Tokyo: India will have more contacts with Ukraine and Russia going forward as such engagements by countries talking to both sides are important to resolve their conflict, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Monday, days after it emerged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi may visit Kyiv next month.
Jaishankar said India’s position has been that a solution to the conflict will not emerge from the battlefield, and cautioned that it could be “fatalistic” to allow the situation to take its course and wait for events in some other parts of the world to provide some help to end the crisis.
“We do believe that we should be more active there,” he said during an interactive session at Japan National Press Club.
Jaishankar is on a three-day visit to Japan.
“I can reasonably expect that there will be more contacts between us and Ukraine and between us and Russia as well,” he said, replying to a question on reports of Modi’s likely visit to Kyiv next month.
Declining to give a specific answer, the external affairs minister added: “We, like any government, make our positions known at the right time through the right channels.”
Jaishankar said more needs to be done to find a way to end the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
“Our feeling today is that more needs to be done (and) that we should not resign ourselves to the continuation of the current state of conflict and say ‘let this take its own course and let us wait for events in other parts of the world to provide some kind of solution’,” he said.
“That to our mind would be fatalistic,” he noted.
Jaishankar said considering the gravity of the situation, it is important for countries who are in touch with both Russia and Ukraine as not many are actually talking to the two sides.
The external affairs minister also referred to Modi’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy last month.
“A few weeks later, we were in Moscow for our annual summit. So he (Modi) had a chance to discuss with President (Vladimir) Putin at very great length. And I myself have kept in touch with my (Ukrainian) counterpart Dmytro Kuleba,” the external affairs minister said.
Jaishankar said India believes it is important for everybody to do whatever they can to see if in some way something improves and something moves out of the battlefield into the conference table.
“We believe that there must be a return to dialogue and diplomacy,” he said.
“From the very beginning, we had the view that the use of force does not resolve problems between countries. In the last two-and-half years, this conflict has deepened, it has cost lives, it has done economic damage; it has had global consequences,” he said.
“I mean look at parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, it has actually impacted other societies. It has created food shortages, it has raised energy costs, it has created a fertilizer supply problem, it has contributed to global inflation and in some cases, it has even directly triggered economic crises in countries,” he said.
“It is very serious as it is. Its implications in a globalised world are even more serious. We recognised that,” Jaishankar said.
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