North Korea May Deepen Ukraine Involvement With Troop Surge
North Korea may send more troops to Russia as early as July to support its war in Ukraine, South Korean lawmakers claim. WSJ's Dasl Yoon reports. Photo: Str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
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CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
Russia's summer offensive in Ukraine underwhelms – but Kyiv won't be celebrating
For months the talk in Kyiv was of a much-anticipated Russian offensive that would aim to gobble up more of the Ukraine's eastern regions. So far, it's been underwhelming – but the Russians have made some gains and vastly reinforced their troop numbers in some areas. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to pursue territorial gains as ceasefire talks take a back seat. Last week he restated what has long been one of his key ways of justifying his unprovoked invasion. 'I consider the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one people,' he said. 'In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours.' Even so, the Ukrainians have launched counterattacks in some areas and are rapidly developing a domestic weapons industry. And Russia's wartime economy is facing stronger headwinds. Russian troops are trying to advance in multiple areas of the 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) frontline. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said this week there are now 111,000 Russian troops in one part of the frontline alone – near the flashpoint city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk, where there are at least 50 clashes every day. That compares to about 70,000 Russian troops in the area last December, according to the Ukrainian General Staff. Syrskyi also claimed that the Russian infiltration of the northern region of Sumy had been halted. The Institute for the Study of War – a Washington-based think-tank, says Ukrainian forces have regained some territory in Sumy and the pace of Russian advances there has slowed. 'We can say that the wave of attempts at a 'summer offensive' launched by the enemy from Russian territory is fizzling out,' Syrskyi claimed. But it's a mixed picture. In recent days Russian infantry assaults have gained ground on the border of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions. The Russian defense ministry claimed on Saturday that another village, Zirka, had been taken. DeepState, a Ukrainian open-source analyst, asserted that Ukrainian 'defenses continue to collapse rapidly, and the enemy is making significant advances … with constant assaults' in that area. The Kremlin has long insisted its campaign will continue until it holds all of the eastern Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. (It already occupies all but a sliver of Luhansk). At the current rate of progress that would take many years. But with the Trump administration apparently less committed to driving ceasefire negotiations, the conflict seems likely to drag on through the end of the year and into 2026. The three-dimensional battlefield is now an unlikely combination of ingenious drone-led special operations and very basic infantry assaults. At one end of the spectrum, Ukraine's audacious attacks at the beginning of June on Russian strategic bombers used drones operated from trucks deep inside Russian territory – a mission that took out about a dozen aircraft used to launch missiles against Ukraine. Ukraine's Security Service reported another drone attack Saturday that it clamed had caused extensive damage to a Russian airbase in Crimea. By contrast, Russian soldiers on foot and motorbikes – sometimes in groups of a dozen or less – push into abandoned villages in eastern Ukraine, with drones for cover but no armor in site. It's an approach that is forcing a change in Ukrainian tactics: to smaller fortified positions. Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said last week that defenses were being camouflaged to match the terrain and made smaller to avoid detection. While infantry defend or take territory, drones continue to play a greater role in shaping the conflict. The Russians are churning out cheap, mass-produced drones designed to overwhelm air defenses and allow some of their missiles to get through. The Russians have increasingly used this tactic to hit Ukrainian cities, especially Kyiv, which has sustained considerable damage and higher civilian casualties in recent weeks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that overnight '477 drones were in our skies, most of them Russian-Iranian Shaheds, along with 60 missiles of various types. The Russians were targeting everything that sustains life.' The Russians use 'up to 500 (Iranian designed) Shaheds per night, combining them with ballistic and cruise missiles — aiming to exhaust our air defenses,' says Umerov. Zelensky has reiterated pleas for more Patriot missile batteries and other western systems, which Trump said last week that the US 'should consider' because of large-scale attacks on Ukrainian cities. Zelensky has said Ukraine is prepared to buy Patriots directly or through the fund established by the US-Ukrainian minerals deal. Both sides are producing drones of all types at an astonishing rate. Ukraine's Security Service reckons Russia is producing nearly 200 Iranian-designed Shahed drones every day, and has an inventory of some 6,000, in addition to about 6,000 decoy drones. Over the last week, the Russians have used more than 23,000 small 'kamikaze' drones on the frontlines, according to the Ukrainian military's General Staff. It's a never-ending race in design and production. Syrskyi said recently that Russia had developed an edge in fiber-optic-controlled drones, which are more difficult to track and intercept. Drone warfare is a 'constant intellectual struggle — the enemy regularly changed algorithms, and Ukraine adapted tactics in response,' Umerov said. 'Solutions that showed high effectiveness at the beginning of the war have lost it over time as the enemy changed tactics.' For its part, Ukraine is stepping up production of the long-range drones it has used to attack Russian infrastructure, such as airfields, refineries and transport. Umerov said 'tens of thousands' would be produced, in addition to more than four million battlefield drones this year. Both sides continue to build defense industries that allow them to keep fighting – even if the scale of Russian production far outstrips that of Ukraine. Russia's huge military conglomerate Rostec is producing an estimated 80% of the equipment used against Ukraine. Its CEO Sergey Chemezov claimed at a meeting with Putin this month that Rostec's production has grown tenfold since 2021, and its revenues rose last year to an eye-watering $46 billion. But there are darkening clouds on the horizon. Russia's military budget is some 40% of its total public spending – more than 6% of its GDP. That's stoked inflation, and Putin acknowledged last week that growth this year would be 'much more modest' to combat rising prices. He even suggested that defense spending would decline next year. One senior Russian official, Maksim Reshetnikov, who is Economic Development minister, said that 'based on current business sentiment, it seems to me we are on the brink of transitioning into recession.' The head of Russia's Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, disagreed with Reshetnikov but warned that financial buffers like the national reserve fund are nearly depleted. 'We must understand that many of these resources have been used up,' she told the St. Petersburg International Forum. Putin himself acknowledged the risk, saying that while some experts predicted stagnation, it should 'not be allowed under any circumstances.' While the longer-term prognosis for Russia may be gloomy – economically and demographically – it can continue in the short-term to fund an army of more than half-a-million men that's in Ukraine or close to its border, taking a few kilometers here and there. Despite hundreds of thousands of casualties, the Russian military can still generate forces far greater than Ukraine. His eye still very much on the prize, Putin said last week: 'We have a saying … where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Russia's 'Mr Nobody' gambles all with film on Kremlin propaganda
When Moscow invaded Ukraine, Pavel Talankin, a staff member at a secondary school in Russia's Ural Mountains, was ordered to film patriotic lessons, songs and morning drills. Talankin, the school's event organiser and also a keen videographer, found the propaganda work so depressing that he wanted to quit his job in the industrial town of Karabash. Then he received what he says was the strangest message of his life. A Europe-based filmmaker got in touch, offering to collaborate on a project to document the abrupt militarisation of Talankin's school in the wake of Russia's February 2022 invasion of its neighbour. Talankin had earlier seen a post from a Russian company looking for people whose jobs had been affected by the war. Talankin said he was ready to talk. After receiving the foreigner's offer Talankin did not sleep all night. The project changed his life forever. After teaming up with David Borenstein and shooting many hours of footage, Talankin last summer fled Russia with seven hard discs, leaving behind his mother, brothers and sisters and the town he loved. Using the smuggled-out footage Borenstein, a Denmark-based US filmmaker, directed what became "Mr Nobody Against Putin", an award-winning 90-minute documentary which exposes the intensity of the propaganda at Talankin's school and throughout Karabash. It premiered at the 2025 Sundance film festival in January. - 'Persona non grata' - The project cost Talankin dearly. Local officials banned his former colleagues from contacting him, he became a hate figure for supporters of the war and his school librarian mother was upset. "I have become a persona non grata," Talankin, 34, told AFP from Prague, where he is now based. Russia outlawed all criticism of the Russian military and the Kremlin and Talankin knew he had taken huge risks. But he has no regrets. "I would do it all over again." He has been buoyed by the support of people featured in the film including those who lost their loved ones in the war. One former colleague said she became ashamed that she, too, was "part of the system." The documentary reaped awards at festivals and the film crew hopes it will be available to wider audiences in Europe later this year. Borenstein said the film's success had been a "relief" because the multi-national crew overcame numerous obstacles including communication and security. But above all he was "really scared" that if the film flopped Talankin's sacrifice would come to nothing. "I knew the whole time that Pasha would have to leave Russia to make this project happen," Borenstein told AFP, referring to his co-director by his diminutive. "That is a huge sacrifice for him, because his mum is there, his whole life is there, he does not speak English, not at that time." Talankin has not been able to join the crew to present the film at the Sundance festival in Utah and elsewhere due to paperwork issues, but the team hopes this will soon change. For now he is learning English and adjusting to his new life in Prague. - 'Like musketeers' - Talankin said he was heartened by the reactions at the screenings. One viewer in the Czech Republic said he hated Russians but the film made him reconsider. "We knew nothing about what was happening to you," Talankin quoted the Czech as saying. "It is a powerful and poetic piece of cinema," said producer Alexandra Fechner, who is promoting the film in France. "This film shows the hidden side of propaganda in Russia, which targets the youngest members of society, children who are being taught a rewritten version of history and given guns!" she said. With the war in its fourth year, Moscow has put society on a war footing and leveraged the educational system to raise a fiercely pro-Kremlin generation. The film features Wagner mercenaries telling children about hand grenades and teachers calling Ukrainians "neo-Nazi", and includes an audio recording of a wailing mother at her soldier son's funeral. But critics also point to the documentary's empathy and light touch. In one episode, a history teacher tells pupils that the spiralling prices could soon make gas unaffordable for Europeans. "The French will soon be like musketeers, riding horses, and the rest of Europe too," he said. Borenstein said that by viewing the footage sent by Talankin nearly every day, he understood the effect of the dehumanising war-time propaganda. While at the beginning he found some of the clips shocking, months later his mind had become so used to the onslaught of the propaganda that he did not see the footage depicting the Wagner mercenaries as something abnormal. "I was able to replicate among myself some of the feelings that maybe the students and people in the school felt," he said. "Looking at this propaganda every single day was a lesson in how desensitised you can become to it." A lot of the footage had not made it into the film, including the school's preparations for the possibility of a nuclear attack. Karabash is located close to one of Russia's most sensitive sites, the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant. Talankin said Borenstein did not want the viewers to "drown in the enormous amount of negative material." "I have plans for this footage," Talankin said. "Sooner or later I will start slowly releasing it." as/sjw/sbk
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Russia has amassed 110,000 troops near strategic Ukrainian city, Kyiv says
Russia has amassed 110,000 troops in the vicinity of Pokrovsk as part of its efforts to take over the strategic eastern Ukrainian city, the Ukrainian military chief said Friday. Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Friday that the area around Pokrovsk was the 'hottest spot' along the 1,200-kilometre (745 miles) front line which runs across the east. Russian forces have been trying to capture Pokrovsk for almost a year, staging one grinding offensive after another. But despite having a clear advantage in terms of the number of troops and weapons available, Moscow has failed to take over the city. Pokrovsk is a strategic target for Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that his goal is to seize all of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk his forces partially occupy. Kyiv and its allies accuse Putin of stalling on peace efforts so that his forces can seize more Ukrainian territory. Although not a major city, Pokrovsk sits on a key supply road and railroad that connect it with other military hubs in the area. Together with Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, it forms the backbone of Ukrainian defenses in the part of Donetsk region that is still under Kyiv's control. Some 60,000 lived in Pokrovsk before the war, but the majority have left in the three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ukraine's last operating coking coal mine was in Pokrovsk and many of its employees were staying in the area to keep it going. Once it was forced to shut down early this year, they too began to leave. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based conflict monitor, said late last year that Ukrainian defensive operations in Pokrovsk have forced Russia to abandon its original plan to take over Pokrovsk in a frontal assault. The ISW said this was because Ukrainian troops began using drones as integral part of their defensive strategy, successfully integrating drone operators with their ground forces. At the same time, Russia was unable to increase the number of troops in the area by much, because it was trying to contain the surprise incursion of Ukrainian troops into its own territory in the southern Kursk region. Syrskyi told reporters last week that at one point, the Kursk operation pulled back nearly 63,000 Russian troops and some 7,000 North Korean troops. 'This allowed us to weaken the enemy's pressure on the main fronts and regroup our troops. And the enemy's capture of Pokrovsk, announced back in September 2024, has not yet taken place, thanks in part to our Kursk operation,' he said. Instead of continuing to attacking the city directly, Russian troops then began encircling the city from south and northeast. The ISW said in its most recent assessment on Friday that Russian forces were continuing assaults with small fireteams of one to two soldiers, sometimes on motorcycles, in all-terrain vehicles and buggies. In a statement issued on Friday, Syrksky said Russia continued to try to break through to the administrative border of the Donetsk region. 'They want to do this not only to achieve some operational results, but primarily for demonstrative purposes. To achieve a psychological effect: to put the infamous 'foot of the Russian soldier' there, plant a flag and trumpet another pseudo-'victory,'' he said.
