Roving Periscope: Why didn’t the Saudis even invite Russia for Ukraine talks?
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: In this era of frenemies and geopolitical promiscuity, everything is possible. It appears the US, China, and Saudi Arabia are, for now, on the same page, and coming closer to isolating Russia on the Ukrainian issue.
For, despite Russia being a member of the Saudi Arabia-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)-Plus Group, Jeddah did not even invite Moscow to the August 6-7 Summit of over 40 countries on the Ukraine crisis. Besides India, the US, and European countries were among those invited to it.
China was also invited despite its ‘dubious’ antecedents of supporting Russia in the UN and then trying to douse the Ukraine fires as a peacemaker, unsuccessfully.
Twenty days before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Moscow and Beijing announced a unique friendship. “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation,” they said in a joint statement on February 4, 2022. Despite this, the Saudis invited China to the Jeddah talks, even as the West suspects Beijing to be secretly helping Moscow in the ongoing conflict.
Now the Russians are fuming at the Saudis for not even inviting them to the Jeddah summit in what is viewed as a global effort to isolate Moscow.
Senior officials from around 40 countries, including India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, gathered on Sunday in Jeddah for a two-day meeting that aimed to agree on key principles about how to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict that has raged for over 17 months.
Angry at being ignored and isolated, Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday chided efforts by international officials meeting in Saudi Arabia to find a peaceful settlement for the war in Ukraine, saying the talks don’t have “the slightest added value” because Moscow — unlike Kyiv — wasn’t invited, the media reported on Tuesday.
Without Russia’s participation or taking into account Moscow’s interests, the meeting was pointless, a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said, as it reiterated earlier assurances that Moscow was open to a diplomatic solution on its terms that ends the war and is ready to respond to serious proposals.
But Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, ruled out Moscow’s previous demands that would give Russia enough time to dig deeper into the parts of Ukraine it has occupied.
Russian forces must fully withdraw from the occupied areas and there would be no Kyiv compromise on that, he announced on microblogging site X, formerly known as Twitter.
In the meanwhile, the Ukrainian Security Service said on Monday it had detained an alleged Russian informant woman who gathered intelligence about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s trip to the southern Mykolaiv region last month.
It claimed the woman “was collecting data for an airstrike during Zelenskyy’s visit.” The woman attempted to establish Zelenskyy’s route, times, and visits in the region. She was detained when she tried to pass the information to the Russians, the statement said, without providing evidence, the reports said.
President Zelenskyy has been a prime target for the Kremlin since Russia’s full-scale invasion—or a “special military operation,” as Moscow called it—when he refused to leave Kyiv as Russian troops approached.
