I saw a friend and former ambassador taking part in a television discussion on the war in Ukraine. He spoke authoritatively and predicted that Russia would soon capture Ukraine and install a puppet government. I thought he was talking balderdash. That is when my wife pointed out that he was eating something while he was on the show.

Without food, no living creature can survive. However, there has never been a case of a man dying because he could not eat while taking part in a TV debate. I totally disagreed with what he said but on my wife’s suggestion, I sent a text message asking him to stop eating. I do not know whether he saw the message or not but he stopped eating. Fortunately, he has not died so far.

What I did on my wife’s suggestion was to protect his interest. After all, the ambassador had given us a state dinner when we called on him at the Indian Embassy where he was our ambasciatore. 

A friend’s duty is not just to cheer for his friend but also advise him and, if necessary, guide him when he thinks that the friend is on the wrong path. Of course, the friend has the freedom to ignore such advice. My friend could have ignored my advice and kept eating chicken kebabs or whatever that he was munching, much to the annoyance of the television viewers.

One constant argument I hear on social media and the mainstream media is that India is duty-bound to support Russia. These pandits hark back to the days when the erstwhile Soviet Union came to the rescue of India during the 1971 war which resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh. They also mention that the Soviet Union repeatedly exercised its veto power to help India.

What they do not realise is that Ukraine was also a part of the same Soviet Union which helped India. They conveniently forget that the USSR was led by Leonid Brezhnev, who was Uranian born and brought up in Ukraine. 

The man who rose against Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, who visited India in 1955 was born in Ukraine and was a great lover of the land, from which India imports most of the sunflower oil it needs. Between Khrushchev and Brezhnev, they led the Soviet Union for 30 years.

Konstantin Chernenko was another Ukrainian who led the Soviet Union for a brief period. His successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last general secretary of the ruling Soviet Communist Party, was partially an Ukrainian, as his mother was of Ukrainian origin.

So, where did Ukraine or Ukrainians antagonise India? Of course, they point out that Ukraine voted against us when India announced that it was a nuclear power. It was not the only country which did so. 

Israel is a nuclear power but it allows ambiguity to prevail on its nuclear status. All that it says is that "Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East”.

There were sections of public opinion in India which were not comfortable with the five nuclear tests India conducted in 1998. Within a week of the euphoria created by the blasts, Pakistan proved that it too was a nuclear weapon state. Until then, India was considered militarily superior to Pakistan. The nuclear tests brought about an unwanted parity between the two nations.

Of course, India has invested heavily in nuclear weapons but what use can they have? Nuclear weapons did not help India in the Kargil war, which was fought with conventional weapons. Nor do they help India in resolving its border and other differences with China. So, why blame Ukraine alone?

In the 1971 war, the only neighbouring country which supported India was Bhutan. All others were against it. Ask which of our neighbours support India’s nuclear policy? Yet, India has chosen to ignore the pleadings of Ukraine for support. In effect, it has supported Russia.

India is a member of the 15-member UN Security Council. Along with China and the UAE, India preferred to abstain from the vote on two occasions. Eleven members voted against Russia. 

When the UN General Assembly held an extraordinary session — first in 40 years — to discuss Ukraine, India again abstained while 141 countries supported the resolution condemning the Russian action. Only five countries, including Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea, opposed the resolution. India was one among the 35 countries which took a neutral stand.

The heavens would not have fallen if India had taken a principled stand that Russia was a friend but it did not support what it did against Ukraine. Such a stand would have had an effect on Russian leader Vladimir Putin for he could not have afforded to antagonise India.

It is often mentioned that India buys most of its weapons from Russia. Other than weapons, we do not buy much from Russia. You would have bought items like iPhones and used technology like the Internet which are of American origin or driven cars of Japanese, South Korean, French, and American make and used countless items like idols of Christmas Father, Lord Ganesha and even the Sikh gurus which are of Chinese origin. Do you remember any Russian products that you bought? It could not make a decent car like the Maruti 800.

In other words, Russia is more dependent on India than India is on Russia. True, some of the defence equipment India uses are of Russian origin and they need servicing. Similarly, the submarine and missile technologies that we developed have their Russian origin or connection.

However, Russia is no longer the producer of the state-of-the-art defence weapons. One of the slangs used against a particular military aircraft is that it is a “flying coffin”. I do not approve of such slang, as our airmen still use them. When Narendra Modi had an opportunity to buy a better military aircraft, he went to Paris, not Moscow.

Rajiv Gandhi had to pay a political price for buying Bofors guns but those guns proved useful in the Kargil war. They were also deployed against the Chinese in the recent conflict in Ladakh. Bofors are of Swedish origin, not Russian. Putin is a super spy, having headed the Soviet Union’s spying agency called KGB. But when Modi wanted to spy on his rivals, he chose Pegasus from Israel, not Russia.

Russia is no longer the critical defence supplier for India. We could have used our position of strength to tell Putin that what he did in Ukraine was unacceptable. Once China used the presence of India’s external affairs minister AB Vajpayee on Chinese soil to attack Vietnam. In protest, he immediately cut short his visit and returned to India.

On the day Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, Pakistan President Imran Khan was in the Kremlin. The message was clear that Russia was moving closer to Pakistan and China, as India was taking part in military exercises conducted by the Quad nations. China is technologically and monetarily richer than Russia and does not need Russia’s support for its material growth. Pakistan is a poor nation and it cannot afford to buy Russian equipment.

In every respect, India had greater leverage on Russia than Russia had on India. We have missed an opportunity to tell the world that we are a democratic nation which does not support military aggression anywhere in the world. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently said that India never committed an aggression against another country.

Alas, when the Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crack down on the reformist trends in Prague, we supported the military action. Again, we were equivocal when the Soviet Union attacked Afghanistan in 1979 on a flimsy pretext. History has proved how wrong our actions were.

As I write this column, the war has entered the ninth day. There were many “experts” who predicted that Ukraine would crumble within one or two days. On the sixth day, Russia admitted that it lost about 500 soldiers. Putin has sent a 65-mile-long convoy of tanks to encircle Kiev.

The fact is that it has not been able to move, as the Ukrainians are resisting its movement and the Russian soldiers are themselves not convinced of what they are supposed to do. Russia has been able to destroy buildings, residential apartments and other infrastructure but it has not been able to destroy the spirit of resistance of the Ukrainian people.

Remember Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, who flew away with his family to a secret destination in West Asia, when the Taliban forces reached Kabul. There were many people who predicted a similar denouement in the “play” supposedly enacted by Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

Far from that, he has been staying put in Ukraine, inspiring the common people to resist the aggression. His wife and children are also with him as he provides purposive and inspiring leadership. There are people who spread rumours that he was a drug addict and an actor who does not know politics.

It is a crisis that brings out the best or the worst in a man. Acting was his chosen career, though he was a lawyer by training. He did so well as an actor that he could inspire a whole nation, which trusted him with the leadership of the nation. When Ronald Reagan became US President, nobody said that he was a failed Hollywood actor!

It would not be an exaggeration if I say that Zelensky is the most popular leader in the world. As he himself said, Putin would like to eliminate him and his family. Even if Putin eventually succeeds in his diabolic mission, there is no guarantee that Russia would be able to hold Ukraine for long. 

This is because democracy has one problem. Democracy may not be the best form of government but once a group of people taste it, they would never accept any other form of government. Putin is a dictator who has been controlling Russia some time as President and some time as Prime Minister. The Soviet Union might have collapsed but Putin did not allow true democracy to prevail in Russia. He conveniently used elections to perpetuate his leadership.

That is not the case in Ukraine where people tasted democracy and found that it was better than the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, a term used by the Soviet leaders to describe their regime. Also, the Ukrainians consider themselves more European, rather than Central Asian.

Small wonder that the first thing Zelensky said when he was invited to address the European Union was to make Ukraine a member of the EU. Those who know the EU structure know only too well that it will take several years, if not decades, before it can be made a full-fledged member.

If even one member objects to its membership, Ukraine’s application will remain in a limbo. Incidentally, Turkey’s membership plea has been pending for over two decades!

What is there in Russia that can inspire the Ukrainians? There was a time when  the Indian students used to go to Russia and, then, China to do MBBS. Now, Ukraine and the Philippines are their favourite destinations. You know why? The people there speak English. I was surprised to find many women fleeing from Ukraine speaking good English.

Putin is a hated figure. During the Cold War, neither the US nor the USSR used the N-word. Even when the US demanded removal of the USSR-made missiles in Cuba! Neither India nor Pakistan threatened to use the nuclear weapon against each other at any point of time.

But when Putin realised that Ukraine was not an easy pushover, he tried to terrorise the whole world by asking his generals to keep the nuclear arsenal in a state of readiness. And his foreign minister is threatening a third world war which would be nuclear-based.

What does Russia imply? That if Putin is not allowed to have his way, he will vaporise the whole world. This is the language of the bully. That is why in the 193-member UN General Assembly, Russia received only five votes, including its own. When the whole world is facing an existential threat, abstention or neutrality is not an option.

(ajphilip@gmail.com)