Category: International

Russia used the powerful hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile during a mass drone and missile attack on Kyiv on Sunday that killed at least two people, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday, marking the third time the weapon has been used in the four-year war.

The intense aerial assault damaged buildings across the Ukrainian capital, including near government offices, residential buildings, schools and a market, Ukrainian authorities said. At least 83 people were wounded in the attack.

Air raid sirens blared through the night as smoke billowed across the city from strikes. Associated Press reporters heard powerful explosions near the city center and close to government buildings.

The attack included 600 strike drones and 90 air, sea and ground-launched missiles, according to Ukraine’s Air Force. Ukrainian air defenses destroyed and jammed 549 drones and 55 missiles. Around 19 missiles failed to reach targets, the Air Force said.

Ferit Hoxha, Albania’s foreign minister, reported that the residence of the Albanian ambassador to Ukraine was hit during the attack, denouncing it as “unacceptable” and a “grave escalation”.

The Oreshnik, which is capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads, struck the city of Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv region, Zelenskyy said on Telegram.

Russia had vowed to strike back for an attack Friday

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Sunday confirmed the weapon’s use, as well as other missile types, to strike Ukrainian “military command and control facilities,” air bases and military industrial enterprises. The ministry added the attack was retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on “civilian facilities on Russian territory,” without giving detail.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday denounced a drone strike on a college dormitory in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, which Moscow blamed on Kyiv. He said there were no military or law enforcement facilities near the college. Putin said he ordered the Russian military to retaliate.

The death toll from that strike had risen to 21, Russian authorities said late Saturday. They said 42 other people had been wounded in the attack the previous night. The Kremlin-installed authorities of the Luhansk region announced two days of mourning for the victims.

At a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the strike, held at the request of Russia, Ukrainian Ambassador Andrii Melnyk denied his Russian counterpart’s accusations of war crimes, calling them a “pure propaganda show” and asserting that the May 22 operations “exclusively targeted the Russian war machine.”

Kyiv’s European allies, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz, condemned the Russian strikes and use of the Oreshnik in statements published on Sunday. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said top diplomats from EU states will meet within days to “discuss how to dial up the international pressure on Russia.”

Ukraine struggles to down all ballistic missiles

Zelenskyy said not all the ballistic missiles were intercepted and that most of the strikes hit Kyiv, the primary target of the attack.

The apparent interception failures underscored Ukraine’s chronic shortage of air defense missiles capable of downing ballistic missiles. Kyiv relies heavily on U.S. Patriot air defense systems to intercept such weapons, but interceptors remain in short supply and are among Ukraine’s most urgent requests to its Western partners.

Developing a domestically produced alternative has become a top priority for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, though doing so will require time and funding.

Fires rage into the morning in Kyiv after attack

Damage was recorded in 50 locations across several districts of the capital, including residential buildings, shopping centers and schools, Ukraine’s emergency service said in a Telegram post. Police department buildings were also damaged, it said.

Fires continued to rage into the morning, complicating rescue efforts as buildings collapsed from the blasts.

“It was a terrible night, and there had never been anything like it in the entire war,” said Kyiv resident Svitlana Onofryichuk, 55, who had worked in the market that was damaged for 22 years.

“I am very sorry that I have to say goodbye to Kyiv now, I am not staying there anymore, there is no possibility,” she added. “My job is gone, everything is gone, everything has burned down.”

Yevhen Zosin, 74, a Kyiv resident who witnessed the attack, said the moment he heard the explosion he rushed to grab his dog.

“Then there was another explosion and she and I were thrown back like a pin by the shock wave. We both survived, she and I. My apartment was blown to pieces,” he said.

In Kyiv’s Shevchenko district, a five-story residential building was hit, which caused a fire, and one person was killed, Ukraine’s state emergency service reported.

A school building was damaged by an attack while people sheltered inside, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Local authorities reported supermarkets and warehouses across the city also were damaged.

Multiple communities recorded damage throughout the Kyiv region, according to Mykola Kalashnyk, who heads the regional administration.

Elsewhere, a Ukrainian drone killed a civilian in the Russian town of Grayvoron, in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, local authorities reported on Sunday morning.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces shot down or jammed 33 Ukrainian drones overnight into Sunday, including over the Moscow region, western and southwestern Russia, and Russian-occupied Crimea.

—Associated Press writer John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

In the 2023-26 cycle, the budget for competitions rose from US$2.45 billion to US$5.62 billion, about a 130 per cent increase, while the budget for development increased only 44 per cent, and its share of budgeted revenues dropped from 44 per cent to 36 per cent.

FIFA could argue that maximum revenue is needed to cover costs of future events and fund football development, but that is not the whole story told by FIFA’s 2027-2030 budget.

Total additional costs are set at around US$3 billion, with the main driver being competition and events. Crucially, for the 2019-2022 cycle, development was 44 per cent of the costs; for 2023-2026, it dropped to 36 per cent of the costs; and for the 2027-2030 cycle, it is budgeted to further decrease to 29 per cent of costs. 

Undoubtedly, these numbers will change, but they currently do not signal that FIFA is going to use its additional ticketing revenue to support broader football-related or social change investments.

That is perhaps not surprising, as FIFA has faced governance challenges in the past, including issues of corruption, bribery and fraud, plus accounting practices that critics say lack transparency. Reforms have attempted to mitigate those problems, and FIFA has started programmes like the FIFA Foundation, whose stated purpose is to use football to improve people’s lives.

Given FIFA’s background, surplus and reserves, however, the biggest question should be whether FIFA’s financial resources are being effectively used to achieve its objectives. FIFA has described its purpose with phrases like “develop the game, touch the world and build a better future”. But to me, its budgets suggest it is focused primarily on the first.

Richard Sheehan is a Professor Emeritus of Business and Economics at the University of Notre Dame. This article first appeared in the Conversation.

• Joint US-Nigeria airstrikes killed at least 175 Islamic State fighters, including the group’s global second-in-command.
• Increased US military involvement in Nigeria has raised questions about transparency regarding the exact role of American troops.
• Analysts argue that while airstrikes are effective in the short term, long-term solutions must address recruitment and the underlying causes of extremism.

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Joint airstrikes by the US and Nigeria have killed at least 175 fighters of the so-called Islamic State (IS) terror group in Nigeria’s northeast.

The jihadist group’s global second-in-command was among those killed, according to the US Africa Command (AFRICOM).

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu was quick to thank US President Donald Trump for his leadership and unwavering support, saying he looked forward to more such “decisive strikes against terrorist enclaves”.

AFRICOM commander General Dagvin Anderson told a Congressional hearing in Washington that Nigeria had been “instrumental throughout the last several months, developing the target, helping us with the intelligence, and providing support” as per the remit of the cooperation between the two countries, which dates back almost 20 years.

However, in recent months, under the initiative of Tinubu, the US involvement in Nigeria, especially its ongoing security affairs, has increased, raising questions about the depth, scale and nature of the current arrangement.

Breaking down the US-Nigeria military partnership 

Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa in Nigeria, regards the present US engagement critically, stressing that the presence of US troops in Nigeria was supposed to be “limited to intelligence-gathering support, [and] training, ruling out combat operations for the troops”.

“But with reports, especially in the US media, saying that US troops were actually deployed for this purpose, this clearly shows that the Nigerian government has not been transparent with regard to the exact roles that the US troops will be playing.”

DW reporter Jamiu Abiodun Sulaiman says that “seeing the United States with its military might, spotlighting the Islamic State in the north, is a welcome development.

“But when you look deeper, [the mood] is kind of divided because there are still concerns because of the issue that the Nigerian government has not been transparent about its partnership with the US,” Sulaiman said, conceding that “[t]he broader US-Nigeria partnership leaves more questions than answers, but a lot of people still believe that this is going to – to some extent – decimate IS in the northeast.”

AFRICOM: An extension of the US’s war on terror

According to the United Nations (UN), more than 40 000 people have been killed and over two million others displaced since the Boko Haram Islamist extremist insurgency began in 2009.

This insurgency has since evolved and now includes Boko Haram’s offshoot and rival, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

The US has been offering help to the Nigerian military, mainly within the framework of AFRICOM, established in 2008, with the intention of fighting terrorism throughout much of Africa.

AFRICOM says its mission focuses on supporting African partner forces through military training, intelligence cooperation, logistics and regional security operations aimed at counterterrorism and stability.

However, despite AFRICOM’s involvement, there has been little improvement on the ground in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s military ‘stretched thin’ between multiple fronts

In early 2026, the United States expanded its military presence in Nigeria following joint counterterrorism operations and airstrikes carried out in late 2025.

While Washington described the deployment as focused on training, intelligence-sharing and advisory support, recent joint operations suggest US involvement in Nigeria’s security operations has become more active and operationally significant.

“The US, as a partner, goes a long way in nipping these issues in the bud. Nigeria alone cannot actually do it,” DW’s Sulaiman highlights.

“The Nigerian military is quite stretched thin – in the sense that we have terrorism, or Boko Haram, in the northeast, we have criminal gangs, bandits in the northwest.”

The upsurge in violence prompted the Nigerian President Bola Tinubu to declare a nationwide state of emergency in 2025 and to seek the help of US President Donald Trump.

Security analyst Samuel argues that these US-led airstrikes serve their purpose, stressing, however, that they cannot go on indefinitely.

“Sustained military operations [are] needed against these violent, extremist groups, but in the long-term, it is not sustainable because the more you rely on operations like this, the more likely [it is] that civilians will get caught [in crossfire],” he told DW.

Risk of civilian casualties

“With the US troops participating in any strike or any attack, you cannot rule out civilian casualties simply because of the presence of US troops.”

It is also unclear whether US forces’ targeting the proverbial head of the snake will actually lead to long-term change.

This week’s attacks killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, a major IS group leader described by the Nigerian military as the “most active terrorist” in the world, in addition to several other senior terrorist figures; US President Trump even went as far as referring to the IS figure as the jihadist organisation’s “second in command”.

READ | Nigeria airstrike kills 100 at market, Amnesty says

“The joint strikes have resulted in the destruction of ISIS checkpoints, weapons caches, logistical hubs, military equipment and financial networks used to sustain terrorist operations,” the military added in an official statement.

But Samuel believes that this alone is not enough: “There’s a need to look at how we found ourselves in this situation; [at] issues like [IS] recruitment. Because while airstrikes or military operations have been killing terrorists, including high-profile terrorists, but groups like Boko Haram have very elaborate recruitment processes,” Samuel stressed, adding that the group has a recruitment pool of fighters, including child soldiers.

He made the statement against the backdrop of attempts to reintegrate former terror group fighters back into society.

“So the long-term strategy should be how to prevent this recruitment.”

This article was originally published on dw.com.

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US President Donald Trump said Thursday he was sending 5,000 troops to Poland, after Washington said an earlier planned deployment had been called off amid pressure on Europe to fend for itself.

Trump said the move was based on his relationship with Poland’s president Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist ally whom he said he was “proud to endorse” in elections that Nawrocki won last year.

“I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland,” Trump said on his Truth Social network.

Trump did not give further details, but his comments appeared to refer to a deployment of several thousand US troops to Poland whose fate has been unclear for several days.

Read more‘Disposable spies’: Poland records unprecedented number of Russian espionage cases

Last week US officials said the deployment of 4,000 US forces to Poland had been scrapped, the latest move by Trump’s administration to slash troop numbers and punish NATO allies for not helping with the Iran war.

Then Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that the deployment of the 4,000 troops had been delayed, not canceled, adding that Trump had not made a “final determination.”

Vance added however that Europe had to stand on its “own two feet,” as Trump continues his push to get European allies to take more of the burden for their defense.

Trump has appeared determined to punish allies who have failed to back the Middle East war or contribute to a peacekeeping force in the crucial Strait of Hormuz waterway, which Iran has effectively closed.

The Pentagon announced at the beginning of May that Washington would pull 5,000 troops from Germany after Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Iran was “humiliating” the United States at the negotiating table.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)