The Ukrainian military is planning to hold a farewell ceremony in Kyiv to honor Tseng Sheng-kuang (曾聖光), a Hualien County-native who died fighting for Ukraine last week.
“He proved himself as a disciplined, balanced, brave warrior,” Vasylyna Nakonechna, a press officer at the military’s Carpathian Sich Battalion, said on Wednesday.
Tseng, 25, was a member of the International Legion of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. He died during a combat mission in the contested Luhansk region on Wednesday last week, making him the first Taiwanese volunteer combatant to die in the Ukraine war.
Photo: screen grab from Facebook
Nakonechna said Tseng served two years in the Taiwanese army before on Aug. 19 joining the Carpathian Sich, an infantry unit made up of foreign and Ukrainian volunteers.
Nakonechna said she had met Tseng several times.
“He was a nice boy, always smiling and smart,” she said, adding that while some volunteers come to Ukraine “because they cannot do another work,” Tseng was motivated by his desire to “fight evil” and help civilians, especially women and children.
The battalion consists of several companies, with Tseng’s saying that it is especially saddened by its loss, but “you can lose everyone in every second, and at any time,” Nakonechna said.
Battalion Deputy Chief of Staff Ruslan Andriyko said Tseng was a courageous defender of Ukraine, and offered his respect to Tseng’s family.
Many volunteers “leave a peaceful life, at home and with a family, to get into the hell of war, mud, rain, frost, a cold trench in which the hot hearts of brothers beat under constant shelling and weeks without sleep. These are the conditions under which he spent his last days,” Andriyko said.
Nakonechna said Tseng’s body has been transported to Dnipro, southeast of Kyiv.
A farewell ceremony is to be held in Kyiv in his honor, but the date has yet to be confirmed, she said.
In Taipei, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday said that Tseng’s family has left for Ukraine to identify his body and deal with matters related to his death.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS