Danish PM: India should influence Russia to stop Ukraine war 

Copenhagen (AP) — Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Tuesday urged her visiting Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, to try to influence Russia to end the war in Ukraine.

“Putin has to stop this war,” Frederiksen said, adding immediately, “I hope that India will influence Russia.”

India’s neutral stance in the war has raised concerns in the West and earned praise from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who lauded India for judging “the situation in its entirety, not just in a one-sided way.”

Frederiksen later said that the West should offer India an alternative to Russia.

“In fact, it is quite obvious that we in the West have a completely unequivocal interest in getting India as close to us as at all possible,”” Frederiksen told reporters.

″(We need) to strengthen our cooperation with other democracies and it does not matter where those democracies are located,” she said. “We need to strengthen our cooperation, especially because there are obviously some very big players who do not recognize democracy at home or globally.”