Taipei has urged Taiwanese to leave Ukraine and the US is to evacuate its embassy in Kiev as Western intelligence officials warn that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is increasingly imminent.
US officials said the US Department of State planned to announce that virtually all US staff at the Kiev embassy would be required to leave ahead of a feared Russian invasion.
The announcement was expected to happen after press time last night.
Photo: EPA-EFE
A small number of officials might remain in Kiev, but the vast majority of the almost 200 Americans at the embassy would be sent out or relocated to Ukraine’s far west, near the Polish border, so that the US can retain a diplomatic presence in the country.
The state department would not comment.
The department had earlier ordered families of US embassy staffers in Kiev to leave, but it had left it to the discretion of nonessential personnel if they wanted to depart.
The new move comes as Washington has ratcheted up its warnings about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Pentagon on Friday said that it is sending another 3,000 troops to Poland to join 1,700 who are already assembling there in a demonstration of US commitment to NATO allies worried at the prospect of Russia invading Ukraine.
The additional soldiers are to depart their post at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, over the next couple of days and should be in Poland by early next week, said a defense official, who provided the information under ground rules set by the Pentagon.
They are the remaining elements of an infantry brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division.
Their mission is to train and provide deterrence, but not to engage in combat in Ukraine.
In Taipei, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday advised Taiwanese to leave Ukraine as soon as possible.
The ministry in a news release urged about 25 Taiwanese registered as living in Ukraine to leave the country as soon as possible and called on others to avoid traveling to the country.
Ukraine-based Taiwanese who need assistance can contact the Taipei-Moscow Economic and Cultural Coordination Commission, which officially handles Taiwan’s affairs in Ukraine, it said.
They can also get in touch with the Taiwan Trade Center in Kiev, which is run by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, Presidential Office spokesman Xavier Chang (張惇涵) said that Taiwan is opposed to any unilateral actions to use force to alter the “status quo” in the region, and called on the countries involved to resolve their disputes through dialogue and peaceful means.
He also stressed that the situation in the Taiwan Strait is fundamentally distinct from the crisis in Ukraine, and that misinformation designed to affect Taiwan’s morale had been identified.
As agencies take steps to counter the misinformation, the public is urged to trust information from the government, he said.
Additional reporting by Su Yung-yao and CNA
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS