New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to hold bilateral talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the G7 summit in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Saturday evening, people familiar with the matter said. It will be the first in-person meeting between the two leaders after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year and is taking place over a month after Ukrainian First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova visited India.
Modi is also scheduled to hold bilateral talks on Saturday with his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida, French President Emmanuel Macron and Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh among others. The meeting between Modi and Zelenskyy has been scheduled following a series of discussions between senior diplomats of India and Ukraine.
The prime minister arrived in Hiroshima on Friday to attend the annual summit of the G7 grouping in the first leg of his three-nation tour that will also take him to Papua New Guinea and Australia. The Ukrainian president is also attending the G7 summit following an invitation by Japan, the current chair of the powerful grouping.
Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council Oleksiy Danilov said that Zelenskyy would attend the summit. "We were sure that our president would be where Ukraine needed him, in any part of the world, to solve the issue of stability of our country," he said on national television Friday.
There will be very important matters decided there, so physical presence is a crucial thing to defend our interests," Danilov said. Dzhaparova visited India last month, in the first high-level trip to India from Ukraine after the conflict began in the eastern European country. During her visit, Dzhaparova handed over a letter to Minister of State for External Affairs Meenakashi Lekhi. The letter was written to Modi by Zelenskyy.