Kremlin says it is hard to imagine talks with U.S. on new nuclear arms reduction treaty
MOSCOW, April 8 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Tuesday that it was very hard to imagine the start of negotiations with the United States on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty given that mutual trust with Washington had still not been fully restored.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was answering a question about the prospects for a replacement for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which runs out in February, 2026.
The treaty caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.
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Scottish Sun
5 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Russia using horror AI kamikaze drone that ‘chooses its own target' as Ukraine now faces blitz of over ‘500 every night'
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) VLADIMIR Putin has begun deploying kamikaze drones that select their own targets using AI in a fresh assault on Ukraine. The country now faces over 500 attacks every night, just days after Kharkiv was rocked overnight by a downpour of missiles. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 5 Fire and smoke rise in Ukraine following a Russian drone and missile strike Credit: Reuters 5 Kyiv is seen engulfed in flames following a Russian drone attack Credit: Reuters 5 Reports said the UAV-V2U is being used to close in on the northeastern city of Sumy, while Putin ramps up drone production and builds new launch sites. Some 70 units a day are now being made compared to just 21 last year, according to Ukraine's military intelligence. This is largely thanks to help from China, the agency has said, as the UAV is "mostly assembled from Chinese-manufactured components." Beijing has repeatedly denied supplying drones or weapon components to Russia, whilst Trump and Biden have both hit China with sanctions to stop it getting access to computer chips. Marking a new escalation in the war, the drones use camera images to navigate and AI to independently locate targets. The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine said: "The key feature of the drone is its ability to autonomously search for and select targets using artificial intelligence. "Its computing system is based on the Chinese Leetop A203 minicomputer, with a high-speed processor assembly built on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin module." This comes just hours after drones and missiles were launched at Kyiv as Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bombers were reportedly unleashed to rain hell on the infamous Snake Island in the Black Sea. Moscow launched a massive strike on Rivne using its Tu-22M3 and Tu-95MS strategic bombers to hit Dubny airbase. Squadrons of these fighter jets were targeted and destroyed last week in Kyiv's daring Operation Spiderweb. Russia bombs Kyiv killing 4 in blitz as Putin plots revenge for Op Spiderweb Another key Ukrainian military airport - Hostomel - was also attacked as Putin sought revenge for the humiliating attack. Polish armed forces command said Nato fighter jets were patrolling due to 'intensive air attack by the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory'. Just days ago, Kharkiv was rocked overnight as 48 kamikaze drones, along with missiles and guided bombs, slammed into residential areas, according to the city's mayor. 'We have a lot of damage,' Ihor Terekhov said. More than 50 explosions rocked Kharkiv, with the mayor adding it was 'the most powerful attack' on the city of the 39-month war. In the latest terror strikes on civilians, 18 multi-story buildings and 13 private houses were hit and damaged. In Kyiv, a dramatic tower block video filmed by a resident showed the terror of another Putin strike on civilians as flames from the exploding drone shot some 80ft up the building. Three were killed and at least 21 wounded, including a six-weeks-old baby, and a 14-year-old girl. A woman, 26, trapped under a slab of concrete was eventually freed three hours after the strike, and was seen being stretchered to an ambulance. Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha described how hundreds of drones and missiles "rained down" on his country overnight. He wrote in a social media post: "Kharkiv had a particularly terrible night. "People were injured and killed, and the energy infrastructure was also damaged." Sybiha added there were further strikes in the Donetsk, Dnipro, Ternopil and Odesa regions. 5 The Kursk region after being struck by a Russian drone attack Credit: Reuters
BBC News
10 hours ago
- BBC News
Frederick Forsyth: Life as a thriller writer, fighter pilot, journalist and spy
Frederick Forsyth, who has died at the age of 86, wrote meticulously researched thrillers which sold in their millions.A former fighter pilot, journalist and spy, many of his books were based on his own wove intricate technical details into his stories, without detracting from the lightning pace of his research often embarrassed the authorities, who were forced to admit that some of the shady tactics he revealed were used in real-life espionage. Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was born on 25 August 1938 in Ashford, Kent. The only child of a furrier, he dealt with loneliness by immersing himself in adventure his favourites were the works John Buchan and H Rider Haggard, but Forsyth adored Ernest Hemingway's book on bullfighters, Death in the was so captivated that - at the age of 17 - he went to Spain and started practising with a cape. He never actually fought a bull. Instead, he spent five months at the University of Granada before returning to do his national service with the spent years dreaming of becoming a pilot, Forsyth lied about his age so he could fly de Havilland Vampire 1958, he joined the Eastern Daily Press as a local journalist. Three years later, he moved to the Reuters news Tonbridge School, Forsyth had excelled in foreign languages but little else. Fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Russian, he was a born foreign correspondent. Posted to Paris, he covered a number of stories relating to assassination attempts on the life of France's President Charles de Gaulle, by members of the Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS).The group of ex-army personnel were angered at de Gaulle's decision to give independence to Algeria after many of their comrades had died fighting Algerian called the OAS "white colonialists and neo-fascists".And he decided that, if they really wanted to kill de Gaulle, they would have to hire a professional assassin. Forsyth joined the BBC in 1965. Two years later, he was sent to Nigeria to cover the civil war that followed the secession of the south-eastern region of the fighting dragged on far longer than had been expected, Forsyth asked permission to stay and cover it. According to his autobiography, the BBC told him "it is not our policy to cover this war"."I smelt news management," he said. "I don't like news management." He quit his job and continued to cover the war as a freelance reporter for the next two chronicled his experiences in The Biafra Story, which was published in 1969. He later claimed that, while in Nigeria, he began working for MI6, a relationship that continued for two decades. He also become friendly with a number of mercenaries, who taught him how to get a false passport, obtain a gun and break an enemy's these tricks of the trade would be incorporated in a tale of an attempted assassination of President de Gaulle, The Day of the Jackal, which he pounded out in his bedsit on an old typewriter in just 35 spent months trying to get it published but faced a string of rejections. "For starters, de Gaulle was still alive," he said, "so readers already knew a fictional assassination plot set in 1963 couldn't succeed."Eventually, a publisher risked a short print run and sales of the book, described once as "an assassin's manual", took off, first in the UK and then in the US. The Day of the Jackal showcased what would become the traditional hallmarks of a Forsyth thriller. It wove together fact and fiction, often using the names of real individuals and Jackal's forgery of a British passport, using the name of a dead child taken from a churchyard, was perfectly feasible in the days before electronic databases and tale was made into an award-winning film in 1973, staring Edward Fox as the anonymous gunman. Forsyth followed up his success with The Odessa File, the story of a German reporter attempting to track down Eduard Roschmann - a notorious Nazi nicknamed the "Butcher of Riga" - who is protected by a secret society of former SS men known as part of his research, Forsyth travelled to Hamburg posing as a South African arms dealer. "I managed to penetrate their world and was feeling rather proud of myself," he later said."What I didn't know was that the (contact) had passed a bookshop shortly after our meeting. And there, in the window, was The Day of the Jackal, with a great big picture of me on the back cover."The film of the book led to the identification of the real "Butcher of Riga", who was living in Argentina - after one of his neighbours went to see it at the local cinema. He was arrested by the Argentinian authorities, but skipped bail and fled to book also mentioned a hoard of Nazi gold that was exported to Switzerland in 1944. Twenty-five years after publication, the Jewish World Congress discovered this passage and, eventually, located gold valued at £1bn. According to the Sunday Times, Forsyth's third novel, The Dogs of War, drew on his experience of organising a coup in newspaper reported that Forsyth had once spent $200,000 hiring a boat and recruiting European and African soldiers of fortune for a raid designed to oust the President of Equatorial Guinea in plan was said to have failed when the arrangements broke down and the soldiers were intercepted by the Spanish police in the Canary Islands, 3,000 miles from their came Devil's Alternative, in which Britain's first female prime minister, Joan Carpenter, was firmly based on Margaret Thatcher, a politician Forsyth greatly admired. She later appeared, under her real name, in four Forsyth was a move into biography in 1982 with Emeka, the life story of Forsyth's friend Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of state of Biafra during that country's brief independence. In 1984, he returned to the novel with The Fourth Protocol: a complex tale of a Soviet plot to influence the British general election and install a hard-left Labour book so impressed Sir Michael Caine that he persuaded Forsyth to allow a film version, in which the veteran actor starred alongside Pierce the late 1980s, Forsyth separated from his first wife, the former model Carole Cunningham and was photographed alongside the actress Faye Negotiator, published in 1991, continued the successful run while The Deceiver, the tale of a maverick but brilliant MI6 agent, was made into a BBC two more thrillers, The Fist of God and Icon, Forsyth took an abrupt detour with The Phantom of Manhattan: a sequel to the Phantom of the Opera, which had been a successful was not a great success but, in 2010, Andrew Lloyd Webber took elements of it for his musical follow-up to Phantom, Love Never Dies. A second set of short stories, The Veteran, also had mixed reviews but Forsyth bounced back in his usual style with Avenger, a 2003 political thriller and, three years later, The Afghan, which had links with the earlier Fist of now, Forsyth had established a reputation as a broadcaster and political pundit. He was a frequent guest on the BBC's topical debate programme Question Time, as someone who held views on the right of the political spectrum.A committed Eurosceptic, he once derailed former Prime Minister Ted Heath on the programme - after proving that he had indeed, despite his denials, once signed a document agreeing to transfer UK gold reserves to Frankfurt. On turning 70, the pace of his writing began to slow. The Cobra, published in 2010, saw the return of some of the characters from 2013, Forsyth published The Kill List, a fast-moving tale built round a Muslim fanatic called The Preacher, whose online videos encouraged young Muslims to carry out a series of wrote all his books on a typewriter and refused to use the internet for his research. Ironically, his 18th novel, The Fox - published in 2018 - was a spy thriller about a gifted computer announced it was to be his final book, but he later came out of self-imposed retirement after the death of his second wife, Sandy, in said he was writing another adventure, and even suggested a raffle might give someone the chance to name a character after sold the film rights for £20,000 in the 1970s, Forsyth received no payment for Eddie Redmayne's version of The Day of the Jackal when it was re-imagined for television last year on into his 80s, he had long since agreed to stop research trips to far-flung parts of the world - when a trip to Guinea-Bissau left him with an infection that nearly cost him a leg."It is a bit drug-like, journalism," he admitted. "I don't think that instinct ever dies."It was an instinct that made his life as full and exciting as his thrillers.
Reuters
15 hours ago
- Reuters
Russia says it takes more territory in east-central Ukraine, creating 'buffer zone' there
MOSCOW, June 9 (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday that its forces had taken control of more territory in Ukraine's east-central region of Dnipropetrovsk, where the Kremlin said fighting was partly aimed at creating a "buffer zone." State media quoted the Defence Ministry as saying that Russian troops "continued to advance into the depths of the enemy's defence" and had increased the area of territory in Dnipropetrovsk they controlled. Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield report. Ukraine said at the weekend that its forces were holding the section of the front near the eastern border of Dnipropetrovsk. Asked if Russia was trying to create a buffer zone by pushing into Dnipropetrovsk, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: "Without a doubt that is part of it." The Russian offensive there is notable because Dnipropetrovsk is not one of the five regions of Ukraine - including Crimea and four areas in the south and east of the country - that Russia has previously claimed as part of its own territory. The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said the purpose of a Russian thrust into Dnipropetrovsk could be to cut off Ukraine's lines of communication and supply to its troops in the Donetsk region, further east. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said at the weekend that the Dnipropetrovsk offensive showed that if Ukraine did not want to accept the reality of Russia's territorial gains in peace talks then Moscow's forces would advance further on the ground. Russia and Ukraine renewed peace negotiations in Turkey last month after a gap of more than three years, but the conflict has actually intensified in recent weeks. Russia has advanced on the battlefield and carried out some of its heaviest air attacks of the war, while Ukraine conducted an audacious operation deep inside Russia on June 1 that inflicted serious damage on Moscow's fleet of nuclear-capable strategic bomber planes.
