Drug activity reported on USS Ronald Reagan, Biden gets assurance from Zelenskyy that F-16s won’t be used in Russia.
1. Five years after cracking an LSD ring aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, Navy investigators are probing reports of new drug activity aboard the carrier, a spokeswoman for Naval Forces Japan said Monday. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is investigating an undisclosed number of sailors for “alleged drug use, possession and distribution,” Cmdr. Katie Cerezo told Stars and Stripes by email.
2. President Joe Biden said Sunday that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy assured him personally he won’t use F-16 fighter jets to attack Russian territory. “I have a flat assurance from Zelenskyy that they will not, they will not use it to go on and move into Russian geographic territory,” Biden said at a news conference in Hiroshima, Japan.
3. Although Russia claims it has won control of Ukraine’s eastern city of Bakhmut, after a grinding nine-month conflict in which tens of thousands of fighters have died, top Ukrainian military leaders say the battle is not over. Ukrainian officials acknowledge they now control only a small part of Bakhmut. Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Monday that Ukrainian troops are holding some areas in the southwest outskirts of the city, while the fight for the strategic heights on the northern and southern parts of the suburbs continues.
4. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy huddled with some of his biggest backers as the Group of Seven summit closed in Hiroshima on Sunday, building momentum for his country’s war effort even as Russia claimed a battlefield victory that was quickly disputed by Ukraine.
5. Near a peak of the Zagros Mountains in central Iran, workers are building a nuclear facility so deep in the earth that it is likely beyond the range of a last-ditch U.S. weapon designed to destroy such sites, according to experts and satellite imagery analyzed by The Associated Press. The photos and videos from Planet Labs PBC show Iran has been digging tunnels in the mountain near the Natanz nuclear site, which has come under repeated sabotage attacks amid Tehran’s standoff with the West over its atomic program.
- News