Jaishankar says India is still talking to Moscow and Kyiv on Black Sea shipping

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Monday that India is still talking to Russia and Ukraine about stopping attacks on civilian shipping in the Black Sea, and that the talks have widened from ships to grain and energy. He was speaking at the Kautilya Economic Conclave in New Delhi.

The round began in July, after commercial ships were hit from both sides and Indian sailors were killed and injured. Jaishankar said India had stayed in contact with both capitals since then. His sequence was specific. The conversation started with civilian shipping. Shipping led to grain, because cargoes had stopped. Grain led to energy. He said a limited understanding, if Moscow and Kyiv could reach one, would already be a large gain.

Where the Indian idea sits among four

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha has described New Delhi's proposal as the broadest of four initiatives in front of Kyiv. In his account, India has suggested combining an energy ceasefire with a truce in the Black Sea, and treating the two as one arrangement. Türkiye and Egypt have proposed a Black Sea truce on its own. The United States has proposed an energy ceasefire on its own. Sybiha said Kyiv was prepared to look at an energy and Black Sea ceasefire if the two were kept together.

That pairing is the Indian addition. A shipping truce without an energy truce leaves the power plants exposed. An energy truce without a shipping truce leaves the grain route exposed. Sailors are the reason New Delhi is in the talks at all. Grain and fertiliser are the reason other importers care. India buys both, and it had crew on the ships that were hit in July.

The meetings that carried it

The Indian Express reported that the contacts ran through a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin in Bishkek in August, a subsequent trip by Jaishankar to Kyiv to see President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a further Modi-Putin discussion in New Delhi on the margins of the BRICS summit. Monday's conclave remarks are the public update on that chain, not a new plan.

The route itself has a paper history that the July attacks interrupted. In July 2022 Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye and the United Nations signed the Black Sea grain initiative, which let ships leave Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhne under inspection. Russia left that arrangement in July 2023. Since then, Ukraine has moved grain on a coastal corridor backed by its own navy, and both sides have hit merchant ships. Indian crew were on vessels in that traffic in July 2026. Jaishankar's point on Monday was that a talk which opened on those sailors now includes the cargo and the fuel used to move it.

What a limited deal would and would not cover

He did not offer a draft, a map of ports, or a monitoring body. A limited understanding, in the sense he used the phrase, would be a pause on civilian hulls and on the grain and energy linked to them. It would not be a ceasefire on the land front, and it would not settle territory. That is why he called even a narrow agreement a large gain. The alternative is the pattern since July: attacks from both sides, sailors dead or injured, and grain shipments that stop when insurers pull cover.

Jaishankar also used the conclave to repeat India's claim to speak for the Global South on the war's side effects: grain, energy and fertiliser. The claim is only as strong as the shipping talks. If the four proposals stay separate, India is one voice among mediators. If Kyiv's preference for a combined energy and Black Sea pause holds, the Indian draft is the one that matches the Ukrainian foreign minister's stated condition.

No text has been published. No ceasefire line and no list of ports has been named. The verified advance is narrower, and it is dated. Talks that opened because Indian sailors were hit in July now cover grain and energy as well as hulls. The Ukrainian foreign minister has ranked India's combined proposal as the broadest of the four on his table. The next public test is whether any of the four drafts is written down with a port list and a start date.