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A former South Korean prime minister and the country’s one-time spy chief have been arrested in connection with the short-lived imposition of martial law by former President Yoon Suk-yeol in December 2024, local media report.

In separate arrests, former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn was detained on Wednesday on charges of inciting an insurrection, and Cho Tae-yong, the former head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), was taken into custody for several violations of NIS law, including dereliction of duty, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports.

According to Yonhap, Hwang posted on Facebook following the declaration of martial law, calling for the arrest of the country’s National Assembly speaker and for the eradication of those involved in alleged electoral fraud.

Former intelligence chief Cho, once a close confidant of disgraced President Yoon, is accused of knowing and failing to report plans for the imposition of martial law to the country’s National Assembly.

“The NIS Act obliges its director to report to the National Assembly, as well as to the president, if a situation that has a significant impact on national security arises,” Yonhap reported.

Prosecutors said that Cho, a career diplomat, failed to report on plans for martial law, despite “understanding its illegality”. At a hearing on Tuesday, Cho denied all of the charges against him, Yonhap said.

Hwang and Cho’s arrests come after prosecutors on Monday added another indictment against the former 64-year-old president Yoon, who was removed from office in April, and is now detained while awaiting trial for his failed attempt to impose martial law.

The latest indictment accuses the former president of attempting to provoke a military conflict between South Korea and North Korea by covertly sending drones into North Korea in an effort to legitimise the state of martial law he declared.

Prosecutors argue that the drone deployment over North Korea in October 2024 led to the leak of military secrets when one of the unmanned aerial vehicles crashed near North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, Yonhap added.

State Prosecutor Park Ji-young told reporters that the special counsel team had “filed charges of benefitting the enemy in general and of abuse of power” against the former president.

Yoon’s move to impose martial law plunged South Korea into political crisis after armed soldiers were sent to parliament in a bid to stop lawmakers rallying against and outlawing his martial law bid. Yoon’s bid to seize power failed, and he was detained in January, becoming South Korea’s first sitting president to be taken into custody.

The United Kingdom has sentenced a Chinese woman to 11 years and eight months in prison for a years-long scheme to launder investment scam proceeds into Bitcoin, luxury property, and other assets now worth about 4.8 billion British pounds ($6.3bn).

Zhimin Qian, 47, was sentenced by the Southwark Crown Court in London on Tuesday, in a case that saw UK police seize a record-breaking 61,000 Bitcoin as part of their investigation.

Qian, who is also known by the alias Yadi Zhang, was found guilty of money laundering and possessing illegally obtained cryptocurrency.

Will Lyne, the Metropolitan Police’s head of Economic and Cybercrime Command, described the case as “one of the largest and most complex economic crime investigations ever undertaken by the Met”.

“This is currently the largest cryptocurrency seizure by law enforcement in the UK and is the largest money laundering case in UK history by value,” he said in a statement.

UK authorities allege that Qian helped mastermind an investment scam in China between 2014 and 2017 that defrauded 128,000 people out of roughly £4.6bn, according to sentencing remarks from Judge Sally-Ann Hales.

Much of the funds were later recovered by police in China, but Hales said that a “sizeable amount was siphoned off and used by” Qian, and transferred into 70,000 Bitcoin stored on a laptop wallet.

Qian fled China in 2017, spending the next seven years on the run, and travelling between the UK and other countries without an extradition agreement with China.

Qian and an accomplice, who has since been sentenced, came to the attention of UK authorities in 2018, when Qian tried to buy three London properties worth 40.5 million pounds ($53.2m) but failed “know your customer” regulations, according to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Qian disappeared from the UK in 2020, but not before police seized items from a safe deposit box, including a laptop smuggled from China.

Hales said that documents found during the search “give an indication of the level of the defendant’s monthly expenditure, and the grandiose ambitions she held for her future using the proceeds of her criminal conduct”.

Qian returned to police attention last year, when she began to use a dormant wallet with the help of a second accomplice, Senghok Ling, 47, a Malaysian national based in the UK.

When police arrested Ling and Qian in April 2024, the pair was living a “lavish” lifestyle in the UK, according to Hales. At the time, Qian was found in possession of 62 million pounds ($81.4m) worth of cryptocurrency, a large quantity of cash, and two false passports.

Ling was separately sentenced to four years and 11 months in prison.

Ukraine’s top military commander has conceded that the army’s situation has “significantly worsened” in parts of the southern Zaporizhia region, where Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from five villages after intense fighting against Russian troops.

News of the setback in Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine comes as Russia said earlier on Tuesday that its forces had pushed deeper into the eastern Ukrainian cities of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk.

Video footage published by Russian war bloggers shows Moscow’s troops riding motorcycles, travelling in battered cars and sitting on top of military vehicles as they poured into Pokrovsk, which Russian media has dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” due to its strategic location.

“Using its numerical superiority in personnel and materiel, the enemy advanced in fierce fighting and captured three settlements,” the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskii, said of the fighting in Zaporizhia on Tuesday.

“The situation has significantly worsened in the Oleksandrivka and Huliapole directions,” Syrskii said in a statement.

The Ukrainian Army said earlier that orders to withdraw from five villages in Zaporizhia were given after the “de facto destruction of all shelters and fortifications” following intensive Russian artillery strikes. An estimated 2,000 shells were launched at the Ukrainian positions.

Control of three other villages is also being hotly contested between Russian and Ukrainian forces northeast of the town of Huliapole in Zaporizhia, according to the Ukrainian Army.

Syrskii said that Russian forces in Zaporizhia had used poor weather conditions to their advantage, advancing under heavy fog to infiltrate between Ukrainian positions in the region. But he added that Russian forces suffered heavy losses during their attacks.

“Every metre of our land costs Russia hundreds of military lives,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was visiting the parts of the southern Kherson region not occupied by Russia on Tuesday, described the situation in Pokrovsk and Zaporizhia as “difficult, in part because of weather conditions that favour the attacks”.

The battlefield situation in Kupiansk was “somewhat easier”, he said, adding that Ukrainian forces had “achieved results there”.

Russia has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, using a pincer movement to attempt to encircle it and threaten supply lines.

Syrskii told US media that Russia has concentrated an estimated 150,000 troops in a drive to take Pokrovsk.

Russia and Ukraine have given conflicting accounts of the battle in recent days, with Moscow claiming for days that it had encircled Pokrovsk, while Kyiv has denied the claims and asserted that it still had supply lines to neighbouring Myrnohrad.

Russia also said its forces have taken full control of the eastern part of Kupiansk in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, located to the northeast of Zaporizhia and Pokrovsk.

A Russian commander, who gave his call sign as Hunter, said his forces had taken control of an oil depot on Kupiansk’s eastern edge. In a video statement issued by Russia’s Ministry of Defence, the commander said his forces had also taken control of a series of train stops south of Kupiansk.

The BBC’s outgoing boss has said that the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster will not be defined by its “enemies” as it faces a public relations and leadership crisis and legal threats from US President Donald Trump.

In a call with staff on Tuesday, the BBC’s director-general, Tim Davie, said he was “fiercely proud” of the publicly-funded broadcaster, even as he acknowledged that it had made mistakes.

“We will thrive, and this narrative will not just be given by our enemies. It’s our narrative,” Davie said.

Davie said the BBC needed to defend its work in the face of mounting attacks on the media.

“I think we have to fight for our journalism,” Davie said.

“There are difficult times it goes through, but it just does good work,” he added.

“And that speaks – it speaks louder than any newspaper, any weaponisation. We are the very best of what I think we should be as a society.”

Davie’s comments come as the BBC grapples with accusations of bias following the leak of an internal memo that accused producers of making misleading edits to footage of Trump’s speech before the January 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol.

Trump has threatened to sue the BBC over the edited footage, aired in the Panorama documentary Trump: A Second Chance?, by Friday, unless the broadcaster provides a “full and fair” retraction and compensation.

BBC executives have acknowledged that the footage, which appeared to show Trump directly encouraging the attack on the US Capitol, was misleading, but have rejected claims of systemic bias.

Davie and the BBC’s head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday, amid the fallout of the controversy, leaving the broadcaster leaderless as it faces a mid-term government review of its governance and regulatory arrangements.

The BBC, which gets most of its funding from about 24 million licence fee payers in the UK, has faced accusations of bias from across the ideological spectrum.

Conservative politicians and media have long accused the BBC of having a liberal bias, but the broadcaster has also come under fire from the left over its coverage of politically charged issues, such as Israel’s war in Gaza.

Despite its critics, the BBC has been repeatedly rated as the most trusted news outlet in the UK.

In a survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last year, 62 percent of respondents said they viewed the BBC as trustworthy, more than for any other outlet included in the poll.

Polling on the BBC’s alleged biases has shown public opinion split along party lines.

In a YouGov poll released on Tuesday, 31 percent of respondents said the broadcaster favoured left-wing views, while 19 percent said that it leaned right.

While 73 percent of Reform UK voters and 52 percent of Conservative Party voters perceived a left-wing bias, 32 percent of Labour Party voters identified a right-wing bias.