NEW DELHI: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has defended procuring oil from Russia and said following the Ukraine conflict India’s energy suppliers in the Middle-East gave priority to provide petroleum products to Europe that paid higher prices. New Delhi did not have any option but to procure Russian crude oil which in turn stabilised the global energy market, he asserted.
Jaishankar also said India has had a “stable” and “very friendly” relationship with Russia, and that Moscow never hurt New Delhi’s interests.
Making these points in an interview to German economic daily Handelsblatt, Jaishankar also suggested that India was open to play the role of a mediator to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict if approached, but at the same time, said New Delhi does not believe that it should initiate anything in this direction on its own.
He asserted that just as India does not expect Europe to have a view of China that is identical to New Delhi’s, Europe should understand that India cannot have a view of Russia that is identical to the European one.
The external affairs minister said India has had a “stable” and “very friendly” relationship with Russia, and that Moscow never hurt New Delhi’s interests. “We, on the other hand, had a politically and militarily much more difficult relationship with China, for example,” he said.
Jaishankar strongly justified India’s procurement of Russian crude oil.
“When the fighting started in Ukraine, Europe shifted a large part of its energy procurement to the Middle East — until then the main supplier for India and other countries,” he said.
“What should we have done? In many cases, our Middle-East suppliers gave priority to Europe because Europe paid higher prices. Either we would have had no energy because everything would have gone to them. Or we would have ended up paying a lot more because you were paying more,” he said. In a certain way, we stabilised the energy market that way, he added.
The external affairs minister’s response came when asked about criticism in Europe against India that its procurement of Russian crude oil is detrimental to the effectiveness of the Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.
He argued that if no one had bought the crude oil from Russia and everyone had procured it from the other countries, prices on the energy market would have shot up even further.
“Global inflation would have been much higher — and that would have been a huge political issue in lower-income countries,” he said.
“If Europe had wanted to maximize the damage at the time, it would have had to stop all economic relations with Russia completely. But it didn’t,” he said.
With inputs from PTI
