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Ukraine's allies have pledged to send more weapons to help it defend against a renewed Russian offensive, BBC reported.

The US and others vowed to send artillery, anti-tank and air Defence aid to Kyiv during a 90-minute video call on Tuesday. 

Ukraine says it needs the weapons to help defend itself as Russia launched a new campaign in the country's east.

Clashes there have marked what Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky said was the start of the "battle for the Donbas". 

The eastern Donbas - which comprises the Luhansk and Donetsk regions - is where Russia is concentrating its efforts.

According to Ukraine, Russian forces have been attacking Ukrainian positions along the entire 300-mile (480km) front line since Monday.

It was amid these renewed attacks that Western leaders met to discuss further military assistance for Ukraine, according to BBC.

Following the meeting, the US defence department said additional military aircraft and aircraft parts had been sent to Ukraine to increase their fleet size and repair others in Ukraine's arsenal that were damaged.

The US defence department added that the US had not provided aircraft to Kyiv itself, and did not provide details on which countries have provided the aircraft.

President Zelensky has been appealing to the US for Soviet-made air defence systems and fighter jets as an alternative to a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Last month, the US refused a proposal by Poland to provide it with MiG-29 fighter jets, which it would then transfer to Ukraine.

President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters after the meeting between Western allies, added that the US is planning to provide a further military aid package to Ukraine of a similar size to the $800m (£615m) aid package he announced last week, according to US media.

He said Washington would also be sending Ukraine more artillery - heavy guns deployed in land warfare.

Other countries also pledged to help Ukraine with further military assistance during the meeting.

"They [Ukraine] need support with more artillery, that is what we will be giving them," said the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in parliament after the meeting, BBC reported.

In Berlin, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany was providing finance to enable Ukraine to buy anti-tank weapons and ammunition from German arms manufacturers. 

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic said it would repair Ukrainian tanks and armoured vehicles when they are damaged in combat.

Further economic sanctions against Russia was another topic on the agenda.

The arms pledges follow persistent calls from President Zelensky for allies to increase their weapons supplies to Kyiv.

"We need heavy artillery, armed vehicles, air defence systems and combat aircraft — anything to repel Russian forces and stop their war crimes," Mr Zelensky said on Twitter last week. "Nobody will stop Russia except Ukraine with heavy weapons".

Russia fiercely opposes such assistance.

"The United States and Western states under its control are doing everything to drag out the military operation for as long as possible," Russia's defence chief Sergei Shoigu said.

The leaders also discussed how to provide security guarantees to Ukraine after the war even if it is not a member of Nato, a French presidential advisor said.

Nato is a military alliance whose 30 members - including the US, UK and Germany - have agreed to come to one another's aid in the event of an armed attack against any one of them.

Since Ukraine is not a Nato member, the alliance isn't obliged to come to its defence. 

Its members fear that involving themselves in direct armed confrontation could lead to an all-out conflict between Russia and the West.

Instead, Nato members have supplied Ukraine with millions of dollars worth of military aid since Russia launched the invasion, according to BBC.

Winds kicked up a towering wall of flames in rural northern Arizona on Tuesday, tearing through two-dozen structures and forcing the evacuation of more than 700 homes, Associated Press reported.

Coconino County declared an emergency Tuesday as the fast-moving wildfire outside of the Northern Arizona University college town of Flagstaff ballooned to over 9 square miles (23 square kilometers) Tuesday, Sheriff Jim Driscoll said during a news conference. 

County officials said 766 homes and 1,000 animals have been evacuated. More than 2,000 people live in the area, officials said.

A couple of hundred homes are still threatened as smoke billowed into the air in an all-too-familiar scene. Residents recalled scrambling to pack their bags and flee a dozen years ago during a much-larger wildfire burned in the same area.

Driscoll said the sheriff’s office got a call saying a man was trapped in his house, but that firefighters couldn’t get to him. They do not know if he survived, according to the Associated Press.

Flame lengths are as high as 100 feet (30 meters), the US Forest Service said. Firefighters on Tuesday were up against 50 mph (80 kph) gusts that pushed the wildfire over the highway and weren’t expected to let up much this week, authorities said.

About 200 firefighters were working the blaze that appeared to be moving northeast away from the more heavily populated areas of Flagstaff, toward Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and volcanic cinders, said Coconino National Forest spokesman Brady Smith. 

“It’s good in that it’s not headed toward a very populated area, and it’s headed toward less fuel,” he said. “But depending on the intensity of the fire, fire can still move across cinders.”

A top-level national fire management team is expected to take over later this week.

Fire and law enforcement agencies that were knocking on doors to warn of evacuations Tuesday were forced to pull out to avoid getting trapped by the flames, Paxton said. Arizona Public Service Co. shut off power to about 625 customers to keep firefighters safe, a spokeswoman said.

Red flag warnings blanketed much of Arizona and New Mexico on Tuesday, indicating conditions are ripe for wildfires. Residents in northern New Mexico’s Mora and San Miguel counties were warned to be ready to evacuate as wildfires burned there amid dry, warm and windy conditions, Associated Press reported.

The National Interagency Fire Center reported Tuesday that nearly 2,000 wildland firefighters and support personnel were assigned to more than a dozen large wildfires in the Southwestern, Southern and Rocky Mountain areas. Scientists say climate change has made the US West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

The fire in Flagstaff was estimated at 100 acres (40 hectares) early Tuesday but quickly grew to 9.3 square miles (24 square kilometers), scorching timber and grass. It started Sunday afternoon 14 miles (22 kilometers) northeast of the city nestled in the largest contiguous Ponderosa pine forest in the US Investigators don’t know yet what caused it and have yet to corral any part of the blaze.

The Arizona Department of Transportation shut down a section of US 89, the main route between Flagstaff and the far northern part of the state, and a primary route to and from Navajo Nation communities, because of the wildfire. Various organizations worked to set up shelters for evacuees and for animals.

Ali Taranto rushed to Flagstaff from Winslow, where she works at a hospital, to check on a property she owns that was threatened by the wildfire. She also was getting messages to check on a neighbor who she found didn’t have access to oxygen while the power was out and didn’t have the strength to manually open her garage door to evacuate, according to the Associated Press.

Taranto said the neighbor was “disoriented and gasping for air” when she reached her. Firefighters in the area helped get the garage door open and the neighbor to the hospital, she said. Taranto was looking for a shelter for the neighbor’s two dogs.

By the time Taranto left the area, the highway into Flagstaff was shut down and she had to drive an extra two hours back home. At least two other neighbors didn’t evacuate, she said.

“To see flames several yards away from your property line and to hear the propane tanks bursting in the background, it was very surreal,” Taranto said. “Ash falling down. It was crazy.”

The wind is expected to be a challenge the rest of the week, along with warmer-than-average weather and low humidity, the National Weather Service said, Associated Press reported.

Russia assaulted cities and towns along a boomerang-shaped front hundreds of miles long and poured more troops into Ukraine on Tuesday in a potentially pivotal battle for control of the country’s eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories, Associated Press reported.

If successful, the Russian offensive in what is known as the Donbas would essentially slice Ukraine in two and give President Vladimir Putin a badly needed victory following the failed attempt by Moscow’s forces to storm the capital, Kyiv, and heavier-than-expected casualties nearly two months into the war.

The eastern cities of Kharkiv and Kramatorsk came under deadly attack. Russia also said it struck areas around Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro west of the Donbas with missiles. Multiple explosions were heard early Wednesday in the southern city of Mykolaiv, the regional governor said. A hospital was reported shelled earlier in the nearby town of Bashtanka.

In Mariupol, the now-devastated port city in the Donbas, Ukrainian troops said the Russian military dropped heavy bombs to flatten what was left of a sprawling steel plant and hit a hospital where hundreds were staying.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Moscow’s forces bombarded numerous Ukrainian military sites, including troop concentrations and missile-warhead storage depots, in or near several cities or villages. Those claims could not be independently verified, according to the Associated Press.

In what both sides described as a new phase of the war, the Russian assault began Monday along a front stretching more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) from northeastern Ukraine to the country’s southeast. Ukraine’s military said Russian forces tried to “break through our defenses along nearly the entire front line.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russian military was throwing everything it has into the battle, with most of its combat-ready forces now concentrated in Ukraine and just across the border in Russia.

“They have driven almost everyone and everything that is capable of fighting us against Ukraine,” he said in his nightly video address to the nation.

Despite Russian claims of hitting only military sites, they continue to target residential areas and kill civilians, he said.

“The Russian army in this war is writing itself into world history forever as the most barbaric and inhuman army in the world,” Zelenskyy said.

Weeks ago, after the abortive Russian push to take Kyiv, the Kremlin declared that its main goal was the capture of the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years, Associated Press reported.

A Russian victory in the Donbas would deprive Ukraine of the industrial assets concentrated there, including mines, metals plants and heavy-equipment factories.

A senior US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s assessments of the war, said the Russians had added two more combat units, known as battalion tactical groups, in Ukraine over the preceding 24 hours. That brought the total number of units in the country to 78, all of them in the south and the east, up from 65 last week, the official said.

That would translate to about 55,000 to 62,000 troops, based on what the Pentagon said at the start of the war was the typical unit strength of 700 to 800 soldiers. But accurately determining Russia’s fighting capacity at this stage is difficult.

A European official, likewise speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military assessments, said Russia also has 10,000 to 20,000 foreign fighters in the Donbas. They are a mix of mercenaries from Russia’s private Wagner Group and Russian proxy fighters from Syria and Libya, according to the official.

While Ukraine portrayed the attacks on Monday as the start of the long-feared offensive in the east, some observers noted that an escalation has been underway there for some time and questioned whether this was truly the start of a new offensive.

The US official said the offensive in the Donbas has begun in a limited way, mainly in an area southwest of the city of Donetsk and south of Izyum, Associated Press reported.

Justin Crump, a former British tank commander now with the strategic advisory company Sibylline, said the Ukrainian comments could, in part, be an attempt to persuade allies to send more weapons.

“What they’re trying to do by positioning this, I think, is ... focus people’s minds and effort by saying, ‘Look, the conflict has begun in the Donbas,’” Crump said. “That partly puts pressure on NATO and EU suppliers to say, ‘Guys, we’re starting to fight now. We need this now.’”

President Joe Biden is expected to announce a new weapons package in the coming days that will include additional artillery and ammunition, according to a US official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, according to the Associated Press.

Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla has said that Nepal and Bangladesh are among the top ten export destinations for India.

He said India’s total exports to these two countries amount to over 16 billion dollars.

Speaking at a program organized by the Bharat Chamber of Commerce on 'Post-Covid Economic Recovery', the Indian foreign secretary said Nepal is India’s ninth-largest export market and an important destination for Indian investments. Indian firms account for over 30% of the total FDI stock in Nepal, worth nearly USD 600 million.

There are about 150 Indian ventures operating in Nepal in the manufacturing, services, power sector and tourism industry, he said.

A number of reforms have been undertaken in recent years in Nepal which are expected to improve the ease of doing business in that country.

Some upcoming areas that may be attractive to Indian industry include vehicle assembly, hydropower, medicinal and aromatic plants, and pharmaceuticals, the top Indian diplomat said. He said, “Nepal is a close neighbor and economic partner of India. It is India’s ninth-largest export market and an important destination for Indian investments.” 

Situated in the laps of Shivapuri Nagarjun National Park, Dekkaido Resort is the perfect place for a quiet weekend getaway. The resort has a great restaurant that serves Nepali and Japanese dishes–its garlic mutton barbeque, spicy pork, ramen and sushi are a must-try. There are also plenty of breakfast, lunch and dinner options. Or you could try the chef specials—fried chicken with special sauce, tofu steak, or salmon steak. The food alone can make your trip here worthwhile. Its tranquil setting, far from the madding crowd, is an added bonus.

Chef’s Special:

Garlic mutton barbeque 

Ramen 

Spicy pork 

Opening hours: 11:00 am to 8:00 pm

Location: Chisini Marg, Budhanilkantha

Meal for 2: Rs 1,000

Phone/Card pay: Yes

Reservation: 985-1328943

The Supreme Court has issued a short-term order not to implement the decision of the government to suspend Nepal Rastra Bank Governor Maha Prasad Adhikari.

A single bench of Supreme Court Justice Hari Prasad Phuyal on Tuesday issued the order directing the government not to stop Adhikari from working at his office.

The apex court has summoned both the parties to the court on April 26 for discussion.

Earlier on April 17, Adhikari had filed a writ petition at the Supreme Court demanding his reinstatement.

Nepal reported 10 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 3, 058 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 10 returned positive. Likewise, 1, 345 people underwent antigen tests, of which no one tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died of virus in the last 24 hours. The Ministry said that 26 infected people recovered from the disease.

As of today, there are 334 active cases in the country.

Foreign Secretary Bharat Raj Paudyal has said that economic partnership is the key area where Nepal and Bangladesh can work together to further expand and diversify the relationship.

Speaking at a program organized by the Institute of Foreign Affairs, a government think-tank, Paudyal identified trade, energy, tourism and travel, and connectivity as key areas where two countries can work together. 

“First and foremost is in the areas of trade. Even if we trade under the existing regional framework of SAFTA, the two countries do hold the potential to increase the current amount of trade many fold provided we rationalize our tariffs and limit the non-tariff barriers to a minimum," said the senior diplomat. 

Highlighting the need for cooperation in the energy sector, the foreign secretary said Nepal’s rivers have enormous potential to contribute to the clean and green energy security in our region.

This sector offers a new vista of sustainable and long-term beneficial collaboration between Nepal and Bangladesh, he said.

The Foreign Secretary further added that there also exists a promising potential in trilateral cooperation for cross-border energy trade between Nepal, Bangladesh, and India as we grow and prosper together. 

We are grateful to Bangladesh for providing an additional transit route via Rohanpur-Singabad railway transit that would facilitate Nepal’s access to Chittagong and Mongla Ports and help boost regional and sub-regional trade, he added.