Modi And Putin Will Not Hold Their Annual In-Person Summit This Year.

The most recent summit was held in New Delhi on December 6, 2021.So far, 21 annual summits have alternated between India and Russia.

NEW DELHI Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin will not hold their annual in-person summit this year, according to an Indian government source, following discussions on the sidelines of an event in September.

Bloomberg News reported earlier in the day that the decision to cancel the summit was made in response to Putin’s veiled threats to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict.

The government source, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the decision to cancel the summit was made much earlier and that the nuclear issue was not a factor.

Putin was in New Delhi last December for the 21st India-Russia annual summit.

The foreign ministry of India and the Russian embassy in New Delhi did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the Bloomberg report.

Modi and Putin met in September on the sidelines of a regional security bloc summit in Uzbekistan, and they have spoken on the phone several times this year, including about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

India, which has become one of Russia’s largest buyers of oil alongside China since the conflict began in February, has not explicitly condemned Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.

According to a Russian official, India’s decision not to hold a summit was made clear at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Uzbekistan, where Modi told Putin that this was not a “war era.”

Throughout the Ukraine war, Putin has issued a series of thinly veiled nuclear threats, but several top officials have repeatedly denied Moscow’s plans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and have accused the West of upping the nuclear ante.

On the outskirts of a regional security bloc summit in Uzbekistan in September, the two leaders met, and Modi told Putin that this war was “not an era of war.”
Since the war began in February, India, along with China, has become one of Russia’s largest buyers of oil.

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