Jaishankar’s messages not dissimilar from PM Modi’s ‘not an era of war’ statement: US State Dept spokesperson

The US State Department on Tuesday (local time) said that the messages passed on to Moscow during External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar’s recent visit to Russia are not dissimilar to what Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said earlier that “this is not an era of war.”

Responding to a query on Jaishankar’s visit, US State Department spokesperson Ned?Price?said, “The messages we heard from Foreign Minister Jaishankar in Russia were not dissimilar in some ways from what we heard from Prime Minister Modi at the United Nations when he made it very clear that this is not an era of war.”

Responding to India becoming the largest oil customer – Russian oil customer after China and expanding their trade ties and why the US is not able to convince India to stay away from Russia in this difficult hour, he said, “We’ve had a number of high-level engagements with our Indian counterparts in recent weeks and recent months. Just yesterday Deputy Secretary Sherman met with Indian Foreign Secretary Kwatra and had a wide-ranging discussion about the US-India relationship. Secretary Blinken met with Foreign Minister Jaishankar here in this building just a couple of months ago. And there have been a number of conversations in between.”

“When it comes to India’s relationship with Russia, we’ve consistently made the point that it’s a relationship that developed and was cemented over the course of decades, really came to be during the Cold War at a time when the United States was not in a position to be an economic partner, a security partner, a military partner to India.”

“That has changed. That’s changed over the past 25 or so years. It’s really a legacy – a bipartisan legacy – that this country has achieved over the course of the past quarter century. President George W. Bush’s administration was really the first to put this into effect,” said Price. (ANI)