The US snooping on top Indian officials has been revealed in the leak of a Washington document on purported talks between India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. 

Reporting on the leaked document, The Washington Post said, “It says that Doval assured Patrushev of India's support for Russia in multilateral venues and that New Delhi was working to ensure the war did not come up during a Group of 20 (G20) meeting chaired by India, despite ‘considerable pressure’ to do so”.

The conversation is said to have taken place on February 22, a week before the G20 foreign ministers meeting in Bengaluru on March 1, according to the newspaper.

According to the Post, the document said that Doval asserted that India was resisting "pressures” to support Western-backed resolutions at the United Nations on Ukraine.

He reportedly said New Delhi  "would not deviate from the principled position it had taken in the past", the newspaper wrote citing the document.

According to the Post, it was one of a trove of documents leaked on Discord, a messaging platform.

Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, has been charged with leaking scores of classified documents, many that offer insights into US surveillance operations.

There is no independent verification of the authenticity of individual documents beyond the filing of spying charges against Texeira collectively over the leaks.

The documents allegedly shared by Texeira on Discord and other social media and messaging sites were in the form of pictures of printouts of documents.

The G20 foreign ministers’ meeting was attended by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Foreign Ministers Sergey Lavrov of Russia and Qin Gang of China.

It obviously could not reach a consensus and it was noted at the top of the outcome document presented by India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar that not all foreign ministers agreed to the two paragraphs on Ukraine.

Those paragraphs said that “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine”  and that “it is essential to uphold international law and the multilateral system that safeguards peace and stability.”

They ended with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oft-quoted statement, “Today's era must not be of war”.

India has stayed neutral on resolutions at the UN on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the UN, while offering carefully couched criticism of Moscow.

Jaishankar said at the UN General Assembly last year, “ India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there”, but added, "We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles”.

According to the Post, the leaked documents showed the US was also able to access Pakistani internal government documents.

It reported that in an internal memo quoted in a leaked document "Pakistan's Difficult Choices", Pakistan’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar said that Islamabad  "no longer try to maintain a middle ground between China and the United States”.

The Post said that according to the document, she wrote that preserving Pakistan’s partnership with the US would sacrifice full benefits from the "real strategic" partnership with China. 

The newspaper said that another document from February 17 showed that an aide to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif advised him that backing a Western-backed resolution on Ukraine under pressure from the West would signal a shift in Pakistan's position and jeopardise Pakistan’s ability to negotiate trade and energy deals with Russia.

The Post said that the documents showed the extent of snooping on South Africa, Brazil and Egypt.

(SAM)