Author: Daily Sabah With Reuters

The United States will provide Ukraine with a $725 million weapons package, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, as President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration seeks to bolster the government in Kyiv in its war with Russian invaders before leaving office in January. The assistance will include Stinger missiles, ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), drones and land mines, among other items, Blinken said in a statement. Reuters had reported last week that the Biden administration planned to provide the equipment, much of it anti-tank weapons to ward off Russia’s attacking troops. “The United States and more…

Syrian opposition forces began preparations to seize Aleppo a year ago but the assault was delayed by war in Gaza and ultimately launched last week when a ceasefire took hold in Lebanon, the head of Syria’s main opposition abroad told Reuters. The insurgents were able to seize the city and other areas so quickly in part because Hezbollah and other Iran-backed fighters who support Syria’s president were still distracted by their conflict with Israel, Hadi al-Bahra said on Monday. The Turkish military, which is allied with some of the insurgents and has bases across its southern border in Syria, had…

The ceasefire in Lebanon has been broadly successful, the U.S. State Department said on Monday, adding the United States and France will look at reports of potential violations in the coming days. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters at a regular news briefing that Washington and Paris would engage with the Israeli and Lebanese militaries to look at reports of violations and deal with them through channels in the mechanism set up in the agreement.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said there would be “hell to pay” in the Middle East if hostages held in the Gaza Strip were not released prior to his Jan. 20 inauguration. “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America,” Trump said in a post on social media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel would respond “strongly” after the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, citing repeated Israeli ceasefire violations, carried out a strike on an Israeli military position.

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”,…