RIC meet may lower LAC tensions

New Delhi, June 22:  A virtual meeting between the foreign ministers of India, China and Russia on Tuesday will form a critical component of New Delhi's move to lower tensions on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) where a meeting of senior army generals on Monday failed to provide a breakthrough.

This second conversation between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart within a week is expected to pave the way for a more substantial meeting in Beijing between Indian Ambassador Vikram Misri and Luo Zhaohui later in the week.

The effort will be to leverage the lowering of tensions to seek a pre-May 5 status quo at several sectors on the LAC as well as agree on not raising permanent structures in overlapping areas, said sources.

The tenor of the talks will be undergirded by conversations currently on in Moscow between Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and his counterpart Sergei Shoigu, a trusted Putin aide.

Sources said Singh's visit was announced after several chips had fallen in place including the first telephonic conversation between Jaishankar and Wang a day after 20 Indians and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers died in a scuffle in Galwan Valley on June 15.

That Singh reached Moscow two days before the Victory Parade commemorating World War II suggests intense conversations with trusted Putin aides, they said.

Russia has been positioning itself as an interlocutor because a rupturing of China-India ties is against its two-decade old policy to dilute US influence over the subcontinent and Central Asia by involving them in multilateral organisation such as BRICS and RIC (Russia-India-China) formats.

Moscow also backs the China initiated Shanghai Cooperation Organisation of which India, Pakistan and four Central Asian countries are also members.

In contrast to Donald Trump's repeated offers to insert the US in cooling down tensions after castigating China, the Russian approach has been discreet.

The Kremlin has let it be known that it is confident that both countries will be able to bilaterally sort out their differences.

“We consider that the two countries are capable of taking necessary steps to prevent such situations in the future and to ensure that this is a safe region for nations, first of all, China and India,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov had observed.

Russian Ambassador in India Nikolai Kudashev has been regularly briefed on the situation by Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla. Russian interest has been leavened with India clearing orders worth Rs 5,000 crore for more Mig and Sukhoi fighter jets.