Only a junior Indian functionary will attend Ukraine conflict meet

According to the report, neither the prime minister nor even the foreign minister plan to go to Switzerland

India doesn’t plan to send any high-ranking minister to the conference on Ukraine conflict in Switzerland scheduled for June 15 and 16, reported the Hindustan Times.

With Putin, Xi and Biden being absent, no one should even dream that Modi the Indian Prime Minister will be there. According to the newspaper, even the Indian foreign minister is too high a functionary to go to Switzerland. India is expected to be represented at the same level or even lower, as it was represented during the four previous such meetings in Copenhagen, Jeddah, Malta, and Davos. India sent either a deputy foreign minister or a deputy national security adviser to those forums.

 National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, who attended the meeting in Jeddah last August, this time is not going to go to Switzerland.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India will take part in the conference on Ukraine to represent “the voice of the global South.”

The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs said earlier that it had invited more than 160 delegations, including from the Group of Seven, Group of Twenty, and BRICS nations, to the conference on Ukraine in Burgenstock on June 15 and 16. Russia, according to Switzerland’s authorities, is not among those invited.

Without a Russian representative such meetings are actually useless devoid of any meaning.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that Russia would not be begging to be invited to the conference if it is unwelcome. On April 12, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed this conference as a “road to nowhere.” Moscow, however, has repeatedly stressed that it doesn’t reject the idea of a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Ukraine.