Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Friday (August 23). Modi will be the first Indian prime minister to visit Ukraine after diplomatic relations were established in 1992. On July 6, Modi met Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Moscow — a visit that both Zelenskyy and the United States had criticised. Does Prime Minister Modi’s visit signal a break from India’s traditional foreign policy stance on Ukraine? This is certainly not a continuation of India’s traditional foreign policy stance. India was close to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Ukraine was born after the fall of the USSR in 1991, but India’s affection for the Soviet Union, and later Russia, did not extend to Ukraine. This is not dissimilar to India’s relations with Poland, the country the prime minister visited on Wednesday and Thursday. During the Cold War, when Poland was a Warsaw Pact member, three Indian PMs visited the country — Jawaharlal Nehru in 1955, Indira Gandhi in 1967, and Morarji Desai in 1979. But after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and with Poland moving away from post-Soviet Russia and closer to the West, India has not found much time for the country. Both Poland and Ukraine are important countries in Europe, but India’s bias towards Russia, in retrospect, likely prevented New Delhi from going full steam on its engagement with central and eastern Europe. This is why the prime minister’s ongoing visit marks a significant departure. What has led India to depart from its older foreign policy stance towards Ukraine? Bilateral relations took a hit after the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022 — the volume of India-Ukraine trade dropped from $3.39 billion in 2021-22 to $0.78 billion and $0.71 billion in 2022-23 and 2023-24 respectively, according to Ministry of Commerce data. But the war has also created a new opportunity for New Delhi to engage with Kyiv. While India has maintained a strategic balance on the conflict itself, over the past two years, the highest levels of the Indian leadership have engaged directly with Ukraine. Modi has met and spoken with Zelenskyy at several multilateral forums, including the G-7 summit held in Italy year. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval have been in touch with their counterparts in Ukraine. Indian officials have participated in various peace meetings. On March 29, Jaishankar hosted Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in New Delhi. The two ministers agreed to restore bilateral cooperation to the level that had existed before the war. New Delhi has framed Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Kyiv as a part of a progression of improving relations. The possibility of post-war reconstruction in Ukraine offers various opportunities for India. More immediately, there is room for defence industrial cooperation. Ukraine’s strength as one of the world’s agrarian powers will add to its strategic salience in the years ahead. Pre-war Ukraine was among the biggest sources of sunflower oil for India. Could Modi’s visit to Ukraine impact India’s relations with Russia in any way? There is no reason for that to happen. India-Russia relations are in no way linked to India’s engagement with Ukraine. The discourse both in India and in the West that forces this connection does not take into account the fact that India is a confident, powerful nation with significant capacity to act on its own in the international sphere. Framing the prime minister’s visit either in terms of India “abandoning Russia” or as Modi’s “redemption tour” following his visit to Moscow, is blind to India’s agency. This is not how international politics works. For instance, Russia and India continue to share a strong relationship, India has been key to keeping Russia’s economy afloat by helping it bypass Western sanctions, and India continues to use Russian military hardware in addition to cooperating on a range of other issues — however, all this does not stop Russia from engaging with China, which is India’s biggest geopolitical rival, on the basis of the common interests of those two countries. At the end of the day, common interests are the driving force in international relations. As Russia’s engagement with China does not impact its relationship with India, Indian engagement with Ukraine will not change its equations with Russia. Moreover, if New Delhi wants to play peacemaker — PM Modi said in Warsaw on Thursday that India supports “dialogue and diplomacy for the early restoration of peace and stability” and “is ready to provide all possible support” to this end — it has to engage with the “other side”. In sum, what is the significance of the PM’s ongoing visit? For decades after Independence, Europe remained a relatively low priority for Indian foreign policy beyond the narrow focus on relations with Europe’s big four — Russia, Germany, France, and Britain. This has changed under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi over the last decade. His visit to Ukraine (and Poland) is part of India’s larger Europe push. Referring to India’s policy of Non-Alignment on Wednesday, PM Modi said: “For decades, India’s policy was to maintain equal distance from all countries. Today, India’s policy is to maintain close ties with all countries.” This push to become “Vishwabandhu” includes a recognition of the opportunity that lies in forging deeper ties in central and eastern Europe, and disentangling New Delhi’s engagement with the region from its relationship with Russia. C Raja Mohan is visiting professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He spoke to Arjun Sengupta
