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Russia is building up infantry and armoured vehicles while stepping up aerial bombardments ahead of planned attacks along the southern front, a Ukrainian military spokesman has said. “The Russians have been preparing for some time, for several weeks, to conduct assault operations in several directions, specifically in the Zaporizhzhia direction,” Vladyslav Voloshyn told Agence France-Presse. Russian troops were focusing on the areas around Vremivka, Gulyaipole and Robotyne. He said Ukraine had bolstered its defensive lines in the frontline sector.
More than 10,000 North Korean troops have begun engaging in combat operations alongside Russian forces, mostly in the far western Kursk oblast, the US state department said. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, meanwhile warned that Russia has prepared about 50,000 troops, including North Korean fighters, for an effort to expel Ukrainian forces from the Russian region of Kursk.
Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s secretary of state, is heading to Europe on a flying visit for urgent meetings on Ukraine with Nato and EU officials. He will hold talks in Brussels on Wednesday on how to boost support for Ukraine, leaving the same day for a conference in Latin America.
Ukraine said on Tuesday that a Russian strike on Kryvyi Rih killed a 32-year-old mother and her three children, including a newborn. The strike a day earlier ripped into the upper storeys of a Soviet-era residential building in the industrial town, burying victims beneath debris.
A majority of Ukrainians oppose giving up any land captured by Russia in exchange for peace, a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology has found. “As of the beginning of October 2024, despite all the difficult circumstances, the majority of Ukrainians – 58% – opposed any territorial concessions,” the survey said. There were 32% ready for territorial concessions – at the beginning of the war it was 10%. While a majority of Ukrainians answered no when asked if they would approve generic territorial concessions, the numbers varied when pollsters asked if giving up some regions would be difficult, but acceptable. About 46% would be ready to accept giving up Donbas and Crimea, the poll said, with 39% saying such a compromise would be difficult.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has said “nothing should be decided about Ukraine without the Ukrainians, nor about Europe without the Europeans”. Speaking in Paris alongside the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, Macron said building up homegrown military capacity would be “a long-term effort” but Europe had for “too long avoided bearing the burden of its own security”.
Macron joined Rutte in calling North Korean troops’ appearance alongside Russian soldiers “a serious escalation” in the Ukraine conflict that widened the threat to the Pacific, increasingly the Americans’ priority theatre. “We must do more than just keep Ukraine in the fight. We need to raise the cost for Vladimir Putin and his enabling and authoritarian friends by providing Ukraine with the support it needs to change the trajectory of the conflict … Russia, working together with North Korea, Iran and China, is not only threatening Europe … but also the Indo-Pacific and North America. So we must stand together.”
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s incoming foreign policy chief, has called for China to face “a higher cost” for supporting Russia in the war against Ukraine, Jennifer Rankin writes from Brussels. In an overture to the future Donald Trump administration in the US, she said support for Ukraine was in Washington’s interest. “If the US is worried about China, or other actors, then they should also be worried about how we respond … [to] Russia’s war against Ukraine, because we see how Iran, North Korea, China – more covertly – and Russia are working together.”
It comes after Donald Trump apparently chose a pair of establishment Republicans for senior roles in his administration. Andrew Roth writes from Washington that Trump is predicted to select the senator Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, the US’s top diplomat, and has asked the congressman Mike Waltz, a retired Green Beret known as a China hawk, to become his national security adviser. Trump went on to announce he will nominate a Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, as secretary of defence.
Jack Teixeira, the “Pentagon leaker”, has been sent to jail for 15 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking highly classified military documents on Discord about the war in Ukraine. Teixeira, 22, a Massachusetts air national guardsman, apologised after pleading guilty to six counts of wilful retention and transmission of national defence information. Prosecutors asked for 17 years; defence attorneys sought an 11-year sentence as “serious and adequate … [and] essentially equal to half the life that Jack has lived thus far”.
A special session of the European parliament on 19 November to mark 1,000 days of war in Ukraine will feature a remote address by Zelenskyy, the parliament’s head said on Tuesday.
Russian owners hit by sanctions over the Ukraine war have sold the Helsinki Arena sports and events complex, the Finnish foreign ministry has told Reuters. The deal was announced a day after the city of Helsinki initiated a forced takeover of the arena from its Russian owners, Gennady Timchenko and Roman Rotenberg. The major concert venue and ice hockey arena has been shut since 2022 under sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine. All of Timchenko’s holdings in the EU have been frozen, while Rotenberg is the target of US sanctions issued against his father, Boris, and uncle Arkadiy and their families for their close ties with Vladimir Putin.