Author: Daily Sabah With Reuters
Israel is closely watching developments in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. “We are constantly watching events in Syria. We are determined to defend the vital interests of Israel and to maintain the achievements of war,” Netanyahu said, visiting new military recruits at a base in central Israel. Insurgents swept into the Syrian city of Aleppo, east of Idlib province, on Friday night, forcing the army to redeploy in the biggest challenge to President Bashar al-Assad in years.
The United States is not considering the idea of returning to Ukraine the nuclear weapons it gave up after the Soviet Union collapsed, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told ABC on Sunday. Sullivan made his remarks when questioned about a New York Times article last month that said some unidentified Western officials had suggested U.S. President Joe Biden could give Ukraine the arms before he leaves office.
Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday that an attempted revolution was taking place in neighbouring Georgia, where protests have broken out against the government’s decision to suspend talks on joining the European Union. The former Russian president said on Telegram that Georgia was “moving rapidly along the Ukrainian path, into the dark abyss. Usually this sort of thing ends very badly.”
One child died in Russia’s western Bryansk region following a massive Ukrainian drone attack, the local governor Alexander Bogomaz said on Sunday in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Bogomaz said the attacks completely destroyed one house in the Starodubsky municipal district. According to a Telegram channel called Mash, an 11-year-old boy died after a drone hit a five-story residential apartment in the region. The Russian defence ministry said its air defences destroyed 29 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 20 in the Bryansk region, seven in Kaluga region, and one each in Smolensk and Kursk regions. The strikes come after…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a military focused budget for 2025-2027, a document published on the official legal acts website showed on Sunday. The state budget for next year includes a 25% hike in military spending but will be the most secretive in post-Soviet history, with almost a third of all spending closed to public scrutiny. The government has acknowledged that the needs of what Moscow calls its special military operation in Ukraine and support for the military will remain the budget priority along with social needs and technological development. The government has presented the draft budget as “balanced”,…
Syrian anti-regime groups led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) breached Aleppo and began entering the city amid clashes with Damascus’ forces, sources said Friday. The armed groups have been approaching Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest and retained by Bashar Assad’s regime, for days and have seized several towns and villages along the way. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said the groups blew up two car bombs at the city’s western edge on Friday. A HTS commander issued a recorded message posted on social media calling on the city’s residents to cooperate with the advancing forces. Fighters also…