External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday met his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov here and discussed bilateral cooperation and regional issues. Their meeting comes just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the margins of the high-level UN week.
"Met FM Sergey Lavrov this afternoon at #UNGA79. Discussed our bilateral cooperation and regional issues,” Jaishankar said in a post on X.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Lavrov and Jaishankar discussed key matters on the bilateral cooperation agenda, as well as urgent international matters, including preparations for the upcoming BRICS Summit in Kazan, the Ukraine settlement, as well as the situation in the Asia-Pacific Region in connection with the Western attempts to bring NATO elements into this region.
"They agreed to continue coordinating interactions between Russia and India within the key multilateral formats."
The meeting between Modi and Zelenskyy last week was the third meeting between the two leaders in little over three months. Modi had met the Ukrainian leader in Kyiv last month, just weeks after he had met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in July. In June, Modi held a bilateral meeting with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the G7 Summit in Italy.
Later on Wednesday, speaking at Asia Society in the city, Jaishankar underlined that wars are not the way of settling disputes. Responding to a question on what is India going to do to help solve the Ukraine conflict, Jaishankar said, "We think at some point there will be a negotiation, and such a negotiation has to obviously include the parties. It cannot be a one-sided negotiation.
"And from those assessments, we have been engaging both the Russian Government and the Ukrainian Government in Moscow and in Kyiv and in other places to see whether there is something we can do which would hasten the end of the conflict and initiate some kind of serious negotiation between them,” he said.
(With inputs from agency)
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