New Delhi: Even as the US president publicly stated that talks with India on Ukraine remain “unresolved”, the divergence between New Delhi and Washington could face another challenge as India is expected not to vote in favour of the US-sponsored resolution in the UN Security Council condemning the Russian invasion.
At about 3 pm on Friday in New York (Saturday 1:30 am IST), the US, along with its European allies, will table the resolution that supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine and calls on Russia to withdraw all its troops immediately.
The draft resolution “went into blue” on Thursday night, New York time. This term means that the sponsors had requested the UNSC secretariat to circulate the final draft before being tabled in the Council for a vote.
As most observers acknowledge, the draft resolution, which India is expected to abstain on, is ‘dead on arrival’ as Russia, a permanent member, will veto it. Not surprisingly, the main sponsors have already called for all UN members to co-sponsor the resolution to signal the extent of support among the wider international community.
With a Russian veto being a foregone conclusion, the individual votes of the UNSC members will be scrutinised more carefully.
Earlier on Thursday night, India time, Indian foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla had said that India’s decision would be taken based on the final form of the resolution. “We have seen a draft resolution, I’m told that would undergo considerable changes, we will wait to see the shape that this resolution takes before we can pronounce ourselves in the position that we would take on this issue,” he told reporters.
Smoke rises from the territory of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s unit, after Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized a military operation in eastern Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine February 24, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Valentyn Ogirenko
In its preamble, the draft resolution condemned Putin’s declaration of a “special military operation” in Ukraine and endorsed the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres’s call for withdrawal of Russian troops. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has stated that Guterres “turned out to be susceptible to pressure from the West”.
The first operative paragraph in the draft resolution also reaffirms commitment to “the sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders”. In the draft text, Russia’s “aggression” was also condemned “in the strongest term” and deemed in violation of article 2 of the UN charter, the draft text.
India has, so far, not referred directly to the Russian military troop movement in any public statements. The official Indian readout of the phone conversation between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday only alluded to the Russian military attack by stating that Modi appealed for an “immediate cessation of violence”.
Even in previous statements at the UNSC, the Indian representative was among the handful of Council members that did not refer to the Russian military build-up at the Ukrainian borders. Neither has India mentioned the need to maintain Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
There has, officially, been no recriminations between India and United States over the divergence over Ukraine, with both sides deflecting any questions
But, US President Joe Biden’s remarks at a media appearance drew the curtain slightly on the topic between the two countries. A White House transcript described Biden’s response thus:
Q: Sir, India is one of your major defence partners. Is India fully in sync with the United States on Russia?
POTUS: We’re going to be — we’re in consultation with — with India today. We haven’t resolved that completely.
During the external affairs minister’s European trip, he had firmly pushed against questions from interlocutors about India’s Ukraine position being contradictory to its membership of the Quad, which supports rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific. Both India and US are part of the revived four-country Quad
At the Munich Security Forum last Saturday, S. Jaishankar asserted, “I don’t think the situations in the Indo-Pacific and transatlantic are really analogous.” His reply answered a question about India’s concerns over China’s incursion at the Line of Actual Control while keeping silent over Russian claims over Ukrainian breakaway regions.
Stating that the security challenges were distinct, he said, “Certainly the assumption in your question that somehow there is a trade-off and one country does it in the Pacific and so in return you do something else, I don’t think that’s the way international relations work.”
Ironically, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov himself seemed to link the US’s Indo-Pacific policy and the Ukraine issue in his meeting with Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in Moscow on Thursday.
In his opening remarks published on the Russian foreign ministry website, Lavrov referred to President Putin’s assertion that the transatlantic alliance NATO was “aspiring to a larger scale”.
“They are ‘responsible for international security’. The way they advance the so-called strategies in the Indo-Pacific region is clear evidence that they have an ‘appetite’ for the entire planet,” said the Russian minister.