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| Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. |
Putin says he wants to end the war in Ukraine "as soon as possible"
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that his government is doing "everything it can" to conclude "as soon as possible" the war in Ukraine, which started in February with a military invasion ordered by Moscow. This has been transferred at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi after he expressed his "concerns" about the invasion on different occasions.
"I know your position regarding the conflict in Ukraine and the concerns you frequently express. We will do everything to bring it to an end as soon as possible," Putin told Modi at a meeting in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, where the event is being held.
This is how he responded to Modi's statements at the summit: "I know that now is not the time for wars and we have talked about it, particularly during our telephone conversations."
In turn, Putin has stated that it is "the other side", the Ukrainian, which rejects the negotiations in the hope of winning "on the battlefield", according to the TASS news agency. The Russian president has promised to keep Modi informed of how the conflict is evolving.
Both leaders agreed at the summit of leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), where the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Chinese, Xi Jinping, are also present.
A hard blow for Russia in Ukraine
This meeting takes place at a time when Russia is going through its lowest moments on the battlefield, after the Ukrainian counteroffensive has allowed Kyiv to recover "about 6,000 square kilometers" of territory in the east and south of the country, according to the president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The advance of the Ukrainian troops in territories long controlled by Russia has allowed the soldiers of Kyiv to find two mass graves with more than 600 corpses in Izium and ten torture chambers in different areas of Kharkiv.
All this occurs at the same time that the pro-Russian authorities of the Ukrainian region of Kherson have denounced a missile attack in the homonymous capital of the province, while the emergency services of the self-proclaimed people's republic of Lugansk have reported the death of the general prosecutor in a bomb attack.
For its part, the United States has announced a new $600 million military aid package to Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion, which includes additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
Faced with this turn of events in the development of the war, the former Russian president and Putin's confidant, Dimitri Medvedev, assured earlier this week that Kyiv's requests are "the prologue of the Third World War", more so if fit after a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has now slowed down.
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