India's strategic position in the US/NATO proxy war

THE US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has gradually but incrementally brought India and its economy into the sharp focus of EU criticism. There has been a profusion of condemnatory rhetoric targeting India for buying Russian oil.

The rebuke is neither novel nor sudden. Ever since the beginning of the European Union’s sanctions packages against the Russian Federation, there have been insistent voices in Europe that India should stop buying Russian oil.

For context, when the second Trump administration assumed office in January of 2025, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, generously confirmed to the world that Ukraine is a US proxy.

Such nuggets of wisdom from a financially and logistically involved military superpower have permitted the re-framing of the conflict in more accurate ways, no matter who else is disaffected by the attribution.

Considering that India is doing business with Europe and the collective West, Brussels finds it repugnant that India could do business with Russia. After all, India is perceived as a US partner in the China containment policy through the defence consortium of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, collectively known as the Quad.  By buying Russian oil, India is said to be funding the so-called Russia’s war against Ukraine.

There are many layers to this imbroglio, obfuscated at various levels by the art of deception and heaps of hypocrisy. The starting point is the battle for the framing and control of the narrative of this conflict.

NATO wants to frame it as an unprovoked Russian aggression against an innocent Ukraine. According to their framers, it conflagrated suddenly without warning and for no reason at all. At least as they claim, not for any cogent reason known to NATO, nor to Ukraine, for that matter.

History has a different opinion, however. It commences on February 9, 1990, when James Baker III promised ‘not an inch of NATO eastward expansion’ if only Mikhail Gorbachev would agree to German Unification. In 1994, President Clinton declared the expansion of NATO all the way to Ukraine. The covert and not-so-subtle steps to accomplish that objective began in earnest.

Russia was too weak to resist the US military juggernaut. Washington was still gloating in self-aggrandisement on the collapse of the Soviet Union, celebrating being catapulted into the only superpower in the world. In this nascent unipolar order, Russia would be encircled from the Black Sea, via Ukraine, the Baltic and Eastern Europe, Zbigniew Brzezinski reasoned.

By 2008, the CIA had built a lot of covert bases in Ukraine. There were other secretive missions besides, including Wuhan-style bio labs for gain-of-function research. And the US would ensure that no Ukrainian leader or politician, for that matter, would oppose Ukraine from joining NATO, or stand in the way of NATO leading a regime change expedition against Russia.

When Viktor Yanukovych became President of Ukraine, the die of war had been cast. For favouring neutrality, the fourth President of Ukraine was toppled from office through the Euromaidan colour revolution.

Following the unconstitutional removal of a democratically elected President and his administration by a cookie-bearing Victoria Nuland, the sequence of events is full of distractions and political miscalculations too numerous to recount.

Significantly, however, the Nazi wearing and saluting Banderites attacked Donetsk and massacred thousands of innocent Russian civilians, in some Gaza-like wholesale slaughter.

The Russians intervened through an expeditionary defence unit. In the heat of battle and fearing an embarrassing loss of the Ukraine assault units, the First Minsk Agreement was signed.

But the Ukrainian forces were not done yet. They regrouped and commenced another round of relentless bombardment of Donetsk and Luhansk. They exposed their flanks too wide, and the Russians encircled them in Debaltseve. At the risk of having all of them exterminated or incarcerated as prisoners of war, whichever was worse, Germany and France proposed a Second Minsk Agreement in 2015.

According to Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, NATO and the collective West had no intention to honour these agreements. Rather, they would use the ceasefire to salvage the encircled Ukrainian battalion and then rearm Ukraine to perpetuate the war of aggression against Russia.

The US needed to facilitate the creation of fortified positions deep behind the frontlines. There were three important ones. These are Bakhmut, Avdeevka and Pokrovsk. The first two have already fallen at great cost to the belligerents. If Pokrovsk, the last of the heavy fortifications, follows suit, the Ukrainian defences in Donetsk would be lost, paving a way for Russia to advance through the Slavyansk and Kramatorsk conurbation in the north and Chasiv Yar in the west, all the way to Kyiv.

Evidently, these are two different narratives. The EU, acting as a US vassal in this war, wants India and its decision-making capabilities to be subject to their version of the narrative. Stop buying Russian oil or else.

Predictably, India has its own interpretation of events. However much they try to tell their version, the decibels of Western ire and hypocrisy just keep getting louder. By decibels, is meant Peter Navarro.

The decibels notwithstanding, the Indian retort is an admixture of history, legality, sovereignty and the right to choose.

It is now part of the history of the Indian lived experience that Russia’s predecessor state, the USSR, supported India in all its military conflicts post-India’s independence. That relationship has continued to this day, extending into academic, economic and other people-to-people relationships. When India built large crude oil refineries, it relied on Russian supply for their hydrocarbon requirements.

When the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out in 2022, the Biden administration persuaded India to buy Russian oil, especially because if none was purchased, the oil prices would explode. India then, considering itself as an ally of the US and by extension of the collective West, owned that script and followed it with precision.

The Europeans continue to purchase Russian oil to this day. Unlike India, they claim, their intentions are altruistic and moral. Their Euros will not fund Putin’s war.

The absurdity of this hypocrisy has not escaped New Delhi. It just so happens that the excess refined petroleum products from India go to the Eurozone. Besides, the single biggest buyer of Indian refined petroleum products is Ukraine. You can’t make this stuff up!

The spokespersons of the Indian government never fail to remind anyone who cares to listen that India is not even the biggest buyer of Russian oil. China is. But the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has defended China for their purchases while vociferously admonishing India for being a Russian oil laundromat. Really Scot! Really?

India also points out that they are not even the largest consumer of Russian gas. Europe is.  Against pointing out of such egregious hypocrisy, Europe is unfazed. They insist that they are conscious of the consequentiality of haphazard measures. In order not to cause irrational panic on the EU energy markets, the termination of buying Russian gas must be gradual.

The parallel in this Aristotelian syllogism, or depraved lesson if you will, is that what’s good for Europe is not necessarily good for India. Poor Europe, they are diligent in ensuring energy and economic stability in the eurozone, while insinuating that India is rapacious, greedy and war profiteers.

Of all the rumpus about India’s purchases of Russian hydrocarbons coming from Western Europe in general and the US in particular, none is more muted than the fact that the United States keeps buying low-enriched uranium from the Russian Federation.

There is a way Washington justifies it. And it is not convenient or urgent. And to be sure, the US and its purchasing predilections from Russia or from anyone else, for that matter, is not up for discussion. But India’s is.

The decibels or Peter Navarro, whichever is louder, has, in the rising cacophony, mischaracterised New Delhi as a laundromat for Moscow. Even more deprecating things have been uttered to impugn India. The road to Ukrainian peace, according to an irate Navarro, passes through India. India, however, did not hear him, either on account of the illogicality of his ramblings or the deafening cacophony of his decibels.

They were listening to Elon Musk, who had something to say about Peter Navarro, possibly about the depravity of his advice, or that he was as dumb as a sack of bricks.

Honourable Hardeep Singh Puri, the Petroleum Minister of India, has interesting insights. For whom were the targeted oil caps meant, he asked. Not Japan. Not China. Not piped oil to Hungary and Slovakia.

As can be seen, this list leaves out India, ostensibly the one against whom these measures were targeted in the first place. But India, as the largest democracy in the world, knows. It is one of the critical supporting plinths of the unipolar order. Pulling India down would bring the entire global edifice to the ground.

Trump is incensed by the SCO pomp and the ceremony of the 80th anniversary of the Chinese celebration of the defeat of Japanese aggression.

For that reason, he will authorise the 100% secondary sanctions for buying Russian oil. Also, Trump is mulling a further 200% tariff on all pharmaceuticals coming from India. In imposing secondary sanctions, the US equally insists that Europe must stop buying Russian hydrocarbons, too. Innocent Europe. What to do!

India is doubling down and will soon be importing more oil from the Russian Federation. But before Europe goes down in flames on self-inflicted sanctions, it demands that India stop right now or else. India is baffled, however.

Or else what?

* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.

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