Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, discussed the latest escalation between India and Pakistan in the wake of last month’s terror attack, and Russian-Indian cooperation in a phone call on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said, TASS reports.
The two top diplomats "discussed pressing issues of Russian-Indian cooperation as well as the escalation between India and Pakistan following the terror attack near Pahalgam," the ministry said in a statement. "Lavrov called for finding political and diplomatic solutions to the dispute between New Delhi and Islamabad on a bilateral basis in line with the 1972 Simla Agreement and the 1999 Lahore Declaration," the statement reads.
Also, Lavrov and Jaishankar discussed the schedule of upcoming high-level and summit meetings, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
On April 22, armed men killed 25 Indians and one Nepalese national and wounded many more with machine gun fire in the popular tourist town of Pahalgam in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. According to media reports, Indian intelligence agencies allegedly found evidence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was involved in the terrorist attack committed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group (outlawed in Russia). After the attack, India almost halved its embassy staff in Pakistan, suspended an agreement with Islamabad on the allocation of water resources, declared the military advisors of the Pakistani diplomatic mission in India personae non gratae, and also suspended the issuance of visas to Pakistani citizens.
