After the Chinese chancellor, New Delhi now welcomes the Russian, Sergei Lavrov. In the Times of India headline, “India sticks to Russia’s trade and Lavrov is on the way.”
The country has already bought nearly as much Russian oil as last year — and more than twice as much cooking oil. And now it also wants to double imports of Russian coal.
The two governments will discuss how to “smooth commercial payments interrupted by Western sanctions on Russian banks”.
On CNBC, an Indian business leader had said that a mechanism “in rubles and rupees” would come out this week. Without the West, he added, there are now “many opportunities for Indian companies.”
Then the South China Morning Post highlighted that “Chinese private companies also see Russia as a land of opportunity, amid the exodus from the West”.
In the same vein, at the top of the Wall Street Journal, “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reject calls to sever oil alliance with Russia.”
And CNBC heard from the Emirati energy minister (above): “Russia will always be part of this group and they have to be respected.”
POST-WAR AZOV
An article in the Financial Times hears, from the founder of the Azov battalion, praise for the Ukrainian “hero” Stepan Bandera, an ally of Nazism. He reports that “Zelensky granted the title of Hero of Ukraine to an Azov commander a month ago.” It notes that, in recent years, the UN “documented that members of Azov placed their weapons in civilian buildings in Donbas” and that the US government itself “labeled it as a hate group”.
And he hears, from an anonymous person in Kiev: “Are these the fascists we want to rule our country after this war is over?”
GENEVA CONVENTIONS
The New York Times reported and published footage from a video of “soldiers who are likely Ukrainians beating and shooting prisoners of Russian forces”, including “some with bags over their heads”. He described it as “possible violation of the Geneva Conventions”.
The Washington Post noted that the Ukrainian government “will investigate”.
COMMON GRAVES
Featured in Qatari Al Jazeera and others, but no attention in the West despite the Reuters dispatch (above, showing a detention center in a suburb of Tripoli), “UN investigators have raised evidence of human rights violations against prisoners in Libya and seek to confirm mass graves with immigrant bodies in a human trafficking center.
The country has been in turmoil since NATO’s intervention a decade ago.
