Ukraine war briefing: western allies response to North Korean deployment is zero, Zelenskyy says

Ukraine’s western allies have not adequately responded to the involvement of North Korean troops in Russia’s war with Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview released on Thursday. Russian President Vladimir Putin is “testing the reaction of the west, of Nato states and the reaction of South Korea,” the Ukrainian leader said in an interview with the South Korean television channel KBS. “And if there is nothing – and I think that the reaction to this is nothing, it has been zero – then the number of North Korean troops on our border will be increased,” he added.

The US and South Korea have called on China to use its influence over Russia and North Korea to prevent escalation after Pyongyang sent thousands of troops to Russia. Beijing has so far stayed quiet. In a rare meeting earlier this week, three top US diplomats met with China’s ambassador to the United States to emphasise US concerns and urge China to use its sway with North Korea to try to curtail the cooperation, according to a state department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

About 8,000 North Korean soldiers are stationed in Russia on the border with Ukraine, the US secretary of state has said, warning that Moscow is preparing to deploy those troops into combat “in the coming days”. Antony Blinken said the US believed that North Korea had sent 10,000 troops to Russia in total, deploying them first to training bases in the far east before sending the vast majority to the Kursk region on the border with Ukraine.

Ukraine’s foreign minister on Thursday called on western nations to lift restrictions on the use of long range missiles against Russia, after North Korean troops deployed to Russia’s border region with Ukraine. Speaking at a peace conference in Montreal, foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said the North Korean troop deployment marked a “true escalation of this war” and that Kyiv should be allowed to use missiles to strike Russian territory. “We need a strong reaction,” he said. “We need [a] strong decision of our allies to lift all the restrictions, to lift all the restrictions to use long-range missiles on the territory of Russia.”

Russia’s defence ministry on Thursday claimed the capture of another village in eastern Ukraine as troops advance rapidly in the Donetsk region. The ministry said troops “as a result of active and decisive operations liberated the settlement of Yasnaya Polyana”, using the Russian name for Yasna Polyana, a small village north-west of the town of Vugledar that Moscow captured early this month.

Russia’s systematic torture of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war is a crime against humanity, UN-backed human rights experts said on Thursday. Erik Møse, chair of the independent commission investigating human rights violations in Ukraine, told reporters: “Our recent findings demonstrate that Russian authorities have committed torture in all provinces of Ukraine that came under their control, as well as in the detention facilities that the commission has investigated in the Russian Federation,” he said.

Rescue teams completed recovery operations on Thursday at a high-rise residence in the north-eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv hit by a Russian-guided bomb, with emergency services saying the death toll had risen to three. Emergency services said children aged 12 and 15 were among the dead in the Wednesday evening strike, and thirty-six people were injured.

Finland’s Coast Guard said it has detected constant disturbances to satellite navigation signals in the Baltic Sea since April and in recent weeks has seen tankers spoofing their location data to cover up visits to Russia. Last week, Finland’s interior minister Lulu Ranne said Finland believes Russia is behind disturbances detected in Finland and the Baltic Sea region in the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) signals used in navigation. The coast guard said GNSS jamming, which it has detected increasingly since April in the Gulf of Finland, has led to ships getting lost at sea or losing their course.

Latvia on Thursday sentenced a taxi driver to seven years’ jail for passing images and information about Nato troops to a ring accused of spying for Russia. According to the Latvian security services, Sergejs Sidorovs “used his discreet appearance and his profession as a taxi driver to move around and take photos of Nato ships and cargo unloaded in the port of Riga, as well as to spy on Nato bases and their multinational personnel”.

South Africa and the Vatican joined Qatar at a conference in Montreal on Thursday in offering to mediate and facilitate the return of about 20,000 Ukrainian children from Russia. “Children, civilians and prisoners of war must be allowed to return home,” Canadian foreign minister Melanie Joly said in announcing an agreement by delegates on steps to “bring these people back home”. Qatar, South Africa and the Vatican, she said, would serve as intermediaries to support and negotiate the return of the children. Lithuania and Qatar would act as transit countries.