Putin | Pakistan

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in India on Thursday for a two-day visit aimed at deepening defence ties, as New Delhi faces heavy US pressure to stop buying oil from Moscow. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was at the airport to welcome the Russian leader in person, greeting him on the red carpet with a hug, before riding together in the same car. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin sit in a car as they depart Palam Air Force Base after the latter’s arrival in New Delhi. —AFP Putin, on his first visit to India since the Ukraine war, is accompanied by his Defence Minister Andrei Belousov, with possible deals on fighter jets and air defence systems expected to be discussed. In an interview with India Today, Putin said he was “very happy” to be meeting “my friend” Modi. “The range of our cooperation with India is huge,” he said in remarks translated by the broadcaster, citing ship and aircraft manufacturing, nuclear energy and space exploration. The Indian premier...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia was “ready” for war if Europe seeks one, accusing the continent’s leaders of trying to sabotage a deal on the Ukraine conflict before he met with US envoys. The comments came as United States envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were in Moscow for high-stakes talks on ending the nearly four-year war, which were preceded by days of intense diplomacy. “We are not planning to go to war with Europe, but if Europe wants to and starts, we are ready right now,” Putin told reporters in Moscow. “They have no peaceful agenda, they are on the side of war,” he added, repeating his claim that European leaders were hindering US attempts to broker peace in Ukraine. He added that European changes to Trump’s latest plan to end the war “aimed solely at one thing — to completely block the entire peace process and put forward demands that are absolutely unacceptable for Russia”. Washington has presented a 28-point draft to end the c...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will discuss all aspects of their countries’ “privileged strategic partnership” when Putin visits New Delhi next week, the Kremlin said. India, a major buyer of Russian oil, has also bought its weapons for decades, though a top defence official said the country had bought US arms worth nearly $30 billion in the past decade and aims to produce more of its own equipment. “They (the Russians) have been our friends through both fair and foul weather, and we are not going to sort of stop our defence cooperation with them anytime soon, but I do want to stress that India follows a policy of strategic autonomy,” Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said in New Delhi on Friday. India was diversifying its suppliers, he told an industry event, adding: “But more than anything else we are trying to ensure that we increasingly do spend the bulk of our money within the country.” Putin last visited India in December 2021, just a few months before Russia...

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar on Tuesday met with senior Russian and Chinese leadership at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Council of Heads of Government summit, according to the Foreign Office (FO). The SCO is holding its Council of Heads of Government summit in Moscow from November 17 to 18. Taking place under Russia’s rotating presidency, the high-level meeting follows the landmark Tianjin summit three months earlier and comes at a pivotal moment for Eurasian economic connectivity in a shifting global order. At the heads of government gathering, Dar met Russian President Vladimir Putin, along with other SCO heads of state and senior officials. In a post on X, the FO said that Putin welcomed leaders to the summit in the Russian capital. He also “emphasised the importance of strengthening regional economic cooperation under the SCO, highlighting its role as a key platform for connectivity, stability, and mutually beneficial development across the region”. Dar also met Chine...

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his top officials on Wednesday to draft proposals for a possible test of nuclear weapons, something Moscow has not done since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The order — responding to President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that the United States would resume testing — was a further signal that the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals are rapidly nearing a step that could sharply escalate geopolitical tensions. “I am instructing the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry … the special services and relevant civilian agencies to do everything possible to collect additional information on the issue, analyse it at the Security Council and make agreed proposals on the possible start of work on the preparation of nuclear weapons tests,” Putin said in televised remarks. Russia-US relations have deteriorated sharply in the past few weeks as Trump, frustrated with a lack of progress towards ending the war in Ukraine, has cancelled a planned sum...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia had successfully tested the Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo that military analysts say is capable of devastating coastal regions by triggering vast radioactive ocean swells. As United States President Donald Trump has toughened both his rhetoric and his stance on Russia, Putin has publicly flexed his nuclear muscles with the test of a new Burevestnik cruise missile on October 21 and nuclear launch drills on October 22. There are few confirmed details about the Poseidon, named after the ancient Greek god of the sea, but it is essentially a nuclear-capable cross between a torpedo and a drone. Putin, over tea and cakes at a hospital in Moscow with Russian soldiers wounded in the Ukraine war, said the test had taken place on Tuesday. “For the first time, we managed not only to launch it with a launch engine from a carrier submarine, but also to launch the nuclear power unit on which this device passed a certain amount of time,” Putin said. “The...

Putin hails deepening Pyongyang ties

United States President Donald Trump said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday agreed to another summit to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, a day before the US president was due to speak with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump said he and Putin would soon meet in Budapest after a more than two-hour-long phone call he described as productive. The Kremlin did not immediately comment. The surprise development came as Zelensky was headed to the White House on Friday to push for more military support, including potential long-range offensive missiles. Yet the positive tone following the US-Russia call appeared to leave in question the possibility of such support in the near term. Energy systems targeted Kyiv and Moscow have been escalating their war with massive attacks on energy infrastructure while Nato struggles to respond to a spate of Russian air incursions. The Trump-Putin meeting will follow lower-level talks between Moscow and Washington next week, Trump said. No date was...

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday he would honour all past deals struck between his country and Moscow, a pledge suggesting Moscow’s two main military bases in Syria are safe. Sharaa, who once headed the Syrian branch of al Qaeda and who toppled predecessor Bashar al-Assad, a close Russian ally, late last year, was speaking at the start of Kremlin talks with Putin, his first visit to Russia since coming to power. “There are bilateral relations and shared interests that bind us with Russia, and we respect all agreements made with it. We are working on redefining the nature of relations with Russia,” Sharaa, who was speaking in Arabic, told Putin. Putin told him that Moscow was ready to do all it could to act on what he called “many interesting and useful beginnings” that had already been discussed between the two sides when it came to renewing relations. The Kremlin chief also congratulated Sharaa on the fact that parliamentary elections were held earlier this ...

The wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Wednesday that laboratory analysis of smuggled biological samples found he was killed by poisoning while incarcerated at an Arctic prison in February 2024. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable critic for years, died in mysterious circumstances while serving a 19-year prison sentence on a string of charges widely seen as retribution for his opposition. The charismatic anti-corruption campaigner had rallied hundreds of thousands across Russia in anti-Kremlin protests as he exposed the alleged ill-got gains of Putin’s inner circle. His allies allege he was murdered in prison, and Moscow has never fully explained the causes of his death, saying only that he fell ill while walking in the prison yard on February 16, 2024. Before he was buried, his wife Yulia Navalnaya said his allies “were able to obtain and securely transfer biological samples of Alexei abroad”. “Laboratories in two countries came to the conclusion that Alexei was killed. Spe...

Shehbaz positions Islamabad as reliable partner; Xi underlines shared future; Putin urges expansion of bilateral trade

Chinese President Xi Jinping will gather more than 20 world leaders at a regional security forum in China next week in a powerful show of Global South solidarity in the age of Donald Trump while also helping sanctions-hit Russia pull off another diplomatic coup. Aside from Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaders from Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia have been invited to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, to be held in the northern port city of Tianjin from August 31 to September 1. The summit will feature Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years as the two neighbours work on further defusing tensions roiled by deadly border clashes in 2020. Modi last shared the same stage with Xi and Putin at last year’s Brics summit in Kazan, Russia, even as Western leaders turned their backs on the Russian leader amid the war in Ukraine. Russian embassy officials in New Delhi last week said Moscow hopes trilateral talks with China and ...

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he hoped Russia’s Vladimir Putin would move forward on ending the war in Ukraine but conceded that the Kremlin leader may not want to make a deal at all, adding this would create a “rough situation” for Putin. In an interview with the Fox News “Fox & Friends” programme, Trump […]

United States President Donald Trump failed to secure a Ukraine war ceasefire at a high-stakes summit with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, but insisted on Saturday that he would now target a full peace agreement to end the conflict. Three hours of talks between the White House and Kremlin leaders at an Alaska air base produced no breakthrough, but Trump and European leaders said they wanted a new summit that includes Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Speaking to top officials in Moscow a day after the talks in Alaska, Putin said he discussed ways of ending the conflict “on a fair basis” during the meeting. He also said the summit with Trump had been “timely” and “very useful”, according to images published by the Kremlin. Zelensky said he will now go to Washington on Monday, while European leaders said they were ready to intensify sanctions against Russia after Trump briefed them on the summit and they held their own protracted talks. European leaders have also been invited to attend Monday’s meeting...

United States President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin will make a deal on his war on Ukraine and that the threat of sanctions against Russia likely played a role in Moscow’s decision to seek a meeting. Trump is scheduled to meet with Putin in Alaska tomorrow. The US president said he is unsure whether an immediate ceasefire can be achieved, but expressed interest in brokering a peace agreement. “I believe now, he’s convinced that he’s going to make a deal. He’s going to make a deal. I think he’s going to, and we’re going to find out,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Radio’s ‘The Brian Kilmeade Show’. Trump also mentioned during the Fox interview that he has three locations in mind for a follow-up meeting with Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, though he noted that a second meeting is not guaranteed. He said staying in Alaska for a three-way summit would be the easiest scenario. “Depending on what happens with my meeting, I’m going to be c...

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that if his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin goes well, he would like to have a quick second meeting with Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and himself. “If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one,” Trump told reporters. “I would like to do it almost immediately, and […]

United States President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that if his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin goes well, he would like to have a quick second meeting between Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and himself. “If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one,” Trump told reporters. “I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky and myself, if they’d like to have me there.” Trump did not provide a timeframe for a second meeting. He is to meet Putin in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. Trump also said Russia would face consequences if Putin did not agree to stop the war. “Yes, they will,” he said. He did not spell out the consequences, but he has warned of stiff economic sanctions if no breakthrough can be achieved. Trump spoke after holding talks via telephone with European leaders and Zelenskiy about his meeting with Putin. “We had a very good call. He was on the call. President Zelensky was on the ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the leaders of China, India and three ex-Soviet states on Friday in a flurry of calls to brief them on his contacts with the United States about the war in Ukraine. Putin met US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow on Wednesday, after which the Kremlin said a summit between Putin and Trump could take place as early as next week. No venue, date or agenda have been announced. Trump, pressing for an end to the 3.5-year war, had set a deadline that expires on Friday for Russia to agree to peace or face new sanctions on Moscow and countries that buy Russian exports. China and India are the biggest buyers of Russian oil. China’s President Xi Jinping told Putin in a phone call that China is pleased to see Russia and the US maintaining contact and improving ties to advance a political resolution of the Ukraine crisis, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said. China is a major backer of Russia in its confrontation with the West, as well as Russia’s biggest trading...

United States envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Wednesday, two days before the expiry of a deadline set by US President Donald Trump for Russia to agree to peace in Ukraine or face new sanctions. Witkoff flew to Moscow on a last-minute mission to seek a breakthrough in the three-and-a-half-year war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Russian state TV showed a brief clip of him shaking hands with Putin at the start of their meeting. Russian news agencies said the talks ended after about three hours, and Witkoff’s motor convoy was seen leaving the Kremlin. Russian investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who earlier greeted Witkoff on arrival and strolled with him in a park near the Kremlin, posted on social media: “Dialogue will prevail.” There was no immediate statement from either side on the substance of the talks. Later, Trump called the meeting “highly productive” in a post on Truth Social. “Great progress was made!” the US president wrote. “...

Ukrainian drones targeted St Petersburg on Sunday, Russian authorities said, forcing the airport to close for five hours as Russian President Vladimir Putin marked the country’s Navy Day in the city, despite the earlier cancellation of its naval parade due to security concerns. St Petersburg usually holds a large-scale, televised navy parade on Navy Day, which features a flotilla of warships and military vessels sailing down the Neva River and is attended by Putin. Last year, Russia suspected a Ukrainian plan to attack the city’s parade, according to state television. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Sunday that this year’s parade had been cancelled for security reasons, following first reports of its cancellation in early July. Putin arrived at the city’s historic naval headquarters on Sunday by a patrol speed boat, from where he followed drills involving more than 150 vessels and 15,000 military personnel in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans and Baltic and Caspian Seas. “Today we are marking this ho...