‘Urged India to speak to Russia against nuke use’

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony J Blinken, who will visit New Delhi on March 1 for the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, has said that he had asked India and China to speak to Russia last year when there were concerns about Moscow’s use of tactical nuclear weapons to convey their “absolute opposition to the use of nuclear weapons”. Both Delhi and Beijing conveyed the message to Moscow, Blinken said.

Blinken also offered an understanding of India’s position on the war in Ukraine, pointing to Delhi’s decades-old relationship with Moscow, including in defence, and said that a shift in ties wasn’t like “flipping a switch” but “moving an aircraft”. In an interview to The Atlantic magazine on Thursday, when asked about the possibility of an escalation in Ukraine and America’s worries about what Russian President Vladimir Putin may do, Blinken said that supporting Ukraine, but ensuring that the conflict does not become wider or create a conflagration, has been President Joe Biden’s top priority. He claimed that Putin himself did not seek an escalation of the war that would directly involve the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation because “he is struggling mightily” in Ukraine itself.

It was then that Blinken referred to an episode from last year that involved India. After a Ukrainian counteroffensive had some success last spring, Blinken said, there was some concern that Putin might react “even more irrationally”, and referred to language coming out of Moscow that suggested that Putin would look to the use of “tactical nuclear weapons”.

“But what we did in that case was to not only message him very directly…but we urged other countries that might have a little bit more influence with Russia these days – like China, but also other countries like India – to engage him directly about their absolute opposition to any use of nuclear weapons. And we know that they conveyed those messages, and I think that had some effect.”

AP Antony J Blinken