Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday visited command posts of the Kremlin’s forces fighting in Ukraine in an apparent effort to rally his troops as the war approaches its 14th month and Kyiv readies a possible counteroffensive with Western-supplied weapons. A video released by the Kremlin and broadcast by Russian state television showed Putin arriving by helicopter at the command post for Russian forces in the southern Kherson region and afterward flying to the headquarters of the Russian National Guard of the eastern Luhansk region Dressed in a dark suit, and in an apparent demonstration of authority, Putin appeared to chair the meetings with his military top brass. It was his second trip in two months to the Russian-occupied territories in the neighboring country. The locations of the military headquarters in the Kherson and Luhansk regions weren’t disclosed, so it wasn’t possible to assess how close they are to the front line. Also Read:G7 'committed to' intensifying sanctions against Russia, to support Ukraine 'for as long as it takes' Russia’s war in Ukraine has turned into a stalemate amid heavy fighting in the country’s east, particularly around the town of Bakhmut, which for 8½ months has been the stage for the war’s longest and bloodiest fight. In both locations, Putin congratulated the military on Orthodox Easter, which was celebrated Sunday and presented them with icons. Russia annexed the Kherson and Luhansk regions along with the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions in September in a move that was rejected by much of the world as illegal. It was impossible to independently verify the authenticity of the video footage. Also Read: China protests US sanctioning of firms dealing with Russia Last month, Putin visited the Russian-held Sea of Azov port city of Mariupol, which was captured by Russian troops in May after two months of fierce fighting. Putin’s trips to the military headquarters come as Ukraine is preparing for a new counteroffensive to reclaim the occupied territories. Ukrainian officials have said they’re buying time by depleting Russian forces in the battle while Kyiv prepares a counteroffensive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued that if Russia wins the Bakhmut battle, it could allow Putin to begin building international support for a deal that would require Ukraine to make unacceptable compromises to end the war. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Associated Press in an interview in Kyiv that Ukraine’s allies are helping the government to achieve the level of technical equipment necessary to launch the attack, delivering heavy armored vehicles and ammunition. He expressed confidence that Ukraine will be able to return all its occupied territories. “We will defeat Russia,” he said. “If you have a strong inner spirit, you will definitely win. And we always had it strong. This is something that always annoyed the Russians.”

Foreign ministers from the world’s largest nations are looking to address the war in Ukraine and its impact on global energy and food security when they meet in Indonesia this week. Yet instead of providing unity, the talks may well exacerbate existing divides over the Ukraine conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi are set to attend the Group of 20 meeting in the Indonesian resort of Bali, which will set the stage for a summit of G-20 leaders at the same venue in November. It will mark the first time Blinken and Lavrov have been in the same room, let alone the same city, since January. There’s no indication the two will meet separately, but even without a one-on-one with Lavrov, Blinken could find himself in some difficult discussions. The State Department announced Tuesday that Blinken will hold separate talks with Wang at a time when already extremely tense U.S.-China relations have been worsened by Beijing’s friendly ties with Moscow. And, unlike in recent leader-level meetings with NATO partners and other like-minded partners, Blinken will find himself among diplomats from countries wary of the U.S. approach to Ukraine and concerned about its impact on them. U.S. officials say that aside from Wang, Blinken will have bilateral talks in Bali with counterparts from countries that have not seen eye to eye with the West on the Russian invasion, notably India, which has increased purchases of Russian oil even as the U.S. and Europe have tried to choke off that revenue stream for Moscow. In announcing that Blinken would meet with Wang in Bali, the State Department had little to say about the possibility of him seeing Lavrov, whom the U.S. has shunned since the Ukraine invasion in February. The department said there would not be a formal meeting between Blinken and Lavrov, whom U.S. officials accuse of a lack of seriousness before, during and after the invasion of Ukraine. “We would like to see the Russians be serious about diplomacy,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said. “We have not seen that yet. We would like to have the Russians give us a reason to meet on a bilateral basis with them, with Foreign Minister Lavrov, but the only thing we have seen emanate from Moscow is more brutality and aggression against the people and country of Ukraine.” The Biden administration maintains there can be no “business as usual” with Moscow as long as the war continues. But neither Price nor other U.S. officials could rule out the possibility of a chance Blinken-Lavrov encounter in Bali, which would be their first since they last met in Geneva in January. Price declined to discuss what he called the “choreography” of the G-20. Like almost all recent international diplomatic gatherings, the Bali meeting will be overshadowed by Ukraine. But unlike the Western-dominated G-7 and NATO summits held in Europe last week, the G-20 will have a different flavor. China and many other participants, including India, South Africa and Brazil, have resisted signing onto U.S. and European full-throated opposition to Russia’s invasion. Some have outright refused Western entreaties to join condemnations of the conflict, which the U.S. and its allies see as an attack on the international rules-based order that has prevailed since the end of World War II. Thus, there may be difficulty in achieving a G-20 consensus on efforts to mitigate the food and energy impacts of the Ukraine conflict, particularly with China and Russia in the room. That will not stop the U.S. from trying, according to American officials. They want to see the G-20 put its weight behind a U.N.-backed initiative to free up some 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain for export mainly to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. ”We would like the G-20 to hold Russia accountable and insist that it support this initiative,” said Ramin Toloui, the assistant secretary of state for Economic and Business Affairs. While a variety of nations, including G-20 host Indonesia, are pushing for Russia to ease its blockade in the Black Sea to allow grain to enter the global market, they remain wary of antagonizing Moscow and its friends in Beijing. And that divergence has set the stage for a potentially contentious preparatory meeting ahead of November’s G-20 summit amid questions about whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend. The U.S. has made clear it does not believe Putin should attend but has urged Indonesia to invite Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy should the Russian leader participate. In the meantime, the U.S. and China are separately at severe odds over numerous issues ranging from trade and human rights to Taiwan and disputes in the South China Sea. Blinken’s meeting with Wang was announced after China’s trade envoy with Washington expressed concern about U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports in a call with with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Neither side gave any indication that progress has been made on the matter and U.S. officials downplayed the chances for any breakthroughs in the short term. In his meeting with Wang, U.S. officials said Blinken would instead be pressing to keep lines of communications open and creating “guardrails” to guide the world’s two largest economies as they navigate increasingly complex and potentially explosive matters. “It’s absolutely critical that we have open lines of communication with our Chinese counterparts, particularly at the senior level ... to ensure that we prevent any miscalculation that could lead inadvertently to conflict and confrontation,” said Daniel Kritenbrink, the top U.S. diplomat for Asia. From Bali, Blinken will travel to Bangkok, Thailand, to make up for a trip to the Thai capital that he was forced to cancel late last year due to COVID-19. In addition to Thai officials, Blinken will meet with refugees who have fled ongoing political violence and repression in Myanmar since a coup toppled a civilian government in February 2021.

Because he’ll shortly be deployed as a soldier on the battlefields of Ukraine, Serhiy Lipko and Anastasia Zukhvala chose to marry first, like a growing number of couples being torn asunder by war with Russia. Like others, their nuptials were rushed and smaller than they would have been during peacetime, with just a few dozen close friends and family. She wore a simple crown of blue flowers in her hair. And then, because laughter can be medicinal and because Lipko was building a career as a comic before the defense of his country called, they headed to a stand-up comedy club in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. There, with his new wife watching from the wings, he took the stage in olive-green fatigues and soon had the crowd in stitches with close-to-the-bone humor about army and married life. He joked that military training with NATO instructors had been a great opportunity for him to practice his English, and how nervous he’d been about handling expensive military gear, for fear of breaking it. The war isn’t remotely funny, but Ukrainians are learning to laugh about the awfulness of it all. Not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to — to stay sane in the brutality that has killed tens of thousands of people, is upending Ukraine, millions of lives and the world order as it rages on front lines in the east and south of the country. Read: Zelenskyy’s unlikely journey, from comedy to wartime leader Russian President Vladimir Putin and his troops, especially dead and wounded ones, are favorite targets of dark Ukrainian wartime humor. But there are red lines: Ukrainian dead aren’t laughed about and the grimmest battles, among them the brutal siege of Mariupol and the port city’s Azovstal steelworks, are far too raw for jokes. The same is true of atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere. “Tragedies cannot and will never be the object of humor,” said Zukhvala, who also works as a stand-up comic, as she and Lipko hugged with the tenderness of newlyweds after his show and scooped up armfuls of bouquets, wondering aloud how they’d find space for them at home. “This is an absolutely crazy time, beyond ordinary experience,” she said. “Our life now is made of paradoxes, and it can even be funny.” Ukraine’s most famous comedian is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now the country’s president, elected in 2019. In the TV comedy series “Servant of the People,” the former stand-up comic and actor played a lovable high school teacher who accidentally becomes president — before he later actually became one for real. But Zelenskyy hasn’t had much cause for comedy since the Feb. 24 invasion thrust him into the role of wartime leader. His daily video addresses to the nation are often grim and forceful.

It now costs Ayan Hassan Abdirahman twice as much as it did just a few months ago to buy the wheat flour she uses to make breakfast each day for her 11 children in Somalia’s capital. Nearly all the wheat sold in Somalia comes from Ukraine and Russia, which have halted exports through the Black Sea since Moscow waged war on its neighbor on Feb. 24. The timing could not be worse: The U.N. has warned that an estimated 13 million people were facing severe hunger in the Horn of Africa region as a result of a persistent drought. Abdirahman has been trying to make do by substituting sorghum, another more readily available grain, in her flatbread. Inflation, though, means the price of the cooking oil she still needs to prepare it has skyrocketed too — a jar that once cost $16 is now selling for $45 in the markets of Mogadishu. “The cost of living is high nowadays, making it difficult for families even to afford flour and oil,” she says. Read: Plane wreckage found in Nepal mountains, 14 bodies recovered Haji Abdi Dhiblawe, a businessman who imports wheat flour into Somalia, fears the situation will only worsen: There is also a looming shortage of shipping containers to bring food supplies in from elsewhere at the moment. “Somalis have no place to grow wheat, and we are not even familiar with how to grow it,” he says. “Our main concern now is what will the future hold for us when we currently run out of supplies.” Another 18 million people are facing severe hunger in the Sahel, the part of Africa just below the Sahara Desert where farmers are enduring their worst agricultural production in more than a decade. The U.N. World Food Program says food shortages could worsen when the lean season arrives in late summer.

As Moscow’s forces bog down in Ukraine, many young Russians of draft age are increasingly jittery about the prospect of being sent into combat. Making those fears particularly acute is an annual spring conscription that begins Friday and aims to round up 134,500 men for a one-year tour of military duty. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu pledged at a meeting of the military brass this week that the new recruits won’t be sent to front lines or “hot spots.” But the statement was met with skepticism by many in Russia who remember the separatist wars in the southern republic of Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s, when thousands of poorly trained young men were killed. Read:Russians leave Chernobyl; Ukraine braces for renewed attacks “I don’t trust them when they say they won’t send conscripts into combat. They lie all the time,” said Vladislav, a 22-year-old who is completing his studies and fears he could face the draft immediately after graduation. He asked that his last name not be used, fearing reprisals. All Russian men aged 18-27 must serve one year in the military, but a large share avoid the draft for health reasons or deferments granted to university students. The share of men who avoid the draft is particularly big in Moscow and other major cities. Even as President Vladimir Putin and his officials say that conscripts aren’t involved in what Russian authorities call “the special military operation in Ukraine,” many appeared to have been taken prisoner during its initial days. Videos emerged from Ukraine of captured Russians, some being shown calling their parents, and were put on social media. The mother of one of the prisoners said she recognized her 20-year-old draftee son in a video even though he was shown blindfolded. “I recognized him by his lips, by his chin. You know, I would have recognized him by his fingers,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Lyubov, for security reasons. “I breastfed him. I raised him.” The Defense Ministry was forced to walk back its statements and acknowledge that some conscripts were sent to Ukraine “by mistake” and were taken prisoner while serving with a supply unit away from the front. There have been allegations that before the invasion, some conscripts were forced to sign military contracts that allowed them to be sent into combat — duty that is normally reserved only for volunteers in the army. Some of the captured soldiers said they were told by their commanding officers that they were going to a military exercise but suddenly found themselves fighting in Ukraine. Lyudmila Narusova, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, spoke in early March about an entire company of 100 men who were forced to sign such contracts and were sent into the combat zone — and only four survived. Military officials did not comment on her allegation. Svetlana Agapitova, the human rights commissioner in St. Petersburg, said Wednesday that relatives of seven soldiers had written to her to complain the men had been forced to sign the contract and sent to Ukraine against their will. She said two of them already had been brought back to Russia. In recent years, the Kremlin has emphasized increasing the share of volunteer contract soldiers as it sought to modernize the army and improve its readiness. The force of 1 million now has over 400,000 contract soldiers, including 147,000 in the infantry. If the war drags on, those numbers could be insufficient to sustain the operations. The Kremlin could eventually face a choice: Keep fighting with a limited number of troops and see the offensive stall, or try to replenish the ranks with a broader draft and risk public outrage that could fuel anti-draft sentiment and destabilize the political situation. Such a scenario occurred during the fighting in Chechnya. Dmitry, a 25-year-old IT expert, has a deferment that should keep him out of the draft for medical reasons. But he’s still nervous like many others, fearing authorities could abruptly waive some deferments to bolster the military. Read:Russians leave Chernobyl site as fighting rages elsewhere “I hate the war. I think it’s a total disaster,” said Dmitry, who also asked that he not be identified by has last name, fearing reprisals. “I fear that the government could change the rules and I could face the draft. They also were saying for months that they wouldn’t attack Ukraine, so why should I trust what they say about the draft now?” Proposed legislation would facilitate the draft by allowing military recruiters to call up conscripts more easily, but the bill has been put on hold for now. Still, it added to the public’s anxiety. Alexei Tabalov, a lawyer who advises conscripts, said medical panels at recruitment offices often admit youths who should be exempt from service because of illness. Now, he added, their attitudes could grow even tougher. “It’s quite probable that doctors may shut their eyes to conscripts’ illnesses and declare them fit for military duty,” Tabalov said. In addition to lowering the medical standard for draftees, there are fears that the government could try to impose some sort of martial law that would ban Russian men from leaving the country and, like Ukraine, force them to fight. “We have received a lot of calls from people fearing mobilization,” Tabalov said. “People now are afraid of everything in this situation. No one even thought before about the need to analyze the law on mobilization.” The Kremlin has strongly denied any such plans, and military officials insist the army has enough contract soldiers to serve in Ukraine. Still, many Russians remain skeptical of the officials’ denials, given their track record. “What kind of trust could there be if Putin says one day that conscripts will not be sent there ... and then the Defense Ministry recognizes that they were there?” Tabalov asked. An existing law allows for a 21-month alternative civil service in hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities for those who view military duty as incompatible with their beliefs, but military conscription offices often broadly ignore requests for such service. After the war began, Tabalov said his group saw a large increase in inquiries about the alternative service law, which is vaguely phrased and allows military officials to easily turn down applications. “We are worried that in the current militarist mood, military conscription offices can take a tougher attitude and reject appeals for the alternative civil service,” he said.