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Sri Lanka’s prime minister says the United Nations has arranged a worldwide public appeal to help the island nation’s food, agriculture and heath sectors face serious shortages amid its worst economic crises in recent memory, Aljazeera reported.

In his speech to parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said the UN plans to provide $48m in assistance over a four-month period. But the projected funds barely scratch the surface of the $6bn the island nation needs to stay afloat over the next six months.

Wickremesinghe said that for the next three weeks, it will be tough to obtain some essentials and urged people to be “united and patient”, to use the scarce supplies as carefully as possible and to avoid nonessential travel.

“Therefore, I urge all citizens to refrain from thinking about hoarding fuel and gas during this period. After those difficult three weeks, we will try to provide fuel and food without further disruptions. Negotiations are under way with various parties to ensure this happens,” Wickremesinghe said.

The Indian Ocean nation of 22 million is nearly bankrupt and has suspended repayment of its foreign loans. Its foreign reserves are almost spent, which has limited imports and caused serious shortages of essentials including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, according to Aljazeera.

This year, the island is due to repay $7bn of the $25bn in foreign loans it is scheduled to pay by 2026. Sri Lanka’s total foreign debt is $51bn.

To tide over the current turmoil, Sri Lanka will need about $3.3bn for fuel imports, $900m for food, $250m for cooking gas and $600m more for fertiliser this year, Wickremesinghe told parliament.

The central bank has estimated the economy will contract by 3.5 percent in 2022, Wickremesinghe said, but added that he was confident growth could return with a strong reform package, debt restructuring and international support.

“Only establishing economic stability is not enough, we have to restructure the entire economy,” said Wickremesinghe, who is working on an interim budget to balance battered public finances, Aljazeera reported.

“We need to achieve economic stability by the end of 2023.”

Russia on Tuesday claimed to have taken control of 97% of one of the two provinces that make up Ukraine’s Donbas, bringing the Kremlin closer to its goal of fully capturing the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories, Associated Press reported.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Moscow’s forces hold nearly all of Luhansk province. And it appears that Russia now occupies roughly half of Donetsk province, according to Ukrainian officials and military analysts.

After abandoning its bungled attempt to storm Kyiv two months ago, Russia declared that taking the entire Donbas is its main objective. Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian government forces in the Donbas since 2014, and the region has borne the brunt of the Russian onslaught in recent weeks.

Early in the war, Russian troops also took control of the entire Kherson region and a large part of the Zaporizhzhia region, both in the south. Russian officials and their local appointees have talked about plans for those regions to either declare their independence or be folded into Russia.

But in what may be the latest instance of anti-Russian sabotage inside Ukraine, Russian state media said Tuesday that an explosion at a cafe in the city of Kherson wounded four people. Tass called the apparent bombing in the Russian-occupied city a “terror act.”

Before the Feb. 24 invasion, Ukrainian officials said Russia controlled some 7% of the country,including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, and areas held by the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces hold 20% of the country, according to Associated Press.

While Russia has superior firepower, the Ukrainian defenders are entrenched and have shown the ability to counterattack.

Zelenskyy said Russian forces made no significant advances in the eastern Donbas region over the past day.

“The absolutely heroic defense of the Donbas continues,” he said late Tuesday in his nightly video address.

Zelenskyy said the Russians clearly did not expect to meet so much resistance and are now trying to bring in additional troops and equipment. He said the same was true in the Kherson region.

Speaking earlier to a Financial Times conference, Zelenskyy insisted on Ukraine’s need to defeat Russia on the battlefield but also said he is still open to peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But a former senior US intelligence officer said the time isn’t right.

“You’re not going to get to the negotiating table until neither side feels they have an advantage that they could push,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor of the Washington-based Center for a New American Security.

The Russians “think they will be able to take the whole of the Donbas and then might use that as the opportunity to call for negotiations,” Kendall-Taylor said at an online seminar organized by Columbia and New York universities, Associated Press reported.

Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, said Moscow’s forces have seized the residential quarters of Sievierodonetsk and are fighting to take control of an industrial zone on the city’s outskirts and nearby towns.

Sievierodonetsk and nearby Lysychansk have seen heavy fighting in recent weeks. They are among a few cities and towns in the Luhansk region still holding out against the Russian invasion, which is being helped by local pro-Kremlin forces.

The Democratic Socialist Party submitted a memorandum of demands to Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba on Tuesday.

Party Chairman Mahantha Thakur along with other leaders handed over an 11-point memorandum to Prime Minister Deuba this morning.

The leaders said that they submitted the memorandum to the Prime Minister to remind the commitment he made to address the demands of the party.

The party said in its memorandum that the children of the naturalized citizens should be given citizenship certificates immediately as per the constitution.

It also demanded withdrawal of false cases slapped against the party cadres during the Tharuhat and Madhesh movement and release of the arrested cadres including Resham Chaudhary in Mahottari and Kailali.

Similarly, the party has also demanded to amend the constitution, provide representation in local bodies, province assemblies and federal parliament on the basis of population, to implement the idea of distributing budget on the basis of population density and to make public the report of high-level probe commission led for former Supreme Court justice Girish Chandra Lal.

Likewise, the party has also demanded the government to arrange fertilizers to the farmers and control inflation and black marketing and provide land ownership certificates to those who have not received yet.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa vowed to finish the remaining two years in his term despite monthslong street protests calling for his ouster, but won’t stand for re-election as he focuses on fixing a financial mess that tipped Sri Lanka into its worst-ever economic crisis, Hindustan Times reported.

“I can’t go as a failed president,” Rajapaksa said Monday in a wide-ranging interview at his official residence in Colombo, his first with a foreign media organization since the crisis unfolded. “I have been given a mandate for five years. I will not contest again.”

The defiance comes in the face of slogans of “Gota Go Home,” with protesters blaming Rajapaksa and his family for decisions that led to severe shortages of everything from fuel to medicine, stoking inflation to 40% and forcing a historic debt default. Thousands of demonstrators have camped outside the president’s seaside office since mid-March, forcing him to retreat to his barricaded official residence about a kilometer away.

The economic tailspin spiraled into political turmoil with the resignation of the president’s old brother -- Mahinda Rajapaksa -- as the nation’s prime minister, after clashes between government supporters and the protesters turned bloody in May.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe are now seeking about $4 billion in aid this year from the International Monetary Fund and countries including India and China. Sri Lanka’s rupee has lost about 82% over the past year and the central bank on Monday flagged the possibility of a further correction. While the nation’s debt trades deep in distressed territory, bonds were quoted slightly higher on Monday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, according to Hindustan Times.

“This is unlikely to placate protesters who are calling for his immediate resignation,” said Patrick Curran, an economist at Tellimer. “With presidential elections more than two years away, Rajapaksa’s decision to see his term through will contribute to heightened political uncertainty over the next couple years and could hamper reform efforts.” 

The president said he wanted to replicate his previous successful stints serving the nation. Gotabaya Rajapaksa oversaw the urban development authority and was Sri Lanka’s defense secretary under then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa, when they crushed a 30-year civil war in 2009, Hindustan Times reported.