KHARKIV, Ukraine—A Ukrainian counterattack in the country’s southeast is chipping away at Russian advances there and demonstrating that Kyiv’s forces have got plenty of fight left as Moscow’s invasion stretches into a fifth year.

With peace negotiations backed by President Trump stalled, Russia has sought to portray its victory in Ukraine as inevitable. But losses among the Kremlin’s troops now number well over one million, and its grinding offensives advance at a few dozen yards a day at best, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Intelligence Studies and the conclusions of several European defense-intelligence departments.

Ukraine has embarrassed Russian generals’ claims of significant gains by largely clearing the city of Kupyansk in the northeast of Russian forces and retaking several villages in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.

At the same time, long-range strikes by Ukraine, Western sanctions and ship seizures are pushing down prices for Russian oil that are critical for Moscow to sustain its military efforts.

Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department at CSIS, said that is why Russian President Vladimir Putin is dangling economic deals in front of Trump—to tempt him to cut off support to Ukraine or try to force Kyiv to hand over territory that his army hasn’t conquered.

“That’s the big breakthrough in a war that his military is unable to win,” Jones said of Putin. “The real hope is that the U.S. will come to their aid.”
War dead

Russian military casualties total some 1.2 million, of which as many as 325,000 have been killed, more than double the numbers for Ukraine, according to CSIS. While Russia has long been able to attract volunteers to the war with large payments, there are signs that recruitment is now struggling to keep pace with casualties. Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, said last week that Russia wasn’t able to replace its battlefield losses in 2025.

KAMPALA, Uganda—Ten million people face hunger in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s east, and it isn’t because there is no food to be had. It is largely because people can’t get what food there is.

The M23 rebel group that one year ago seized Goma, eastern Congo’s largest city, has tried to establish itself as the prevailing government in the area and consolidate control. Instead, it has driven farmers from their land, left produce to rot at roadblocks and blocked food imports except those from its allies in neighboring Rwanda, according to local traders and activists.

The result is empty shelves in most stores and sky-high prices for meat, milk, grain and vegetables in stores that do manage to stock up, residents and activists report.

Noella Amisi, a nurse in Goma, rushed out for baby formula, sugar and other groceries as soon as she received a $30 mobile-money transfer from her husband in government-held Kinshasa, Congo’s capital city. For hours, she crisscrossed the city looking for a stocked supermarket. She found nothing to buy.

“I am just trying my best to ensure that my children don’t starve, but every day the situation gets worse,” said 28-year-old Amisi.

The United Nations projects three million people in eastern Congo will likely slip into a food emergency by the end of June—its term for life-threatening hunger.

After years of insurgencies, residents in eastern Congo are accustomed to food shortages, inflation and destitution. But since the Rwandan-backed M23 stormed through the mineral-rich region and seized Goma and Bukavu, the region’s No. 2 city, people have had to comb looted markets for scraps of food. Some locals sell clothes and other personal items to raise cash to buy what high-priced food they can find.

Across rebel-held cities and towns, supermarket shelves sit empty while crops wither in inaccessible fields and go bad at rebel checkpoints.

Rwanda’s quest to solidify its influence in eastern Congo has prompted it to deploy its military, which fought alongside the rebels and is now helping M23 create what is de facto an autonomous region in the country’s mining heartlands, according to U.N. investigators.

Rwanda’s economy has become one of Africa’s fastest-growing, thanks in part to smuggled Congolese minerals, according to economists.

But by choking off agricultural production, transport and markets, Rwanda’s M23 allies are aggravating Congo’s hunger crisis. Analysts say Congo’s situation is reminiscent of the insurgency that created the 1985 famine in Ethiopia, which killed nearly one million people, and the continuing conflict in Sudan, which has turned the country’s breadbaskets into hunger spots.

“The M23 rebel group is inflicting deeper suffering on civilians through brutal tax collection and tight controls over food trade and property ownership,” said Richard Moncrieff, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Rebels block dairy and beef from entering Congo—except if it comes from Rwanda, traders and residents say. In some areas they control, rebels allow merchants to import cooking oil, rice and wheat from other neighboring countries only if cleared by the Rwandans, residents and traders say.

For several weeks, a supermarket owner in Goma hasn’t been able to restock the cold-storage section, where he normally keeps perishables. The trader said he lost $60,000 last month after a container he imported from Kenya was impounded at the Congolese border for several weeks, rendering milk, cheese and sausages inedible.

“Eastern #DRC has long been a covert economic engine for Rwanda through its illicit networks and proxies,” said Zobel Behalal, senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a Washington-based think tank. “M23 now functions as the armed extension of Rwanda’s influence.”

Millions Face Starvation in #Congo. Their New Rulers Are to Blame.

#UN chief condemns dehumanization of migrants for political gain. Migrants are being “dehumanized” and “pushed into danger” around the world “to score political points, with devastating human consequences,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday, adding that they’re “not criminals.”

“Instead of responding with cooperation, the global reaction has too often been driven by fear, division and rank opportunism,” Guterres told an informal meeting of the General Assembly on migration.

Guterres did not point to a specific country, instead noting this harm occurs “across continents.”

Guterres also presented his latest biennial report on migration to member states Friday, which found an estimated 3.7 percent of the global population were migrants in 2024.

That amounts to an estimated 304 million people worldwide -- with children accounting for up to 42 million of them.

“Safe and regular pathways are becoming ever more restrictive -- especially for families and low-wage workers who face the steepest barriers,” Guterres said.

But migrants don’t disappear when countries block legal pathways.

Instead they are “pushed into danger, exploitation and the hands of smugglers,” Guterres said.

“It is a moral outrage that thousands of men, women and children die or go missing every year because no safe alternative exists.”

“Migration is a story as old as humanity: a story of courage, resilience and mutual benefits. Our task is to ensure that it never becomes a story of death and despair."

Macron to visit top-secret sub base as some Europeans worry about U.S. nuclear guarantees.

French President Emmanuel Macron, the person with the power to unleash France’s nuclear arsenal, will on Monday update French thinking on the potential use of warheads carried on submarines and planes, if it ever came to that. This in the context of concerns in Europe that Russian war-making could spread beyond Ukraine, and uncertainty about U.S. President Donald Trump’s steadfastness as an ally.

For decades, Europe has lived under a protective umbrella of U.S. nuclear weapons, stationed on the continent since the mid-1950s to deter the former Soviet Union and now Russia. Lately, however, some European politicians and defence analysts are questioning whether Washington can still be relied upon to use such force if needed.

As the only nuclear-armed member of the 27-nation European Union, the questions are particularly pertinent for France.

Possible revisions to France’s nuclear deterrence policy, sure to be carefully calibrated and scrutinized by allies and potential enemies alike, could be among the most consequential decisions that Macron makes in his remaining 14 months as president, before elections to choose his successor in 2027.

That Macron feels a need to bare France’s nuclear teeth, in what will be the commander in chief’s second keynote speech laying out the country’s deterrence posture since his election in 2017, speaks to his concerns, voiced multiple times, about geopolitical and defence-technology shifts that threaten the security of France and its allies.

Those voicing doubts about Washington’s reliability include Rasmus Jarlov, chair of the Danish parliament’s Defence Committee.

“If things got really serious, I very much doubt that Trump would risk American cities to protect European cities,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We don’t know but it seems very risky to rely on the American protection.”

He and others are turning to France for reassurance. In the longer term, Jarlov argues that other European nations also need to arm themselves with nuclear weapons — an almost unfathomable prospect when U.S. protection seemed absolute in European minds.

“The Nordic countries have the capacity. We have uranium, we have nuclear scientists. We can develop nuclear weapons,” he said. “Realistically, it will take a lot of time. So in the short term, we are looking to France.”
Adjusting to geopolitical risks

The world has changed dramatically since Macron’s first policy-making nuclear speech in 2020, with new uncertainties shoving old certainties aside.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth year, brought war to the EU’s door and repeated threats of possible nuclear use from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

China is expanding its nuclear arsenal. So, too, is North Korea’s nuclear-armed military. In October, Trump spoke about U.S. intentions to resume nuclear tests for the first time since 1992, although U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright later said that such tests would not include nuclear explosions.

Russia revised its deterrence policy in 2024, lowering its bar for possible retaliation with nuclear weapons. The United Kingdom has announced plans to buy nuclear-capable U.S.-made F-35A fighter jets, restoring a capacity to deliver nuclear airstrikes that it phased out in the 1990s, leaving it with just submarine-based nuclear missiles.

The chosen site for Macron’s speech on Monday — the Île Longue base for France’s four nuclear-armed submarines — will drive home that French presidents also have nuclear muscle at their disposal in an increasingly unstable world. They each can carry 16 M51 intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with multiple warheads.

“There are high expectations from the allies and partners, and maybe also the adversaries, about how the French nuclear doctrine could evolve,” said Héloïse Fayet, a nuclear deterrence specialist at the French Institute of International Relations, a Paris think tank.

Speaking in an AP interview, Fayet said she’s hoping for “real changes.”

“Maybe something about a greater and a clearer French commitment to the protection of allies, thanks to the French nuclear weapons,” she said.
France’s nuclear force

Macron said in 2020 that France has fewer than 300 warheads — a number that has remained stable since former President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a modest reduction to that level in 2008.

Macron said the force is sufficient to inflict “absolutely unacceptable damage” on the “political, economic, military nerve centers” of any country that threatens the “vital interests” of France, “whatever they may be.”

Nuclear specialists will be watching for any hint from Macron that he no longer considers the French stockpile to be sufficient and that it might need to grow.

The language of deterrence is generally shrouded by deliberate ambiguity, to keep potential enemies guessing about the red lines that could trigger a nuclear response. Officials from Macron’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the nuclear policy changes that Macron might make, were extremely guarded in their wording, not least because deterrence is a strictly presidential prerogative.

“There will no doubt be some shifts, fairly substantial developments,” one of the officials said.
Protecting Europe

Again with careful wording, Macron in 2020 said the “vital interests” that France could defend with nuclear force don’t end at its borders but also have “a European dimension.”

Some European nations have taken up an offer Macron made then to discuss France’s nuclear deterrence and even associate European partners in French nuclear exercises.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says he’s had “initial talks” with Macron about nuclear deterrence and has publicly theorized about German Air Force planes possibly being used to carry French nuclear bombs.

European nations engaging with France are seeking “a second life insurance” against any possibility of U.S. nuclear protection being withdrawn, says Etienne Marcuz, a French nuclear defence specialist at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research think tank.

“The United States are unpredictable — have become unpredictable — because of the Trump 2 administration,” he said. “That has legitimately raised the question of whether the United States would truly be prepared to protect Europe, and above all, whether they would be willing to deploy their nuclear forces in defence of Europe.”

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John Leicester, The Associated Press

Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet in Paris and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.

#Sweden intercepts suspected Russian #drone during visit by French aircraft carrier.

The armed forces said Thursday that a Swedish naval ship observed the suspected drone during a patrol in the Öresund strait, which divides Sweden from Denmark. They said that unspecified countermeasures were taken to disrupt the drone, and that contact with it was then lost.

The French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is in the southern Swedish city of Malmö this week as part of regular NATO exercise activities. Malmö is located on the Öresund, opposite Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen.

French military spokesperson Guillaume Vernet told The Associated Press that the drone was detected on Wednesday and handled by Swedish forces integrated into a security system around the carrier. He said Friday that the drone was more than 10 kilometres (6 miles) from the Charles de Gaulle.

“This system showed it is robust, and this event had no impact on the activity of the aircraft carrier battle group,” Vernet said.

Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson told public broadcaster SVT Thursday evening that the suspected violation of Swedish airspace by a drone happened in connection with a Russian military ship being in Swedish territorial waters. Asked what country he thinks the drone belongs to, he replied: “Probably Russia.”

The Russian ship continued into the Baltic Sea, and Swedish authorities have been in close contact with Denmark about the incident, Jonson said. The armed forces said that no further drones were observed.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said during a visit to the French ship on Friday that “everything implies that it is a Russian violation of Swedish airspace,” but he wouldn’t go into detail. He added that “it is serious and maybe not surprising,” as Russia dislikes Western exercises and the West dislikes Moscow’s actions.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, who also visited the Charles de Gaulle, emphasized that the security of the aircraft carrier wasn’t threatened.

“If indeed ... there is a potential Russian origin for this incident, it would be a ridiculous provocation,” he said. He said that he had no information of his own on the source of the drone.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he didn’t know about the incident. Asked by reporters about Swedish officials linking the drone to the Russian ship, Peskov said that “it’s quite absurd” to claim that the drone was Russian just because a Russian ship was nearby.

Western officials say Russia is masterminding a campaign of sabotage and disruption across Europe. An Associated Press database has documented well over 100 incidents. Not all of them are public and it can sometimes take officials months to establish a link to Moscow.

While officials say the campaign — waged since Russia launched an all-out war against Ukraine in 2022 — aims to deprive Kyiv of support, they believe Moscow is also trying to identify Europe’s weak spots and divert law enforcement resources.

A genetic analysis reveals new details on ancient couplings between humans and Neanderthals.

A new genetic analysis offers some ancient gossip: The pairings were more often female humans with male Neanderthals.

How exactly this happened remains a huge question mark. Did human women venture into Neanderthal populations, or were the Neanderthal males drawn to larger human enclaves? Were these interactions peaceful, confusing, secretive or even violent?

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get a definitive answer to how this happened, since we can’t travel back in time,” said population genetics expert Xinjun Zhang with the University of Michigan, commenting on the new analysis.

But the study, published Thursday in the journal Science, shows “that whenever Neanderthals and modern humans have mated, there has been a preference for male Neanderthals and female modern humans, as opposed to the other way around,” said author Alexander Platt, who studies genetics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Scientists know that Neanderthals and humans mated because there is a small but important percentage of Neanderthal DNA in most modern humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa — including genes that can help us fight some diseases and make us more susceptible to others.

But they have also known that the Neanderthal DNA is not distributed evenly throughout the human genome.

In particular, there is a surprising lack of Neanderthal DNA in the human X chromosome, one of the bundles of genes in each cell known as a sex chromosome, compared with the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the other, non-sex chromosomes in the cell.

Scientists thought that maybe the genes in those locations were simply not beneficial – or even harmful. Perhaps people with those gene patterns didn’t survive as well so those genes were filtered out by evolution over time.

Or, they thought, maybe the difference could be explained by how the two species intermingled.

To try to solve the riddle, Platt and colleagues looked instead at the Neanderthal genome and the human DNA that got interspersed during a “mating event” 250,000 years ago.

When comparing these genes, they found more of a human fingerprint on the Neanderthal X chromosome – the same chromosome that, in humans, has less Neanderthal DNA than would be expected.

The most likely explanation for this mirror image pattern is mating behavior. That’s because of the way sex chromosomes are passed from parents to children, explained Platt. Because genetic females have two X chromosomes and genetic males have one X and one Y chromosomes, two out of every three X chromosomes in a population, on average, are inherited from people’s mothers.

If more human females mated with Neanderthal males than the other way around, over thousands of years you would expect to see just what they found: more human DNA in Neanderthal X chromosomes and less Neanderthal DNA in human X chromosomes.

“I think that they’ve taken some really important steps in filling missing pieces to the puzzle,” said Joshua Akey, who studies evolutionary genomics at Princeton University and wasn’t involved with the new study.

The study can’t totally rule out other explanations. For example, Zhang said, it’s possible that the offspring of human males and Neanderthal females just didn’t survive as well.

But the simplest and most likely, explanation, the study found, is also the most interesting: “It’s not the result of a strictly Darwinian survival of the fittest,” Platt said. “It’s really the result of how we interact with each other, and what our culture and society and behavior is like.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

Peru declares a state of emergency for hundreds of districts after severe rains and flooding.

Signed by interim President José María Balcázar and published in the country’s official gazette, the decree aims to fast-track funding for local and regional authorities to secure vital infrastructure — including bridges, roads, water and electricity — while protecting the life and health of residents. More than 700 districts across the Pacific coast, the Andes and the Amazon are now under a state of emergency.

Although rains have intensified in the past days, the new government was unable to implement the decrees until now. President Balcázar only swore in his Cabinet on Tuesday, ending a period without ministers that began on Feb. 17 following the removal of his predecessor, José Jerí, who faces an investigation into corruption and influence peddling.

Peru’s ministry of transportation said Wednesday that about 931 kilometers (580 miles) of roads have been damaged nationwide, with the destruction concentrated in the four regions hardest hit by rainfall. These vital routes serve more than half a million people every week.

Authorities also updated the death toll, noting that 68 people have died due to rain-related causes since December. Among the recent victims were a father and son swept away by a landslide in Arequipa, as well as a police officer in Lima who drowned in the Rimac River while attempting to rescue a dog trapped by the Andean floods.

According to authorities, Pacific waters are warming and El Nino Costero is expected to strengthen slightly in March. The warming of ocean waters leads to high evaporation rates and extreme rainfall, as well as increased river flows.

U.S. unveils new #Iran sanctions in ‘maximum pressure’ effort. The United States on Wednesday announced fresh sanctions targeting Iran, pressing on with what Washington calls its “maximum pressure” campaign ahead of talks between both sides in Geneva.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened strikes if Iran does not cut a deal on its nuclear program.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s latest sanctions take aim at more than 30 individuals, entities and vessels said to be enabling “illicit Iranian petroleum sales,” as well as its weapons production.

In particular, vessels operating “as part of Iran’s shadow fleet, which transport Iranian petroleum and petroleum products to foreign markets” were targeted as a means to strike at authorities’ revenue sources, the Treasury said.

“Iran exploits financial systems to sell illicit oil, launder the proceeds, procure components for its nuclear and conventional weapons programs, and support its terrorist proxies,” charged U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a statement.

He vowed that the Trump administration will continue to push for “maximum pressure on Iran to target the regime’s weapons capabilities and support for terrorism.”

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump accused Tehran of “sinister nuclear ambitions” after he ordered a massive military deployment around the Gulf.

But for now, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has said that he had a favourable outlook for talks between both sides.