Ukraine-Russia dwell: North Korea vows to again Putin’s battle as US declare hundreds of troops put together for battle

Russia’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov has hosted his North Korean counterpart Choe Son Hui for talks, as the Pentagon accused Pyongyang of sending 10,000 troops to Russia to fight against Ukraine.

Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have specified the agenda for Ms Choe’s talks in Moscow, but in a closed-door hearing at South Korea’s parliament, the South’s spy agency said she may be involved in high-level discussions on sending additional troops to Russia and negotiating what the North would get in return.

South Korean and Western officials have voiced concern that Russia may offer technology that could advance the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program.

Pope Francis has issued a call for people to pray for Ukraine, as he declared that “war is always a defeat”.

The Catholic leader said on X, formerly Twitter: “Let us pray for martyred Ukraine and for Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Myanmar, South Sudan, and for all peoples suffering from war. War is always a defeat, always! War is also ignoble, for it is the triumph of lies and falsehood.”

A noted Belarusian film director and dissident who was held in Serbia for a year while Belarus sought his extradition has been released from house arrest.

Andrei Hniot told the Associated Press that Serbian authorities released him from house arrest on Thursday, exactly a year after he was detained, in line with Serbian law which states that pre-extradition detention cannot exceed one year.

Belarus issued an international warrant for Hniot – a critic of authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko –on charges of tax evasion, which he claims are false. Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was among those to campaign for his release, in efforts she said were backed by Germany’s foreign ministry and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen.

Having now moved to Germany, he said: “In Berlin I was able to to breathe a sigh of relief and try to comprehend that this nightmarish year is already behind me.”

The Belarusian human rights group Viasna says there are about 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus, including the group’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder Ales Bialiatski.

Japan and the European Union have announced a security and defence partnership amid growing tensions with Russia, North Korea and China.

It is the first security partnership that the EU has struck with an Indo-Pacific country, Japanese foreign minister Takeshi Iwaya and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters.

“We live in a very dangerous world. We live in a world of growing rivalries, climate accidents and threats of war. And there is only one antidote to this challenging world, which is partnerships among friends,” Mr Borrell said. “It is an historical and very timely step given the situation in both of our regions.”

Russian investigators have claimed that a Ukrainian drone attackkilled two people at a convent in the Kursk region late last month.

The state Investigative Committee said the attack took place in late October. A Russian military blogger claimed the victims were two young men who were trying to evacuate people.

A court in Russia’s far-eastern city of Vladivostok has sentenced a former US consulate worker charged with cooperating with a foreign state to four years and 10 months in prison.

Robert Shonov, a Russian citizen and former US consulate employee, was arrested in May 2023 and accused by the FSB of “gathering information about the special military operation” in Ukraine, a partial call-up in Russian regions and its influence on “protest activities of the population in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.”

The US State Department condemned the arrest last year and said the allegations against Shonov “are wholly without merit”.

The US and South Korea have called on China to use its influence over Russia and North Korea to prevent escalation after Pyongyang sent thousands of troops to Russia to aid Moscow’s war against Ukraine. Beijing has so far stayed quiet.

In a rare meeting earlier this week, three top US diplomats met with China’s ambassador to the United States to emphasise US concerns and urge China to use its sway with North Korea to try to curtail the cooperation, according to a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Thursday that the sides had “a robust conversation just this week” and that China knows US expectations that “they’ll use the influence that they have to work to curb these activities”.

“But I think this is a demand signal that’s coming not just from us, but from countries around the world,” he said at a news conference in Washington with defence secretary Lloyd Austin and their South Korean counterparts.

Didi Tang and Matthew Lee have the full report:

Russia launched more than 2,000 attack drones at civilian and military targets across Ukraine last month, bringing the total this year to nearly 7,000 , Kyiv’s military has said.

Moscow has carried out regular air strikes on Ukrainian towns and cities, with the capital Kyiv coming under attack 20 times in October alone, according to city officials.

Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement it had intercepted 1,185 of the 2,023 drones launched last month and that another 738 were “locationally lost”.

“In total, since the beginning of 2024, the enemy has launched 6,987 attack UAVs on the territory of Ukraine. Enemy drones mostly targeted civilian and critical infrastructure,” it said.

A former British Army soldier who died fighting the Russians in Ukraine was a “brave soul”, his father has said.

Liam Love, a 24-year-old who grew up in Coventry, was killed by a mortar bomb in Lyman in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine in October, his family said. His parents live in Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and a funeral service will he held there on Saturday.

Mr Love served with the Royal Anglian Regiment for four years, during which he helped train Ukrainian conscripts following the invasion by Russia in early 2022. His father, Michael, said that experience had a profound effect on his son and he left the British Army earlier this year to join the fight in Ukraine.

“The training was all too short because the men were needed back in Ukraine as quickly as possible,” Mr Love told BBC Northern Ireland. “Liam befriended and kept in touch with them when they went back to Ukraine, but a lot were killed.

“He gave me a sense that he wanted to be more involved but never did I think that involvement would one day lead him to actually crossing the border into Ukraine.

“He empathised with the Ukrainian people and their plight and I think he felt that he didn’t give enough to the Ukrainian recruits when he was part of the training package. So he wanted to go out and help them to free themselves from what the Russians were doing at the time.”

He added: “I want him to be remembered that he did believe in what he did and despite the discomforts of battle, warfare; his determination to see it through, I want that to be his lasting legacy. He wanted to be remembered by a simple quote, ‘What we do in life echoes in eternity’, and that will echo with me. He was just a brave soul.”