Macron will travel to New Delhi this week to attend the G20 summit, which will be hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is the third G20 leader to dial Zelenskyy just before attending the summit of the premier forum for international economic cooperation. Trudeau and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently had phone calls with the president of Ukraine.

Apart from the heads of states and heads of governments of the 19 G20 nations and the European Union, India has also invited the leaders of nine other nations to the summit.

The Modi government, however, resisted pressure from the West and did not include the president of Ukraine in the list of “special invitees”, ostensibly to avoid annoying Russia, which shares a "special and privileged strategic partnership” with India.

Zelenskyy had addressed the G20 leaders through video-link during the intergovernmental forum’s 17th summit, which had been held at Bali in Indonesia in November of 2022. He had presented his peace formula during his address to the summit, which Russian President Vladimir Putin had not attended.

Putin will also not attend the 18th G20 summit, which will be held on Saturday and Sunday.

The phone calls the G7 leaders are having with Zelenskyy are apparently intended to signal their support to Ukraine.

New Delhi has been trying to push the Russia-Ukraine war down on the agenda to save the summit from being overshadowed by the conflict.

But the United States has made it clear that President Joe Biden will discuss with his counterparts ways to mitigate the social and economic impacts of “Putin’s war in Ukraine”. Trudeau was more candid in telling Zelenskyy that he was disappointed that India had not invited the latter to attend the summit.