IN A strongly-worded criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday expressed “huge disappointment” and called it a “devastating blow to peace efforts”.
“In Ukraine today, 37 people were killed, three of whom were children, and 170 were injured, including 13 children, as a result of Russia's brutal missile strike. A Russian missile struck the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine, targeting young cancer patients. Many were buried under the rubble. It is a huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world's most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day,” Zelenskyy posted on X.
Ukraine has said that it has recovered fragments of a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile from the children's hospital which was hit on Monday during a wave of Russian attacks that killed at least 41 Ukrainians across the country. Russia has countered that it was a Ukrainian anti-missile system that struck the hospital.
This is the most sharply-worded statement by Zelenskyy against Modi since the war started. It comes about a month after their phone conversation, after Modi’s re-election, and their meeting on the sidelines of the G7 leaders’ summit in Italy in June.
The last time that the Ukrainian side was critical was when India was buying Russian oil at discounted rates. In August 2022, Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba had said that “every barrel of Russian crude that India gets has a good portion of Ukrainian blood in it”. India had defended its decision by saying that it was trying to cushion the inflationary impact of the energy prices on the Indian economy and its citizens.
But Kuleba’s visit to India in March this year -- his first since the Russia-Ukraine war started – was portrayed as an evolution in Kyiv's position towards Delhi. Modi has spoken to Zelenskyy at least five times in the last two-and-a-half years and has met him twice – their first meeting was on the sidelines of the G7 leaders' summit in Hiroshima, Japan, last year.
In recent weeks, there has been some talk of a possible visit by Modi to Kyiv as well, as Zelenskyy had invited him on the margins of the G7 summit in Italy. However, Modi did not go for the peace summit on Ukraine which was held in Switzerland. Secretary (West) in MEA Pavan Kapoor (now named as the next Deputy NSA) attended the summit, but India did not sign the joint communique since Russia was not present. Russia had called the Swiss summit a “waste of time”.
Zelenskyy’s statement comes amid Russia’s heaviest bombardment of Kyiv in almost four months -- one of the deadliest of the war -- hitting seven of the city’s 10 districts. The strike on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, which interrupted open-heart surgery and forced young cancer patients to take their treatments outdoors, drew international outrage.
The hospital, Ukraine's largest medical facility for children, was caring for about 670 patients at the time of the attack, Okhmatdyt’s Director General, Volodymyr Zhovnir, said Tuesday. “The building where we conducted dialysis for children with kidney failure or acute intoxication is ruined entirely,” he told reporters, estimating the overall damage to the hospital at $2.5 million.
With agency inputs from Kyiv
