World roundup: May 31-June 1 2025
Stories from Iran, China, Russia, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
May 31, 1223: A Mongolian army on an expedition to circle the Caspian Sea crushes a substantially larger Kievan Rus’ force at the Battle of the Kalka River. Perhaps as much as 90 percent of the Rus’ army was wiped out, and the Mongols continued unimpeded on their way back to their homeland in eastern Asia.
May 31, 1902: The Treaty of Vereeniging brings an end to the Second Boer War. In effect the Boer states (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) surrendered in exchange for an amnesty and a British pledge that, after a period of postwar military control, both states would be allowed to transition to the status of self-governing colonies. Presumably it will not come as a great surprise to learn that the parties agreed to put off any discussion of Black enfranchisement until after the colonies had achieved self-governing status, or in other words indefinitely. It should also not come as a surprise to learn that when they were granted self-governing status (1906 for the Transvaal and 1907 for the Orange Free State) the issue of Black enfranchisement still didn’t come up. The two colonies did agree to merge into the Union of South Africa in 1910, which gained independence (under the British Commonwealth) in 1931.
June 1, 1215: After a lengthy siege during which a substantial portion of its population is believed to have starved to death and after which many more were massacred (actual figures are hard to come by), the city of Zhongdu—known today as Beijing—surrenders to Genghis Khan’s invading Mongolian army. Zhongdu had been the capital of the Jin dynasty, which ruled northern China, and this was the second time in very short order that the Mongols had besieged it. After the initial siege the Jin retained control of the city but moved their court to Kaifeng for security, which was perceived by the Mongols as a provocation and thereby triggered the second siege. Because the Mongols turned their attentions west shortly after capturing Zhongdu, the Jin were able to survive at Kaifeng until it (and the dynasty as a whole) fell to the Mongols in 1233.
June 1, 1916: The Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of World War I and at least by some measures the largest in history to that point, ends in what I would say (there’s still disagreement on this point) was a fairly pyrrhic German victory. The Germans sank substantially more British ships and killed substantially more British personnel than vice versa, but these were losses that the British navy could sustain more easily than the Germans. The German government was able to claim victory in the immediate aftermath of the battle, but the British fleet maintained and arguably even increased its naval superiority for the remainder of the war, while keeping Germany’s High Seas Fleet largely out of the Atlantic Ocean. Put another way, the battle was a German tactical victory but a British strategic one. Of historical note, Jutland was the last major naval battle that featured battleships as the main participants before aircraft carriers displaced them as the primary combat ship for large naval powers.
INTERNATIONAL
Major OPEC+ member states announced on Saturday that they will once again raise global oil production by 411,000 barrels of oil per day in July, on top of the 411,000 bpd increases they implemented in May and again in June. The Gang is working its way back quickly from the 2.2 million bpd production cut it imposed in January 2024 due to declining oil prices, and seems committed to these increases even though oil prices are once again falling (down to the low $60s per barrel for most blends on Sunday).
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Islamic State fighters attacked a Syrian Democratic Forces patrol in northeastern Syria on Sunday, killing at least three people according to the SDF. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the patrol was “accompanying an oil convoy” that was heading for government-held territory, indicating that the SDF is supplying oil from fields under its control to the authorities in Damascus.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud visited Damascus on Saturday and announced that Riyadh will join the Qatari government in jointly funding public sector salaries for the interim Syrian government. The Qataris had previously pledged $29 million per month for that purpose and it’s unclear how much the Saudis plan to add to that total. It’s also unclear why they decided to contribute at all, though perhaps Faisal and company took note of the reconstruction benefits that might accrue to countries that help Damascus make ends meet.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
I have to admit, when I wrote a few days ago that this new Gaza aid distribution system might be “weaponized” against Palestinians I really did not envision the Israeli military (IDF) just firing at will on crowds of people trying to obtain the aid. That’s my naïveté I guess, because it appears that’s pretty much what’s happening. After a number of smaller massacres over the course of the week, the IDF reportedly killed at least 31 people and wounded over 170 others near a “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” distribution facility in southern Gaza on Sunday. Witnesses describe gunfire from quadcopter drones and shelling from nearby tanks—the latter presumably ruling out any perpetrator other than the IDF, even as Israeli officials are denying that the incident took place. There are also sketchier reports of an attack near a distribution facility in central Gaza but not much by way of detail.
Hamas responded to the Trump administration’s latest ceasefire proposal on Saturday with something between acceptance and outright rejection, stressing that it is prepared to release captives and enter a truce with Israel but insisting that any deal must lead to a long-term cessation of hostilities—something the current Trump proposal does not do. While not an outright rejection this is probably tantamount to one, inasmuch as the Israeli government is dead set against a long-term ceasefire. The proposal’s author, Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff, lambasted Hamas’s response on Saturday as “totally unacceptable,” arguing that it “only takes us backward.” And to be fair the response does “take us backward” to a time when Witkoff actually appeared to be brokering an end to the conflict rather than acting as the Israeli government’s lead negotiator.
IRAN
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest reports on Iran’s nuclear activities conclude that Tehran has significantly increased its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and, more concerningly, has engaged in “secret” projects with nuclear material whose existence it has not declared to the agency’s inspectors. With respect to the former, Iran now possesses some 408.6 kilograms of uranium enriched to the 60 percent level, very close to weapons grade (90 percent or above) and enough to produce nine warheads if it were further enriched.
As far as the “secret” work is concerned, the IAEA has for several years now been investigating allegations that Iran engaged in experimental work toward developing nuclear weapons before suspending that work in the early 2000s. The agency has also been investigating evidence of nuclear material at three sites that the Iranian government never declared as nuclear facilities. This report concludes that those allegations are true while also criticizing Iranian authorities for failing to cooperate fully with the IAEA’s investigations. The likely outcome here is that the US and “E3” (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom) will use this report as fodder to support their push to censure Iran at the IAEA’s quarterly meeting later this month. Iran’s response to that effort could dictate the success or failure of ongoing US-Iranian nuclear talks.
Speaking of those talks, Witkoff has apparently sent Iran a new outline for a potential agreement in principle. The exact terms haven’t been made public but the Trump administration is reportedly considering a couple of options to bridge the main gap between the US and Iran, which is over the continuation of an Iranian uranium enrichment program. One possibility involves the creation of a regional enrichment consortium, which would include Iran and other countries and could be overseen by the IAEA and/or US. The Iranians have indicated some openness to that idea but want the enrichment to be done inside Iran, which the Trump administration opposes. Another idea apparently on the table is that the administration would explicitly acknowledge that Iran has a right to enrich uranium while the Iranians would suspend their actual enrichment program. I’m not sure anybody has run that option past the Iranians yet.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government has gotten a couple of bits of positive diplomatic news in recent days. On Friday the Pakistani government announced that it will name an ambassador to run its embassy in Kabul, raising its diplomatic profile in Afghanistan to the highest official level. Then on Sunday, the Afghan Foreign Ministry said that the Russian government had accepted its nomination of an ambassador to head Afghanistan’s embassy in Moscow. Neither country has formally recognized the current Afghan government (no country has), but these steps could be viewed as a sort of de facto recognition.
CHINA
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CBS News on Sunday that he expects Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will “have a call” to “[iron] out” concerns over Beijing’s critical minerals export controls “very soon.” Trump on Friday accused the Chinese government of violating an agreement it made to ease those export restrictions at last month’s US-China trade meeting in Switzerland, though the only people insisting that China made such an agreement are currently employed by the Trump administration. The Chinese Commerce Ministry said that it “firmly rejects” that charge on Monday morning (local time), criticizing the US for having “made bogus charges and unreasonably accused China of violating the consensus, which is seriously contrary to the facts.”
SOUTH KOREA
South Korean voters will head to the polls on Tuesday for the snap presidential election necessitated by the impeachment and removal of former President Yoon Suk-yeol two months ago. Democratic Party nominee Lee Jae-myung, who lost to Yoon in 2022, is well ahead in polling despite his legal difficulties and it would be surprising if he doesn’t emerge victorious.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Three drone strikes hit the Rapid Support Forces-controlled city of Nyala in Sudan’s South Darfur state on Sunday. The Sudanese military has been attacking Nyala by air with some regularity over the past few weeks, though it would take a sustained ground operation to put military forces anywhere close to the city. Meanwhile, there are also reports of new RSF drone strikes on Saturday targeting the de facto military capital, Port Sudan. The militants (possibly with UAE assistance) carried out a series of attacks on Port Sudan across several days last month but those attacks had subsided.
LIBYA
According to Al-Monitor’s Francesco Schiavi, Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” held a parade in Benghazi on Monday that really highlighted the extent of the support it has been receiving from Russia:
Around 13,500 infantry troops marched in formation alongside elite units — special forces, paratroopers, engineers, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) teams, and electronic warfare elements. But it was the ground and air assets that conveyed the core message. The LAAF unveiled Russian-supplied Tor-M2E and Pantsir-S1 air defense systems, Mi-26 helicopters, and dozens of Kamaz and Ural military trucks. Upgraded armor included caged T-72 tanks and retrofitted T-62s, modified to counter first-person view (FPV) drones and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) — adaptations reflecting battlefield practices honed by Russian forces in Ukraine.
The BM-30 Smerch multiple-launch rocket system stood out as a symbol of high-end Russian artillery support, capable of saturating targets up to 90 kilometers (56 miles) away with thermobaric or cluster munitions. These systems offer the LAAF a new level of stand-off strike capacity, marking a recalibration in artillery doctrine from shorter-range saturation tactics to deep-strike deterrence — a notable leap beyond its previous 122 mm Grad systems.
Other hardware included BMP-2M Berezhok advanced infantry fighting vehicles, BTR-82A armored personnel carriers, and over 100 Spartak vehicles, underscoring a significant modernization of LAAF infantry mobility. Soviet-era SCUD-B and Luna-M ballistic missiles were also displayed — a nod to legacy assets still in use, and a symbolic assertion of Haftar’s capacity to wield strategic firepower unmatched by rival factions.
The appearance of MiG-29 and Su-24 aircraft — reportedly operated by Russian personnel — hinted at enhanced aerial capabilities. Chinese-made vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones, both reconnaissance and dual-use, were also featured, reflecting the LAAF’s growing integration of unmanned aerial vehicles into its operational toolkit.
As Schiavi notes, the Russian government has really begun to treat the LNA, and by extension the eastern Libyan administration with which it is affiliated, as a national entity. That shift may be related to the defeat of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which left Moscow scrambling to find a new ally in the eastern Mediterranean. If Haftar and company were finally to emerge in control of Libya they would certainly fit that bill. The changeover from the ostensibly private Wagner Group to the Russian military-run “Africa Corps” as the main Russian support mechanism for Haftar has also contributed to this shift in the sophistication and professionalism of the hardware Moscow is supplying. From the Libyan perspective, the parade was probably less about showing off the LNA’s muscle to rival armed groups in western Libya than about convincing observers that it is essentially a “genuine” national military rather than what it really is, which is one of Libya’s many armed militant factions.
MOROCCO
The Moroccan government got its own diplomatic boost on Sunday, when UK Foreign Minister David Lammy said that London now supports Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region. The UK government joins its counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain as European nations that have shifted from calling for regional self-determination to backing Morocco’s claim on the territory under an “autonomy plan.” The US got the ball rolling on this trend when it recognized Western Sahara as Moroccan territory in 2020 in return for Morocco’s diplomatic normalization with Israel. The Polisario Front, which backs Sahrawi independence, and its patron Algeria have rejected the “autonomy plan” and the Algerian Foreign Ministry reacted negatively to Lammy’s statement.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
In a fairly stunning operation codenamed “Spider’s Web,” the Ukrainian military on Sunday carried out drone strikes targeting four military airfields well inside Russia, possibly damaging or destroying a major portion of the Russian military’s long-range bomber fleet. The attack, which was apparently some 18 months in the planning, involved smuggling dozens of quadcopter drones into Russia and then maneuvering them to the various bases (one of which, Belaya, is located near the Mongolian border so quite some distance from Ukraine) before loosing them on their targets. The Russian defense ministry called the operation a “terrorist attack” in what is arguably the worst bastardization of that term to date and that’s saying something. Ukrainian officials are claiming that the operation “destroyed” over 40 bombers though it’s impossible to know that for certain. If true that would represent a major blow to Russia’s long-range strike capabilities, particularly inasmuch as many of the planes that were hit are likely types that the Russian military no longer produces.
The Ukrainians may also have been responsible for destroying two bridges in Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk oblasts overnight. The Bryansk incident left at least seven people dead after the collapsed bridge fell onto a passenger train. Russian authorities have attributed the incidents to “explosions” without going into any additional detail, so it’s not even certain that they were deliberate acts (though as far as I know bridges are not given to spontaneously combusting, so two incidents like this in one night is at least an interesting coincidence). They say they are investigating the blasts as potential acts of, and here’s that word again, terrorism. At least in this case it is potentially applicable. Ukrainian or pro-Ukrainian actors have sabotaged Russian infrastructure in the past.
UKRAINE
A Russian missile strike on an unspecified “army training area” in Ukraine killed at least 12 soldiers and wounded over 60 more on Sunday. Ukrainian army commander Mykhailo Drapatyi announced his resignation due to his “personal sense of responsibility for the tragedy.” Ukrainian officials have not indicated where the strike took place, though the Russian military says it hit a military facility in Ukraine’s Dniepropetrovsk oblast. The Russian military also captured another village in Ukraine’s Sumy oblast on Sunday. Moscow is trying to establish a buffer zone on the Ukrainian side of the border between Sumy and Russia’s Kursk oblast, having driven Ukrainian forces out of the latter, though that limited objective could always expand into a bigger incursion if the opportunity presents itself. The Ukrainian government ordered the evacuation of 11 border villages in Sumy on Saturday in response to Russian bombardments.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on Sunday that he will have a delegation in Istanbul on Monday for a new round of peace talks with Russia. Whether those talks will actually go forward in light of Sunday’s drone strike (see above) remains to be seen, but if they do the Ukrainians are reportedly planning to submit a “roadmap” to a peace deal. The process would begin with a 30 day ceasefire, followed by an all for all prisoner swap and continuing on from there. The Ukrainians say they’ve already sent the outline to Moscow ahead of Monday’s session.
POLAND
Exit polling suggests that Sunday’s Polish presidential runoff will be decided by a razor thin margin with the outcome currently not looking so great for the country’s centrist government or for the European Union. After an initial exit poll gave a narrow lead to centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, a second survey put far-right academic Karol Nawrocki in the lead. Nawrocki is a euroskeptic who aligns fairly closely with outgoing incumbent Andrzej Duda, whose fit with the current Polish government has needless to say not been great.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, at TomDispatch William Hartung and Ashley Gate consider Donald Trump’s push to excise human rights entirely from US foreign policy:
The Trump administration seems intent on undermining America’s ability to make human rights a significant element of its foreign policy. As evidence of that, consider its plan to dramatically reduce policy directives and personnel devoted to those very issues, including the dismantling of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor. Even worse, the Trump team has attacked a crucial global institution, the International Criminal Court, and put it under crippling sanctions that have ground its operations to a halt — all for telling the truth about Israel’s illegal and ongoing mass slaughter in Gaza.
The Trump administration’s assault on human rights comes against the background of years of policy decisions in Washington that too often cast aside such concerns in favor of supposedly more important “strategic” interests. The very concept of human rights has had a distinctly mixed history in American foreign policy. High points include the U.S. role in the Nuremberg prosecutions after World War II, its support for the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and President Jimmy Carter’s quest to be the “human rights president” in the late 1970s. But such moments have alternated with low points like this country’s Cold War era support for a series of vicious dictators in Latin America or, more recently, the way both the Biden and Trump administrations have backed Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, actions that a number of reputable independent reports suggest constitute nothing short of genocide.
Amid such ups and downs have come some real accomplishments like support for the democratic evolution of the government in the Philippines, the passage of comprehensive sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and the freeing of prominent political prisoners around the world.
Some critics of the human rights paradigm argue that such issues are all too regularly weaponized against American adversaries, but largely ignored when it comes to this country’s autocratic allies like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and El Salvador. The solution to such a critique is not to abandon human rights concerns, but to implement them more consistently across the globe.