Two days after India announced the success of Mission Shakti, Russia has asked New Delhi to join international efforts to ensure that outer space is not weaponised. It has referred to a Russian-Chinese draft treaty that is aimed at preventing weaponisation of outer space while offering India to join the efforts of “like-minded nations”.

“Russia intends to continue to make necessary effort to prevent an arms race in outer space,” reads a statement issued by the country, as reported by news agency ANI, in response to successful test of anti-satellite missile by India on Wednesday.

“The idea of developing a multilateral legally binding instrument for keeping outer space peaceful based on the Russian-Chinese draft treaty with support of a group of like-minded nations to prevent weaponization of outer space, the use or threat of force against space objects as well as multilateral initiative - political obligations not to be first to place weapons in space are becoming particularly important. We offer our Indian partners to actively join these joint efforts of the international community,” Russia said in the statement, according to ANI.

On March 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India has entered the elite club of nations to possess the capability to hit a target in space. India had shot down a live satellite in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO), a reference to altitude less than 2,000 km. The other countries with such capability are the US, Russia and China.

First Published: Mar 29, 2019 11:18 IST