On his first foreign trip this year, Putin calls for ex-Soviet states to expand influence

The Associated Press

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on his first trip abroad since being indicted by the International Criminal Court in March, has Friday called on an alliance of former Soviet states to expand relations with non-Western countries. In an address to the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Putin on Friday also defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to prevent war, and blamed the United States as an integral cause of the current war between Israel and Hamas fighters. His comments did not break ground but the trip was significant as his first venture outside Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine after the ICC indictment for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.