The State Department announced today that Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland will head up an interagency delegation to Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka from March 19-23, ostensibly to shore up “Indo-Pacific cooperation.” She will be accompanied by Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Amanda Dory, hold Partnership Dialogues in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and Foreign Office Consultations in New Delhi. The team will also meet with “civil society and business leaders” in each country, meetings typically used to organize local forces to pressure governments should they fail to bow to foreign dictates.
Talks with India are likely to be conflictive. India’s Ambassador to Russia Denis Alipov reiterated in an interview with the Russia-24 TV channel today, that India “adopts its own neutral position,” vis-a-vis the Ukraine-Russia crisis. “India is well aware of not only the goals of [Russia’s military] operation, but also the origin of the security situation in Europe, all circumstances of Russian-Ukrainian relations in recent years and decades. This is one of the purposes why India is taking a fairly balanced position in relation to the aggravation that we are witnessing,” Alipov said, according to TASS.
