The European ministerial contingent at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi was the largest, and they came to deliver one message: India and Europe as democracies had a duty to stand by one another against authoritarian Russia!
“Russia’s aggression constitutes an assault on our democratic values,” asserted Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister.
Latvia’s foreign minister Krisjanis Karins said “While the threat level is going up, we are seeing more and more disturbances to the international order. The basic values that we live by in Europe and India are democracy and the rule of law. And the democracies need to work together to stabilise as a counterweight to the unrest. India has a very big role to play.”
European leaders also underscored India as a major power in this region, perhaps as part of an effort to get this country to dump Russia.
“As a big democracy here in the Indo-Pacific, Europe and India must work together to coordinate and find more areas of cooperation because the world needs stability based on basic values and on the UN charter of international law… In this part of the world, India has a huge, huge role to play,” said Krisjanis Karins.
None of this cut much ice with External Affair Minister Jaishankar, who while endorsing the call for peace and stability in Ukraine, would not condemn Russia for invading that country.
“We have had a stable and always very friendly relationship with Russia. And our relationship with Russia today is based on this experience. For others things were different and conflicts may have shaped the relationship.”
In fact, Jaishankar believes the West is doing itself no favours by isolating and sanctioning Russia, forcing it into dependence on China.
“Russia is a power with an enormous tradition of statecraft,” he pointed out. “Such powers would never put themselves into a single relationship of an overwhelming nature. It would go against their grain.”
In his view, “It makes sense to give Russia multiple options.”
But Europe seems to believe that the only way to deal with Russia is to confront it head on, unmindful that Ukraine happened because to the Kremlin leadership, Nato was undermining its security in its neighbourhood. These are inconvenient facts for Europe.
