World roundup: August 9-10 2025
Stories from Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
August 9 (or so), 378: A Gothic army annihilates a larger Roman army at the Battle of Adrianople (modern Edirne). Some two-thirds of the Roman soldiers were killed, including Emperor Valens. This virtual eradication of an imperial army opened the door for the Goths to move into the empire for good and contributed to the eventual collapse of the empire in the west.
August 9, 1945: The United States drops its second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, while the Soviet army invades Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Some 80,000 people are believed to have died of causes that can be linked to the bombing. The combination of the atomic bombings and the entry of the Soviets into the war against Japan is credited with convincing Japanese leaders to surrender, though there was and is evidence that they were preparing to do so anyway and the debate over the necessity of the bombings continues to the present day.
August 10, 1270: Amhara leader Yekuno Amlak is crowned “Emperor of Ethiopia” under the regal name Tesfa Iyasus, having led a rebellion that overthrew the ruling Zagwe dynasty. Yekuno Amlak founded the Solomonic dynasty, so called because it claimed descent (absent any credible evidence) from the biblical Israelite King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The “House of Solomon” expanded Ethiopia’s borders to and beyond those of the present day nation, and ruled the empire until the military coup that ousted Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.
August 10, 1920: The Ottoman Empire signs the Treaty of Sèvres, formally withdrawing from World War I and surrendering to the Allied Powers. The terms, which required the empire to give up not only all of its Arab territory but most of its Anatolian territory as well, were so lopsided that they quickly sparked the Turkish War of Independence. The new Republic of Turkey emerged victorious from that war, and the terms of the ensuing 1923 Treaty of Lausanne superseded Sèvres.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference on Sunday to discuss his newly-approved plan for the next phase of the Gaza genocide. Contrary to how it’s been characterized, Netanyahu insisted that he is not ordering the Israeli military (IDF) to “occupy” Gaza but rather to eliminate the “two remaining Hamas strongholds” (Reuters’ term) in Gaza. The first of these is Gaza City, the IDF’s initial target after (according to Netanyahu) its remaining civilian population has a chance to evacuate to designated “safe zones.” I didn’t see the press conference so I don’t know if anyone asked Netanyahu how it’s possible that Gaza City remains a “Hamas stronghold” more than 22 months into this campaign or why, given that, anybody should believe him when he claims that this new operation is finally going to be the thing that “completes the job” (his words). But somebody should have asked.
The second “stronghold” is in central Gaza’s refugee camps, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s unclear when that part of the operation will begin, and despite Netanyahu’s insistence that this whole effort could be over “fairly quickly,” if the intention is to move into central Gaza after Gaza City then that could be months away. It’s not clear what happens after that but we can assume Netanyahu’s thinking is that either Hamas will surrender or he’ll suddenly find out about a new stronghold that simply must be assaulted, after displacing the local civilians. The real point seems as ever to be facilitating the eventual ethnic cleansing of the territory.
While it’s impossible to know what’s going on inside Netanyahu’s mind, from the outside it does seem like he’s tempered his plans over the course of the past week. Reporting across Israeli media as of Monday was that he’d decided on a “military occupation” of all of Gaza. After some pushback from within the IDF, the plan that the Israeli security cabinet approved on Thursday and that Netanyahu described on Sunday seems substantially smaller in scope. Maybe Netanyahu is planning to widen that scope as the operation proceeds, but the howls of outrage emanating from his far-right pals suggest that what he’d promised them and what he’s actually proposed are two different things.
The IDF appears to be gearing up for its new Gaza City assault by killing local journalists before they have a chance to report on whatever atrocities Israeli soldiers are likely to commit. Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif and four of his colleagues were the targets of an Israeli airstrike on Sunday, and when I say “targets” I mean Israeli officials have openly acknowledged their intent to kill him. He was Hamas, apparently—really, who isn’t at this point? Ironically, while Netanyahu is murdering local reporters he announced in his press conference that he’s going to allow more foreign journalists to accompany the IDF into Gaza. It’s safe to assume those journalists will be screened for friendliness and shown only what Netanyahu and company want them to see. Finally, there’s apparently a new push by mediators to secure a ceasefire before the Gaza City operation begins in earnest. Suffice to say there’s not much reason for optimism on that front.
EGYPT
If you’re wondering what Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is doing while the IDF prepares to intensify its displacement and slaughter of civilians in Gaza, he’s apparently paying a premium to buy Israeli natural gas:
A $35 billion gas deal announced on Thursday will see Egypt redouble its energy dependence on Israeli fields as an expansion of a landmark 2018 deal between the two countries.
Per the terms of the deal, the Egyptian side will pay about $35 million more per billion cubic meters than it did under the terms of the previous deal, a 14.8 percent increase, per Mada Masr’s calculations.
Over the course of the deal, which runs to 2040, Egypt will import an additional 130 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Israel’s Leviathan field.
The deal, which is still pending key expansion in pipeline and extraction infrastructure, was announced as part of a shareholder disclosure by Israel’s NewMed Energy firm, a partner in the development of Israel’s Leviathan gas field.
The agreement marks the end of months of negotiations to expand the volume of Israeli natural gas piped to Egypt to support the government in meeting growing domestic energy demand. The talks have continued in parallel to Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, even as the war has placed a strain on bilateral relations.
IRAN
The Jaysh al-Adl jihadist group has claimed responsibility for the killing of a police officer in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province on Sunday. A group of its fighters apparently tried to storm a police station in the provincial capital, Saravan, sparking a clash in which three of those fighters were also killed.
Elsewhere, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced via social media on Sunday that a “deputy director-general” of the International Atomic Energy Agency (there are six and as far as I know he didn’t specify which one) will visit Iran on Monday. It sounds like this will be an entirely political visit without any site inspections or other nuclear-related activity. Instead they’ll be trying to work out “a framework for cooperation” after the Iranian government suspended its involvement with the IAEA in the wake of the “12 Day War.”
ASIA
AZERBAIJAN
Azerbaijani ambassador to the UK Elin Suleymanov told Reuters over the weekend that the US-brokered Armenia-Azerbaijan agreement that was unveiled on Friday leaves those countries just one step shy of of a full peace accord. I suspect it’s a few more steps than that, but in a basic sense the two main obstacles to such an agreement have been an understanding around the development of an Azerbaijani transit corridor through southern Armenia and Azerbaijan’s insistence that the Armenian government amend the country’s constitution to drop any claim on the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Friday’s agreement at least theoretically establishes a basis for the transit corridor—we’re now supposed to call it the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity”—which leaves the constitutional issue outstanding. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has called for a constitutional referendum but none has been scheduled as yet and it’s far from certain that Armenian voters would support the relevant amendment.
The thing is, the parties to this agreement still need to work out all of the technical details surrounding the transit corridor, and if either the Armenian or Azerbaijani governments becomes dissatisfied with how that process is going then this whole deal will collapse. On top of that there are regional challenges to consider. While the Iranian Foreign Ministry tentatively welcomed the deal Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior security advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, suggested that the transit corridor could become a “graveyard for [Donald] Trump’s mercenaries.” Tehran was already concerned that the proposed corridor would effectively cut off its border with Armenia, a friendly country, and turn it over to Azerbaijan, an unfriendly country. The addition of a US presence makes the corridor even less palatable to them. And there’s the Russian government, which finds itself being supplanted as a supposed security guarantor in the southern Caucasus—a role that it hasn’t been fulfilling as far as the Armenians are concerned—by the US. It also tentatively welcomed Friday’s summit but warned against Western involvement in the region.
INDIA
According to Indian officials, an extended battle between security forces and suspected Kashmiri rebels that began on August 1 has left at least two soldiers and one militant dead so far. The fighting is taking place in a forested region of Kashmir’s Kulgam district and was still continuing off and on as of Saturday.
THAILAND
Three Thai soldiers were wounded, at least one severely, when their patrol tripped a landmine along the Cambodian border on Saturday. The incident comes as the two countries are trying to stabilize their tentative ceasefire and carries uncomfortable echoes of similar incidents that took place on July 16 and July 23 and led into the border conflict that broke out on July 24. Thai officials are claiming that this latest incident took place on Thai soil in an area that had previously been cleared of mines, suggesting that the Cambodian military planted fresh mines there recently. The Cambodian government has attributed all three of these landmine incidents to unexploded devices planted in the border region decades ago.
JAPAN
France 24 reports on Saturday’s 80th anniversary commemoration of US atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki:
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudan’s Emergency Lawyers activist group is accusing Rapid Support Forces militants of killing at least 18 people in attacks on two villages in North Kordofan state on Thursday. The allegation can’t be verified but fighting between the RSF and the military has been heavy in North Kordofan and each party to this conflict has a history of attacking civilians perceived as supporting the other side.
Elsewhere, a health official in North Darfur state told AFP on Sunday that 63 people had died of malnutrition over just the previous week in the besieged regional capital, Al-Fashir. The RSF has surrounded that city for months, making it difficult if not impossible to get food into it. In addition to its normal population Al-Fashir is home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by RSF attacks on other parts of Darfur. The United Nations World Food Program warned earlier this week that the risk of starvation in Al-Fashir was rising.
MALI
AFP reported on Sunday that Mali’s ruling junta has “arrested two dozen soldiers accused of plotting to overthrow” it. One unconfirmed account puts the number of people arrested at 50 or more. At least one senior general, Abass Dembele—the former governor of central Mali’s Mopti region—was apparently among the detained. This is noteworthy inasmuch as the current junta came to power in a 2020 coup, then retrenched its authority in a second coup in 2021, driven to a significant extent by discontent within the military regarding the previous government’s handling of the country’s conflict against jihadist militants. But the junta has more or less failed to oversee any sort of improvement and the uncovering of this apparent plot suggests that frustration is once again rising within the military.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Congolese officials are claiming that the M23 militant group has killed at least 86 people over the past couple of weeks in the eastern DRC’s South Kivu province. Its fighters reportedly killed at least 80 of them in a single August 4 assault on the village of Nyaborongo and another six in a July 24 attack on the village of Lumbishi. The UN on Wednesday accused the militants of killing at least 319 people in North Kivu province last month. All of this killing comes despite the statement of intent that M23 and the Congolese government signed last month that was supposed to be the precursor to a peace agreement. A new round of peace talks was set to begin in Qatar on Friday, but as far as I can tell it did not.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not react well to the news that not only was Donald Trump inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to Alaska for a “peace” conference on Friday, but that the two men would be discussing a Russian framework under which Ukraine would have to give up territory to end the war. On Saturday he rejected the idea that Ukraine should give up land to “the occupier.” Multiple European leaders subsequently signed on to a joint statement supporting Zelensky’s position and putting forward their own proposal for a ceasefire as a precursor to negotiations in which “reciprocal” territorial exchanges could be discussed. I’m unclear as to what territory Russia would be supposed to give to the Ukrainians in such an exchange.
Zelensky is negotiating from a losing hand and realistically Ukraine is going to lose (or really has already lost) territory, though the question of whether or not Russia’s conquests should be formally recognized is a significant one that doesn’t have an easy answer. But even from his weak position the Ukrainian leader can obviously sink any deal that Trump and Putin negotiate without Ukrainian input. It seems the Trump administration may have collectively realized this over the weekend, because NBC News reported on Saturday that it is “considering” inviting Zelensky to Alaska even though Putin has refused to meet with him. It’s unclear what the structure of the conference would look like if Zelensky attended but didn’t interact with Putin.
AMERICAS
HAITI
Haiti’s transitional government has declared a three month state of emergency covering the country’s West, Center, and Artibonite departments due to escalating gang violence. The criminal groups that now control upwards of 90 percent of Port-au-Prince have been expanding out from the Haitian capital in recent months and Artibonite in particular has been heavily targeted. The emergency declaration is supposed to marshal additional government resources toward protecting those provinces, but that supposes that this government has any additional resources to marshal and it seems pretty clear that it does not.
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Washington Post reports that negotiations around Donald Trump’s tariff scheme have moved beyond simple trade talks and more closely resemble a global shakedown:
President Donald Trump’s freewheeling use of tariffs as a tool of American power may have been more extensive than was publicly known, encompassing an array of national security goals as well as the interests of individual companies, according to internal government documents obtained by The Washington Post.
This month, State Department officials considered demanding that U.S. trading partners vote against an international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the oceangoing container ships that are the backbone of global trade. In a draft “action memo,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was told that department officials had sought “to inject this issue into the ongoing bilateral trade negotiations” with maritime nations such as Singapore.
That move came after administration officials this past spring debated broadening trade negotiations with more than a dozen nations, including by requiring Israel to eliminate a Chinese company’s control of a key port and insisting that South Korea publicly support deploying U.S. troops to deter China as well as Seoul’s traditional rival, North Korea, the documents said.
Administration officials saw trade talks as an opportunity to achieve objectives that went far beyond Trump’s oft-stated goal of reducing the chronic U.S. trade deficit. In the first weeks after the president paused his “reciprocal” tariffs April 9 to allow for negotiations, officials drew up plans to press countries near China for a closer defense relationship, including the purchase of U.S. equipment and port visits, the documents said.
Among the private firms for which the administration attempted to blackmail other countries was oil giant Chevron and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet firm. Presumably they stopped working for the latter after Trump and Musk fell out.