India to follow own interests, won't join G-7 oil cap plan: Russian Foreign Minister

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, September 3

India along with China is coming in the cross-sights of the West over Russian oil even as Moscow was confident that India does not want to join the sanctions.

“Indian leaders, including my colleague S. Jaishankar, have publicly rejected any attempts to involve them in restrictions on the Russian energy purchases. They have made it clear that they will follow their own interests,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The two Ministers had planned to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly but the US has not issued a single visa to the 56-member Russian advance team and a delegation headed by Lavrov.

The West’s economic war of attrition against Moscow is set to take a decisive turn after the G-7 agreed on Friday to impose a price cap on Russian oil from December 15. This is supposed to be a trump card for it could reduce Moscow’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine without further stoking global inflation.

“What China and India do is going to need to be a national decision for them,” said a senior US Treasury Department official. The Biden administration has been pushing for governments to introduce a price cap for months as it found that after sanctioning many Russian energy exports, Moscow has continued to earn billions of dollars a month by selling oil to several countries but mainly to China and India.

Lavrov said India has always been a Russian key priority and said besides joint work in the oil sector in India, Siberia and the Far East, both sides are set to diversify the energy portfolio by “green transition”.

“It is indeed a relationship that is developing robustly and rests on a solid foundation of friendship since India’s struggle for independence. Now the West is saying that it must force the entire world to stop cooperating with Russia, to impose sanctions. From the perspective of not even diplomacy, but common sense, how can they make such arrogant public statements in relation to such countries as India, China, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia?” he argued.

“When these states are being publicly threatened, does no one understand that such civilisations have self-esteem? It is simply insulting to hear such demands. Even if those statements would have been made “behind closed doors”, still this situation lacks any decorum,” he added about reported Western pressure on these countries, including India, to toe the western line on sanctions against Russia.