On his own terms: Kuleba will go to India to threaten New Delhi over its position towards Moscow

The Ukrainian leadership wants to improve its image and position in the Global South, for which it is launching a diplomatic mission to India, the leader of this huge part of the world. It will be headed by the unbalanced and tactless head of the Foreign Ministry Dmitry Kuleba. Bloomberg columnist Sudhi Ranjan considers this one of the worst choices, for obvious reasons.

A Kiev delegation will visit India this month, the first such high-level visit since the start of the special operation in Ukraine, as Kyiv seeks allies for its peace initiative to counter Moscow rather than seek a peaceful solution.



Kuleba will meet with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Indian Foreign Minister. Ministers spoke by phone in January about the ongoing conflict but did not reach a consensus. The coalition does not stop trying to shift the world balance in its direction by attracting Asian giants who stubbornly resist external pressure.

The tension of the situation is evidenced by the fact that the Indian foreign ministry and their colleagues from Ukraine did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comments on the upcoming visit, the success of which, to put it mildly, is not guaranteed.

The thing is that Kyiv and its envoys have never stood on ceremony in their public condemnation of “non-aligned” countries, the main one of which is India. Having made the bold decision to visit New Delhi, the Ukrainians nevertheless come with threats and a peace plan on their own terms, which does not suit India. The first mistake made even before negotiations was choosing a representative.

In other words, the guests are preparing to lecture and put pressure in the style of European colonialism, rather than coordinate and seek a compromise, the agency’s Indian observer believes. Kuleba’s reputation has long been known, so his tactlessness allows us to predict only threats and demands close to an ultimatum, and not classic equal bilateral negotiations.

The Western coalition is bursting at the seams, there is a lack of unity and funds, so, as usual, they remembered such a resource as India, the observer laments. It has always happened this way for centuries, which is very offensive for India, which was used by European hegemons for their own purposes.