India on Wednesday abstained from voting on a draft resolution in the United Nations General Assembly to condemn Russia’s annexation of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine and the referendums held there.

The resolution was adopted as 143 countries voted in favour of it, while five countries – Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Nicaragua – voted against it. Thirty-five countries, including India, Pakistan and China, abstained from voting.

India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ruchira Kamboj said that New Delhi has consistently held that no solution in the Ukraine war could be reached at the cost of human lives.

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“We have urged that all efforts be made for an immediate cessation of hostilities and an urgent return to the path of dialogue and diplomacy,” she said.

Kamboj also said that India was willing to support all efforts aimed at deescalation of the conflict. She also said that the “entire global South” has suffered substantial collateral damage due to the war.

“As developing countries face the brunt of the conflict’s consequences on food, fuel and fertiliser supplies, it is critical that the voice of the global South be heard and their legitimate concerns duly addressed,” she said.

Kamboj also said that remarks made by Pakistani representative Munir Akram comparing the situation in Ukraine with that in Jammu and Kashmir were “frivolous and pointless”.

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The Indian representative asserted that the entire territory of Jammu and Kashmir is and will be an integral and inalienable part of the country. She said that statements such as the one by Pakistan “deserve our collective contempt and sympathy for a mindset which repeatedly utters falsehoods”.

The Pakistani representative had said that under international law, the right to self-determination applies to “people who are under foreign or colonial domination and those who have not yet exercised the right to self-determination, as in the case of Jammu and Kashmir”.