India on Friday joined its partners in the Quad – Australia, Japan and the United States – to denounce Russia’s threat of using nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar hosted the Japanese and Australian Foreign Ministers, Yoshimasa Hayashi and Penny Wong, as well as the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in New Delhi early on Friday. They discussed the responses of the four nations to the Russia’s “special military operations” in Ukraine and the “immense human suffering” caused by it.
The Quad Foreign Ministers met just a day after a war of words between the western nations and Russia over the conflict in Ukraine marred a G20 conclave in New Delhi itself.
Jaishankar joined his counterparts from Canberra, Tokyo and Washington DC to tacitly condemn Russia’s threat of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine even when the Foreign Minister of the former Soviet Union nation, Sergey Lavrov, was also in New Delhi.
Lavrov accused the US of trying to militarise the Quad and using it to escalate tension between India and China.
The ministers of the four nations concurred that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons was inadmissible. “We underscored the need for a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter. We emphasised that the rules-based international order must respect sovereignty, territorial integrity, transparency and peaceful resolution of disputes,” according to a joint statement issued after the meeting.
Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Head of Russia’s Security Council, had on January 19 said that the former Soviet Union nation could start a nuclear war if it lost its conventional war in Ukraine. “The loss by a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war,” Medvedev, a close aide of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had posted on Telegram.
