AT SCO, XI AND MODI DIFFERED OVER THEIR VIEWS ON UKRAINE

Given their record of mistaking what they wish for as what is, Atlanticist media immediately reached the conclusion that Xi's concerns were the same as Modi's.

- MADHAV NALAPAT

Months before he initiated the SpeLeial Military Operation (aka war) against Ukraine, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin came to Delhi on a visit that barely lasted nine hours. Even during that brief period, it became clear that Putin was losing patience at the way in which the Ukrainian military and irregular "nationalist" groups such as the Azov Regiment were taking kinetic action against those parts of Ukraine that had broken away to form the Donetsk and Lugansk "republics". Such activities were being backed by NATO, which since 2014 had been conducting a proxy war against Russia, through the generous provisions of training, intelligence, weapons and other battlefield requisites to Ukrainian forces. Together with what may be called either mercenaries or "guest fighters" from parts of Europe, Ukrainian units sought to win back the territory lost to Russian-speaking separatists in 2014, the year that saw the forced exit and exile of President Viktor Yanukovych. The disquiet over developments in Ukraine manifested by Putin during his nine-hour 2021 visit to Delhi was interpreted in Washington, London, Berlin and Paris as evidence that his confidence was getting shaky. Rather than hold back the Ukrainian forces from their assault on the newly declared Lugansk and Donbass republics, they were encouraged to deliver blow after blow, with artillery shelling and military probes into Russian-speaking territories multiplying as a consequence of the misreading within NATO of Putin's determination to not repeat his earlier example of doing little when Kosovo was formally detached from Serbia in 2008. That same year. Putin launched a military campaign against Georgia by annexing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as separate "republics".