Thailand, Cambodia exchange heavy artillery fire as fighting rages for second day
Thailand's military reported clashes from before dawn in the Ubon Ratchathani and Surin provinces and said Cambodia had used artillery and Russian-made BM-21 rocket systems. Authorities said 100,000 people had been evacuated from conflict areas on the Thai side.
"Cambodian forces have conducted sustained bombardment utilising heavy weapons, field artillery and BM-21 rocket systems," the Thai military said in a statement.
"Thai forces have responded with appropriate supporting fire in accordance with the tactical situation."
Both sides blamed each other for starting the conflict on Thursday at a disputed border area, which quickly escalated from small arms fire to heavy shelling in at least six locations 209 km (130 miles) apart along a frontier where sovereignty has been disputed for more than a century.
Reuters journalists in Surin province reported hearing intermittent bursts of explosions on Friday, amid a heavy presence of armed Thai soldiers along roads and gas stations in the largely agrarian area.
A Thai military convoy, including around a dozen trucks, armoured vehicles and tanks, cut across provincial roads ringed by paddy fields and moved toward the border.
The fighting erupted on Thursday just hours after Thailand recalled its ambassador to Phnom Penh the previous night and expelled Cambodia's envoy, in response to a second Thai soldier losing a limb to a landmine that Bangkok alleged had been laid recently by rival troops. Cambodia has dismissed that as baseless.
The Thai death toll rose to 15 as of early Friday, 14 of them civilians, according to the health ministry. It said 46 people were wounded, including 15 soldiers.
Cambodia's national government has not provided details of any casualties or evacuations of civilians. A government spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest clashes.
Meth Meas Pheakdey, spokesperson for the provincial administration of Cambodia's Oddar Meanchey province, said one civilian had been killed and five were wounded, with 1,500 families evacuated.
Thailand had positioned six F-16 fighter jets on Thursday in a rare combat deployment, one of which was mobilised to strike a Cambodian military target, among measures Cambodia called "reckless and brutal military aggression".
Thailand's use of an F-16 underlines its military advantage over Cambodia, which has no fighter aircraft and significantly less defence hardware and personnel, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies
The United States, a long-time treaty ally of Thailand, called for an "immediate cessation of hostilities, protection of civilians and a peaceful resolution."
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Thailand and Cambodia are members, said he had spoken to leaders of both countries and urged them to find a peaceful way out.
"I welcome the positive signals and willingness shown by both Bangkok and Phnom Penh to consider this path forward. Malaysia stands ready to assist and facilitate this process in the spirit of ASEAN unity and shared responsibility," he said in a social media post late on Thursday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
24 minutes ago
- Reuters
Insight: Russia at the gates: How Ukraine defended a strategic city for months
DONETSK REGION, July 28 (Reuters) - For months, Ukraine has picked off Russian soldiers by the thousand around the frontline city of Pokrovsk, using small drones armed with bombs to tie down a numerically superior force. Now though, Russian troops are creeping forward in a summer offensive that has probed weak spots in Ukraine's defences and last week saw some Russian soldiers enter the city for the first time, according to footage on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels and geolocated by Reuters. Ukrainian soldiers' success in stopping their enemy from taking Pokrovsk since last year has long thwarted one of Moscow's central military goals, although the city itself is heavily damaged and all but a few hundred of the 60,000-strong population has fled. Pokrovsk sits atop large coking coal reserves and until Russian forces moved closer was important to Ukraine's military supply lines in the country's east. Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources including Ukrainian soldiers and relatives of Russian soldiers missing in action around the city, and made two trips to the area over four months to examine the shifting tactics in the key theatre of the eastern front. The Pokrovsk front is the most active in the war, with 111,000 Russian soldiers amassed there for the summer offensive, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi has said. Russia's forces initially aimed to seize Pokrovsk early last year, first with frontal assaults and later trying to encircle the city, which Russia calls by the Soviet-era name Krasnoarmeysk, or Red Army town. Ukraine slowed the advance this spring by deploying experienced units, laying minefields and other defensive barriers, while harassing Russian forces with large numbers of drones, said Viktor Trehubov, spokesperson for the military administration that covers Pokrovsk. 'They didn't stop trying to advance, but we were repelling them well,' said an artillery unit soldier who goes by call sign Vogak and serves on the Pokrovsk front. Since then, Moscow's forces have picked up the pace, adapting and expanding the use of drones in their own arsenal. Russia has built on the lessons used in pushing Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk region, where it first scaled the use of fibre-optic cable drones that cannot be stopped by the electronic jammers both sides used to confuse regular radio-controlled drones, analyst Michael Kofman said. The spools of hair-like cable give them enough range that Russia can threaten Ukraine's forces and logistics 25 kilometres behind the front line. Russia has more of the fibre-optic drones than Ukraine, giving them an advantage, said Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of Ukrainian open-source research group DeepState. The advances accelerated after Russia took control of a highway in May that connects Pokrovsk to Kostiantynivka, another of Ukraine's 'fortress cities' in the east, a map generated by DeepState shows. One of the main roads to the city is covered by nets to protect vehicles from Russian drone strikes. Serhii Dobriak, the head of the local military administration, last week said it was increasingly hard to deliver food to the city and that grocery stores would have to close in the coming days. While faster than before, Russia's territorial gains remain minor, with only 5,000 square kilometres (1,930 square miles) of Ukraine taken since the start of last year, less than 1% of the country's overall territory, according to a June report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. In total, Russia has occupied around a fifth of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the entry of small groups of Russian troops into Pokrovsk was insignificant and that they were "all destroyed" by Ukraine's soldiers. Russia's Defence Ministry did not respond to detailed requests for comment for this story. Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called 'Da Vinci Wolves,' which operates around Pokrovsk, saw first-hand how Russia's glacial advance on the city over the past year cost it heavily in killed and injured soldiers in the first half of 2025. Russian soldiers tried to advance by stealth but were hounded by Ukrainian soldiers flying small quadcopter drones mounted with cameras and explosives, he said. 'Every prisoner says drones are the thing they are most afraid of, the thing that constantly kills them, and the things they see when they sleep, the nightmares they have,' Filimonov told Reuters in an interview in April, citing debriefs of Russian soldiers captured by his men. Filimonov said groups of attackers were given a phone with a location pinned on a map, and told to head towards it. If the first group was killed, another one was sent to replace them, he said, citing the debriefs. Reuters was unable to independently verify his account. The Russians operated in raiding parties of around a half a dozen, often advancing on foot because large vehicles are an easy target for drone pilots, Filimonov and Trehubov said. Some left their vehicles as far as nine miles (15 km) from the front line and walked the rest of the way to be less visible to drone operators, Filimonov said. Others have taken to motorbikes to outpace the aircraft, piloted by Ukrainian soldiers often wearing virtual reality-style goggles attached to a drone's camera, offering a first-person view of the route and target, Trehubov said. The Ukrainian resistance in and around Pokrovsk has blocked Russia's ambition of taking the remaining parts of Ukraine's Donetsk region, one of President Vladimir Putin's principal war aims. Although its significance to Ukraine as a military supply centre has already faded, Kyiv-based military analyst Serhii Kuzan said Pokrovsk's fall could free up Russian troops and open the door to more Russian advances in the region. More than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, almost a quarter of those since the start of this year, according to British military intelligence estimates. Reuters could not verify these numbers. Neither Ukraine nor Russia gives official data on their own personnel losses. Towards the end of last year, Moscow's commanders deployed soldiers with very little training, including convicts or injured men, according to conversations with five relatives of Russian soldiers. The relatives did not want their identity or the soldiers' identities published for fear of reprisals. The army struggled to account for who was missing or dead, the relatives said. One soldier was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front despite having an injury to his leg sustained on previous missions, according to a relative. 'He could barely walk,' the relative said. He went missing on March 9, when his vehicle was hit. The relative said a member of his unit, to whom she had spoken, had heard him over the radio after the strike, saying he had been badly wounded. He was listed as absent without leave, she said, though she believes he is dead or taken prisoner. Another soldier, recruited from a Russian penal colony on December 18, was given a week of training and on December 26 was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front, according to a relative. The relative said he had not been heard from since. Shortly before the mission, the soldier rang relatives to ask them to send 50,000 roubles ($600) so he could buy a walkie-talkie. She said the soldier was officially listed at the end of December as having gone absent without leave, but she believed he was dead. A third soldier, a 21-year-old father of two from western Siberia, signed a contract with the army in 2024 after he was promised a non-combat role far from Ukrainian frontlines and signing-on bonuses of 1 million roubles, or $12,000, according to his relative. But instead, he was sent to Ukraine and in late December, he was ordered on a raid near the village of Vovkove, on the Pokrovsk front. In January, he was designated as absent without leave. At the end of April his family was notified he had been killed in action on December 27, according to the relative and letters from the military seen by Reuters. His relative said the family received 5 million roubles and a monthly pension as compensation for his death. The overall commander of Ukraine's land forces, Major-General Mykhaylo Drapatyi, was given the additional direct responsibility for the part of the front that includes Pokrovsk in January, after another town fell. Drapatyi, who previously stopped a Russian offensive on the second city of Kharkiv, brought 'a fresh vision' to the battle, helping mount counter-attacks to disrupt Russian advances and threaten its local logistics, DeepState's Pohorilyi said. However, Russia's adaptation and new technology such as the fibre-optic drones have shifted the balance. What soldiers call the drone 'kill zone' stretches several kilometres either side of the front line. That creates challenges to sustaining logistical supply chains for both armies. Any vehicle bringing forward fresh supplies of men, ammunition, food and water can be targeted. The overall Russian advance over the whole frontline doubled from 226 square kilometres in April to around 538 square kilometres in May, according to open-source analyst Pasi Paroinen with the Finnish 'Black Bird Group'. DeepState estimated that Ukraine had its biggest territorial losses of 2025 in June. More than a quarter of the 556 square kilometres taken by Russia in June were on the Pokrovsk front, DeepState estimated. Filimonov's Da Vinci Wolves fight on, defending the city against Russia's latest recruits. 'Russia finds new victims, which it throws into the furnace,' he said. ($1 = 79.4000 roubles)
Scottish Sun
an hour ago
- Scottish Sun
Exact time Donald Trump to meet Sir Keir Starmer in Scotland today as leaders set for showdown talks
The US President praised Sir Keir for doing a 'very good job' in office MAJOR SUMMIT Exact time Donald Trump to meet Sir Keir Starmer in Scotland today as leaders set for showdown talks Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) DONALD Trump is to meet Sir Keir Starmer at his Turnberry golf resort in Ayrshire this morning. The Prime Minister will engage in "wide-ranging" discussions with the US President on issues including trade and the Israel-Hamas war. Sign up for the Politics newsletter Sign up 3 Trump is to meet Sir Keir Starmer at his Turnberry golf resort this morning Credit: Reuters 3 The Prime Minister will engage in "wide-ranging" discussions with the US President Credit: EPA 3 John Swinney will also meet the president during his five day visit to the country Credit: Reuters Later, the PM and First Minister John Swinney will attend a banquet-style dinner hosted by the US leader in the north-east. It comes ahead of him opening a new 18-hole golf course in honour of his late Scottish mother, Mary Anne Macleod, at Menie, Aberdeenshire, on Tuesday. According to an itinerary published by website Trump will meet Starmer at noon. The pair will then hold "bilateral" discussions at 12:30pm. Starmer is expected to raise the prospect of reviving ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas and the future of tariffs on British steel. The two leaders have built a rapport on the world stage despite their differing political backgrounds, with Mr Trump praising Sir Keir for doing a "very good job" in office ahead of their talks today. First Minister John Swinney, who will also meet the president during his five-day visit to the country, said he would urge Mr Trump to apply pressure on Israel to agree to a lasting ceasefire and allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza. "I think what's important is that we focus on the solutions that are required now, and the absolutely immediate situation is a necessity for a ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to need to flow into Gaza so that the people of Gaza can be saved from the starvation that they face," Mr Swinney told BBC Breakfast. "And that is the blunt human reality of the situation that we face, and there must be an intensification of pressure on Israel. "And I think President Trump is ideally positioned. In fact, he's perhaps uniquely positioned to apply that pressure to Israel to ensure that there is safe passage for humanitarian aid to support the people of Gaza, who face an absolutely unbearable set of circumstances as a consequence of the conflict. "And a key part of that must be the application of a durable ceasefire, the flow of humanitarian aid and the progress towards a two state solution in the Middle East." The Republican President will leave for Aberdeen at 3:45pm and arrive in the Granite City at 5:25pm.
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Climate, gender in focus for World Bank in aid-reliant Pacific Islands
SYDNEY, July 28 (Reuters) - The World Bank has maintained its focus on climate change and gender in the Pacific, managing director of operations Anna Bjerde said on a visit to Australia, even as its largest shareholder the United States reduces aid in those areas. After meeting Pacific Islands economic ministers in Fiji, Bjerde said countries in the region continued to worry about being exposed to the accelerating effects of climate change, and had grave concerns about food security and rising debt levels. Six Pacific Island countries are at high risk of debt distress, the bank says. The World Bank is moving a regional vice president from Washington to Singapore, and will move directors from Australia to Fiji and Papua New Guinea to be closer to a $3.4 billion Pacific aid programme that has grown seven-fold in 10 years, she said in an interview on Monday. "We are committed to designing projects that really take into account the vulnerabilities of countries we work in. In this part of the world, countries are vulnerable to the impact of climate change," she said. "We haven't really changed our language around that," she added. Pacific road projects designed to be flood resilient provide better infrastructure that can withstand the changing climate and also be counted in climate finance programmes, Bjerde said. The World Bank was focussed on boosting women's workforce participation to help lift the region's economic growth, she said, after meeting women leaders in Fiji who highlighted the need for childcare so women can work. On Monday, Bjerde also met officials from the Australian government, the largest bilateral donor to the region. Under reforms introduced last year by its president Ajay Banga, the World Bank has started to roll out region-wide programmes to have a bigger impact among Pacific countries with small populations. Eight countries have joined an arrangement that stops small island states being cut off from the international financial system, while a health programme targeting non-communicable disease will potentially reach 2 million people across the Pacific Ocean and train 16,000 health workers. A trade programme is also being designed to give access to goods faster and more cheaply, she said.
