Polar bear chases man through Arctic snow – Watch the video to see what happens next
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This scary incident happened in Pyramiden, a remote village in the Svalbard archipelago, where
polar bear sightings
have become more common lately. What's usually a rare and careful encounter suddenly turned dangerous– and it was all caught on camera.
Locals in Pyramiden say they've been seeing polar bears around the village more often in recent weeks. The animals have been drawn to snowmobiles, food supplies, and even buildings, as their natural habitat keeps shrinking with the melting Arctic ice.
Watch the video here:
In this case, things got dangerous fast. A polar bear, instead of backing off like others, charged straight at a Russian mining manager. He tried to run but dropped his rifle, while nearby people screamed, "No! Go away," desperately trying to distract the bear.
The man's quick thinking probably saved his life. As the bear got closer, he managed to jump onto a snowmobile and speed away just in time.
The whole event lasted only moments but has had a lasting impact on those who saw it– and on the thousands who've since watched the video online.
A source from
Arktikugol
, the Russian company working in the area, told the Daily Mail that both the man and the polar bear got away without any injuries.
Incidents like this highlight how often humans and animals now cross paths in the Arctic. As one Arktikugol source shared with the Daily Mail, "Bears often enter Pyramiden because their migration route passes through the area.
Some bears are aggressive, while others are more cautious and skittish."
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Economic Times
an hour ago
- Economic Times
Russia says destroyed Ukraine's Sapsan missile production facilities funded by Germany just hours before Putin-Trump meeting
Amid rising tensions, Russia announces the destruction of Ukrainian missile manufacturing plants known for producing Sapsan missiles, funded by German investments. This bold move comes just prior to a pivotal summit in Alaska between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, where the Ukraine conflict is expected to dominate discussions. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads List of Ukrainian missile production units hit Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads What is the Sapsan missile? The Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska Russia claimed that it destroyed several facilities in July 2025 deep inside Ukraine where medium-range Sapsan missiles , financed by Germany, were being produced. But the details of the covert operations were revealed only on August 13, 2025, just hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to meet his US counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska's Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on August 13, 2025 asserted that Germany's link to the production of Sapsan missiles was confirmed and five Ukrainian defense facilities making them and other weapons destroyed in a joint operation with the Defense missile is also known as Hrіm-2, Grom or OTRK Sapsan and has an official range of about 500 kilometers (over 310 miles). But Russia believes it can be used against targets over 700 km (435 miles) away, potentially bringing its capital Moscow within news outlet TASS reported that the FSB and Russian Defense Ministry carried out a sabotage mission to destroy production facilities where Sapsan missiles were being manufactured. The FSB claimed that it was a much bigger operation than Ukraine Security Service's much-talked about Operation Spider's Web on June 1, 2025, in which dozens of armed drones were smuggled inside Russia and used to attack its strategic heavy bomber aircraft across several airbases, some thousands of miles away from the frontlines."The damage to the Ukrainian military-industrial complex is colossal, far outweighing the harm done to Russia in Operation Spiderweb carried out by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry Main Intelligence Directorate," TASS reported from the FSB strikes were carried out at five locations - two in Pavlograd, two in Shostka, and one in Zhytomyr Pavlograd, a city in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast (eastern Ukraine), a chemical plant producing solid fuel to power Sapsan missiles, and also making and stockpiling shells, small aerial bombs, and thermobaric charges was targeted. A mechanical plant nearby which produced and assembled missiles, propulsion units, control systems, and Sapsan warheads was also 580 kms to the north, two facilities in Shostka in Sumy Oblast, northeastern Ukraine, were hit. One was the Shostka State Plant "Zvezda" where gunpowder and warheads were made and the second was the Shostka Research Institute of Chemical Products. Here rocket fuel for flamethrower systems was produced and new types of explosive materials were being that the covert operations were carried out against ballistic missile production facilities to neutralize Ukraine's offensive capabilities, the FSB report claimed that Kiev was also on the verge of developing and deploying longer range projectiles against also quoted a FSB officer, who was involved in the planning the covert strike, as stating that Germany had financed the production facilities where Sapsan missiles were being built."It has been established that with Germany's financial support and the assistance of foreign specialists the development and production of the Sapsan medium-range operational-tactical missile systems capable of striking deep into the territory of the Russian Federation has been carried out at defense enterprises in the Dnepropetrovsk and Sumy regions of Ukraine," the officer stated according to a TASS report.A June 23, 2025, report states that Germany had advanced a financial aid of 5 billion euro defense package to Ukraine for the development of longer range hypersonic missiles to counter Russia's massive has maintained that Ukraine used the Soviet stockpile and technical knowhow to develop its own missile started developing the Sapsan missile in 2014 and two years later Saudi Arabia joined the project by investing $40 million into it. Sapsan was successfully test-fired for the first time in August 2024.A few months later on November 9, 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the country had produced 'its first 100 missiles'. International defence experts concluded that he was referring to the Sapsan based on Zelenskyy's comment that these could be used for 'striking deeper and deeper into Russia'. Some experts were of the opinion that he was referring to the R-360 Neptune, a subsonic cruise missile with a maximum range of 1,000 kms (620 miles).The officially admitted maximum range of Sapsan is 300 km (190 mi) with a 480 kilogram conventional warhead. The missile can fly hypersonic with a top speed of Mach 5.2 (1.1 mi/s; 1.8 km/s). It is powered by a single-stage solid propellant two leaders are meeting on August 15 at a military base in the US state of Alaska. They will discuss ways and means to bring the war in Ukraine, which has been going on since late February 2022, to an has warned Russia of "severe consequences" if Putin fails to end the war in Ukraine. However, he has not spelt out his plans if Putin refuses a Russian President has been adamant on annexing the entire eastern part of Ukraine. These include Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. Crimea has been under Russian rule since 2014 when Putin sent his forces into Ukraine for the first currently occupies almost 25 percent of Ukraine. An Al Jazeera report states that almost 114,500 square km (44,600 square miles) of Ukraine's land is under Russian control.
Hindustan Times
an hour ago
- Hindustan Times
The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War
KYIV, Ukraine—Europe's largest wave of prisoner exchanges since the wake of World War II was set in motion when a Ukrainian soldier reached into the pocket of a dead Russian officer and found a phone. The device landed in the hands of Brig. Gen. Dmytro Usov, a deputy to the head of Ukraine's HUR military intelligence service, which had just lost two of its men in battles northwest of Kyiv. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was only three weeks old, and the phone presented a way to retrieve their remains. Usov, a career intelligence officer with a trim gray-streaked beard, scrolled through the deceased's phonebook and pressed 'call' on a contact whose rank suggested this might be a Russian frontline commander. 'Your officer is dead,' he told the stunned Russian after introducing himself. He texted a photograph of the corpse, then offered a deal: the bodies of your men for ours. What followed has evolved into one of the strangest subplots of Europe's biggest war since the 1940s: a series of swaps that started with a few corpses and then slowly escalated into the regular trade of hundreds of captured prisoners, many skeletal and barely clinging to consciousness. President Vladimir Putin has refused to meet Volodymyr Zelensky unless the Ukrainian president all but concedes defeat, complicating President Trump's peace summit in Alaska on Friday. The two countries, once part of the same Soviet empire, no longer have embassies with each other, and successive peace talks have broken down. And yet without fanfare, Ukraine and Russia over the course of their war have managed to exchange more than 10,000 combatants across front lines and secure corridors in neighboring Belarus. They include some 1,200 soldiers traded in recent weeks; another 100 young, wounded and ill combatants are due to cross the border on Thursday, Ukrainian officials say. Despite being snared in conflict and deadlocked at the negotiating table, both sides speak of their shadowy prisoner exchange channel—run directly by military intelligence officers—as efficient and professional. Their transactions mark a striking paradox: two bitter enemies aligned on almost nothing, yet collaborating time and again on one deeply human issue—prisoners of war. Military historians have puzzled over the relatively smooth logistics and regular pace of these trades, conducted mid-conflict, a pattern virtually unheard of in modern warfare. By contrast, the Soviet Union held onto German POWs for years after World War II. Some weren't freed until 1956. The United States and North Vietnam didn't begin consistent POW releases until 1973, after two decades of American deepening involvement and a long, grinding peace process. Iran and Iraq, whose war ended in 1988, released their last POWs three days before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq began. The backstory of how Moscow and Kyiv began trading in a resource they both have—an oversupply of captured men—dates back more than a decade, to the earliest days of Ukraine's violent break from Russia. It hints at a hidden infrastructure that reveals the war is more nuanced than many Americans understand. Mostly, it centers around a tiny handful of military and intelligence officers who now constitute nearly the last thin wire still linking two neighbors that Putin insists are 'one people, a single whole.' Usov, speaking hours before his agency commenced another historic exchange via Belarus in June, put it a different way: 'Despite the fact that we're enemies, that Russia is the aggressor, we have established a certain level of communication,' he said. 'It's hard to fight them, and it's hard to negotiate with them. But at the same time, we do it honestly.' Usov used a cellphone found in the pocket of a dead Russian officer to initiate contact with officials on the other side of the war. To understand how two wartime enemies managed to set aside their differences to retrieve their POWs, The Wall Street Journal spoke to more than a dozen Ukrainian, Russian and European officials, and visited exchange points along the frontline and detention facilities throughout Ukraine. Reporters also spent time in the basement of a military-intelligence office in Kyiv that functions as the nerve center for Ukraine's hunt for soldiers captured by Russia. These sources described trades as a way to ease domestic pressure, demonstrate progress to foreign powers—most recently, the U.S.—and relieve themselves of the burden of feeding and housing thousands of the enemy. At the center of the web is perhaps the world's top prisoner trader, Vladimir Putin, who last year greenlighted a wide-ranging exchange, freeing a group of dissidents and journalists, including three wrongly held Americans—among them, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—in return for eight Russian spies, cybercriminals, smugglers and a professional hitman. That trade, on a cordoned off airfield in Turkey, attracted global attention. But it is dwarfed by the lesser-known human commerce underway along the frontlines between Russian and Ukrainian forces. 'If there's a chance to save a human life, returning someone home to their family before hostilities end, and in the process free our own soldiers whom we deeply care about it, then we do it,' said Russia's chief negotiator on Ukraine, Vladimir Medinsky, who used a Russian idiom to emphasise that the neighbors remain mortal enemies: 'As we say in Russia, we don't christen our children together.' 'Five letters in his name' The seeds of the POW channel were planted more than a decade ago, in the President Hotel in the Belarussian capital of Minsk. It was 2014 and Ukraine was struggling to reclaim eastern territory seized by Russian-backed militants. Western leaders had pressured its government into talks—to resolve political, economic and cultural disputes. The negotiators argued over every point, from the spelling of Ukrainian and Russian names to whose troops were shelling where, according to the Swiss diplomat, Tony Frisch, who oversaw the sessions. When he tried to coax the parties to socialize during lunch breaks or have evening drinks at the hotel bar to build a rapport, he was sternly rebuffed. Several times, Viktor Medvedchuk, the head of a minor pro-Kremlin Ukrainian party who was supposed to be negotiating for Kyiv, made a surprising announcement: He needed to fly to Moscow, to seek guidance from 'a man with five letters in his name.' When he returned, it was clear Putin wanted to make a trade, and the stage was set for a series of small prisoner exchanges from the end of 2014 into the next year. Prisoners crossed through checkpoints on landmine-littered roads, between Ukraine and the Kremlin-backed paramilitaries. The two sides fell into dysfunctional haggling over whose captives were worth more, as one Russian delegate refused to speak—at all. In the meantime, the Swiss visited paramilitary prisons with the International Committee of the Red Cross, and met Ukrainian captives who recalled being tortured, choked with plastic bags, their children's lives threatened. Ultimately, over the course of about 125 meetings, the two sides managed to trade 600 prisoners: 'I can tell you, it was sometimes like a discussion in a market in Morocco for sheep or cows,' said Frisch. Then, as Russian troops amassed around Ukraine's borders in early 2022, meetings were abruptly canceled. On February 22, 2022, Putin yanked all Russian diplomats from Ukraine, blaming 'provocations' and threats to their lives. That same day, he effectively ended the Minsk process, lamenting a lack of results. Two days later, some 150,000 Russian troops streamed across the border. The long game Less than a month later, Brig. Gen. Usov was summoned to his boss Kyrylo Budanov's office at HUR's sprawling headquarters: Ukraine's military intelligence agency had no way to contact its counterpart inside Russia. Old communications lines were shuttered and new attempts were floundering. 'There was no trust. We had battles just outside Kyiv, and we had to convince them to swap people,' Budanov said in an interview. 'But we didn't believe each other.' The breakdown rendered the Chinese-made Xiaomi cellphone in Usov's hands an unusually precious channel to re-establish communication between two nations rallying troops into a fight that both claimed was now a war of survival. Ukrainian Military Intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said that, early on, 'there was no trust.' In conversations with the Russians, Usov used his call-sign—Stayer, or marathon-runner—and his real name only sparingly. Trust had to be built painstakingly slowly. He never shared his own number. Two months into the war, Russia revealed his counterpart: a lieutenant general at Moscow's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU. In Libya, Gen. Aleksandr Zorin had been Russia's pointman on relations with the pro-Kremlin faction controlling the country's east. He represented Russia in Syrian ceasefire talks with the U.S. in Geneva—and as those talks dragged into the evening, he stepped into the press hall, and delivered pizza to foreign journalists. Usov found Zorin, who at 56 is his senior by 12 years, frank and straight-talking. Zorin had been born in Soviet Ukraine. 'The way he spoke, and discussed things, corresponded with his general's rank,' Usov said. 'He was head and shoulders above the others I had talked with up to that point.' That call with Zorin was the start of a long working relationship that would inspire Usov to embrace a new role as negotiator. Two of his great-grandfathers had died in Nazi captivity and he said he felt duty-bound to ensure Ukrainian servicemen did not repeat their fates. The two senior spies began to assess one another in more regular calls. Usov was learning on the job, studying the complex mechanics needed to safely engineer an exchange, and seeking advice from Jonathan Powell—now the U.K.'s national security adviser, who had once helped end The Troubles in Northern Ireland. He read a copy of Zorin's doctoral thesis, which he said recounted negotiating conflicts in the Middle East. 'When I read this, I understood how I might establish a working relationship with him,' Usov said. Zorin couldn't be reached for comment and the GRU didn't respond to a request for an interview. Within a month, Usov was barrelling deep into Russian-held territory to meet Zorin in person in the devastated coastal city of Mariupol, escorted by two Russian Tigr armored vehicles, a white flag fluttering above his car. The cars wound through streets littered with the corpses of dead civilians. Next to the charred metal and rubble of the port city's steel mill, the Ukrainians stopped to collect one of the commanders of a 2,500-strong garrison of elite Ukrainian fighters who were surrounded inside the plant under constant bombardment to surrender. That afternoon Usov shook hands with Zorin, who was flanked by four Russian officers, and sat opposite him at a conference room table at a location outside the city, according to a person who was there. The talks dragged on for hours, with both sides fielding calls to their superiors in Kyiv and Moscow. Eventually, Ukraine consented to a surrender: The 2,500 fighters would be taken to Russian prisons. The question remained of how Ukraine might bring the fighters home. Kyiv looked for a country that could mediate an exchange, but Switzerland was now on Moscow's 'Unfriendly Countries List,' punishment for joining European sanctions. Instead, it turned to the new Switzerlands of the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. On September 21, Turkey brokered the largest swap since Russia's invasion, a choreography that flew five captured Ukrainian commanders to the capital of Ankara while Moscow received Medvedchuk, the pro-Russian politician who had once negotiated in Minsk but had since been arrested for high treason. A separate group of European POWs captured while fighting for Ukraine simultaneously boarded a Saudi jet leaving Russia to find a celebrity businessman there to escort them: Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. By now, the two sides had an understanding. The top intelligence officers had met and sized each other up. Foreign governments were standing by to help resolve disputes if necessary. Intelligence chiefs in both countries reported back to superiors in their capitals: This is someone we can work with. Smuggled lists In time, those early exchanges birthed a whole new infrastructure. In a leafy district of Kyiv, near hipster cafes and beauty salons, a nondescript three-story building became HUR's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-War. On the top floor, Usov and his HUR subordinates meet regularly in a conference room with the families of POWs who come dressed in T-shirts bearing logos of their son or husband's brigade and often harangue the officials over a lack of results. In the basement, analysts scour Russian websites and social media feeds for clues about POWs' location and condition. They have compiled a vast database that includes 200 data points about each individual including height, eye color and Russian responses to questions from the Red Cross. Ukrainians released in swaps have smuggled out lists with the names of comrades in a specific cell. Photos of those lists are compiled in evidence to convince the Russians a particular person is in their captivity. 'To get people back, we have to know who we're fighting for,' said Viktoriia Petruk, a 34-year-old who leads the analytics department and spoke for the first time to the media about her work. Viktoriia Petruk leads a group of HUR analysts who scour websites and social media to feed a database of POWs held by the Russians. The basement analysts have identified almost 200 detention facilities across Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine where Ukrainian combatants are held often in dire conditions. Ukraine has five dedicated POW camps, most of them former prisons where the captive Russians earn money sewing, chopping wood, or producing furniture for sale at Ukrainian stores. Kyiv is eager to show Western partners it has moral high ground by treating its prisoners better than Russia. Logistics have often been fraught. In January 2024, a Russian military plane carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs to a prisoner swap was shot down near the border, a move Moscow blamed on Kyiv, which hasn't taken responsibility for it. During a lull in swaps, and facing political protests from prisoners' relatives, HUR concocted several long-shot schemes to speed things up: offering convicted pro-Russian collaborators and even the bones of long-buried Russian spies for exchange. Russia didn't take the bait. But when peace talks stalled in Istanbul this Spring, both countries consented to another round, this time bigger than ever before. On a sunny recent morning, Usov again headed north from Kyiv to greet a fresh cohort of hundreds of exchanged Ukrainian soldiers. Injured men limped and staggered up to the general to thank him, then asked a question: when would be the next round of prisoner trades that might bring their brothers-in-arms home? Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Drew Hinshaw at and Joe Parkinson at The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Russia says destroyed Ukraine's Sapsan missile production facilities funded by Germany just hours before Putin-Trump meeting
Amid rising tensions, Russia announces the destruction of Ukrainian missile manufacturing plants known for producing Sapsan missiles, funded by German investments. This bold move comes just prior to a pivotal summit in Alaska between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, where the Ukraine conflict is expected to dominate discussions. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads List of Ukrainian missile production units hit Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads What is the Sapsan missile? The Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska Russia claimed that it destroyed several facilities in July 2025 deep inside Ukraine where medium-range Sapsan missiles , financed by Germany, were being produced. But the details of the covert operations were revealed only on August 13, 2025, just hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to meet his US counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska's Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on August 13, 2025 asserted that Germany's link to the production of Sapsan missiles was confirmed and five Ukrainian defense facilities making them and other weapons destroyed in a joint operation with the Defense missile is also known as Hrіm-2, Grom or OTRK Sapsan and has an official range of about 500 kilometers (over 310 miles). But Russia believes it can be used against targets over 700 km (435 miles) away, potentially bringing its capital Moscow within news outlet TASS reported that the FSB and Russian Defense Ministry carried out a sabotage mission to destroy production facilities where Sapsan missiles were being manufactured. The FSB claimed that it was a much bigger operation than Ukraine Security Service's much-talked about Operation Spider's Web on June 1, 2025, in which dozens of armed drones were smuggled inside Russia and used to attack its strategic heavy bomber aircraft across several airbases, some thousands of miles away from the frontlines."The damage to the Ukrainian military-industrial complex is colossal, far outweighing the harm done to Russia in Operation Spiderweb carried out by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry Main Intelligence Directorate," TASS reported from the FSB strikes were carried out at five locations - two in Pavlograd, two in Shostka, and one in Zhytomyr Pavlograd, a city in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast (eastern Ukraine), a chemical plant producing solid fuel to power Sapsan missiles, and also making and stockpiling shells, small aerial bombs, and thermobaric charges was targeted. A mechanical plant nearby which produced and assembled missiles, propulsion units, control systems, and Sapsan warheads was also 580 kms to the north, two facilities in Shostka in Sumy Oblast, northeastern Ukraine, were hit. One was the Shostka State Plant "Zvezda" where gunpowder and warheads were made and the second was the Shostka Research Institute of Chemical Products. Here rocket fuel for flamethrower systems was produced and new types of explosive materials were being that the covert operations were carried out against ballistic missile production facilities to neutralize Ukraine's offensive capabilities, the FSB report claimed that Kiev was also on the verge of developing and deploying longer range projectiles against also quoted a FSB officer, who was involved in the planning the covert strike, as stating that Germany had financed the production facilities where Sapsan missiles were being built."It has been established that with Germany's financial support and the assistance of foreign specialists the development and production of the Sapsan medium-range operational-tactical missile systems capable of striking deep into the territory of the Russian Federation has been carried out at defense enterprises in the Dnepropetrovsk and Sumy regions of Ukraine," the officer stated according to a TASS report.A June 23, 2025, report states that Germany had advanced a financial aid of 5 billion euro defense package to Ukraine for the development of longer range hypersonic missiles to counter Russia's massive has maintained that Ukraine used the Soviet stockpile and technical knowhow to develop its own missile started developing the Sapsan missile in 2014 and two years later Saudi Arabia joined the project by investing $40 million into it. Sapsan was successfully test-fired for the first time in August 2024.A few months later on November 9, 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the country had produced 'its first 100 missiles'. International defence experts concluded that he was referring to the Sapsan based on Zelenskyy's comment that these could be used for 'striking deeper and deeper into Russia'. Some experts were of the opinion that he was referring to the R-360 Neptune, a subsonic cruise missile with a maximum range of 1,000 kms (620 miles).The officially admitted maximum range of Sapsan is 300 km (190 mi) with a 480 kilogram conventional warhead. The missile can fly hypersonic with a top speed of Mach 5.2 (1.1 mi/s; 1.8 km/s). It is powered by a single-stage solid propellant two leaders are meeting on August 15 at a military base in the US state of Alaska. They will discuss ways and means to bring the war in Ukraine, which has been going on since late February 2022, to an has warned Russia of "severe consequences" if Putin fails to end the war in Ukraine. However, he has not spelt out his plans if Putin refuses a Russian President has been adamant on annexing the entire eastern part of Ukraine. These include Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. Crimea has been under Russian rule since 2014 when Putin sent his forces into Ukraine for the first currently occupies almost 25 percent of Ukraine. An Al Jazeera report states that almost 114,500 square km (44,600 square miles) of Ukraine's land is under Russian control.
