Russian President Vladimir Putin met Sunday with China’s new defense minister, Gen. Li Shangfu, who is visiting Russia on his first official foreign trip. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also took part in the meeting.
The Washington Post reported last week that a leaked U.S. intercept showed that Russian intelligence claimed Beijing had agreed to send Moscow weapons to help its war in Ukraine. China denied the allegations.
Meanwhile Sunday, Ukrainians were still shoveling away debris by hand at the site of a rocket strike two days earlier in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, which killed 15 people, including a 2-year-old boy. They were unable to use heavy machinery in the damaged apartment building, one of at least 50 destroyed in the attack, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The 2-year-old “was alive when we took him from the rubble, but he died in the ambulance,” Vitalii Didyk, a 26-year-old car mechanic who was sifting through debris to find his friend, said outside the apartment complex Sunday. “We were hoping to find both of them alive.”
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Breaking up with Russia is hard for many Western firms, despite war: Hundreds of Western companies said they would exit the Russian market after the invasion of Ukraine, but the majority of them remain, watchdogs say. The Western companies that stayed are often heavily reliant on Russian business, with the losses of an exit perhaps outweighing possible damage to their brands of staying in the country, Robyn Dixon reports.
Products from brands such as BMW and Apple remain available in Russia after the companies announced plans to suspend or end operations in the country, though in some cases, this is because of unofficial imports. Ukraine has also named 19 other foreign firms still operating in Russia as sponsors of the war. “There are a lot of companies that did nothing or still continue to wait,” said Andrii Onopriienko, director of the Leave Russia Project at the Kyiv School of Economics.
