which was being used by the US Government to implement its “devious policy” of engaging New Delhi in games against China as well as to undermine Russia’s close partnership with India.

India, Australia, Japan and the US elevated the Quad to the level of the leaders with a virtual summit of the leaders on March 12. Modi joined President Joe Biden of the US as well as the leaders of Japan and Australia in the White House on September 24 for the first in-person summit of the Quad.

New Delhi, however, has been insisting that the Quad has a benign agenda and will focus primarily on development cooperation to counter China – unlike the AUKUS, which is intended to give a fillip to defence cooperation among the three nations in the Indo-Pacific region.

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