Prime Minister Modi’s call for an immediate cessation of hostilities during a G20 summit: Implications for food and energy security
Zelensky said Monday that he depended on India’s help to implement a peace formula during his phone call with Modi.
As a result of New Delhi becoming one of the top buyers of Russian oil, it is currently trying to boost trade ties with Moscow and keep its neighbor out of a war.
In a statement following the call, the Indian government said Modi had repeated his calls “for an immediate cessation of hostilities” and to “revert to dialogue and diplomacy.”
Zelensky presented a 10-point peace formula to world leaders at the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November. India assumed the presidency of the G20 this month and will be in charge until next year.
“The Prime Minister explained the main priorities of India’s G20 Presidency, including giving a voice to the concerns of developing nations on issues like food and energy security,” New Delhi’s statement said.
India and Moscow have solidified their ties. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Vladimir Putin in September and called their countries’ friendship “unbreakable.” The Russian president was told it’s not a time for war by him. But a year on, Modi still refuses to assign blame for the violence, and has voiced more concern over the spike in global food and fuel prices triggered by the war.
Modi was also thought to be a key player in the G20’s decision to issue a joint declaration condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine “in the strongest terms.”
India, a nation of 1.3 billion, has repeatedly said its decision to increase purchases of Russian energy is to protect its own interests as a country where income levels are not high.
A list of more than 500 items was sent to India by Russia and included parts of cars, aircraft and trains.
Russia is trying to avoid responsibility: confronting Ukrainian “fake news” with new laws to suppress dissent in post-Soviet Russian life
According to state media, Putin said he was ready to negotiate about acceptable solutions for the war in Ukraine. In response, a Zelensky adviser said Moscow “doesn’t want negotiations, but tries to avoid responsibility” as it continues to attack civilians.
Russia launched air strikes on civilian infrastructure to try to stop the Russian-Ukrainian conflict during the winter. There are few signs that Ukrainians are backing down from the bombing campaign.
At the time, Putin insisted his forces were embarking on a “special military operation” — a term suggesting a limited campaign that would be over in a matter of weeks.
The invasion has forced millions of Ukrainians to leave their homes, wreaked havoc on the Ukrainian economy and killed many civilians.
Yet the war has also fundamentally upended Russian life — rupturing a post-Soviet period in which the country pursued, if not always democratic reforms, then at least financial integration and dialogue with the West.
Since February, there has been a ban on criticism of the military or leadership. Nearly 20,000 people have been detained for demonstrating against the war — 45% of them women — according to a leading independent monitoring group.
The Russian army has been accused of defaming it on charges of questioning its conduct or strategy by a large group of high profile opposition voices.
The repressions extend elsewhere: organizations and individuals are added weekly to a growing list of “foreign agents” and “non-desirable” organizations intended to damage their reputation among the Russian public.
The most revered human rights group in Russia was forced to stop their activities because of alleged violations of the foreign agents law.
Russia’s already restrictive anti- LGBT laws have been greatly expanded by the state to argue that the war inUkraine reflects a wider attack on “traditional values.”
Disregards are still targeted for now. Some of the new laws are still unenforced. But few doubt the measures are intended to crush wider dissent — should the moment arise.
Leading independent media outlets and a handful of vibrant, online investigative startups were forced to shut down or relocate abroad when confronted with new “fake news” laws that criminalized contradicting the official government line.
Restrictions extend to internet users as well. American social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook were banned in March. Since the start of the conflict, more than 100,000 websites have been blocked by the internet regulators in the Kremlin.
Access to independent sources of information is still offered by technical workarounds. But state media propaganda now blankets the airwaves favored by older Russians, with angry TV talk shows spreading conspiracies.
The Russian Exodus Since Russia’s First Battle: The War That Saved Ukraine and Its Struggles to Reinvigorate Ukraine
Thousands of perceived government opponents — many of them political activists, civil society workers and journalists — left in the war’s early days amid concerns of persecution.
Yet Putin’s order to mobilize 300,000 additional troops in September prompted the largest outflow: Hundreds of thousands of Russian men fled to border states including Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Georgia in an attempt to avoid the draft.
Putin believes it was a good way of cleaning up the Russian society from spies and traitors. Russian officials have suggested taking away the passports of people who left the country. Yet there are questions whether Russia can thrive without many of its best and brightest.
Meanwhile, some countries that have absorbed the Russian exodus predict their economies will grow, even as the swelling presence of Russians remains a sensitive issue to former Soviet republics in particular.
Russia’s ruble currency plummeted and the banking and trading markets were shaky during the initial days of the invasion. Hundreds of global corporate brands, such as McDonald’s and ExxonMobil, reduced, suspended or closed their Russian operations entirely.
As a result of new Western sanctions, the European Union decided to phase out all seaborne imports of Russian crude oil within six months.
President Putin is betting that the Europeans will blink first when it comes to sanctions, because they are angry about high energy prices at home. He announced a five-month ban on oil exports to countries that abide by the price cap, a move likely to make the pain more acute in Europe.
The economic damage has already put an end to Putin’s reputation as a reliable ruler, which was once a key component of his support among Russians who remember the chaotic years after the fall of the USSR.
When it comes to Russia’s military campaign, there’s no outward change in the government’s tone. Daily briefings from the Defense Ministry give an update on how Russia’s defense works. The man assures that everything is going according to plan.
Yet the sheer length of the war — with no immediate Russian victory in sight — suggests Russia vastly underestimated Ukrainians’ willingness to resist.
Russian troops have proven unable to conquer Ukraine’s capital Kyiv or the second city of Kharkiv. Kherson, the sole major city seized by Russia, was abandoned amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive in November. Russian forces have been shelling the city.
Moscow has not been able to establish full control over the lands it now claims as its own, as a result of the illegal annexation of four territories of Ukraine in September.
The true number of Russian losses is a subject that is usually off-limits at home. Western estimates put those figures at much higher than they are.
A series of explosions, including along a key bridge linking Russia to Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, has put into question Russia’s ability to defend its own infrastructure.
Russia’s invasion has backfired in its goals, with the NATO alliance looking set to expand towards Russia’s borders.
Longtime allies in Central Asia have criticized Russia’s actions out of concern for their own sovereignty, an affront that would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. India and China have eagerly purchased discounted Russian oil, but have stopped short of full-throated support for Russia’s military campaign.
Putin’s December State of the Nation Address, Oil Prices, and Chinese Reopening of the IELA Energy Scale: Russia’s Future Oil Supply with the EU and China
A state of the nation address, originally scheduled for April, was repeatedly delayed and won’t happen until next year. Putin’s annual “direct line” — a media event in which Putin fields questions from ordinary Russians — was canceled outright.
An annual December “big press conference” – a semi-staged affair that allows the Russian leader to handle fawning questions from mostly pro-Kremlin media – was similarly tabled until 2023.
The Kremlin has given no reason for the delays. Many suspect it might be that, after 10 months of war and no sign of victory in sight, the Russian leader has finally run out of good news to share.
Russia will reduce its crude oil output by half a million barrels per day in March, just two months after major world economies imposed a price cap on its seaborne exports.
Futures prices for Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped 2.7% on the news Friday morning to $86 a barrel as traders anticipated a tightening in global supply.
Russian crude traded at a discount to the international benchmark crude of $28 a barrel. The EU has ended all of its crude imports from Russia, just as India and China have taken up cheap oil from Moscow.
There is a possibility of a drop in oil supply. China’s swift reopening of its economy in December after almost three years of strict coronavirus restrictions has pushed up estimates for global oil demand.
The International Energy Agency said last month that they expected demand to go up by 1.9 million barrels per day to reach an all- time high of 101.7 million barrels per day, with China accounting for nearly half of the increase.
The India-China Relationship after the Cold War and India’s Dependence on India: What Do We Expect to Learn From the Indian Dialogue of Ukraine?
All this reminds me that condemnation of Russia isn’t unanimous a year into the war. Much of the global south actually sees the West’s focus on Ukraine as a distraction from other, more pressing issues like food security, inflation and mounting debt.
India was still under British rule when Russia opened its first office in the country. But relations really took off during the Cold War.
“It started out as strategic sympathy for the Soviet Union, in the backdrop of India getting independence from the British. So it’s an anti-colonial experience, anti-imperialism,” says Rajeswari (Raji) Pillai Rajagopalan, a political scientist at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “And as the Cold War picked up, it became a more anti-West, anti-U.S. sentiment they shared.”
“You’re seeing a very close relationship between Russia and China even in the last few years,” says the ORF’s Rajagopalan. “So the current Indian approach is, we don’t want Russia to go completely into the Chinese fold. China has become the top national security threat for India.
In November, Modi’s top diplomat, S. Jaishankar, traveled to Moscow, where he stood alongside his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and called their countries’ relationship “steady and time-tested.”
“The actions that India is engaged in so far do not reflect any remorse or even mild criticism of the events in Ukraine,” says Praveen Chakravarty, a political economist affiliated with the opposition Indian National Congress party. It seems to help and abet.
India has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. (The IMF forecasts 6.8% growth for India this year, compared to just 1.6% for the United States.) India will be the third-largest economy in the world by the year 2030.
It is the 3rd largest oil consumers in the world. And it needs even more to fuel all that growth. Because India does not have much oil and gas reserves, most of the oil has to be imported. It’s also a relatively poor country, particularly sensitive to price.
Indian officials have defended those purchases by saying it’s their job to find bargains for their citizens. And Jaishankar, the foreign minister, has suggested it’s hypocritical of wealthier Westerners to ask them not to.
“Europe has managed to reduce its imports [of Russian gas] while doing it in a manner that is comfortable,” Jaishankar told an Austrian TV channel last month. “At 60,000 euros or whatever is your per capita income, you’re so caring about your population. I have a population at 2,000 dollars [per capita annual income]. I also need energy, and I am not in a position to pay high prices for oil.”
Pyatt said earlier in the month that the U.S. government was comfortable with India’s approach to Russian oil. And Karen Donfried, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, said the U.S. is not looking at sanctioning India for this.
Here’s one possible explanation for Washington’s change of heart: India is buying Russian crude at deep discounts — something the West can’t do because of sanctions, or doesn’t want to do because of the optics. Then India refines that same Russian oil and exports it onward to the U.S. and Europe. So the West gets Russian oil, without getting its hands dirty.
Moscow is India’s biggest arms dealer more than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia has reportedly supplied India with around $13 billion in weapons in the past five years alone.
Let’s go to India’s Air Force. Most of the fighters are referred to as ‘flying coffins’. Very often Indian pilots die when they are testing, or flying, those,” says Aparna Pande, a political scientist at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “So India knows they need to be replaced.”
Indian defense experts may have been the only ones not surprised to see Russian tanks falling apart in Ukraine this past year, Pande says. They’ve been unhappy with Russian equipment for years.
“Let’s say my entire apartment had only IKEA furniture, and now I decide, ‘OK now I want to change it, and I want West Elm.’ I can’t just replace one chair. Pande explains that he has to change his dining table and chairs. “So what India has done [in terms of updating its weapons] is piecemeal. But those big ticket items are still Russian-made. So that’s the change which has to happen, and this is what will reduce the Russian influence.”
Russia isn’t India’s biggest foreign policy preoccupation. It’s China. The two countries share a more than 2,000-mile disputed border. Satellite images show China may be encroaching on Indian territory. Soldiers clashed there in June 2020, and again this past December.
So even if Washington doesn’t like it, Biden administration officials say they understand why India has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and they’re willing to grant India a wide berth.