Category World News

A large crowd reportedly fills the streets in honor of 2024 student-led uprising leader Sharif Osman Hadi, who was fatally shot as he left a Dhaka mosque. Mohammad Yunus, the interim leader of Bangladesh, joined mourners days after Hadi’s passing in a hospital in Singapore.

Rwanda has been criticized by the UN Security Council for supporting an offensive by rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also being asked to halt support for the M23 armed group.

The UNSC extended the UN’s peacekeeping mission, known as MONUSCO, for a year on Friday, and the resolution was unanimously approved. Rwanda has repeatedly denied involvement in a conflict that has escalated as a result of a broken peace deal that was broken, contrary to overwhelming evidence.

The UNSC argued that M23’s seizure of the important city of Uvira “risches destabilizing the entire region, seriously endangers civilian populations, and severely limits ongoing peace efforts.”

According to US representative Jennifer Locetta, M23 must leave Uvira for at least 75 kilometers (47 miles) and return to carrying out all of its obligations under the Framework Agreement.

Less than a week after the DRC and Rwandan presidents met in Washington and pledged to reach a peace agreement, M23 captured Uvira in the South Kivu Province on December 10.

“It is a wonderful day for Africa, great day for the world, and great day for these two nations.” And they can’t stop laughing as fighting quickly tore the White House spectacle.

Feza Mariam, a Uvira resident, recently told Al Jazeera, “We don’t know anything about the political process they are talking about.”

“Peace is all we need,” he says. Anyone who can calm us down is welcome here. We as citizens don’t care about it for the rest.

The M23 organization announced on Wednesday that it was leaving the city in response to international criticism, but the DRC government maintained that the M23 forces are still present.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said his government had signed agreements it could hold people to and that commitments made under the Washington accord were still being made on Friday.

According to US officials, between 5, 000 and 7, 000 Rwandan soldiers were reportedly operating in eastern DRC as of early December, despite earlier warnings from the US that it would use the available means to combat those who violated the peace agreement.

Following the seizure of Uvira, the US had previously ordered Rwandan cabinet ministers to be held accountable.

More than 84, 000 people have fled into Burundi since early December, according to the UN refugee agency, which claims the country has reached a “critical point” as refugees arrive exhausted and traumatized. They join roughly 200 000 others who have already sought refuge in the nation.

More than 400 civilians have been killed in the city’s recent violence, according to regional officials.

Concerned about a wider regional spillover is resulted from Uvira’s seizure, which occurs directly across Lake Tanganyika from Bujumbura, Burundi’s largest city. After M23 seized the provincial capital, Bukavu, in February, the DRC government and the Wazalendo, which are DRC-allied militias, had their last significant foothold in South Kivu.

Despite the evaluations of UN experts and the international community, Rwanda has consistently denied backing M23. Despite being the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Rwandan President Paul Kagame claimed in a February interview with CNN that he was unaware that the country’s troops were stationed in the DRC.

In February 2024, Rwanda rebuffed a US request to withdraw troops and surface-to-air missile systems, saying it had changed its self-defence posture. It also rejected this request.

Rwanda asserts that the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a militia made up primarily of Hutus who fled to the DRC after participating in the genocide that killed about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, is a factor in its security concerns.

Kigali accuses the DRC government of supporting the organization and views it as an existential threat.

As Moscow intensifies its attacks on the strategically important Black Sea region and negotiations to end the conflict are still at a crucial stage, a Russian ballistic missile strike on port infrastructure in Ukraine’s Odesa port in the south has resulted in the deaths of at least eight people and the injuries of 27.

Critical logistics infrastructure was hit by the attack late on Friday, with some of the injured stranded on a bus at the strike’s epicenter as trucks started to burn in a car park.

More than two million people have been without electricity, water, or heating for days in the war’s fourth punishing winter, according to Ukrainian officials, as part of a long Russian campaign against Odesa’s civilian infrastructure.

Moscow struck reservoirs in a move that Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba described as being purposefully aimed at civilian logistics routes on Saturday.

As both sides battle multiple fronts, the escalation drags on in the face of US-led negotiations and numerous high-level meetings in Europe without a resolution.

Although the reports could not be independently verified, Russia claimed on Saturday that it had taken control of the villages of Svitle in the eastern Donetsk region and Vysoke in the northeastern Sumy region.

Russia’s military and energy assets have been targeted by Ukraine as a response.

A military patrol ship patrolling close to the platform and Ukrainian drones struck the Filanovsky oil rig belonging to Russian energy giant Lukoil on Friday night in the Caspian Sea.

Although the rig had been hit at least twice in December, the attack marked the first officially recognized Ukrainian attack on Caspian drilling infrastructure.

A Russian Kilo-class submarine was attacked by Ukrainian forces at the Novorossiysk Naval Base in the Black Sea between December 14 and 15, according to a report from the British Defence Intelligence Agency.

Miami exchanges

The attacks take place as American and European officials discuss ending the nearly four-year conflict in Miami over the weekend, with Russian and Ukrainian teams also present.

Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian envoy to Miami, announced his arrival on Saturday.

Despite calling the conflict “not our war,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted that Washington would not impose any sanctions on Ukraine.

Rustem Umerov, a negotiator for Ukraine, and other UK, French, and German officials are in conversation with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Russian officials are holding separate meetings with American officials, including Kremlin-key negotiator Dmitriev.

The main impediment is still the use of territorial concessions, with reports suggesting that Washington is compelled to renounce eastern Donetsk in favor of ceding areas.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, pledged to continue conducting military operations and to anticipate new successes before the end of the year by no means of compromise at his annual choreographed news conference on Friday.

Putin’s remarks come just after he ordered troops to enter the neighboring nation, the latest in a string of frequently repeated maximalist Russian positions.

One of the most contentious issues in the negotiations to end the war so far is the question of territory gained, lost, or to be ceded.

Putin has resisted giving Ukraine all of its territory to the regions that Moscow and his forces seized and annexed in 2014.

Additionally, he wants Ukrainian troops to leave eastern Ukraine, which the Russian military has yet to do in the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting continues to be attritional, conditions that Kyiv has explicitly rejected.

Russia has a significant influence over the eastern and Black Sea coastal regions of Ukraine, and the fighting continues as the talks progress.

Putin said on Friday that Russian forces had “fully seized strategic initiative” and that they would gain more before the year was over, and that they had confidence in the state of the battlefield.

However, this week’s shaky narrative centers on Moscow’s claim that it will win in the face of undisputed facts.

After isolating Russian forces inside its northern city of Kupiansk, Ukraine gradually relinquished control of almost all of its territory, defying Russian claims that they had seized it.

Russian forces were unable to dislod Ukrainian defenders from Pokrovsk, a city in eastern Donetsk, to support Moscow’s claims of total control.

On Friday, European leaders agreed to offer a 90 billion euros ($105bn) loan to cover Ukraine’s military and economic needs for the following two years.