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(LONDON) — At least seven civilians have been killed and approximately 20 others have been injured in Cambodia amid renewed border clashes with neighboring Thailand, according to the Cambodian Ministry of National Defense.

This week’s Thai attacks, which stem from a long-running border dispute between the two Southeast Asian nations, have also forced more than 20,000 from their homes in several communities, the Cambodian ministry said, along with destroying infrastructure, damaging temples disrupting public services.

“In addition to these major impacts, further tragedies and damages continue to unfold, as the Thai military has launched various types of long-range munitions into Cambodian civilian settlements located up to 30 kilometers from the border,” the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, at least one Thai soldier has been killed and 29 others have been injured in the reignited combat around contested frontier territory, according to the Royal Thai Army.

The army said in a statement that its troops were on Tuesday enduring “continuous attacks against our positions” by Cambodian forces. Opposing troops had been “firing BM-21 multiple-launch rockets and employing bomb-dropping drones and kamikaze drones targeting our bases and defensive positions across several battlefronts” near the border, the army said.

More than 125,000 people were using the hundreds of temporary shelters set up on the Thai side of the border, the army said.

Since Monday, the clashes have spread to several provinces along the Cambodia-Thailand border. Both sides accuse each other for starting the fighting.

The latest clashes come just months after both sides agreed to a ceasefire. The two Southeast Asian nations have long disputed territorial sovereignty along their land border of more than 500 miles, according to The Associated Press.

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(NEW YORK) — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were expected to meet Wednesday at the White House with top diplomats from the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland, its semiautonomous territory, U.S. officials said, as tensions escalate amid President Donald Trump’s threats to “acquire” the island — possibly even by military force.

When asked about his strong personal interest in the world’s largest island, Trump repeatedly cites its rare earth minerals and other natural resources he says are critical to U.S. national security.

“One way or the other, we are going to have Greenland,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He told the New York Times last week that his desire to take over the territory is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

At the same time, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen argues Trump using the U.S. military to seize Greenland would mark “the end of NATO” because Denmark, a NATO ally, like the U.S., is obligated to come to the island’s defense, as are other European NATO allies.

The European Union’s defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, echoed her grave hypothetical scenario, contending Europe would be forced to confront the U.S. if Greenland’s NATO allies had to protect it from an American takeover attempt.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has downplayed the diplomatic alarms, saying the alliance is “not at all” in crisis and offered assurances it was focused on securing the Arctic from inroads by China and Russia, something Trump has said Greenland, and Denmark, have failed to do.

Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Wednesday’s meeting was aimed at understanding the U.S. position after weeks of heated rhetoric from Trump and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who has said the U.S. has a “right” to Greenland and has notably declined to rule out military force to secure it.

“Our reason for seeking the meeting we have now been given,” Rasmussen said, “was to move this whole discussion, which has not become less tense since we last met, into a meeting room where we can look each other in the eye and talk about these things.”

But Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, was more direct ahead of the Washington meeting.

“We are now facing a geopolitical crisis,” he said. “If we have to choose between the U.S. and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark, NATO, and the EU.”

On Tuesday, when was asked about the prime minister’s comments, Trump told reporters, “That’s their problem. I disagree with them. I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him, but that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Danes shocked by US rhetoric toward Greenland
Danish and Greenlandic officials have said consistently that Greenland is not for sale, even as Rubio appeared to try to temper Trump’s strong rhetoric — and defuse congressional opposition to using force — by floating the idea of the U.S. buying the island, saying Trump has talked about doing so since his first term.

A source familiar with the emerging rift said the policy pronouncement came as a shock, and that the U.S. goal to buy the island was never communicated to Copenhagen — which the source said had never received an offer of any kind.

State Department officials under Rubio had never driven a Greenland policy aimed at acquiring it, the source said, and Copenhagen had been satisfied with bilateral relations through most of 2025.

That changed in December, when Trump appointed Louisiana GOP Gov. Jeff Landry to be his special envoy to Greenland, a move designed to steer policy from the White House instead of through the State Department, the source said.

Vance, who traveled to Greenland last March, said last Thursday, “I guess my advice to European leaders and anybody else would be to take the president of the United States seriously.”

Following some of Trump’s comments that he wanted Greenland to be part of the U.S., which came days after he ordered the American military to attack Venezuela, Danish and Greenlandic officials in Washington went to Capitol Hill to voice concerns to lawmakers.

A source familiar with those meetings said there was a tone shift among Republicans, who said they took the president’s threats seriously – not as a laughing matter.

The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee emerged from his meeting with the Danish envoys foreclosing any suggestion the future of Greenland was in dispute.

“I think it has been made clear from our Danish friends and our friends in Greenland that that future does not include a negotiation,” Sen. Roger Wicker said.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of American lawmakers was crossing the Atlantic for meetings in Copenhagen at the end of this week.

Arctic security as a central argument
Trump has said the U.S. would demand sovereignty over the island for its own national security purposes, suggesting China and Russia could pose a threat to America by taking the island themselves.

“Basically, their defense is two dog sleds,” Trump said of Greenland, where the U.S. has a military base and 150 troops stationed. “In the meantime, you have Russian destroyers and submarines and China destroyers and submarines all over the place.”

Danish officials have pointed to new investments there and a willingness to work with NATO and the U.S. on protecting the island. The kingdom announced a $6.5 billion Arctic defense package last year.

Denmark’s top lawmaker overseeing defense said the threat to the island did not come from the east, but instead from the U.S., its NATO ally across the Atlantic.

“It is my job to be on top of security in Greenland and I get all relevant information about it,” Rasmus Jarlov wrote in a post on X. “I can assure you that your fantasies about a big threat from China and Russia against Greenland are delusional. You are the threat,” he wrote of the U.S. “Not them.”

Provocations from China and Russia have been more concentrated near Alaska than Greenland, said Connor McPartland, who noted China has minimal commercial interests on the island and there’s been no uptick in Russian or Chinese naval activity near the island.

McPartland, who was the deputy director of the Pentagon’s Office for Arctic and Global Security until September, said Trump’s attention to Arctic security comes as a needed focus on an overlooked region.

“Caring about the Arctic is not just caring about the Arctic,” he said. “It has ramifications for our global security, not just in this one little sliver of at the top of the world.”

“In my office, we’d like to say that the Arctic is the front door to the homeland, because most of the really existential threats to the United States that we think about [like a] nuclear missile … are going to fly over the pole to get to the continental United States,” said McPartland, who is now an an assistant director with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative.

“It’s the fastest way to get to the United States, from Russia, from North Korea, from Iran, from China.”

A 1951 treaty between the U.S. and Greenland allows the American military, which has downsized its presence to only one base in Greenland, to upscale its footprint as it wants. During the Cold War, the U.S. had 17 military installations there.

“There aren’t really problems to be solved by the United States controlling Greenland,” said McPartland. “We can build infrastructure, we can station troops, we can operate from Greenland almost at will, as long as we recognize the sovereignty of Denmark and Greenland.”

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(LONDON and KYIV, Ukraine) — Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared last week to be cautiously optimistic on the U.S. 28-point peace plan to end his invasion of Ukraine, but statements made by his emissaries in the days since then have led some analysts to believe he thinks he can get a better deal.

“I believe that it could also form the basis for a final peace settlement, but this text has not been discussed with us in detail,” Putin told his Security Council on Friday.

Momentum has appeared to be building as U.S., European, Ukrainian and Russian representatives met first in Geneva, Switzerland, and then in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. U.S. President Donald Trump has now said a deal could be “very close” and has ordered his envoy Steve Witkoff to travel to Moscow next week to present the plan to Putin.

But despite the diplomatic flurry and public optimism, many close observers of Russia still doubt Putin is actually ready to take a deal now or sees much need to compromise.

“I see nothing at the moment that would force Putin to recalculate his goals or abandon his core demands,” Tatiana Stoyanova, founder of R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center wrote on X. 

“He feels more confident than ever about the battlefield situation and is convinced that he can wait until Kyiv finally accepts that it cannot win and must negotiate on Russia’s well-known terms,” Stoyanova said. “If the Americans can help move things in that direction — fine. If not, he knows how to proceed anyway.”

Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit in protest after Russia’s 2022 invasion, also told ABC News he thought it “most likely” that this latest round of negotiations will fizzle out with the combatants still far apart on key issues, as has been the case with previous efforts.

The new 19-point plan negotiated with Ukraine this week is highly unlikely to align with Moscow’s goals, Bondarev said. Even the original 28-point plan that Russia helped draw up with Witkoff “wasn’t fully acceptable to Russia in the first place,” he said, pointing to the Kremlin’s apparent hesitance to commit to the initial blueprint.

“Now it’s even less acceptable,” he said. “So, of course, they would not accept it.”

But Bondarev didn’t rule out entirely that Putin might lunge for a deal that contains many of his demands.

“Of course, we can and we should be ready for any surprises from the Kremlin,” he said. “They can still surprise sometimes.” 

The original 28-point U.S. proposal that heavily favored Russia was revised down to 19, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials, during the Geneva negotiations.

Some of the most unacceptable points to Kyiv have been removed, according to sources familiar with the discussions, including a cap on Ukraine’s army and a war crimes amnesty. But it is not entirely clear what the new plan includes and the most intractable issues, including Ukraine ceding more unoccupied territory remain.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday again downplayed hopes for a deal, saying it was “too early to say” whether the warring parties are close to an accord. Russia’s deputy foreign minister has since said Moscow will not make any major concessions.

Previous rounds of talks have resoundingly failed. And, while the U.S. has been projecting hope, it’s unclear how serious Russia — which has been eking out battlefield gains — is about making peace.

“Putin does not want an agreement,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said at an Atlantic Council event on Tuesday. “The only agreement he wants is diktat — a Ukrainian surrender. Otherwise, he wants to continue fighting.”

“I suspect if Ukraine had accepted those dreadful 28 points, Putin would come back for more,” Herbst said. “He realizes those 28 points reflected great flexibility moving his direction on the part of the United States, and he would say, ‘See what else we can get’.”

Putin’s long march
The Kremlin has indicated that the new peace plan was discussed at the summit between Putin and Trump in Alaska in August.

Putin left Alaska with Trump’s endorsement of the “fantastic relationship” between the two presidents, having successfully neutralized Trump’s previous demand he agree an immediate ceasefire and pushing off the threat of more American sanctions, while gaining the prospect of potentially lucrative bilateral economic cooperation.

Despite a nominal commitment to peace talks, as summer turned to fall, Russia only intensified its frontline offensives and expanded its long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, according to information released by Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Russian forces have captured some 350 square miles of Ukrainian territory — roughly the same area as the German capital of Berlin — since Trump and Putin sat down together in Alaska, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War think tank.

Putin has for years said that any peace deal in Ukraine must reflect the “new territorial realities” of Russian occupation of large chunks of the country. As Russian troops edge forward, Putin appears to be trying to entrench those territorial realities.

That new territory is a tiny sliver of the roughly 44,600 square miles — nearly 20% — of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces. But despite the slow rate and reportedly high human cost of Russia’s advance, independent military analysts worry it reflects a growing momentum for Moscow.

A high-profile advance around the destroyed Donetsk city of Pokrovsk and an unexpected local breakthrough on Ukraine southern Zaporizhzhia front have further burnished the Kremlin’s propaganda campaign promoting what they claim as an inevitable Russian victory.

Relentless Russian drone and missile strikes continue to kill civilians and wreak havoc on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, particularly the energy grid. Concentrated strikes on power stations and natural gas infrastructure have precipitated rolling blackouts in many parts of the country — including in Kyiv — as winter bites.

Zelenskyy’s government has also been rocked by a corruption scandal that has seen two cabinet ministers removed from their posts and figures close to the president investigated.

Bondarev said he believes Russia is repeating its strategy of delay and obfuscation. Putin is “playing for time,” he said, and “outsmarting” his Western adversaries.

“Putin says we need to remove the root causes of the war,” Bondarev said. “You cannot remove these root causes of the war just by signing some memorandum. You need to work it through. It takes a lot of experts, meetings, coordination — so it may take months. And at the same time, he will be fighting.”

“With each new tiny victory — every new village occupied, every square kilometer occupied — the Russian position will be more and more robust, less and less flexible,” Bondarev said.

Red lines
“People’s expectations for how long a process like this will take are wildly exaggerated,” Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told ABC News this week.

“I think even in the best case we are talking about months not weeks,” Charap added.

Still, Charap said, the new push by the Trump administration was positive, noting it had jumpstarted negotiations and for the first time produced a framework document that at least included almost all the core issues of the conflict.

“You have to give them credit, they have certainly shaken up the stasis which had set in,” he said. “There are conversations happening that weren’t happening a week ago.”

Ukrainian lawmakers and analysts told ABC News there remains little hope in Ukraine that Putin can be trusted to abide by the terms of any peace deal. That is why Kyiv’s demands for Western security guarantees, NATO membership and more military aid have been so central to the Ukrainian negotiating position.

Still, Yehor Cherniev — a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News that the framework established with the U.S. “is a good signal and it’s good progress in our peace negotiations, because before we were stuck.”

But some “red lines” remain, Cherniev said, “as before, about the concession of our territories or of or our sovereignty.” Ukrainian officials have said they want to leave such thorny topics to a meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House.

“I have doubts that Russia will agree with this,” Cherniev added.

Oleksandr Merezhko, another member of parliament and the chair of its foreign affairs committee, told ABC News he believes “Putin will reject this peace plan and will reiterate his maximalist demands.”

“He is not interested in peace or ceasefire — he is only interested in our surrender,” Merezhko said. “We should insist not on a ‘peace treaty’ but on a ceasefire agreement.”

Zelenskyy has consistently urged more pressure on Russia twinned with more muscular Western military aid for Kyiv. Trump has often threatened a tougher line on Moscow, but — according to Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland — it is unclear if he is willing to deliver.

“In the end, Trump is going to have to stare down Putin to get his deal in any kind of decent form,” Fried said at an event Tuesday.

But Bondarev said he sees little hope of an imminent change in U.S. strategy, suggesting that any disunity within the administration will only further strengthen Moscow’s hand.

“Western diplomacy has never tried to get the initiative, to first elaborate its own agenda and impose it on Russia,” the former diplomat said. “They only follow what Russia is doing. You can never prevail if you just follow your adversary and let him lead.”

“Trump mentioned that ‘it takes two to tango,'” he added. “But there is someone in every couple who leads and someone who follows.”

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