Latest news with #ballisticmissiles
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Russia launches ‘hellish' aerial attack on eastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad
Russia launched its biggest ever attack on the eastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad early on Saturday, as part of a large wave of strikes across the country involving hundreds of kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles. The six-hour bombardment was the worst in the city's history. The head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergey Lysak, said a factory was damaged, a fire station destroyed and a five-storey residential building hit. 'A hellish night and morning for Pavlohrad. The most intense attack on the city. Explosion after explosion. Russian terrorists targeted it with missiles and drones,' Lysak said. Drones could be heard flying over Pavlohrad in the early hours of Saturday. There were cacophonous booms and orange explosions lighting up the night sky. The streets echoed with machine-gun fire as anti-aircraft units tried to shoot them down. In the morning, thick black smoke hung above the city. There were several fires. One exhausted resident, Oleh, said it was the worst night he had known. 'Nobody slept. We were all in shelters. There was a thunderstorm as well. We had explosions and rain together,' he said. The attack came soon after Gen Keith Kellogg, Trump's special envoy to Ukraine, flew back to Washington after a six-day visit to Kyiv. This week the White House announced a large-scale arms package to Ukraine, including additional Patriot anti-aircraft systems, to be paid for by European allies. The Kremlin refrained from carrying out a large-scale bombardment while Kellogg was in the country. Social media was awash with memes depicting Kellogg as a cat protecting the capital, since Keith sounds similar to 'kit', or cat in Ukrainian. On Friday, Russia's former president Dmitry Medvedev promised Moscow would escalate its aerial attacks in response to the EU's latest sanctions package, which was agreed after the pro-Kremlin government in Slovakia dropped its objections. The city of Pavlohrad is a strategic hub for the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Russian troops are close to capturing territory in the region – which borders Donetsk province – for the first time since Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion. In recent days they have captured several neighbouring villages. Sign up to Headlines Europe A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day after newsletter promotion Early on Saturday, Russian forces also targeted the Black Sea port of Odesa, setting fire to a nine-storey apartment building, the city's mayor said. Five people were rescued from the top floor, and one woman subsequently died. Odesa's mayor, Hennady Trukhanov, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said at least 20 drones had converged on the city, a frequent target of Russian strikes. 'Civilian structure has been damaged as a result of the attack,' Trukhanov wrote. 'A high-rise apartment block is on fire. Rescuers are taking people out from the flames.' Ukraine's new prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, said Moscow had launched another 'brutal attack' on Odesa and other Ukrainian cities. 'One person killed, several more wounded, families destroyed. This is the cost of hesitation. Without bold response, the strikes will come again,' she said.
Russia Today
4 days ago
- Business
- Russia Today
US Patriots struggling against Russian weaponry in Ukraine
US-made Patriot air defense systems, long hailed as a cornerstone of Western military aid to Ukraine, are now struggling to intercept advanced Russian ballistic missiles, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing sources. One unnamed Ukrainian official told the outlet that Russian ballistic missiles have become more maneuverable, allowing them to evade Patriot radar detection. He did not clarify what type of missiles he was referring to. Meanwhile, in light of the EU's efforts to wean itself from the American military-industrial complex amid uncertainty regarding continued US support for Ukraine, a next-generation European alternative is seeking to dethrone the Patriots, the report says. The upgraded Samp/T missile system, developed by the Franco-Italian joint venture Eurosam, is being promoted as better suited to handle current threats and features a new radar that reportedly detects targets at a distance of more than 350km while being able to fire missiles in all directions, the paper notes. The Samp/T also requires fewer operators, with the entire system able to run with as few as 15 people, compared to roughly 90 troops needed for a US Patriot battery, according to the WSJ. Ukrainian forces have reportedly expressed concerns about Samp/T's performance. Nevertheless, an Italian defense official told the paper that the system had received 'positive feedback' from Kiev. On Monday, US President Donald Trump announced 17 Patriots were 'ready to be shipped' to Ukraine, although his remark caused some confusion in Kiev as he did not clarify whether that number referred to full systems or their individual components. Trump has also insisted on a scheme in which European NATO members would purchase US weapons for Ukraine. The EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has welcomed his readiness to send Patriots but urged Washington 'to share the burden' for the deliveries. Russia has consistently condemned Western arms shipments to Ukraine, saying they only prolong the conflict without altering its outcome.
Reuters
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
The ever-evolving 'Trump doctrine' and the fight for US strategy
WASHINGTON, July 11 (Reuters) - As some 20 Iranian ballistic missiles headed for the U.S. airbase at Al Udeid in Qatar last month following U.S. strikes against Iran, the only U.S. personnel at the almost entirely evacuated base were some 40 air defence personnel manning a Patriot missile battery flown in a few weeks earlier. According to a press briefing by U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Daniel Caine, a few days later, together with another Patriot detachment from the Qatari military also present at the base, the U.S. team fired more of the defence missiles than in any previous engagement since the system was first deployed in the first Gulf War in 1991. 'They crushed it,' he said, noting that damage to the base was minimal with no casualties. On the surface, officials from the Trump administration have painted last month's U.S. strikes against Iran as an unusually decisive use of U.S. power, talking of a new 'Trump doctrine' in which military force is used with much clearer aims than under previous presidents. They argue it has 'restored American deterrence', sending a clear signal to other potential foes including Moscow and Beijing. The administration had also presented its 52-day bombing campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen as being similarly successful in restoring freedom of navigation there – only for the Houthis to restart attacks on shipping in recent days. All of that comes amid growing divisions within the administration over the future use of U.S. military force, while still leaving open questions over how the U.S. might respond to potential future crises, particularly a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or Russia attack on eastern NATO states. On that front, recent events in the Gulf have already had consequences in Washington and beyond. According to reports this week, the U.S. has barely 25% of the Patriot missile stockpile the Pentagon believes it needs. Consumption of those missiles in the Middle East and Ukraine has made growing those stocks impossible despite heightened production. Last week, that prompted a Pentagon edict stopping shipment of several weapons types to Ukraine including Patriot, long-range HIMARS strike rockets and artillery shells, described at the time as a deliberate decision to help rebuild U.S. stocks. That decision, however, has since been reversed by President Donald Trump amid reports it had never received White House authorisation in the first place. 'We have to,' Trump told a press conference in Washington. 'They have to be able to defend themselves.' The U.S. president has become increasingly critical of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in recent days, accusing him of being uninterested in Trump's efforts to mediate a peace deal as Russian forces have launched the largest drone strikes of the war against Ukraine. That will likely worry the powerful group within the current administration known as 'the restrainers', keen to rein in the multi-decade U.S. tendency to make open-ended defence commitments and become entangled in long-running 'forever wars'. The result is several increasingly apparent divisions over policy, between them opening up huge uncertainties over future U.S. military posture. On one side are those including several top U.S. military commanders who argue Ukraine should be supported as its defeat would likely empower Moscow and Beijing to launch future attacks. On the other are individuals including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon number three civilian official Elbridge Colby who have argued publicly that sending too much support to Ukraine helps China by driving down already limited U.S. weapons stocks. Ironically, that group – including Vice President JD Vance, among the most publicly committed U.S. officials to reducing America's overseas military footprint – had been among the most supportive of Trump's actions on Iran, presenting it as an example of a new and much more limited approach to U.S. intervention. "What I call the Trump Doctrine is quite simple," Vance told an Ohio fundraising dinner last month. "Number one: you articulate a clear American interest ... in this case, that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem. Number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it becomes a protracted conflict.' Attempting to classify Trump's presidential decisions within a defined doctrine, however, still brings several challenges. The first is the man himself, who as far back as the 1980s was describing his unpredictability and habit of making last-minute decisions on investments as a central tenet of his 'Art of the Deal'. More recently since taking office, attempts to lock him into one course of action can readily backfire and lead to him endorsing another. Another even more significant challenge is that the threats the United States now most needs to deter – a potential Chinese attack against Taiwan, or a Russian assault into Eastern Europe – are likely impossible to counter through a single U.S. strike. Instead, Trump or his successors would likely face a choice between either unleashing a massive open-ended U.S. conventional military campaign – at the very least an air, drone and missile offensive against advancing Russian or Chinese forces – or abandoning Taiwan and eastern European allies to their fate. In his first term in office and also early in last year's presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly questioned whether European NATO members deserved U.S. protection if they were not spending enough on their own defence. But audio recently released of a fundraising speech last year showed him claiming he had taken a much tougher line with both Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in private, warning he would launch U.S. military action if they attacked Taiwan or Ukraine, neither of which has a binding defence treaty with the United States. "If you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of Moscow. I'm telling you I have no choice," Trump said he told Putin on an undisclosed date. "And then he goes, like, 'I don't believe you'," Trump continued. "But the truth is he believed me 10%." He said he also made a similar threat to Xi: 'He thought I was crazy,' Trump told his fellow diners, adding that he believed that even if they only believed him 'five or ten percent' the deterrent was effective. Since that audio was released, some have questioned whether the conversations Trump described ever took place – his former national security adviser John Bolton said he was aware of no such conversations before his own 2019 government departure. If they did take place, however – or even if they did not but reflect his broader conclusions over the necessity to sometimes threaten or use force – it would broadly reflect the experience of previous presidents as well as Trump's own record during his first administration. In the aftermath of World War Two, presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy all wrestled with the challenge of confronting both the Soviet Union and Communist China, particularly after the perception the U.S. would not come to the aid of South Korea was seen as having inadvertently led to the start of the Korean War in 1951. Their conclusion, often quite reluctantly, was that to avoid further bloodshed and perhaps escalation to catastrophic global war they must deepen commitments to threatened U.S. allies, including warning the U.S. would use conventional or atomic force to protect them if attacked. On several occasions in his first term, Trump authorised U.S. action on a scale that might have been rejected by the Obama or Biden administrations – but which those around the president believe were successful in at least partially deterring and restraining adversary behaviour.
Forbes
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Targeting Drug Trade In Yemen Won't Bring Houthis To Heel, Experts Say
A Yemeni security member guards during a destruction of narcotic drugs, seized in past 6-month of ... More this year, during a destruction ceremony to commemorate International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, on June 26, 2022 in Sana'a, Yemen. Security authorities run by Yemen's Houthi movement in Sana'a, burned and destroyed over than 40 tons of confiscated narcotics and some two million captagon pills, in the International Day Against Drug, staged by the United Nations annually on June 26 to raise awareness of the major problem that illicit drugs and its affects on the society. (Photo by) Getty Images Israel has once again executed long-range airstrikes targeting ports in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen in an attempt to pressure the group economically. However, as with preceding airstrikes over the past year, this latest attack did not deter the Houthis from retaliating by firing ballistic missiles at Israel. Consequently, some in Israel believe it needs to adopt a different strategy to economically pressure the group, such as targeting its drug production. Overnight July 6-7, 20 Israeli fighter jets dropped over 50 munitions on key Yemeni ports, including Hodeidah and the Ras Khatib power station. The jets also targeted the Galaxy Leader, a commercial vessel the Houthis hijacked back in November 2023. The Houthis again attempted to hit Israel's Ben Gurion Airport with a ballistic missile in response as part of what it called a 'qualitative military operation' on Thursday. Israel's air defense foiled that attack. The Houthis also sank two commercial vessels in the Red Sea, actions that do not suggest that Israeli airstrikes are deterring them. They have repeatedly declared that they will only cease targeting Israel once there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Since the Israeli Air Force first targeted the Houthis in July 2024 in retaliation to a fatal drone strike on Tel Aviv, it has invariably bombed economic-related targets in a bid to pressure the Houthis to relinquish their attacks. Interestingly, the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom highlighted the Houthis involvement in the Captagon drug trade following Israel's latest strikes, hinting that it could become a future target for Israel. Dubbed the 'poor man's cocaine,' Captagon is an 'amphetamine-type stimulant' that was widely smuggled across the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Arab Gulf countries, by the former regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The sale of Captagon made up the vast majority of the Assad regime's income in the latter years of its rule, effectively turning Syria into a narco-state. Caroline Rose, the director of the Crime-Conflict Nexus and Military Withdrawals portfolios at the New Lines Institute, has conducted diligent research on the Captagon trade in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf regions and briefed governments and intelligence agencies on the topic. 'It's clear that there has been a shift in Captagon trafficking through Yemen, though the volume of traffic still is largely along Saudi Arabia's border with Jordan and via major maritime ports,' Rose told me. 'There is most certainly an economic incentive for criminal and armed actors, such as the Houthis, to try and exploit this new 'vacuum' in production that was left behind by the Syrian regime, taking advantage of a slight increase in pill prices,' she said. 'However, I don't expect that actors in Yemen have the capacity to build up production operations to the level of what we've seen seized in Douma, Yarfur, Mazzeh, Latakia, and other former regime-held areas.' Border authorities in Yemen announced in June that they had busted an attempt to smuggle 1.5 million pills from Yemen's Houthi-controlled capital city, Sanaa, to Saudi Arabia. Mohammed Al-Basha of the Basha Report, a Virginia-based Risk Advisory, noted that 'the first confirmed evidence' of Captagon production in Yemen was revealed in Yemen in June by the Security Director of Aden, General Mutahar Al Shuaibi. Unlike Sanaa, the port city of Aden remains under the control of Yemen's internationally recognized government. 'According to Al Shuaibi, intelligence sources identified a Captagon manufacturing facility located in the Houthi-controlled Mahweet governorate,' Al-Basha told me. 'He likened the site to drug factories previously uncovered in Syria and urged Saudi Arabia to provide immediate support in combating the rapidly growing drug trade. He warned that Yemen has become a key transit corridor for narcotics flowing into Saudi Arabia.' 'Given the high level of security in Houthi-held areas, such a facility could not be operating without the Houthis either deliberately ignoring it or actively profiting from it.' New Line's Rose estimates that the Captagon trade in Yemen remains 'quite small' compared to other hubs for production and trafficking in the region. However, she wouldn't rule out Israel 'seeking to double down' on whatever evidence of drug smuggling or production it can find, noting that recent Israeli press articles 'indicate a baseline interest and intrigue' in the illicit Houthi drug trade. 'I think that after such a concerted effort by Israel, the U.S., and partner countries to degrade Houthi capabilities (and largely unsuccessfully) over the last two years, it's possible that Israel could deem any Houthi facility or asset suspected of being used for drug production/trafficking as a military target,' she said. The potential targeting of another drug industry in Yemen has already been suggested in a January 2025 article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Yossi Melman, the paper's intelligence and strategic affairs correspondent, highlighted the 'treasured habit' of chewing Khat leaf in Yemen, which also gives the consumer an amphetamine effect. He suggested that targeting Khat crops could become a 'game changer' against the Houthis. However, he also noted that similar American efforts to destroy coca crops by air in Colombia utterly failed. 'In Yemen, since khat is mainly for personal use at home, there is a chance that if the people are deprived of the leaf, they may rebel against the Houthi leadership, which might be forced to come to terms with Israel: Stop destroying khat crops in exchange for halting the missile fire on Israel,' Melman wrote. Of course, none of this necessarily means Israeli fighters will soon end bombing runs against Yemeni ports in favor of dropping bombs or defoliant on Yemen's Khat crops. Al-Basha doubts such a move would 'alter the Houthis' mindset,' noting that the group 'withstood' eight years of Saudi-led bombing and the more recent 51-day American Rough Rider air campaign earlier this year. Additionally, any serious attempt to destroy Yemeni Khat production could ultimately backfire. 'In theory, targeting Khat farms may disrupt parts of the local economy, but Khat remains a key cash crop supporting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands,' Al-Basha said. 'Damaging this source of income may only drive more people into the arms of the Houthis, both as a means of economic survival and as retaliation.'
Al Arabiya
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
Russian attack on Kyiv wounds at least two: Mayor
Russian strikes on Ukraine's capital Kyiv wounded at least two people, the mayor said early Thursday, with the military administration warning the city was under 'threat' of ballistic missiles. 'One wounded person was hospitalized... in Solomyansky district,' Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram, adding minutes later that another person was wounded in the same district. Kyiv's military administration warned of a 'threat of enemy use of ballistic weapons,' and told all residents to 'immediately head to the nearest shelters.'
