KYIV: Ukraine’s army has retreated from a neighborhood in the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a strategically important town in the eastern Donetsk region that has been reduced to rubble under a monthslong Russian assault, a military spokesperson said Thursday.
Chasiv Yar is a short distance west of Bakhmut, which was captured by Russia last year after a bitter 10-month battle. For months, Russian forces have focused on capturing Chasiv Yar, a town which occupies an elevated location. Its fall would put nearby cities in jeopardy, compromise critical Ukrainian supply routes and bring Russia closer to its stated aim of seizing the entire Donetsk region.
The Ukrainian army retreated from a northeastern neighborhood in the town, Nazar Voloshyn, the spokesperson for the Khortytsia ground forces formation, told The Associated Press in a written message Thursday.
Ukraine’s defensive positions in the town were “destroyed,” he said, adding that there was a threat of serious casualties if troops remained in the area and that Russia did not leave “a single intact building.”
Months of relentless Russian artillery strikes have devastated Chasiv Yar, with homes and municipal offices charred, and a town that once had a population of 12,000 has been left deserted.
Oleh Shyriaiev, commander of the 255 assault battalion which has been based in the area for six months, said after Russian troops captured the neighborhood, they burned every building not already destroyed by shelling.
Shyriaiev said Russia is deploying scorched-earth tactics in an attempt to destroy anything which could be used as a military position in a bid to force troops to retreat.
“I regret that we are gradually losing territory,” he said, speaking by phone from the Chasiv Yar area, but added, “we cannot hold what is ruined.”
Russian troops outnumber Ukrainians 10-to-1 in the area but Shyriaiev suggested that, even with that ratio, they have not been able to make significant progress in the past six months of active fighting.
The intensity of Russian strikes on Ukraine’s defensive line in the area of Chasiv Yar has increased over the last month, Voloshyn said.
In the past week alone, Voloshyn said Russia has carried out nearly 1,300 strikes, fired nearly 130 glide bombs and made 44 ground assaults.
Other Russian attacks in recent weeks have focused on capturing nearby settlements that would allow them to advance to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the biggest cities in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donetsk region.
Ukrainian commanders in the area say their resources remain stretched, largely due to a monthslong gap in military assistance from the United States which threw Ukraine’s military onto the defensive.
Shyriaiev, the assault battalion commander, said ammunition from allies is arriving, but more slowly than needed by the army.
“We are determined to hold on to the end,” said the commander, who has been fighting on the front line since the outbreak of the war.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the governor of the northern Chernihiv region, Viacheslav Chaus, said Russia launched 22 drones over Ukraine last night. One hit a power infrastructure facility in the northern Chernihiv region, leaving nearly 6,000 customers without electricity, he said, adding that the rest were shot down.
Russia is continually targeting Ukraine’s badly damaged energy infrastructure, resulting in hours of rolling blackouts across the country. Ukrainian officials have warned that the situation may worsen as winter approaches.
Ukraine’s army retreats from positions as Russia gets closer to seizing strategically important town
https://arab.news/mbhxm
Ukraine’s army retreats from positions as Russia gets closer to seizing strategically important town
- For months, Russian forces have focused on capturing Chasiv Yar, a town which occupies an elevated location
- The Ukrainian army retreated from a northeastern neighborhood in the town, Nazar Voloshyn
Philippine president to meet Trump in Washington this month
- Security, tariff issues will be priorities when Marcos meets Trump, expert says
- Manila, Washington have increasingly boosted defense engagements in recent years
MANILA: President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will visit Washington this month, the Philippine Foreign Ministry said on Friday, making this the first trip of a Southeast Asian leader since Donald Trump took office.
The trip, which follows Trump’s tariffs announcement earlier this week, will take place from July 20 to 22, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, adding that details of the visit are not yet finalized.
Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Manuel Romualdez told reporters that Marcos is the “first ASEAN head of state invited by Trump,” referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Trade and security will likely be the focus of discussions, according to Prof. Ranjit Sing Rye, president of OCTA Research.
“I think it’s a very significant meeting of both leaders of the Philippines and the US, especially at this time when there’s so much dynamics in the … South China Sea,” Rye told Arab News.
“It signifies and symbolizes the broadening and deepening of US-Philippine relations under the Trump administration.”
Tensions have continued to run high between the Philippines and China over territorial disputes in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which billions of dollars of goods pass each year.
Manila and Beijing have been involved in frequent maritime confrontations in recent years, with China maintaining its expansive claims of the area, despite a 2016 international tribunal ruling the historical assertion to it had no basis.
The US has a seven-decade-old mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and Washington has repeatedly warned that a Chinese attack on Filipino ships could trigger a US military response.
Philippine and US forces have increasingly upped mutual defense engagements, including large-scale combat exercises in the Philippines.
Manila is also sending trade officials to the US next week to hold further negotiations on tariffs, after Trump raised a planned tariff on Philippine exports to the US to 20 percent from 17 percent.
It is not immediately clear if the Marcos visit will coincide with that of Manila’s tariff-negotiating team.
“Over the next three years, there will be, in my view, a broadening and deepening of US-Philippine relations on many levels, not just economic, not just socioeconomic, but also in trade, but also in security relations,” Rye said.
“And maybe some of these details will be threshed out during that meeting.”
This will be Marcos’ third visit to the US since he became president in 2022.
His last trip was in April 2024, when he met with then President Joe Biden and former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in the first trilateral summit among the treaty allies.
Thousands gather in Srebrenica to mark 30 years since genocide against Bosniak Muslims
- Thousands gather to mark massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Europe’s only genocide since WWII
- Seven newly identified victims of the 1995 massacre, including two 19-year-old men, were laid to rest
SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Thousands of people from Bosnia and around the world gathered in Srebrenica to mark the 30th anniversary of a massacre there of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim boys and men — an atrocity that has been acknowledged as Europe’s only genocide after the Holocaust.
Seven newly identified victims of the 1995 massacre, including two 19-year-old men, were laid to rest in a collective funeral at a vast cemetery near Srebrenica Friday, next to more than 6,000 victims already buried there. Such funerals are held annually for the victims who are still being unearthed from dozens of mass graves around the town.
Relatives of the victims, however, often can bury only partial remains of their loved ones as they are typically found in several different mass graves, sometimes kilometers (miles) apart. Such was the case of Mirzeta Karic, who was waiting to bury her father.
“Thirty years of search and we are burying a bone,” she said, crying by her father’s coffin which was wrapped in green cloth in accordance with Islamic tradition.
“I think it would be easier if I could bury all of him. What can I tell you, my father is one of the 50 (killed) from my entire family,” she added.
July 11, 1995, is the day when the killings started after Bosnian Serb fighters overran the eastern Bosnian enclave in the final months of the interethnic war in the Balkan country.
After taking control of the town that was a protected UN safe zone during the war, Bosnian Serb fighters separated Bosniak Muslim men and boys from their families and brutally executed them in just several days. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves around Srebrenica which they later dug up with bulldozers, scattering the remains among other burial sites to hide the evidence of their war crimes.
The UN General Assembly last year adopted a resolution to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide on the July 11 anniversary.
Scores of international officials and dignitaries attended the commemoration ceremonies and the funeral. Among them were European Council President Antonio Costa and Britain’s Duchess of Edinburgh, Sophie, who said that “our duty must be to remember all those lost so tragically and to never let these things happen again.”
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp said he felt “humbled” because UN troops from the Netherlands were based in Srebrenica when Bosnian Serbs stormed the town.
“I see to what extent commemorating Srebrenica genocide is important,” he said.
In an emotional speech, Munira Subasic, who heads the Mothers of Srebrenica association, urged Europe and the world to “help us fight against hatred, against injustice and against killings.”
Subasic, who lost her husband and youngest son in Srebrenica along with more than 20 relatives, told Europe to “wake up.”
“As I stand here many mothers in Ukraine and Palestine are going through what we went through in 1995,” Subasic said, referring to ongoing conflicts. “It’s the 21st century but instead of justice, fascism has woken up.”
On the eve of the anniversary, an exhibition was inaugurated displaying personal items belonging to the victims that were found in the mass graves over the years.
The conflict in Bosnia erupted in 1992, when Bosnian Serbs took up arms in a rebellion against the country’s independence from the former Yugoslavia and with an aim to create their own state and eventually unite with neighboring Serbia. More than 100,000 people were killed and millions displaced before a US-brokered peace agreement was reached in 1995.
Bosnia remains ethnically split while both Bosnian Serbs and neighboring Serbia refuse to acknowledge that the massacre in Srebrenica was a genocide despite rulings by two UN courts. Bosnian Serb political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, along with many others, were convicted and sentenced for genocide.
Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic expressed condolences on X while calling the Srebrenica massacre a “terrible crime.”
“There is no room in Europe — or anywhere else — for genocide denial, revisionism, or the glorification of those responsible,” European Council President Costa said in his speech. “Denying such horrors only poisons our future.”
NATO needs more long-range missiles to deter Russia, US general says
- The war in Ukraine has underscored Europe’s heavy dependence on the United States to provide long-range missiles
BERLIN: NATO will need more long-range missiles in its arsenal to deter Russia from attacking Europe because Moscow is expected to increase production of long-range weapons, a US Army general told Reuters.
Russia’s effective use of long-range missiles in its war in Ukraine has convinced Western military officials of their importance for destroying command posts, transportation hubs and missile launchers far behind enemy lines.
“The Russian army is bigger today than it was when they started the war in Ukraine,” Major General John Rafferty said in an interview at a US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany.
“And we know that they’re going to continue to invest in long-range rockets and missiles and sophisticated air defenses. So more alliance capability is really, really important.”
The war in Ukraine has underscored Europe’s heavy dependence on the United States to provide long-range missiles, with Kyiv seeking to strengthen its air defenses.
Rafferty recently completed an assignment as commander of the US Army’s 56th Artillery Command in the German town of Mainz-Kastel, which is preparing for temporary deployments of long-range US missiles on European soil from 2026.
At a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Monday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is expected to try to clarify whether such deployments, agreed between Berlin and Washington when Joe Biden was president, will go ahead now that Donald Trump is back in the White House.
The agreement foresaw the deployment of systems including Tomahawk missiles with a range of 1,800 km and the developmental hypersonic weapon Dark Eagle with a range of around 3,000 km.
Russia has criticized the planned deployment of longer-range US missiles in Germany as a serious threat to its national security. It has dismissed NATO concerns that it could attack an alliance member and cited concerns about NATO expansion as one of its reasons for invading Ukraine in 2022.
European plans
Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo University who specializes in missiles, estimated that the US provides some 90 percent of NATO’s long-range missile capabilities.
“Long-range strike capabilities are crucial in modern warfare,” he said. “You really, really don’t want to be caught in a position like Ukraine (without such weapons) in the first year (of the war). That puts you at an immediate disadvantage.”
Aware of this vulnerability, European countries in NATO have agreed to increase defense spending under pressure from Trump.
Some European countries have their own long-range missiles but their number and range are limited. US missiles can strike targets at a distance of several thousand km.
Europe’s air-launched cruise missiles, such as the British Storm Shadow, the French Scalp and the German Taurus, have a range of several hundred km. France’s sea-launched Missile de Croisiere Naval (MdCN) can travel more than 1,000 km.
They are all built by European arms maker MBDA which has branches in Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Britain and Sweden are now participating in a program to acquire long-range, ground-launched conventional missiles known as the European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA).
As part of the program, Britain and Germany announced in mid-May that they would start work on the development of a missile with a range of over 2,000 km.
‘Everybody is tired’ of war in Ukraine, UN migration chief says
- Russia’s invasion has triggered Europe’s biggest refugee crisis this century, with 5.6 million Ukrainian refugees globally and 3.8 million uprooted in their country
ROME: Fatigue over the war in Ukraine and US-led foreign aid cuts are jeopardizing efforts to support people fleeing hardship, the head of the UN migration agency warned in an interview on Friday. International Organization for Migration (IOM) Director General Amy Pope was speaking a day after a Ukraine recovery conference in Rome mobilized over €10 billion ($11.69 billion) for the country.
“It’s three-and-a-half years into the conflict. I think it’s fair to say that everybody is tired, and we hear that even from Ukrainians who’ve been experiencing the ongoing attacks in their cities and often have been displaced multiple times,” she said.
“The response to it, though, has to be peace, because ultimately, without peace, there won’t be an end, not only to the funding request, but also to the support for the Ukrainian people.”
Russia’s invasion has triggered Europe’s biggest refugee this century, with 5.6 million Ukrainian refugees globally and 3.8 million uprooted in their country, according to UN data. The IOM and other UN agencies are hampered by major funding shortages as US President Donald Trump slashes foreign aid and European donors like Britain shift funds from development to defense.
US decisions will give the IOM a $1 billion shortfall this year, Pope said, saying budget reductions should be phased gradually or else Trump and others risk stoking even worse migration crises.
“It doesn’t work to have provided assistance and then just walk away and leave nothing. And what we see happening when support falls is that people move again … So (the cuts) can ultimately have a backlash,” she said.
Warning for US, praise for Italy
Pope, 51, is the first woman to lead the IOM and a former adviser to the Obama and Biden administrations who is now working with Trump’s White House on so-called “self-deportations.”
She said the IOM has decades of experience of such programs in Europe and they take time to implement, especially to prepare returnees and check they are going voluntarily.
“That doesn’t always move as quickly as governments would like,” Pope said.
Asked whether the IOM would stop working with the US if the returns turned out to be forced, she said: “We’ve made clear to them what our standards are, and as with every member state, we outline what we can do and what we can’t do, and they understand that, and it is part of the deal.”
After Rome, Pope was on her way to Washington to meet with Trump administration officials and US lawmakers. Turning to Europe, she praised Italy’s decision to increase migrant work permits to nearly 500,000 for 2026-2028, coming from a right-wing government otherwise pursuing tough border policies.
“What Italy is doing is taking a realistic look at what labor they need, what skills they need, what talent they need. And then they’re designing a system to allow people to come in through a safe and legal channel,” Pope said.
Greece to adopt legislation against migrant ‘invasion’ from Libya
- Conservative lawmakers are expected to approve emergency legislation enforcing the temporary ban
- Proposed law to allow authorities to detain asylum seekers in camps for up to 18 months
ATHENS: Greece on Friday was to enforce a three-month freeze on asylum claims from migrants arriving by boat from North Africa, to stem a surge from Libya that the government has called an “invasion.”
Conservative lawmakers, who hold a parliamentary majority, are expected to approve emergency legislation enforcing the temporary ban, allowing authorities to detain asylum seekers in camps for up to 18 months.
“We have made the difficult but absolutely necessary decision to temporarily suspend the examination process of asylum applications for those arriving by sea from North African countries,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement to German tabloid Bild on Friday.
“This decision sends a clear message, leaving no room for misinterpretation, to human trafficking networks: Greece is not an open transit route. The journey is dangerous, the outcome uncertain, and the money paid to smugglers ultimately wasted,” he said.
Greece’s migration ministry says over 14,000 migrants have reached the country this year, including over 2,000 in recent days from Libya.
“Greece cannot have boats totaling 1,000 people a day,” Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told Skai TV, adding that the country will undertake a “draconian revision” of how it deals with migrants.
Plevris – formerly a member of the far-right LAOS party and now part of Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party – has called the recent influx an “invasion from North Africa.”
The move has been criticized by rights groups as a violation of international and EU law, and opposition parties have called it unconstitutional.
Noting an “exceptional” situation, European Commission migration spokesperson Markus Lammert said on Thursday: “We are in close contact with the Greek authorities to obtain necessary information on these measures.”
Greece took similar steps in 2020 during a migration surge at its land border with Turkiye.
To manage the influx, the government could reopen camps built after the 2015 migration crisis, government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said this week.
Mitsotakis also told parliament that it would build up to two additional camps on the island of Crete.
