North Korean forces kill Russian troops as Putin loses ‘1,000 soldiers’ in past day

Ukraine said on Monday Russia was to blame for a major oil spill in the Kerch Strait that leads into the Black Sea, accusing Moscow of breaking navigation safety rules by using old tankers and keeping two vessels at sea during a storm.

A Russian oil tanker split apart during a storm on Sunday, while another one ended up in distress in the strait that separates Russia from the Crimean Peninsula that Moscow’s troops seized and annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Russia did not say how much fuel was leaked but its state news agency TASS reported the two vessels had been carrying 9,200 metric tons of oil products.

“The Russians have a rather complicated situation… in the Azov and the Black Sea region. They use an outdated fleet: these ships were more than 50 years old,” Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine‘s navy, told Reuters by phone. The vessel that was torn apart, the Volgoneft 212, dates back to 1969 and the Volgoneft 239 was built in 1973, according to certificates seen by Reuters.

Pletenchuk said the vessels in the accident were designed to transfer oil products along rivers and load them onto other vessels at sea and were not meant to be used in stormy weather. The two vessels had earlier turned off their AIS identification system, a global naval navigation system, making it impossible to identify their locations using satellites, he added.

Russia is disrupting mobile communications and ship-tracking data across the Baltic Sea, endangering vessels and energy supplies to test how Western powers will respond, a Polish admiral overseeing the area said.

Vice Admiral Krzysztof Jaworski said Moscow was systematically using such tactics to hide the movements of its own vessels and disrupt the operations of others in the sea which is bordered by eight Nato countries and Russia.

“Hybrid war in the Baltic is the biggest challenge we are facing,” Jaworski told Reuters in an interview last week, referring to the practise of launching conventional attacks alongside attempts to disrupt politics, energy supplies and other systems.

“We are talking about aggressive behaviour by Russia. They are trying to disrupt our lives,” Jaworski, commander of Poland’s Naval Operations Centre, added. “They are also testing us, us as an alliance (to see) how far they can go.”

The United States joined nine other nations and the European Union on Monday in condemning the increasing military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, the countries said in a joint statement.

“We will continue to act in concert, including through imposition of economic sanctions, to respond to the danger posed by the DPRK-Russia partnership,” the said in the statement, which included Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Britain.

Estonia will propose that the leaders of the United Kingdom-led alliance of northern European Nato countries spend no less than 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence in response to the threat from Russia.

Only 23 of the 32 Nato members are on track to hit the Nato target of a minimum 2 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defence spending.

“Everybody in Nato and in the EU right now has the feeling in their back bone that you should increase defence expenditure, because of what is happening all over the world and with Russia,” Michal told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

“Europe as the wealthiest region of the world has to spend more on defence, security and security.”

Michal hosts the heads of the alliance, called the Joint Expeditionary Force, in Tallinn this week, and will focus discussions on Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, which he described as an “an environmental disaster waiting to happen”.

Estonia has doubled its defence spending since the start of the nearly three-year-old war in Ukraine, up to 3.2 per cent of GDP in 2024.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in July that he would increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, but only when the country could afford it and after a review of defence strategy.

There are several variants of Army Tactical Missile Systems, a long-range missile system that often carries varying amounts of cluster bomblets.

Ukrainian forces used the US-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles for the first time in October 2023, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying the weapons had “proven themselves.”

Ukraine likely has what are known as M39A1 Block IA ATACMS that are guided in part by Global Positioning System and have a range of 40 to 190 miles. They can carry a payload of 300 bomblets. The M39 Block IA were used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Army documents, and were added to the US arsenal in 1997.