Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Thursday that allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles to strike inside Russia would be seen by Moscow as NATO’s direct entry into the war.

“This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,” he said.

According to the Russian president, “the Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West” without Western assistance in targeting.

The United States already does provide intelligence to Ukraine, and has previously assisted in the targeting, although not with the long-range systems currently being considered.

According to Center for New American Security Senior Fellow Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn, there may also be other intelligence resources available to Ukrainian forces, including commercial satellite imagery, depending on the target.

In a press conference on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated that, as part of continuing military assistance to Ukraine, the United States provides intelligence to Ukrainian forces, but declined to answer whether the US would increase its intelligence sharing.

The United States first provided Ukraine with long-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles, which have a maximum range of approxmiately 186 miles, in October of 2023. Kyiv has long advocated its backers to allow the use of weapons systems that would provide a longer reach inside Russian territory.

Michael Callahan, Natasha Bertrand, and Oren Liebermann contributed reporting.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Brigadier General Yossi Sariel, who led its 8200 intelligence unit, has informed them he will “conclude his role in the near future.”

The country’s public broadcaster Kan and several other media outlets have published excerpts of his resignation letter stating he feels personally responsible for not preventing Hamas from launching the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

“On October 7th at 06:29 I did not fulfill the task as I expected of myself, those at my command and commanders expected me and the citizens of the state I love so much,” the letter said, according to Kan.

“Today, in accordance with the state of the war, the processes of the gathering ranks and the building of the unit’s resilience, and after the completion of the initial investigative processes, I request to fulfill my personal responsibility as the commander of the unit on October 7 and at a time to be determined by my commanders to pass the baton to the next shift,” Kan reported Thursday.

Shortly after the attack, a number of top defense and security officials came forward to take responsibility, to some extent, for missteps that led to Hamas’ attack on Israel, which left 1,200 people dead and another 250 taken hostage.

On October 16, the head of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, tasked with combating terrorism, wrote a statement saying: “The responsibility is on me.”

“Despite a series of actions we carried out, we weren’t able to create a sufficient warning that would allow the attack to be thwarted,” Shin Bet chief Ronan Bar said.

Later that month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also received sharp public criticism after he accused security chiefs in a later-deleted social media post of failing to warn him about the impending attack.

In a May interview with Dr. Phil McGraw on the “Dr. Phil Primetime” show, Netanyahu admitted there were political and military failures. “The government’s first responsibility is to protect the people. That’s the ultimate enveloping responsibility. People weren’t protected. We have to admit that,” Netanyahu told Dr. Phil.

When asked if he held himself to that standard and failed in some way he added, “I hold myself and everyone on this. I think we have to examine how it happened. What was the intelligence failure?”

South Korea has for decades been known as the world’s largest “baby exporter” – sending hundreds of thousands of children overseas after the country was ravaged by war and many mothers left destitute.

Many of those adopted children, now adults scattered across the globe and trying to trace their origins, have accused agencies of corruption and malpractice, including in some cases forcibly removing them from their mothers.

A report released earlier this week by a Korean government commission supports those claims and uncovers new evidence on the coercive methods used to force mothers to give up their children.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, tasked in 2022 with investigating the claims, found that more than a dozen babies in several government-funded care facilities in the 1980s had been forcibly taken to adoption agencies, sometimes “on the day of birth or the next day.”

It examined three care facilities in the cities of Daegu and Sejong where, in 1985 and 1986, 20 children in total were transferred to adoption agencies. Most of those children were adopted overseas in the United States, Australia, Norway and Denmark.

The commission is still investigating cases allegedly involving falsified paperwork. An interim report is expected to publish later this year.

Searching for their roots

More than 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted overseas since the 1950s following World War II and the Korean War, according to authorities. Many of those children were adopted by families in the US and Europe.

While adoptions continue today, the trend has been declining since the 2010s after South Korea amended its adoption laws in an effort to address systematic issues and reduce the number of children adopted overseas.

For a generation of adoptees who have grown up in often homogenous, majority-White populations, some say they feel both disconnected from their Korean roots and unable to fit in. It’s what prompted a search for their biological families.

Some of those adoptees say they have mixed emotions over the commission’s findings, feeling both horror and hope that the investigation will shed light on what many long suspected.

“It’s truly terrifying to hear how systemic these issues were, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily surprising,” said Susanné Seong-eun Bergsten, who was adopted from South Korea and grew up in Sweden.

Bergsten’s biological family found her when she was a young adult, and while there was no sign that her paperwork was falsified, she says she can understand the struggles having been involved in advocacy for Korean adoptees.

“Us adoptees, we’re all kind of told, these adoptions are for our own good and we should all feel grateful for escaping poverty,” she said, calling the reality “far more complex.”

“Our adoption papers often lack important information which could give us more context for adoption, like our cultural background, stigma, and the individual struggles that our parents faced in the post-war era,” she said.

“[It] validates what Korean adoptees have known for decades within our community: The narrative that Korean mothers chose of their own volition to relinquish their children is, in all too many cases, a fiction,” he said.

While both Zastrow and Bergsten said it marked a promising step in the right direction, Bergsten urged the government to continue taking accountability and offer reparations to adoptees and their families.

“Adoption touches every level of Korean society, every economic class,” said Zastrow. “There is still much about Korean adoption that has not been formally acknowledged.”

New pictures of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un touring what state media said is a uranium enrichment facility have given an extremely rare glimpse inside the isolated nation’s closely guarded nuclear weapons program.

According to a report from Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Friday, Kim visited the facility – a bright, sterile warehouse filled with long rows of cylindrical machinery – which is used to produce weapons-grade nuclear material for the North’s growing arsenal.

The report comes as North Korea continues to ramp up its illegal nuclear weapons program and strengthens relations with Russia, deepening widespread concern in the West over the isolated nation’s direction under Kim.

The location and exact date of Kim’s visit to the site were not disclosed in the report, but the purpose of his inspection was clear, according to KCNA: to lay out a “long-term plan for increasing the production of weapon-grade nuclear materials.”

Experts say the images – which show Kim flanked by men in military uniforms and crisp white lab shirts – underscore North Korea’s growing confidence in its position as a nuclear power.

“Kim is exceptionally confident these days and he’s particularly interested in making sure that his calls for a massive increase in nuclear capabilities are not misinterpreted,” said Ankit Panda,  Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding “these disclosures lend credibility to North Korea’s plans and demonstrate that they’ve come a long way in their enrichment capabilities.”

It’s a theme the North Korean leader has touched on frequently in recent years, including this week.

In a speech celebrating the 76th anniversary of North Korea’s founding on Monday, Kim pledged to “exponentially” expand the regime’s nuclear arsenal, reiterating bellicose rhetoric he has used in the past.

During his visit to the purported enrichment facility, Kim expressed repeated satisfaction with the technical capabilities of North Korea’s nuclear sector and emphasized the need to increase the number of centrifuges for greater production, according to state media.

Park Won-gon, professor of North Korean Studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said the timing of the disclosure is also important.

The disclosure comes at a time of heightened tensions between North Korea and the West, with the US and its allies accusing North Korea of providing substantial military aid to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Both Moscow and Pyongyang have denied North Korean arms exports, despite significant evidence of such transfers.

In June, the two autocratic nations pledged to use all available means to provide immediate military assistance in the event the other is attacked, according to a landmark defense pact agreed to during a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang.

Since the location of this facility was not revealed in the KCNA report, it’s unclear whether the images are from a site already known to international observers, such as the Yongbyon nuclear research facility, or something entirely new. North Korea is believed to have several sites for enriching uranium.

“I’m not sure we can establish the site from the images,” said Martyn Williams, a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, “but it’s certainly the first time we’ve seen this set up and in this level of detail.”

Russia’s FSB security service said on Friday it had revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow whose actions it said showed signs of spying and sabotage work.

Britain’s embassy in Moscow did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB, said it had documents showing that a British foreign office department in London responsible for Eastern Europe and Central Asia was coordinating what it called “the escalation of the political and military situation” and was tasked with ensuring Russia’s strategic defeat in its war against Ukraine.

“Thus, the facts revealed give grounds to consider the activities of British diplomats sent to Moscow by the directorate as threatening the security of the Russian Federation,” the FSB said in a statement.

“In this connection, on the basis of documents provided by the Federal Security Service of Russia and as a response to the numerous unfriendly steps taken by London, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, in co-operation with the agencies concerned, has terminated the accreditation of six members of the political department of the British Embassy in Moscow in whose actions signs of spying and sabotage were found,” it said.

The six diplomats were named on Russian state TV, which also showed photographs of them.

“The English did not take our hints about the need to stop this practice (of carrying out intelligence activities inside Russia), so we decided to expel these six to begin with,” an FSB employee told the Rossiya-24 state TV channel.

The FSB said Russia would ask other British diplomats to go home early if they were found to be engaged in similar activity.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was cited by the state TASS news agency as saying the activities of the British embassy in Moscow had gone well beyond diplomatic convention and accusing it of carrying out deliberate activity designed to harm the Russian people.

Typhoon Yagi, Asia’s most powerful storm this year, has left dozens dead since sweeping across southern China and Southeast Asia last week, leaving a trail of destruction with its intense rainfall and powerful winds.

After hitting the Philippines, where it killed more than a dozen people, it churned westwards towards southern China and shortly after parts of Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos.

Nearly a week since it made landfall, many farms and villages in northern parts of Vietnam and neighboring Thailand remain under water as communities struggle to cope with severe flooding and the looming threat of landslides.

In Vietnam, the death toll has risen to at least 226 as a result of the storm and the landslides and flash floods it triggered, the government’s disaster agency said Thursday, according to Reuters. The storm caused widespread damage to infrastructure and factories.

Video captured by a car’s dashcam earlier this week showed the moment a steel bridge collapsed over the engorged Red River in Vietnam’s Phu Tho province, plunging drivers into the raging waters.

The downpours also inundated Thailand’s northern province of Chiang Rai, submerging homes and riverside villages, making rescue efforts difficult.

At least 33 people have died across Thailand since mid-August due to rain-related incidents, with at least nine deaths this week after Yagi, Reuters reported citing the local government.

Storms are being made more intense and deadlier by the warming ocean, scientists have long warned. While developed nations bear a greater historical responsibility for the human-induced climate crisis, developing nations and small-island states are suffering the worst impacts.