World
South Korea says ‘not ruling out’ supplying weapons to Ukraine
South Korea is not ruling out providing weapons directly to Ukraine, President Yoon Suk-yeol has said, following North Korea’s deployment of troops to support Russia in its war.
Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict presented a threat to Seoul, as the reclusive state’s soldiers get much-needed combat experience, which its military lacks, and additionally gets rewarded by Moscow with sensitive military technology transfers, Yoon told a news conference on Thursday.
South Korea, a major arms exporter, has a longstanding policy of not providing weapons to countries in conflict.
“Now, depending on the level of North Korean involvement, we will gradually adjust our support strategy in phases,” Yoon said.
“This means we are not ruling out the possibility of providing weapons.”
Yoon said he discussed North Korea with United States president-elect Donald Trump in a phone conversation that laid the groundwork for a face-to-face meeting in the “near future”.
North Korea has become one of the most vocal and important backers of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
South Korea and the West have long accused Pyongyang of supplying artillery shells and missiles to Moscow for use in Ukraine.
But intelligence reports from Seoul, Washington and NATO have revealed that North Korea has deployed 10,000 troops to Russia, indicating an even deeper involvement in the conflict.
Yoon said his office would monitor the unfolding developments related to the operations of North Korean soldiers, and if he decided to provide weapons to Ukraine, the initial batch would be defensive.
“If we proceed with weapons support, we would prioritise defensive weapons as a first consideration,” he said, without elaborating.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told South Korean broadcaster KBS that the Ukrainian military had its first confrontation with North Korean soldiers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has criticised the West’s lack of response to the arrival of the North Korean soldiers on the front lines, said these “first battles with North Korea open a new chapter of instability in the world”.
South Korea supplies weapons to Poland, including rocket launchers, tanks and FA-50 fighter aircraft.
In a defence exhibition in Seoul in October 2023, Yoon said that he wants his country to become the “world’s fourth-largest defence equipment exporter”.
Compared with his dovish predecessor Moon Jae-in, Yoon has taken a tough stance with the nuclear-armed North while improving ties with security ally Washington.
Since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s second summit with then-president Trump collapsed in Hanoi in 2019, Pyongyang has abandoned diplomacy, doubling down on weapons development and rejecting Washington’s offers of talks.
While in office, Trump met with Kim three times, beginning with a landmark summit in Singapore in June 2018, though the pair failed to make much progress on efforts to denuclearise the North.
Trump has previously accused South Korea of getting a “free ride” on US military power and demanded it pay far more of the cost of keeping US troops in the country to counter the threat of aggression by North Korea.
On Monday, a day before the US election, South Korea and the US signed a five-year plan under which Seoul agreed to an 8.3 percent jump in its 2026 contribution to the cost of maintaining US bases in the country to 1.52 trillion won ($1.09bn), with future increases capped at 5 percent.
Yoon on Thursday said: “We will be building a perfect security posture together with the new administration in Washington and safeguard our freedom and peace.”
On Wednesday, the Federation Council of Russia, the upper house of parliament, ratified a landmark mutual defence pact with North Korea. The treaty was signed in Pyongyang on June 19 during a state visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The unanimous vote in the upper house formalises months of increasing security cooperation between the two nations, the largest since the time they were communist allies during the Cold War.
World
Armed Kurdish fighters try to breach Iran border as regional threat grows amid protests: reports
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Armed Kurdish separatist groups tried to cross into Iran from Iraq in recent days, stoking fears that the country’s spiraling unrest has attracted dangerous foreign militants who could destabilize the wider region, according to reports.
Iranian officials said the attempted breach came amid a sweeping crackdown on nationwide protests against the country’s regime, with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leading the response, Reuters reported.
The Tasnim News Agency also reported armed militia groups operating in Iraq crossed the border in western and northwestern Iran, according to Middle East Monitor.
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Kurdish Peshmerga fighters gather north of Kirkuk, Iraq. (Reuters)
Reuters had reported that three sources, including a senior Iranian official, said Turkey’s intelligence agency, known as MIT, warned the IRGC that Kurdish fighters were trying to cross the Iran-Iraq border.
The Iranian official said clashes also broke out after the attempt to cross and accused the fighters of trying to exploit the unrest and create further instability.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, around 30 million Kurds live in the Middle East, mainly in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
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Kurdish separatists attempted an Iran crossing from Iraq amid protests. (Mustafa Ozer/AFP via Getty Images)
Turkey has designated Kurdish militant groups in northern Iraq as terrorist organizations and has carried out cross-border military operations against them. The Turkish military has also targeted PKK bases in Iraq.
In 2025, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) said it would disarm and end its decades-long battle against Turkey.
Reuters said MIT and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s office did not comment on the Iran crossing, though it warned that any interference in Iran would inflame regional crises.
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Iranians attend an anti-government protest Jan. 9 in Tehran, Iran. (UGC via AP)
Iranian authorities alleged the fighters were dispatched from Iraq and Turkey and said the Iranian regime has asked both governments to stop any transfer of fighters or weapons into Iran.
The number of deaths during the crackdown on protesters rose to at least 2,571 on Wednesday, accordin g to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.
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President Donald Trump said Wednesday he had been told the killings had halted, and he believes there is no plan for large-scale executions.
Asked who told him, Trump said they were “very important sources on the other side.”
Iran closed its airspace to most flights Wednesday, according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24, with the closure lasting a little more than two hours.
Airspace restrictions come amid fears that US President Donald Trump could attack Iran.
Published On 15 Jan 2026
Iran temporarily closed its airspace to most flights amid attack threats by United States President Donald Trump, according to the US aviation authority.
Most flights were prohibited from Iranian airspace between 1:45am and 4:00am local time (22:15 to 00:30 GMT) and again from 4:44 am to 7am (01:14 to 03:30 GMT) on Thursday, according to the notices posted by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
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The restrictions applied to all commercial flights without “prior approval” from Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation (CAO), according to the notices.
FlightRadar, an online flight tracking service, showed just three aircraft over Iran as of 6:05am local time, with dozens of planes flying around the country’s borders. Iran’s airspace reopened at about 7am local time.
The FAA and CAO did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The airspace restrictions come amid threats by US President Donald Trump to attack Iran following Tehran’s deadly crackdown on antigovernment protests in the country.
The US and the United Kingdom on Wednesday withdrew a number of military personnel from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, after a senior Iranian official said Tehran had warned that it would target US forces in the Middle East region if Trump launched an attack.
A number of countries have also issued advisories to their citizens in the region amid fears of escalation.
Trump appeared to lower his rhetoric towards Tehran later on Wednesday, saying he had received assurances from “important sources” that the killings of protesters in Iran had stopped.
Safe Airspace, a website run by the aviation safety organisation OpsGroup, said the airspace closures could signal “further security or military activity” and warned of the “risk of missile launches or heightened air defence, increasing the risk of misidentification of civil traffic”.
In 2020, Iran’s air defences shot down a Ukraine International Airlines flight shortly after it took off in Tehran, killing all 176 people on board.
A 2021 report by Iran’s CAO concluded that the missile battery’s operator had misidentified the Ukrainian aircraft as a “hostile object”, and that officials had not properly evaluated the risks to commercial planes amid tensions with the US.
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