Ukraine is bringing war ‘back to Russia,’ Zelenskyy says after new Kursk offensive
DONETSK OBLAST, UKRAINE – DECEMBER 31: Ukrainian soldiers watch the Zelensky New Years Eve address from their base in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on 31 December 2024. (Photo by Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that some 38,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded fighting in Russia’s western Kursk region since August, with Kyiv now launching a fresh offensive in the border region.
“We continue to maintain a buffer zone on Russian territory, actively destroying Russian military potential there,” Zelenskyy said in a statement posted to the presidency’s website.
Monday marked five months since Ukrainian units crossed into Kursk in a surprise summer 2024 offensive there. Russian forces — recently supported by North Korean troops — have since slowly been reclaiming ground in their bid to eject Ukrainian troops from the region.
On Sunday, Ukrainian and Russian officials confirmed that Kyiv had launched a fresh offensive in Kursk, with fierce fighting reported in several villages.
“Since the beginning of the Kursk operation, the enemy has already lost over 38,000 troops in this area alone, including approximately 15,000 irrecoverable losses,” Zelenskyy said.
“The Russians have deployed their strong units to the Kursk region,” he added. “Soldiers from North Korea are involved there. What’s important is that the occupier cannot currently redirect all this force to other directions, in particular the Donetsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, or Zaporizhzhia regions.”
“I thank all our warriors who are bringing the war back to Russia and providing Ukraine with greater security and strength,” Zelenskyy said.
Multiple Russian military bloggers reported that Ukrainian troops, tanks, armored vehicles and demining equipment attacked the villages of Berdin and Bolshoye Soldatskoye, north of Sudzha — the main administrative border town that Ukraine captured in August. Bloggers also reported an attack further west on the border town of Tetkino.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a Monday statement that two assaults were repelled. “The operation to destroy the Ukrainian Armed Forces formations continues,” it wrote on Telegram.
The Institute for the Study of War think tank reported that Ukraine intensified its offensive operations in Kursk through Monday, with Russian forces elsewhere in the region launching their own fresh attacks on the Ukrainian salient.
The think tank reported “tactical advances” by Ukrainian troops in areas northeast of Sudzha, though the extent of their success remains unclear.
Andriy Yermak — the head of Zelenskyy’s presidential office — said in a Sunday post to Telegram there was “good news” from the Kursk battlefields, adding: “Russia is getting what it deserves.”
Ukraine launched its latest Kursk push just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has promised to end the war in 24 hours, repeatedly hinting at pressing Ukraine to make territorial and political concessions in exchange for peace.
Zelenskyy and his top officials have been working hard to build ties with the incoming administration and convince the president-elect of the need to support Ukraine and contain Russia.
Zelenskyy said on Monday that he “held a meeting with international relations officials to plan our meetings and negotiations for January.
“We are accelerating arms deliveries to Ukraine and working toward new and more long-term relations with partners,” he said. “We are preparing positive diplomatic news for Ukraine.”
Continued Ukrainian presence in Kursk may give Kyiv more leverage in peace talks with Moscow, with Russian troops still occupying around 25% of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory.
“We don’t need Russian territory, but we need our territories back,” Yehor Cherniev — a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News.
“This will probably be one of the positions for further negotiations,” Cherniev said.
ABC News’ Patrick Reevell and Natasha Popova contributed to this report.
(SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA) — South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will face an impeachment vote Saturday, days after briefly imposing martial law.
The country’s dominant opposition party moved on Wednesday to impeach Yoon, submitting a motion a day after his declaration of martial law set off a night of political chaos.
The opposition party, the Democratic Party, had been working Friday to gain enough votes from the ruling party side to pass the motion to impeach, which would then go to the Constitutional Court.
A high-level official in Korea’s spy agency this week also said he had refused a request by the president to arrest several key political figures. He was immediately dismissed with Yoon claiming he did note order arrests of lawmakers.
The head of the ruling People Power Party turned course from Thursday in announcing that the president is unfit to lead the country.
“I think that President Yoon Suk Yeol should be suspended from office as soon as possible,” Han Dong-hoon said during an emergency party meeting on Friday morning.
He was careful to avoid using the word “impeachment” but implied that Yoon should either resign or be forced to step down.
After that about-face statement, South Korea’s political scene went through a roller coaster ride.
Han briefly met with the president at his request in the afternoon.
The president was on his way to the National Assembly but turned back after a group of opposition party lawmakers gathered at the entrance of the Assembly Hall chanting “impeachment,” “treason” and and even calling for the arrest of Yoon.
The speaker of the National Assembly read a stern statement on camera demanding that the president hold off a visit to the National Assembly until security matters are ironed out.
“A second sate of emergency cannot be tolerated,” and “If there is, by any chance, another misjudgment by the President in declaring a state of emergency, we will do everything in our power to prevent it,” Woo Won-shik said.
Yoon declared martial law in a televised speech late Tuesday, saying the measure was necessary due to the actions of the country’s liberal opposition, which he accused of controlling parliament, sympathizing with North Korea and paralyzing the government.
The move sparked massive protests, and hours after the declaration, the National Assembly voted early Wednesday morning local time demanding that the president lift the martial law order. Yoon lifted the order shortly thereafter.
“This is a serious act of rebellion and perfect grounds for impeachment,” a Democratic Party spokesperson said in a statement after martial law was lifted.
(LONDON) — Dominique Pelicot, 72, has been given the maximum sentence of 20 years in the massive trial that has shaken France and shocked the world.
Pelicot and the 50 codefendants have all been found guilty, with all except one having been charged with rape.
The trial began on Sept. 2. Hearings took place for nearly three months and included testimony from Gisèle herself, who has become a feminist icon in France and across the world.
Prosecutors demanded the maximum sentence of 20 years for Dominique Pelicot and 10 years or more for most of the other co-defendants, if they’re found guilty. Dominique Pelicot had asked his family to “accept his apologies.”
Forty-nine of the 50 other co-defendants face aggravated rape or attempted rape charges. One co-defendant is accused of sexual assault and could face up to four years in prison.
Dominique Pelicot testified during the trial in Avignon that he mixed sedatives into Gisèle Pelicot ‘s food and drink so he could rape her, and that he recruited at least 50 other men via an online chat forum and invited them over to the family home where they are alleged to have raped and sexually abused Gisèle Pelicot. Dominique acknowledged in court that he’s guilty of the allegations and that his co-defendants understood what they were doing, The Associated Press reported.
The alleged abuse took place for almost a decade in their home in Provence, from 2011 to 2020. Gisèle has since divorced her husband.
Dominique Pélicot collected 20,000 photos and videos and stored the evidence, which later helped lead prosecutors to the 50 other defendants — “although about 20 others haven’t yet been identified,” The AP has reported.
She refused to stay anonymous, saying in court at one point during the hearings that she wants women who have been raped to know that “it’s not for us to have shame — it’s for them,” per The AP.
ABC News’ Tom Soufi Burridge and Hugo Leenhardt contributed to this report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko at the Kremlin in Moscow on April 5, 2023. (Photo by PAVEL BYRKIN/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — “Europe’s last dictator” — as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has often been termed — thus far appears to have kept his nation out of the worst of the spiralling war engulfing his neighbors to the east and south.
The 70-year-old provided invaluable material and political support for Russian ally President Vladimir Putin in his war on Ukraine, even offering Belarus as a launchpad for the doomed Russian drive towards Kyiv in the early stages of the full-scale invasion.
Since then, Russian forces have used Belarusian territory to launch ballistic missiles into Ukraine. Belarus houses bases at which Russian troops train for battle and hospitals where they recover.
Minsk even now hosts Russian nuclear warheads and Lukashenko brokered the short-lived settlement between the Kremlin and Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin after the latter’s ill-fated 2023 mutiny.
As the war in Ukraine escalated and the enmity between Moscow and its Western rivals deepened, Lukashenko’s apparent hesitance to fully commit to the conflict seems to have bought him some level of freedom from retaliation.
But with Moscow’s drone and missile barrages into Ukraine growing in scale and regularity, Belarusian opposition groups say the danger to their country is increasing.
The Belarusian Hajun Project — an open-source intelligence group banned as an “extremist” organization by Minsk — said a record-high total of 151 drones entered Belarus during November. At least three were shot down by Belarusian air defenses, it added.
One Russian attack in late November saw a record 38 strike drones cross into Belarus, the group said. ABC News could not independently verify the drone flights.
Neither the Belarusian Defense Ministry nor Foreign Ministry replied to ABC News’ requests for comment.
Russian drones were first reported over Belarus in mid-July, their appearance then relatively sporadic. In October, the Hajun Project said it tracked a total of 49 Russian drones flying into Belarusian airspace across the month. The monthly total trebled by the end of November.
At least one drone landed and exploded in the southeastern Gomel Oblast, according to Ukrainian and opposition Belarusian media reports.
According to Ukrainian air force after-action reports, Russian drones enter Belarus near-nightly. The air force has noted that its evolving electronic warfare countermeasures play some role in the increasing number of Russian strike drones going off course.
Minsk has complained of Ukrainian drones violating its airspace. In July, Lukashenko himself demanded that Kyiv ensure “comprehensive measures be taken to rule out any such future incidents in the future which could lead to further escalation of the situation in the region.”
In September, Belarus’ military said it had downed foreign drones.
Chief of the General Staff Col. Sergei Frolov said drones were shot down without specifying their nation of origin. “Timely actions by the air defense forces on duty destroyed all the violators’ targets,” he said in a statement quoted by the state-run Belta news agency.
Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in the U.K., told ABC News that Lukashenko “has always been very careful to calibrate the policy in a way that allows implausible deniability of any involvement in the Ukraine war — and at the same time makes himself useful to the Russians.”
“He also knows that most of the Belarusian population has no interest in being dragged into the war at all,” Eyal added, describing a “balancing act” in which the Belarusian leader has to at least pretend to be defending the nation’s airspace.
“It’s not a great secret that the Russians can do more or less what they want with Belarusian airspace,” Eyal added. “The idea that somehow the Belarusian military is determined to defend its sovereignty is a bit far-fetched.”
“These are very calibrated messages from Lukashenko trying to persuade people — both at home and overseas — that somehow he remains a complete master of his own destiny,” Eyal said.
For Belarus’ pro-Western opposition — many now living in exile following Lukashenko’s crackdown on the mass protests that followed the 2020 presidential election — the drone flights are a sign of Minsk’s weakness.
Franak Viacorka, the chief political adviser to Belarusian opposition leader-in-exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, told ABC News that drones “are flying over Belarus practically every single night.” An average week sees 40 or 50 UAVs transit border areas, he said.
Viacorka said Lukashenko’s government is working hard to hide any evidence of errant Russian munitions. “It’s very uncomfortable for them to say that the Russians are using our airspace,” he said. “It happens with the agreement of Lukashenko, or perhaps Russia doesn’t even ask Lukashenko for permission.”
Aliaksandr Azarau — a former police investigator who defected and now leads the opposition BYPOL group made up of former Belarusian security employees — said government propaganda seeks to hide the problem while framing all intruding drones as Ukrainian.
“The concern is only for the people who see these drones above their heads near the Ukrainian border,” Azaru said. “The rest of Belarusians don’t think about the drones — it’s not their problem.”
Official Belarusian reports of drones being intercepted, he added, are part of “a political game.” Azaru even claimed that Belarusian military aircraft have held fire and flown alongside Russian drones, effectively escorting them into Ukrainian airspace
When a drone does fall on Belarusian territory, Viacorka said, “the place is cleared immediately” and any witnesses are pressed by security services not to reveal any details.
The issue, he added, is politically sensitive for Lukashenko. “His narrative is that, thanks to him, Belarus has not gotten involved in war,” Viacorka said. “But when people see drones and shells flying over their territory, they see that Belarus is already involved in war.”
“It’s very worrying that Belarus is getting more and more involved,” Viacorka said.
Lukashenko and his Russian allies, he added, are “putting more and more people in Belarus in danger.”
Russia’s access to Belarusian airspace may also pose a threat to eastern NATO nations, three of whom — Poland, Lithuania and Latvia — border the country.
Russian freedom to act throughout Belarusian airspace has “many implications” for regional NATO states, Eyal suggested, as well as for western Ukrainian regions that will be more accessible for Moscow’s Shaheds.
In September, Latvia’s Defense Ministry reported that a Russian strike UAV crashed in the Rezekne region in the east of the country after flying across Belarus.
Since then, “improvements in all levels of Latvian airspace surveillance have been made, as well as in decision-making and information exchange algorithms,” a ministry spokesperson told ABC News. This includes the deployment of mobile air defense battle groups to the eastern Latgale border region, they said.
The procedures for NATO’s Baltic air policing mission “have also been clarified, allowing allied fighters to destroy aggressor drones entering Latvian airspace if necessary,” the spokesperson added.
“Russia has control over Belarusian foreign and domestic policies,” they continued. “Belarus is an additional Russian military district, so the threat coming from Belarus is orchestrated by Russia. Unfortunately, it is not up to Belarus and its citizens to decide how Russia uses Belarusian airspace to achieve its aggressive foreign policy goals.”
“Hybrid warfare is already happening between Russia and the West,” the ministry spokesperson said. “Belarus is just a tool for Russian aggressive foreign policy. In the short term, Russia will continue to use a wide range of hybrid warfare tools to weaken Western countries and divide their unity.”
“The Belarusian regime’s hybrid attack on the Latvian border with artificial migration demonstrates that we must prepare for all possible scenarios including violation of our airspace,” they said.
