India’s Ukraine mediation doesn’t add up

Is Modi flying to Kiev just to assuage Washington’s feelings over his earlier Moscow visit?

It is a fortuitous happening that the Washington Post featured on August 17, in the run-up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s forthcoming visit to Kiev on August 23, an exclusive report with a Kiev dateline on how Ukrainians strung along Russians through past two months of Qatari mediation into believing they were willing to conclude an agreement at Doha declaring a moratorium on mutual attacks on energy infrastructure as part of a larger framework eventually to end the war itself. The catch is, Ukrainians were also meanwhile preparing for their invasion of Kursk.

The good part is that no one can now ridicule New Delhi for naïveté to wade into mediation to end the war. Chafing under Kiev’s deception, Russia proclaimed that “there is no question” of any peace talks with Ukraine in the foreseeable future — at least, not until the occupation of ‘Mother Russia’ is vacated. This is the third time since the March 2022 Istanbul talks and the subsequent ‘grain deal’ of July that year — under Turkish/UN mediation — that Moscow willingly suspended disbelief and fancied that peace and reconciliation with Kiev was still possible through negotiations.

It is left to presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to bring some credibility to the Russian discourse. Patrushev said in an interview with Izvestia: “It was the West who brought the criminal junta to power in Ukraine. NATO countries sent weapons and military instructors to Ukraine, they continue to provide them with intelligence data and they control actions of neo-Nazi groups. The operation in the Kursk Region was also planned with the participation of NATO and Western special services.” 

Patrushev added, “It’s common for the United States to say one thing and do just the opposite. Without their participation and direct endorsement, Kiev would have never dared to set its foot on Russian territory.” Lavrov said on state television, “He (Zelensky) would never have dared to do this if he had not been instructed to do so by the US.”

This is the first time since World War II that Russian territory has come under foreign occupation. In 1941, Hitler’s Wehrmacht came up to the northwestern edge of Moscow, but this is more of an incursion and Ukrainians will be increasingly hard-pressed to hold on to the Russian territory. There is no question that this is a poignant moment in Russia’s history.

The ‘known unknown’ factor is that Russia’s nuclear doctrine explicitly commits the Kremlin leadership to use atomic weapons in the event of an attack on Russian territory. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly highlighted that ‘red line’. Indeed, it is conceivable that by massively breaching that ‘red line’, the US and NATO may be testing the manner and resolve of the Russian reaction. There are no signs of any slowing down of the Russian offensive in Donbass. 

On the contrary, all signs are that the Battle of Donbass is intensifying as it inches toward the final phase with Russian forces threatening strategic cities of Pokrov, Toretsk, Kostiantynivka, among others. A shift in the trajectory of the war in Russia’s favour is to be expected. Clearly, peace talks can be ruled out for the next several months. Suffice to say, the developing situation will cast a shadow on the BRICS summit meeting in October in Kazan, Russia, under Russia’s rotating chair. 

Three other things must also be noted from an Indian perspective. First, the Indian prime minister’s bonhomie with Russia’s enemy when our time-tested friend is in deep sea may not go down well in Moscow, especially as reports of Ukrainian atrocities against hapless Russian villagers have begun appearing. Is Modi’s trip to Kiev worth its while just for assuaging the hard feelings in Washington over his earlier euphoric visit to Moscow?

Second, this is a proxy war. Therefore, shouldn’t Modi do some plain-speaking to US President Joe Biden, who wields the big stick, that the US is risking a world war and pushing the planet into the nuclear winter. Of course, such frank talk, as he did to Putin, may annoy Biden who is known to be an unvarnished Russophobe haunted by the spectre of defeat in Ukraine as his presidential legacy. 

Finally, all things considered, various moves New Delhi is making on the chessboard suggest that its priority may not be so much the Ukraine war as the demonstrative effect of a prime ministerial visit to Kiev that might get Modi government some relief from the mounting US pressure on a range of sensitive issues from the Pannun case to Bangladesh. 

(The writer is a former diplomat)