Ukraine war briefing: US resumes military supplies to Ukraine, Zelenskyy announces
Donald Trump confirmed he had struck a deal with Nato leaders to supply weapons to Ukraine, Andrew Roth writes. During an interview with NBC News, the US president said: 'So what we're doing is the weapons that are going out are going to Nato, and then Nato is going to be giving those weapons [to Ukraine], and Nato is paying for those weapons.' He added: 'I'm disappointed in Russia, but we'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks.'
The EU's top diplomat has said the 27-nation bloc was pondering a new raft of sanctions against Moscow. 'Russia has increased its attacks against civilians to really cause as much pain … and that's unacceptable,' the EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said. Brussels was considering an 18th round of sanctions against Moscow and 'we are also still in negotiations to put the oil price cap on, that would deprive Russia from the means to fund this war', she told AFP.
Kallas said she was assured by Laos's top diplomat that Vientiane had 'no intention or willingness' to send military help to Russia, following claims that Moscow was planning to involve military personnel from Laos to bolster its efforts in Ukraine. 'I also expressed that it has consequences for European aid to Laos if something like this is happening,' Kallas said. 'If you [Laos] contribute to that existential threat, we can't have good cooperation,' she warned.
Ukrainian drone and shelling attacks killed three people in Russia on Friday. Russian air defence systems intercepted 155 Ukrainian drones overnight, Moscow said. There was one dead in Russia's Lipetsk region and another was killed in the western Tula region from the drone attacks, local officials said. Ukrainian shelling later killed another civilian in the border region of Belgorod, the governor announced. The Russian defence ministry said out of the 155 downed Ukrainian drones, 11 were bound for Moscow.
Ukraine said its drones struck a Russian fighter aircraft plant in the Moscow region and a missile production facility in the Tula region, causing explosions and fires at both. Ukraine's military said on Telegram the aviation facility in the town of Lukhovitsy, about 135km (84 miles) south-east of Moscow, produced MiG fighters. The other site was the Instrument Design Bureau, which specialised in producing anti-aircraft missiles and missile-gun systems, it said. 'Defence forces continue to take all steps to undermine the military and economic potential of the Russian occupiers,' the military said.
Russian bombardments on eastern Ukraine overnight on Friday forced the evacuation of a maternity centre in Kharkiv and wounded nine people. Zelenskyy said a medical facility was hit in the attack on the country's second-largest city. 'Among the wounded are women in a maternity hospital – mothers with newborns, women recovering from surgery,' he wrote on social media. 'Fortunately, no children were injured.' He added that several other regions were attacked overnight.
Nato will need more long-range missiles in its arsenal to deter Russia from attacking Europe because Moscow is expected to increase production of long-range weapons, a US army general told Reuters. 'The Russian army is bigger today than it was when they started the war in Ukraine,' Maj Gen John Rafferty said at a US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany. 'And we know that they're going to continue to invest in long-range rockets and missiles and sophisticated air defences. So more alliance capability is really, really important.'
The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that wartime censorship in Russia is justified amid the conflict with Ukraine and the closure of opposition-minded media. Speaking to Russian magazine Expert, Peskov said that many media outlets have been closed, while some reporters have left the country in the past three years. 'But don't forget the situation we are in. Now is the time of military censorship, unprecedented for our country. After all, the war is going on in the information space too,' Peskov told the magazine. Russian authorities also blocked X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. 'It would be wrong to turn a blind eye to the media that are deliberately engaged in discrediting Russia,' he said.
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The Guardian
37 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Young people don't feel part of the EU – and they're right
The former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi produced his much-awaited prescription for how to reboot Europe's economy last year. The Draghi report was rightly applauded as a rude awakening for a European Union that is far too complacent about its own obsolescence. Draghi concluded that an €800bn-a-year public spending boost would be needed to end years of stagnation. If Europe did not catch up with its rivals, he warned, it would face a 'slow and agonising' decline. And yet, one ingredient was missing from Draghi's recipe. In his nearly 400-page roadmap for rescuing the EU, the word 'democracy' is mentioned only three times (once in the bibliography). By contrast, 'integration' is used 96 times and 'defence' 391 times. It's true that Draghi's report was explicitly devoted to the future of European competitiveness (and not more widely to the Europe of the future). But if the EU can't find a way to better engage its citizens, it will be difficult to achieve any more of the integration that Draghi says is indispensable to make a still-fragmented single market more competitive and Europe more capable of defending itself. One thing is sure: the old method of decision-making that a generation of European leaders relied on is obsolete. We urgently need to reform the EU, but the top-down approach to doing so is no longer fit for purpose. True, the debate on the 'democratic deficit' is as old as the EU itself. Direct elections to the European parliament, the first and only international assembly elected in this way, were introduced in 1979 to respond to the same criticism. However, at least until the end of the last century, the discussion on European democracy was seen as a niche for thinktanks – something nice to have to complete an integration project mostly run by an enlightened elite. Today, the picture has radically changed: the European parliament's powers have increased over time, but only about half of people who are entitled to vote in European elections bother to do so. Less than 50% of those vote for the two political 'families' (centre-right and socialist) that for decades provided the consensus that the EU project required to function. And no less worryingly, according to a recent survey from Cluster17, a French polling company, the percentages of European citizens who say the EU is not democratic and instead describe it as bureaucratic and disconnected are higher among younger age groups (becoming a solid majority among those aged 34 and under). More competitiveness requires a larger EU budget (it currently stands at just 1% of GDP) and more money for European 'public goods' (goods for which there is a clear economic case for producing them at EU level, for example, satellite-based telecommunication services or trans-European high-speed trains). But you can't ask for new taxation to fund joint EU spending without more representation. More common defence should be a commonsense direction given the existential threats that Europe is facing and the inefficiencies that running 27 military budgets imply. However, it requires a sufficiently wide public perception that such spending is going to benefit every citizen of the community we want to defend. And yet, surprisingly perhaps, according to Cluster17's poll, younger people feel less European even than their parents, preferring to call themselves citizens of the world. Without a European demos, it will be difficult to create an EU army – if that is what emerges from the debates on security – but also a real European democracy. And if we have neither citizenship nor engagement, we risk a political backlash like the ones we have seen on the green deal or the austerity measures that came after the global financial crash and the eurozone crisis, even when the policies are theoretically right. Last month about 100 policymakers, politicians, journalists, academics and students from all the major European countries (EU and beyond) gathered in Siena to consider how a Europe of the future could deal with some of its biggest challenges, such as common defence, the threat posed by global trade wars and AI. The outcome is a paper that prioritises identifying ways to better engage voters in each of the big decisions. A recent European Commission initiative – a citizens' panel in which 150 randomly selected EU citizens were enlisted to help the EU decide how to spend its money in the future – was considered a good start. But the conference in Siena identified changes that will be essential if citizens' recommendations are to be included in a systematic way. In EU budgetary decision-making for example, the language must change so that citizens can understand what goal is being achieved in any spending plans. The budgetary logic must be 'zero based' (which in accountancy parlance means not decided on the basis of incremental adjustments to past spending). Such an approach could ensure that 'participatory democracy' becomes a mainstream instrument of EU policymaking. No less crucial is a set of 'positive actions' that a group led by Luca Verzichelli of the University of Siena drew up to promote the European demos. The most eye-catching proposal – and one that attracted the broadest consensus – was to make the Erasmus student programme free and mandatory for all EU students in secondary and tertiary-level education. A quarter of the money spent by the EU on farmers would be enough to cover an expanded version of Erasmus, the Vision thinktank that convened the Siena conference calculates. I have no doubt the results would be more transformational. The democracy deficit is not just a European problem. Representative institutions are suffering more broadly from what seems to be a form of technological obsolescence. The internet has massively altered the control of information, which is power. This requires a radical transformation of the mechanisms through which power is acquired, restrained and exercised; and of the instruments we use to transmit individual preferences and convert them into collective choices. The EU needs more clarity about what it is for, and it needs to go well beyond superficially involving citizens to give its messages cosmetic legitimacy. But it has the paradoxical advantage of being an unfinished project. This means it has the flexibility to experiment with new forms of participation, policymaking and citizenship. It must urgently acknowledge that the only way to protect democracy is to adapt its forms to a radically different technological context. Francesco Grillo is a visiting fellow at the European University Institute, Florence and director of the thinktank Vision
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
A British soldier was found dead in a Ukrainian reservoir with his hands tied. Nobody will say why
Ever since Vladimir Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine, a patch of lawn in Kyiv's Independence Square has served as a makeshift memorial to the nation's war dead. On it are planted tens of thousands of tiny flags, each put there in honour of a fallen soldier. Amid the sea of blue and yellow are Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and European tricolours. They honour volunteers who came to fight for Ukraine's International Legion – and who paid the ultimate price. Not everyone who is remembered there, though, died gloriously in combat. One flag that has fluttered since 2023 commemorates Jordan Chadwick, a volunteer from Burnley in Lancashire. Aged 31, he was a former member of the Scots Guards, a regiment with a fighting history stretching back nearly four centuries. Their motto, Nemo me Impune Lacessit, translates as 'No one assails me with impunity'. Tragically, however, that seems to have been exactly how Chadwick met his end. On 24 June 2023, Chadwick was found lying dead in a reservoir outside Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that lies close to the Donbas front line. In a part of the country that is repeatedly hit by indiscriminate Russian missile fire, such grisly discoveries aren't unknown, but Chadwick's death was no random act from afar. His hands were tied behind his back, and his body had been in the water for no more than a day or two. Someone, it seemed, had taken him prisoner before killing him and trying to hide his corpse – unaware, perhaps, that the reservoir was still fished by local anglers, who found his body in a reed bed close to the shore. Who, though, would do such a thing, and why? Had he been captured by Russian troops, not best known for their respect for the Geneva Conventions? Or, as many now believe, was he killed not by enemy forces at all, but by fellow Legionnaires? Last month marked the second anniversary of Chadwick's death, since when a lot has changed in Ukraine. The much-vaunted counter-offensive that he was taking part in that summer, which the West hoped might halt Putin's invasion for good, petered out with little success. Today, it is Russian forces that are gaining ground around the Donbas, moving ever closer to Kramatorsk. Yet the circumstances of his death remain as murky as the water he was found in. 'Everyone has a different theory,' one volunteer told me. 'But those who really know don't want to talk about it.' That much I have also learnt, having spent the last three years reporting from Ukraine for The Telegraph, and also writing a book about the Legion's role in the war. During that time I have interviewed scores of Legionnaires about their experiences – some on front lines, some in bases, bars and hospital wards. Many of their stories sound like an Andy McNab novel on steroids, with battles that make Afghanistan and Iraq seem like child's play. Amid the tales of heroism, however, there is a darker, less-talked-about side to life in the Legion, which has proved to be a magnet for hotheads and ne'er-do-wells. As some volunteers only half-joke, the people they watch out for most in Ukraine are not the Russians, but fellow Legionnaires. Few are willing to talk openly about Chadwick's death, even though these are not men who take fright easily. Storming a Russian trench position is one thing. Speaking out about former comrades quite another, bringing a risk of reprisals – or, if nothing else, a break from an unofficial volunteers' code that 'what happens in Ukraine, stays in Ukraine'. It is a far cry from the lofty tones evoked by President Zelensky when he announced the Legion's creation on the third day of the invasion, a time when Russian victory seemed all but inevitable. Describing it as 'the beginning of a war against Europe, against democracy, against basic human rights', he invited anyone with military experience to join the fight. Within weeks, Kyiv officials claimed, more than 20,000 people had applied. Many saw themselves following in the footsteps of George Orwell, who fought as a Republican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. But a significant minority were fantasists, misfits and ex-criminals, often fleeing troubled pasts. The bad apples sullied the Legionnaires' reputation in the eyes of Ukrainian commanders, who either shunned them, or used them as cannon fodder. That led to many volunteers forming their own independent fighting units –which, while technically part of the Legion, were effectively self-run militias, with little by way of formal command or discipline structures. Some also prided themselves in taking on extremely dangerous missions, at which even their Ukrainian counterparts might baulk. The 50/50 Assault Group, the unit that Chadwick joined, was a case in point. Composed of a couple of dozen mainly British and American fighters, it specialised in hardcore combat – its name a reference to the risks its members ran of death or injury. In 2023 the unit was serving in the Donbas city of Bakhmut, the fiercest battle of the entire war. When reports of Chadwick's death first emerged that summer, many Legionnaires assumed he had been taken prisoner by Russian troops. Those more familiar with the Donbas's geography, however, could rule that out. The reservoir where his body was found – a vast stretch of water nicknamed the Kramatorsk Sea – was 30 miles west of the nearest front lines, and had never been part of the combat zone. That left the possibility of a run-in with his fellow volunteers. Legionnaires are no strangers to fights sparked by battlefield mishaps, drunken arguments or personality clashes. Steroid abuse is also common in volunteer circles – one known side-effect of which are bouts of aggression known as 'roid rage'. Might a punch-up between the bruisers of 50/50 have got out of hand? Numerous Legionnaire contacts knew of ex 50/50 members who had served alongside Chadwick, but every time I asked if they would speak with me, the same answer came back: 'They don't want to talk'. It was not until four months after Chadwick's death that I first tracked one down, and even then he knew only half the story. 'Chadwick was a good soldier, but he was also quite conflictual and argumentative,' he told me. 'All I know is that there was some kind of row, which ended up with him being killed. 'The Legion then sorted it out without any proper investigation. That's the usual way here, they find it easier. The guys involved were just asked to go home, although you'd think the British embassy here in Kyiv [which helped oversee the repatriation of Chadwick's body] must have wondered what the hell was going on. A British guy gets killed, and everyone just says: 'so be it'?' The story got little coverage in Britain, by then focused on the horrors of the October 7 massacre in Israel. But in Legionnaire chat groups on Whatsapp and Signal, gossip was rife. One story had it that Chadwick had died during an SAS-style 'selection' ritual, involving waterboarding. His body had then been dumped in the reservoir, to make it look like he'd drowned. Another story was that the waterboarding had been done not as part of a ritual, but as a punishment for stealing. Both stories named the culprit as a British volunteer call-signed 'Huggs', who had previously served in the French Foreign Legion. For nearly a year, Ukrainian police declined to comment, saying only that it was a 'criminal case'. Then, during a visit to Kramatorsk in February last year, I finally spoke to a detective active in the investigation. I met Inna Lyakhova in a heavily guarded police station downtown, where her room contained a mannikin for reconstructions of homicide scenes. She said that she believed Chadwick's death was misadventure rather than murder. 'It seems there was an argument one night between him and some other soldiers at the house they were staying at,' she told me. 'He became emotional and aggressive, so he was put into plastic cuffs. His comrades told him: 'Go away, and don't come back.'' Chadwick then left the house, which Lyakhova said was in a village next to the Kramatorsk reservoir. He then appeared to have strayed into the reservoir itself, where his body was found between 24 and 48 hours later. Whether he had stumbled in accidentally or walked in deliberately was unknown. Either way, he would have been unable to swim with his hands tied behind his back, and the cause of death was drowning. Foul play had been ruled out, as police found no signs of injuries on Chadwick's body that indicated a struggle. 'We think he had gone to the water by himself, as it would have been hard to make him go there against his will,' Lyakhova said. All his 50/50 comrades had been questioned, she added. When I checked again with the Kramatorsk police just last month, there were no updates. Yet the police account raises as many questions as it answered. Most combat units, after all, are well-drilled in how to take prisoners. Would they really allow a distressed, drunken soldier to wander off into the night alone, hands tied behind his back? If he was being a nuisance, could they not have simply cuffed him to a post or a tree outside, or cuffed his ankles too? Likewise, was the absence of injuries on his body really proof that he had wandered into the lake of his own accord? What if he had been frog-marched there at gunpoint? Many volunteers I spoke to suspected a cover-up, or that at the very least Ukrainian authorities had little incentive to get to the bottom of it. The battle for Bakhmut that the 50/50 were helping with was crucial to Ukraine's war. Detaining some of them over a petty dispute that had got out of hand would remove valuable assets from the front line. 'You hear of this happening occasionally – some troops have a punch-up, someone gets killed accidentally, and it's just quietly forgotten about,' said one Legionnaire. So who really was Jordan Chadwick, and what brought him to Ukraine in the first place? Details of his life remain almost as sketchy as his death. The only public comment his family have made was a brief statement after the discovery of his body, praising his 'unwavering courage and resilience'. He is understood to have served in the Scots Guards from 2011-2015, doing guard duty outside Buckingham Palace. But like many ex-soldiers, his life appears to have unravelled after leaving the Army. In Burnley, residents of the quiet suburban street where his family home used to be spoke of a troubled young man but declined to elaborate. 'I don't want to speak ill of the dead,' one told me. By the time the Ukraine war beckoned, Chadwick was living rough, camping out in woods in Burnley's suburbs and eating in soup kitchens. One person who got to know him during that time was Pastor Mick Fleming, a reformed drug dealer who runs a local homeless charity, Church On The Street. It was visited by Prince William in January 2022, a month before the Ukraine war broke out. At the time, Chadwick was a regular drop-in at the charity – Fleming remembers him being excited about the prospect of going to fight. 'He was a lovely guy, very easy to talk to, but also a loner, quite isolated from other people,' Fleming told me back in February. 'The minute the conflict in Ukraine broke out, bingo! – he wanted to be part of it. He said it felt like his duty, as an ex-soldier, to go.' Straight away, that struck Fleming as a bad idea. Chadwick, he says, was seriously underweight from months of living rough. He smelt heavily of marijuana, and seemed to be delusional. 'I don't think anyone in their right mind would have taken him on as a soldier. He wasn't in a fit state.' Fleming's advice not to go to Ukraine went unheeded. Chadwick, he said, devoted the next few months attempting to get fit for combat, trying to use his soldier's skills to live off the land. Then, in October 2022, he headed for Ukraine. Chadwick wasn't alone in seeing the Legion as a chance to turn his life around. Other volunteers I have met went there after stints in jail, messy divorces, or simply because they were bored with life. Fleming heard nothing from Chadwick again, until the reports of his death nearly a year later. 'At first I figured he'd probably been captured by the Russians and executed, but it now looks like he fell out with someone from his own side. From my limited knowledge of him, that seems the most realistic explanation. He was a nice lad, but he couldn't cope with everyday society, with rules. That might have caused him to upset the wrong people.' Who, though, and why? It wasn't till last month that a clearer picture finally emerged, courtesy of another source, 'Dave', who only agreed to speak after months of persuasion. His accounts of dates, times and people is detailed, and corresponds with other events that I have been able to verify. In the Legionnaires' world, that is about as good as it gets. According to Dave, the incident that led to Chadwick's death was a fight he had one night with another team member, call-signed 'Bronco'. '50/50 shared two houses close to each other, with Bronco in house one and Chadwick in house two,' Dave recalled. 'Chadwick came over one night, all dressed for battle, and was trying to kill Bronco. The spark for the fight wasn't clear, but they subdued him and then tied his hands behind his back. It's not clear whether he was dead or alive when he left the house, but Huggs drove him away. His body was found in the reservoir a day or two after.' An American, a Dane, and three Britons, including 'Huggs', were apparently in the house when the fight happened. After Chadwick's body was found, they were all detained and questioned by Ukrainian police, but then released, except for Huggs. Then, in a bizarre twist, they went out for dinner together at a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, only for it to be hit by a Russian missile. This part of the story crosses over with mine – I was sitting in the very same restaurant myself that night. By some miracle, just as I was browsing the menu, I got a phone call from a contact who wanted to meet urgently on the other side of town. I left the restaurant, and less than half an hour later heard the explosion. It was caused by an Iskander ballistic missile – a 24ft monster big enough to carry a nuclear warhead – which killed 13 diners, including the Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina, and wounded 60. Among the other casualties were the American 50/50 volunteer, who died, and the Dane, who was seriously injured. The two Britons escaped serious injury, but left Ukraine shortly afterwards. In the wake of Chadwick's death and the pizza restaurant bombing, the 50/50 effectively ceased operation for some time. Huggs was released from questioning, and continued to fight in Ukraine with a different unit. For legal reasons, I am withholding publication of his name, but recently I tracked him down through an Instagram account. In a series of message exchanges, he confirmed that he had been 'the primary person under investigation' for a time as he was 50/50's team leader. He and the rest of the unit were then cleared, he said, after DNA and polygraph tests. Asked what had happened to Chadwick, he wrote the following: 'He [Chadwick] developed a hatred for a team member code-name 'Bronco'. After a few drinks he made ready his weapon and headed to the other team house to confront Bronco. To which he was disarmed, removed from the team house and [the] team itself. It was after that time he was discovered dead.' He said he was 'not the last person to see Chadwick alive', but declined to elaborate on how Chadwick had died, or who was responsible, adding: 'I cannot confirm what else happened as part of the investigation.' Once again, it is an explanation that raises as many questions as it answers. If, as Huggs claims, Chadwick was brandishing a weapon threateningly, it might have been legitimate to use force in self-defence. But if so, why dump his body in a reservoir several miles away? And why do Huggs' and Dave's accounts vary so much from that given by the police? Detective Lyakhova made no mention of Chadwick brandishing a weapon. She also said the house where the fight took place was right next to the reservoir, while Dave insists it was in Kramatorsk itself. In a subsequent message a few weeks after our first exchange, Huggs claimed the police investigation had moved on to focus on members of a previous unit Chadwick had served with, which he had left after an argument. Again, he did not elaborate, but said the argument had taken place after 'an op went bad outside of Bakhmut'. An inquest into Chadwick's death was due to be held in Britain 18 months ago, but was then postponed, with no new date set. A coroner, however, has no power to compel witnesses to give evidence from overseas. In which case they may have to rely largely on what Ukrainian police tell them. No Scotland Yard team has gone to Ukraine to investigate, and British diplomats may require special security clearance even to travel outside of Kyiv. 'The investigation into Jordan Chadwick's death is being led by the Ukrainian authorities,' Lancashire Police told me. Meanwhile, the war rumbles on, with Russian troops now barely 10 miles from Kramatorsk. A time may come when both the city and its police station fall into Kremlin hands, at which point the plight of a troubled young Englishman who died there two years ago will surely be forgotten. Somebody, somewhere, knows exactly how Chadwick ended up in that reservoir. But right now, the truth about what happened to him in Ukraine may well stay in Ukraine. The Mad and the Brave: The Untold Story of Ukraine's Foreign Legion, by Colin Freeman (HarperCollins, £22), is published on July 17
BreakingNews.ie
2 hours ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Russian drone and cruise missile attacks kill at least four in Ukraine
At least four people were killed overnight and on Saturday as Russia continued to pound Ukraine with hundreds of drones as part of a stepped-up bombing campaign that has further dampened hopes for a breakthrough in efforts to end the more than three-year-old war. Two people died and 14 were wounded when Russian forces attacked the Bukovina area in the Chernivtsi region of southwestern Ukraine with four drones and a missile, regional governor Ruslan Zaparaniuk said on Saturday. Advertisement He said that the two people died because of falling debris from a drone. A drone attack in Ukraine's western Lviv region wounded nine people, regional governor Maksym Kozytskyi said. A damaged residential building after a Russian air attack in Lviv (Mykola Tys/AP) Three people were wounded in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine when the city was hit by eight drones and two missiles, mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Russia fired 597 drones and decoys, with 26 cruise missiles, into Ukraine overnight, Ukraine's air force said. Advertisement Of these, 319 drones and 25 cruise missiles were shot down and 258 decoy drones were lost, likely having been electronically jammed. Two people were killed on Saturday in a missile strike in the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to regional governor Serhii Lysak. Russia has been stepping up its long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities. Earlier this week, Russia fired more than 700 attack and decoy drones at Ukraine overnight, topping previous nightly barrages for the third time in two weeks and targeting Lutsk near the border with Poland in western Ukraine, a region that is a crucial hub for receiving foreign military aid. Advertisement Poland's air force scrambled fighter jets in areas bordering Ukraine, Polish officials said. Russia's intensifying long-range attacks have coincided with a concerted Russian effort to break through parts of the roughly 620-mile front line, where Ukrainian troops are under severe pressure. Russia's defence ministry said it shot down 33 Ukrainian drones overnight into Saturday.
