Category World News

In desperate battles for control of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, in eastern Ukraine, which Moscow views as a gateway to the region’s unfinished areas, Russian and Ukrainian forces are locked in a flurry of fighting.

Vladimir Putin’s 2nd and 51st Combined Arms Armies “advancing along converging axes” and “have completed the encirclement of the enemy,” according to Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of staff, on Sunday.

He claimed that elite airborne and marine units were encircled along with 5,500 Ukrainian troops.

Russian military reporters refuted these claims, with one reporting to 621, 000 Telegram subscribers as saying “There is simply no encirclement” because Gerasimov’s attempted pincer movement was still “several kilometers” apart.

The Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, also refuted Gerasimov’s assertion on Thursday.

According to Syrskii, “Russian propaganda’s claims about the alleged “blocking” of the Ukrainian defense forces in Pokrovsk and Kupiansk do not match reality.”

The Russian journalist added that it was “extremely unlikely” that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers would be trapped.

He claimed that today’s urban battles are “conducted by small groups of infantry with the support of many drones” and that they are “a classic meat grinder head-to-head” with battles for each house.

On October 23, isolated Russian groups entered western and central Pokrovsk, but they did not appear to have control any of the city’s areas, preferring to lay out positions and wait for reinforcements.

The situation in Pokrovsk, according to the Ukrainian General Staff, “remains difficult.” Some 200 Russian troops are thought to have spied on the town, but defending units said they were conducting sabotage operations that prevented Russian units from gaining a permanent foothold.

Pokrovsk’s front remained strong as well.

The porousness of the front line was demonstrated by the report from Ukrainian military observer Konstantyn Mashovets, who claimed Kyiv’s troops were able to ambush Russian rear positions in the village of Sukhetsky, northeast of Pokrovsk.

Russian small infantry groups and Ukrainian corresponding groups started to clash frequently and suddenly, even before their deployment or when they were attempting to strengthen and replenish their assault groups directly, according to Mashovets.

The positions of both sides are still ambiguous, according to Kremlin-aligned Russian military news outlet Rybar, citing the abundance of drones in the air, which make any large concentrations of infantry moving very dangerous. The lack of a single front line is prevented, and the control zones’ precise boundaries are also prevented.

Prior to the most recent assault, which started in the middle of October, Mashovets estimated that the Russian 2nd Combined Arms Army, known as the “main impact force,” had received reinforcements from other front-line locations of between 6 000 and 10 500 troops.

Pokrovsk and the surrounding areas receive particular attention, according to the statement. In a speech on Monday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that is where the occupier has concentrated its largest assault forces. “Pokrovsk is their main goal,” they say.

Russian energy hubs are targeted by Ukraine.

Zelenskyy has stated on numerous occasions that his goal is to bring the war to Russian soil. Last week, long-range drones and cruise missiles from Ukraine performed that task.

On October 23, Ukraine set fire to a crude oil distillation unit at the Ryazan oil refinery for the fifth time this year. 139 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

On Saturday, the regional governor of Leningrad declared that “several” Ukrainian drones had been shot down without inflicting any harm or casualties.

According to Crimean occupation Governor Sergey Aksyonov, Ukraine struck a fuel and lubricant container on Wednesday in Simferopol.

Putin boasts of having weapons that “nobody else in the world has.”

Russian officials, who have long supported US President Donald Trump’s efforts to reach a deal directly with Putin, changed after Trump abruptly canceled a summit with him and put sanctions on Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft.

Trump’s deputy head of Russia’s National Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said that the US was now “completely aligned with mad Europe, and its verbose ‘peacemaker’ is now firmly on the warpath against Russia.”

Putin made the announcement over the weekend that a new nuclear-powered torpedo with the ability to launch radioactive tidal waves targeting coastal regions over cakes and tea with Russian war veterans.

The Poseidon reportedly has a range of 10, 000km (6, 200 miles) and travels at 185km/h (115mph). There is nothing like it in the world, its rivals are unlikely to appear anytime soon, and there are no existing interception methods, according to Putin, as he had previously stated.

Andrey Kartapolov, the head of the Duma Defense Committee, claimed that the Poseidon was “capable of disabling entire states.”

A new nuclear-capable cruise missile, the Burevestnik, which is also nuclear-powered, was successfully tested by Putin three days earlier.

It is a special item that no one else in the world can find, according to Putin.

In November 2024, Russia launched the Oreshnik, a hypersonic, intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of hitting a Ukrainian factory in Dnipro, in a similar political intimidation tactic. By December, Putin had promised to deploy the Oreshnik in Belarus.

In the Sea of Japan, Russia tested the Sarmat, a brand-new intercontinental ballistic missile, which Putin claimed is still in use. None of the tests had independent verification, and it was unclear whether any of the new weapons were capable of being used in combat or whether they could be produced on a scale.

Moscow carried out a routine strategic forces exercise on October 22 by sending long-range Tupolev-22M3 bombers over the Baltic Sea in response to Western aggression.

Trump claimed on Monday that Putin should concentrate on bringing the war to an end.

“Focus, focus, and focus on affordability” in New York City.

Robert Wood, a 47-year-old writer and lead volunteer for mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, believes that the key to winning voters in New York City’s tense election campaign is in the simple message.

Mamdani’s surprise victory in the June Democratic primary and his dominating lead in the polls ahead of the election day on November 4 have a symbolic impact that extends far beyond the city’s five boroughs.

A rebuke to the wealthy donor-dominated Democratic establishment has been deemed by many to be a path forward for liberal politics that was abandoned by US President Donald Trump.

Mamdani supporters are aware that he must actually make it into City Hall for a movement that has spread across the nation and indeed the globe to fully realize. That begins and ends with door-knocking: there is a lot of door-knocking.

A door opened to reveal Nadia on a windswept October day in a row of townhouses in the Crown Heights neighborhood, which Mamdani and her main rival Andrew Cuomo split in the primaries. She claimed she is already anticipating Mamdani.

We must ensure that our friends and families get out and vote, Wood argued, noting that a resounding mandate would boost Mamdani’s ambitious plans, which included increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers, to increase rent freezes on stabilized apartments, free buses, and universal childcare.

The governor and state legislators will have to veto hard-fought victories in order for execution.

Another man claimed to be unsure at a nearby, rent-stabilized apartment complex. Wood cited Mamdani’s pledge to freeze rents in similar buildings, which account for about a quarter of the city’s housing stock.

The man is gracious but reluctant to say, “Thank you, I’m still deciding,”

Onika Saul, a 45-year-old property manager, was greeted down the street as she climbed a steep concrete stoop. She was concerned that “realism is kind of skewed” in Mamdani’s pledges.

Anyone can say anything, she said, but “action always speaks louder than words.”

“So I personally want to see more action than words because I have been so many times deceived by so many politicians and so many promises,” I say.

Wood, however, inserted. He described Mamdani’s activism as a state assemblyman, which included a hunger strike led by taxi drivers, and his arrest in front of US Senator Chuck Schumer’s residence in connection with the US’s funding of the Gaza war. He also noted that Mamdani has relied on small donations, in contrast to the donations made by billionaire business and real estate executives who have helped Cuomo’s campaign.

He also cited Mamdani’s vocal support for Palestinian rights, a rarity in mainstream US politics, as one of the most important issues in the race.

Wood said that Zohran is undoubtedly the only politician in the race to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide.

Saul reaffirmed that it was a genocide.

Saul had her reservations by the conclusion. After all, Mamdani’s most important promises, such as universal childcare for children under five, do not directly apply to her. However, she claimed she would support his vision and vote for him.

Syrians are fighting for justice and accountability in a new battle almost a year after the Assad regime was overthrown.

Every scandal-filled period of American government exists. Trump’s innovation is to incorporate scandal into the political philosophy. The Trump regime’s corruption is a perversion of American democracy, but the truth is more unsettling: it’s a mirror. It’s open profiteering, using the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment. Trump’s era and those before it differ in one way: there isn’t corruption, but there is visibility and the nation’s inability to feel scandalized as a result.

In the United States, corruption has been moralized as a disgrace for decades as a disgrace to an otherwise valid system. American capitalism has always depended on the conversion of public office into private profit, from the railroad barons and company towns of the 19th century to Wall Street’s and Washington’s revolving door in the 20th and 21st. The mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise when politicians became lobbyists and habitual insider traders, corporations wrote legislation, bank executives and political donors received bailouts from the government, and hospital executives became wealthy on public subsidies as their patients and workers fell into precarity. We were taught to value morality in market value and to associate success with it by the neoliberal order.

By the time Trump arrived, corruption was recognized as realism. Trump merely stripped it of its polite fictions in both domestic and foreign policy, where the US has long used language of democracy and human rights to justify its violence. For instance, Trump’s extrajudicial killings of unidentified people by unilateral military strikes in Latin American waters are a naked display of the practice that previous administrations have carried out under the guise of impunity and euphemism. Similar to Trump, there hasn’t been a single instance of brutality or cruelty against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead, it was largely a dramatized, made-for-TV adaptation of what Barack Obama pioneered as he developed Tom Homan’s, now-Trump’s so-called border czar career. Obama and Trump both had admirations for Homan, winning him the 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service in recognition of his passion for detaining immigrants, separating children from their parents, and incarcerating people in detention facilities.

We are already aware that Trump’s corruption and cruelty, including nepotism, grift, self-dealing, the open auctioning of government contracts and justice, serve the wealthy people who own them, whether directly or indirectly through their donations and lobbyists or via networks of influence, bribery, and extortion. A weary acceptance that things have always worked this way replaces the outrage that might have once followed.

In this way, Trump is a revelation as opposed to an aberration. Trump uses capitalism as pure id: unrestrained appetite and unashamed greed, as opposed to earlier administrations who moralized it as a meritocracy to boost the egos of billionaires and the politicians they allowed into power. His corruption is the disavowed truth made flesh rather than a disease of the system.

Legality has been destroyed, but it also contains the psychic structure that once made it seem objectionable. What was once thought to be transgression is now thought to be truth-telling. We are no longer subject to prohibitions, but instead the superego commands us to watch blatant displays of power and our own complicity.

The exposure of corruption does not lead to a collective moral renewal in a society where every aspect of life has been subordinated to the logic of accumulation, where medicine, education, and even care itself are governed by profit. Everyone has a suspicion that there isn’t any moral precedent to defend, which it confirms. The end result is some sort of political paroxysm. We can identify corruption, but we can’t stop it because it would require the dismantling of the very system we’ve been taught to believe is inevitable and the foundation of our country as we know it.

For the same reason, liberal responses to corruption falter. They make no objection to the fact that these values have lost their institutional and cultural foundation, instead appealing to morality, decency, fairness, and honesty. Meanwhile, the right has developed strategies to exploit this emptiness. Trump’s genius lies in his ability to make corruption look like it’s real, and to portray it as being violent like freedom. His supporters are correct to say that corruption permeates elite life and that it is at the source of it. They observe a lack of decadence in bureaucrats as opposed to billionaires and monopolies as immigrants.

If corruption no longer causes a meaningful response, let alone a popular uprising, it’s because, as the Democratic Party claims, “the resistance” has been made profitable. Cynicism is a badge of sophistication, while anger has evolved into a lifestyle. Political criticism and condemnation have been extensively commodified, making them popular in the culture industry, a process that produces aphorisms about tyranny and publishes corrupt politicians’ memoirs alongside. When politics turn into entertainment and outrage turns into a corporate aesthetic, fascism no longer needs to hide its virtue; it simply needs to put on a show that is better than its alleged foes.

Trump’s corruption continues unchecked because no one else notices it, but because they no longer consider it to be possible. After all, to be scandalized is still to believe in a morally righteous world. A society that no longer believes in its own chance of redemption is what we are currently dealing with.

More than just exposing corruption, it will take a lot to rekindle an ethical imagination. It will require investing in forms of collective, reciprocal caregiving that give democratic ethics concrete life and value, as well as creating real public and civic institutions that are meant to serve working-class people as opposed to the interests of the wealthy.

Corruption flourishes in solidarity’s crumbling remains. We must create a society where truth and honesty are not a matter of individual performance but rather of shared public purpose, confrontation with our oppressive past, and real detachment from it.

The US and Chinese presidents met in South Korea to come to a consensus on a lower trade tension. In addition to imposing new restrictions on the flow of the deadly drug fentanyl, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping made new commitments regarding the supply of crucial agricultural commodities and rare earth minerals.