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India is discussing how to set up a rupee-ruble payment mechanism to enable it to trade with Russia, to circumvent the U.S. sanctions regime.India abstained from voting on the March United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution demanding an end to Russian offensive in Ukraine (General Assembly resolution demands end to Russian offensive in Ukraine).Since its Independence, India has tried to steer a neutral course between the U.S. and Russia (and previously, the USSR). During the 1950s, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a prime architect behind the Non-Aligned Movement, under which developing countries tried to pursue their national interests...

The dawn would have illuminated the pools of blood, as the villagers emerged to count their dead. For all of the night of February 24, 2000, residents of the hamlet of Lanjote had bunkered down, hoping not to be hit by artillery fire arcing across the LoC. The 16 bodies on the streets, though, bore evidence of the precision savagery of the knife, not the shell: 90-year-old Mohammad Alam Wali, and a young couple, Mohammad Murtaza and Kali Begum, had been decapitated. Limbs were severed; heads hacked. The youngest victim, Ahmad Niaz, was just two. With deliberation, it seemed, the...