Ukraine resist Russian advance in prolonged battle for region
Ukrainian forces have successfully halted Russia 's recent advance into the northern Sumy region, stabilizing the front line near the border.
Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's top military commander, stated this success prevented Russia from deploying approximately 50,000 troops to other critical areas, a claim not independently verified.
Across the broader 1,000-kilometre front line, Russian forces continue to make slow, incremental gains in certain sectors, but these advances have come at a significant cost in terms of troop casualties and armoured vehicles.
The outnumbered Ukrainian army has increasingly relied on drone technology to counter Russian pressure, while both sides continue to launch long-range strikes.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed its forces captured two villages, Novoserhiivka and Shevchenko, in the eastern Donetsk region, as part of an offensive to break into Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region.
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The Independent
13 minutes ago
- The Independent
I thought I knew what Keir Starmer believed – now, it's anyone's guess
Harriet Harman once described a politician's waking nightmare. As social security secretary in the New Labour government, she was delivering her first speech to the party conference in October 1997. 'All these unfamiliar words started coming up on the autocue. I couldn't go back to my notes, and just had to carry on. I realised that Gordon Brown had made the changes to delete all my references to spending plans.' Something similar happened to Keir Starmer in May, as he read a speech on immigration from the prompter in Downing Street. He told Tom Baldwin, his biographer, in an interview published on Friday, that when the unfamiliar phrase 'an island of strangers' scrolled up on the glass screens, he just read it out. 'I wouldn't have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of [Enoch] Powell,' he told Baldwin. 'I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn't know either.' Starmer had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, and learned that morning that his former home in Kentish Town had been firebombed in the small hours. His sister-in-law was living there and called the fire brigade: no one was hurt, but Starmer was 'really shaken up'. He said, 'It's fair to say I wasn't in the best state to make a big speech,' and that he almost cancelled it. Baldwin wrote: 'Emphasising he is not using the firebomb attack as an excuse and doesn't blame his advisers or anyone else except himself for these mistakes, Starmer says he should have read through the speech properly and 'held it up to the light a bit more'.' Now, a month and a half later, he said: 'That particular phrase – no – it wasn't right. I'll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.' Both parts of his confession to Baldwin were unwise in the extreme. It was unwise to admit that he doesn't always read his speeches before he delivers them – or that he doesn't always read them 'properly', which is the same thing. The pressures on a prime minister's time are intense, and any prime minister has to rely on speechwriters they can trust to produce most of the words that have to be pumped out. But a politician should never admit that their words are not their own, or blame their speechwriters while insisting that they are not blaming them. Especially not one, such as Starmer, who already has a reputation for being the puppet of Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, who saw him as the figurehead for his bid to take the Labour Party back from the Corbynites five years ago. But this confession was particularly unwise because it suggests that Starmer's critics were right to detect the echo of Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech in the prime minister's words. The message of the speech was entirely different. Powell complained that the effect of immigration was that the existing population 'found themselves made strangers in their own country'. Starmer's speechwriters, by contrast, were making the point that 'fair rules' hold a country together. 'In a diverse nation like ours – and I celebrate that – these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.' The sentiment is worthy and uncontroversial, even if the phrasing is a bit poetic. But the meaning was completely clear in the next paragraph: 'So when you have an immigration system that seems almost designed to permit abuse … you're actually contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart.' I don't know who would actually disagree with that – apart from Enoch Powell, who didn't want any immigration at all. Some of Starmer's critics have also seized on his comment – in the foreword to the immigration white paper, so he presumably did hold these words 'up to the light' – that the 'damage done to our country' by the Conservative 'experiment in open borders' is 'incalculable'. But again, it is hard to disagree: the writer of Starmer's foreword is not saying that immigration is damaging, but that quadrupling it when you promised to reduce it is. Even those who think the UK can easily absorb a net immigration of 906,000 in a 12-month period have to accept that the Tory failure to control immigration has, as the foreword's author said, opened a wound in 'trust in politics'. So Starmer should have defended 'his' words to Baldwin. The message was the right message: that there should be fair rules for immigration, and that immigration has been too high. Now we just do not know what the prime minister thinks. Is the real Starmer the liberal lefty human rights lawyer who implied to Baldwin that he thinks that any attempt to control immigration is Powellism? Or is it the man reading McSweeney's words off the autocue, saying, as he did just before he got to the 'island of strangers' paragraph: 'I know, on a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.' What does he believe in? I thought I knew, but now that he has given that self-pitying interview to his biographer, I am not so sure.
BreakingNews.ie
an hour ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Rod Stewart says Britain should ‘give Farage a chance'
Sir Rod Stewart has called on Britain to 'give Nigel Farage a chance' as he revealed how close he came to pulling out of his Glastonbury appearance. The 80-year-old singer backed the Reform UK leader ahead of appearing in the festival's afternoon legends slot on Sunday, 23 years after he headlined the Pyramid Stage. Advertisement 'I've read about (Sir Keir) Starmer cutting off the fishing in Scotland and giving it back to the EU. That hasn't made him popular,' he told The Times. 'We're fed up with the Tories. We've got to give Farage a chance. He's coming across well. Nigel? What options have we got? Rod Stewart has called on Britain to give Reform UK leader Nigel Farage a chance (PA) 'Starmer's all about getting us out of Brexit and I don't know how he's going to do that. Still, the country will survive. It could be worse. We could be in the Gaza Strip.' Admitting his wealth ensures 'a lot of it doesn't really touch me', he insisted he is not out of touch and expressed his support for Ukraine – criticising US president Donald Trump and vice president JD Vance for their treatment of Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskiy on his visit to the White House – and Gaza. Advertisement 'It's depressing, what's going on in the Gaza Strip,' he said. 'Netanyahu doesn't realise that this is what happened to his people under the Nazis: total annihilation. And Trump is going to turn the Gaza Strip into Miami?' Stewart said a prolonged bout of flu, which forced him to cancel five shows in the US, nearly forced him to withdraw from a Glastonbury appearance he described to ITV as his 'World Cup final'. 'This time last week I was thinking of cancelling,' he told The Sun, crediting his wife Penny Lancaster with nursing him back to health. 'I have had Influenza A. It's been so terrible. It's the worst thing anyone could possibly have, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Advertisement 'Apart from (Vladimir) Putin. I'd wish it on him.' Stewart told The Sun he had negotiated an extra quarter of an hour on top of the allotted 75 minutes for his set. He confirmed he will be joined at Glastonbury by former Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood, Simply Red's Mick Hucknall and Lulu, as well as performing the song Powderfinger by Saturday headliner Neil Young.
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Trump dropped an F-bomb this week – and just for a moment, I warmed to him
I did not get out of bed this morning expecting to praise the public use of an expletive, but such is 2025. If any president was going to break this presidential norm, as NPR put it, it was always going to be Donald Trump. 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing,' the president told a group of reporters this week. 'Do you understand that?' he asked, before storming off. It appears to be the first time a president has deliberately used the F-word live on camera to a press scrum or in a public forum, instead of being 'caught' using the term accidentally on a hot mic (even that has only happened a handful of times). Cue plenty of puns from journalists about the 'dropping of the F-bomb'. For the record, Trump actually used the F-word about Iran in 2020, but the slightly delayed radio broadcast bleeped it out. Plus, as this 2016 video compilation shows, it's not unusual for him to swear. But what was different about this time – coming as it did at a moment of heightened global anxiety about military escalation – is that it came across as … authentic. Many people watching will have felt, heard and even shared that frustration about Israel and Iran's alleged breaking of the ceasefire. Trump's swearing made the point more forcefully than any diplomatic 'disappointment' could have done. It wasn't eloquent, but I believed it. We know other presidents – such as Lyndon Johnson, and especially Richard Nixon – swore in private. They wouldn't have dreamed of risking the reputational damage to do so in public, and would have had to apologise if they did. No British prime minister has ever said 'fuck' publicly to my knowledge. Few world leaders ever have. Which is potentially part of the problem. The most common complaint about the political elite is that they're out of touch; that we can't trust a word that comes out of their mouths because it's all untrustworthy scripted spin. Yet at the same time we believe they're swearing like sailors – and saying what they really think – behind closed doors (a perception bolstered by iconic roles such as Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, or the blue-mouthed Roger Furlong from Veep.) Of course, swearing doesn't equate to honesty. And, in Trump's case, the obscenity only masked his own complicity in creating the situation that frustrated him – from pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 to his 'monumental' airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. But my point is that the public clearly doesn't trust the polished and sanitised scripts that characterise so much political speech. I'm not suggesting world leaders all suddenly disrespect the gravitas of their office. Can you imagine Keir Starmer being encouraged to swear? He'd sound like a headteacher attempting to rap. What I am saying is there's power in judicious swearing. You want to appear more human to voters? Act more like one. YouGov polling reported in April revealed that just 8% of Britons never swear. Perhaps an occasional curse or two would allow politicians to ally themselves with the 92% of us who do. Linguistic norms are always changing. For six years, I wrote a regular column for the Guardian's Mind your language section. During that time, I saw changes that would incense any purist. For instance, the BBC made even less use of those with received pronunciation accents and started broadcasting more voices that really sound like people across the country. Such 'real' accents are supposed to make the institution seem less remote and more trustworthy. The same is true of the institution of politics. Sounding more like real people does nobody any real harm. If the stakes are literally life and death, and people aren't listening, a well-placed, truly meant expletive will wake everyone up. At time of writing, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran is holding. Maybe the F-bomb did the job after all. Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and author
