Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Russia’s latest attack on Ukraine, a police raid in France, and a nationwide strike in India.
Overnight Attack
Russia fired hundreds of drones at Ukraine early Wednesday in a massive barrage that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said marked a record number of aerial targets in a single day during the war.
The attack involved 728 drones and 13 missiles, Zelensky said in a post on X, and mainly targeted Lutsk—a city in northwestern Ukraine, near the Polish border, that is home to military airfields. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the assault focused on Ukrainian air bases and hit “all the designated targets.” Ukrainian officials said that at least one person was killed in the attack..
“This is a telling attack—and it comes precisely at a time when so many efforts have been made to achieve peace, to establish a ceasefire, and yet only Russia continues to rebuff them all,” Zelensky wrote on X. Beyond Lutsk, damage was also reported in 10 Ukrainian regions, he said.
The Kremlin’s latest assault comes at a tenuous point in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—which has now stretched past its third year—particularly as U.S. support for Kyiv has wavered under U.S. President Donald Trump. Frictions between Trump and Zelensky were on full display in February, when the U.S. leader and Vice President J.D. Vance publicly and repeatedly berated their Ukrainian counterpart in front of news media in an Oval Office meeting.
Trump’s stance on Ukraine now appears to be turning a new page as his frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin has grown and peace talks have faltered. On Monday, U.S. senior envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg accused Russia of stymying peace talks, which the Kremlin denied. “Russia cannot continue to stall for time while it bombs civilian targets in Ukraine,” Kellogg said.
That same day, Trump announced that the United States would resume weapons shipments to Ukraine to help boost the country’s defenses.
“They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard,” he said on Monday. “We’re going to have to send more weapons, defensive weapons, primarily, but they’re getting hit very, very hard. So many people are dying in that mess.”
The White House had announced last week that the Pentagon was pausing some of those shipments, citing the need to conserve the United States’ own weapons stockpiles. The move stunned Kyiv and its European allies, as well as a number of Republicans in Congress.
It also reportedly surprised State Department officials and may have even caught Trump himself off guard. When asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday who had approved the pause, Trump—who was sitting next to his defense secretary in a cabinet meeting at the time—deflected, firing back at Collins: “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
Still, Trump reiterated that the weapons would again start flowing to Kyiv, saying that Putin was “not treating human beings right.” He’s “killing too many people, so we’re sending some defensive weapons to Ukraine,” Trump said.
The White House is now weighing sending Kyiv another Patriot air defense system, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. If that happens, it would be the first time that Trump has authorized sending a major weapons system to Ukraine, outside of what was approved by his predecessor.
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What We’re Following
Police raid. French authorities raided the headquarters of the far-right National Rally party on Wednesday, during which they seized documents and accounting records. The raid was part of an official probe into the party’s campaign finances and aims to investigate allegations of financial impropriety during its 2022 presidential campaign, 2022 legislative campaign, and 2024 European Parliament election campaign, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. No charges have been made, and the party has denied any wrongdoing.
This is not the first such investigation to plague the National Rally, which has surged in popularity in recent years and is now a powerful force in French politics. The party’s former president, Marine Le Pen, was convicted of embezzlement earlier this year and is now prohibited from running for public office for five years. She has appealed the decision.
The party, for its part, condemned the raid. “This deployment of force has only one aim: to put on a show for the news channels, to search the private correspondence of the leading opposition party, to seize all our internal documents,” Jordan Bardella, the party’s president, said in a post on X. “Nothing to do with justice, everything to do with politics.”
Nationwide strike. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s big plans to privatize state-run companies are facing steep resistance. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the country launched a nationwide strike on Wednesday to protest Modi’s privatization bid and other economic policies in a sweeping demonstration spearheaded by a coalition of 10 major trade unions.
The striking workers are calling for higher wages, the end of Modi’s privatization bid, the removal of new labor laws, and efforts to plug vacancies in government jobs, The Associated Press reported, while striking farmers are demanding a higher minimum crop purchase price. New Delhi has not officially responded to the strike.
Repatriated. On Wednesday, South Korea returned to its northern neighbor six North Korean fishermen who accidentally floated into South Korean waters months ago, Seoul’s Unification Ministry said. The fishermen were found in two separate instances—four in May and two in March—after their boats’ engines failed, according to South Korean officials.
The fishermen had clearly expressed interest in returning to North Korea, South Korean officials said. But Pyongyang did not respond to Seoul’s efforts to communicate and coordinate their repatriation, further complicating what is already a delicate and controversial issue in the region. Ultimately, South Korean officials decided to return the fishermen—citing humanitarian reasons—and they were met by a North Korean patrol boat on Wednesday.
Odds and Ends
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may have many strengths, but flipping pancakes is certainly not one of them. At a pancake breakfast in Calgary earlier this month, the Canadian leader struggled to fling the fluffy flapjacks, resulting in some oddly-shaped pancakes. “There are certain things at my job I’m better at,” he quipped. “I’m better at eating pancakes … I’m better at Eggo waffles.”
The post Russia Fires Record Barrage of Drones, Missiles at Ukraine appeared first on Foreign Policy.
