分类： politics

A fresh wave of coordinated drone attacks carried out by Ukrainian forces targeted key Russian energy infrastructure across multiple regions and commercial oil tankers in the Sea of Azov on Thursday, coming just 24 hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a landmark agreement to grant Kyiv a manufacturing license for Patriot air defense systems. This new series of strikes builds on a sustained campaign against Russian fuel networks that has already sparked a growing domestic fuel crisis, with long lines at filling stations, widespread gasoline shortages, and mandatory fuel rationing in at least 10 Russian regions.

The first strike of the day was reported early Thursday at a large oil storage depot in Tver, a major city in western Russia roughly 100 miles northwest of Moscow. Acting regional governor Vitaly Korolyov confirmed that the attack ignited a significant blaze at the facility, though no immediate casualties were reported.

Further south, in Russia’s Stavropol Krai, regional governor Vladimir Vladimirov confirmed that multiple large oil storage tanks were set alight by drone assault in the town of Vyazniki. As the fire spread beyond initial containment efforts, local authorities ordered the emergency evacuation of residents from several nearby apartment blocks to protect public safety.

Offshore in the Sea of Azov, a strategically critical waterway connecting southern Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, Ukrainian drones hit two Russian oil tankers, according to Rostov regional governor Yuri Slusar. Slusay reported that one of the two vessels remained engulfed in flames as of Thursday afternoon, and all crew members from both ships were evacuated before the fires reached critical sections. Thursday’s attack marks the third strike on oil tankers in the Sea of Azov in the past week, part of Ukraine’s intentional campaign to disrupt Russian fuel supply lines to occupied Crimea and frontline Russian military forces operating in southern Ukraine.

In a statement on the defensive actions taken during the strikes, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that its air defense systems had intercepted and downed 73 Ukrainian drones across the country between late Wednesday and early Thursday. Ukraine, in turn, reported that Russia launched a massive overnight retaliatory drone and missile strike across Ukrainian territory, deploying 94 long-range attack drones and two ballistic missiles. Ukraine’s Air Force said that 72 of the incoming drones were either intercepted by air defenses or jammed and disabled before impact, but 19 remaining drones and both ballistic missiles caused damage to infrastructure and civilian sites across 13 locations.

The strikes unfolded against a dramatic shift in U.S.-Ukraine relations, a day after Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a high-stakes meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey. During that meeting, Trump announced the U.S. would approve a license allowing Ukraine to manufacture its own Patriot air defense systems, a capability Kyiv has requested for years to counter relentless Russian missile and drone strikes on its territory. This agreement marks a major breakthrough for Ukraine, which has relied on a limited number of donated Patriot systems from Western allies to date.

The collaborative tone of Wednesday’s meeting stood in stark contrast to a contentious meeting between the two leaders at the White House in February 2025, when Trump publicly berated Zelenskyy over the progress of the war and negotiations. During the latest encounter, however, Trump offered effusive praise for Zelenskyy, commending his willingness to engage in negotiations to end the more than four-year conflict. “He has done an amazing job and been very effective,” Trump told reporters following the meeting.

LONDON – The UK’s Labour Party launched its leadership election process Thursday to select a successor to outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with veteran progressive politician Andy Burnham positioned as the only candidate and set to take the country’s highest office later this month.

The opening of nominations kicks off a short, orderly contest that appears all but decided before voting even begins. Other prospective challengers have already withdrawn from consideration, leaving Burnham as the sole hopeful. On Wednesday evening, former Defense Secretary Al Carns, who had publicly weighed a run for the leadership, confirmed he would not mount a challenge against Burnham.

In an official statement announcing his decision, Carns noted that while he had hoped a public leadership contest would spark a robust, needed policy debate for the party, an extended period of internal factional politics is not what the UK public requires at this critical moment. “We’ve got to get on with the job of governing,” Carns wrote, adding “Andy Burnham’s earned this position and he’s got my full backing.”

Under Labour Party rules, any candidate must collect a minimum of 80 signatures from sitting Labour Members of Parliament to appear on the ballot. Burnham, the former 10-year mayor of Greater Manchester, is already on track to far surpass this threshold, according to party insiders.

Nominations will close on July 16, with an official confirmation of the new leader expected the following day. Following the announcement, Burnham will travel to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King Charles III on July 20, where he will formally be invited to form a government and take office as prime minister.

The leadership vacancy was created last month when Starmer announced he would step down immediately after his successor was chosen. Starmer, who led Labour to a landslide general election victory in 2024, saw his approval among both party members and the general public collapse over two years in office, undermined by repeated policy missteps and widely criticized judgment calls that eroded public trust in his leadership.

Burnham returned to national Parliament just last month, winning a special by-election after nearly a decade leading the major northern English metro region of Greater Manchester. He has campaigned on a platform of sweeping national economic change, promising to reverse almost 17 years of sluggish UK growth that began after the 2008 global financial crisis. His signature policy approach, branded “Manchesterism,” draws on his experience in regional government, and calls for combining private and public sector investment to upgrade underfunded national assets including transport networks, affordable housing, and core infrastructure.

Despite his momentum and united party backing, Burnham will inherit the same deep-seated challenges that plagued Starmer’s tenure. The UK continues to grapple with stagnant overall economic growth, strained and under-resourced public services, and ongoing cost-of-living pressures that have left millions of households facing financial hardship.

On foreign policy, Burnham has already signaled he will maintain broad continuity with the existing government’s approach. In an op-ed published in The Times of London, he confirmed that the UK’s “commitment to NATO and the U.K.’s nuclear deterrent will remain absolute.” He added that the country will continue to serve as a steadfast ally to the United States and maintain unwavering support for Ukraine in its ongoing conflict against Russian invasion.

In the sunbaked, underdeveloped toe of Italy’s boot, a quiet standoff over geopolitics and public health is playing out. Calabria, Italy’s poorest region, has become an unlikely exception to a growing global trend: it continues to host hundreds of Cuban medical professionals, defying long-running U.S. efforts to shut down Cuba’s iconic international medical program. For decades, Cuban doctors have brought their specialized experience delivering care in low-resource settings to developing nations across the globe, but Calabria is one of the few places in Europe where the program still operates under mounting American pressure.

Calabria’s decades-long struggle with healthcare access creates the urgent need for foreign medical staff. For 17 years until April, the region operated under special national administration due to persistent budget shortfalls, compounded by systemic corruption and Mafia infiltration that gutted planned investments in public health. Young Italian medical graduates overwhelmingly leave for higher-paying careers in the wealthy, industrialized north, leaving gaping staffing shortages that shuttered entire hospital departments by the early 2020s. Before the first cohort of Cuban doctors arrived in Polistena Hospital in January 2023, chief physician Francesco Moschella told the Associated Press he was single-handedly keeping the facility’s emergency room open. At one point, patients faced waits of up to 12 hours just to see a provider.

Today, more than 200 Cuban doctors work across remote Calabrian hospitals, filling half of all emergency room staffing in some facilities. Zoila Yakelin Arevalo Cruz, an emergency medicine specialist who left her young son in Cuba to take up her post in mid-2023, works in Polistena’s ER, which treats 30,000 patients annually. The 38-year-old, who now speaks fluent Italian and even picked up the local Calabrian dialect from visiting patients, said she and her colleagues had no idea how severe the doctor shortage was in a European first-world region. Thanks to the addition of Cuban staff, she said, wait times have dropped from multiple hours to under 60 minutes. Local residents echo that praise: 72-year-old Maria Morano, a regular patient at Polistena, said the Cuban doctors bring a rare combination of skill, empathy and humility that many local patients don’t see from Italian providers. “We are lucky they came, otherwise our hospital would have been closed entirely,” she said.

The U.S. government has spent years targeting Cuba’s medical program, which it labels a lucrative revenue stream for Cuba’s socialist government and accuses of operating as a form of human trafficking, citing the Cuban state’s practice of collecting a portion of doctors’ salaries and claims of passport confiscation. Under successive U.S. administrations, Washington has pressured allied nations to cut ties with the program, and many have complied: in March, Jamaica ended its 50-year medical cooperation agreement with Cuba, displacing nearly 300 healthcare workers, while Honduras expelled more than 150 Cuban medical staff this year. But not all nations have bowed to pressure: Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum publicly defended the program in March, noting it delivers critical care to underserved populations that would otherwise go without treatment.

Cuba says it currently deploys 22,000 medical personnel across 55 countries, framing the program as a global mission of solidarity rooted in the country’s longstanding commitment to universal healthcare. In February, U.S. officials including charge d’affaires to Cuba Mike Hammer traveled to Calabria to meet with regional governor Roberto Occhiuto to press for an end to the arrangement. The meeting was cordial, but Hammer made clear Washington would prefer Calabria source foreign staff from other countries. Occhiuto, a senior member of a strongly anti-communist Italian political party who was even featured in the official newspaper of Cuba’s Communist Party, is an unlikely defender of the program. But he makes no apologies for prioritizing his region’s people over geopolitical pressure: he told the AP that while he shares Washington’s opposition to Cuban socialism, his first responsibility is keeping local hospitals open. “I’ve faced pressure during the Biden administration, but it grew much more intense under Trump,” Occhiuto said. “I told U.S. officials we are working on incentives to lure local Italian doctors back to Calabria, but right now, we need these doctors to keep care accessible. I intend to keep all currently deployed Cuban doctors in their posts.” Occhiuto added that he would even like to triple the number of Cuban medical staff in the region to roughly 1,000, but has held off to avoid escalating conflict with Washington.

To address U.S. concerns, Calabria structured its agreement with the Cuban doctors unusually: rather than sending payments to the Cuban government agency that runs the country’s international medical missions, the region signs individual contracts with each doctor and deposits their full salary directly into Italian bank accounts. Even so, many Cuban doctors told the AP they voluntarily send up to half of their earnings back to the Cuban government, as a contribution to the state that trained and educated them. Daisy Luperon Loforte, a Cuban cardiologist working in Calabria, rejected the U.S. claim that doctors are forced into the program and exploited. “We do not consider ourselves modern-day slaves at all, as somebody has called us,” she said. “We love our country, we give an economic contribution, and we are happy to do so. Sixty-three Cuban doctors, many with prior experience in the country’s international missions, have already applied to extend their stays in Calabria and take up independent roles in the regional health system, according to the governor. The Cuban government has not commented on the applications, and the U.S. State Department declined to answer questions about its meeting with Occhiuto. For patients and local leaders, however, the arrangement is not about geopolitics—it is about keeping critical healthcare open for a neglected region that has few other options.