North Korea invited visiting Chinese delegates and Russian artists to a paramilitary parade featuring rocket launchers pulled by trucks and tractors, state media said Saturday, in leader Kim Jong Un’s latest effort to display his ties with Moscow and Beijing in the face of deepening confrontations with Washington.
The event in the capital, Pyongyang, which began Friday night to celebrate North Korea’s 75th founding anniversary that fell on Saturday, came amid expectations that Kim will travel to Russia soon for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin that could focus on North Korean arm sales to refill reserves drained by the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.
While China has sent a delegation led by Vice Premier Liu Guozhong to the North Korea’s anniversary celebrations, Russia sent a military song and dance group.
South Korean media speculated that the lack of Russian government officials at the festivities in Pyongyang could be related to preparations for a summit between Kim and Putin, which Washington expects within the month. According to some US reports, it could happen as early as next week.
Putin is expected to attend an international forum that runs from Sunday to Wednesday in the eastern city of Vladivostok, which was also the site of his first summit with Kim in 2019 and is now seen as a possible venue for their next meeting.
South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing Thursday that North Korea and Russia could also be arranging an unexpected “surprise” route for Kim’s visit to avoid potential venues reported by the media.
North Korea has not confirmed any plans for Kim to visit Russia.
“Whether or not a Putin-Kim summit soon follows, the United States is attempting to deter serious violations of international law by preemptively releasing intelligence,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
The growing cooperation between China, Russia and North Korea, and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to skip the Group of 20 Summit in India, give the appearance of a widening fissure in Asia’s geopolitical landscape, he said.
Still, a major Russia-North Korea arms deal, which would breach numerous international sanctions, should worry Beijing because “association with an emerging pariah state bloc could have negative repercussions for China’s globalized but struggling economy,” Easley said.
KCNA said Kim received letters from Putin and Xi on the anniversary, where both leaders said that their countries’ strengthening ties with North Korea would contribute to the region’s peace and stability.
Saturday’s parade was centered around paramilitary organizations and public security forces protecting Pyongyang, rather than the military units that handle his nuclear-capable weapons systems, which have been the focus of other parades this year.
Millions of North Koreans between the ages of 17 and 60 are listed as Worker-Peasant Red Guards, a national civil defense organization that could be loosely compared to military reserve forces of other countries. Saturday’s marches of the Red Guards included huge columns of motorcycles, anti-tank rockets towed by tractors and civilian-style trucks equipped with multiple rocket launchers, according to KCNA’s text reports and photos.
Photos showed Kim smiling and talking with his young daughter, believed to be named Ju Ae, as they watched the parade from leather chairs set up at Kim’s balcony in Kim Il Sung Square named after his state-founding grandfather.
Since November, Kim Jong Un has been bringing his daughter — believed to be around 10 years old — to major public events involving the country’s military. Analysts say Kim’s showcasing of his daughter is meant to send a statement to the world that he has no intention of voluntarily surrendering the nuclear weapons and missiles he sees as the strongest guarantee of his survival and the extension of his family’s dynastic rule.
State media did not mention whether Kim made a speech during the parade, indicating that he likely didn’t.
KCNA said Kim met with Liu and other Chinese delegates ahead of the parade, where they exchanged views on “further intensifying the multi-faceted coordination and cooperation” between the countries.
Tensions in the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, as the pace of both North Korea’s missile tests and the United States’ combined military exercises with South Korea and Japan have intensified in tit-for-tat.
To counter the deepening security cooperation between Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, Kim has been trying to boost the visibility of his partnerships with Moscow and Beijing as he seeks to break out of diplomatic isolation and have North Korea be a part of a united front against the United States.
In July, Kim invited delegations led by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Li Hongzhong to a huge military parade in Pyongyang, where he rolled out his most powerful weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to target the US mainland.
A day before the parade, Kim took Shoigu on a tour of a domestic arms exhibition, which demonstrated North Korea’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and added to suspicions the North was willing to supply arms to Russia.
In exchange for providing Russia with artillery shells and other ammunition, North Korea could seek badly needed energy and food aid and advanced weapons technologies, analysts say. There are concerns that potential Russian technology transfers would increase the threat posed by Kim’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles that are designed to target the United States and its Asian allies.
The African Union was made a permanent member of the G20, comprising the world’s richest and most powerful countries, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the bloc’s summit in New Delhi on Saturday.
The African Union, a continental body of 55 member states, now has the same status as the European Union – the only regional bloc with a full membership. Its previous designation was “invited international organization”.
Modi, in his opening remarks at the summit, invited the AU, represented by Chairperson Azali Assoumani, to take a seat at the table of G20 leaders as a permanent member.
“We welcome the African Union as a permanent member of the G20 and strongly believe that inclusion of the African Union into the G20 will significantly contribute to addressing the global challenges of our time,” a draft declaration reviewed by Reuters showed earlier.
The move was proposed by Modi in June.
Other issues being decided on at the summit include more loans to developing nations by multilateral institutions, reform of international debt architecture, regulations on cryptocurrency and the impact of geopolitics on food and energy security.
The 38-page draft which was circulated among members left the “geopolitical situation” paragraph blank — reflecting deep division over the war in Ukraine — but 75 other paragraphs indicated broad agreement on issues such as cryptocurrencies and reforms in multilateral development banks.
The G20 previously comprised 19 countries and the European Union, with the members representing around 85% of global GDP, more than 75% of global trade and about two-thirds of the world population.
The US on Friday confirmed it disrupted in April a multi-million-dollar shipment of crude oil by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, seizing more than 980,000 barrels of contraband crude oil that violated US sanctions.
In a sanctions enforcement operation, the US confiscated cargo onboard the Suez Rajan, a Marshall Islands tanker, which was carrying Iranian oil at sea. The vessel was unloaded last month after waiting 2-1/2 months off the coast of Texas to discharge.
The “illicit sale and transport of Iranian oil” violated sanctions targeting Iran, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement that for the first time acknowledged its role.
The Suez Rajan Ltd company pleaded guilty in April and was sentenced by to three years of corporate probation and a fine of almost $2.5 million, according to legal documents.
Empire Navigation, the operating company of the vessel carrying the contraband cargo, agreed to cooperate and transport the Iranian oil to the United States, the DOJ added, calling it the first criminal resolution to such a sanctions-violating sale.
Greece-based Empire Navigation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s a message to every Iranian smuggler that there is an off ramp from the mob,” said Mark Wallace, chief executive of US advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran, which uses satellite images to track tanker movement and first noted that the Suez Rajan had taken on the oil from another tanker.
Iran’s judiciary charged Thursday that a female journalist, who said she had been sexually assaulted in prison, failed to “report” or “provide any evidence” in support of her claims.
Nazila Maroufian, 23, has been arrested repeatedly since she interviewed the father of 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini, whose death in police custody in September last year sparked months of nationwide protests.
The judiciary’s Mizan Online website said Maroufian’s complaint that she was “beaten and assaulted” during her latest stint in Tehran’s Evin prison, had been reported by “hostile media”.
“The investigations carried out on the allegations show that not only had she not provided any reason or evidence for this claim, but until now has not filed any complaint in this regard,” Mizan said, AFP reported.
“Neither Maroufian nor her lawyer filed a complaint in this regard and no report of violence or assault was lodged with prison authorities.”
In his interview with Maroufian, Amini’s father Amjad accused authorities of lying about the circumstances of his daughter’s death.
Maroufian, a Tehran-based journalist from Amini’s hometown of Saqez in Kurdistan province, was first arrested in November, 2022. She was later released.
She was most recently detained on August 30 for not wearing a headscarf in public.
Her latest arrest came around two weeks after she was released on bail after spending more than a month behind bars.
She had posted a photo of herself without a headscarf.
Last year’s demonstrations saw hundreds of people killed, including dozens of security personnel, and thousands arrested in connection with what officials labelled as foreign-instigated “riots”.
Authorities have questioned or arrested more than 90 journalists since the protests, Iranian media reported last month.
The two women journalists who published Amini’s story, Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, have spent almost a year in Evin prison since their arrest last September.
They have been charged with propaganda against the state and conspiring against national security, and are being tried separately behind closed doors in Tehran.
G20 leaders began to descend on New Delhi Friday, hoping to make progress on trade, climate and a host of other global problems despite the Chinese and Russian presidents skipping the summit.
The G20 was conceived in the throes of the 2008 financial crisis as a way of managing the global economy.
China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin will be absent.
As the summit was set to begin, officials had yet to achieve the normally routine task of smoothing over disagreements and finalising a joint communique for leaders to sign off on.
Xi will instead host the leaders of Venezuela and Zambia in Beijing.
Heading to the summit, US President Joe Biden insisted that the meeting would “deliver”, even as markets fretted that a trade war between the world’s two largest economies was poised to escalate.
Severe rainstorms eased but floodwaters were still rising in parts of central Greece Friday, while fire department and military helicopters were plucking people from villages inundated by tons of water and mud that have left six dead, six missing and many people clinging to the roofs of their homes.
Flooding triggered by rainstorms also hit neighboring Bulgaria and Türkiye, killing a total of 18 people in all three countries since the rains began Tuesday, The Associated Press said.
In Greece, severe rainstorms that lashed the country turned streams into raging torrents that burst dams, washed away roads and bridges and hurled cars into the sea. Authorities said some areas received twice the average annual rainfall for Athens in the space of just 12 hours.
Evacuation orders were issued for two areas north of the city of Larissa Friday morning, with authorities sending alerts to cell phones in the area warning that the Pineios River had burst its banks. Parts of Larissa, one of Greece’s largest cities, were already starting to flood.
“The situation is tragic,” Larissa resident Ioanna Gana told Greece’s Open television channel, adding that water levels in her flooded neighborhood were rising “minute by minute.”
Elsewhere, residents of villages left without electricity or drinking water dialed in to Greek television and radio stations, appealing for help and saying people were still trapped on rooftops without food or water.
Between Tuesday and early Friday, the fire department said more than 1,800 people had been rescued and the department had received more than 6,000 calls for help in pumping water from flooded homes and removing fallen trees.
In the Pilion area, residents and tourists were ferried to safety by sea late Thursday as all access roads to some villages were severed. On Thursday alone, a fleet of 10 helicopters airlifted 110 people from the hard-hit areas of Karditsa and Trikala to safety, while dozens more were being rescued by air and boats Friday.
Authorities have deployed swift water rescue specialists and divers as floodwaters rose above 2 meters (6 feet) high in some areas, leaving many houses flooded up to their roofs. Residents of some villages have reported buildings collapsing completely.
The flooding followed on the heels of devastating wildfires that destroyed vast tracts of forest and farmland, burned homes and left more than 20 people dead.
A Russian missile attack Friday on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown in central Ukraine killed one policeman and injured at least 44 others, emergency officials said. It was among multiple Russian attacks across the country overnight, officials said.
Ten buildings were damaged in the attack on Kryvyi Rih. Three of the people who were pulled out of the rubble were in serious condition, according to Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of Internal Affairs. Photos posted by Klymenko on Telegram showed a building on fire and emergency services evacuating the injured, The Associated Press said.
Three people were also injured in a Russian missile attack in the eastern city of Sumy, Klymenko said. Russian forces also struck the Odesa region in the west with drones for the fifth time in a week, regional Gov. Oleh Kiper said. No casualties were reported.
The southern region of Mykolaiv was also targeted, Gov. Vitalii Kim said on Telegram.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said one person was wounded in a Russian missile attack on Zaporizhzhia city in southern Ukraine.
Also on Friday, a funeral was being held for an 18-year-old who was among 16 people killed Wednesday in a Russian attack on a market in Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The attack, which wounded 33 others, turned the market into a fiery, blackened ruin and overshadowed a two-day visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken aimed at assessing Ukraine’s 3-month-old counteroffensive and signaling continued US support with the announcement of an additional $1 billion in aid.
Britain announced Friday it will host a global food security summit in November in response to Russia’s withdrawal of a Black Sea grain deal and attacks on Ukraine’s grain supply.
The announcement came as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrived in India for a Group of 20 summit, where he hopes to marshal international resources to counteract the war’s impact on the global food supply.
Sunak’s government said Royal Air Force aircraft will fly over the Black Sea as part of efforts to deter Russia from striking cargo ships transporting grain from Ukraine.
“We will use our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to monitor Russian activity in the Black Sea, call out Russia if we see warning signs that they are preparing attacks on civilian shipping or infrastructure in the Black Sea, and attribute attacks to prevent false-flag claims that seek to deflect blame from Russia,” the UK government said.
Russia “must stop” its blockade of Ukrainian seaports after pulling out of a United Nations and Turkey-mediated deal to ensure grain shipments, European Council president Charles Michel said Friday.
“It’s frankly scandalous that Russia, after having terminated the Black Sea grain initiative, is blocking and attacking Ukrainian ports. This must stop,” Michel told reporters in India’s capital New Delhi ahead of a G20 summit.
Russia pulled out of the grain agreement in July after claiming that it had failed to fulfil the goal of relieving hunger in Africa, said AFP.
Tensions have built in the region since, with Russia mounting attacks on Ukrainian export hubs and Kyiv’s forces targeting Moscow’s naval ports and warships.
The Kremlin has since asked Turkey to help Russia export its grain to African countries without any involvement from Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin said Monday that Moscow is just weeks away from supplying free grain to six African countries.
“The Kremlin’s offer of one million tons of grain to Africa is absolutely cynical,” Michel said.
“Ships with grains need to have safe access to the Black Sea,” he said, noting that the UN initiative had initially delivered 32 million tons to the market, “especially to developing countries”.
Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of grain and seed oil.
Last year’s grain agreement helped push down global food prices and provide Ukraine with an important source of revenue to fight the war.
Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine’s shipping infrastructure.
“Over 250 million people face acute food insecurity worldwide, and by deliberately attacking Ukraine’s seaports, the Kremlin is depriving them of the food they desperately need,” Michel added.
‘Diplomatic exile’
Putin is not attending — or even planning to make a video address at — the G20 in India, with relations between Moscow and many members of the bloc fraught over the war in Ukraine.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will take Putin’s place at the summit this weekend.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in a statement released ahead of his travel to India for the meeting, condemned Putin’s actions in Ukraine and said London would hold a summit in November focused on food security and malnutrition.
“Once again, Vladimir Putin is failing to show his face at the G20. He is the architect of his own diplomatic exile, isolating himself in his presidential palace and blocking out criticism and reality”, Sunak said.
“The rest of the G20, meanwhile, are demonstrating that we will turn up and work together to pick up the pieces of Putin’s destruction,” he added.
“That starts with dealing with the terrible global consequences of Putin’s stranglehold over the most fundamental resources, including his blockade of and attacks on Ukrainian grain.”
British police said that an ex-soldier accused of spying for Iran escaped from a London prison on Wednesday.
Daniel Khalife is accused of collecting information “directly or indirectly useful to an enemy,” according to the BBC.
The BBC reported that the state Khalife is accused of gathering information for is Iran.
His trial had been set to begin in November.
Khalife, 21, escaped from the Wandsworth prison in southern London on Wednesday at 8:00 a.m.
A major manhunt is underway to track him down, with enhanced security checks at ports and airports which have led to delays for passengers.
Perry Benton says he believes Khalife “would have carefully planned this” and there are a number of ways he could have fled the country, including by trains and via ports.
Khalife appeared in court in London on January 28 and was remanded in custody over two incidents at the Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Stafford, central England, near the army barracks where he lived.
Accusations against Khalife that arose in 2021 include attempting “to elicit information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.
He was also charged with planting a hoax bomb at the Royal Air Force base in Stafford, central England, on 2 January this year.
The public was warned not to approach him but to call the police immediately.
“We have no information which indicates, nor any reason to believe that Khalife poses a threat to the wider public,” said Dominic Murphy, the head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.
North Korea has launched a newly built “tactical nuclear attack submarine” capable of carrying out an underwater nuclear attack that would further strengthen the state nuclear deterrence, the country’s media said Friday.
The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the launching ceremony for the submarine, held last Wednesday, was attended by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
“The submarine-launching ceremony heralded the beginning of a new chapter for bolstering up the naval force of North Korea and made clearer the steadfast will of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) and the government to further strengthen the state nuclear deterrence both in quality and quantity and by leaps and bounds for regional and global peace and security,” the KCNA said.
Iran’s limited steps to slow its buildup of near-weapons-grade uranium may help ease US-Iranian tensions but do not signify progress toward a wider nuclear deal before the 2024 US elections, say analysts.
According to UN nuclear watchdog reports seen by Reuters, Iran has reduced the rate at which it is making uranium enriched up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% that is weapons grade, and has diluted a small fraction of its 60% stockpile.
But that stockpile continues to grow. Iran now has nearly enough uranium enriched to 60%, if refined further, for three nuclear bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) theoretical definition. It also has enough uranium enriched to a lower level to make even more bombs.
Iran has also failed to resolve IAEA concerns about uranium traces found at two undeclared sites or to make progress on restoring monitoring cameras despite long-standing pressure from the IAEA and Western powers to do so.
According to Reuters, non proliferation analysts say Iran’s nuclear slowdown may be enough for the United States and Iran to keep exploring what they describe as “understandings” – which Washington has never acknowledged – to lower tensions over nuclear and other issues.
That does not necessarily imply any real curbs to Iran’s nuclear program ahead of the Nov. 5, 2024 US election, they said, but it may help US President Joe Biden avoid a politically damaging crisis with Iran as he seeks re-election.
“The slowdown of the 60% accumulation is a clear sign Tehran is open to advancing the de-escalatory ‘understandings’ with Washington,” said Henry Rome of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Rome said the slowdown and expectations of a US-Iranian prisoner exchange this month, set “the stage for additional diplomacy this fall around the nuclear program, albeit without the goal of reaching a new deal until after the US presidential elections.
“For Washington, there is probably a low bar for what Iran needed to do for the purposes of ‘de-escalation,'” he added. “Iran has likely crossed that bar.”
Biden’s main objective appears to be keeping a lid on tensions, which range from Tehran’s nuclear program to attacks by Iranian-backed militias on US interests in the Middle East.
“Iran has taken its foot off the gas in some areas but it’s not pumping the brakes on the nuclear program,” analyst Eric Brewer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative said of Iran’s recent steps, calling them “de-escalation lite.”
“The nonproliferation value of the steps Iran took is relatively small, but the point of the (US) de-escalation policy isn’t to solve the nuclear program right now but to build in a political cushion and avoid a crisis,” he said.
“Until next year’s election, it seems the administration wants calm and is willing to pay the price in vast enrichment of the Iranian regime,” said Elliott Abrams, former US President Donald Trump’s special representative for Iran now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Abrams was alluding to rising Iranian oil exports despite US sanctions and the transfer of $6 billion in Iranian funds from South Korea to Qatar as part of the prisoner exchange.
While the Biden administration has argued that the money is going from one restricted account to another and can only be spent for humanitarian purposes, it seems clear Iran will have greater access to them in Qatar than it did in South Korea.
The State Department has danced around whether it has struck any ‘understandings’ with Iran in part because an admission that it has cut a deal with Tehran over the Iranian nuclear program could by law trigger a US congressional review.
A State Department spokesman on Tuesday said he had nothing to add beyond mid-August comments in which the department denied any US-Iran nuclear pact and did not rule out the possibility of unwritten understandings.
After taking office in January 2021, Biden tried to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal under which Iran had restricted its nuclear program in return for relief from US, European Union (EU) and UN sanctions.
Trump, a Republican, reneged on that deal in 2018, arguing it was too generous to Tehran, and restored broad US economic sanctions against Iran.
Efforts to revive that deal appeared to die about a year ago, when diplomats say Iran rejected what EU mediators called their final offer.
Diplomats regard that deal as beyond resurrection because of Iran’s advances – notably in running advanced centrifuges that have a much bigger output – but analysts said there may be room for more serious nuclear talks after the US elections.
Asked why Iran slowed its program, a Western diplomat said “I think that’s part of discussions that they’ve been having with the US and it’s part of the wider deal, the non-deal deal.”
“It’s better than nothing, but I would hardly count it as a massive bit of progress,” he added.
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