Leaders of the United States, South Korea, Japan and allied countries convened an emergency meeting during an Asian summit on Friday and condemned North Korea’s firing of a suspected intercontinental ballistic missile, calling for a united response.

The missile, which landed just 200 kilometres (130 miles) off Japan, was capable of reaching the mainland United States, Japanese officials said.

Meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Bangkok, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris called the launch a “brazen violation” of multiple U.N. resolutions and said North Korea’s actions were destablising for security in the region.

South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said the North’s activities were illegal and “will never be tolerated”, calling for a united front and a resolute response.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said such launches were occurring with “unprecedented high frequency” lately.

“There is the possibly that North Korea will launch further missiles,” he warned.

The incident came a day after a smaller missile launch by the North and its warning of “fiercer military responses” to the U.S. boosting its regional security presence.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said North Korea’s move needed to be condemned “by all regions around the world”, while Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese said the missile launches were “reckless actions”.

“We stand with the world, and indeed with our allies, in opposing and condemning this action in the strongest possible terms,” Albanese said.

“And we stand ready to be part of a global response to this.”

New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern said she acknowledged the “anxiety, the deep concern, the security threat” felt in Japan and South Korea.

To Republicans, Pelosi has long taken on a kind of mythic malice. But progressives, too, were not enamored of her

As the new House Republican majority stumbles into power, with all the chaotic, embittered bumbling of a rich man’s son who can only seem to fail upwards, another, peculiar kind of political transition is taking place: Nancy Pelosi, 82, is leaving the House speakership, almost certainly for the last time.

Perhaps no individual has come to symbolize the Democrats more to the people who do not like the party. To Republicans, Pelosi has long taken on a kind of mythic malice. To the Fox-watching white male, Pelosi symbolizes liberal elitism, a vague but totalizing specter of corruption, and that particular kind of liberal decadence that can be evoked by the name of the city that makes up nearly all of her longtime congressional district: San Francisco. She’s a woman in power, and she’s long been supportive of gay rights, and she opposed the Iraq war. She’s been a reliable opponent of conservatives’ favorite culture war crusades: she supports gun control and opposes Confederate statues. In an association facilitated by misogyny, her very face is a shorthand for liberal extremism, a visual code that denotes secularism, taxation and frightening new pronouns.

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Russia said on Friday it was strengthening positions on the Crimean peninsula, annexed from Ukraine in 2014, as Kyiv’s forces reclaim territory in the neighbouring Kherson region.

“Fortification work is being carried out on the territory of Crimea under my control with the aim of guaranteeing the security of all Crimeans,” the Moscow-appointed governor of the region, Sergei Aksyonov, said on social media.

Russia annexed Crimea in the wake of nationwide pro-democracy demonstrations that led to the ouster of Ukraine’s former Kremlin-friendly president.

It was used as a launching pad in February for what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Aksyonov said that the fortification work was being carried out even though the military and law enforcement were already taking measures.

Ukraine forces in recent months have been pushing a counter-offensive in the south of the country and last week reclaimed Kherson, the capital of the Ukrainian region bordering Crimea.

Russia claimed to have also annexed that region along with three more in September, vowing to defend them with all available military means.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has said his forces intend to recapture the peninsula, too.

There have been several explosions at or near Russian military installations in Crimea since February, including a coordinated drone attack on a key Russian naval port at Sevastopol.

In October, the Kerch bridge connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland was partially destroyed in an attack attributed to Ukraine by Moscow.

The post Russia Says “Fortifying” Annexed Crimean Peninsula appeared first on Kyiv Post.

Several Asia-Pacific leaders gathered for an economic summit in the Thai capital broke away from their meeting on Friday to condemn North Korea after it test fired an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Separately, police fired rubber bullets to disperse anti-government protesters in Bangkok as the host of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, was opening the conference.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris called an emergency gathering of leaders from Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada and New Zealand on the sidelines of the summit after North Korea carried out the missile test just an hour before its inauguration.

“This conduct by North Korea most recently is a brazen violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions,” she said at the meeting. “It destabilises security in the region, and unnecessarily raises tensions.

Thailand’s Prayuth earlier urged participants at the summit to seek sustainable growth and development after economic and social challenges from COVID, climate change and geopolitical rivalries.

“We can no longer live like we did. We need to adjust our perspective, ways of life and ways of doing business,” he said to an audience that included Harris and China’s President Xi Jinping.

Established to promote economic integration, APEC groups 21 economies that account for 38% of the global population, and 62% of gross domestic product and 48% of trade.

Prayuth did not refer to North Korea’s missile, which Japanese officials said landed just 200 km (130 miles) off Japan and had sufficient range to reach the mainland of the United States.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is in Bangkok for the APEC meeting, told reporters that North Korea had “repeated its provocations with unprecedented frequency”.

The APEC gathering is the third summit in the region in the past week. A Southeast Asian summit that included China, Japan and the United States was held in Cambodia while the Group of 20 (G20) nations met on the Indonesian island of Bali.

The earlier meetings were dominated by the war in Ukraine as well as tensions over Taiwan and the Korean peninsula.

Campaigners are keen to see leaders address food insecurity, surging inflation, climate change and human rights.

A reminder of grassroots demands came as Thai pro-democracy protesters clashed with police about 10 km (6 miles) from the central Bangkok summit venue.

Videos on social media showed protesters trying to overturn a police car, throwing projectiles and charging at police, while officers in riot gear advanced on them with shields and beat them back with batons.

An official in charge of security for the summit said police fired rubber bullets to disperse about 350 anti-government protesters. Police said they arrested 10 people.

French President Emmanuel Macron, a special guest at the summit, urged APEC leaders to re-embrace international rules and multilateralism for global peace and stability.

The Russian war in Ukraine was “an aggression against international rules”, he said, and countries should pursue inclusive, sustainable development to address inequality and instability.

“We have to reform the DNA of our economies. All have accepted capitalism and trade but we have to make it more inclusive and sustainable,” he said.

At the G20 meeting in Indonesia, countries unanimously adopted a declaration saying most members condemned the Ukraine war, but that also acknowledged some countries saw the conflict differently.

Russia is a member of both G20 and APEC but President Vladimir Putin has stayed away from the summits. First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov is representing him at APEC.

Xi, warning against Cold War tensions in a region that is a focus for competition between Beijing and Washington, said on Thursday the Asia-Pacific was no one’s backyard and should not become an arena of big power rivalry,

“No attempt to wage a new cold war will ever be allowed by the people or by our times,” Xi said in remarks at a business event linked to the summit.

Relations between the world’s two largest economies have been strained in recent years over issues like tariffs, Taiwan, intellectual property, the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and disputes over the South China Sea.

In a move likely to be seen by China as provocative, a U.S. official said Harris would visit the Philippine islands of Palawan on the edge of the disputed South China Sea on Tuesday.

The trip will make Harris the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the island chain adjacent to the Spratly Islands. China has dredged the sea floor to build harbours and airstrips on the Spratlys, parts of which are also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

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The life of Viktor Bout reads like a spy thriller.

Russia wants the jailed arms dealer back in Moscow and is discussing a prisoner swap with the United States that could see him exchanged for Americans imprisoned in Russia including basketball star Brittney Griner.

Variously dubbed “the merchant of death” and “the sanctions buster” for his ability to get around arms embargoes, Bout, 55, was one of the world’s most wanted men prior to his 2008 arrest on multiple charges related to arms trafficking.

For almost two decades, Bout became the world’s most notorious arms dealer, selling weaponry to rogue states, rebel groups and murderous warlords in Africa, Asia and South America.

His notoriety was such that his life helped inspire a Hollywood film, 2005’s Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer loosely based on Bout.

Even so, Bout’s origins remained shrouded in mystery. Biographies generally agree that he was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, then the capital of Soviet Tajikistan, close to the border with Afghanistan.

A gifted linguist, who later used his reported command of English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Persian to build his international arms empire, Bout reportedly attended the Dushanbe Esperanto club as a young boy, becoming fluent in the artificial language.

A stint in the Soviet army followed, where Bout has said he achieved the rank of lieutenant, serving as a military translator including in Angola, a country that would later become central to his business.

Bout’s big breakthrough came in the days after the 1989-91 collapse of the Communist bloc, cashing in on a sudden glut of discarded Soviet era weaponry to fuel a series of fratricidal civil wars in Africa, Asia and beyond.

With the Soviet Union’s vast air fleet disintegrating, Bout was able to acquire a squadron of around 60 old Soviet military aircraft based out of the United Arab Emirates, by which he could supply his products around the world.

A 2007 biography entitled “Merchant of Death: Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible” by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun reported several details of Bout’s murky trade. Reuters could not independently verify its description.

From a base in the Gulf emirate of Sharjah, he interwove his arms trafficking empire with a seemingly innocuous logistics business, always insisting when queried that he was a legitimate entrepreneur with respectable clients and no case to answer.

Even so, Bout, who first appeared on the CIA’s radar amid reports of a shadowy Russian citizen trading arms in Africa, was by the turn of the millennium one of the most wanted men in the world.

But Bout, whose clients included rebel groups and militias from Congo to Angola and Liberia, had little in the way of firm ideology, tending to place business above politics.

In Afghanistan, he variously sold guns to Islamist Taliban insurgents and their foes in the pro-Western Northern Alliance, according to “Merchant of Death”.

It said Bout supplied guns to former Liberian President and warlord Charles Taylor, now serving a 50-year prison term for murder, rape and terrorism, to various Congolese factions, and to Philippine Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf.

The end only came in 2008, after an elaborate sting operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration saw Bout tracked across multiple countries to a luxury hotel in Bangkok.

During a spectacular sting operation, Bout was caught on camera agreeing to sell undercover U.S. agents posing as representatives of Colombia’s leftist FARC guerrillas 100 surface-to-air missiles, which they would use to kill U.S. troops. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested by Thai police.

After over two years of diplomatic wrangling in which Russia loudly insisted that Bout was innocent and his case politically charged, Bout was extradited to the United States, where he faced a raft of charges, including conspiracy to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill Americans, and money laundering.

Bout was tried on the charges related to FARC, which he denied, and in 2012 was convicted and sentenced by a court in Manhattan to 25 years in prison, the minimum sentence possible.

Ever since, the Russian state has been keen to get him back.

On Aug. 5, the United States and Russia said they were ready to discuss a prisoner swap, a day after basketball star Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison for bringing cannabis-infused vape cartridges into Russia. read more read more

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Friday that it hopes a possible swap including Bout could be agreed.

“Viktor Bout is among those who are being discussed, and we certainly count on a positive result,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Sources familiar with the situation told Reuters that Washington had offered to exchange Bout for Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who in 2020 was sentenced to 16 years in jail for spying. read more

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said Bout’s extradition from Thailand was “a glaring injustice” and suggested he was innocent.

Comments from a 2012 interview with the judge who presided over Bout’s New York City trial that his 25-year sentence was “excessive” have occasionally been seized on by Russian media making the case for Bout’s return home.

Earlier this year, speculation rose that Bout was set to be exchanged for Trevor Reed, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran jailed in Russia on assault charges. Reed was ultimately freed in return for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot jailed in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

For some experts, the Russian state’s continued interest in Bout, plus his skills and connections in the international arms trade, hint strongly at Russian intelligence ties.

In interviews, Bout has said he attended Moscow’s Military Institute of Foreign Languages, which serves as a training ground for military intelligence officers.

“Bout was almost certainly a GRU agent, or at least a GRU asset,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, referring to Russia’s military intelligence service.

“His case has become totemic for the Russian intelligence services, who are keen to show that they don’t abandon their own people,” Galeotti added.

According to Christopher Miller, a journalist who has corresponded with neo-Nazis imprisoned along with Bout at United States Penitentiary Marion in Illinois, the former arms dealer keeps a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his cell and says he does not believe Ukraine should exist as a state.

Reached by Reuters over the WhatsApp messaging service, Bout’s wife Alla, who lives in St Petersburg, said: “We very much hope that everything will be resolved and an agreement will be reached.

“All that’s left to do is to pray,” she added.

Russia is not ruling out further high-level meetings with the United States on “strategic stability”, Moscow’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Friday, as an upcoming meeting between the two powers in Cairo on nuclear proliferation nears.

“If the Americans show interest and readiness, we will not refuse,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying.

Strategic stability is a term Russia and the United States, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, use to mean reducing the risk of nuclear war.

Russian and the U.S. officials are expected to meet soon in the Egyptian capital of Cairo from Nov. 29 to Dec. 6 to discuss the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty.

However, Ryabkov earlier indicated there was nothing to talk about with the U.S. on the subject of Ukraine.

“No, there is simply nothing to talk about with them on Ukraine. There can simply be no dialogue, let alone negotiations, given the radical opposing positions,” he was quoted by Interfax as saying earlier.

There is no talk of a summit between President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.