PM Modi’s outreach to Putin helped prevent ‘potential nuclear attack’ on Ukraine: Report | India News

NEW DELHI: The United States reached out to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, among other world leaders, to seek his intervention to avert a potential nuclear strike by Russia as Moscow’s war against Ukraine raged in 2022, reported CNN citing two senior administration officials.
Washington feared that the Kremlin could resort to nuclear attack, the first time since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945, and started “preparing rigorously” to prevent the possibility of the fatal bombing.
The report claimed that outreach to PM Modi and other world leaders played a key role in containing the potential crisis.
According to officials, the Biden government engaged with non-allies, including India to discourage Russia from nuke attacks as the Pentagon was concerned that Russian President Putin might use tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons.
“One of the things we did was not only message them directly but strongly urge, press, encourage other countries, to whom they might be more attentive, to do the same thing,” the senior administration official said.
“I think we believe showing the international community the concern about this, particularly the concern from key countries for Russia and the Global South, was also a helpful, persuasive factor and showed them what the cost of all this could be,” CNN quoted a senior administration official as saying.
The senior officials said that the fact that India, China and others weighed in “may have had some effect on their thinking”.
“I can’t demonstrate this positively, but I think that’s our assessment,” the official added.
Ever since the war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, New Delhi has always maintained a position that differences can be sorted out with dialogue and has condemned civilian casualties in the war.
Last year on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Uzbekistan, PM Modi told Putin that the 21st century is not the “era of war”.
In the late summer to fall of 2022, the officials said that the National Security Council held a series of meetings to establish plans in case a nuclear attack is carried out.
“In the event of either a very clear indication that they were about to do something, attack with a nuclear weapon, or if they just did, how we would respond, how we would try to preempt it or deter it,” the senior administration official said while speaking about the meetings.
“We discussed how to respond, deter, or prevent such an attack,” said a senior official from the administration.