 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are going to discuss about the December 19 UN General Assembly resolution forwarded by Ukraine and United States against Russia, condemning the human right violation in Crimea. Also we are going to discuss about India's opposition to this UN resolution and can we see this as India's standing with Russia. To discuss this we have Prabir Purkayashta, who is the founding editor of NewsClick. Thank you Prabir. Prabir, India's decision to stand against this resolution, does it show that India is moving towards Russia? I think that would be reading too much into India's vote, India has voted now successively twice in the General Assembly, one on the resolution against the United States on the issue of Jerusalem. That's been a pretty interesting position because it was thought that considering that Netanyahu is coming to visit India, Modi had visited Israel earlier, had de-linked it from a visit to Palestine. It appeared that India would be probably abstaining on that, it didn't. It voted against the US position and also we have seen the response of Nikki Haley and others which said that United States is going to punish the United Nations as well as other countries on this. It's also interesting to see which of the countries voted with the United States. It was really almost two client states, Guatemala and Honduras and all others whose combined population would probably be less than one-tenth of Delhi's population. So that's the kind of support United States was getting, it didn't get support from even its allies. On the question of Ukraine, it's a more interesting issue because Ukraine in that sense does not concern India's geostrategic interest directly. It's something unlike West Asia where India has a lot of stake after all a huge part of its income, remittance income comes from West Asia and therefore being out of West Asian politics completely on the side of Israel is not a good thing for Indian economy to be in. But the question of Ukraine, it didn't appear that India had the direct interest on it. It could have also abstained. That was an option which a number of countries utilized, didn't want to come into that. The fact that India did not would seem to show that India also wants to keep its one foot in the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement in which Russia is there, China is there. So it wants to take an independent geostrategic position. It's also true that on Crimea, whichever way we want to pronounce it, the question is that this has been something which has a part of a larger geostrategic shift that the United States wants to make in which the original commitment not to get NATO to the borders of Russia, in fact not to get it beyond the original boundary of NATO, which was something that the United States has given and given as a guarantee to Gorbachev and that has been violated continuously. So we have seen it coming into Baltic states, we have seen it coming into Poland, we have seen it also coming into Ukraine. So you see the arms being given to the Ukrainian government very recently. The arms deal between US, Canada and Ukraine. All of this seems to indicate that there is a continuous shift to put pressure on Russia to the extent that it's almost at the threat of a war. Now that is the context within which I think a number of countries have taken a position that this is taking it too far. And condemnation of Russia in the current context makes the, shall we say, the situation more tense, more likely for a war and that's not something of the global interest. Talking about the US and Canadian supply of arms to Ukraine, Russia has expressed a serious concern with NATO trying to deploy anti-missile system in Ukraine and also recently US has agreed to supply anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Russia says that it is going to escalate the conflict. Do you think that Trump and the US military is trying to see the whole conflict in Ukraine through Cold War prism? You know, that's an interesting position. Why would the United States engage in oppositional terms with Russia considering that it is no longer a socialist state? So therefore, there is really no Cold War kind of scenario in which you could talk about democracy versus totalitarian dictatorships, capitalism versus socialism, whichever way you want to express it. You have to see this now in terms of the new doctrine that Trump has issued, which it makes it very clear that the issue is not a question of systems. It's really a question of which country can oppose the United States militarily and it does see Russia as a country which can actually oppose militarily United States, has an ability to take on the United States military in different theaters and therefore recognizes it as it's one of the main opponents, as it also recognizes China, but Russia is a bigger opponent. So this is purely a military view of countries and the US view currently is that getting to isolate Russia, coordinate, would make it militarily and hegemonically stronger in different theaters, particularly the European theater. And that's why the push to arm Ukraine and the push to have anti-ballistic missiles on Russian borders. This is not just in Ukraine. This is also true for anti-ballistic missiles in the Baltic region. Given this scenario, I think the Crimean resolution in the United Nations was a part of a larger war mongering that the United States has been doing vis-a-vis Russia and vis-a-vis the Eastern Europe theater and that's something which no country in the world should really support because war is a nuclear war, it's not in the interest of the people. So I would take it is not that India was standing with Russia, but India was reverting to its shall we say older positions, which is what is in our national interest and is this in our national interest or is this even in the global interest? So then we can say India was trying to be pragmatic in this situation. Yes, I would say that this does show that Indian Foreign Office has not lost complete will to build an independent foreign policy and to that extent there is an element of an independent foreign policy that still survives the Modi era shall we say that are like in the case of China where it seems to be following the containment of China policy. On the issue of Russia it seems that it is willing to take an independent position. Of course India has military relations with Russia still buys a lot of arms of Russia therefore it would not like probably to put all its military eggs in the American basket so it does want to retain some of its autonomy in this. So I would say yes that would seem to we seem to see that Indian Foreign Office Ministry has taken a decision which is a little different from what it has been following for some time particularly with respect to Israel and with respect to China and the Far Eastern theater. Thank you Praveer. Thank you for talking to Newsclick. 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