NEW DELHI
\nIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin will not hold an annual in-person summit this year, an Indian government source said on Friday, after the two held discussions on the sidelines of an event in September.
\nBloomberg News reported earlier in the day that the decision to cancel the summit was taken after veiled threats by Putin to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war.
\nThe government source, who declined to be named citing the sensitivity of the matter, said the decision not to hold a summit was taken much earlier and that the nuclear angle was not a factor.
\nPutin visited New Delhi in December last year for the 21st India\u2013Russia annual summit.
\nSpokespeople for India\u2019s foreign ministry and the Russian embassy in New Delhi did not respond to Reuters requests for comment on the Bloomberg report.
\nModi and Putin met on the sidelines of a regional security bloc summit in Uzbekistan in September and have spoken on the phone a number of times this year, including on the subject of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.
\nIndia, which has become one of the biggest buyers of Russian oil along with China since the war began in February, has not explicitly condemned what Russia calls its \u201cspecial military operation\u201d in Ukraine.
\nA Russian official told Bloomberg that India\u2019s decision not to hold a summit was clear at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Uzbekistan, where Modi told Putin that this was \u201cnot an era of war\u201d.
\nPutin has issued a series of thinly veiled nuclear threats during the course of the Ukraine war, but several top officials have repeatedly denied Moscow plans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and have accused the West of upping the nuclear ante.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin will not hold an annual in-person summit this year, an Indian government source said on Friday, after the two held discussions on the sidelines of an event in September. Bloomberg News reported earlier in the day that the decision to cancel the summit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-300535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n