BRUSSELS — NATO defense ministers are gathering in Brussels on Wednesday for more meetings on the long-term response to Russia’s war against Ukraine, including boosting the production of armaments and ammunition.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Russia has “lost strategically, operationally and tactically,” after he met in Brussels with defense chiefs from countries supporting Kyiv.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Key developments
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- NATO is “looking for ways to enhance our defense industrial capacity,” Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said. Ukraine’s backers expect the war, which is depleting ammunition stocks, to intensify in the coming months.
- NATO hopefuls Finland and Sweden will take part in Wednesday’s meetings. “The main question is not whether Finland and Sweden are ratified together,” Stoltenberg told reporters earlier. “The main question is that they are both ratified as full members as soon as possible.”
- U.S. researchers accused Russia of putting thousands of Ukrainian children in “reeducation” camps, while Moscow called the allegations “absurd statements.” The State Department-supported Conflict Observatory said the camps “expose children from Ukraine to Russia-centric academic, cultural, patriotic, and/or military education,” as part of what a report describes as an operation directed by the Kremlin. The Russian Embassy in Washington said Moscow has accepted children who fled Ukraine, adding that “we do our best to keep minors in families.”
- The head of the Wagner Group said that “for a long time” he ran the internet troll farm that faced U.S. sanctions over charges of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yevgeniy Prigozhin, whose mercenary forces are fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine, said on Telegram that he created and managed the Internet Research Agency to “protect the Russian information space from the boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian assertions from the West.”
