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Thousands of people were evacuated Saturday in a Russian city after an explosive device was found near the site where a bomb was accidentally dropped by a Russian warplane earlier this week.
About 3,000 people were evacuated from 17 apartment buildings in Belgorod, a Russian city near the Ukrainian border. On Thursday, a Russian warplane accidentally dropped a bomb in the city, causing a powerful blast that injured three people and left a large crater.
The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that a weapon accidentally released by one of its own Su-34 bombers caused the explosion and said an investigation was underway.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of Belgorod province, said Saturday that crews decided to detonate an “explosive object” near the same site, “in the immediate vicinity of residential buildings.” Evacuations ended later Saturday after the bomb was removed, Demidov wrote on Telegram.
The reports “further underscore the serious nuclear safety and security risks facing Europe’s largest nuclear power plant during the military conflict,” he said.
“I’m deeply concerned about the situation at the plant,” he added.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, told the Associated Press he is confident Ukraine would out-innovate Russia in a war of technology as both sides vie for advantages.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic warfare, satellite communications and other technologies have been fundamental to the war effort, Fedorov said.
“Technologies allow traditional and modern artillery to be more accurate, and they help save the lives of our soldiers,” he said, adding that Ukraine’s government is planning to invest in more new technology projects.
“In this technology war we will surely win,” Fedorov said.
RAMALLAH: Despite ongoing Eid Al-Fitr celebrations, Israeli military forces continued to storm Palestinian towns and arrest people in many parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem amid violent confrontations on Saturday.
Palestinian observers expect an escalation in tension and violence after Eid, which began on Friday and continues until Sunday.
Violent confrontations broke out between Palestinian youths and Israeli border guards on Saturday after the guards stormed the Shuafat refugee camp north of Jerusalem. The soldiers fired rubber-coated metal bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas. No injuries were reported.
The Israeli forces continued to tighten measures at military checkpoints near Nablus in the northern West Bank. The city’s 150,000 residents were subjected to vehicle searches and ID checks.
In Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, the Israeli army arrested a 22-year-old man after a dawn raid on his family house. Clashes broke out but no injuries were reported.
In the town of Yatta, south of Hebron, Israeli settlers — under the protection of Israeli forces — destroyed Palestinian crops on Saturday.
Ratib Al-Jubour, the coordinator of the Popular Committees to Resist the Wall and Settlements in South Hebron, said that settlers released their livestock into farmers’ fields in Masafer Yatta, which led to the destruction of crops belonging to the Al-Zuwaidin family. A fistfight occurred between the land’s unarmed owners, who tried to remove the livestock, and the armed settlers, but the Israeli army came to the rescue of the settlers.
Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, 44, from the town of Arraba, south of Jenin, continued his hunger strike for the 77th day in a row. He is being held in the Ramla Prison Clinic.
The Prisoners’ Club issued a statement saying that Adnan is dangerously ill and could die. Adnan has refused to accept any medical assistance and has been on hunger strike since his arrest on Feb. 5 after Israeli forces stormed his house in Arraba, near Jenin in the northern West Bank.
Adnan previously spent almost eight years in incarceration. He has been arrested 12 times and has staged six hunger strikes. The current one is his longest.
In a disturbing development, Israeli security forces stormed Al-Rahma Chapel in Al-Aqsa Mosque, cutting off the electricity and damaging its doors, according to Palestinian sources.
Ismat Nassour, a Palestinian expert on Israeli affairs, told Arab News that the Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts made by the US, Jordan, and Egypt hinged on the condition that the Israeli military halted incursions into Palestinian cities in the West Bank during the month of Ramadan.
He said he expected that the Israeli army would now restart military operations in the West Bank, resuming arrests and house demolitions and adding more military checkpoints. He noted that the Israeli army had deployed three additional battalions in the West Bank on Friday in anticipation of a surge in violence there.
Given the politically weak Israeli government, an escalation was imperative to gain public support, Mansour said.
He added that he also expected an escalation in East Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque area, pointing out that Israeli provocation would generate violent Palestinian reactions, keeping the pot boiling.
Mansour said the West Bank was the only place where Israel could achieve a victory of sorts by improving its public image in Israel. The government fears an escalation with Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, or Hezbollah in southern Lebanon or Iran, he added.
Meanwhile, Ahmed Ghunaim, a prominent leader in the Fatah movement from East Jerusalem, told Arab News: “All indications are that this Israeli government is trying to solve its internal crisis by exporting it to the Palestinian side so that violence will soon be resurgent.
“The Israelis tried to demonize the month of Ramadan as a motive for the escalation of violence, but the main reason behind the violence is the Israeli occupation, not the month of Ramadan,” he added.
SEOUL, South Korea | With the nuclear-use threshold lowered, a regional arms race underway, diplomacy dead and communications channels silent, the flashpoint Korean peninsula faces a slew of challenges.
The Ukraine war is also offering North Korea fresh opportunities to exit its diplomatic and economic isolation, putting even more pressure on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol as he prepares for this week’s state visit to Washington that was supposed to celebrate the coming 70th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean alliance.
Now a leading liberal voice in Seoul on nuclear issues is urging the conservative Mr. Yoon and President Biden to look to the example set by former President Donald Trump and reopen “imaginative and realistic” communication with Kim Jong Un, the North’s mercurial leader.
“Now is one of the worst times ever,” warned Moon Chung-in, vice chairman of the Asia-Pacific Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation. “U.S.-North Korea relations have hit rock bottom, China has become a kind of bystander — it is moving away from peninsula issues — and inter-Korean relations are very bad.”
Mr. Moon has a deep familiarity with the crisis, having advised all three South Korean presidents who have summited with North Korean leaders, and has joined every presidential delegation Seoul has dispatched to Pyongyang over the years.
“North Korea is an existential threat, so we have to prepare for any kind of military provocation, but at the same time, we should come up with dialogue and negotiations,” he insisted in an interview. “But we have only the first component; the second is all gone.”
A Kim-Trump 2018 summit in Singapore summit laid the groundwork for a second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019. There, Mr. Kim offered up his central nuclear facility, Yongbyon, in return for partial sanctions relief.
That cautious start point could have led to an ongoing process of trust building, but Mr. Trump, pressed by more hawkish aides such as National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, sought a more aggressive “all-or-nothing” denuclearization deal and abruptly left the Hanoi meeting.
“He went back with nothing,” Mr. Moon said. “Trump later confessed to [South Korean President Moon Jae-in] that Pompeo and Bolton pushed him very hard.”
Neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Yoon has resurrected Mr. Trump’s outreach, and both international tensions and factors on the ground are making matters ever more combustible, Mr. Moon said.
These dynamics “provide extended space for North Korea’s survival and prosperity, better than its current situation,” he said. “It could be the beneficiary of a newly emerging Cold War structure, or of bloc diplomacy.”
Seoul has shot back at the endless rhetorical salvos fired by Pyongyang. The conservative Yoon administration has also called prior policies of engagement with the North as “appeasement,” backing itself into a corner, Mr. Moon alleges.
“The Yoon government says the Moon government had a submissive attitude toward [North Korea],” he said. “The dilemma now is they cannot adopt any of those policies — they cannot get out of the current situation.”
Meanwhile, cross-DMZ communications, including those between the leaders, intelligence offices and military commands, have gone silent. The North Koreans “are not answering any of those lines,” Mr. Moon said.
Nuclear doctrine
Mr. Moon said the need to lower tensions is even more critical after North Korea recently announced it was modifying its doctrine on when it would use its nuclear arsenal.
Under its new Nuclear Forces Policy Law, the Kim regime “will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states if it deems the non-nuclear state is ‘colluding with nuclear states,’” said Gen. Paul LaCamera, head of U.S. forces in Korea, told a congressional hearing last week.
North Korea’s doctrinal threats are backed up by serious hardware. Pyongyang has, this year, unveiled a string of game-changing new weapons.
Another is the Haeil, a nuclear torpedo that takes the atomic threat out of the clouds and into the depths.
South Korea’s population densities near the border with the North further complicate defense.
“South Korea has an immense window of vulnerability: More than 20 million people live in the [greater Seoul area] within firing range of artillery and short-range missiles,” Mr. Moon warned “Look at the array of North Korean offensive weapons — there is no way to defend.”
This broad range of the North’s arsenal, combined with new protocols on when to launch missiles if the leadership is incapacitated, virtually guarantees a second strike if North Korea is attacked first.
“Kim and his elite have learned from Iraq and Libya, where they saw the fates of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi,” Mr. Moon said. “If there is a war, it will be the end of the regime and the leader, so they will fight to the last ditch.”
Mr. Moon said the extended deterrence and the U.S. pledge to defend its ally, which have prevented a major war on the peninsula since the 1953 armistice, are no longer enough.
“The U.S. alliance provides security, but not peace,” he said. “I don’t mean I don’t trust the U.S., but the U.S. has capability limitations, and this means there could be a real problem when the real time comes.”
The answer is a new paradigm for the 70-year-old bilateral alliance in the years ahead.
“I want an alliance with the U.S.” Mr. Moon said. “But for peace, not for the status quo.”
On Thursday, the AP published a story about Iran acknowledging that it had “enriched uranium to 84% purity for the first time” as part of its weapons program, something that has been a foreign policy challenge for multiple presidencies. The regime’s uranium development is key to nuclear capability.
But it went beyond just reporting the facts.
“The acknowledgment by a news website linked to the highest reaches of Iran’s theocracy renews pressure on the West to address Tehran’s program, which had been contained by the 2015 nuclear deal from which America unilaterally withdrew in 2018,” the AP wrote.
“Years of attacks cross the Middle East have followed,” the AP added, linking to another AP story from early February about Israeli drone strike on an Iranian weapons facility.
There has been a years-long political divide over whether President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal actually slowed down Iran’s nuclear program, something Republicans always argued it did not. The lack of access and transparency regarding Iranian facilities have always clouded the debate.
The Trump administration ultimately pulled out of the deal in 2018. The Biden administration attempted to renegotiate the deal but President Biden suggested as recently as December that talks with Iran are “dead.”
Critics on social media accused the AP “rewriting history” using “Democrat talking points.”
“This is why it’s not quite right to talk about ‘bias’ in journalism. Bias is when you write a news story that’s supposed to be objective but you let your personal views seep in. This is different. It’s something in between laundering Democrat talking points and rewriting history,” reacted Omri Ceren, national security adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Others were more blunt with their criticism, calling it “propaganda.”
FILE – Sept. 10, 2015: President Obama, accompanied by Secretary of State John Kerry, meets with veterans and Gold Star Mothers to discuss the Iran Nuclear deal, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington. (AP Images)
The AP did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
China is closer than ever to becoming a nuclear superpower, according to the United States Pentagon. On Changbiao Island, over 100 miles off the coast of the mainland, scientists are building two new fast-neutron nuclear breeder reactors. These highly efficient reactors produce more nuclear fuel than they consume.
Chinese authorities claim these reactors are designed to generate electricity for civilian purposes. However, the two combined can create 400 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year. According to ScienceDirect, a nuclear warhead requires 4 to 5 kilograms of plutonium. These two new reactors will be capable of churning out 80 to 100 nuclear warheads a year.
China is in the middle of a big buildup of its nuclear-weapon arsenal. My belief is that one of the purposes of these reactors is to produce weapons-grade plutonium for that buildup. —Frank von Hippel, physicist and nuclear-policy expert
nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that China is estimated to have “1,500 warheads by 2035.” It is believed it has approximately 400 now.
Breeder reactors are powered by uranium, which is then converted into plutonium through radioactive decay. Where does China obtain its uranium?
cru analyst Toktar Torbay estimated last year that China has stockpiled over 144,000 tons of uranium in the past decade alone. The World Population Review lists it as the eighth top producer of uranium in the world. Last May, massive uranium deposits were discovered in China that could increase total uranium reserve to more than 2.4 million tons.
Despite its vast quantities of uranium, the nuclear material for these particular reactors is being supplied by Russia. Over the past few months, the nuclear power company Rosatom, headquartered in Moscow, has shipped 30 tons of highly enriched uranium to China for the production of these reactors. Why is China receiving uranium from Russia? It’s all about strengthening an alliance.
Russia is currently the leading nuclear superpower in the world, with an estimated 5,900 nuclear warheads; the United States trails close behind with 5,300. It would take China decades to catch up to them. When partnered with Russia, however, the combined Asiatic superpower yields a nuclear arsenal that far surpasses the U.S. Russia and China’s nuclear force is on a steep, upward trajectory. And there are no signs of it slowing down.
This is a cause for deep concern in America.
In an interview with Fox News last week, President Donald Trump explained: “The biggest problem we have in the world—it’s not global warming—it’s nuclear warming. And all it takes is one madman and you’re going to have a problem the likes of which the world has never seen. And it’s only a matter of seconds. You don’t have to wait 200 to 300 years for it to happen.”
In recent months, experts have warned that Russia is becoming increasingly dependent on China. The New York Sun referred to Russia as “China’s Little Brother.” These assertions increased following Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow last month. Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to give Beijing massive discounts and is now conducting trade in China’s currency. Many analysts believe China is taking the lead in their partnership.
The alliance between Russia and China is prophesied in the Bible. Ezekiel 38 states that the leader of this Asiatic bloc is “the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” (verse 2). Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has identified Putin as this “prince of Rosh.” (Read The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia’ for proof.)
According to Bible prophecy, Russia, led by Putin, will be at the head of this Asian alliance. Could China’s reliance on Russia for uranium factor into this dynamic? Learn more by requesting our free booklets Russia and China in Prophecy and Nuclear Armageddon Is ‘At the Door.’
In the 18th annual NATO Conference on Arms Control, Disarmament and Weapons of Mass Destruction and Non-Proliferation on Tuesday, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg warned that the global arms control system is on the verge of collapse.
“We stand at a crossroads,” the NATO chief said during the conference, which was organized by the international alliance and the U.S. State Department.
“In one direction lies the collapse of the international arms control order and the unrestricted proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, with profoundly dangerous consequences,” he added.
Stoltenberg also warned that this is a “deeply challenging period – for arms control and for our security in general” and that Russia’s war against Ukraine should be seen as a long pattern of aggressive behavior. He further cautions that Moscow now seeks to “undermine the foundations of the international rules-based system.
Ignoring, violating or abandoning much of the network of international arms control agreements that have kept the world safe.”
It is believed that around 1,500 of Russia’s warheads may be retired, yet still intact – while 2,889 are in reserve and 1,588 are deployed strategic warheads. That includes 812 on land-based launchers, 576 on submarines and 200 at heavy bomber bases.
Beyond the Russian Threat
The nuclear threat goes way beyond that of Russia, the NATO head also noted.
“China is rapidly growing its nuclear arsenal without any transparency about its capabilities,” said Stoltenberg. “Iran and North Korea are blatantly developing their own nuclear programmes and delivery systems.”
He also noted that in the longer term, the West must rethink and adapt its approach to a more dangerous and competitive world. That will mean engaging with China, which is estimated to have 1,500 warheads by 2035.
“As a global power, China has global responsibilities. And Beijing too would benefit from the increased transparency, predictability and security of arms control agreements,” Stoltenberg continued. “NATO is a unique platform where we engage with China and the wider international community for our mutual benefit.”
Author Experience and Expertise: A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.
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