'Strong possibility' Ukraine retakes all territory by end of 2023 - apart from Crimea - Sky News

Ukraine has a good chance to liberate all its territory - apart from Crimea - by the end of 2023, a military expert says.

Cities like Severodonetsk, Melitopol and even Mariupol could be liberated if Volodymyr Zelenskyy's forces keep up their counteroffensive success, according to former military intelligence officer Philip Ingram.

As we approach the end of a year that has seen Vladimir Putin's Russia invade its neighbour, causing untold destruction and bringing about the unprecedented return of war in Europe, Sky News looks at what could happen in Ukraine in 2023.

In the months since the February 24 invasion that saw Kremlin forces come within striking distance of Kyiv, Ukrainian defenders have reclaimed more than half of the land captured by Russia since the beginning of the war.

President Zelenskyy has insisted that his troops will eventually liberate all its territory, including areas in the Donbas and Crimea that have been occupied since 2014.

While experts remain split on whether that will ultimately be possible, Ukraine's forces have demonstrated their mettle and determination again and again on the battlefield.

The early days of the war saw the historic defence of the port city of Mariupol, in which a small band of troops held out for 82 days against appalling odds - buying crucial time for defence forces elsewhere to regroup and obtain Western weapons.

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More recently, stunning counterattacks in the east and south have sent Russian forces retreating from Kharkiv and Kherson.

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So what could happen next year?

Former intelligence officer Mr Ingram says it could all depend on what Ukraine does in the next few weeks as it seeks to advance again.

He told Sky News: "If their next counteroffensive is as successful as the two they have done already - and I see no reason why it shouldn't be - there's definitely a strong possibility that they have recaptured all the territory in mainland Ukraine by the end of the year.

"So I think 2023 will be a year of further Ukrainian counteroffensives and successes.

"I think at that point we will be discussing the potential of operations to recapture Crimea."

Mr Ingram said further Ukrainian successes would lead to an increase in dissent within Russia, perhaps putting the rule of President Putin at risk.

He said the recapture of Mariupol in particular would have a huge psychological impact.

However not all experts agree on this future for Ukraine over the next 12 months.

Image: The attack on the Kerch Bridge at Crimea was a major event in the war. Pic: AP

Supplies of Western weapons 'not a bottomless pit'

Retired Air Vice-Marshal Sean Bell argued that the West can only support Ukraine for so long, as weapons supplies dwindle and the resolve of some countries perhaps weakens amid high energy prices at home.

"When you look at the scale of the weapons that have been provided, there's not a bottomless pit," he told Sky News.

"It's very difficult militarily to see the West being able to sustain Ukraine for more than a year."

He said that while President Zelenskyy is publicly calling for the return of all territory, behind closed doors he may be talking "pragmatically" about the future.

"I think that's where you have great statesmanship, because if winning is about securing more territory then, yes, Putin's won.

"If Putin strategic aims are actually to halt the expansion of NATO, that has failed.

"If its aim is to restore Russia's greatness, that has failed. If it's to create a more powerful economy, that has failed.

"So depending on what metric we choose from a grand strategic perspective, it's very difficult to see this invasion being anything other than abject failure."

He said it could well be that a peace is ultimately brokered where President Zelenskyy blames the West for forcing his hand but privately accepts that it is the only way to stop further loss of life.

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2022-12-31 04:25:20Z
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Sunak demands negative Covid tests for all travellers from China - The Times

Rishi Sunak has ordered mandatory Covid tests for all travellers from China because of fears that Beijing cannot be trusted to reveal the full truth about its surging infections.

The prime minister stepped in amid frustration that the lack of reliable data was hampering efforts to track potential new and dangerous variants.

The Department of Health said that anyone on direct flights from China on or after January 5 will be asked to take a pre-departure Covid-19 test. From January 8 the UK Health Security Agency will sample test Chinese passengers.

Ministers including Mark Harper, the transport secretary, who led opposition to Covid restrictions from the back benches, had questioned the approach because scientists said that there was no evidence it would stop the spread

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2022-12-31 00:00:00Z
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The long journey to getting Trump's taxes released - BBC

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By Kayla Epstein

BBC News, New York

Former President Donald Trump's tax returns have been released, ending a bitter six-year long battle to gain greater insights into his finances.

The returns stretch from 2015 through 2020, covering Mr Trump's candidacy and time in the White House.

They give details of various entities through which he would have paid tax, including holdings companies and personal income.

The BBC is reviewing the documents.

Responding to Friday's release of thousands of pages of tax returns, Mr Trump's camp warned that the disclosure will lead to the US political divide becoming "far worse".

"The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it's going to lead to horrible things for so many people," his statement said.

Ever since his entry into politics, critics have been keen to get Mr Trump - whose foundational pitch to voters had been that his business success made him the best choice to run the country - to show what his wealth actually looked like.

He had steadfastly refused.

Democrats who control the House of Representatives and oversaw the release argued that it was a necessary act of oversight.

Representative Don Beyer, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee which released the documents, said on Friday that Mr Trump "abused the power of his office to block basic transparency on his finances and conflicts of interest which no president since Nixon has foregone."

The committee also found that the Internal Revenue Service - the US federal entity charged with tax collection - failed to audit Mr Trump during his first two years in office, and only began doing so after congressional oversight proceedings were started in 2019.

Here's what it took to get to the disclosures made public.

Trump defies tradition

For decades, presidential candidates and officeholders have released their tax returns to the public in the interest of transparency and accountability.

The longstanding tradition is "mainly about trying to ensure the public that the president is operating free of conflicts and entanglements, and taxes are sort of the window into the financial soul of someone," said Steve Rosenthal, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

But Mr Trump "crashed all the norms," Mr Rosenthal said, by refusing to release his tax returns as a candidate when he ran for office in the 2016 presidential election.

His fierce insistence on the matter invited scrutiny and speculation among critics that he had something to hide - could it be that Mr Trump was not as rich as he claimed, some asked, or that he had paid less tax than he should?

Supporters, meanwhile, backed his right to his privacy. After all, there is no legal requirement for a candidate to release their tax returns.

New York Times investigations

But over the course of his presidency and afterward, the public has gradually come to gain some insight into Mr Trump's personal tax history.

A great deal of those revelations come from an investigation published by the New York Times in 2020, which obtained two decades of Mr Trump's tax returns from before his time in office. The documents gave unprecedented insight into Mr Trump's businesses.

They revealed he paid little to no federal income taxes over that period, and that Mr Trump had reported in his tax filings that his businesses lost significant amounts of money - despite his public boasts of financial success. In 2017, the Times reported, Trump paid just $750 (£623) in federal income tax despite being a billionaire.

The New York Times reporting "calls into question whether he's a billionaire, or is there some trick he uses to avoid pay taxes, legal or not," Mr Rosenthal said.

Reuters

Taking the fight to the Supreme Court

Meanwhile, in Washington, Democrats began using their powers to conduct oversight of Mr Trump once they gained control of the House of Representatives in early 2019.

The Ways and Means Committee fought for three years to obtain Mr Trump's tax returns.

The fight went all the way to the US Supreme Court this year, and in November, the justices refused to block the release of Mr Trump's tax returns to the committee, thereby paving the way for their release.

On 21 December, the committee voted to release the tax returns they had obtained to the public, with the vote splitting along party lines.

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Friday's release of the tax documents come mere days before Republicans are set to take over control of the House of Representatives, potentially signalling the end of any continued pursuit of looking into Mr Trump's finances for the foreseeable future.

It is possible that the US Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, could continue investigations.

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2022-12-30 23:59:09Z
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Covid: Why are some places testing Chinese arrivals? - BBC

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By Fergus Walsh

Medical editor

When a country of 1.4 billion people suddenly ended its zero-Covid policy after nearly three years, there was little doubt what would happen.

Poor immunisation levels and little natural immunity meant an explosion of cases - just as China is about to lift restrictions on its citizens travelling abroad.

So now, some countries - wary of an influx of cases - are imposing Covid testing, and possible quarantine, on visitors from China.

The Covid wave hitting China is not due to some radical new variant, but Omicron in its different forms.

BF.7 and BQ.1 are both sub-lineages of BA.5, which itself is part of the Omicron "family" - more contagious, more infectious than any previous Covid strain.

But these Omicron sub-variants have all been widely detected outside China - including in the UK.

Omicron has been the dominant global variant for more than a year, but that does not exclude the possibility that a new variant of concern will emerge in future.

A key reason that many countries are imposing Covid checks on travellers from China is the lack of surveillance data coming out of the country. The more Covid that is circulating, the more chance there is for the virus to mutate.

But new variants can pop up anywhere - the UK, Brazil, South Africa and India have all been the likely origins of previous variants of concern.

So will the new Covid test restrictions make any difference?

Several countries are asking travellers from China to produce a negative Covid test in order to gain entry.

The US said this would "slow the spread" of the virus, while scientists worked to identify any potential variants that may emerge. But no-one is suggesting that this will stop Covid cases coming in.

Italy has gone further, and is imposing mandatory post-arrival PCR tests on travellers from China. Those that test positive will need to quarantine for several days.

This has the advantage of enabling genomic sequencing of the virus, and so aids the search for new variants. But it will also add to airport congestion.

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that those travellers from China who have tested positive so far are carriers of "Omicron variants already present in Italy". Italy wants an EU-wide approach on the issue - but the EU's disease agency says, for many reasons, that is "unjustified".

In the UK, there is plenty of Covid about. Probably well over a million people a week are getting infected, either at work, home or socialising - in other words anywhere people gather. The latest ONS survey estimated that around 1 in 45 people had the virus earlier this month.

But most of the UK population is very well protected from severe illness, via a combination of vaccines and repeated natural infection.

That means Covid - while still a potential danger here - is no longer the threat it once was.

More on Covid in China

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• How many Covid cases are there in China?
• 'Everyone I know is getting a fever' - Covid hits China

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2022-12-29 22:42:49Z
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Andrew Tate detained in Romania over human trafficking case - BBC

Reuters

By George Wright

BBC News

Controversial online influencer Andrew Tate has reportedly been detained in Romania as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation.

Mr Tate - who was detained alongside his brother Tristan - had his house raided in the capital, Bucharest.

A lawyer for the brothers confirmed their detention, Reuters said.

The former kickboxer rose to fame in 2016 when he was removed from British TV show Big Brother over a video which appeared to show him attacking a woman.

He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear responsibility" for being sexually assaulted. He has since been reinstated.

"The four suspects ... appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost," prosecutors said, according to the Reuters news agency.

The brothers have been under investigation since April alongside two Romanian nationals.

Video circulated widely on social media appears to show Mr Tate and his brother being led away from a luxury villa.

Romania's Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) issued a statement, but did not name the Tate brothers, stating that two British citizens and two Romanian citizens were suspected of being part of a criminal group focused on human trafficking.

It also released a video of the raid, showing guns, knives, and money on display in one room.

Mr Tate moved to Romania five years ago.

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Prior to gaining worldwide notoriety, Mr Tate - a British citizen who was born in the US - fought professionally as a kickboxer and won world titles.

In 2016, he entered the Big Brother house but was soon removed after a video was circulated, which appeared to show him hitting a woman with a belt.

At the time of his expulsion from the show, Mr Tate said the video had been edited, calling it "a total lie trying to make me look bad".

He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear responsibility" for being sexually assaulted.

Mr Tate has been banned from other social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, with TikTok also removing him, saying "misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated".

His posts on other online sites promote misogyny and target women and have millions of views, with the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring saying earlier this year his content had "raised concerns about the real-world effect it could have".

Alongside former US president Donald Trump, he has recently been allowed back onto Twitter following Elon Musk's takeover.

On Wednesday, Mr Tate became embroiled in a war of words on Twitter with climate activist Greta Thunberg.

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2022-12-30 02:23:12Z
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Covid in China: Checks on visitors under review - UK defence minister - BBC

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By Nathan Williams

BBC News

The UK government is reviewing whether to introduce Covid restrictions on visitors from China, the defence secretary has said.

Ben Wallace said the Department for Transport would take medical advice and talk to the Department of Health.

Earlier, an ex-health minister urged the government to consider testing arrivals from China for Covid.

A number of countries are introducing mandatory testing in response to China's coronavirus surge.

Asked whether the government would consider restrictions, Mr Wallace said: "The government is looking at that, it's under review, we noticed obviously what the US has done and India and I think Italy has looked at it."

"We keep under review all the time, obviously, health threats to the UK, wherever they may be."

• UK Covid modelling data to stop being published

• Covid-19 in the UK

Several countries - including the US, Japan and Italy - are now enforcing testing on visitors from China.

This follows a surge in cases in China after Beijing's decision to effectively end its zero-Covid policy.

UK Health Minister Will Quince said he knew that many people would be concerned "about the news coming out of China" and the government was taking the situation "incredibly seriously".

However, there was "no evidence at this point of a new variant from China", which he said would be the "key threat".

"At the moment the variant that is in China currently is already prevalent here in the UK."

Meanwhile, the Scottish government said it currently has no plans to change travel requirements, and would continue to work with the UK Health Security Agency and other countries to "monitor the spread of harmful variants".

There are concerns that a new variant may emerge in China and that international travel could quickly spread it.

When there is lots of virus circulating in any population, there will be opportunities for it to change or mutate in potentially harmful ways.

Covid is circulating in lots of countries around the world.

According to latest estimates for the UK, one in every 45 people in Britain is infected.

Vaccines are saving lives but they can't stop infections. Instead, experts are tracking the virus and seeing if the vaccines need updating to be a better match for any significant new mutations.

So far, science is keeping up with the virus and there are no particularly worrying new variants.

Lord Bethell, who was health minister during the pandemic, told the BBC there was a good reason to look at testing people when they land, a policy Italy has adopted.

"What the Italians are doing is post-flight surveillance of arrivals in Italy, in order to understand whether there are any emerging variants and to understand the impact of the virus on the Italian health system," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"That is a sensible thing to do and something the British government should be seriously looking at."

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China is reporting about 5,000 cases a day, but analysts say such numbers are vastly undercounted - and the daily caseload may be closer to one million.

Prof Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said he did not think the current situation in China was likely to generate many more Covid cases in the UK or generally across the globe.

While China was in a "dark" and "difficult" place, the current evidence suggested the particular variant causing most infections in the country was "very common elsewhere in the world", he told BBC Radio 4's PM programme on Wednesday. The UK has seen many such cases since it appeared in the summer, he added.

On Wednesday, the US said a lack of "adequate and transparent" Covid data in China had contributed to the decision to require Covid tests from 5 January for travellers entering the country from China, Hong Kong and Macau.

Others have also announced restrictions:

• In Japan, from Friday, travellers from China will be tested for Covid on arrival. Those who test positive will have to quarantine for up to seven days
• In India, people travelling from China and four other Asian countries must produce a negative Covid test before arriving. Positive passengers will also be put in quarantine
• Taiwan says people arriving on flights from China, as well as by boat at two islands, will have to take Covid tests on arrival throughout January. Those who test positive can isolate at home
• Malaysia has put additional tracking and surveillance measures in place
• Italy has also imposed mandatory Covid testing on travellers from China

On Thursday, Italy urged the rest of the EU to follow its lead and ensure Chinese arrivals were tested. However, the EU's disease agency said the surge in cases in China was not expected to impact members states and said screening travellers from China for Covid would be "unjustified".

Beijing's foreign ministry has said coronavirus rules should only be put in place on a "scientific" basis and accused Western countries and media of "hyping up" the situation.

China only announced on Monday its decision to end quarantine for arrivals - effectively reopening travel in and out of the country for the first time since March 2020.

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2022-12-29 17:40:40Z
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Ukraine rocked by massive Russian missile barrage - Financial Times

Scores of Russian missiles were fired at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Thursday in what officials described as one of the largest daily barrages of a months-long campaign targeting the country’s energy infrastructure.

“Russia keeps resorting to its missile terror against peaceful citizens of Ukraine,” General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, said in a Twitter post. “This morning . . . 69 missiles were launched in total. 54 cruise missiles were shot down by the assets of Ukraine’s armed forces,” he added.

Colonel Yuriy Ignat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force, told the Financial Times that in addition to the missiles, Russia had fired at least 11 kamikaze drones at Ukraine early on Thursday.

The number of casualties and the extent of the damage nationwide, almost a year into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, were not immediately clear.

Ukraine’s air force command said in a statement that “after the night attack of kamikaze drones, the enemy attacks Ukraine from various directions with air and sea-based cruise missiles from strategic aircraft and ships”.

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Local officials in two Russian regions on the border said anti-air defences had shot down Ukrainian targets, including drones. The apparent attacks suggested Ukraine was continuing to attack Russian territory after a series of recent strikes on air bases deep behind enemy lines, including two hits on the Engels air base.

In neighbouring Belarus, which has allowed its ally Russia to use the country as a launch pad for attacks without joining the war itself, officials claimed to have shot down a stray Ukrainian air defence missile. Belarus’s foreign ministry said it summoned the Ukrainian ambassador and warned him of “disastrous consequences for all” if any further missiles landed in the country.

In a video posted by state news agency Belta, Anatoly Konovalov, military commander of the western Brest region where the Soviet-era S300 missile reportedly fell, said “residents have nothing to worry about”. He likened the incident to a similar incident last month when a stray Ukrainian anti-aircraft strike landed in Poland, killing two, as Kyiv tried to repel a Russian barrage of similar intensity to Thursday’s strikes.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said it was ready for an “objective investigation” of the incident.

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration, in a Telegram channel post that included photographs of destruction, said three people were injured, among them a 14-year-old girl, after a missile landed in a residential neighbourhood in the eastern Darnytsky district of Kyiv. Tymoshenko also posted a photograph of a Russian missile that landed in a house in Ivano-Frankivsk, a provincial capital in western Ukraine, but did not explode.

Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv’s mayor, said there were “several explosions in the capital”. He urged residents to charge their phones and stock up on water as “there may be power outages”.

Andriy Sadovyi, mayor of Lviv, the largest provincial capital in western Ukraine where explosions were also heard, said “90 per cent of the city is without electricity”, adding that water supplies could be disrupted.

Explosions were reported in many Ukrainian towns and cities, some close to the frontline, including Odesa on the Black Sea and Kharkiv, the largest city in eastern Ukraine.

Russian missile and kamikaze drone strikes on the Ukrainian electricity grid and heating infrastructure have triggered rolling, hours- and days-long power and heating blackouts in recent months. Moscow launched the campaign this autumn after counteroffensives pushed back Russian forces from swaths of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, where Moscow still holds close to 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory.

Klitschko said the air force had downed 16 missiles over the capital.

Thursday’s attack comes days after US president Joe Biden said he had approved provision of one Patriot missile battery for Kyiv to be delivered in the coming months. Zelenskyy has for months pleaded for the US and European countries to bolster Ukraine’s air defences, which rely mostly on depleting Soviet-era equipment, with more sophisticated air defence systems.

In a statement on Thursday, Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said: “This is another example of Putin’s brutality, attacking Ukraine’s critical infrastructure . . . as part of the barbaric war that Russia is waging. The US will continue to provide Ukraine with what it needs to defend itself.”

Kyiv has received a handful of medium-range systems including one Iris-T from Germany, Nasams from the US and Norway, as well as Hawks from Spain.

After Thursday’s attacks, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser in Zelenskyy’s administration, criticised western leaders who had urged Kyiv to engage in peace talks, adding that the strikes showed Russia was not, despite recent public calls by Putin for negotiations, interested in peace more than 10 months after he launched his full-scale invasion.

“We’re waiting for further proposals from ‘peacekeepers’ about ‘peaceful settlement,’ ‘security guarantees for the Russian Federation and undesirability of provocations’,” Podolyak added.

Additional reporting by Max Seddon in Riga

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2022-12-29 21:34:29Z
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