Posted on August 24, 2024
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently visited Ukraine for the first time and promised President Volodymyr Zelensky that he is ready to interfere personally in order to establish the peace.
He was rebuked by President Zelensky last month as the Indian leader hugged Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Moscow on the day of brutal attacks within Ukraine, including the attack on Kyiv’s largest children’s hospital.
Mr Modi, 73, said he had said this to Mr Putin, problems cannot be resolved through military means.
‘Both sides will have to sit together and to look for ways to come out of this crisis,’ he said after meetings in Kyiv.
Mr Modi, who took the train from Poland, is the first international leader to visit Kiev since Ukraine troops entered Russia’s Kursk region on August 1 and took more than 1,250 sq km of territory, as claimed by Kiev’s military.
In his interview six weeks ago, President Zelensky expressed his ‘huge disappointment’ at observing Mr Modi embracing the Russian president.
On Friday it was the Ukrainian leader’s turn to be hugged by Mr Modi but it was a strange hug this time. Mr Zelensky seemed to have a look of disgust but might well have been blinking in the sun.
Seven more people had been killed by Russian strikes in a city on the day that Mr Modi had gone to Moscow. Among them is Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv which has been directly hit.
Not unexpectedly, the first stop that Mr Modi was taken to on Friday was Ukraine’s history museum, where he was shown a performance dedicated to all the Ukrainian children who were killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country began in February 2022 and 570 of them have died.
Both leaders bent down to lay down soft toys at a semblance of a shrine and the Indian prime minister stated later his heart was heavy with sorrow for the young people ‘martyred’ in this war.
Once, he befriended the Ukrainian president, placing his arm around the man’s shoulders – a gesture captured on Mr Modi’s Twitter page with a message that claimed he cared for the families of dead children.
Then emerged his private offer to broker the cessation of hostilities, with Mr Narendra Modi insisting that the only solution to the conflict was negotiation.
And the more he proceeded, the more it became obvious that for this man from India there was never an uncertainty of the side that had been taken in the war. ‘Our side was peace from day one. ’ Mr Modi reminded about his origins from India, the land of Mahatma Gandhi whose statue the Prime Minister had time to visit in Kyiv earlier.
But beyond words, the reality is that India has never denounced Russia’s full scale invasion and has been contributing to fueling Moscow’s war economy; Delhi became the largest importer of Russian oil last month during the same it was hit by western sanctions.
Both, Mr Modi and President Zelensky did talk about the ongoing military operation of Ukraine in Russian territory, it is however, not clear what was said during this conversation.
India did attend a peace meeting in Switzerland in June convened by Ukraine and to which Russia was not invited, and Mr Zelensky called on Mr Modi to issue a joint statement that underlined the sovereignty of Ukraine and every other state.
However, he thanked his visitor for ‘endorsing our sovereignty and territorial integrity’, a statement that Mr Modi echoed shortly – both declared it historic.