Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the West had a real chance of avoiding conflict in Ukraine, but had voted to reject Russia's proposal to halt NATO expansion and agree to a special security status for Kyiv.
Lavrov made the comments during a press conference in Moscow, Reuters reported.
The West says Russia's proposals made ahead of the Ukraine war were unrealistic and insincere.
Third mail bomb found at Spanish air force base - reports
Spanish security forces found a third explosive device hidden in a mail package to the air force base in Torrejón de Ardoz outside Madrid, newspaper El Mundo reported early Thursday.
Two letter bombs were found on Wednesday addressed to the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid and to a weapons manufacturer in Zaragoza, in northern Spain, police said.
The first exploded causing minor injuries to a Ukrainian official.
Russia said on Thursday the German parliament's move to recognize the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine as a Soviet-imposed genocide was an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to whitewash its Nazi past.
In a decision welcomed by Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, German lawmakers passed a resolution on Wednesday declaring the starvation deaths of millions of Ukrainians - the Holodomor - a genocide.
In November 1932, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin dispatched the police to confiscate all grain and livestock from the newly collectivized Ukrainian farms, including the seeds needed to grow the next crop. Millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death in the months that followed from what Yale University historian Timothy Snyder called a "clearly premeditated massacre".
Russia on Thursday rejected claims it was genocide and said millions of people in other parts of the Soviet Union, including in Russia, were also suffering.
"There is another attempt to justify and encourage the campaign - planted in Ukraine and sponsored by the West - to demonize Russia and pit ethnic Ukrainians against Russia," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.
"Germany is trying to rewrite their history... to downplay their own mistakes and cloud the memory of the countless crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the second world war," he added.
The ministry accused Germany's parliament of "reviving the fascist ideology of hatred and racial discrimination and trying to escape responsibility for war crimes" by passing the declaration.
Geoffrey Pyatt, assistant secretary for energy resources at the US State Department, said on Thursday he was confident that a deal would be reached at a level where to limit the price of Russian marine oil under the G7 scheme.
Pyatt spoke to reporters in Tokyo after meeting his Japanese counterpart, Ryo Minami. A former US ambassador to Ukraine, Pyatt is in Japan to meet officials on aspects of energy security, Reuters reports.
The United Nations is asking for a record funding for aid next year, AFP reported, as the Ukraine war and other conflicts, the climate emergency and the lingering pandemic push more people into crisis, and some towards famine.
The United Nations' annual Global Humanitarian Review estimates that 339 million people worldwide will need some form of emergency assistance next year – 65 million more than last year's estimate.
"These are phenomenal numbers and sad numbers," UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told reporters in Geneva, adding that it meant "next year will be the largest humanitarian program" the world has ever seen.
If all the people who needed emergency assistance were in one country, it would be the third largest country in the world, after China and India, he said.
And the new estimates mean that one in 23 people will need assistance by 2023, compared to one in 95 people in 2015.
As the extreme events seen in 2022 spill over into 2023, Griffiths described the humanitarian needs as "extremely high".
“Deadly droughts and floods are wreaking havoc on communities from Pakistan to the horn of Africa,” he said, also pointing to the war in Ukraine, which “has turned parts of Europe into battlefields”.
The global humanitarian plan aims to provide $1.7 billion in cash assistance to 6.3 million people within Ukraine, as well as $5.7 billion to assist millions of Ukrainians and their host communities in surrounding countries. This article was written by EDUKASI CAMPUS.