Ukraine crisis: why India isn’t condemning Russia, unlike the rest of the Quad
- India has stopped short of criticising Russia’s actions in Ukraine or threatening to join in with US-led sanctions, like Japan and Australia
- Observers said New Delhi’s neutral stance reflected its desire not to take sides – adding that deft diplomacy would be required to navigate the complex issue
“Neither the US nor European Union take sides on issues of core concern to us,” said Kanwal Sibal, a former foreign secretary of India, in reference to recent tensions with Pakistan over Kashmir and border disputes with China.
“We need not get into this game and [instead] maintain a constructive position on the issue of favouring a de-escalation and dialogue without taking sides,” he said, highlighting Russia’s grievances, such as the threat of Nato expansion and Western arms sales to Ukraine, and adding: “If condemnation has to take place it should be of all sides.”
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Nandan Unnikrishnan of the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation think tank, who specialises in Russia, agreed that “right now there is no significant reason for India to change its position” of neutrality – though he said references to a 2014 agreement signed in Minsk that tried and failed to put a stop to fighting in Ukraine’s breakaway Donbas region may have to stop “because that is in cold storage for the foreseeable future”.
Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions – collectively known as the Donbas – broke away from Ukrainian government control in 2014 and proclaimed themselves independent “people’s republics”.
Foreign policy analyst C. Raja Mohan said India needed to show deft diplomacy to navigate the complexity of the Ukraine issue.
“While India must maintain its relations with Russia, it will also have to look at the changed scenario in central Europe where Indian interests are also growing,” he said, adding that Delhi had to balance its Moscow ties with other countries’ concerns about Russian aggression.
“I would not describe India as the last holdout,” said P.S. Raghavan, a former Indian ambassador to Russia. “We are asking for legitimate security concerns to be taken into account. That includes [the concerns of] the US, Russia, Nato and Ukraine.”
Raghavan further pointed to “the careful way the US and the EU are reacting to Russia’s decision” in terms of actual action beyond “the harsh condemnation”.
US officials indicated on Tuesday that the deployment of Russian troops to the breakaway regions of Ukraine did not yet merit the harshest sanctions that Washington and its allies had prepared in the event of a full-scale invasion.
Sibal, the former top diplomat, said the Ukraine issue had been bound to blow up sooner or later, as too much went unresolved following the ousting of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in 2014, which immediately preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Russia could upset India’s US-China balancing act
As its largest arms supplier, Russia accounts for nearly half of India’s hardware – and even refused a request from China to halt weapons sales to India as both the countries were locked in a stand-off at their border since May 2020.