Race to contain fire continues after tanker-container ship collision in North Sea
Lee Whitaker/Getty Images
(LONDON) — A fire burning onboard two ships that collided Monday in the North Sea appeared in aerial footage to have been largely put out, although a shipping official told BBC News it would be “premature” to say the fire on the tanker had been extinguished.
A Portuguese container ship collided with a U.S.-flagged oil tanker while the tanker was anchored in the North Sea, on the eastern coast of England, with both ships catching on fire, officials said Monday.
“There will be an investigation,” said Martyn Boyers, chief executive of the Port of Grimsby. “With all the technology that these vessels have, there’s no way it should have happened.”
The U.S. ship was identified as the Stena Immaculate, while the Portuguese-flagged container ship was identified as the Solong. Both ships sustained significant damage and were abandoned by their crews.
Thirty-six people between the two ships were safely brought to shore, with one person transported to a hospital, the U.K. coast guard said.
One of the Solong’s crew members remains missing in the wake of the collision, while the other 13 were brought safely to shore, according to Ernst Russ, the manager of the container vessel.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Mark Osborne and Meredith Deliso contributed to this report.
(HONG KONG and LONDON) — Select American goods imported into China will be subject to tariffs of up to 15%, Chinese officials said Tuesday, as they rolled out a series of retaliatory measures to counteract U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs.
China said it would on Feb. 10 impose a 15% tariff on U.S. coal and liquefied natural gas, along with a 10% tariff on other products, including crude oil, agricultural machinery and pickup trucks.
“China firmly opposes the U.S. practice and urges the United States to correct its wrong practices immediately,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.
The move came as the deadline passed for Trump’s 10% tariffs on Chinese goods imported into the United States. Trump was expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday putting those tariffs into effect, according to the White House.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to talk in “the next couple days,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday. It was unclear whether that discussion would happen prior to the Chinese tariffs going into effect next week.
The leaders last spoke in January, prior to Trump’s inauguration, as the U.S. ban on social media app TikTok was set to take effect.
Trump on Feb. 1 announced tariffs against the United States’ three largest trading partners, saying he would put in place 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, along with 10% tariffs on those from China, according to the White House.
Those duties had been expected to be put in place on Tuesday, although Trump and the leaders of Canada and Mexico announced on Monday that Trump’s administration had paused plans for both North American trading partners for a month.
China in the days since Trump’s announcement had said the tariffs on Chinese exports amounted to a serious violation of World Trade Organization rules, with officials adding that the tariffs were “of a bad nature.” The U.S. tariffs were “typical unilateralism and trade protectionism,” the Beijing’s commerce officials said Tuesday.
China said it had brought the U.S. tariffs to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism.
“The U.S. practice seriously undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system, undermines the foundation of economic and trade cooperation between China and the United States and disrupts the stability of the global industrial chain and supply chain,” the Ministry of Commerce said.
China’s State Council Tariff Commission released a list of 72 items that would fall under the10% tariffs. Much of that list was related to agriculture, including several types of tractors, harvesters and other large pieces of farming equipment.
The list of U.S. imports that will be subject to 15% tariffs was far shorter, listing just eight types of coal and natural gas.
As Trump introduced the tariffs against Canada, Mexico and China last week, the White House positioned them as a “bold action” that would hold the three countries “accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”
Canada responded with a threat of tariffs of its own. Mexico announced on Monday a plan to send troops to its border with the U.S.
U.S. officials also described the tariffs as a point of leverage for the Trump administration against China, pointing to the president’s first-term announcement that he would at that time place tariffs on Chinese goods.
During that trade war in 2018 and 2019, “President Trump acted with conviction to impose tariffs on imports from China, using that leverage to reach a historic bilateral economic agreement,” the White House said on Friday.
(LONDON) — Ukrainian forces are struggling to prevent what could be a significant military setback, as their hold on the area of Russian territory they seized last year is becoming increasingly precarious.
A Russian offensive supported by North Korean troops in the past few days has made a serious advance in Russia’s Kursk region northeast of Ukraine, breaking through Ukrainian positions and forcing them to withdraw to new defense lines, according to Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers. Russia is attempting to cut Ukraine’s crucial supply road into Kursk, which is already under fire, meaning several thousand Ukrainian troops inside Russia are now at growing risk of encirclement.
Ukraine seized a foothold in the Kursk region with a surprise offensive in August, capturing hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, which it hoped to use as a bargaining chip in any peace negotiations. Russia for months has sought to dislodge the Ukrainians from the region, including with North Korean troops, but until recently had made slow progress while suffering heavy casualties.
Over the past week, Russian progress has dramatically increased, according to bloggers and Ukrainian troops on the ground, with Ukrainian troops clearly under severe pressure and forced to withdraw largely back toward the main town they control in the region, Sudzha. The Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed Sunday that Russian forces are “collapsing” the northern part of the Ukrainian lines in Kursk.
Russian forces have also succeeded in a flanking attack back across the border into Ukraine, aiming to reach the main supply road to the Ukrainian forces in Sudzha, according to open-source analysts. While Ukraine has, for now, reportedly blunted the Russian push, Russian troops are close to both sides of the route, which has already been under artillery and drone fire.
Over the weekend, Russian forces reached the outskirts of Sudzha itself, entering its industrial zone after launching an attack through a gas pipeline, according to military bloggers. Ukrainian units withdrew from much of their western flank in Kursk after Russian forces crossed the Psel River, allowing Russia to recapture several villages there, according to Clément Molin, a military analyst based in Lyon, France, and co-director of the Atum Mundi think tank.
The commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi, on Monday denied that Ukraine’s forces were at risk of encirclement, saying the situation was under control and they were inflicting heavy casualties on Russia.
Yurii Butusov, a prominent Ukrainian military journalist, confirmed Monday on his Telegram channel that the situation is “very difficult” but said there is currently no threat of Ukrainian troops being encircled, and that reinforcements continue to arrive into Sudzha.
Russia has intensified its efforts to drive Ukraine out of Kursk, as efforts at possible negotiations to end the three-year-old war have intensified under the Trump administration. The Kremlin has repeatedly signaled it will not start meaningful negotiations with Ukraine as long as it occupies parts of Kursk.
The ISW and other analysts have suggested the Trump administration’s sudden cutoff of U.S. intelligence sharing earlier this month is likely impacting Ukraine’s ability to defend in Kursk. The ISW noted that the Russian offensive appears to have intensified around the same time as President Donald Trump announced aid cutoff to Ukraine last week, suggesting Russia is trying to take advantage of it.
Ukrainian officials who spoke to ABC News last week said the curtailing of intelligence was intended to limit Ukraine’s strikes into Russia and warned it would hamper Ukraine’s ability to hit forces massing in Kursk.
“This will help Russians to concentrate their forces,” the source told ABC News on Thursday. “For example, now we know that North Korean soldiers are concentrating there again. We could have hit them preemptively, but now we can’t.”
The situation in Kursk, however, was already deteriorating before Trump halted intelligence sharing.
Ukraine’s deteriorating position in Kursk comes as it is finally seeing more positive developments on the eastern front in Donbas, where Russian forces’ advance appears to be stalling out and Ukraine is now mounting a number of counterattacks, according to independent military analysts.
For six months, Russia has crept forward toward the city of Pokrovsk, an important defensive hub, but there are signs its advance may now be close to exhausted there after suffering extremely high losses, according to Ukrainian military accounts and independent researchers.
Ukrainian troops in the past two weeks have managed to launch successful counterattacks on Russian positions around Pokrovsk, recapturing some ground. Ukraine has also managed to counterattack in another city, Toretsk, which, despite nine months of intense urban fighting, Russian forces have failed to capture.
(LONDON) — Ukrainian special forces claimed on Monday to have inflicted more than 100 casualties among North Korean forces over three days of operations.
Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces branch claimed in a post to its official Telegram channel that 77 North Koreans were killed and 40 wounded in recent fighting.
On Sunday, the SSO posted photos of what it said were North Korean troops killed in Russia’s western Kursk region. The SSO also uploaded photos of purportedly fabricated Russian military identity cards. ABC News was not immediately able to independently verify the images.
“Russia is trying to hide the presence of military personnel from North Korea by issuing them with fake documents,” the SSO wrote.
It added that the documents “do not have all the seals, photographs, the patronymics are given in the Russian manner and the place of birth is signed as the Republic of Tuva,” the home region of Sergei Shoigu — formerly Russia’s defense minister and now the secretary of the Security Council.
The SSO said the signatures of the document owners were written in Korean, which it said “indicates the real origin of these soldiers.”
U.S., South Korean and Ukrainian officials have said there are currently up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers inside Russia, deployed there primarily to help push Kyiv’s forces out of positions taken in Russia’s western Kursk region since August 2024.
Ukrainian military sources told ABC News in November that North Koreans were expected to be among the 50,000 troops arrayed for a major counter-offensive in Kursk.
The deployment of troops marks a new milestone in North Korean support for Russia’s war, Pyongyang already having supplied Moscow with ammunition and weapons — including ballistic missiles — since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month that Kyiv has “preliminary data that the Russians have begun to use North Korean soldiers in their assaults — a significant number of them.”
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, meanwhile, has reported “significant casualties” among North Korean troops deployed on the front lines alongside Russian units.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on Monday that Seoul expects Pyongyang to send more troops and equipment to Russia.
“North Korea is preparing to rotate or increase the deployment of troops [in Russia], while currently supplying 240mm rocket launchers and 170mm self-propelled artillery,” said South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, as quoted by Yonhap.
“There are also some signs of [the North] moving to manufacture and supply suicide drones,” the JCS said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited a drone production and test facility in November. Then, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Kim “underscored the need to build a serial production system as early as possible and go into full-scale mass production.”
