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Russia on Wednesday said it is ‘interested in ending military operations’ in Ukraine if its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agrees to 'conditions' put forward by Moscow at negotiations, Russian media RT reported quoting Kremlin.

The Kremlin also said that it has halted the attack on Kyiv as a ‘goodwill gesture’ to promote peace talks. “Withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region is a gesture of goodwill to create conditions for negotiations, during which serious decisions are possible,” the Kremlin said.

Russia has removed about two-thirds of its troops from around Kyiv, mostly sent back to Belarus with plans to redeploy elsewhere in Ukraine, a senior US official said on Monday. "They have about a third left of the forces that they had arrayed against Kyiv," the official told news agency AFP.

Union external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will reply to the debate over Ukraine in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, a news agency reported. The Lok Sabha is discussing the Ukraine situation under rule 193, the notice for which was given by RSP MP NK Premachandran and Congress MP Manish Tewari.

The members of parliament are keen to know the situation in Ukraine and India's political stand on Russia and Ukraine. The MPs also want to understand how the government is planning to accommodate the Indian students who were brought from the war-hit country via special planes.

Many students who were in their later years of college for medical education and see their future in a limbo with the college infrastructure completely destroyed in Ukraine.

Sri Lanka’s parliament convened on Tuesday for the first time after a state of emergency was imposed. The country of 22 million people has been suffering from a shortage of food, fuel, and prolonged power cuts lasting up to 13 hours, triggered by a lack of foreign exchange that has stalled imports.

Opposition parties and even members of Rajapaksa’s ruling alliance rejected the move for a unity government, setting the stage for a test of strength in parliament.

Police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters who gathered outside Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s private residence in Tangalle, in southern Sri Lanka. Mahinda, the president’s elder brother, was away at the time in Colombo, the country’s commercial capital, where peaceful protests continued into the night.

The BJP is sounding the poll bugle in Telangana come April 14 with the second leg of its Praja Sangrama Yatra to star a host of central leaders, from party chief J P Nadda to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The party pranna pramukhs are fanned out on the ground to enrol new members while a dedicated team of strategists and data analysts is camped in Hyderabad to coordinate the BJP campaign.

With the Congress floundering, the BJP sees an opportunity in the state's two-party political arena. It sounded its intent with the Huzurabad bypoll win of November 2021, where the BJP candidate stunned the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi's nominee. The TRS's nervousness is apparent in the scaling up of its campaign against the BJP, including at the Centre, where it has shed its neutrality to take on the Narendra Modi government.

The J&K unit of Congress on Monday staged a protest against the delimitation commission urging the visiting team to provide sufficient time to the party so that it can highlight the “irregularities” in its draft report in a proper way.

The protest led by Pradesh Congress Committee president GA Mir was staged at the beginning of the public hearing of the delimitation commission on its report which was made public last month.

The commission headed by Justice (Retired) Ranjana Prakash Desai reached here on a three-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday. The delegation started interacting with delegations from across the Jammu region on Monday morning and they are scheduled to visit Srinagar later in the day for a similar exercise on Tuesday.