The United States said on Monday it will skip Vladimir Putin’s swearing-in ceremony in Russia, TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.
"We will not have a representative at his inauguration... You can draw your own conclusions," Matthew Miller, State Department spokesperson, told a daily briefing.
"We certainly did not consider that election free and fair but he is the president of Russia and he is going to continue in that capacity," Miller said when asked by TURAN whether Washington considered Putin as a legitimate president.
The Kremlin in March claimed Putin's "landslide victory" in a presidential election for his fifth term, just weeks after his most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, died in jail.
A senior Kremlin official was quoted by Russian media on Monday as saying the heads of all the foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow had been invited to attend today's inauguration.
The EU over the weekend announced that the bloc's ambassador to Moscow would not attend the ceremony, in keeping with the position of most of the bloc's member states. In the meantime, about seven EU member states are reportedly expected to send a representative, according to media reports.
The inauguration comes about 2.5 years after Putin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a Monday statement that Kyiv "sees no legal grounds" for recognising Putin as the democratically elected and legitimate president.
Today's ceremony, Ukraine said, sought to create "the illusion of legality for the nearly lifelong stay in power of a person who has turned the Russian Federation into an aggressor state and the ruling regime into a dictatorship."
Politics
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On 23 November at the COP29 climate conference in Baku, eco-activists from different countries held a protest action against the failure of countries to agree on climate finance.
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On the eve of the closing of the COP29 climate conference in Baku, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has drawn attention to the criminal cases of journalists detained in Azerbaijan.
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Negotiations at the 29th session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Baku have been extended until November 24, a source in the UNFCCC Secretariat told the Turan news agency. According to the source, participants aim to finalize and sign the concluding documents by that date.
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According to the Turkish newspaper Sabah, officials from the Istanbul Prosecutor's Office's Anti-Smuggling Unit have detained an Azerbaijani citizen with a large shipment of gold. The detention took place near the Vadi İstanbul shopping center in the Sarıyer district, where a taxi was stopped. During the search, 70 kg of gold was found. The Azerbaijani citizen in the vehicle claimed ownership of the cargo and also stated that he was a diplomat. The investigation by the prosecutor's office is ongoing, reports Sabah newspaper. The media outlet does not disclose the name of the "diplomat," only his initials – M.G.Ş. The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs has declined to comment on the situation.
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