From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: In the most high-profile gesture of protest so far made by a Russian diplomat over the war in Ukraine, a counselor in Moscow’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva resigned on Monday.
“Never have I been so ashamed of my country,” Boris Bondarev, a mid-ranking official, wrote in an email to diplomats. He described the invasion as a crime against both Ukraine and the Russian people, and told The New York Times that the Kremlin “basically got everything wrong.”
In Davos, Switzerland, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed global business leaders at the World Economic Forum, which Russian diplomats and oligarchs were barred from attending.
Zelensky urged leaders to establish safe corridors for Ukrainian grain exports and pressed for a full embargo on Russian oil and trade — as well as the banning of all Russian banks from global financial networks.
He also encouraged businesses to flee Russia and set up shop in Ukraine, promising a postwar environment scrubbed of corruption and untainted by association with “war crimes
