India has traditionally had close economic and defence ties with Moscow and refrained from criticising Russia over its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, instead increasing purchases of Russian oil to record levels.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has urged India to stand by Kyiv, saying the nation's close ties with Russia are based on a Soviet legacy that is evaporating, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
Kuleba arrived in New Delhi on Thursday to advance Kyiv's vision of the path to peace in Ukraine and to strengthen ties with India. As per Kuleba, “the co-operation between India and Russia is largely based on the Soviet legacy. But this is not the legacy that will be kept for centuries; it is a legacy that is evaporating.”
India has traditionally had close economic and defence ties with Moscow and refrained from criticising Russia over its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian minister also said that each barrel of Russian crude that India bought after the war had a “good portion of Ukrainian blood in it”. India is a leading buyer of Russian crude oil.
Kuleba said India has much to gain from expanding trade and technology ties with Ukraine and offered Indian companies a role in postwar reconstruction.
Ukraine was now looking to "restore trade" with India, he told the newspaper, resuming exports of agricultural products such as sunflower oil and buying more Indian goods itself. "We are interested in importing some of the heavy machinery items that India is producing," he said.
Ukraine hopes to hold a summit of world leaders without Russian participation in the coming months to advance its blueprint for peace, which calls among other things for the withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory. Russia has dismissed the Ukrainian diplomatic initiative as a non-starter.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DNA staff and is published from Reuters)
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