India’s ‘peace proposals’ on Ukraine, though welcomed by Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha on October 3, will not end Russia’s ongoing invasion of his country. Indeed, the initial wonder is that India has moved away from its old position that the Russia-Ukraine war is Europe’s concern and has suggested peace talks involving the Black Sea, energy, foodgrains and fertilisers.But while sharing the scope of the peace proposals, New Delhi did not even mention the word ‘invasion’, reaffirming India’s decision to abstain from supporting UN General Assembly resolutions condemning the violation of international law, and Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory.Generally, Ukraine welcomes any peace plans. Russian President Vladimir Putin has appreciated the ‘peace-bringing’ ideas of Russia’s friend, Prime Minister NarendraIllustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Modi. But not once will Putin admit that he has blithely ignored Modi’s earlier calls for peace. No doubt, he will ignore those made by for external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, too.In fact, Moscow’s intention to continue its expansionist war was conveyed to Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz when he visited Kyiv on October 4, by the all-day bombing of the capital and other Ukrainian cities.Significantly, Russia made clear at a UN Security Council meeting on September 23 that Russia does not intend to pause military operations during negotiations with Ukraine “in any format”. This highlights Moscow’s determination to achieve its core objectives – control over all of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, which borders Russia, and subjugating Ukraine.This rules out any chance of Moscow engaging in the dialogue and diplomacy favoured by India. Instead, Russia has pledged to intensify strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Additionally, Moscow has raised defence spending by 27% and cut down expenditure on education and healthcare, implying that the war could last indefinitely.Russia has also threatened nuclear war several times since 2022 and did so again on September 30, after Jaishankar’s meeting with Putin in Moscow on August 24, and Modi’s with the president on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in New Delhi on September 11.When Jaishankar met Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on September 3, the latter urged India and other major buyers of Russian oil to cut back or halt their energy trade with Russia, maintaining that reducing Moscow’s oil revenues is crucial to stopping the conflict.Jaishankar has defended India’s ongoing purchases of Russian crude, stating that stopping energy imports from Moscow will not end the Russia-Ukraine war. He is right – but Russia’s belligerence and imperial ambitions, to which he doesn’t refer, leaves India building ‘peace castles’ in the air.The minister stressed that the Indian government’s responsibility is to supply affordable energy to its 1.4 billion citizens amid a volatile global market. He made an analogous statement in 2022, soon after India decided to buy Russian crude after Russia’s invasion started – some four years before the Israeli-US attack on Iran provoked Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil passes. India hasn’t condemned any of these illegal invasions or explained why the upholding of international law is essential to end the growing global energy crisis.Instead, India maintains that it is exercising its sovereign right to buy Russian oil.What New Delhi doesn’t say is that it is selling refined Russian oil to Moscow, while the Indian consumer pays more for petrol. The transactional nature of Russian oil buys is unclear or unknown to many Indians.Russian crude is refined by India’s Nayara Energy (partly owned by Russia’s Rosneft), which is based in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. As Ukraine hit Russia’s oil refineries, Russia imported a record 172,000 tonnes of oil products in August 2026; India accounted for almost 70% of the total.Russia’s determination to wage war was ignored by India as Jaishankar recently defended New Delhi’s controversial stance at the Munich Leaders’ Meeting on October 4, by saying that Russia was the only country which backed India against Pakistan in 1971.Presumably, he was referring to the humanitarian consequences of Pakistan’s genocidal war in what was then East Pakistan, and the possibility of a two-front war with Pakistan and China. However, at no time did China offer, or assure Pakistan, of support for a war against India, although Islamabad helped to bring about a rapprochement between Richard Nixon’s US and Mao Zedong’s China.Taken together with Jaishankar’s statement in December 2023, that the tie with Russia had “saved us many times”, his reference to the 1971 war does make India look like a country that was (and is?) unable to save itself. Whatever her flaws, Indira Gandhi didn’t make India look pathetic at any time in 1971.International politics is not played by any ideas about gratitude or about one country “saving” another, which is how India defends its ties with Russia. Putin has not gifted oil – or weapons – to India as a favour. Moscow has sold that oil, sometimes at prices higher than those set by the G7, and demanded payment in US dollars and Chinese yuan. Moscow has no use for Indian rupees, whether as payment for oil or arms.New Delhi is aware that India lags behind China economically. Why it has not crafted strategies to win friends who could have offered it more than Russia economically is a puzzle. So it avoids telling India’s citizens inconvenient facts by harping on India’s thanks to Russia, rather than how much money it has spent on Russian oil, as a result of which it has a huge trade deficit with Moscow.Clearly, Russia enjoys a seller’s market with India, which has nothing to do with gratitude but its national interest, which will remain defined by its illegal warmongering in Ukraine.Anita Inder Singh is a founding professor of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in New Delhi. She has been a Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington DC and has taught international relations at Oxford and the LSE.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.