India stands 'firmly for peace', PM Modi tells Ukraine's Zelensky
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00:00Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with an embrace as he arrived at the Presidential Palace in Kyiv this Friday.
00:08Modi is the first Indian leader to visit Ukraine and has been casting himself as a possible peacemaker in the war with Russia,
00:15though many in Ukraine see him as too close to Vladimir Putin.
00:18Modi also shared a warm hug with the Russian leader during a visit to Moscow in July.
00:24Still, Modi told Zelensky that India is ready to make proactive contributions to peace efforts.
00:29Well, for the very latest, we can cross now to our correspondent, Gulliver Cragg.
00:33Gulliver, what's come out of Modi's visit so far?
00:38Well, that warm hug, which in a way is a mirror of the warm hug that Narendra Modi shared with Vladimir Putin in July and for which he was so criticized.
00:48And then some calls from the Indian Prime Minister for diplomatic efforts and peace talks between Ukraine and Russia
00:56to start basically, you know, as soon as possible, he's urging to move to that phase.
01:02I think that neither Russia nor Ukraine is actually prepared for that at the moment.
01:07The Russians, ever since the Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Kursk region, have been saying they will not sit down and talk to the Ukrainians, you know, and protest, if you like, about that.
01:17The Ukrainians, meanwhile, I think that they, well, officially, of course, they're saying they won't talk to the Russians, they won't give up any of their territory.
01:25And I think that their feeling is that they're still waiting and hoping to see if this incursion into Kursk region contributes to exhausting the Russians, forcing them to spread their military resources thinner,
01:36and will lead to their ongoing offensive in Donetsk region culminating without them taking too much more Ukrainian territory.
01:43Paradoxically, in a way, though, the Ukrainian attack inside Russia is being seen by a lot of analysts here as perhaps a prelude to some kind of negotiations,
01:54because, of course, one of the ideas behind it, that's not being talked about officially, but it's being talked about by almost everyone I speak to as I was traveling around eastern Ukraine in recent days,
02:05is the idea that at some point in the negotiations, Ukraine might be engaging in a land swap where it would give back the occupied part of Russia in exchange for some occupied part of Ukraine.
02:16But I stress, that's not something that any high-ranking Ukrainian politician has openly talked about officially.
02:22Gulliver, as you said, Ukraine's incursion into Russia has sort of shifted the power balance in this war. Tell us, what is the latest from the front lines?
02:32Well, the incursion into Russia has put the Russians on the back foot in one area and boosted the Ukrainians' morale,
02:38but it hasn't really, at least not yet, done anything to stop the Russian offensive in Donbass.
02:46And there it's really the Russians who are on the attack, the Ukrainians are on the back foot, really, really struggling to defend the area around Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian-held city in Donetsk region.
02:57And that's really one of the key questions anyway in the next few weeks and months is will the Russians manage to take Pokrovsk.
03:02I mean, if they do, it's very, very bad news for the Ukrainians.
03:05I've heard mixed views from Ukrainian military about, you know, what they realistically assess the Russians' chances of doing that being.