KYIV: Ukrainian soldiers were still engaging Russian forces in fierce battles in and around Bakhmut on Sunday, military officials said, hours after Moscow and the private army Wagner announced that their troops had taken full control of the eastern city.
The fog of war made it impossible to confirm the situation on the ground in the invasion’s longest battle, and a series of comments from Ukrainian and Russian officials added confusion to the matter.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minsiter Hanna Malyar even went so far as to say that Ukrainian troops “took the city in a semi-encirclement.”
“The enemy failed to surround Bakhmut, and they lost part of the dominant heights around the city,” Malyar said. “That is, the advance of our troops in the suburbs along the flanks, which is still ongoing, greatly complicates the enemy’s presence in Bakhmut.”
Her comments came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the Group of Seven summit in Japan, appeared to suggest that Bakhmut had fallen.
When asked if the city was in Ukraine’s hands, Zelensky said: “I think no, but you have to — to understand that there is nothing, They’ve destroyed everything. There are no buildings. It’s a pity. It’s tragedy.”
Zelensky’s press secretary later walked back those comments.
And the spokesman for Ukraine’s Eastern Group of Forces, Serhii Cherevaty, said that the Ukrainian military is managing to hold positions in the vicinity of Bakhmut.
“The president correctly said that the city has, in fact, been razed to the ground. The enemy is being destroyed every day by massive artillery and aviation strikes, and our units report that the situation is extremely difficult.
“Our military keep fortifications and several premises in the southwestern part of the city. Heavy fighting is underway,” he said.
It was only the latest flip-flopping of the situation in Bakhmut after eight months of intense fighting.
Only hours earlier, Russian state new agencies reported that President Vladimir Putin congratulated “Wagner assault detachments, as well as all servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces units, who provided them with the necessary support and flank protection, on the completion of the operation to liberate Artyomovsk,” which is Bakhmut’s Soviet-era name.
Russia’s Defense Ministry also said that Wagner and military units “completed the liberation” of Bakhmut.
At the G-7 in Japan, Zelensky stood side by side with US President Joe Biden during a news conference. Biden announced $375 million more in aid for Ukraine, which included more ammunition, artillery and vehicles.
“I thanked him for the significant financial assistance to (Ukraine) from (the US),” Zelensky tweeted later.
The new pledge came after the US agreed to allow training on American-made F-16 fighter jets, laying the groundwork for their eventual transfer to Ukraine. Biden said Sunday that Zelensky had given the US a “flat assurance” that Ukraine wouldn’t use the F-16s jets to attack Russian territory.
Many analysts say that even if Russia was victorious in Bakhmut, it was unlikely to turn the tide in the war.
The Russian capture of the last remaining ground in Bakhmut is “not tactically or operationally significant,” a Washington-based think tank said late Saturday. The Institute for the Study of War said that taking control of these areas “does not grant Russian forces operationally significant terrain to continue conducting offensive operations,” nor to “to defend against possible Ukrainian counterattacks.”
In a video posted on Telegram, Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin said the city came under complete Russian control at about midday Saturday. He spoke surrounded by about a half-dozen fighters, with ruined buildings in the background and explosions heard in the distance.
Russian forces still seek to seize the remaining part of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control, including several heavily fortified areas.
It isn’t clear which side has paid a higher price in the battle for Bakhmut. Both Russia and Ukraine have endured losses believed to be in the thousands, though neither has disclosed casualty numbers.
Zelensky underlined the importance of defending Bakhmut in an interview with The Associated Press in March, saying its fall could allow Russia to rally international support for a deal that might require Kyiv to make unacceptable compromises.
Analysts have said Bakhmut’s fall would be a blow to Ukraine and give some tactical advantages to Russia but wouldn’t prove decisive to the outcome of the war.
Bakhmut, located about 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of the Russian-held regional capital of Donetsk, had a prewar population of 80,000 and was an important industrial center, surrounded by salt and gypsum mines.
The city, which was named Artyomovsk after a Bolshevik revolutionary when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, also was known for its sparkling wine production in underground caves. Its broad tree-lined avenues, lush parks and stately downtown with imposing late 19th-century mansions — all now reduced to a smoldering wasteland — made it a popular tourist destination.
When a separatist rebellion engulfed eastern Ukraine in 2014 weeks after Moscow’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the rebels quickly won control of the city, only to lose it a few months later.
After Russia switched its focus to the Donbas following a botched attempt to seize Kyiv early in the February 2022 invasion, Moscow’s troops tried to take Bakhmut in August but were pushed back.
The fighting there abated in autumn as Russia was confronted with Ukrainian counteroffensives in the east and the south, but it resumed at full pace late last year. In January, Russia captured the salt-mining town of Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, and closed in on the city’s suburbs.
Intense Russian shelling targeted the city and nearby villages as Moscow waged a three-sided assault to try to finish off the resistance in what Ukrainians called “fortress Bakhmut.”
Mercenaries from Wagner spearheaded the Russian offensive. Prigozhin tried to use the battle for the city to expand his clout amid the tensions with the top Russian military leaders whom he harshly criticized.
“We fought not only with the Ukrainian armed forces in Bakhmut. We fought the Russian bureaucracy, which threw sand in the wheels,” Prigozhin said in the video on Saturday.
The relentless Russian artillery bombardment left few buildings intact amid ferocious house-to-house battles. Wagner fighters “marched on the bodies of their own soldiers” according to Ukrainian officials. Both sides have spent ammunition at a rate unseen in any armed conflict for decades, firing thousands of rounds a day.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has said that seizing the city would allow Russia to press its offensive farther into the Donetsk region, one of the four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow illegally annexed in September.
Ukraine says troops still engaging Russian forces in Bakhmut after Moscow announces victory in city
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Ukraine says troops still engaging Russian forces in Bakhmut after Moscow announces victory in city
- Russia claimed on Saturday to have fully captured the smashed eastern Ukrainian city, which if true would mark an end to the longest and bloodiest battle of the 15-month war
In Java, Indonesian conservationist leads efforts to protect endangered silvery gibbons
- Rahayu Oktaviani won the 2025 Whitley Award, which recognizes grassroots conservation leaders
- There are fewer than 2,500 Javan gibbons in the wild, half of which live at a national park in West Java
JAKARTA: It was deep in the heart of an Indonesian rainforest in West Java that Rahayu Oktaviani, known as Ayu, first heard the “song” of the Javan gibbon.
She had her first encounter in 2008 while visiting the Mount Halimun Salak National Park for an undergraduate research project that required her to obtain a voice sample of the primate.
After waiting patiently for two weeks, coming in and out of the forest, she finally heard a Javan gibbon make its distinctive call.
She recalled how the sound she described as melodic and haunting had created a hush, as it echoed throughout the forest.
“It’s like the most beautiful song that I ever heard in my life. It’s so amazing,” Ayu told Arab News.
“They are non-human primates, but they can have like this beautiful song that can make all of … the creatures in the forest just keep silent.”
In the 17 years since, Ayu has dedicated her life to protecting the endangered animals, which are also known as “silvery gibbon,” or “owa jawa” locally.
A vast archipelago stretching across the equator, Indonesia is a top global biodiversity hotspot and home to over 60 species of primates, about 38 of which are endemic to the country.
“Maybe a lot of people know about the orangutan, about the rhino, about the tiger, but how about the overlooked species, just like, for example, the Javan gibbon? Not so many people know about them,” Ayu said.
Fewer than 2,500 Javan gibbons remain in the wild today, according to an estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. About half of them live in the 87,000-hectare Mount Halimun Salak National Park, where Ayu and her team have laid the building blocks for grassroots conservation of the endangered species.
The gibbons rely on a continuous canopy for movement and foraging, making them particularly vulnerable to forest fragmentation and habitat degradation. As around 55 percent of Indonesia’s 270 million population lives in Java, the survival of the endemic species found only in the island’s forests is threatened by deforestation and illegal animal trafficking.
“With the situation in Java, where only like 10 percent of the natural forests are remaining, it means the forest itself should be intact. The forest itself still needs to be there not only for the Javan gibbons, but also for the other species that need this habitat for their lives,” Ayu said.
In 2020, she co-founded the conservation nongovernmental organization Kiara to expand efforts to save the Javan gibbon, believing that a key aspect in protecting the species was to engage the local community.
When she started out as a primatologist, spending much time in the forest to study the gibbons, Ayu did not realize that she was neglecting the very people who lived alongside the primates.
She recalled a question a villager posed at the time, a woman named Yanti, who was curious as to why Ayu always went to the forest but rarely stopped by the village.
“That’s a really casual and simple question, but it kept me thinking about what I’ve been doing so far. Is there something that I’ve been missing?” Ayu said.
Yanti’s query eventually led her to realize that she needed to do more with the community.
“We want to build together with the communities, where actually the gibbon can be something that they can be proud of,” she said. “Community engagement is 100 percent the core for conservation because without community, we cannot do everything.”
Ayu has employed people from Citalahab, a small village enclave located within the national park where locals make a living working in tea plantations or as rice farmers. Eight of them now work in the field alongside Ayu and her team to monitor the gibbons in the wild.
With Kiara, she also established the Ambu Halimun initiative, which involves 15 local women between the ages of 17 and 50 in ecoprinting workshops and financial literacy training.
In April, Ayu won the prestigious Whitley Award, which recognizes achievements in grassroots conservation, to advance her work in protecting the Javan gibbons.
With 50,000 British pounds ($67,000) from the award, Ayu plans to scale up her programs with Kiara to mitigate threats from human activities and to protect the gibbons’ habitat.
This includes developing a data management system to enhance park-wide conservation efforts, training the park rangers in biodiversity monitoring techniques, and guiding conservation strategies.
The 38-year-old, whose role models are “the Trimates,” primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas, has faith that humans can live in coexistence with wildlife.
“Actually, if we put aside our ego, we are part of the ecosystem itself. We are not separated from the ecosystems, so it means we have to have more balance with nature,” she said. “And to do that, we also have to respect what else (is) actually living together with us in these ecosystems.”
Ayu said the Whitley Award served as good momentum to raise awareness about the species she loves dearly, the Javan gibbons.
“I believe not so many people are aware of the existence of the Javan gibbon, so it’s the right momentum to share the love for the Javan gibbon and make people care about it,” she said. “Because how can you care about the species if you know nothing about them?”
With the award and the coverage that it garnered internationally, Ayu is also hopeful about inspiring a new generation of conservationists from Indonesia.
“I think women also play a good part to be conservationists in the future … It’s also about … regeneration: the importance of nurturing the new generation of conservationists and primatologists from Indonesia, especially because we need more and more people who work in this field.”
UK working with Israel to arrange charter flights out of Tel Aviv, Lammy says
LONDON: Britain is working with Israeli authorities to arrange charter flights for British nationals from Tel Aviv when the airport reopens, foreign minister David Lammy said on Friday.
“As part of our efforts to support British nationals in the Middle East, the government is working with the Israeli authorities to provide charter flights from Tel Aviv airport when airspace reopens,” Lammy said in a statement.
Israel’s main international gateway, Ben Gurion Airport, closed last week due to Israel and Iran’s spiralling air war.
On Monday, the British government advised its citizens in Israel to register their presence with British authorities, saying it was monitoring the situation and considering options for assistance.
It said it had increased its logistical support for citizens who have turned to overland routes into Jordan and Egypt.
Taiwan to hold recall election for lawmakers that could reshape parliament
TAIPEI: Taiwan will hold a recall vote for around one quarter of parliament’s lawmakers — all from the main opposition party — next month, the election commission said on Friday, a move which could see the ruling party take back control of the legislature.
While Lai Ching-te won the presidency last year, his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its parliamentary majority, leaving the Kuomintang (KMT) and the much smaller Taiwan People’s Party with the most seats.
The KMT and the TPP have passed a series of measures, including swingeing budget cuts, angering the DPP, though the campaigns to gather enough signatures for the recalls were led by civic groups.
The opposition has 62 of parliament’s 113 seats and the DPP holds the remaining 51. The recall votes for 24 KMT lawmakers will take place on July 26, the election commission said.
The DPP has given full support for the recalls, releasing a video this week calling on people to vote yes and “oppose the communists” — a direct reference to China and what the party says is the opposition’s dangerous cosying up to Beijing.
The KMT has vowed to fight what it calls a “malicious recall” that comes so soon after the last parliamentary election in January 2024.
“The KMT calls on the people of Taiwan to oppose the green communists and fight against dictatorship, and vote ‘no’,” the party said in a statement after the recall vote was announced, referring to the DPP’s party colors.
The KMT says its engagement with China, which views separately-governed Taiwan as its own territory, is needed to keep channels of communication open and reduce tensions.
China has rejected multiple offers of talks from Lai, branding him a “separatist,” and has increased military pressure against the island.
Recall campaigns against DPP lawmakers failed to gather enough valid signatures.
For the recalls to be successful, the number of votes approving the measure must be more than those opposing it, and also exceed one-quarter of the number of registered voters in the constituency, so turnout will be important.
If the recall votes are successful, there will be by-elections later this year to select new lawmakers.
Taiwan’s next parliamentary and presidential elections are not scheduled until early 2028.
Belgium announces border checks in migration clampdown
- A spokesperson for the Belgian Immigration Office said it was difficult to give figures for illegal immigration at the moment without the systematic border checks
BRUSSELS: Belgium will introduce border checks on people coming into the country to clamp down on illegal migration, the government said, in another limit on free movement across Europe’s Schengen zone.
The restrictions in the country that borders the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg and Germany will start this summer, a spokesperson for the junior minister for migration, Anneleen Van Bossuyt, said on Friday.
“Time for entry controls. Belgium must not be a magnet for those stopped elsewhere. Our message is clear: Belgium will no longer tolerate illegal migration and asylum shopping,” Van Bossuyt wrote on X.
The announcement follows similar moves by the Netherlands and Germany, part of a broader crackdown on migration across the continent, even as numbers of arrivals on many major routes have shown signs of falling.
“The checks will be carried out in a targeted manner on major access roads such as motorway car parks, on bus traffic ... on certain trains ... and on intra-Schengen flights from countries with high migration pressure, such as Greece and Italy,” a Belgian government statement said late on Thursday.
Prime Minister Bart De Wever, in office since February, has said curbing migration is a key priority for his right-leaning government.
Belgium is part of the open-border Schengen area which guarantees free travel between its 29 member states. Under article 23 of the Schengen Borders Code, members can temporarily reinstate border checks in response to security or migration pressures.
A spokesperson for the Belgian Immigration Office said it was difficult to give figures for illegal immigration at the moment without the systematic border checks.
Belgium, one of the world’s richest countries, received 39,615 asylum applications in 2024, 11.6 percent more than in 2023, numbers from the Federal Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers show.
The country had the capacity to take in 35,600 applicants in 2024, according to the figures, leaving many arrivals without proper accommodation.
Iran-Israel war could have ‘harmful’ migration impact on Europe, Erdogan warns
ISTANBUL: The Iran-Israel air war could spark a surge in migration that could harm Europe and the region, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Friday.
Israel, saying Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, launched a massive wave of strikes a week ago, triggering an immediate retaliation.
“The spiral of violence triggered by Israel’s attacks could harm the region and Europe in terms of migration and the possibility of nuclear leakage,” his office quoted him as saying in a phone conversation with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Erdogan said the solution to the nuclear disagreements with Iran was “through negotiations.” He said the violence had “raised the threat to regional security to the highest level” and Turkiye was “making efforts to end the conflict.”
Despite the escalating confrontation, a Turkish defense ministry source said Thursday there had been “no increase” in numbers crossing from Iran.
The Turkish authorities have not released any figures.
AFP correspondents at the main Kapikoy border crossing near the eastern Turkish city of Van reported seeing several hundred people crossing in both directions, with a customs official saying the numbers were “nothing unusual.”
During a visit to the frontier on Wednesday, Defense Minister Yasar Guler said “security measures at our borders have been increased.”
