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Mr Modry told the BBC the separatist movement has grown in recent months - driven in part, he believes, by the president's rhetoric.

Since the 1990s, an armed separatist insurgency against Indian rule in the region has claimed tens of thousands of lives, including those of civilians and security forces.

Their fate was sealed when Russia declared the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics" - separatist entities it had helped to set up - as independent states.

Then, in 2020, Azerbaijan - backed by Turkey - regained control of big swathes of the lost territory, while the Karabakh enclave remained in the hands of ethnic Armenian separatists.

When the pro-Russian “Novorossiya” separatists in eastern Ukraine started waving a flag that looked suspiciously like the Confederate battle flag, a lot of people — including me — were baffled.