“Ukraine – Russia”

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky beat most world leaders to offer his congratulations to Donald Trump, using his message to apparently express hope that things would continue unchanged between Ukraine and the United States of America.

Seems Ukraine and Russia will be at the peace table soon if rumours are true.

The soldiers were dug into their positions southeast of Pokrovsk when the Russian assault started. Over the next 20 hours, artillery rained down on their trenches, interspersed with dozens of glide bombs launched from Russian territory. As the Ukrainians were forced to pull back, newly mobilised Russian reserves swooped in on their position and swiftly dug in.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” Vitaliy Milovidov, an officer in the Ukrainian armed forces, said. “I don’t know how we can take such positions back.”

Who would have believed when Ukraine was invaded that, almost three years on, North Korean troops would be fighting on European soil? Yet, here we are, with Pjongjang now a full-fledged participant in Russia’s war, largely thanks to the West’s failure to deter. The US now estimates that 10,000 North Korean troops are stationed in Russia and 8,000 of those forces will be imminently deployed to the battlefront. After meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Friday, North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui vowed to “stand alongside our Russian comrades” until Russia’s “day of victory” in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday lashed out against the “zero” response of his Western allies to reports that thousands of North Korean mercenaries are preparing to fight on Russia’s behalf.

“Putin is checking the reaction of the West … And I believe that after all these reactions, Putin will decide and increase the contingent … The reaction that is there today is nothing, it is zero,” Zelensky complained to South Korean broadcaster KBS in a televised interview.

As she sweeps up broken glass outside her shop, Inna knows her country’s future is in the hands of Americans voting more than 5,000 miles away.

“We hope that the woman, Kamala Harris, will win and support us,” she says.

A Russian bomb had shattered her shop windows – a common occurrence in the city of Zaporizhzhia. There’s a 10-metre (32ft) wide crater in the middle of the road.

“Of course we are worried about the outcome [of the election],” she adds. “We want to defeat the enemy!”

More than 600,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the invasion of Ukraine, the secretary-general of Nato has claimed.

Speaking to journalists in Brussels, Mark Rutte confirmed that North Korean troops had been sent to help Russia and said some had already been deployed in the Kursk border region, which Ukrainian forces have partly occupied.

Military chiefs believe that the fighting in Ukraine could break into a multinational war as North Korea sends troops to Russia for training.

A wider conflict had been thought inconceivable but Pyongyang’s dispatch of up to four brigades, amounting to 12,000 troops, marks a worrying trend, according to one senior western government source.

The deployment highlights the emergence of a power block opposing the West, one “willing to trade lives and money to forge an axis of aggression that risks the very foundations of the international rules-based system”, the source said, referring to a “deadly quartet” of Iran, North Korea, Russia and China.

The draft evasion scandal currently engulfing Ukrainian officialdom has far-reaching implications. It raises hard questions both about the country’s ability to sustain the war, and what it will look like after the conflict. For while the wealthy and well-connected can bribe or bully their way out of service, many ordinary youths are simply hiding or trying to escape abroad. Consequently, the methods being used to round them up are becoming increasingly harsh.

Ukraine joins the North Atlantic Treaty. Or Ukraine goes nuclear. That’s the choice President Zelensky gave Donald Trump at their meeting last month at New York.

“In a conversation with Donald Trump, I said: ‘This is our situation,’” Mr. Zelensky told the European Council last week. “What way out do we have? Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, which for us will be a defense, or we’ll need to have some sort of alliance.”

The US has said for the first time that it has seen evidence of North Korean troops in Russia, and South Korean lawmakers have said about 3,000 soldiers have been sent to support the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, with more to follow.

The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, speaking in Rome, said it would be “very, very serious” if the North Koreans were preparing to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine, as Kyiv has alleged, though he said it remained to be seen what they would be doing there.

“There is evidence that there are DPRK troops in Russia,” Austin told reporters, using North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.