Russia downs 30 ‘Ukrainian drones’ in overnight attack, defense ministry says
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(LONDON) — Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday it defeated a fresh wave of Ukrainian drone attacks over the west of the country.
The ministry wrote on its official Telegram channel that 29 “Ukrainian drones were destroyed by air defense on duty overnight.”
The ministry said that 15 UAVs were downed over Bryansk region, five over the Kursk region, four over the Smolensk region, two over the Orel region and one each over Belgorod, Kaluga and Rostov regions.
On Sunday morning, the ministry said it shot down an additional Ukrainian drone over the Ryazan region.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired two ballistic missiles, one cruise missile and 14 Shahed UAVs into the country on Saturday night. The cruise missile and 10 Shaheds were shot down by air defenses, it wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine did not comment on its alleged overnight drone attack into Russia. Ukrainian leaders and commanders generally do not confirm or deny attacks within Russian borders.
The latest drone and missile exchange followed a large Russian drone assault against Ukrainian cities on Friday night and Saturday morning. Ukraine’s air force said it downed 72 of 76 Shahed drones fired at targets including the capital Kyiv.
Moscow said it also destroyed Ukrainian drones over two western regions on Friday night.
ABC News’ Tanya Stukalova contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — Georgia’s Saturday parliamentary elections have been cast by all parties as an era-defining moment for the country’s 3.8 million people.
For one of the country’s best known men, the results of the election could mean the difference between incarceration and freedom.
Former President Mikheil Saakashvili, 56, has been jailed since 2021 on charges of abuse of power and organizing an assault on an opposition lawmaker — charges he contends are politically motivated.
“My imprisonment is purely political and everyone knows that,” Saakashvili told ABC News in an interview conducted from his prison cell via intermediaries. “Once the politics changes, it will be finished.”
Saturday’s election will pit the Moscow-leaning Georgian Dream government against several pro-Western opposition parties, among them the United National Movement party founded by Saakashvili in 2001.
Among the UNM’s priorities, if it wins power as part of a pro-Western coalition, will be to free Saakashvili.
The campaign has been fraught with allegations of meddling and political violence on behalf of GD. The opposition is hoping to mobilize a historic turnout to defeat what they say are GD efforts to undermine the contest.
“The only recipe for tackling election meddling is erecting the wall of mass turnout at the ballot box,” Saakashvili said.
People power has proved a serious problem for GD in recent years. Mass protests defeated the government’s first effort to introduce a foreign agents registration law — which critics say was modeled on Russian legislation used to criminalize Western-leaning politicians, activists and academics — in 2023.
The government pushed the legislation through again in 2024 despite renewed and intense demonstrations.
Opponents credit GD founder, former prime minister and Georgia’s richest man — Bidzina Ivanishvili — as the mastermind behind what they say is the government’s authoritarian and pro-Moscow pivot, though the billionaire does not hold an official position.
Saakashvili said Ivanishvili — who made his fortune in Russia after the Soviet collapse — and the GD party “will go as far as it takes” to retain power this weekend, “but the question will be once they lose the elections if the government structures follow the orders from the oligarch,” he added, referring to Ivanishvili.
Ivanishvili and his party are framing the vote as a choice between war and peace. A new Western-led government, they say, will put Tbilisi back on the path to conflict with Russia, reviving the bloodshed of the 2008 war that saw Moscow cement its occupation of 20% of Georgian territory.
“It is straight from the Russian playbook,” Saakashvili said of the GD warnings. “Blaming victims for aggression against them. As far as we are concerned, real security and peace is associated with being part of Euro-Atlantic structures, and European Union membership is within reach.” Georgia received EU candidate status in 2023.
The latest polls suggest that GD will emerge as the largest party, but will fall significantly short of a parliamentary majority. A grand alliance of pro-EU and pro-NATO opposition parties, though, could get past the 50% threshold to form a new governing coalition.
“Polls are a very treacherous thing in authoritarian systems,” Saakashvili said. “Moldova’s recent example shows that polls get compromised by mass vote buying, and surely that will be the case in Georgia.”
“On the other hand, those that say to pollsters that they are voting for the government very often don’t say the truth,” he added.
Saakashvili’s 2021 imprisonment marked the nadir of a 20-year political rollercoaster. Saakashvili went from the much-loved leader of Georgia’s pro-Western Rose Revolution in 2003 to being vanquished by President Vladimir Putin’s Russian military machine by 2008.
By 2011, Saakashvili’s government was itself accused of violently suppressing protests, with the president soon also embroiled in human rights and corruption scandals.
Constitutionally barred from serving three consecutive terms, Saakashvili left Georgia after the 2013 presidential election and in 2018 was convicted in absentia on abuse of power and other charges.
A Ukrainian citizen — his citizenship was revoked by President Petro Poroshenko in 2017 before being restored by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 — Saakashvili went on to serve as governor of the Odessa region from 2015 to 2016. Zelenskyy appointed Saakashvili as the head of the executive committee of the National Council of Reforms in 2020.
Saakashvili returned to Georgia in October 2021 as the country prepared for local elections. He was arrested and detained by police.
His domestic and international allies have repeatedly condemned his imprisonment, raising concerns of his ill treatment and subsequent ill health. U.S. and European Union officials have also urged Tbilisi to do more to ensure Saakashvili’s fair treatment.
He has been hospitalized while in prison — once due to a hunger strike — and his gaunt appearance during a 2023 video conference court hearing prompted Zelenskyy to summon the Georgian ambassador in Kyiv to complain.
Saakashvili broadly blames Putin for his current situation. But he believes Moscow is not necessarily in a position to prevent a pro-Western pivot in Tbilisi.
“In 2008, the war happened after the West had sent a clear sign of weakness by refusing the NATO accession for Georgia and Ukraine,” Saakashvili said.
“If there is no hesitation this time, Russia is so stuck in Ukraine that it has no motivation to create a new hot war elsewhere.”
“We have no other choice,” he responded, when asked about the risks of perturbing the Kremlin. “The only other alternative is going back,” he said, “living in the Russian sphere of influence.”
As to his own plans if indeed he is freed, Saakashvili described himself as “a regional rather than purely Georgian leader.”
“I will help any next non-oligarch government with transition by advice,” he added, but said he will not seek any official position of power.
“And of course, I am a Ukrainian national and it is my duty to stand by Ukraine.”
(TEL-AVIV, Israel) — Israel said it killed another top Hezbollah commander — Muhammad Hussein Srour, the commander of Hezbollah’s Aerial Command — in a “precise” strike on Beirut Thursday.
At least two people were killed, and 15 others were injured in a strike on Dahieh in Beirut, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. Hezbollah has not yet commented on the death of its commander.
This comes hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will “continue the fighting with full force.”
At least 23 people were killed — including 19 Syrian refugees — and four others were injured after Israel struck a building on the Syrian-Lebanese border in another strike Thursday, officials said.
Nearly 700 people were killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since Monday, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. Strikes this week follow the explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies throughout the country last week.
Netanyahu shot down the possibility of a cease-fire that could end fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon after the U.S. and France said they have put a proposal on the table for a 21-day stop in fighting. He also said fighting in Gaza will continue until the goals of the war are achieved.
Despite the proposal on the table, all signs point to Israel preparing for a possible ground invasion into Lebanon.
President Joe Biden told reporters on Wednesday that there is global support for a 21-day cease-fire proposal that he and other leaders have called for.
“We were able to generate significant support from Europe, as well as the Arab nations. It’s important this war not widen,” Biden told reporters as he returned to the White House Thursday.
The president was returning from the U.N. General Assembly, where he met with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday to discuss details of a joint statement announcing the proposal, according to senior administration officials.
The Israel Ministry of Defense secured a $8.7 billion U.S. aid package from Washington to support its ongoing military efforts. The package includes $3.5 billion for essential wartime procurement, which has already been transferred, and $5.2 billion designated for air defense systems, according to the Ministry of Defense.
Israel has said it is attacking Hezbollah in order to allow residents to return to the north.
As tensions continue to rise in the region, Iran “will not remain indifferent in case of a full-scale war in Lebanon,” the Iranian Foreign Minister said in comments to reporters Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
He also warned Israel’s “crimes will not go unpunished,” and said the Middle East region “risks full-scale conflict” if the U.N. Security Council does not “act now to halt Israel’s war and enforce an immediate cease-fire.”
“The Israeli leaders must understand that their crimes will not go unpunished. The path to de-escalation is clear. Israel must immediately stop its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. Without a cease-fire in Gaza, there will be no guarantee of peace in the region,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Wednesday.
“Iran will not remain indifferent in case of a full-scale war in Lebanon. We stand with the people of Lebanon with all means,” he added.
(LONDON) — Julian Assange made his first public appearance since his release from prison, telling European lawmakers the United States had forced him to “plead guilty to journalism” to put an end to his years of captivity and that his case still set a dangerous precedent.
Assange addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, an international rights body, in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday.
He said he had eventually chosen “freedom over unrealizable justice” in agreeing to the deal that allowed him to walk free after 14 years spent in detention.
“I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism,” Assange said at the hearing, which was broadcast live.
Assange was released from Britain’s Belmarsh prison in June and flown to a U.S.-district court on the Pacific island of Saipan after accepting the deal. There he pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. documents and a judge sentenced him to 62 weeks in prison, the equivalent to his time spent in Belmarsh. The U.S. had been seeking to prosecute Assange on 18 counts under the Espionage Act.
The agreement ended the more than decade-long effort by the U.S. to prosecute Assange for his role in publishing thousands of classified materials, including diplomatic cables and some materials showing possible war crimes by American troops.
“I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source and I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else,” Assange said.
Assange was imprisoned in Belmarsh for five years while fighting extradition to the U.S. Prior to that, he spent seven years confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, facing arrest if he went outside.
“The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey,” Assange said on Tuesday. “It strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence. I am yet not fully equipped to speak about what I have endured.”
Since his release, Assange has been living with his wife Stella and their two young sons in his native Australia.
“I think everyone can tell that he is exhausted, that he is still very much in the process of recovering,” Stella Assange told reporters at the hearing. “And at the moment, the only concrete plan in the foreseeable future is that he will continue his recovery.”
Assange and his supporters have warned that the plea deal still sets a dangerous precedent for media freedom, making him the first journalist to be convicted under the Espionage Act. At the hearing, Assange said he was precluded from seeking justice over his detention, saying the U.S. had required the plea agreement to include a prohibition on his filing cases at the European Court of Human Rights.
He and his team are campaigning for a U.S. presidential pardon.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief, who also attended Tuesday’s hearing, addressed the precedent of Assange’s pardon with ABC News.
“You need to take away that dagger. It has now been bloodied once. And if there is no reaction and no push and no political desire to take that weapon out of any politician’s hand, it will be used again,” said Hrafnsson.
Asked if Assange had plans for work with WikiLeaks now that he was free, Hrafnsson said he had nothing to disclose for now.
“I’m certain there will be a role,” Hrafnsson said. “And of course there is a role for Julian. And of course there’s a role for the recognition of the work and the past and the legacy of Julian Assange’s and how he contributed in this massive manner to the history of journalism in this century.”
