Nation and World Glance
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to sell Ukraine 210 anti-tank missiles to help it defend its territory from Russia, in a major escalation of U.S. lethal assistance to Ukraine’s military.
The State Department is telling Congress it plans to approve the $47 million sale. Congress has 30 days to block the sale but is not expected to do so. Lawmakers from both parties have long pushed government to provide the weapons.
The move comes the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his country has developed new nuclear weapons he claims can’t be intercepted by an enemy.
In its notice to Congress, the State Department says it plans to sell 37 command launch units along with the 210 American-made Javelin missiles. The missiles will come from existing U.S. Army stockpiles.
UN official: Pauses in Syria suburb unilateral, ‘not enough’
BEIRUT — The five-hour daily pauses in fighting in Syria’s embattled eastern suburbs of the capital Damascus — laid out under a “unilateral” plan by Russia — are not enough to take in aid or evacuate civilians, a top U.N. aid official said Thursday.
Jan Egeland also said the U.N. Security Council resolution over the weekend calling for a 30-day cease-fire has done little to improve the situation in the rebel-held region east of Damascus.
“Since it was adopted, it did not get better — it got worse,” he said.
Eastern Ghouta was among the first areas to rise up against President Bashar Assad’s rule in 2011. The area was taken over by rebels as unrest turned into an armed insurgency, then a full-blown civil war now seven years old.
Egeland’s comments came after the Russian military accused Syria’s rebels of shelling a humanitarian corridor that Moscow set up with the Syrian government, offering residents of Damascus’ besieged eastern suburbs a way out of the embattled enclave.
Later on Thursday, Maj.Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, chief of the Russian center for reconciliation of conflicting sides in Syria, said militants in Ghouta were carrying out public executions of people who want to leave the area. He said “the hotline of the Russian reconciliation center has begun receiving calls about public executions of those who are trying to flee from the enclave.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a five-hour daily humanitarian pause to allow civilians to exit the region. The daily pauses began on Tuesday but so far, no humanitarian aid has gone in — and no civilians have left the area, except for an elderly Pakistani man and his wife who were evacuated from the town of Douma Thursday.