Why did Prime Minister Narendra Modi make the side-trip to Ukraine on his two-day visit to Poland? Why did he ignore suggestions from scouts that a visit to Ukraine was inadvisable at that moment? Was it because pressing agreements had to be signed? Or was superpower geopolitics using him as a messenger to forestall a potential global catastrophe?
Consider this. Modi had visited Moscow in early July for a show of camaraderie with Vladimir Putin. Even as a Russian missile struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv on the first day of his visit, Putin called him “param dost” (ultimate friend). The optics couldn’t have been worse.
Six weeks later, while India was fending off indignation from not only the Western anti-Russian coalition but also Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Putin announced on August 22 that incursive Ukrainian forces had tried to attack the Kursk nuclear power plant at Kurchatov using kamikaze drones. This was a serious escalation because the Kursk nuclear plant, one of Russia's four largest, is the main node of the country's national energy network. In July 2023, one unit at Kursk was disconnected from the grid following a Ukrainian drone attack. The plant was saved partly because the drones were short-range and carried low-strength thermobaric warheads.
But here’s the thing: the two operating reactors at Kursk are from the Soviet era—and of the same design as at Chernobyl, barely 500 km away. If Kursk blows up, it will irradiate a vast landmass. The Kursk plant is located 60 km from the Russia-Ukraine border and less than 50 km from the city of Kursk.
If that happens, Putin, who has so far backed off from a hair-trigger response, might have no alternative but to use tactical nukes. Given that NATO personnel have been photographed hamming while taking selfies during their participation in the Ukrainian storming of the Kursk Oblast that began on August 6, even a one-time use of a battlefield nuke could end in a war nobody wants.
As an op-ed in The Moscow Times said, “The mere possibility of a nuclear plant being seized during a war is a nightmare scenario for any nuclear and radiation safety specialist. But after the almost two-and-a-half-year-long Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and the seizures (again, by Russia) of the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the research reactor in Sevastopol during the occupation of Crimea in 2014, such scenarios have become more possible.”
On August 27, after visiting the Kursk plant, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi said, “A nuclear power plant of this type so close to a point of contact or military front is an extremely serious fact. The fact we have military activity a few kilometres away from here makes it an immediate point of attention. At the end of the day, again, this may sound common sense and simple: don't attack a nuclear power plant."
In effect, what we are facing is an escalation of the war, aided and abetted by President Joe Biden’s administration in the US that appears bent upon twisting the knife not only into Russia, but resultantly into Ukraine as well.
Why Ukraine, one might ask. Because Zelenskyy had said on August 22 that Ukraine would do everything to force Putin to end the war through diplomacy. The same day, Russia and Ukraine exchanged 230 prisoners of war—115 from each side. A diplomatic breakthrough was a long-shot conceivability, if not a feasibility.
Modi was in Warsaw when the drone attack on the Kursk plant took place. Photographic evidence of the attack went viral. Within hours, the PM entered ‘Rail Force One’ for a 10-hour, 690-km journey from Warsaw to Kyiv.
Modi’s sojourn in Kyiv was just seven hours long—the second-shortest in the city after Biden’s four-hour visit in February 2023. Biden’s visit had been secretive and designed to pump up Zelenskyy; Modi’s was announced well in advance and meant to palliate. If there was a conciliatory message he was carrying from Putin, Zelenskyy acidly returned it to the sender.
Zelenskyy is not an exemplar of diplomatic stability. After Modi’s departure, Zelenskyy wasn’t polite in upbraiding what he saw as India’s intransigence on Russia. The geostrategist and professor at the Centre for Policy Research Brahma Chellaney tweeted, “Coinciding with Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, Modi’s Kyiv visit was not just ill-timed; India got an earful from Zelenskyy, who not only rejected a mediating role for India in the war but also slammed India on issues ranging from its UN voting record to its oil imports from Russia.”
Four days after Modi’s visit, Zelenskyy was singing a combative tune, asserting during a press conference on August 27 that he intended to present a plan to Biden (and, playing the field, to Biden’s successors): “There can be no compromises with Putin, dialogue today is in principle empty and meaningless because he does not want to end the war diplomatically.”
Modi thus returned with no credit, either as war conciliator or as statesman. His disembarking in New Delhi was novelly lowkey. He was unsmiling. The usual throng was missing. Only one uniformed salutant stood at the base of the airstairs. Most tellingly, there was just one video news camera. It was a final flexure of futility.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)