EGN NEWS DESK
Kyiv desires India to hitch its imaginative and prescient for “a simply peace,” aimed toward concentrating a worldwide effort round pushing the Kremlin to finish its full-scale invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioned in a press release Friday.
But India — at the moment one of many largest commerce companions of Russia, a significant purchaser of Russian oil, in addition to supplier of about 16 humanitarian help packages to Ukraine — retains stating it stays impartial and requires peace, however not the “simply peace” that Kyiv desires.
“A peaceable answer to the battle is finest for humanity,” Modi mentioned Friday. In a joint assertion revealed later, the leaders mentioned India and Ukraine each help upholding ideas of worldwide legislation, together with the U.N. Charter, resembling respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of states.
While in Kyiv, Modi signed a number of agreements, deepening cooperation with Ukraine in pharmaceutical, agrarian, humanitarian and cultural areas. He additionally met with Indian diaspora representatives, visited the Mahatma Gandhi monument, met with Ukrainian diplomatic officers and hugged Zelenskyy, identical to he hugged Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow a month in the past.
That first hug dealt a blow to Ukraine’s diplomatic relations with India, as Modi visited Moscow and embraced Putin the day Russian forces bombed a kids’s hospital in Kyiv. Although Modi referred to as on Putin to cease the battle and mentioned an answer couldn’t be discovered on the battlefield, Zelenskyy was disillusioned by Modi’s coziness with the Russian chief.
“It is a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the chief of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody legal in Moscow on such a day,” Zelenskyy wrote, referring to the lethal Russian assaults final month.
