Category World News

Kyiv, Ukraine – Pokrovsk, a key fortress and logistical hub for Ukrainian forces in the eastern region of Donbas, has been under siege for almost two years.

But in recent weeks, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been storming the town around the clock, taking over the streets where buildings are mostly reduced to bombed-out, deserted ruins.

They use reconnaissance drones and satellite images to identify gaps in Ukrainian defences and use tiny groups of soldiers who are attacked and killed in droves by Ukrainian drones.

But the surviving soldiers grind forward, targeting drone operators and engaging them in close combat, blazing the trail for larger groups of servicemen.

They are backed by Russian artillery, drones and glide bombs that destroy even the deepest and most fortified bunkers.

The town is “a layer cake of passages, spots under fire, our and enemy positions”, Kirill Sazonov, a Ukrainian political scientist-turned-serviceman, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.

“Somebody is sitting on a third floor, someone’s in a house next door, someone’s in the basement,” he wrote. “There’s no front line, sectors under [Russian or Ukrainian] control or logic.”

He’s confident that Ukrainian forces won’t leave Pokrovsk because Kyiv wants to defend it by any means necessary – and the open fields outside it are “less comfortable than the town’s basements”.

Moscow wants to spur Pokrovsk’s takeover because of worsening weather, muddy roads and a lack of tree foliage that makes troop movements more detectable.

But any predictions about Pokrovsk’s future can only be made “by an idiot, a cynic or a tarot cards reader”, Sazonov wrote.

Is the takeover imminent?

Other analysts disagreed with Sazonov’s assessment that Ukraine will hold its position.

Ukrainian forces “have so few soldiers on the front line that it was possible to contain Russia’s advance only while the Russians were in the fields” around Pokrovsk, Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

As soon as Russian soldiers infiltrated the town, they met next to no resistance because Ukrainians are so few and their drones are less effective among buildings, he said.

“The town’s takeover is a matter of time,” Mitrokhin, who has written hundreds of authoritative analyses of the hostilities since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022, told Al Jazeera.

Kyiv may have to make the uneasy decision to pull the remaining forces out of Pokrovsk or risk having them encircled, he said.

Why does Russia want Pokrovsk so badly?

Moscow wants to use the town as a springboard for the takeover of the Kyiv-controlled part of Donbas, a key rustbelt region whose annexation Russia declared unilaterally in September 2022.

Kyiv still controls one-third of Donbas, and Pokrovsk’s fall will pave the way for the takeover of other parts of Ukraine’s “belt of strongholds” that have been fortified since 2014.

The town’s commanding heights will also let Russian forces use swarms of drones to back their advance westwards to the Dnipro region.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the town in late October to encourage the troops, but even his staunchest supporters lambasted him and his top brass for allowing Russian forces to infiltrate Pokrovsk and smaller towns nearby.

“The president takes the risk by coming to support the troops, but systemic problems of managing the troops are not being solved, and we keep losing town after town,” lawmaker Mariana Bazuhla wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

Pokrovsk’s fall would be a major propaganda triumph for Moscow even though the victory will have cost tens of thousands of lives.

How will peace talks be affected?

For Russia, the takeover of Pokrovsk would mean that the front-line is “unstable” and Moscow would try to persuade Washington, where United States President Donald Trump has been pushing for peace talks for months, that this insistence on a ceasefire makes no sense, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank.

Washington and Kyiv want to suspend hostilities along the current front line, which stretches more than 1,000km (620 miles), and begin negotiations on who will hold what territory after that.

The Kremlin’s rationale is that “Russian forces are expanding the zone of their control and that Ukraine will have to unilaterally cede land”, Fesenko told Al Jazeera.

“The peace settlement will be paused for several weeks or even months,” he said.

The Washington-brokered peace talks have been stalled for months and are not likely to be resumed after Trump cancelled his summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, which had been expected to be held in Budapest.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin keeps coming up with new demands, such as Ukraine maintaining a neutral status, limitations of its military and recognition of Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.

Putin also wants the West to lift all sanctions slapped on Russia since it annexed Crimea in 2014 and the recognition of Russian as the second official language in Ukraine.

However, the possible loss of Pokrovsk won’t affect the fighting spirit of Ukrainian troops.

“This isn’t the first town in Donbas Ukrainian forces have to leave. I don’t think it will cardinally affect the morale,” Fesenko said.

What are the economic consequences if Pokrovsk falls to Russia?

Pokrovsk is a major centre for Ukraine’s coal mining industry, and large metallurgical plants in central Ukraine depend on the coking coal it produces.

It is also home to almost a dozen Soviet-era plants although these have suspended work because of the hostilities.

The town’s takeover could boost the Kremlin’s recent efforts to modify the plants of Donbas for production of weaponry and military-related items, according to Pavel Lisyansky, head of the Strategic Research and Security Institute, a Kyiv-based think tank

“They militarise the economy,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that Moscow aims to turn the region into “a huge military base to frighten Europe”.

Pokrovsk also sits at the intersection of several strategic highways and railroads.

After Pokrovsk, Moscow will push to retake Sloviansk, the first Ukrainian town seized by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani is bidding for a second term, a goal that requires his electoral bloc, the Construction and Development Coalition, to win a commanding number of seats in the November 11 parliamentary elections and back his selection for the role.

Al-Sudani’s campaign is built on his government’s successes in improving services, maintaining balanced relations between Tehran and Washington, and steering Iraq clear of regional conflict since October 7, 2023.

However, while analysts predict al-Sudani’s coalition may win the highest number of seats, it may well disintegrate after the election results are announced.

A broad, not unified, coalition

Al-Sudani’s coalition, announced in May 2025, includes seven political forces.

The most prominent are Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) Chairman Faleh al-Fayyad; Minister of Labour Ahmed al-Asadi; and Karbala Governor Nassif al-Khattabi.

It also includes influential tribal leaders (sheikhs) and some 53 incumbent MPs, most of whom won as independents in 2021 or defected from parties within the Shia Coordination Framework (SCF), the main Shia parliamentary bloc that nominated al-Sudani four years ago.

The coalition also contains the Al-Furratain Current, the party al-Sudani founded after resigning from the Dawa Party following the 2019 Tishreen protests. However, his is the smallest faction in this broad alliance.

Local observers in central and southern Iraq note that al-Sudani’s success in getting other candidates to run with him masks the weakness of Al-Furratain and may actually be the driver of his coalition’s post-election collapse.

The coalition’s tickets are dominated by the tribal sheikhs and other candidates, while Al-Furratain’s cadres, those closest and most loyal to al-Sudani, are the least likely to win seats.

These partners are happy to leverage the prime minister’s current power to further their own popularity, but past elections indicate that their loyalty will be transactional and is not expected to outlast his full prime ministerial authority.

Take al-Fayyad, who al-Sudani protected when Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), an SCF party led by Qais al-Khazali, pushed a law that would have forced him into retirement to make way for AAH to rise to more power in the PMF.

When al-Sudani becomes a caretaker prime minister after the election and SCF rivals resume their push to remove al-Fayyad, he will seek new alliances to protect himself.

The tribal sheikhs and MPs use being on al-Sudani’s list to leverage state resources to deliver services in their electoral districts and fast-track government approvals for their constituents.

MP Dhiaa Hindi, a Sudani candidate in Karbala, boasts on Facebook of processing 16,000 official transactions during his three nd a half years in parliament.

These same MPs may well jump ship when rival blocs, intent on blocking al-Sudani’s second term, offer them financial incentives and influence in the next government.

Former Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi tried building a loyal bloc to secure a second term by supporting independent candidates in the 2021 elections, hoping that loyal MPs would strengthen his negotiating position.

“Twenty-three of those we supported won,” recalled a senior official who served in al-Kadhimi’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“But … when we needed their votes as a bloc to support Kadhimi’s nomination during the government formation talks, they all abandoned [him]. They demanded huge sums of money, luxury cars, and government staff for their personal service. We couldn’t provide these things, even if we wanted to; we were a caretaker government with no legal authority.”

As a soon-to-be caretaker PM, al-Sudani likely has al-Kadhimi’s experience top of mind.

‘Construction’

The coalition’s “Construction and Development” rhetoric, symbolised by its construction crane logo, centres on al-Sudani’s performance in delivering services.

However, most projects are concentrated in Baghdad, while provincial allocations have decreased significantly.

This is a high-risk political calculation on al-Sudani’s part, a strategy Iraqi political analysts interpret as trying to build a visible legacy in the capital, which holds 69 of parliament’s 329 seats and where he is running as a candidate.

According to parliamentary finance committee documents, funds allocated to local governments shrank by 60 percent, from 8.783 trillion dinars ($6.7bn) in previous years to 2.767 trillion ($2.1bn) in 2024 – the federal government holding most of that money to spend in Baghdad.

“What should have been spent on infrastructure, schools, and hospitals in the provinces was spent on roads and bridges in Baghdad,” said MP Adnan al-Zurfi, parliamentary finance committee member for the past 8 years.

Najaf Governor Yousef Kannawi noted that only 60 billion of the 500 billion dinars allocated to his province had arrived.

A Ministry of Finance document from the first half of 2025 shows projects in Baghdad received 822 billion dinars ($629m), while the rest of the central and southern provinces, the main electoral base for Shia parties, received only 600 billion dinars ($459m) combined.

The notable exception is Karbala, whose Governor al-Khattabi is in al-Sudani’s coalition and received 318 billion dinars ($243m), separate from other governorates.

These sidelined southern provinces that are paying for al-Sudani’s electoral strategy are traditional strongholds for the SCF.

What comes next for al-Sudani?

In a televised interview on Saturday, AAH’s al-Khazali said a second term for al-Sudani would be “the decision of the Coordination Framework [SCF]”, emphasising that the post is subject to the “Shia consensus”.

He was referring to the Muhasasa system, in place since the first elected government in 2006, that grants Shia parties the right to name the prime minister, while Kurds name the president and Sunni the speaker of parliament.

Nouri al-Maliki, former prime minister and leader of the State of Law coalition, echoed this in a separate interview, saying becoming prime minister “is not related to the number of seats won”.

These statements are a response to al-Sudani’s attempts to build an independent power base, which SCF leaders like al-Maliki and al-Khazali see as their appointee trying to challenge their long-term control of Shia politics.

This view was aired by al-Khazali as far back as 2022, when he publicly stated that the prime minister is merely a “director-general”- an administrative, apolitical role. The PM, he insisted, “should not monopolise state decisions … He must return to the Framework for all decisions, whether political, security, or economic.”

They are publicly reminding him, and his new allies, that he is dispensable and that the path to a second term runs through, not around, them.

This puts al-Sudani in a bind, with his second term depending on navigating two challenges: First, holding his fragile electoral bloc together and, second, undertaking post-election negotiations with Shia rivals who are already signalling he is dispensable.

Climate-related disasters and conflict have displaced millions of people across the globe, the United Nations has warned before the opening of its annual climate change conference.

The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a report, published on Monday to coincide with the launch of the 30th annual UN Climate Change conference (COP) in Brazil, that weather-related disasters caused about 250 million people to flee their homes over the past decade.

The migration agency issued its second major report on the effect of climate change on refugees – No Escape II: The Way Forward – in the run-up to COP 30, as it appears that the enthusiasm of countries to agree action to curb climate change continues to ebb.

“Over the past decade, weather-related disasters have caused some 250 million internal displacements – equivalent to over 67,000 displacements per day,” the report said. 

The UNHCR added that climate change is also increasing the difficulties faced by those displaced by conflict and other driving forces.

“Climate change is compounding and multiplying the challenges faced by those who have already been displaced, as well as their hosts, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings,” it continued.

Floods in South Sudan and Brazil, record heat in Kenya and Pakistan, and water shortages in Chad and Ethiopia are among the disasters noted in the report.

The number of countries facing extreme exposure to climate-related hazards is projected to rise from three to 65 by 2040.

Those 65 countries host more than 45 percent of all people currently displaced by conflict, it added.

“Extreme weather is … destroying homes and livelihoods, and forcing families – many who have already fled violence – to flee once more,” UN refugees chief Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

“These are people who have already endured immense loss, and now they face the same hardships and devastation again. They are among the hardest hit by severe droughts, deadly floods and record-breaking heatwaves, yet they have the fewest resources to recover,” he said.

By 2050, the report reads, the hottest 15 refugee camps in the world – in The Gambia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Senegal and Mali – are projected to experience nearly 200 days of hazardous heat stress per year.

Weakening commitment

The refugee agency’s report emphasised that while the effect of climate change is growing, the commitment towards dealing with it has been weakening.

The UNHCR hopes to reawaken efforts to fight the effects at the conference in Brazil.

Under President Donald Trump, the United States, traditionally the world’s top donor, has slashed foreign aid.

Washington previously accounted for more than 40 percent of the UNHCR’s budget. Other major donor countries have also been tightening their belts.

“Funding cuts are severely limiting our ability to protect refugees and displaced families from the effects of extreme weather,” Grandi said.

“To prevent further displacement, climate financing needs to reach the communities already living on the edge,” he said. “This COP must deliver real action, not empty promises.”

About 50,000 participants from more than 190 countries will meet in Belem, in the Amazon rainforest, to discuss curbing the climate crisis.

One topic on the agenda exposing the difficulties of agreeing on global action is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

The policy is designed to prevent “carbon leakage” by requiring importers of carbon-intensive goods like steel and cement to pay the same price for embedded emissions that EU producers face domestically.

While the EU promotes CBAM as a necessary environmental tool to encourage greener practices, critics of the policy, including major trading partners like the US and China, view it as a veiled act of protectionism.