Modi to visit Ukraine this week – Indian Foreign Ministry
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit Ukraine, the foreign ministry announced on Monday, confirming earlier media reports that a trip was being scheduled for later this week. Modi will arrive in Kiev on Friday after visiting Poland, the ministry stated.
The visit to Kiev will be the first by an Indian prime minister in the three decades since Ukraine emerged as an independent country after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Modi’s visit to Kiev comes weeks after he traveled to Moscow for the first official visit of his third term as prime minister. His meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin was criticized by Kiev and its Western backers. Vladimir Zelensky called Modi’s trip to Russia “a blow to peace efforts,” while Washington expressed its “concerns” to New Delhi over its ties with Russia.
India summoned the Ukrainian ambassador in relation to comments made by Zelensky to express New Delhi’s “displeasure” with Kiev’s reaction, the Economic Times reported.
Modi’s visit to Kiev will “build upon the recent high-level interactions between the leaders,” foreign ministry officials told the media on Monday. Modi also met with Zelensky in June on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) after the meeting, Modi wrote: “Regarding the ongoing hostilities, [I have] reiterated that India believes in a human-centric approach and believes that the way to peace is through dialogue and diplomacy.”
India is “willing to provide all possible support and contribution required to help find peaceful solutions to this complex issue,” said Tanmaya Lal, secretary (west) of the Ministry of External Affairs.
India has successfully balanced longstanding ties with Moscow while seeking closer security partnerships with Western nations amid regional tensions with China. Since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, New Delhi has refrained from directly condemning Russia, advocating instead for dialogue between both sides. In July, India refused to sign the final document that emerged from the ‘peace summit’ held in Switzerland, to which Russia wasn’t invited. New Delhi has insisted that both Moscow and Kiev must be a part of the negotiations.
The South Asian nation, however, has been under constant pressure from its Western partners over ties with Moscow that have seen unprecedented development in the past two years as Russia has become a major source of discounted crude oil for India, providing support for the country’s rapid economic growth.
In 2023, Russian-Indian bilateral trade surpassed $63 billion, nearly six times greater than the two countries’ previous trade turnover. During the bilateral summit held in Moscow earlier this month, the two leaders agreed to raise the bilateral trade target to $100 billion annually by 2030.
