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      Putin warns that Russia could supply arms to other countries to strike west

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      Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has slammed the west’s delivery of long-range weapons to Ukraine, warning Moscow could supply similar arms to other countries to attack western targets.“If someone thinks it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to attack our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply our weapons,” Putin told a press conference in St Petersburg.His comments came after a a US senator and a western official confirmed that Ukraine has recently used US weapons to strike inside Russia.The weapons were used under recently approved guidance from Joe Biden allowing American arms to be used to strike inside Russia for the limited purpose of defending Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.The Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a member of the Senate armed services committee, confirmed the strikes with US weapons, but did not say how he was briefed.Biden’s directive allows for US-supplied weapons to be used to strike Russian forces that are attacking or preparing to attack. It does not change US policy that directs Ukraine not to use American-provided army tactical missile systems (Atacms) or long-range missiles and other munitions to strike offensively inside Russia, US officials have said.Berlin also recently authorized Ukraine to hit some targets on Russian soil with German-supplied long-range weapons, a move Putin said would be a “dangerous step” that would ruin relations between Berlin and Moscow.Ukrainian officials had stepped up calls on the US and other allies to allow Kyiv’s forces to defend themselves against attacks originating from Russian territory. Kharkiv sits just 20km (12 miles) from the Russian border and has come under intensified Russian attack.According to a 3 June report from the Institute for the Study of War, Ukrainian forces struck a Russian S-300/400 air defense battery in the Belgorod region, probably with a high mobility artillery rocket system, or Himars, on 1 or 2 June. The air defense system was located roughly 60km (40 miles) from the current frontline in the northern Kharkiv region and more than 80km from the city of Kharkiv, which is within the range of Himars, the institute reported.Putin on Wednesday also said that the US administration was taking “energetic steps” to try to secure the release of a detained Wall Street Journal reporter but said such questions could only be resolved on the basis of reciprocity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPutin added talks with US intelligence agencies on the subject were ongoing, but needed to be conducted in “silence”.Gershkovich, a 32-year-old reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has been held in the Lefortovo prison on the outskirts of Moscow since March last year on allegations by the Russian authorities of espionage while on a reporting trip in the city of Ekaterinburg. The state department has declared him wrongfully detained, and Gershkovich denies spying, and Joe Biden said his administration is working “every day” to get him released. More

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      in Elections

      Deepfake of U.S. Official Appears After Shift on Ukraine Attacks in Russia

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      A manufactured video fabricated comments by the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller.A day after U.S. officials said Ukraine could use American weapons in limited strikes inside Russia, a deepfake video of a U.S. spokesman discussing the policy appeared online.The fabricated video, which is drawn from actual footage, shows the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, seeming to suggest that the Russian city of Belgorod, just 25 miles north of Ukraine’s border with Russia, was a legitimate target for such strikes.The 49-second video clip, which has an authentic feel despite telltale clues of manipulation, illustrates the growing threat of disinformation and especially so-called deepfake videos powered by artificial intelligence.U.S. officials said they had no information about the origins of the video. But they are particularly concerned about how Russia might employ such techniques to manipulate opinion around the war in Ukraine or even American political discourse.Belgorod “has essentially no civilians remaining,” the video purports to show Mr. Miller saying at the State Department in response to a reporter’s question, which was also manufactured. “It’s practically full of military targets at this point, and we are seeing the same thing starting in the regions around there.”“Russia needs to get the message that this is unacceptable,” Mr. Miller adds in the video, which has been circulating on Telegram channels followed by residents of Belgorod widely enough to draw responses from Russian government officials.The claim in the video about Belgorod is completely false. While it has been the target of some Ukrainian attacks, and its schools operate online, its 340,000 residents have not been evacuated.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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      Blinken Hints U.S. May Allow Ukraine Greater Latitude to Strike in Russia

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      The U.S. secretary of state suggested that Ukraine’s use of American-supplied arms could expand beyond the current limitation to strikes in the Kharkiv area.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken left open the possibility on Friday that President Biden could allow Ukraine to use U.S.-made weapons to strike at a broader array of targets inside Russia, going beyond attacks he has approved on launch sites the Russians are using for their current assault on the Kharkiv area.“Going forward, we’ll continue to do what we’ve been doing, which is: As necessary, adapt and adjust,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference in Prague at the end of a two-day meeting of top diplomats from member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Mr. Blinken was responding to a reporter’s question on whether the United States might give permission for Ukraine to use U.S.-made weapons to strike deeper into Russia. The phrase “adapt and adjust” is one that Mr. Blinken used in a news conference on Wednesday in Chisinau, Moldova, to suggest that Mr. Biden was about to make a major policy shift and grant Ukraine permission to use the weapons to strike in Russia, as Ukrainian and European leaders had been urging for weeks.American officials then said on Thursday that Mr. Biden had made that decision in recent days and told the Ukrainians, but that the permission to strike in Russia was limited to sites the Russians were using for the assault on Kharkiv. U.S. officials said the ban on Ukraine using weapons for “long range” attacks in Russia had not changed.But Mr. Blinken’s remarks on Friday suggested the ban could change, depending on shifts in battlefield conditions and the direction of the war. He did say, though, that the United States was “proceeding deliberately as well as effectively.” That included ensuring Ukrainian soldiers had the necessary training to use new weapons systems and the capacity to maintain them, he said.American officials say the policy shift means Ukrainian attacks with U.S. weapons in Russia can be pre-emptive, but can only take place within Russian areas near Kharkiv that the Pentagon has designated and that U.S. military officials have communicated to their Ukrainian counterparts.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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      Europe Banned Russia’s RT Network. Its Content Is Still Spreading.

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      A study found that hundreds of sites, many without obvious Kremlin links, copied Russian propaganda and spread it to unsuspecting audiences ahead of the E.U. election.The website calling itself Man Stuff News caters to a certain sensibility, with categories like “Backyard Grilling,” “TV Shows for Guys” and “Beard Grooming.” A recent article headlined “Tips for Dads During Labor” offered this nugget of advice: “Just remember to spend some time together before deciding whether or not to give birth.”Get to its section devoted to world news, however, and the nature of the coverage changes drastically. There, a recent article belittled an international warrant to arrest Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, for war crimes. It repeated, word for word, an article that had appeared a day before under a different byline on the website for RT, Russia’s global television network.RT, which the U.S. State Department describes as a key player in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Sites like Man Stuff News, however, have helped RT sidestep the restrictions and continue reaching European and American audiences, according to a new report.Replicas of RT articles have been laundered thousands of times through hundreds of sites, according to the report, written by researchers from the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research nonprofit. The sites include content aggregators like Infowars, run by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; mirrors of RT repurposed from abandoned “zombie” sites; faux local news outlets with names like San Francisco Telegraph; and domains focusing on spirituality, yoga, extraterrestrials and the apocalypse. Many of the articles were then further disseminated through social media.The rationale for reposting RT content most likely varies from site to site, but the surreptitious republishing represents a particular danger in the European Union, where concerns about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns are intensifying, especially as Russia tries to weaken European support for Ukraine ahead of parliamentary elections next week.“This is really the tip of the Russian propaganda iceberg,” said Bret Schafer, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at German Marshall. “It was quite evident when we were running the search results in the E.U. that if Russian propaganda is not showing up on Russian domains, it’s getting through, which is sort of a double whammy because it’s not just evading restrictions and bans, it’s doing so on sites that are less transparent than RT itself.”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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      in Elections

      Monday Briefing: Ukraine Fears a Russian Push Near Kharkiv

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      Also, Hamas fires missiles at central IsraelA hardware superstore was hit in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Saturday. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesZelensky warned of a new Russian offensiveA day after at least 16 people were killed in what officials said was a Russian missile strike on a hardware superstore in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Moscow’s forces were massing for a new ground offensive in the northeast.Zelensky said that Russia was “preparing for offensive actions” and gathering troops near the border. Kharkiv has seen a sharp escalation in the ferocity of aerial attacks this month, forcing many to flee. On Saturday, a second strike, which came just hours after the attack on the superstore, hit commercial infrastructure, wounding at least 25 people.Far from the front lines, U.S. and allied intelligence officials are tracking an increase in low-level sabotage operations in Europe that they say are part of a Russian campaign to undermine support for Ukraine.The covert operations have mostly been arsons or attempted arsons targeting a wide range of sites, including a warehouse in England, a paint factory in Poland, homes in Latvia and an Ikea store in Lithuania. People accused of being Russian operatives have also been arrested on charges of plotting attacks on U.S. military bases.Analysis: Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, this month changed defense ministers for the first time in more than a decade, and he recently allowed corruption arrests among top officials. It is most likely a sign that he has greater confidence about his battlefield prospects in Ukraine.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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      Do Not Allow Putin to Capture Another Pawn in Europe

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      The Georgians call it the Russian Law. It was passed recently by the Parliament in the Republic of Georgia, purportedly to improve transparency by having civil society and media groups that get some of their funds from abroad register as groups “carrying the interests of a foreign power.” But the tens of thousands of Georgians who have taken to the streets again and again against the law know its real goal — to suppress those who would hold the government to account, and to move the country into the orbit of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.The law has drawn stiff rebukes from the United States and Europe. The State Department has announced visa restrictions on officials behind the foreign-agent law and Congress has threatened further sanctions. European Union officials have warned that it could block Georgia’s bid for membership only six months after the country was granted candidate status. This is a serious threat for a country where polls show about 80 percent of the population supporting a Western political orientation.The clash over the foreign-agent law in a small country nestled in the Caucasus Mountains has been largely overshadowed by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Yet it is also at its core an East-West struggle over Georgia’s political path, a contest with cardinal implications for the region’s future. Georgia, in fact, was the first neighboring country invaded by Russia post-Soviet Union, in 2008, to block its westward drift.Now the ruling party, Georgian Dream, seems to share Russia’s goal, though it has generally avoided openly siding with Russia. Launched 12 years ago by the billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili — who made his money in Russia — as a broad and ill-defined opposition movement, the party has taken an increasingly anti-Western stance in recent years. In a speech in Tbilisi, the nation’s capital, last month, Mr. Ivanishvili inveighed against a “global war party” that, he said, was “appointed from outside” and was using nongovernmental organizations to take control of Georgia. Georgian Dream has also echoed other Russian attacks on purported Western decadence.The foreign-agent bill marks the most overt political attack on Western influence the party has taken. When first introduced last year, massive public protests forced the government to pull it back. But the government revived it this spring, and despite even larger and angrier protests, the protests were as large and angry, the Parliament passed the bill on May 14.The pro-Western president of Georgia, Salome Zourabichvili, whose position is largely ceremonial but allows her to block legislation, promptly vetoed the measure, arguing that in essence and spirit it was “a Russian law that contradicts our Constitution and all European standards, and therefore an obstacle to our European path.” Though Georgian Dream has more than enough votes to override the veto, it has not done so yet, and there are reports that it might be prepared to let it stay on the shelf in exchange for Western aid and other perks.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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      Russia Bombs Hardware Superstore in Kharkiv, Killing 6, Ukraine Says

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      It was the latest attack in a sustained bombing campaign that has made life increasingly dangerous for civilians in the northeastern Ukrainian city.Russia bombed a hardware superstore in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday afternoon, killing at least six people and injuring at least 40 others, Ukrainian officials said. The attack was the latest in a sustained bombing campaign against the city that has made life increasingly difficult and dangerous for civilians.Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said that 16 people were still missing, suggesting that the death toll could rise. He added that another airstrike on Saturday, in the center of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, injured at least 14 people.“For the entire day, Kharkiv has been under Russian terrorist strikes. The air raid in the Kharkiv region has been ongoing for more than 12 hours,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media.Saturday’s attack, Mr. Zelensky added, underscored Ukraine’s recent calls on Western allies to provide it with air defense systems and other weapons capable of shooting down Russian missiles and the planes that launch the bombs. “If Ukraine had sufficient air defenses systems and modern combat aircraft, Russian strikes like this one would have been impossible,” he said.Videos and photos posted online by Ukrainian officials showed large plumes of black smoke billowing from the superstore, as firefighters scrambled to extinguish a blaze that the authorities said extended over 10,000 square meters.Kharkiv, currently home to 1.3 million people and located just 25 miles from the Russian border, has been increasingly targeted by Russian airstrikes in recent months, in what Ukrainian officials and military experts say is a tactic intended to intimidate residents and create panic.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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      Ukraine Steps Up Attacks With U.S. Long-Range Missiles

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      The assaults have hit military targets in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine. Pressure is now mounting on Washington to let Kyiv fire the missiles into Russia itself.The Ukrainian army has increasingly used U.S.-supplied long-range missiles to target Russian airfields and warships deep inside Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, but it has been barred by Washington from extending its attacks into Russia proper, limiting its ability to repel enemy assaults.In the past week, Kyiv’s forces launched three attacks using Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS. The air assaults — which hit an air-defense system and a missile ship in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine’s east and south — were reported by both sides, and their impact was confirmed by independent groups that analyze geolocated footage of the battlefield.Ukraine hopes that the strikes, by hurting Moscow’s ability to conduct military operations, will ultimately help relieve troops struggling to contain Russian advances on the ground. But the United States and other Western allies have permitted only the firing of Western weapons into Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, not into Russia itself, for fear of escalating the war.Ukrainian officials have complained that the policy allows Moscow to launch attacks from inside Russia without risk and handcuffs Ukraine’s ability to repel them. “They proceed calmly, understanding that our partners do not give us permission” to strike, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an interview with The New York Times this past week. “This is their huge advantage.”Now, pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to reverse that policy in the face of Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield. The latest call came on Friday, with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, telling The Economist that denying “Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.”Ukraine does not produce powerful long-range weapons, leaving it dependent on its Western allies to obtain them. But Washington had long refused to even provide ATACMS — pronounced “attack ems” — fearing that doing so could cross one of the Kremlin’s “red lines” that would lead to escalation.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