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Ukraine's First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova will begin a four-day visit to India on Sunday, the first official visit from the East European country since the Russian invasion began last year. Dzhaparova will hold talks with Sanjay Verma, Secretary (West) in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). It is expected that the Ukrainian deputy foreign minister may extend an invitation for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit Ukraine. The MEA announced Dzhaparova's visit to India in a statement on Saturday. The First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Emine Dzhaparova will be on an official visit to India from April 9 to 12," it said. It said Dzhaparova will hold talks with Verma, during which both sides are expected to discuss bilateral relations, exchange views on the current situation in Ukraine and global issues of mutual interest. Dzhaparova will also call on Minister of State for External Affairs and Culture Meenakshi Lekhi and meet Deputy National Security
The head of a Ukrainian rescue organization said Saturday that the organization has brought back 31 children from Russia, where they had been taken during the war. Mykola Kuleba said at a news conference in Kyiv that the children were expected to arrive in the capital later in the day. Kuleba is the executive director of the Save Ukraine organization and is the presidential commissioner for children's rights. Deportations of Ukrainian children have been a concern since Russia's February 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine. The International Criminal Court increased pressure on Russia when it issued arrest warrants on March 17 for President Vladimir Putin and Russian children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine. The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week it had been in contact with Lvova-Belova, the first confirmation of high-level international intervention to reunite families with children who were forcibly ...
Russia lost elections to three United Nations bodies this week, a sign that opposition to its invasion of Ukraine over a year ago remains strong. The votes in the 54-member UN Economic and Social Council follow approval of six non-binding resolutions against Russia by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly. The latest on Feb. 23, the eve of the first anniversary of the invasion called for Moscow to end hostilities and withdraw its forces and was adopted by a vote of 141-7 with 32 abstentions. In the ECOSOC votes, Russia was overwhelmingly defeated by Romania for a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women. It lost to Estonia to be a member of the executive board of the U.N. children's agency UNICEF. And it was defeated by Armenia and the Czech Republic in secret ballot votes for membership on the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said after Wednesday's votes, This is a clear signal from ECOSOC members that no country ...
Russian forces used ground- and air-fired missiles, rocket launchers and weaponised drones to bombard the provinces of Ukraine it has illegally annexed but doesn't fully control, causing casualties, building damage and power outages Friday. The Ukrainian military said Russian forces launched 18 airstrikes, five missile strikes and 53 attacks from multiple rocket launchers between Thursday and Friday mornings. According to the General Staff statement, Russia was concentrating the bulk of its offensive operations in Ukraine's industrial east, focusing on the cities and towns of Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka in Donetsk province. Most of Friday's battlefield reports concerned the four Ukrainian provinces Russia annexed in September: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his military to gain complete control of the provinces, while Ukraine has indicated it will soon launch a counteroffensive to take back more territory. Russia a
Russia may pull out of a wartime deal that allows the export of Ukrainian grain to global markets if the West fails to remove obstacles to Russian agricultural exports, Moscow's top diplomat suggested Friday. The deal, which was brokered by the United Nations and Turkiye in July, unblocked shipments that were stuck in Ukraine's blockaded and mined ports, alleviating rising food prices and threat of hunger in some countries. A separate agreement aimed to facilitate the export of Russian fertilisers and grain. Moscow has repeatedly complained that the deal failed to work for Russian agricultural exports, which have had trouble reaching world markets due to Western sanctions. Speaking at a joint news conference with his Turkish counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters that Russia agreed last month to extend the deal for 60 days - instead of the 120 days set under a previous extension - to send a warning signal to the West. After we extended the deal for 120 .