United Nations, July 18: India, "a great power" pursuing its own national interests, is facing "completely unjustified" pressure over its relations with Moscow, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

"India is a great power, sets its own national interests, determines its own national interests, chooses its own partners, and we know that India is being subjected to enormous pressure, completely unjustified, pressure in the international arena," he said at a news conference here on Wednesday.

"I think India is doing everything right," he said defending India's ties with Russia, particularly energy cooperation, against the criticism during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Moscow last week.

Lavrov called Ukraine President Volodymyr's remarks about Prime Minister Modi's Moscow visit "very insulting".

He noted that India called Ukraine's ambassador to India, Oleksandr Polishchuk, to the Ministry of External Affairs and protested Zelensky's remark.

Zelensky had posted on X, "It is a huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world's largest democracy hug the world's most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day" when a children's hospital in Kyiv was hit by a Russian missile.

Bracketing China with India, Lavrov attacked the West's criticism of these "Asian giants".

He said, "A multipolar world is a reality. It's not just a made-up of fiction."

"The fact that the West is exhibiting its displeasure to powers like China, like India, well, it shows the lack of erudition, the inability to partake in diplomacy, and also speaks to the failure of political analysts," he said.

"It's really beneath them, behaving this way … in particular when they're speaking in this way to these two giants, these two great powers," he added.

US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said during Prime Minister Modi's Moscow visit, "We made quite clear directly with India our concerns about their relationship with Russia."

"India is a strategic partner with whom we engage in a full and frank dialogue, and that includes on our concerns about the relationship with Russia," he said.

Lavrov spoke of India's External Affairs Minister's unapologetic defence of buying energy products from Russia.

"My colleague Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, after a tour of Western states, answering questions, including the question of why are you buying more oil from Russia, he cited statistics and those statistics showed that the West has also increased its purchases of gas from the Russian Federation despite some of the restrictions that have been imposed, gas and oil as well," he said.

"And then he went on to say that India will decide for itself, how to trade with whom and how to defend its national interests," Lavrov added.

In December 2022, during German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock's visit to New Delhi, External Affairs Minister Jaishankar told a Western reporter that during a ten-month period that year, the European Union had imported more Russian oil than the next 10 countries combined and that its import was six times India's.

The EU also imports gas and coal, he said.

Also at a media interaction in London, External Affairs Minister Jaishankar said that India had "actually softened the oil markets and the gas markets through our purchase policies. We have, as a consequence, actually managed global inflation and people should be saying thank you".

(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)

--IANS

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