India pushing for bigger role in Russia-Ukraine talks

NEW DELHI: India is seeking a greater role in brokering an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Sunday, as New Delhi steps up contacts with both sides.

“Our position on that conflict has been very clear, which is that we’d like to see an end to this conflict, and we believe that this will require dialogue and diplomacy,” Jaishankar said at a Munich Security Conference in New Delhi.

“We have been advocating it for many years, and in recent months we have got a little bit more involved beyond advocacy, so we have conversations with both Russia and Ukraine in this regard.”

Jaishankar said India was “trying to be helpful, starting with the Black Sea safety of shipping”.

But he said India was also “going beyond that”, including discussion on grain and energy exports and “on non-attack possibilities”, he said.

“Those are ongoing conversations right now”, he added.

Jaishankar made his first solo trip to Ukraine in September.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin have close ties, and the pair met in New Delhi in September.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that the United States wants to broker a new round of talks with Ukraine and Russia on ending the four-and-a-half-year war, aiming to hold them by the end of October.

The US-led peace efforts have been largely stalled with Washington’s attention shifted to its war with Iran and as Ukraine says Russia has ramped up its aerial attacks across the war-torn country.

Previous rounds of talks have failed to yield tangible progress towards peace, with Moscow unwilling to drop its maximalist conditions to end the fighting.