Happy Cinco de Mayo (no it is not a holiday for mayonnaise)

Since Russia invaded Ukraine and the US imposed multiple sanctions against the invader India has resisted joining the sanctions list.

There is a simple reason for that reluctance…..India and Russia have a relationship that goes all the way back to 1955 when the USSR was trying to sure up its standing in the Third World…..plus Russia successfully brokered the deal that ended the Sine-India War of 1962.

The relationship has not been broken in all that time…..and now it has become a major importance because of the Ukraine conflict.

The US has made much of its success in isolating Russia internationally. But that boast is hard to take too seriously when Russia is growing ever closer to the two largest countries in the world. While the world has been watching the “no limits” partnership between Russia and China grow into “a relationship that probably cannot be compared with anything in the world,” Russia has been growing quietly closer to the second largest country in the world.

India has long been a close partner of Russia. In 2009, India and Russia signed the Joint Russian-Indian Declaration of Deepening and Strategic Partnership. In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Russia where the two sides agreed on a number of steps to enhance that partnership.

That partnership did not come apart under US pressure after Russia invaded Ukraine. Despite intense pressure from the US to “take a clear position” against Russia, India has refused to condemn Russia at the UN and has repeated Russia’s call to take “into account the legitimate security interests of all countries.” India has also offered Russia an escape from sanctions by swelling from a country that once imported little Russian oil to a country that now has Russia as its top supplier of oil. India imported $41.56 billion from Russia in the last fiscal year, which is about five times its previous level. Before the war, Russia was India’s eighteenth largest import partner; since the war, Russia has become India’s fourth largest import partner.

And the partnership did not only not come apart, it grew stronger. On September 16, 2022, over half a year after the war in Ukraine began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “Relations between Russia and India have significantly improved.” He called the friendship “extremely important.” Seven months later, on April 16, 2023, Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said the relationship with Russia had not changed, calling it “among the steadiest of the major relationships of the world in the contemporary era.”

The Growing Russia-India Relationship

The BRICS (Brazil,Russia, India, China, South Africa) are resisting the isolation of Russia….that makes those sanctions basically ineffective as has been proven recently.

BRICS is a group that needs watching….their dream is to confront the West and its dominance of markets.

If you would like to learn what BRICS is all about (HA HA  as if)…..

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brics.asp

How will this end?  (He asked knowingly)

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”