Captive Ukrainians address Russian court in emotional statements
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Saudi Gazette
11 hours ago
- Saudi Gazette
Kim Jong-un and Putin discuss alliance and war efforts against Ukraine
SEOUL — North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a phone call to discuss their deepening ties and war efforts against Ukraine, both countries' state media said Wednesday. The phone call comes as Putin gets set to meet with US President Donald Trump in the US state of Alaska this Friday to discuss a ceasefire proposal on Moscow's all-out war in Ukraine. According to North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency, Putin praised the 'bravery, heroism and self-sacrificing spirit' displayed by North Korean troops as they fought together with Russian forces against a Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Kursk border region, during the call. Putin also shared with Kim information about his upcoming talks with Trump, scheduled to take place Friday in Alaska, according to Russia's state-run Tass news agency, citing the Kremlin. The North Korean reports did not mention the Trump meeting. Kim told Putin that Pyongyang will fully support 'all measures to be taken by the Russian leadership in the future, too,' as they discussed advancing ties in 'all fields' under a strategic partnership agreement they signed during a summit last year, KCNA said. In recent years, Russia and North Korea have developed stronger ties, with Pyongyang providing Russia with personnel and munitions. A mutual defence deal was struck between the two nations during Putin's visit to the isolated dictatorship last year. And since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kim has made Moscow the priority of his foreign policy as he aims to break out of diplomatic isolation and expand relations with countries confronting Washington. His government has dismissed Washington and Seoul's stated desires to restart diplomacy aimed at defusing the North's nuclear program, which derailed in 2019 following a collapsed summit with Trump during his first term. In April this year, Pyongyang acknowledged for the first time that it sent a group of its soldiers to fight side by side with Russian troops. According to South Korean assessments, North Korea has sent around 15,000 troops to Russia since October last year and also supplied large quantities of military equipment, including artillery and ballistic missiles, in support of Moscow's war. Kim has also agreed to send thousands of military construction workers and deminers to Russia's Kursk region, a deployment South Korean intelligence believes could happen soon. — Euronews
Saudi Gazette
12 hours ago
- Saudi Gazette
European leaders hope to sway Trump on Ukraine during virtual meeting
BRUSSELS — European leaders will on Wednesday use a virtual meeting with Donald Trump to try to ensure the US president truly understands what is at stake for the continent before he meets Vladimir Putin later this week, but experts are doubtful they will succeed. Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, will join a meeting convened by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the early afternoon (central European time) that will also include the leaders of Finland, France, Italy, Poland, the UK, the NATO Secretary-General and the chiefs of the European Commission and Council. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will also take part from Berlin where he will meet with Merz. The German Chancellor, France's Emmanuel Macron and British premier Keir Starmer will then chair a meeting of the so-called coalition of the willing, scheduled to start at around 16:30 CET, according to media reports. "We welcome the efforts of President Trump to reach peace for Ukraine, a peace that is just and lasting and respects sovereignty and territorial integrity. And in this sense, we are working with Ukraine to make sure that this is kept in mind in the meeting on Friday," a spokesperson for the European Commission told reporters on Tuesday. "What we're doing now is reiterating our views on what a just and lasting peace for Ukraine should be and that any decision on Ukraine can be taken with Ukraine at the table," Arianna Podestà added. Zelensky is not expected to attend the summit to be held in Alaska on 15 August between the US and Russian presidents. Trump told reporters on Monday that "out of respect I'll call him first" after the talks wrap up. The announcement last week that a summit would be held has led to a flurry of diplomatic contact in Europe over fears Ukraine and the wider continent's interests will be trampled on in a bid for a quick deal. EU leaders - bar Hungary - reiterated in a joint statement on Tuesday that no deal can be made without Ukraine at the table. They also wrote that "international borders must not be changed by force", thereby rejecting Putin's ceasefire proposal to trade the Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. "Unable to bring much to the negotiations, European leaders have been relegated to the margins with the EU seen by Trump and Putin as largely irrelevant," Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told Euronews. "European leaders are able to inform Trump of their ideas, and the US will brief them on the summit outcomes, but Europe is in the position that the Ukraine conflict outcomes are being negotiated over its head and the continent's leadership is essentially an observer," he added. The call with Trump and Vance is a last-ditch attempt before the summit to get that point across before the Arctic meet-up. One of the central issues for Europeans, Ian Bond told Euronews, is that Trump appears to be treating a possible peace deal in Ukraine "like a real estate transaction". "He does not understand that some of the territory in the east of Ukraine that Putin covets would be vital to Ukraine's defence when (and it is 'when' not 'if') Russia resumes its aggression and tries to take more Ukrainian territory," the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform (CER) added. Additionally, recent comments by Trump "showed that he still blames Zelensky for the war, even though Russia was the aggressor." Vance's participation is also "significant", Majda Ruge, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) told Euronews, "because his position is further away from the one Europeans are hoping to get President Trump to agree to". The US vice-president told Fox News on Sunday that the US is "done with the funding of the Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing". He also said that any deal was "not going to make anybody super happy" and called on Europe "to step up and take a bigger role in this thing, and if you care so much about this conflict you should be willing to play a more direct and a more substantial way in funding this war yourself". The EU and its member states are the biggest contributors to Ukraine's defence through their financial, humanitarian and military assistance to the war-torn country since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion in late February 2022. "The US Vice-President is keen to improve US relations with Russia and sees a need for compromise with Russian President Putin. He is therefore more likely to push for a position that involves greater concessions from Ukraine than what President Zelensky or the European leaders would like to see," Ruge added. The European leaders present in the meeting with Trump will then brief their counterparts involved in the so-called coalition of the willing. The group, led by France and the UK, was formed back in March following the initial thawing of relations between Washington and Moscow to discuss the security guarantees Europe could offer in the event of a peace deal. This will be their seventh meeting. They have so far agreed to the creation of a 'Multinational Force Ukraine' following reconnaissance visits to Ukraine by military chiefs and to "bolster Ukraine's ability to return to peace and stability", and to the establishment of a headquarters in Paris. "So far, the coalition of the willing has not been particularly willing to act. Its focus has been on preparing to support a peace settlement that was never likely as long as Putin's war aims were unchanged," Bond opined. "But what Ukraine needs at present is a coalition willing to help it before the cessation of hostilities – to put enough pressure on Russian forces that Putin is incentivised to stop fighting and make concessions. There is no sign of such a coalition at present," he added. The grouping itself, Dr Melvin said, "is a sign that the main institutions of the Euro-Atlantic community are now unable to deliver the political and security solutions that Europe needs" due to the fact that the EU and NATO run primarily on consensus. Whether Europe's efforts to rally Trump to their cause are fruitful will likely only be observed in Alaska on Friday. Their exchange will have been successful if Trump "stands up to Putin in Alaska, strengthens Zelensky's position militarily, and joins the Europeans in increasing sanctions pressure on Russia," Bond said, cautioning however that "it seems unlikely that the meeting will achieve any of those outcomes" given recent comments from US officials. "Maybe the best we can hope for is that Putin over-reaches so that even Trump finds it impossible to accept his proposals," he added. — Euronews
Saudi Gazette
13 hours ago
- Saudi Gazette
Russian troops pierce Ukraine's patchy defenses in Donetsk
KYIV — Small groups of Russian troops have pierced parts of Ukraine's defenses in its eastern Donetsk region, according to local officials, as Russia appears to be making an 11th-hour dash to snatch as much territory as possible ahead of the planned meeting between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump on Friday. Russian forces are making a push towards Dobropillia, the Ukrainian battlefield monitoring group DeepState reported Tuesday. The town is around 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the key strategic city of Pokrovsk, which has been in the Kremlin's crosshairs for more than a year. 'Groups of Russians have advanced about 10 kilometers (6 miles) in several places. All of them have no equipment, only weapons in their hands. Some have already been found, partially destroyed, partially captured,' Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a briefing Tuesday. 'The task of this advance is clear to us,' Zelensky said, adding that Russia is trying to create the distorted perception ahead of the Putin-Trump meeting 'that Russia is moving forward, advancing, and Ukraine is losing.' Ukrainian officials conceded that their defenses near Dobropillia had been infiltrated by clusters of Russian forces, but stressed that this involved small numbers of troops and did not mean Russia had taken control of territory. Elsewhere in the area, Ukraine's military warned of 'heavy defensive battles against superior enemy forces.' 'In the Pokrovsk direction alone, the occupiers have concentrated a group of more than 110,000 personnel,' the Ukrainian General Staff said in an update Tuesday evening, adding that the army is allocating additional forces and assets to strengthen defenses in some said that the overall ratio of manpower is 1 to 3 in favor of Russia's troops, but added that Russia's losses are also three times greater than Ukraine's.'They are preparing for an offensive operation, we believe, in three directions. The main directions are Zaporizhzhia, Pokrovsk, and Novopavlivka,' Zelensky said, emphasizing that Russia's troop buildup is happening just before Trump and Putin sit down in Alaska on Friday.'We believe that they will do everything to prepare for offensive actions after the 15th,' the Ukrainian president added. 'We believe that they will be ready with these brigades by September.'In his meeting with Trump, Putin – potentially seeking to secure at the negotiating table what Russia has not been able to win by force – will be at pains to give the impression that Russia's advance in Donetsk is inevitable. Although there is confusion over Putin's reported conditions for a ceasefire in Ukraine, most versions stress that the Russian president will demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from all parts of Donetsk region they still Ukrainian officials on Tuesday warned that their grip on the front lines was loosening, after months of incremental Russian gains, driven by Moscow's superior Col. Bohdan Krotevych, a former chief of staff of the 12th special forces of Ukraine's elite Azov Brigade, gave a rare public warning to Zelensky about Ukraine's dwindling defenses. 'Mr President, I honestly don't know what you're being told, but I am informing you that the situation (near Pokrovsk) is, without exaggeration, a complete mess,' Krotevych wrote on X.'The front line is virtually non-existent,' he said.A commander near Pokrovsk, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN that Ukraine's defenses in the area mostly comprise two-man positions resupplied by drones alone. Rather than two frontline trenches facing each other, the battlefield now consists of a series of mostly hidden, isolated and small outposts, where infantry try to hold ground covertly, without being spotted by enemy new type of face-off plays to Russia's advantage of greater manpower, enabling them to surge forces forwards in small groups, content to lose troops if they run into resistance, or reinforce any success.'The enemy is trying to use the 'thousand cuts' tactic,' Valentin Manko, the commander of Ukraine's Assault Forces, told CNN.'Three small groups of several men each slipped through our positions (near Dobropillia). They slipped through and inflicted some damage,' he said. 'Some of them were destroyed, some were taken prisoner.'Manko said Ukrainian officers were working to search the entire area, which could take some regional command of Ukraine's ground forces in Donetsk claimed that many of the groups that infiltrate Ukraine's defenses are soon picked off.'The enemy personnel who infiltrate between the positions of (our) units are met by Ukrainian soldiers and face certain death,' it Tregubov, a spokesperson for Ukraine's ground forces in the neighboring Dnipro region, said that these infiltrations 'does not mean (Russia has) taken control of that territory.''What actually happened is that a small Russian group – perhaps five to 10 people – managed to slip through,' he said, stressing that battlefield control maps – like those produced by DeepState – can depict this as a solid territorial gain for Russia.'It doesn't mean they control the entire route they moved through. They simply made their way in and tried to hide in a basement somewhere,' Tregubov fear for Kyiv, however, is that Russia will use so many of these small groups that it will eventually be able to consolidate its gains behind Ukraine's patchwork defenses, even if many of the groups are picked Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, said Tuesday that it was 'premature' to call Russian advances near Dobropillia an 'operational-level breakthrough, though Russian forces very likely seek to mature their tactical advances into an operational-level breakthrough in the coming days.'It said this tactic is reminiscent of Russia's penetration of Ukraine's defenses around Avdiivka, another city further east in Donetsk, which Russia was able to capture in April 2024.'The next several days in the Pokrovsk area of operations will likely be critical for Ukraine's ability to prevent accelerated Russian gains north and northwest of Pokrovsk,' ISW Miroshnikov, a Ukrainian military blogger, was bleaker in his assessment, saying the situation in the area 'is gradually approaching the point where Pokrovsk... can no longer be saved.''For now, that point has not yet been reached. The critical moment has not yet come. But unfortunately, everything is heading in that direction as of now,' he wrote on Telegram. — CNN
