Category: 2. World

Chinese ambassador to India Xu Feihong has said that Beijing “firmly opposes” Washington’s steep tariffs on Delhi and called for greater co-operation between India and China.

Xu likened the US to a “bully”, saying that it had long benefitted from free trade but was now using tariffs as a “bargaining chip” to demand “exorbitant prices” from other nations.

“US has imposed tariffs of up to 50% on India and even threatened for more. China firmly opposes it. Silence only emboldens the bully,” Xu said on Thursday.

Earlier this month, Trump imposed a 25% penalty on India in addition to 25% tariffs for buying oil and weapons from Russia. The new rate will come into effect on 27 August.

Delhi’s increased imports of cheap Russian crude since the Ukraine war has caused a strain in its ties with the US and impacted negotiations on a trade deal.

India has defended its purchases of Russian oil, arguing that as a major energy importer, it must buy the cheapest available crude to protect millions of poor Indians from rising costs. It has also pointed out that the Biden administration had told India to buy Russian oil to stabilise world energy markets.

In the backdrop of Delhi’s shaky trade relations with Washington, there appears to be a rapid thawing of ties between India and China.

Relations between the neighbours plunged after the 2020 clashes in Galwan in Ladakh. Since then Beijing and Delhi have been gradually working towards normalising ties.

Earlier this week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a two-day trip to Delhi during which he said that India and China should view each other as “partners” rather than “adversaries or threats”.

On Thursday, Xu made statements along similar lines while speaking at an event in the Indian capital.

He called the two countries “double engines” of economic growth in Asia and added that unity between India and China benefits the world at large.

He also invited more Indian enterprises to invest in China and added that Beijing hoped that India would provide a “fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment” for the Chinese enterprises in India to benefit the people of both countries.

“At present, tariff wars and trade wars are disrupting the global economic and trade system, power politics and the law of the jungle are prevalent and international rules and order have suffered severe impacts,” he said, alluding to Washington’s tariff measures against India and other countries.

“China will firmly stand with India to uphold the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at its core,” he added.

He also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s upcoming visit to China to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit would give “new impetus to China-India relations”.

WASHINGTON:

The United States on Wednesday defiantly expanded efforts to hobble the International Criminal Court over its prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sanctioning a judge from ally France.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also targeted a Canadian judge in a separate case in his latest volley of sanctions against the tribunal in The Hague, which is backed by virtually all other Western democracies as a court of last resort.

“The Court is a national security threat that has been an instrument for lawfare against the United States and our close ally Israel,” Rubio said in a statement, using a term popular with President Donald Trump’s supporters.

He attacked the court for investigating US and Israeli citizens “without the consent of either nation.”

Among the four people newly slapped with sanctions was Judge Nicolas Guillou of France, who is presiding over a case in which an arrest warrant was issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

France — whose president, Emmanuel Macron, was in Washington two days earlier — expressed “dismay” over the action.

The sanctions are “in contradiction to the principle of an independent judiciary,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in Paris.

The ICC in its own statement denounced the “flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution.”

The court’s prosecution alleges Netanyahu is responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s offensive in Gaza including by intentionally targeting civilians and using starvation as a method of war.

Netanyahu saluted Rubio for his “decisive act against a smear campaign of lies against the State of Israel” and the Israeli army.

Israel launched the massive offensive in response to an unprecedented attack by Hamas against Israel in which mostly civilians were killed.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro says armed dissidents, drug trafficking cartels should be considered ‘terrorists’ and ‘pursued internationally’.

At least 18 people have been killed and dozens injured in two attacks in Colombia attributed to dissident factions of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group.

In Cali, the country’s third most populated city, a vehicle packed with explosives detonated on Thursday near a military aviation school, in an incident that left six people dead and 71 injured, according to the mayor’s office.

Hours earlier, a National Police Black Hawk helicopter participating in a coca leaf crop eradication operation was downed by a drone in the municipality of Amalfi, in the department of Antioquia, killing 12 police officers.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro blamed the attacks on dissident factions of the now-defunct FARC group that have rejected a 2016 peace agreement to end a prolonged internal conflict that has left more than 450,000 dead in the country.

Petro said on X that the attack on the police helicopter occurred as the aircraft was transporting personnel to an area in Antioquia, in northern Colombia, to eradicate coca leaf crops, the raw material for cocaine.

Antioquia Governor Andres Julian said on social media that a drone attacked the helicopter as it flew over coca leaf crops.

Colombian Defence Minister Pedro Sanchez said that preliminary information indicates the attack caused a fire in the police helicopter.

Petro initially blamed the Gulf Clan, the country’s largest active drug cartel, for the helicopter attack. He asserted that the aircraft was targeted in retaliation for a cocaine seizure that allegedly belonged to the group.

In a later post on social media, Petro shared a photo of a suspect in the car bomb attack near the Colombian Aerospace Force in Cali, saying the person detained by police was a member of the EMC (Estado Mayor Central) – described as a federation of dissidents of the former FARC group – and “subordinate” to drug traffickers.

FARC dissidents, who have rejected a peace agreement with the government, and members of the Gulf Clan operate in the Antioquia area.

Petro later announced that he would request that the Gulf Clan and the armed dissidents be “considered terrorists and pursued anywhere on the planet”.

Coca leaf cultivation is on the rise in Colombia.

The area under cultivation reached a record 253,000 hectares (about 625,000 acres) in 2023, according to the latest report available from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The Russian president met Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday for the first Russia-U.S. summit in more than four years and spent almost all of their three-hour closed meeting discussing what a compromise on Ukraine might look like, according to the sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

Speaking afterwards beside Trump, Putin said the meeting would hopefully open up the road to peace in Ukraine – but neither leader gave specifics about what they discussed.

In the most detailed Russian-based reporting to date on Putin’s offer at the summit, Reuters was able to outline the contours of what the Kremlin would like to see in a possible peace deal to end a war that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people.

In essence, the Russian sources said, Putin has compromised on territorial demands he laid out in June 2024, which required Kyiv to cede the entirety of the four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia: Dontesk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine – which make up the Donbas – plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south.

Kyiv rejected those terms as tantamount to surrender.

In his new proposal, the Russian president has stuck to his demand that Ukraine completely withdraw from the parts of the Donbas it still controls, according to the three sources. In return, though, Moscow would halt the current front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, they added.

Russia controls about 88% of the Donbas and 73% of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to U.S. estimates and open-source data.

Moscow is also willing to hand over the small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine it controls as part of a possible deal, the sources said.

Putin is sticking, too, to his previous demands that Ukraine give up its NATO ambitions and for a legally binding pledge from the U.S.-led military alliance that it will not expand further eastwards, as well as for limits on the Ukrainian army and an agreement that no Western troops will be deployed on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force, the sources said.

Yet the two sides remain far apart, more than three years after Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion that followed the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and prolonged fighting in the country’s east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry had no immediate comment on the proposals.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly dismissed the idea of withdrawing from internationally recognised Ukrainian land as part of a deal, and has said the industrial Donbas region serves as a fortress holding back Russian advances deeper into Ukraine.

“If we’re talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that,” he told reporters in comments released by Kyiv on Thursday. “It is a matter of our country’s survival, involving the strongest defensive lines.”

Joining NATO, meanwhile, is a strategic objective enshrined in the country’s constitution and one which Kyiv sees as its most reliable security guarantee. Zelenskiy said it was not up to Russia to decide on the alliance’s membership.

The White House and NATO didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the Russian proposals.

Political scientist Samuel Charap, chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND, a U.S.-based global policy think-tank, said any requirement for Ukraine to withdraw from the Donbas remained a non-starter for Kyiv, both politically and strategically.

“Openness to ‘peace’ on terms categorically unacceptable to the other side could be more of a performance for Trump than a sign of a true willingness to compromise,” he added. “The only way to test that proposition is to begin a serious process at the working level to hash out those details.”

Trump: Putin wants to see it ended

Russian forces currently control a fifth of Ukraine, an area about the size of the American state of Ohio, according to U.S. estimates and open-source maps.

The three sources close to the Kremlin said the summit in the Alaskan city of Anchorage had ushered in the best chance for peace since the war began because there had been specific discussions about Russia’s terms and Putin had shown a willingness to give ground.

“Putin is ready for peace – for compromise. That is the message that was conveyed to Trump,” one of the people said.

The sources cautioned that it was unclear to Moscow whether Ukraine would be prepared to cede the remains of the Donbas, and that if it did not then the war would continue. Also unclear was whether or not the United States would give any recognition to Russian-held Ukrainian territory, they added.

A fourth source said that though economic issues were secondary for Putin, he understood the economic vulnerability of Russia and the scale of the effort needed to go far further into Ukraine.

Trump has said he wants to end the “bloodbath” of the war and be remembered as a “peacemaker president”. He said on Monday he had begun arranging a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, to be followed by a trilateral summit with the U.S. president.

“I believe Vladimir Putin wants to see it ended,” Trump said beside Zelenskiy in the Oval office. “I feel confident we are going to get it solved.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Putin was prepared to meet Zelenskiy but that all issues had to be worked through first and there was a question about Zelenskiy’s authority to sign a peace deal.

Putin has repeatedly raised doubts about Zelenskiy’s legitimacy as his term in office was due to expire in May 2024 but the war means no new presidential election has yet been held. Kyiv says Zelenskiy remains the legitimate president.

The leaders of Britain, France and Germany have said they are sceptical that Putin wants to end the war.

Security Guarantees For Ukraine

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was instrumental in paving the way for the summit, and the latest drive for peace, according to two of the Russian sources.

Witkoff met Putin in the Kremlin on August 6 with Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov. At the meeting, Putin conveyed clearly to Witkoff that he was ready to compromise and set out the contours of what he could accept for peace, according to two Russian sources.

If Russia and Ukraine could reach an agreement, then there are various options for a formal deal – including a possible three-way Russia-Ukraine-U.S. deal that is recognised by the U.N. Security Council, one of the sources said.

Another option is to go back to the failed 2022 Istanbul agreements, where Russia and Ukraine discussed Ukraine’s permanent neutrality in return for security guarantees from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, the sources added.

“There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war,” one of the people said.

August 22, 2025

BEIJING – A number of the Chinese military’s advanced weapons are set to be unveiled at the upcoming V-Day parade on Sept 3, representing the latest achievements in the armed forces’ modernization efforts, according to a senior military official.

Major General Wu Zeke, a senior officer from the Central Military Commission’s Joint Staff Department and deputy director of the Office of the Leading Group for the Military Parade, told a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday that all of the hardware to be displayed has been domestically developed and built, and has been in active service.

“It will be a comprehensive debut of our new-generation weaponry since the National Day parade in October 2019,” he said.

China will stage a grand military parade on Sept 3 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) and the World Anti-Fascist War. This will be the country’s 19th military parade since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 and the second V-Day parade.

During the first part of the parade, troops — members of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police Force, as well as China’s militia and reserve service — will line up in formations along Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, and they will be reviewed by President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The second part of the 70-minute celebration event will consist of shows of flags, processions of troops and ground-based hardware, and a flyby of aircraft.

The majority of hardware to be shown at the parade will be new models, ranging from main battle tanks to fighter jets, Wu said.

Unmanned platforms, counter-drone equipment and cyberspace operations apparatus will also be highlighted, including new types of combat drones, directed-energy weapons and electronic jamming instruments, he said.

Wu added that to display the PLA’s strategic deterrence prowess, a group of new hypersonic, missile-defense and intercontinental ballistic missiles will be displayed at the parade.

“These weapons feature a high level of information and automation capabilities and represent our efforts to adapt to the development trends of science, technology and modern warfare, and will show our strength that will win future wars,” Wu said.

He added that a total of 45 marching soldier units, land weaponry groups and aircraft squadrons are set to take part in the parade.

Many military units involved in the event have a long history that can be traced back to the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, he said.

Another aspect of the parade is that it will be the first time for the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, Information Support Force and Joint Logistics Support Force to take part, Wu noted.

Major General Xu Guizhong, an official of the PLA Central Theater Command and deputy head of the command’s parade organizing headquarters, said that organizers have been using the parade training to enhance troops’ fighting spirit, hone their operational skills, and help them become familiar with new weapons.

“We have used a positioning service based on China’s Beidou Navigation Satellite System and intelligent assessment tools to facilitate the troops’ training, and that has proved very useful and efficient,” Xu said.

Commanders have asked troops to make full use of this precious opportunity to strengthen their awareness and capabilities regarding joint operations, according to Xu.