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Zelenskyy to meet Starmer at Downing Street to discuss US draft peace deal

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit Downing Street on Monday for an in-person meeting with Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz in a show of support for Ukraine. Starmer will use the meeting with the leaders from Ukraine, France and Germany to discuss the continuing talks between US and Ukrainian officials aimed at finding an agreement on guaranteeing Ukraine’s postwar security. The four leaders took part in a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing” about two weeks ago, where they discussed plans to provide a European peacekeeping force that could be deployed to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire. In a statement about the meeting released by the European Council, the trio expressed full support for “President Trump’s comments that the current line of contact must be the starting point for any talks”. The draft peace deal, quietly brokered between US and Russian officials, has been criticised for leaving Ukraine in a weak and vulnerable position. The initial draft plan, which was reportedly developed by Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the Kremlin adviser Kirill Dmitriev, would have forced draconian measures on Ukraine that would have given Russia unprecedented control over the country’s military and political sovereignty, conditions that were seen as a surrender by Kyiv. The peace plan was significantly amended by Ukraine last month, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands. Though for now, the conflict continues. On Friday night, Russia launched a drone and missile attack on Ukraine’s power and transport infrastructure. The Ukrainian military said Russia had launched 653 drones and 51 missiles on Ukraine overnight. Ukrainian forces downed 585 drones and 30 missiles, the military said. Zelensky has said Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was the main target for hundreds of Russian drones and about 50 missiles, with Ukrainian officials accusing Moscow of seeking to “weaponise” the cold by denying civilians access to heat and power. Meanwhile, US and Ukrainian officials will conduct a third day of talks in Florida as Trump’s administration pushes Kyiv to accept an American-backed peace plan. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has already rejected some parts of the plan, with Ukraine’s territorial integrity and measures to deter future Russian attacks proving big sticking points for Moscow. Starmer has repeatedly stressed that Ukraine must determine its own future, and said the coalition of the willing’s peacekeeping force would play a “vital role” in guaranteeing the country’s security. In its new national security strategy, published overnight on Saturday, the White House said it was committed to Ukraine’s survival as a “viable state”. But the strategy also prioritised improving relations with Moscow, stating that ending the war is a core US interest to “re-establish strategic stability with Russia”. On Saturday evening, Zelenskyy said he had held a “very substantive and constructive” call with the US envoys Witkoff and Jared Kushner. “Ukraine is committed to continuing to work honestly with the American side to bring about real peace,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram. “We agreed on the next steps and the format of the talks with America.” Zelenskyy, who was in Kyiv, joined the call with the senior Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov, and Andriy Gnatov, the chief of staff of Kyiv’s armed forces, both of whom were in Miami for the talks with the US side. The two Americans – Witkoff and Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law – had been in talks with Umerov and Gnatov since Thursday. Zelenskyy said the call with Witkoff and Kushner “focused on many aspects and quickly discussed key issues that could guarantee an end to the bloodshed and remove the threat of a third Russian invasion, as well as the threat of Russia failing to fulfil its promises, as has happened many times in the past”. He said he was waiting a “detailed report” from Umerov and Gnatov.

Syria interim president accuses Israel of fighting ‘ghosts’ and exporting crises

Syria’s interim president has accused Israel of fighting “ghosts” and exporting its crises to other countries after the war in Gaza. President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s comments come amid persistent airstrikes and incursions by the Israeli military into southern Syria. Sharaa told an international conference in Doha on Saturday that Syria had insisted on respecting a 1974 disengagement agreement with Israel that had “held for over 50 years – in one way or another it is a successful agreement”. Tampering with the deal “and seeking other agreements such as a demilitarised zone ... could lead us to a dangerous place with unknown consequences”. Israel’s forces pushed into a UN-patrolled buffer zone in the occupied Golan Heights after the fall of Bashar al-Assad a year ago and conduct regular incursions deeper into Syria. The level of insecurity for Syrians in the region south of Damascus is increasing. Since he took power a year ago, Sharaa insisted he had been sending “positive messages to Israel regarding regional peace and stability”. He also said Israel “extrapolates” its conflict with Hamas militants and justifies aggression in the name of security. “Israel has become a country that is in a fight against ghosts,” he said. “They justify everything using their security concerns and they take 7 October and extrapolate it to everything that has happened around them.” Israel had become a country that exports crises, he added. Sharaa said: “Israel responded to Syria with extreme violence, launching more than 1,000 airstrikes and carrying out 400 incursions into its territory. The latest of these attacks was the massacre it committed in the town of Beit Jinn in the Damascus countryside, which claimed dozens of lives.” He said that Syria was working with “influential” countries to pressure Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. “There are negotiations with Israel, and the US is involved with us in these negotiations, and all countries support our demand for its withdrawal to the pre-8 December borders.” Donald Trump issued a warning last week to Israel to co-operate with the Syrian president, suggesting he does not welcome the Israeli incursions inside Syria. Sharaa said the demand for a demilitarised zone raised many questions for Syria, chiefly, “who will protect this zone if there is no presence of the Syrian army?” Israel says it fears terrorist groups linked to Hamas or that Sharaa will invade Israel unless there is a firm buffer zone. Israel has seized the 400 sq km (155 sq miles) of demilitarised buffer zone in southern Syria. Sharaa, who has spent time in US jails inside Iraq, was given a rock-star welcome at the conference. He stressed that “any agreement must guarantee Syria’s interests, as it is Syria that is subjected to Israeli attacks”. Sharaa insisted: “Syria is a developed country”, pointing to the recent People’s Assembly elections. The polls have been criticised as biased in favour of the country’s interim leaders. Sharaa said the polls had been conducted “in a manner that is appropriate for the transitional phase”, adding, “the people choosing who governs them is a fundamental principle”. “We do not link the building of Syria to individuals but to institutions, and this is the biggest challenge in the transitional phase that we are going through.” He promised full elections in four years and said women had nothing to fear in Syria. It was the men that needed to worry, he said.

Gunmen kill at least 11 people including three-year-old in hostel in South Africa

Gunmen have stormed into a hostel in South Africa’s capital and killed at least 11 people, including a three-year-old child, and injured more than a dozen others. Police said they had launched a “manhunt” for three people and were investigating whether the killings were linked to a bar within the hostel that may have been selling alcohol illegally. The attack is the latest in a series of mass shootings in the country of 63 million people, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world. “I can confirm that a total of 25 people were shot,” said a police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe of the early morning attack in Saulsville township, 11 miles (18km) west of Pretoria. She said 14 people had been hospitalised in the attack in which armed men shot indiscriminately. Mathe added: “Ten died on this particular scene, and one died in hospital.” The victims also included a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl. South African police have been grappling with violence linked to illegal bars, known as shebeens, which often sell home-brewed drinks. With high levels of gun ownership, shootings linked to organised crime are common and police say they are often fuelled by alcohol. “These illegal shebeens are really giving us a problem as the police,” Mathe told the 24-hour eNCA news broadcaster. “Because a lot of murders are being reported at these illegal establishments.” Forensic and ballistic experts and investigators were at the scene. “So we are on a manhunt. For now, we are looking for three suspects,” Mathe said. Between April and September, more than 60 people were killed each day in South Africa, according to police data. Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

EU says US ‘still our biggest ally’ despite release of policy paper supporting Europe’s far-right – as it happened

Overnight Russian missile and drone strikes left parts of Ukraine without power on Saturday morning, Ukraine’s energy ministry said. The Russian defense ministry confirmed that Russian forces attacked energy facilities that supported the Ukrainian military and port infrastructure used by Ukrainian forces, saying that the strike was in response to what it called Ukrainian attacks on civilian targets. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant temporarily lost all off-site power overnight, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Saturday, marking the 11th time the facility temporarily lost power during the war. Ukraine peace plan talks continue between Trump advisers and Ukrainian officials, with the parties involved saying on Friday that they will meet for a third day of talks. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas responded to the US National Security Strategy, a policy paper released by the Trump administration on Friday that made explicit Washington’s support for Europe’s nationalist far-right parties. “US is still our biggest ally,” Kallas said Saturday.

Russia launches attacks across Ukraine as Miami peace talks continue

Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukraine in the early hours of Saturday as US and Ukrainian officials continued talks in Miami which the White House hopes will bring an end to the conflict. Russia used more than 650 drones and 51 missiles overnight, Ukraine’s armed forces said, with drones targeting locations across the country, including in western regions hundreds of miles from the frontline. Warning sirens also sounded in parts of eastern Poland, close to the Ukrainian border. At least three people were injured in the attacks in Kyiv region, while the national energy operator, Ukrenergo, said much of the overnight attack had targeted power stations and other energy infrastructure. Russia has been relentlessly attacking Ukraine’s energy capabilities in recent weeks, in the hope of cutting supplies of heat, light and water as the country prepares for a fourth winter of full-scale conflict. Russia’s defence ministry said it had shot down 116 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory, while there were unconfirmed reports on Telegram that Ukraine had hit an oil refinery in the city of Ryazan. The regional governor said a residential building had been damaged and drone debris had fallen on an “industrial facility”. Donald Trump is keen to put an end to the war, but there has so far been little sign the two sides are anywhere close to finding a common position. Talks between US and Ukrainian negotiators are due to continue for a third day in Miami on Saturday, after a meeting between Vladimir Putin, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Moscow earlier in the week. Washington’s plans involve Ukraine surrendering land in return for vague security guarantees and would be hard for Kyiv to accept in the current moment. There is also no indication that Russia is ready to sign a deal on Trump’s suggested terms. “The Russia-Ukraine thing has been a source of perennial frustration, I think, for the entire White House,” the US vice-president, JD Vance, said in an interview with NBC on Friday, reiterating that the administration had been surprised that the conflict was not easy to solve. European nations have been blindsided by some of the US efforts and have been scrambling to stay part of the process. On Saturday, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, tried to downplay the significance of the Trump administration’s new national security strategy, published a day earlier, which said Europe was facing “civilisational erasure” due to immigration and suggested the US should back rightwing forces on the continent. “The US is still our biggest ally,” said Kallas, speaking at a diplomatic conference in Qatar. “I think we haven’t always seen eye to eye on different topics, but I think the overall principle is still there. We are the biggest allies and we should stick together.”

Maduro says the real reason for Trump’s Venezuela fixation is oil – is he right?

Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, says the real motive behind the massive US military buildup in the Caribbean is oil: his country has the largest proven reserves in the world. The US state department denies this, insisting that the airstrikes on boats that have killed more than 80 people and the vast military deployment off South America are part of a campaign against drug trafficking. Either way, Donald Trump seems bent on regime change in Venezuela – a country whose main allies are China, Russia and Iran, and one that has endured a deep economic collapse that triggered the region’s largest migration crisis. However, Trump has proved happy to reach an understanding with authoritarian leaders elsewhere, and airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean are unlikely to have much impact on the flow of drugs – most of which enter the country through Mexico – leading critics of the US president to conclude that there must be another motive at work. Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro – who is himself in an increasingly bitter feud with Trump – has described the three-month campaign against Caracas as “a negotiation about oil”, arguing that Trump “is not thinking about democratising Venezuela, much less about drug trafficking”. But analysts familiar with how Venezuela’s oil sector operates say it is not that simple. “I think oil may be one of the motivations [of the military buildup], but not the main one. It’s just part of the picture,” said Francisco J Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, in Houston. First of all, “Venezuela is a very small player at this point,” he said. The country has almost a fifth of all known global reserves – but it accounts for less than 1% of world production. Most of Venezuela’s reserves are “heavy sour” crude, which is more difficult and expensive to extract. Meanwhile, its oil sector has been hamstrung by decades of corruption, mismanagement and underinvestment. Monaldi estimates that current output of just under 1m barrels a day could rise to 4m or even 5m a day – but doing so would require about $100bn in investment and would take at least 10 years. After a strike by oil workers in the early 2000s, Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, dismissed large numbers of workers at the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA) and consolidated government control of the company. His government later decreed that PDVSA must hold at least 51% ownership and operational control of all exploration fields, driving away multinationals that had long operated in the country, such as ConocoPhillips and Exxon-Mobil. Production then went into a steep decline, especially after the US, during Trump’s first term, imposed sanctions banning imports of Venezuelan oil. Joe Biden eased those restrictions in the hope that Maduro would allow a democratic transition, but after last year’s elections – widely believed to have been stolen by Maduro – Trump reinstated the sanctions Even during sanctions, however, the US-based oil giant Chevron never fully suspended its operations in Venezuela, maintaining them albeit at drastically reduced levels. Trump revoked Chevron’s licence, but reversed course in July, ordering that instead of being transferred to Maduro’s regime royalties should be used to cover operational costs and pay down a longstanding Venezuelan government debt to the US company. Although the Maduro regime’s lack of transparency is reflected in the oil sector, analysts estimate that PDVSA currently holds 50% of operations; Chevron, 25%; 10% is in joint ventures led by China; 10% by Russia; and 5% by European companies. Since Trump’s recent easing of restrictions, Chevron has been importing between 150,000 and 160,000 barrels a day to the US. “I believe the main beneficiary of a political change in Venezuela would be Chevron,” said José Ignacio Hernández, a legal scholar and researcher of Venezuela’s oil industry who works with the consultancy Aurora Macro Strategies. But Hernández, who was a member of Juan Guaidó’s team, when the opposition figurehead declared himself interim president in 2019, also rejects the idea that oil is the main focus of the US campaign. “The oil sector in Venezuela is destroyed … It’s not an attractive market in the short term, especially for a country like the US, which already has the world’s largest production,” he added. Hernández pointed to recent reports that during talks with US envoys, Maduro offered to open up all existing and future oil and gold projects to US companies. “If Trump wanted to strike a monopoly deal over Venezuela’s oil, he would have accepted Maduro’s offer,” said Hernández. Monaldi said that even if there were a change of regime and a US-backed candidate took office, the final decision on whether to invest in Venezuela’s oil would ultimately lie with the companies, which would weigh political and economic stability above all. “Venezuela has massive resources, a lot of infrastructure and fields that are already developed; one would not go there and explore from scratch … But, at the same time, there are tons of potential obstacles: the political risks, the country’s history, the fact that the oil is less valuable,” he said. “So the obstacles are mostly above ground.”

Harbadus attacks Andvaria: cyber war game tests Nato defences against Russia

Russia and China were barely mentioned, but they were the threats in everyone’s minds in Tallinn this week, where Nato hosted its largest ever cyber war game. The goal of the war game, conducted 130 miles from the Russian border in Estonia, was to test the alliance’s readiness for a rolling enemy assault on civilian and military digital infrastructure. It involved hundreds of multinational troops, representing 29 Nato nations and seven allies, including Ukraine, hunkered down in CyberRange14, a facility established by the Estonian ministry of defence in the wake of a crippling Russian cyber attack in 2007, where Nato has run preparedness exercises since 2014. Those involved looked drained as the seven-day cyberbattle ended. They had endured simulated sudden power blackouts, jammed satellites, blocked ports and public chaos. Their combat fatigues stayed spotless as they fought malware, not missiles. But even against a fictitious enemy, cyberwar was “very stressful” and “quite exhausting”, they said. War doesn’t come much foggier than in the cyber realm, which, alongside space, is rapidly becoming as critical as land, sea and air to the security of Nato and its allies. The players had to focus on responding to mysterious complex computer collapses in their own countries while also sharing fixes globally with more than 1,000 other military and civilian personnel engaged from Tokyo to Texas. It was, said one participant, like “juggling a football, solving a Rubik’s cube and talking with your neighbour” all at the same time. The event was set using storylines premised on Nato’s northern defence forces responding to threats to an ally, Andvaria, from its belligerent neighbour, Harbadus. The struggle was over an imaginary island called Icebergen in the north Atlantic, but the theatre of war was international because Harbadus supported its hostile aims by weaving a complex web of global cyber-mischief. As the game reached its denouement, the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, accused Moscow of “increasingly reckless behaviour … such as violating our airspace, conducting cyberattacks”. Russia increased cyber-attacks against Nato states by 25% in the year to June, according to analysis by Microsoft, whose widely installed software affords it considerable insight into digital threats. Most of these were intended to allow espionage but Russia has also been targeting vulnerable small businesses to create bridgeheads for larger attacks. Meanwhile, Nato has attributed attacks against allies and Ukraine to Russia’s GRU military intelligence, and has accused China of “malign hybrid and cyber operations”. Last weekend the chair of the alliance’s military committee, Adm Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, said it was considering “being more aggressive or being proactive instead of reactive” to Russian hybrid warfare. In Tallinn, where rows of monitors and big screens are clustered around large racks of neon-flashing microprocessors, the scenarios started small but quickly snowballed. The Swedes began by dealing with an injection of malware into an unclassified email system used in their military’s base in Lithuania; soon they were unable to support logistics to the forward operating position. Worse was to follow for them and many other players. “Other allies had similar, parallel attacks,” said Maj Tobias Malm, from Sweden. “[Next] we had the satellite system.” Next, the storyliners – whose task it is to monitor the process and introduce new challenges for the participants as the game unfolds – triggered a multistage attack on a satellite internet provider, the kind offered by Elon Musk’s Starlink. That knocked out communications between space and Earth, with cascading crippling effects on intelligence and surveillance, power-grid monitoring, military and civilian GPS, banking and military coordination. When it began, some participants detected unusual behaviour on the network, while others picked up intelligence – but no single country had the full picture. They started seeing anomalies on the dashboard controlling satellites, connections going on and off, and events spiralling, said Ezio Cerrato, a deputy exercise director. “They completely lose control … right to the point of the wiping of the system,” he said. “It shows how a problem in space can quickly affect every domain on Earth.” In another scenario the enemy uploaded malware into fuel management systems, forcing the war gamers to scramble to ration remaining supplies and disconnect networks to cauterise the digital wound. Resisting the human urge to narrowly focus on the cyber-attack in front of each country was part of the challenge. It was vital for the participants to rapidly communicate with allies, raise warnings and share fixes. “There is no boundary in cyberspace,” said the exercise director, Commander Brian Caplan, a US naval officer. “Adversaries can go into one nation and pivot into another nation. Something that affects one nation can have a second- or third-order effect in other nations. So it’s really important that these nations are communicating, building that trust, that relationship.” Nato also revealed it was experimenting with an AI-powered chatbot to help human cyberwarriors cope with the sheer complexity of cyberwar. It is being built using an OpenAI model to provide commanders with a rapid way to understand what is happening in a rapidly developing scenario and even suggests steps they could take. It was not yet in use, even in the war games, but had shown “very strong potential to support decision-making, for situational awareness and command and control”, said Alberto Domingo, the cyberspace technical director at Nato’s strategy and military command. He stressed it was undergoing careful checks on the accuracy of its outputs. As the exercise continued, big screens displayed rolling feeds styled as online news headlines about the shifting crisis, with alarming headlines detailing the mayhem the fictitious enemy was sowing. “Fake train schedules cause chaos,” read one headline. Multiple states of emergency were declared in regions hit by power blackouts. A tranche of classified Nato documents had been “dumped”, while allied military rotations had been disrupted by power grid outages in Denmark. Then a leak revealed a plan for a secret naval base, destabilising the picture further. The participants were faced with a challenge wholly unfamiliar to their predecessors a generation earlier: what happens when a conflict involves the spread of fake news on social media? Military lawyers were on hand to advise on the legality of what Nato and its allies could do in response to cyber-attacks, which are often launched not directly by hostile militaries but by shadow proxies and target civilian, not solely military, assets. “How do you cross those streams?” said US air force’s Maj Tyler Smith, one of the lawyers involved. “We are working through those problems now … [to see] can we put agreements in place beforehand and … not have to do things on the go?” But after a week of wrestling with the waves of cyber-aggression, a crucial question remained: was Nato winning? The answer was yes, but with bumps along the way, one official said. Another offered a little more reassurance, for now at least: “I see people surviving at the end of the day.”

Ukraine war briefing: Progress depends on Russia taking peace talks seriously, say Washington and Kyiv

Ukrainian and US officials will hold a third straight day of talks in Miami on Saturday, with Washington saying the two sides agree that “real progress” would depend on Russia’s willingness to end the war. Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have been meeting top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov and Andrii Hnatov, the chief of staff of Kyiv’s armed forces. “Both parties agreed that real progress toward any agreement depends on Russia’s readiness to show serious commitment to long-term peace, including steps toward de-escalation and cessation of killings,” said a summary of the talks. The US and Ukrainian officials “also agreed on the framework of security arrangements and discussed necessary deterrence capabilities to sustain a lasting peace”. The talks in Florida come after Witkoff and Kushner met Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Tuesday to discuss a US plan to end the conflict but the Russian president rejected parts of the proposal and threatened that Russia was “ready” for war if Europe started it. Emmanuel Macron has said there is “no mistrust” between Europe and the US, a day after a report claimed the French president had warned privately there was a risk Washington could betray Ukraine, reports Oliver Holmes. “Unity between Americans and Europeans on the Ukrainian issue is essential,” Macron said during a visit to China on Friday. “And I say it again and again, we need to work together.” The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said they held “very constructive” talks with the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, on Friday over an EU plan to use Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine, which Belgium has so far refused to endorse. The EC, along with most European governments, prefers a “reparations loan” using Russian state assets immobilised in the European Union due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We agreed that time is of the essence given the current geopolitical situation,” von der Leyen said after the meeting in Brussels. Moscow’s ambassador to Germany, meanwhile, warned that the plan to use frozen Russian assets would have “far-reaching consequences” for the EU. “Any operation with sovereign Russian assets without Russia’s consent constitutes theft,” Sergey Nechaev claimed. A railway hub near Kyiv was hit during a large-scale Russian drone and missile attack that damaged the depot and railway carriages, Ukraine’s state railway company said on Saturday. No casualties were reported from the overnight attack in the town of Fastiv. Ukrzaliznytsia said it was forced to cancel several suburban trains near the capital and the city of Chernihiv in north-eastern Ukraine. Emergency services reported a fire, while also citing an attack on infrastructure in the Chernihiv region. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones targeted Russia’s Ryazan and Voronezh regions overnight, causing damage but no casualties, local governors said. Pavel Malkov said the Ryazan attack sparked a fire on the roof of a multi-storey residential building. Russian drones struck a house in central Ukraine overnight to Friday, killing a 12-year-old boy, officials said, while long-range Ukrainian strikes reportedly targeted a Russian port and an oil refinery. In Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, the Russian drone attack destroyed a house where the boy was killed and two women injured, said the regional military administration head, Vladyslav Haivanenko. In Russia, Ukrainian drones attacked a port in the Krasnodar region on the border with Ukraine, sparking a fire at the Temryuk seaport and damaging port infrastructure, officials said. Ukrainian drones also aimed deeper inside Russia, attacking the city of Syzran on the Volga river, said the mayor, Sergei Volodchenkov, without providing more details. Unconfirmed media reports said Ukrainian drones hit an oil refinery in Syzran. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said a Ukrainian drone struck and damaged a high-rise building in Grozny, capital of Russia’s southern Chechnya region, and vowed to retaliate within a week. The drone had caused no casualties, he said on Friday. Vladimir Putin has told the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, that Russia is ready to continue “uninterrupted” shipments of oil to India, signalling a defiant stance to the US as the two leaders met in Delhi and affirmed that their ties were “resilient to external pressure”. The statement, made on Friday after the annual India-Russia summit, appeared to be directed at western countries – particularly the US – that have attempted to pressure New Delhi into scaling back its ties to Moscow, reports Hannah Ellis-Petersen.