US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in snowbound Kiev yesterday amid calls for Washington to begin arming Ukraine to battle Russian-backed separatists advancing in the east.
NATO said Russia has sent weapons, funds and troops on the ground to assist the rebel advance, which scuppered a five-month-old ceasefire in eastern Ukraine where war has already killed more than 5,000 people.
Moscow denies involvement in fighting for territory the Kremlin now calls “New Russia.”
Photo: AFP
Washington has given its clearest signal yet that it is considering providing weapons to Ukraine. US President Barack Obama’s pick for defense secretary, Ashton Carter, told a US Senate committee on Wednesday that he would “very much incline” toward supplying arms to Ukraine.
“The nature of those arms, I can’t say right now,” Carter said at his Senate confirmation hearing. “But I incline in the direction of providing them with arms, including, to get to what I’m sure your question is, lethal arms.”
Asked about the risks of escalation, he said: “I think the economic and political pressure on Russia has to remain the main center of gravity of our effort in pushing back.”
Kerry’s visit is more about diplomatic support for now. US officials said he would promise US$16.4 million in humanitarian aid, barely a token gesture for a nation that is in desperate need of billions in overseas financing to stave off the threat of bankruptcy, worsened by war.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, sources yesterday said the EU will add 19 people, including five Russians, to its sanctions list over the crisis in Ukraine following an increase in fighting between Kiev and Moscow-backed rebels.
Nine “entities” will also be targeted by the sanctions, which were agreed at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers from the 28-nation EU in Brussels last week, several sources said.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called unambiguously for NATO arms in an interview with the German newspaper, Die Welt.
“The escalation of the conflict that’s happening today, the increasing number of civilian casualties ... should move the alliance to provide Ukraine with more support,” Poroshenko said.
“[That] includes, among other things, delivering modern weapons for protection and for resisting the aggressor,” he added.
However, some NATO members are opposed to sending weapons.
“This is not a solution that could involve the European Union or our country in the slightest,” Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said in a radio interview.
He said that the EU should maintain pressure through sanctions, not weapons.
The rebels have been concentrating their advance on Debaltseve, a rail hub between their two main strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk, where a government garrison has held out despite being nearly encircled.
On Wednesday, the rebels appeared to have captured Vuhlehirsk, a nearby small town where government troops had also been holding out. The army said it was still contesting the town, but journalists who reached it saw no sign of areas under army control.
In Kiev, the military yesterday said that five more soldiers had been killed and 29 wounded in the past 24 hours. Troops had fended off two attempts to storm Debaltseve.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS