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      NATO Weighs Taking Over Ukraine Defense Contact Group

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      The proposal faces several obstacles, including whether all members would agree to the changes. But the alliance is worried about wavering American support for Kyiv.With continued American aid to Ukraine stalled and against the looming prospect of a second Trump presidency, NATO officials are looking to take more control of directing military support from Ukraine’s allies — a role that the United States has played for the past two years.Under a proposal being discussed this week at the military alliance’s headquarters, NATO would oversee the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group currently led by the United States that coordinates the donation and delivery of weapons to the battlefield. Discussions are also underway about a plan floated by Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, to secure an additional $100 billion from the alliance’s 32 member states for Ukraine over five years.“A stronger NATO role in coordinating and providing support is the way to end this war in a way where Ukraine prevails,” Mr. Stoltenberg said on Wednesday at the start of meetings among the alliance’s top diplomats.“There is a need to give this a more robust and institutional framework to ensure predictability and commitment for the long haul,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. He added: “I strongly believe it’s important that allies make decisions fast. And that includes, of course, the United States.”Mr. Stoltenberg would not discuss specifics, but he said he hoped to have the new efforts approved in time for a July summit meeting of NATO leaders in Washington, where officials are expected to again debate when Ukraine might be allowed to join the military alliance, as has been promised for years.A NATO official confirmed the proposals, which were reported earlier by news outlets including Bloomberg News.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rep. Tim Walberg Says Gaza ‘Should Be Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

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      A Republican House member from Michigan openly mused during a town hall last week about wiping out Gaza, telling his constituents that “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”“Get it over quick,” Representative Tim Walberg said, according to a video that emerged online from the March 25 event in Dundee, Mich.His remarks, invoking the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan during World War II while discussing his opposition to U.S. humanitarian aid for Gaza, drew swift condemnation, including at least one call for his resignation. He said that his remarks were taken out of context and that the clip showed only part of his response.Justin Amash, a former House G.O.P. colleague in Michigan and a Palestinian American, denounced Mr. Walberg for his comments, writing on X on Saturday that they “evince an utter indifference to human suffering.“The people of Gaza are our fellow human beings — many of them children trapped in horrific circumstances beyond their individual control,” Mr. Amash wrote. “For him to suggest that hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians should be obliterated, including my own relatives sheltering at an Orthodox Christian church, is reprehensible and indefensible.”Mr. Amash, the only sitting Republican member of Congress to support President Trump’s first impeachment, left the Republican Party in 2019 while facing attacks by Mr. Trump. Mr. Amash is running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan.In a post on X on Sunday morning, Mr. Walberg, 72, a former pastor and a longtime House member who represents southern Michigan, sought to clean up his remarks and accused his critics of twisting his words.“As a child who grew up in the Cold War Era, the last thing I’d advocate for would be the use of nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “In a shortened clip, I used a metaphor to convey the need for both Israel and Ukraine to win their wars as swiftly as possible, without putting American troops in harm’s way.”Mr. Walberg’s office also provided an audio recording and a transcript of the exchange that prompted his remarks. He had been asked why the United States was spending money to build a pier to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.“We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid,” he said, according to the recording. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick. The same should be in Ukraine. Defeat Putin quick. Instead of 80 percent of our funding for Ukraine being used for humanitarian purposes, it should be 80 percent, 100 percent to wipe out Russian forces, if that’s what we want to do.” More

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      Witnesses Describe Fear and Deprivation at Besieged Hospital in Gaza

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      More than a dozen patients have died as a result of the prolonged Israeli military assault against the Al-Shifa hospital complex, the Gazan authorities say.Seven days after Israel’s military began a raid on the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, a picture of the sustained assault on the complex and its surrounding neighborhood emerges in fragments.Residents nearby described a relentless daily soundtrack of gunshots, airstrikes and explosions. A surgeon spoke of doctors and patients corralled in the emergency ward while Israeli forces took control of the complex outside. A Palestinian teenager who spent four days sheltering in the hospital described the bodies she saw piled up outside the entrance.“They had put the bodies on the side and thrown blankets over them,” said Alaa Abu Al-Kaaf, 18, who said she and her family were at Al-Shifa for days before leaving on Thursday. It was not immediately clear when or how the bodies were brought there.Interviews with other witnesses in the hospital, residents in or near the facility and the Gazan authorities in recent days, as well as with others who have left the complex over the past week, described a situation of fear and deprivation, interrogations and detentions of Palestinian men by Israeli forces, and a persistent lack of food and water.The assault on Al-Shifa, one of Israel’s longest hospital raids of the war in Gaza, began on Monday with tanks, bulldozers and airstrikes. The military said it was aimed at senior officials of Hamas, the armed group that led an attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israel began a war on Gaza in response to that assault, with intense aerial bombardments and a ground offensive.A woman in the Gaza Strip on Thursday after fleeing the Al-Shifa medical complex.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ocasio-Cortez, in House Speech, Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide’

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      Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had called for a permanent cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas, but had resisted labeling the conflict a genocide.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on Friday that Israel’s blockade of Gaza had put the territory on the brink of severe famine, saying publicly for the first time that the nation’s wartime actions amounted to an “unfolding genocide.”In a speech on the House floor, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, forcefully called on President Biden to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel unless and until it begins to allow the free flow of humanitarian assistance into the Gaza Strip.“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she said. “It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”The comments were a sharp rhetorical escalation by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party’s left wing, and they illustrated the intense pressure buffeting party officials as they grapple with how to respond to Israel’s war tactics and the deepening humanitarian crisis.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, defying party leaders, has been a proponent of a permanent cease-fire since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and has called for putting conditions on American military aid to Israel. But she had resisted describing the ensuing war, which has killed 30,000 Gazans and left the territory in ruins, as a genocide.Israel has firmly denied that the term applies, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez indicated in January that she was waiting for the International Court of Justice to render an opinion on a legal designation. Privately, she has expressed concerns to some allies that the highly contentious term would alienate potential supporters of a cease-fire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jake Sullivan Makes Covert Trip to Ukraine

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      Jake Sullivan met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his senior officials as additional U.S. aid continued to languish in the House.President Biden’s top national security official made a secret trip to Kyiv on Wednesday, as Ukrainian soldiers holding off Russian troops are running out of munitions and U.S. aid remains stalled in congressional gridlock.Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his senior officials “to reaffirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine in its self-defense against Russia’s brutal invasion,” said a national security spokeswoman, Adrienne Watson. “He stressed the urgent need for the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the national security supplemental to meet Ukraine’s critical battlefield needs.”The covert trip showed the rising sense of urgency in the White House to pressure Congress to pass billions of dollars of aid for Ukraine, a financial package that the Biden administration says the country needs to defend itself against Russia.The White House has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to push House Republicans to support a $60 billion emergency spending plan for weapons for Ukraine and to bolster armament production in the United States.With that funding held back and future U.S. aid in limbo, the administration last week sent Ukraine a $300 million package that included air defense interceptors, artillery rounds, armor systems and an older version of the Army’s longer-range missile systems known as ATACMS. But that package is most likely going to hold off Russia for only a matter of weeks, U.S. officials have said.“Ukrainian troops have fought bravely, are fighting bravely throughout this war,” Mr. Sullivan said when the package was announced, “but they are now forced to ration their ammunition under pressure on multiple fronts.”Mr. Sullivan’s visit came one day after Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III met with other backers of Ukraine in Germany to strategize on how to maintain military support for Kyiv.“Ukraine’s battle remains one of the great causes of our time,” Mr. Austin said. More

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      U.S. Defense Secretary Praises NATO Allies for Commitment to Ukraine

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      Despite doubts about further U.S. aid, the American defense secretary told a meeting of Kyiv’s backers that the fight against Russia “remains one of the great causes of our time.”With additional American aid still in doubt, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Tuesday called for “creative, adaptable and sustainable ways” to continue arming Ukraine and praised European allies who were trying to bolster Kyiv’s military as the war against Russia entered a critical stretch.Mr. Austin, in Germany for the start of a semiregular meeting of nearly 50 nations who are supplying Ukraine’s forces, said that allies would “dig deeper to get vital security assistance to Ukraine.” He singled out Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden for recent donations of weapons and noted the Czech Republic’s efforts to provide 800,000 artillery shells — the first tranche of which could arrive on the battlefield within weeks.Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said Berlin would send Ukraine 10,000 rounds of badly needed artillery shells, 100 armored infantry vehicles and transport equipment in a new infusion of support worth 500 million euros, about $544 million.“Things are progressing sometimes in small steps, sometimes in larger steps, but the main thing is the constant supply of ammunition,” Mr. Pistorius told journalists in Germany, according to local news reports.The United States remains the single largest donor of military support to Ukraine, and last week, Washington pledged an additional $300 million of air defense missiles, artillery rounds and armor systems. The latest package also included attack missiles with a range of about 100 miles that dispense clusters of small munitions and can do damage over a wide area, though they are still at least a week from arriving.Yet Ukrainian forces are expected to burn through the new American aid within a few weeks, and it is unlikely that the Biden administration will be able to send much more unless Republicans in Congress agree to a $60 billion emergency spending plan to ship additional weapons to Ukraine and bolster armament production in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rebellious Russians Attack From Ukraine, Reinforcing Ukrainian Drone Strikes

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      The surprise attacks, timed to Russia’s election, are meant to undermine the sense of stability in Russia and divert the country’s military resources from Ukraine.Gathered in a Ukrainian farmhouse, soldiers checked their kits: rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, spare batteries for radios, red and white flashlights, all that would be needed for a stealthy and daring night assault across the border into Russia.The soldiers are Russians who have turned against the government of their country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and are now fighting for the Ukrainian side by making incursions back into Russia.Their goal has been to break through a first line of Russian defenses, hoping to open a path for another unit to drive deeper into Russia with tanks and armored personnel carriers.“We will jump in their trench and hold it,” one of the soldiers, who declined to be identified for security reasons, explained. “Either we take them out, or they take us out.”By both Ukrainian and Russian accounts, fierce fighting has raged along Russia’s southern border for five days in the most sweeping ground attacks into Russia since its military invaded Ukraine two years ago.Three Russian exile groups, which were openly backed by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, say the assaults are timed to undermine the sense of stability that underlies Mr. Putin’s quest for a fifth term, in which three days of voting wrap up on Sunday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Iran and U.S. Held Secret Talks on Proxy Attacks and Cease-Fire

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      Diplomats gathered in Oman in January, with the U.S. side seeking to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping and American bases, and Iran looking for a Gaza cease-fire.Iran and the United States held secret, indirect talks in Oman in January, addressing the escalating threat posed to Red Sea shipping by the Houthis in Yemen, as well as the attacks on American bases by Iran-backed militias in Iraq, according to Iranian and U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.The secret talks were held on Jan. 10 in Muscat, the capital of Oman, with Omani officials shuffling messages back and forth between delegations of Iranians and Americans sitting in separate rooms. The delegations were led by Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator, and Brett McGurk, President Biden’s coordinator for the Middle East.The meeting, first reported by The Financial Times this week, was the first time Iranian and American officials had held in-person negotiations — albeit indirectly — in nearly eight months. American officials said Iran requested the meeting in January and the Omanis strongly recommended that the United States accept.Since the beginning of the war in Gaza after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the United States and Iran have reassured each other that neither was seeking a direct confrontation, a stance conveyed in messages they passed through intermediaries.But in Oman, each side had a clear request of the other, according to U.S. and Iranian officials.Washington wanted Iran to rein in its proxies to stop the Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea and the targeting of American bases in Iraq and Syria. Tehran, in turn, wanted the Biden administration to deliver a cease-fire in Gaza.President Biden at Dover Air Force Base last month, watching as one of the three American soldiers killed in a drone strike by an Iran-backed militia was brought home. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More