“I start every day pretty much the same way: Coffee and News Items.” — Richard Haass, senior counsellor at Centerview Partners, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former US diplomat.
1. Russian forces are just 12 miles from Sumy, a northern Ukrainian regional capital and a new target for Moscow, as the Kremlin presses its manpower advantage at a growing number of places along the front. Having almost entirely ejected Ukrainian forces from the Russian Kursk region earlier this year, Russian forces have now poured over the border in the opposite direction toward Sumy. With 50,000 troops in the area, they outnumber the Ukrainians roughly 3-to-1, according to soldiers fighting there. “Their main strategy,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, Ukraine’s top military commander, said of the Russians, is to “wear us down with their numbers.” (Source: wsj.com)
2. The United States obtained intercepted communication between senior Iranian officials discussing this month’s U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating than they had expected, said four people familiar with the classified intelligence circulating within the U.S. government. The communication, intended to be private, included Iranian government officials speculating as to why the strikes directed by President Donald Trump were not as destructive and extensive as they had anticipated, these people said. Like some others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. The intercepted signals intelligence is the latest preliminary information offering a more complicated picture than the one conveyed by the president, who has said the operation “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
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