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Daleep Singh, the architect behind the sanctions against Russia and its allies, warned India against the support of Russia.
On Thursday, March 31, Singh, the US Deputy National Security Advisor cautioned the Indian administration that Russia may not come to India’s defense if China were to violate the Line of Actual Control (LAC) since Moscow and Beijing are now in a “no limits partnership”.
This comment comes after India’s neutral stand in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and on top of India’s dealings with Russia on importing oil at a discounted price.
The US doesn’t want to see a “rapid acceleration” in India’s imports from Russia of energy and other commodities prohibited by global sanctions regimes and there will be consequences for countries that attempt to circumvent the embargoes imposed following the invasion of Ukraine.
During an interaction with a small group of journalists amid his engagements with Indian interlocutors, Singh was unusually blunt in his remarks about the consequences for any country trying to backfill sanctions imposed on Russia for “Putin’s needless war” against Ukraine. However, he noted that friends such as the US and India don’t set “red lines” and his discussions in New Delhi amounted to an “honest dialogue” about protecting core principles underpinning global peace and security.
“What we would not like to see is a rapid acceleration of India’s imports from Russia as it relates to energy or any other any other exports that are currently being prohibited by the US or by other aspects of the international sanctions regime,” he said in response to a question about India’s recent decision to take up Russia’s offer of discounted crude oil.
While noting that US financial sanctions exempt energy payments and that there is currently no prohibition on energy imports from Russia, Singh said the US and its European allies have a shared interest in reducing their reliance on an “unreliable energy supplier” such as Russia.
India has so far refrained from censuring Russia for the invasion of Ukraine and also abstained on all Ukraine-related votes at UN bodies – moves that have been linked to New Delhi’s long-standing defense and strategic partnership with Moscow.
India has, however, called for respecting the UN Charter and the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pressed for an end to hostilities and a return to dialogue in his conversations with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Daleep Singh is the latest in a long list of Western leaders and officials making a beeline to New Delhi to nudge the Indian government to change its position on the Ukraine crisis and to pressure Russia to end the war. He arrived in the Indian capital a day ahead of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who will hold talks with external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Friday.
Singh accused Putin of violating all the core principles underpinning global peace and security – “the principle that you can’t redraw borders by force, the principle that you can’t subjugate the will of the free people, that countries have the right to set their own course” – and this can be a signal to “autocrats all over the world that might wish to exert their own sphere of influence, bully their neighbors, perhaps right on India’s doorstep”.
The US wants to broaden the coalition against Russia because “when democracies don’t stand up in solidarity and defend those principles together, the costs and risk to all of us become that much larger”, he said.
The American sanctions are working on five separate channels – imposing “immediate and acute costs through a financial shock to Russia’s largest banks”, cutting off technologies needed by Putin to modernize the military and diversify the economy, “methodically ejecting Russia from the international world order” by revoking most favored nation status and denying borrowing privileges at the IMF and World Bank, “exposing and holding to account the Russian kleptocracy”, and “downgrading Russia’s status as a leading energy supplier”.
Singh said: “The intent of these sanctions is to change Putin’s strategic calculus, to show unequivocally that if he continues to wage this needless, illegal, unprovoked war of aggression, it will be a strategic failure.” He accused Russia, one of the largest energy suppliers, of periodically weaponizing supplies.
He added that the US is ready to help India diversify both energy supplies and military hardware but acknowledged this will be a time-consuming process. “The conversation I’ve had here is that we stand ready to help India diversify its energy resources, much like is the case for defense resources over a period of time,” he said.
Some sanctions shutting off Russia’s access to advanced technologies will also affect its ability to export advanced military equipment. “That poses a material risk to India in terms of its readiness to defend itself. And so our message is we stand ready to help, to help India as a reliable supplier, if it would like to diversify away from Russian military equipment over time, recognizing that’s going to be a long process,” he said.
