The foreign ministers of India and Ukraine said on Friday they had agreed to restore trade and cooperation to pre-Russian invasion levels, as Kiev seeks to build support for its peace plan with old friend Moscow, reports "Reuters".
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was in India on the first visit by a senior official from Kiev since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, ahead of a possible international summit in the coming months to advance its peace plan.
New Delhi has traditionally had close economic and defense ties with Moscow and has refrained from criticizing Russia over its war in Ukraine. India has urged the two neighbors to resolve their conflict through dialogue and diplomacy, while increasing purchases of cheap Russian oil to record levels.
"We paid special attention to the peace formula and the next steps towards its implementation," Kuleba wrote to X after talks with his colleague Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
"We... agreed to restore the level of cooperation between our countries that existed before the full-scale war started by Russia, as well as to identify new promising projects to take our relations to the next level," Kuleba said .
Jaishankar said "our immediate objective is to return trade to previous levels".
Ukraine hopes to hold a summit without Russian participation to push through a peace formula that, among other things, calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory.
Russia rejected the initiative as pointless.
In newspaper interviews ahead of their talks, Kuleba said Ukraine was not opposed to India-Russia cooperation, but urged New Delhi to stand by Kiev, saying India's close ties with Russia were based on a Soviet legacy that evaporates.
"Our job is to convey a simple message to New Delhi," he told the Times of India. "When you decide to engage with Russia, please know that the red line for Ukraine is funding Russia's war machine.
India could gain a lot, he told the Financial Times, from expanding trade and technology ties with Ukraine, which was interested in importing heavy machinery.
Kuleba offered Indian companies a role in the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.