PM to sign strategic accord with Moscow

NEW DELHI, DEC 29: Prime Minister A B Vajpayee is likely to visit Moscow this summer to sign the ``strategic partnership'' between New De...

NEW DELHI, DEC 29: Prime Minister A B Vajpayee is likely to visit Moscow this summer to sign the “strategic partnership” between New Delhi and Moscow.

Russia’s ambassador to India, Albert Chernyshev, told journalists here today Moscow also hoped that India had “better relations with China,” adding that New Delhi had told the Russian premier, Yevgeny Primakov, that it was trying to ameliorate relations with Beijing.

He said a strategic partnernship between New Delhi and Moscow would soon extend

across the board, as both nations found that they increasingly needed each other in the future.

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“Russia’s earlier tilt towards the West is already returning to equilibrium. The earlier slogan was that the `West would feed us.’ But we have now understood that the West will not only feed us, it doesn’t want to feed us.”

Meanwhile, he added, Moscow had implicitly accepted India’s status as a nuclear weapons state. “We take the situation like it is. If you consider yourself a nuclear weapons state, pleasebehave accordingly and accept the (nuclear) regimes which exist for nuclear weapons States.”

The ambassador also confirmed that Russia had stopped asking for converting the rupee debt into hard currency, saying the change of heart was due to the huge discount being demanded by New Delhi. On Iraq, Chernyshev admitted that Russia would not take steps that would provoke the situation to the brink of war. “We will take those measures which we can take, serious political-diplomatic measures which don’t bring us to the brink of war.”

He said Moscow had contacted China and other regional powers, including India, to seek coordinated action on the Iraq crisis. He said Russia deplored the US use of force, which he said had set a “very bad precedent in international relations.”