At least 70 people were killed after a drone strike targeted the last functioning hospital in the besieged capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state late Friday, according to local officials and the World Health Organization.

At the time of the attack, the hospital was “packed with patients receiving care,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Saturday, with Sudan’s foreign ministry saying that the victims of the strike were primarily women and children.

The attack on the Saudi Teaching Maternal Hospital in El Fasher marks the latest escalation in a string of violence in Sudan’s 20-month civil war – a brutal power tussle between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) that has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced over 11 million others, according to the United Nations.

Friday’s airstrike is one of many attacks that have resulted in multiple civilian casualties. Last month, more than 100 people were killed after bombs hit a crowded market in Kabkabiya, a town in North Darfur.

Ghebreyesus did not name who was responsible for Friday’s attack.

The SAF and the RSF, both headed by two of Sudan’s most powerful generals, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – also known as Hemedti – frequently accuse each other of carrying out drone attacks on civilian areas.

Darfur Governor Mini Minnawi blamed the RSF for the hospital attack, saying: “It exterminated all the patients who were inside it.”

Sudan’s foreign ministry also accused the RSF of the strike, describing the attack as a massacre.

“More than 70 civilians receiving treatment, most of them women and children, were victims of the massacre when the militia attacked the hospital’s accident department with drones,” it said in a statement.

The Saudi hospital, El Fasher’s remaining public facility with the capacity to perform surgery and treat the wounded, has previously come under fire. Last August, a patient carer was killed when an air strike hit the hospital’s surgical ward. Five others were injured in that attack.

The RSF controls large swathes of Darfur, including much of the country’s western and central regions as it viciously competes for control of the region with the Sudanese military. El Fasher is the last major town in Darfur yet to be captured by the RSF.

WHO chief Ghebreyesus said Friday’s hospital attack is making life for people in the region even more difficult as it “comes at a time when access to health care is already severely constrained” in North Darfur “due to the closure of health facilities following intense bombardments.”

Ghebreyesus called on warring parties to cease fighting and to leave Sudan’s health facilities alone, adding that, “above all, Sudan’s people need peace. The best medicine is peace.”

South Korean prosecutors have indicted the impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol on insurrection charges over his brief declaration of martial law, making him the first sitting president in the country’s history to be indicted.

President Yoon attempted to impose martial law in early December, a move that plunged the country into political turmoil and was overturned within hours by parliament.

Yoon – who denies wrongdoing – has been in custody since being arrested last week.

The embattled president had been holed up in his fortified residence for weeks surrounded by his Presidential Security Service team before eventually leaving his residential compound with investigators in a motorcade.

The country’s Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials (CIO) first attempted to detain him earlier this month, but it failed after an hours-long showdown in which soldiers and members of the presidential security detail blocked some 80 police and investigators from approaching the presidential compound.

He could face life in jail or the death penalty if convicted, although South Korea has not executed anyone in decades.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Three people were killed and 31 others injured by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese government said, as residents of villages near the border defied orders by Israel’s military not to return to their homes.

“One citizen was martyred in Houla, and nine others were injured and transferred to the Tebnine Governmental Hospital, where they are receiving treatment,” Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said in a statement on Sunday.

The statement said that eight people had also been injured in Kfar Kila and transferred to the Marjayoun Governmental Hospital for treatment.

Two people were killed in the towns of Blida and Aitaroun, according to the health ministry, after the Israeli military launched attacks on Lebanese citizens attempting to enter towns still occupied by Israeli forces.

Lebanon’s president Joseph Aoun said he was “monitoring this issue at the highest levels” in a statement.

“Lebanon’s sovereignty and the unity of its territory are not subject to compromise,” he said and promised residents of the south he would “ensure your rights and dignity.”

The deaths come as Israel’s military ordered residents of dozens of southern Lebanese villages not to return to their homes earlier in the morning as a deadline expired Sunday to withdraw forces from the area under a ceasefire agreement that ended months of conflict with Hezbollah.

“Urgent!! A new reminder to the residents of southern Lebanon: Until further notice you are prohibited from moving south to the line of villages and their surroundings,” Avichay Adraee, Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), wrote on X.

The post included a map of southern Lebanon with an area along the border with Israel shaded red and a list of more than 60 villages residents were prohibited from accessing.

“The Defense Forces do not intend to target you and therefore at this stage you are prohibited from returning to your homes from this line south until further notice. Anyone who moves south of this line puts themselves at risk,” Adraee said.

Israel’s government said Friday that the military would not withdraw from Lebanon by Sunday’s deadline, in violation of a ceasefire agreement.

Israel was expected to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon as part of the deal, but the Israeli government said some its forces would remain, blaming Lebanon for failing to uphold its end of the agreement.

Belarusians are voting in a closely managed presidential election that is all but certain to extend the rule of Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994 and Europe’s longest-serving leader.

The last time Belarus held a presidential election in 2020, Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory with more than 80% of the vote. The opposition cried foul, claiming that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was the rightful winner. Hundreds of thousands protested in the capital, Minsk, sparking the harshest crackdown in the country’s post-Soviet history.

This year, with voting underway, Tsikhanouskaya is not asking Belarusians to take to the streets again. The costs are too high, she says.

She should know. Since the brutal regime response in 2020, Tsikhanouskaya has lived in exile with her two children. Human rights activists say Belarus is holding more than 1,200 political prisoners, including Tsikhanouskaya’s husband, Sergei, whom she has been unable to contact for nearly two years.

Tsikhanouskaya only ran in 2020 after her husband was jailed and prevented from running. Perhaps underestimating the political novice, Lukashenko allowed Tsikhanouskaya to run against him – an oversight that led to the greatest threat he faced in his decades-long rule.

Now, Lukashenko is facing only token challengers, one of whom has said he is running “not instead of, but alongside the president.” For the first time, no independent observers will monitor the vote and polling stations abroad will not be open, depriving some 3.5 million citizens outside the country of their vote.

While not calling for large-scale demonstrations, Tsikhanouskaya has urged Belarusians to voice their dissent at the ballot box.

“We’re asking those forced to take part in this sham election to vote against all candidates,” she wrote on Telegram.

Tsikhanouskaya’s opposition movement has said the “elections” are merely “a meticulously orchestrated charade designed to perpetuate the illegitimate dictator’s grip on power.” The European Parliament and US State Department have also labelled the election a “sham.”

“Repression is born of weakness, not strength. The unprecedented measures to stifle any opposition make it clear that the Lukashenko regime fears its own people,” the State Department said last week.

After casting his ballot Sunday, Lukashenko told journalists he did not care whether the West recognizes Belarus’ election or not.

Lukashenko, a 70-year-old former Soviet collective farm boss, survived the scare in 2020 in part thanks to his longtime ally Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose support has become existential for the Belarusian regime.

After state media employees resigned in solidarity with the opposition, Putin sent Kremlin propagandists to replace them. Since then, Minsk’s dependence on Moscow has only deepened.

But Moscow has been exacting a price for its support. Russia used Belarus as a launch pad for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Lukashenko has since allowed Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil. In December, Lukashenko said he was also preparing to receive Russia’s new ballistic missile, the “Oreshnik,” first used in a strike on Ukraine late last year.

Although Lukashenko is “more dependent on Russia and on Putin personally than ever before,” there may be limits to this alliance, said Gould-Davies, now a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank.

“Belarus has provided a wide range of valuable services to Russia, but the thing of course that it hasn’t done is send its own forces (to Ukraine),” he said, suggesting he may fear a backlash among his own troops or wider population if he did so.

“Ordinary Belarusians, emphatically, do not see this as their war, and they could not be persuaded that it is, no matter how much propaganda the Belarusian state were to pump out to them,” he said.

Since 2020, Lukashenko’s regime has stepped up its efforts to stamp out dissent. By the end of December 2024, Belarus was holding 1,265 political prisoners, according to Viasna, a human rights group.

Among them is Ales Bialiatski, the founder of Viasna who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, alongside human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine, for his documentation of rights abuses. The oldest prisoner is Mikhail Liapeika, 76, who was sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment after insulting Lukashenko.

Pavel Sapelka, a lawyer with Viasna, has said many detainees are held in conditions and subjected to treatment that amounts to “torture.”

Lukashenko will be 74 if he completes his seventh term in office. But he has given no indication that he intends to step down. “As long as I have health, I will stay with you,” he said during a visit to a church outside Minsk earlier this month.

Last week, Lukashenko mocked opposition leaders he said were waiting for him to “drop dead.”

“They say: ‘He is about to die, his voice is not the same, he has trouble speaking.’ Don’t hold your breath,” Lukashenko said.

Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s economy has surpassed expectations. Its figures are, if not rosy, not ruinous either. Last year, the war economy likely grew faster than the United States and all major European economies. Unemployment is at a record low. And if the ballooning defense budget has cramped other spending, that’s only temporary.

These statistics send a message to audiences at home and abroad, said Elina Ribakova, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. To the Russian public: “We’re still standing.” To Ukraine’s allies: “We can outlast you.”

Projecting an image of Russia’s economic strength has real-world consequences. Some in the West have questioned whether the sanctions imposed by Ukraine’s backers – and dismissed by President Vladimir Putin as mere “logistical hurdles” – work at all. If they don’t, why bother?

But other experts say this image of resilience is a mirage – one carefully curated by the Kremlin to make its adversaries think Russia’s economy is in good shape. As the war nears its third anniversary, this mask is starting to slip.

To explain Russia’s apparent economic might, analysts have turned to metaphor. Some have used the phrase “on steroids,” to describe growth that is rapid, but unnatural and unsustainable.

Russia may soon feel the pain after the party. Increasingly disgruntled Russian officials have warned that Russia’s economy is hitting the limits of what it can produce, driving up prices. Inflation accelerated last year despite the central bank hiking interest rates to 21% in October, a two-decade high.

While signing a flurry of executive orders on his first day back in the White House, US President Donald Trump said Russia’s economy was a sign that the country was in “big trouble,” and that Putin was “destroying Russia by not making a deal” on Ukraine.

Evidence of that trouble includes the impact of new sanctions, persistent labor shortages and signs of a credit bubble. Despite recent battlefield gains, analysts say Russia’s worsening economic problems could bring Putin to the negotiating table sooner than expected and may make sanctions relief a more powerful bargaining chip for the West.

Shadow budget

Throughout the war, the Kremlin has made extensive use of a strategy known as “reflexive control,” aimed at shaping an adversary’s perceptions in a way that leads the adversary – in this case, Ukraine’s Western backers – to choose actions that benefit Russia.

Weapons are a case in point. Every time the West has considered sending new technology to Ukraine – first, modern tanks, then fighter jets, then long-range weapons – the Kremlin has warned of dire consequences, potentially involving a nuclear strike. This has slowed the supply of weapons to Kyiv, benefiting Moscow.

The economy is no different. The Kremlin wants to convince Ukraine’s allies, particularly the United States, of Russia’s economic strength. If Russia can fund its war for years, the US might support a ceasefire that favors the Kremlin’s goals. Controlling perceptions is paramount, observers say.

And so, it helps to boast of Russia’s economic might. At his marathon annual press conference last month, Putin said Russia’s economy was growing “in spite of everything,” outstripping Europe and the US.

Economic growth and low unemployment have become Putin’s “trump cards,” Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote recently.

But these headline numbers conceal concerning trends. Russia is hiding the true cost of its war by using a shadow “off-budget financing scheme,” according to a new report by Craig Kennedy, an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

While Russia’s “highly scrutinized” defense budget remains at sustainable levels, there has been a parallel and “largely overlooked” surge in corporate borrowing. These loans look private but really are disguised state spending, Kennedy wrote.

On February 25, 2022 – day 2 of the full-scale invasion – Russia enacted a law that empowers the state to force banks to lend to businesses providing goods and services for the war on terms set by the state, he noted.

Between the middle of that year and late 2024, Russia saw an “anomalous” 71% surge in private credit, by an amount equal to 19.4% of its gross domestic product, according to Kennedy. He estimates up to 60% of these loans (as much as $249 billion) have been made to war-related firms. “These are loans that the state has compelled banks to extend to largely uncreditworthy, war-related businesses on concessionary terms,” he wrote.

This means Russia is spending almost twice as much on the war as official figures indicate, Kennedy noted.

The funding scheme could lead to a far-reaching credit crisis, he warned, in large part by imposing heavy debt loads on war-related companies that are likely to default over time, which risks overwhelming banks with “a wave of toxic debt.”

Savers’ jitters

Kennedy’s analysis has provoked a range of responses. A Financial Times commentary said it showed Putin was sitting on a “ticking financial time bomb.”

Others are more temperate. Prokopenko and Alexander Kolyandr, a scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis, have also disputed some of Kennedy’s findings, writing this month that fears of a banking crisis are “overblown.”

Tymofiy Mylovanov, head of the Kyiv School of Economics and Ukraine’s former economy minister, said the findings were concerning, but not necessarily destructive.

One such trigger could be panic among ordinary Russians, who know how it feels to have their savings wiped out. If they believe their deposits are at risk, this could spark bank runs.

Since the fall, rumors have swirled that the central bank could freeze customers’ deposits, which have ballooned as savers have rushed to profit from high interest rates. The Bank of Russia has called the idea “absurd.” But this has done little to reassure Russians, Mylovanov said.

“The fact that they are talking about it is a sign of trouble,” he said. “They cannot not talk about it.”

Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s New People party, Alexei Nechayev, has proposed a new law to prevent the central bank from freezing customers’ deposits without the Duma’s consent.

While the central bank tries to inspire confidence, some are voicing doubts about its governor, Elvira Nabiullina. Although she was credited with saving the economy at the war’s outset, some of Russia’s elite have since turned on her. The head of the state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec said the central bank’s high key interest rate was hampering exports, while the chair of oil giant Gazprom Neft said expensive credit could impact companies providing services to the oil industry, raising “serious concerns.”

Even Putin, a longtime supporter of Nabiullina, made a muted complaint during his year-end press conference, saying the central bank could have used instruments other than interest rate hikes and acted “more efficiently and at an earlier stage.”

Headwinds

Even without a credit crisis, Russia’s economy faces serious headwinds in 2025.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that Russian GDP grew 3.8% in 2024, but forecasts just 1.4% growth this year.

Putin recently conceded that “the amount of products has not grown as much as consumption has” – a classic recipe for price rises. Inflation accelerated to 9.5% last year, from 7.4% in 2023. Some supermarkets locked butter in cabinets to prevent thefts.

Although wages are up, this reflects problems in the labor market. Putin boasts of Russia’s record-low 2.3% unemployment rate, but this sword is double-edged. Low unemployment means higher wages, as Russian companies – short of 1.6 million skilled workers – must pay more to attract labor.

Russia could offset this by encouraging immigration, but Central Asian migrants – long used to plug gaps in the workforce – have faced rising xenophobia after recent terror attacks in Russia stoked ethnic tensions.

Most importantly, Western sanctions are beginning to inflict serious pain. A package announced by the Biden administration in its final days targeted Moscow’s “shadow fleet” – aging oil tankers used to dodge earlier sanctions on Russia’s oil exports. Dozens of these ships have dropped anchor around the world, unable to dock and unload due to the new measures. China and India – whose oil and gas purchases from Russia have helped fund its war – are reportedly looking for other suppliers.

Kyiv’s refusal to renew a gas transit agreement that allowed Russian gas to flow through Ukraine will cost Gazprom up to $5 billion a year in sales, Reuters has reported. The energy giant posted a loss of almost $7 billion in 2023 – its first in nearly 25 years – and is considering axing more than 1,500 jobs. Less money for Gazprom means less for Russia’s war chest.

The growing economic strain is causing Russia’s social contract to creak, said Prokopenko, the Carnegie fellow.

With this support “dwindling” – as war spending eats into budgets for other services – Prokopenko warned there was now “a clear divergence between the expectations of the population and the Kremlin’s capacity to deliver.”

Moscow cannot keep financing the war and the regular economy at the same time as maintaining broader economic stability, she said. Although the Kremlin has so far fudged all three, something may soon have to give.

Among 34,000 people in the town of Oświęcim is just one Jew – a young Israeli named Hila Weisz-Gut. It’s an interesting choice of residence, given the most famous feature of the town is its proximity to the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz – where at least 1.1 million people, mainly Jews, died between 1940 and 1945.

Nearly every member of Weisz-Gut’s grandmother’s family was lethally gassed there upon arrival in a cargo transport from Hungary. Today, Weisz-Gut can see Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where her grandmother survived, from her bedroom window.

She moved from Israel to join her Polish husband in Oświęcim, his hometown, in 2023, fully aware of her own family’s tragic history.

For Weisz-Gut, maintaining a Jewish presence in the town – even if tiny – is vital. As the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp nears, on January 27, a disturbing trend is emerging across Europe, monitoring groups say – the rise of antisemitism.

Factors in this may be anger over the war in Gaza and a growing far-right presence in some countries, where electoral successes have lent far-right politicians and their supporters a louder voice. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights said some organizations had reported a 400% increase in antisemitic incidents since the October 7, 2023 terror attacks in Israel.

The story of Oświęcim, whose population was nearly 60% Jewish in 1939 before the Nazis arrived, serves as a stark reminder of what unbridled antisemitism can unleash.

Weisz-Gut currently works at the town’s Oshpitzin Jewish Museum, educating Israeli visitors about the region’s once-vibrant Jewish community. The museum has said she is the only Jewish person living in Oświęcim.

This past year, living so close to Auschwitz has taken on greater significance for Weisz-Gut. On October 7, 2023 she sat horrorstruck as she watched social media videos of Israelis running for their lives at the Nova music festival after Hamas militants attacked. Her mother, who lives 10 minutes from the Lebanese border in northern Israel, has had to take refuge in an underground shelter amid strikes launched by Hezbollah.

Since the attack, Weisz-Gut has felt forced to take account of the specter of increasing prejudice in Europe on a personal level. While on a trip to London, she said, her mother and husband urged caution, suggesting she remove her Jewish star necklace. She also wore long sleeves to cover a tattoo in Hebrew. “Since the war with Gaza, people don’t separate between Jewish people and Israeli people,” she said. “There are no clear boundaries.”

The Community Security Trust, a Jewish security charity, recorded 1,978 antisemitic incidents across the UK in the first half of 2024, a record high. A sharp uptick in anti-Muslim hate has also been reported in the UK since the October 7 attacks.

France, which has the largest Jewish population in Europe, recently reported a sharp rise in antisemitism since October 7, with reported incidents increasing by 284%. In Germany, there has also been a steep increase in reported antisemitic crime, according to a government report, with greater incidence of violence.

Much of the problem occurs online and via social media. “The digital world is the Wild West. There are no rules, there is no law. There are almost no consequences,” explained Derviş Hızarcı, the head of the board at KIgA, a Berlin-based organization whose international network, ENCATE, fights hatred and antisemitism. “I think online hate is the biggest challenge after October 7.”

Still, Weisz-Gut remains committed to living a Jewish life in Europe, specifically in the town co-opted by the Nazis to create the largest death machine in modern history.

“For me, it’s a statement that they tried to break us and exterminate us, but they failed,” she said of her presence in a place so associated with the Nazi regime. “We are the generation that is here to say ‘you didn’t succeed. No more. Not again.’”