New Delhi: India has made it clear that any international peace summit on Ukraine should not be one-sided and should have Russia on board as well.
“We have been involved with the multiple meetings of the summit starting from Copenhagen,” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday while addressing the media in Kyiv following the bilateral summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“There was a diversity of views not just involving India. I think many other countries have also taken part in these meetings and they have their particular views on how to take it forward.”
Jaishankar said that “what we heard from the Ukrainian side on how to take this forward and their expectations is understandable”. “Our view is that any exercise, if it has to be productive, will naturally have to involve the other party concerned (meaning Russia),” he stated. “It cannot be a one-sided effort.”
According to a joint statement issued following the summit, Modi and Zelenskyy reiterated their readiness for further cooperation in upholding principles of international law, including the UN Charter, such as respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of states. They agreed on the desirability of closer bilateral dialogue in this regard.
"The Indian side reiterated its principled position and focus on peaceful resolution through dialogue and diplomacy, as a part of which, India has attended the summit on peace in Ukraine, held in Burgenstock, Switzerland, in June 2024,” the statement reads. “The Ukrainian side welcomed such participation by India and highlighted the importance of high-level Indian participation in the next Peace Summit. The Ukrainian side conveyed that the Joint Communique on a Peace Framework, adopted at the Summit on Peace in Ukraine, could serve as a basis for further efforts to promote just peace based on dialogue, diplomacy, and international law.”
It needs to be mentioned here that though India has attended all four international meetings on peace in Ukraine leading up to the summit in Switzerland held so far since the invasion of Russia in February 2022, it did not become a signatory to the joint communique issued following the summit.
In November 2022, President Zelenskyy announced a 10-point peace plan, on the issues of nuclear safety, food security for Asian and African countries, Ukraine's energy infrastructure, the release of prisoners and the return of Ukrainian children deported to Russia, restoration of the 1991 Russia–Ukraine border, withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, prosecutions for war crimes in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, handling of ecological damage, guarantees against future Russian aggression, and a peace conference and international treaty. In December 2022, Zelenskyy called for the G7 states to support the plan.
Ahead of the summit in Burgenstock, four meetings were held in Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Malta and Switzerland. India had participated in all these meetings. On June 24, 2023, the first meeting was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, which saw participation from representatives of Ukraine, G7 states, the European Union (EU), India, South Africa, Brazil and Turkey, to build wide international support for a peace process based on the Ukrainian 10-point proposal. A European Commission official stated that there was emerging consensus at the meeting that the peace process should be based on the UN Charter principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty.
A second meeting was held on August 5-6, 2023, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that had representatives from about 40 countries, including China, India, EU member states, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Zambia, Egypt and the US. Agreements were made to establish working groups on the themes of the Ukrainian 10-point peace proposal and an ambassadors’ group. The aim of holding a meeting at the heads-of-state level was “considered plausible” for later in 2023.
A third meeting was organised on October 28-29, 2023, in Malta among national security advisors from 65 states from Europe, South America, the Arab world, Africa and Asia.
A fourth meeting was held in mid-January 2024 in Davos, Switzerland, prior to the World Economic Forum, with representatives from 83 countries and international organisations participating, including 18 from Asia, without China, and 12 from Africa. On January 15, following the meeting, Swiss President Viola Amherd stated that Switzerland was planning to organise a “possible peace conference”.
Finally, the international peace summit in relation to the Russo-Ukrainian War, formally called the Summit on Peace in Ukraine, was held in Burgenstock Resort in Switzerland on June 15–16, 2024. The conference was hosted by Swiss President Amherd. Representatives from 92 nations and eight international organisations attended the summit, while Russia did not participate.
A Joint Communique on a Peace Framework became the final statement of the summit and was supported by the majority of participants. In the Joint Communique, the signees declared that they agreed to take “concrete steps… with further engagement of the representatives of all parties” on three themes: nuclear power and weapons, food security, prisoners and deportees.
The signees agreed that “Ukrainian nuclear power plants and installations, including Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, must operate safely and securely under full sovereign control of Ukraine and in line with IAEA principles and under its supervision” and that “any threat or use of nuclear weapons in the context of the ongoing war against Ukraine is inadmissible”. They declared that for the “supply of food products…attacks on merchant ships in ports and along the entire route, as well as against civilian ports and civilian port infrastructure, are unacceptable” and that “Ukrainian agricultural products should be securely and freely provided to interested third countries”. They stated that “all prisoners of war must be released” and that all children and “other Ukrainian civilians who were unlawfully detained, must be returned to Ukraine”.
However, India, though a participant in the Burgenstock summit, did not become a party to the communique. “India did not sign the communique because it was based on two earlier UN resolutions on Ukraine,” Swasti Rao, Associate Fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses and an expert on issues of Russia and Ukraine, told ETV Bharat. “India had abstained from both these resolutions.”
Rao said that India on Friday once again reiterated that both Russia and Ukraine should agree on a solution that is acceptable to all. “India can pass on messages that are acceptable for everybody, including Ukraine,” she said. India all along has maintained that dialogue and diplomacy were the only way to solve the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
“I know that today’s era is not the era for war,” Modi had famously told Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation ((SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in September 2022. “We’ve spoken to you many times on the phone before on this, that democracy, diplomacy and dialogue — these things help the world.”
However, India and Russia remain close allies. Modi’s visit to Kyiv on Friday, the first by an Indian prime minister in 30 years after the establishment of diplomatic ties between India and Ukraine, comes close on the heels of his visit to Moscow last month for the annual India-Russia bilateral summit. It is because of all this that Modi’s visit to Ukraine and his meeting with Zelenskyy is under scrutiny from across the world.
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