Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to justify his war in Ukraine as legal under international law at his flagship economic forum on Friday. Sitting beside him on the stage, a key ally diplomatically disagreed.
After Putin argued he was protecting Russian-speakers in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk peoples’ republics of eastern Ukraine, which Russia had recognized as independent days before the invasion, moderator Margarita Simonyan, head of the Kremlin-funded RT TV, pressed Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on whether he supported Russia’s view.
He didn’t.
