Modi’s peace mission in Kyiv is doomed to fail

There is a beautiful thought attributed to Albert Einstein that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He was ruminating on the death of a dear friend. Indeed, there is no such thing as the linear flow of time; we live only within an ever-changing now.

This becomes an apt description of the Ukraine war. In a prescient passage recently, John Helmer, author and the longest-serving foreign correspondent based in Moscow, wrote, “In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia … for the first time since 1945, the battlefield war is being won by the Russian General Staff.

“The uncertainty which remains is whether President Vladimir Putin will continue to restrict the General Staff’s war plans in order that Putin can go to negotiations with the Americans on terms which will forgo the demilitarisation and denazification of the territory between Kiev and the Polish border, and concede to the Kiev regime unhindered control of the cities to the east — Kharkov, Odessa and Dniepropetrovsk.” 

Washington believes that Putin will concede. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump also subscribe to such a belief although their notions of pushing Putin toward making concessions may vary. 

The Kremlin was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU. In such a dramatic perspective, the famous words of former President Dmitry Medvedev, currently the deputy chairman of the Security Council under Putin, — that “there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY!” [Medvedev’s caps] — acquired great resonance.

Medvedev drew that bottom line on August 21. Suffice to say, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Kyiv on August 23 had already become futile a day before he took the night train from Warsaw to Kyiv. 

After the Kursk incursion by Ukrainian forces, the popular slogan in Russian social media is, ‘War is war — either we go to war or surrender’. Russian people sense the imperative to knock the Ukrainians out of the war. Putin’s loss of face due to the perception that he had advance knowledge of a Ukrainian incursion on August 6 and yet disallowed the General Staff from acting pre-emptively is consequential.

New Delhi does not grasp that the special status of the present moment is an illusion. The Joe Biden administration strongly encouraged Modi’s visit to Kyiv. The government bought into the US narrative that the war had come to a ‘stalemate’. But that was never the case, not at least since Russian Army's capture of the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka in February. The point is, it is one thing to have taken an independent stance on the Ukraine war, but it is an entirely different thing to anchor that stance on a jaundiced view of the war culled from Western narratives. The Russian assaults on Vuhledar and Povors’k testify that the war is only changing course. 

The Western powers’ support for the Ukrainian attacks on Russian border regions was meant to apply pressure to provoke Russia into retaliating, then accusing it of disproportionate use of force. The game plan is consistent: gradually raise the stakes, so that the West’s own escalation is manageable, and predictable. 

The Indian understanding is fundamentally flawed because of its failure to learn that this is at its core a civilisational war — and to see it as a Russian-Ukrainian war is utter folly. Russia’s ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov wrote on Telegram recently, “The American ‘Ukraine project’ has brought destruction and entailed huge sacrifices of the Slavic people. There is no doubt that Russia will cope with the new challenge to its security and the goals and objectives of the special military operation will be fully implemented.” 

On the day after Modi’s hug diplomacy in Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed into law legislation banning religious organisations linked to the Russian Orthodox Church from operating in Ukraine. Zelenskyy, a Jew himself, announced in a recorded video address to the nation on August 24 that Ukraine is “today taking a step toward liberation from Moscow’s devils.”

This is a watershed moment in the Great Schism of 1054. There is no way Putin can now quietly delist ‘denazification’ from the eternal war being fought on Ukraine’s soil by the Slavic people. On his part, Modi must tell his advisers that this is a turf that angels fear to tread.

(M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.