S Jaishankar on criticism of India buying Russian oil: Do you have a better deal

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday defended India’s decision to purchase oil from Russia amidst.

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and asked whether the world has a “better deal” to meet the energy demands of India. In recent years, the import of crude oil from Russia has significantly gone up, with Moscow becoming the largest supplier of crude oil to India, accounting for more than 35 per cent of the country’s imports.

Speaking at the 22nd edition of the Doha Forum panel on ‘Conflict Resolution in a New Era’, the bureaucrat-turned-politician further said that after nearly three years of the Russia-Ukraine war, the world is realising the need to be at the negotiating table to resolve the conflict and India is actively working to facilitate every effort in that direction.

“I get oil, yes. It is not necessarily cheap. Do you have a better deal?” S Jaishankar, who is having his second stint as the External Affairs Minister, said in Doha.

“We’ve always held to the view that this war is not going to be solved on the battlefield. At the end of the day, people are going to return to some kind of negotiating table. The sooner, the better. Our effort has been to facilitate that to the extent possible. That has not been the most popular thing, at least in some parts of the world,” Jaishankar said.

“I do think today, the needle is moving more towards the reality of the negotiation than the continuation of the war… We are going to Moscow, talking to President Putin, going to Kyiv, engaging President Zelensky, meeting them in other places, trying to see if we can encourage find common threads that can be picked up at some point in time when the circumstances are right to be developed,” he said.

The Russia-Ukraine war, which broke out in February 2022, has seen wide-scale devastation. As per London-based Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), as many as 7,001 people have been killed in it. Speaking at the forum, Jaishankar, however, clarified that India does not have a peace plan to resolve the conflict, but holds “honest and transparent” conversations between both parties.

“We’re not attempting a peace plan, we’re not doing a mediation in that sense. We’re doing multiple conversations and are very transparent about telling each party that the end of the conversation that this is what we’ll tell the other party. We think that at this point of time, the most useful…diplomatically,” he said.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Ukraine and met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, emphasising India’s stand for peace in the country’s ongoing conflict with Russia.

Zelenskyy, on the other hand, said he wanted India on Ukraine’s side and asked New Delhi not to do a “balancing act”.