Jung Pak, the U.S. Senior Official for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, told VOA on Monday that there have been at least 10 instances where North Korean missiles have been used on the battlefield in Ukraine. Pak told VOA’s Nike Ching that the U.S. still assesses North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is not currently planning an imminent attack on Washington’s allies, South Korea and Japan.
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Author: Dreameu
Austin Hosts First In-Person Ukraine Defense Contact Group of 2024
Ramstein, Germany — Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is in Germany to build upon the international community’s military support for Ukraine, even as the U.S. Congress has yet to approve additional funding for Kyiv.
This is Austin’s first international trip since he was hospitalized on Jan. 1 due to complications from surgery to treat his prostate cancer in late December. On Tuesday, he will host another round of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG), which brings together officials from more than 50 nations to coordinate their Ukraine efforts.
Ukrainian forces have continued to fight back against Russian forces in the east while inflicting “considerable damage” to Russian forces in the Black Sea. However, Moscow— with the help of North Korea and Iran — has drastically ramped up its defense production capacity, forcing Ukraine to retreat from some battles due to ammunition shortages, according to a senior defense official, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity ahead of the UDCG.
“Ukraine is heavily outgunned on the battlefield. We’ve received reports of Ukrainian troops rationing or even running out of ammunition on the front lines,” said the official.
The U.S. has contributed about $44 billion in security assistance for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, with allies and partners also committing more than $44 billion in that time frame.
But the U.S. military has run out of congressionally approved funds for replenishing its weapons stockpiles sent to Ukraine, and leadership in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has so far refused to bring new aid for Ukraine up for a vote.
Last week, the United States announced its first new round of military aid for Ukraine since late December, in what defense officials have called an “ad hoc” package made possible through U.S. Army procurement savings.
The military assistance package is valued at up to $300 million and will provide Ukraine with immediate air defense, artillery and anti-tank capabilities, along with more ammunition for HIMARS and 155-mm artillery rounds. But officials say it is unclear if there will be future procurement savings to produce another extraordinary package of aid.
“This is not a sustainable solution for Ukraine. We urgently need congressional approval of a national security supplemental,” the senior defense official said.
“There isn’t a way that our allies can really combine forces to make up for the lack of U.S. support,” the official added.
The emphasis on ammunition and air defense will likely be as strong as ever during this UDCG meeting.
“They need interceptors for a whole variety of their air defense systems, and over time, they keep running out as they try to defend against these wave upon wave of attacks that we’re seeing from Russia,” the senior official said.
Coalition leadership group
To better organize how the UDCG provides Kyiv with military weapons and equipment, the group’s members have formed capability coalitions to identify ways to increase Kyiv’s efficiency and cut costs.
Defense officials say Austin will convene a meeting of the leads and co-leads of all the capability coalitions for the first time on Tuesday, during a special coalition leadership group session.
Air Force capability is co-led by the United States, Denmark and the Netherlands. The armor capability is co-led by Poland and Italy. The artillery capability is co-led by France and the United States. De-mining is co-led by Lithuania and Iceland. Drone capability is co-led by Latvia and the United Kingdom. Information technology is co-led by Estonia and Luxembourg. Integrated air and missile defense capabilities are co-led by Germany and France, and maritime security is co-led by the United Kingdom and Norway.
Critics like Sean McFate, a professor at Syracuse University and author of “The New Rules of War,” told VOA the international community is putting its money into expensive military aid that falls short in modern warfare.
“It’s not conventional warfare that beat back Russia’s blitz. It was Ukrainian guerrilla warfare,” he said. “Ukraine was winning the unconventional fight. But then in fall of 2022, they decided to go conventional against Russia, which was strategically silly.”
McFate added that giving Ukraine more conventional war weapons was, in his view, “the strategic definition of insanity.”
Instead, he said Ukraine and its allies needed to think about unconventional ways where they can leverage their power to defeat Russia, such as guerilla operations and more direct actions deep inside Russia to build upon the Russian population’s unfavorable opinions of the war.
“Use your conventional forces to hold the line, but don’t invest them to create an offensive which requires a lot more resources,” McFate told VOA.
“M1A1 Abram tanks and F-16 fighter jets … will win tactical victories on the battlefield, but we all know that you can win every battle, yet lose the war, because wars are won on the strategic level, not at the tactical level of warfare,” he said.
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US, Japan Urge Nations Not to Deploy Nuclear Weapons in Orbit
WASHINGTON — The United States and Japan on Monday proposed a U.N. Security Council resolution stressing that nations should comply with a treaty that bars putting nuclear weapons in space, a message that appeared aimed at Russia.
Washington believes Moscow is developing a space-based anti-satellite nuclear weapon whose detonation could cause havoc by disrupting everything from military communications to phone-based ride services, a source familiar with the matter has said.
Russia, a party to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that bars putting “in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction,” has previously said it opposes deploying nuclear weapons in space.
Russia’s defense minister has also denied it is developing such a weapon. Deploying a nuclear weapon in orbit is barred by the treaty; developing one, however, is not prohibited.
In their resolution seen by Reuters, the United States, the only nation to use a nuclear weapon in war, and Japan, the only nation attacked with one, urged countries bound by the treaty not to place such weapons into space and also not to develop them.
Reports about possible Russian development emerged after a Republican lawmaker on February 14 issued a cryptic statement warning of a “serious national security threat.”
The clearest public sign Washington thinks Moscow is working on such a weapon was a White House spokesman’s February 15 comment that the lawmaker’s letter was related to a space-based anti-satellite weapon that Russia was developing but had not deployed, and that would violate the Outer Space Treaty.
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Russian Opposition Activists in Seattle Remember Navalny as Putin Claims Victory
In Seattle, there were no polling stations for Russian citizens to join the worldwide movement known as “Noon Against Putin,” a symbolic protest of the re-election of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead, they commemorated opposition leader Alexey Navalny and wrote letters to the growing list of political prisoners in Russia. Natasha Mozgovaya has the story.
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European Far-Right Firebrand Prevented From Speaking at Swiss Event
Berlin — A prominent European far-right figure was prevented from giving a speech at an event in Switzerland and thrown out of the region where it was taking place.
Martin Sellner of the Identitarian Movement said in a video posted on social media network X, formerly Twitter, that he had been invited by a local group, Junge Tat (Young Deed), to “talk about remigration and the ethnic vote” and what happened at a recent meeting in Germany that prompted a string of large protests there. Remigration refers to the return, sometimes forced, of non-ethnically European immigrants back to their place of racial origin.
Sellner, who comes from neighboring Austria, said that a few minutes after he started speaking at the event Saturday, the electricity was turned off and he was taken to a police station, then told he was thrown out of Aargau canton (state) and escorted to Zurich.
Regional police said in a statement that they tracked down the Junge Tat event in the small town of Tegerfelden on Saturday after receiving several tips. They found some 100 people at the venue and said that, after the landlady found out about the contents of the planned meeting, she canceled the contract for it.
Police said they told organizers to end the event, but they didn’t obey. Without identifying Sellner by name, they said the speaker was held and ordered out of the region “to safeguard public security” and prevent confrontations with opponents.
Germany has seen large protests of the far right following a report that extremists met in Potsdam in November to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship. Sellner presented his “remigration” vision for the deportation of immigrants there.
That meeting has prompted widespread criticism of the Alternative for Germany party, some of whose members reportedly attended. The party has sought to distance itself from the event, while also decrying the reporting of it.
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Is the West Waging a Proxy War in Ukraine?
For as long as the U.S. and its Western allies have been sending military assistance to Ukraine, Moscow has accused the West of using Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia. But, as Maxim Adams reports, the reality is much more complicated. VOA footage and video editing by Elena Matusovsky.
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AFP Journalist Among 50 Detained at Kurdish Event in Turkey
Istanbul — Around 50 people including an AFP journalist were detained by police Sunday in Istanbul on the sidelines of the Kurdish New Year celebrations, witnesses said.
AFP video journalist Eylul Yasar was preparing to film the celebrations of the Kurdish New Year when she was arrested at a checkpoint, journalists and lawyers at the scene reported.
She was released after being handcuffed and held by police for more than six hours, along with another 14 people locked up in the same van.
Yasar said she had been arrested and taken away in a police van after objecting to an “intrusive” and “brutal” body search.
She and the others being held in her van were insulted by police, she said, who called them “pig droppings, terrorists, traitors.”
Two journalists from the Bianet news site who were filming the arrests said they were beaten and thrown to the ground by police.
A statement from Agence France-Presse said: “AFP deplores the detention of our journalist Eylul Yasar who was just doing her job.
“While it welcomes her release, AFP calls on the Turkish authorities to respect the rights of journalists and to treat them with respect.”
Erol Onderoglu, correspondent with media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in Turkey, denounced Yasar’s “arbitrary arrest, which prevented her from doing her job.”
He had earlier said that around 50 people who came to attend the celebrations, which normally include traditional dances and a large bonfire, were also arrested at the site.
An AFP photographer said the bonfire had been canceled.
Many Kurds, who make up about a fifth of Turkey’s estimated 85 million people, say they face significant discrimination in the country.
The former leading figure of the main pro-Kurdish party, Selahattin Demirtas, was imprisoned in 2016 for “terrorist propaganda,” while more than a hundred mayors of Kurdish localities saw elections canceled in the last municipal vote in 2019.
Turkey has repeatedly insisted that it does not discriminate against Kurds as a minority but rather opposes the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization banned by Ankara and its Western allies as a terrorist organization.
According to the RSF, Turkey last year ranked in 164th place out of 180 countries on its index of press freedom.
That marks a drop of 16 places from 2022.
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Spanish Farmers Stage Fresh Protests in Madrid
Madrid — Hundreds of farmers paraded through the Spanish capital on foot and by tractor on Sunday in the latest protest over the crisis facing the agricultural sector.
The farmers marched from the Ministry of Ecological Transition to the Ministry of Agriculture after the European Union proposed legislative changes to drastically ease the environmental rules of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Friday.
Rallied by their trade union, farmers carried banners proclaiming “We are not delinquents” to the sound of horns and whistles. One decorated his tractor with a mock guillotine.
“It is as if they want to cut off our necks,” said Marcos Baldominos explaining his guillotine.
“We are being suffocated by European rules,” the farmer from Pozo de Guadalajara, 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Madrid, added.
Friday’s concessions in Brussels aimed to loosen compliance with some environment rules, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said.
While the move was welcomed by Spain’s left-wing government, some environmental NGOs criticized the measures.
“We are faced with a pile of bureaucratic rules that make us feel more like we are at an office than on a farm,” the trade union behind Sunday’s march, Union de Uniones, said with reference to requirements “that many small and medium-sized farms” cannot “cope with”.
Sunday marked the fourth demonstration in Madrid since the start of the wider European farm protest movement in mid-January.
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Belgorod, City Where War in Ukraine Came to Russia, Perseveres
BELGOROD, Russia — Air raid sirens wail almost daily in the southern Russian city of Belgorod, sending people rushing for cover and reminding residents the full-scale war in neighboring Ukraine is a reality for them too.
Compared with the destruction across much of Ukraine, Russia’s vast territory has been largely unscathed.
Belgorod, 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of the border, is the main exception, a reminder that not every civilian can be shielded from the conflict.
As Russians began voting early on Friday in a three-day presidential election, a missile alert forced election officials to take shelter at a polling station in Belgorod and voting was briefly halted, according to Russia’s RIA state news agency.
Vladimir Seleznyov, a pensioner who witnessed a missile attack on Plekhanov Street on February 15 in which seven people were killed, said it was hard to grow accustomed to the danger.
“Of course, the situation is difficult, but we live near the border. It would be a stretch to say that we got used to that,” he told Reuters on a recent visit to the city to which international media rarely get access.
“It’s understood that, naturally, we will win, we will prevail, but the people are worried and concerned,” he said.
In the ancient fortress town, now a modern city of 300,000 people that is once again on Russia’s front lines, scores of civilians have been killed in drone and missile strikes from Ukraine since February 2022, including two on Saturday.
Kyiv denies targeting civilians just as Moscow does, despite Russia having launched drones and missiles against Ukraine that have killed thousands of civilians and caused hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of damage.
In the worst civilian loss of life from foreign enemy fire in internationally recognized Russian territory since World War II, 25 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in missile attacks on Belgorod on December 30.
As he marches towards all but certain reelection in the March 15-17 vote, President Vladimir Putin nevertheless remains popular in Belgorod as he does across Russia, underlining how the war has galvanized support for him.
He calls it a “special military operation” and casts it as part of a long-running battle with a decadent and declining West that humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Ukraine and its Western allies say the invasion was an aggressive and illegal land grab.
War footing
For Belgorod residents, disruptions are frequent, and the signs of war are in plain view.
Soldiers walk the streets and cement blocks have been positioned at bus stops to protect people from potential blasts.
Primary schools have moved to only online lessons while secondary schools are working on a hybrid model of home and in class, similar to how many Ukrainian institutions operate.
Buses stop running when warnings of a missile threat sound, forcing people to disembark and walk. Shopping can be complicated, and appointments are often canceled. Thousands of people left the surrounding region to escape the danger.
Civilian volunteer groups in Belgorod are supporting soldiers, a phenomenon that is common across Russia and Ukraine.
Galina, who collects everyday hygiene items and tools for digging trenches and sends them to the army, said she helps to try to bring the conflict to an end.
Echoing words used by the Kremlin to describe the leadership in Kyiv, she spoke of the need to “denazify” Ukraine and end “fascism” there. Ukraine and its allies dismiss such language as nonsense, pointing out that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.
“There are no other options,” said Galina, who gave only her first name, as she stood in a warehouse with goods for soldiers.
“I believe that the work that he [Putin] has started in terms of a special military operation, he must complete it,” she said.
Cross-border incursions
Russia’s defense ministry said on Friday its forces had thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to launch a cross-border attack on the Belgorod region the day before.
In a statement, the ministry said Ukraine used helicopters to land up to 30 soldiers close to the border village of Kozinka. It said they were repelled by Russian soldiers and border guards.
Ukrainian officials said earlier on Friday that two Russian border provinces, Belgorod and neighboring Kursk, were under attack by anti-Kremlin Russian armed groups based in Ukraine.
The town of Shebekino, located some 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) from the border in the Belgorod region, was hit by shelling in May and June last year by armed infiltrators. Shell craters mark the roads, and buildings were hit and damaged.
At that time, regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov escorted about 600 children from Shebekino and Graivoron districts to the cities of Yaroslavl and Kaluga, far from the Ukrainian border.
Pensioner Valentina said she also left Shebekino temporarily last summer, persuaded to do so by her daughter, before returning.
She said that she hoped the war would end soon and that people who left the town would come back.
“Everyone wants to get back home,” she said, adding that she planned to vote for Putin. “He has to finish off this war.”
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Russian-Belarusian Band Returns to Stage After Detention in Thailand
Warsaw, Poland — A Russian-Belarusian rock band that denounces Moscow’s Ukraine invasion returned to the stage this week, voicing defiance after being detained in Thailand in January and threatened with deportation to Russia.
The band, Bi-2, formed in the 1980s in Belarus when it was part of the Soviet Union, left Russia in protest over the invasion and has been touring ever since in countries with large Russian-speaking communities.
Ahead of a concert in Vilnius on Thursday, band members met with exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and supporters of late Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month.
“We have become hostages to Russian history,” Egor Bortnik, one of the band’s two founders, told AFP ahead of a concert in Warsaw on Saturday.
But 51-year-old Bortnik, who is better known by his stage name “Lyova,” said he was “not against the war.”
“On the contrary, I’m for the war. I just want Ukraine to liberate its own territory,” he said.
“Putin has to gather his orcs and get out of Ukraine,” Bortnik said, using a disparaging term for Russian soldiers frequently used by Ukrainians.
The band was detained in Phuket, Thailand, in January on immigration charges in a case that has alarmed Russians critical of President Vladimir Putin living abroad.
The organizers of their concerts said all the necessary permits had been obtained, but the band was issued with tourist visas in error, and they accused the Russian consulate of waging a campaign to cancel the concerts.
After a week in detention, the band members were released and traveled to Israel, where they met with Foreign Minister Israel Katz who said in a statement that the episode showed that “music will win.”
Several of their concerts in Russia were canceled in 2022 after they refused to play at a venue with banners supporting the war in Ukraine, after which they left the country.
“I put my prosperity on the line when the war began, and I had to leave Russia. It was unexpected, it was not a process we had prepared for,” Bortnik said.
Bortnik, who moved to Israel while still a teenager, said he was more used to emigration than some of his peers who left Russia in the wake of the war.
“I understand how difficult it is,” he said.
Bortnik said he was no “geopolitician” and does not write explicitly “political songs” although their lyrics can “hit a nerve that is constantly vibrating.”
He said Putin’s demise could be sudden and violent and would also bring down Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for three decades.
“If something happens to Putin then there could be a civil war — the finale for any tyranny,” he said.
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Iceland Volcano Erupts 4th Time, Spewing Lava Into Sky
COPENHAGEN — A volcano in Iceland erupted on Saturday for the fourth time since December, the country’s meteorological office said, spewing smoke and bright orange lava into the air in sharp contrast against the dark night sky.
In a video shot from a Coast Guard helicopter and shown on public broadcaster RUV, fountains of molten rock soared from a long fissure in the ground, and lava spread rapidly to each side.
The eruption began at 2023 GMT, and the fissure was estimated to be about 2.9 kilometers (1.8 miles) long, roughly the same size as the last eruption in February, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said in a statement.
Authorities had warned for weeks that an eruption was imminent on the Reykjanes peninsula just south of Iceland’s capital Reykjavik.
The site of the eruption was between Hagafell and Stora-Skogfell, the same area as the previous outbreak on February 8, the Met Office said.
“This was definitely expected,” said Rikke Pedersen, head of the Nordic Volcanological Centre.
“Of course, the exact time of the eruption is impossible to predict. The first cues of this moving towards the surface actually only happened about 15 minutes in advance,” she said.
Reykjavik’s Keflavik Airport’s website showed it remained open both for departures and arrivals.
Lava appeared to be flowing rapidly south toward the nearby Grindavik fishing town, where a few of the nearly 4,000 residents had returned following earlier outbreaks, the Met Office said. .
The town was again being evacuated, public broadcaster RUV reported. An outbreak in January burned several of its homes to the ground.
“We’re just like, this is business as usual,” Kristin Maria Birgisdottir, who was evacuated from Grindavik in November, told Reuters.
“My son … just called me and said, ‘Mamma, did you know the eruption has started?’ And I was like, ‘yeah, I did know.’ Oh, my grandma just told me. So it’s like we don’t even bother telling each other anymore,” she said.
Icelandic police said they had declared a state of emergency for the area.
The nearby Blue Lagoon luxury geothermal spa immediately shut its doors, as it did during previous eruptions.
Iceland, roughly the size of the U.S. state of Kentucky, boasts more than 30 active volcanoes, making the north European island a prime destination for volcano tourism, a niche segment that attracts thousands of thrill seekers.
In 2010, ash clouds from eruptions at the Eyafjallajokull volcano in the south of Iceland spread over large parts of Europe, grounding some 100,000 flights and forcing hundreds of Icelanders to evacuate their homes.
Volcanic outbreaks in the Reykjanes peninsula are so-called fissure eruptions, which do not usually cause large explosions or significant dispersal of ash into the stratosphere.
Gases from the eruption were traveling westwards out to sea, the meteorological office said.
Scientists fear the eruptions could continue for decades, and Icelandic authorities have started building dikes to divert burning lava flows away from homes and critical infrastructure.
The February eruption cut off district heating to more than 20,000 people as lava flows destroyed roads and pipelines.
Located between the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates, among the largest on the planet, Iceland is a seismic and volcanic hot spot as the two move in opposite directions.
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Latvia Starts Criminal Case Against EU Lawmaker Suspected of Russian Espionage
HELSINKI — Latvia’s state security service has started criminal proceedings against an European Parliament lawmaker and a citizen of the Baltic country who is suspected of cooperating with Russian intelligence and security services, according to Latvian media reports Saturday.
Latvian media outlets reported that the security service, known by the abbreviation VDD, has been investigating the activities of Tatjana Ždanoka, 73, and her alleged Russia ties over the past several weeks since reports were published in January by Russian, Nordic and Baltic news sites saying that she has been an agent for the Russian Federal Security Service since at least 2004.
According to news agency LETA, the Latvian security service decided to start a criminal process against Ždanoka on Feb. 22. The security service couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Ždanoka has denied all of the allegations against her.
The European Parliament said in late January that it had opened an investigation into news reports that a Latvian member of the assembly, Ždanoka, has been working as a Russian agent for several years. The European Union’s legislative body, based in Strasbourg, France, said it was taking the allegations very seriously.
Following a joint investigation, the independent Russian investigative journalism site The Insider, its Latvian equivalent Re:Baltica, news portal Delfi Estonia, and Swedish newspaper Expressen published on Jan. 29 emails that they said were leaked and showed Ždanoka’s interactions with her handler.
Expressen claimed that Ždanoka has been spreading propaganda about alleged violations of the rights of Russians living in Baltic countries and arguing for a pro-Kremlin policy, among other things. She has also refused to condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the paper said.
Latvia, a Baltic nation of 1.9 million people, and neighboring Estonia are both home to a sizable ethnic Russian minority of about 25% of the population. Both countries are ex-Soviet republics.
Over the past few years, Moscow has routinely accused Latvia and Estonia of discriminating against their Russian-speaking populations.
Ždanoka’s resume, which is posted on the European Parliament website, lists her as the president of the EU Russian-Speakers’ Alliance, a nongovernmental organization, since 2007. She was first elected to the European Parliament in 2004.
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