Ukraine-Russia war latest: Human wave of North Korea troops ‘sent to death’ amid music speaker bomb plot claim
South Korea, Ukraine and the US previously accused Pyongyang of sending thousands of soldiers to help Russia
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Your support makes all the difference.US officials have claimed that North Korea is suffering mass casualties on the front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine, being used in costly “human wave” attacks.
White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Friday that thousands of North Korean troops had been killed or wounded in the last week alone.
“It is clear that Russian and North Korean military leaders are treating these troops as expendable and ordering them on hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses,” Kirby said.
South Korea, Ukraine and the US previously accused Pyongyang of sending thousands of soldiers to help Russia fight off the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk border region.
It comes as Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had foiled a plot by Ukraine to kill a high-ranking Russian officer and a pro-Russian war blogger with a bomb hidden in a portable music speaker.
On the instructions of the Ukrainian intelligence officer, a Russian citizen had retrieved a bomb from a hiding place in Moscow, the FSB said. The bomb, equivalent to 1 1/2 kg of TNT and packed with ball bearings, was concealed in a portable music speaker, the FSB said.
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Ukraine sends food aid to Syria, says Zelensky
Ukraine, a global producer and exporter of grain and oilseeds, has sent its first batch of food aid to Syria, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday.
Zelensky said that 500 metric tons of wheat flour were already on their way to Syria as part of Ukraine‘s humanitarian “Grain from Ukraine“ initiative in cooperation with the United Nations World Food Programme.
“The wheat flour is planned to be distributed to 33,250 families or 167,000 people, in the coming weeks,” Zelensky said on X, adding: “Each package weighs 15 kilograms and can feed a family of five for one month.”
After the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, a close Russian ally, Ukraine has said it wants to restore relations with Syria.
Kyiv traditionally exports wheat and corn to countries in the Middle East, but not to Syria.
Russia says it has taken two more east Ukrainian villages, RIA reports
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had taken control of two eastern Ukrainian villages, Ivanivka in the Donetsk region, and Zahryzove in the Kharkiv region, the RIA state news agency reported.
RIA also cited the ministry as saying it had downed four British-made Storm Shadow missiles in the past week.
These claims could not be independently verified.
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Kremlin says Finland's seizure of ship suspected of cable damage is not an issue for it
The Kremlin has said that Finland's boarding of a ship carrying Russian oil on suspicion the vessel caused an outage of the Estlink 2 undersea power cable was not a matter for it.
Estonia's armed forces have launched a naval operation to protect the parallel Estlink 1 undersea power cable in the Baltic Sea in response to the damage, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said on Friday.
When asked about Finland's actions Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "I can't say anything precise here, this is a very narrow-profile issue which is hardly the prerogative of the (Russian) presidential administration."
Estonia's navy to protect Baltic Sea power link after cable damage
Estonia's armed forces have launched a naval operation to protect the Estlink 1 undersea power cable in the Baltic Sea in response to the damage this week of a parallel electricity line, Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has said.
On Thursday, Finland seized a ship carrying Russian oil on suspicion the vessel caused an outage of the Estlink 2 undersea power cable which, like Estlink 1, connects Finland and Estonia, and that it also damaged four internet lines.
Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for acts of sabotage following a string of outages of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.
Damage to subsea installations in the region has now become so frequent that it is difficult to believe this was caused merely by accident or poor seamanship, Tsahkna said on Thursday.
Finnish investigators believe the seized ship - the Cook Island-registered ship, named as the Eagle S - may have caused the damage by dragging its anchor along the seabed, one of several such incidents in recent years.
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