Russia has captured the key eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, ending months of resistance and underscoring the scale of Kyiv’s challenge as it heads into its third wartime winter.

Ukraine’s military confirmed its withdrawal from Vuhledar Wednesday, noting Russia had managed to send reserves on the flanks, leading to the “threat of encirclement.” The decision to withdraw, it said, was taken “to save personnel and military equipment.”

A key goal of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is to take the whole of the eastern Donbas region. Russia has been making incremental gains this year in the east and the loss comes as Ukraine’s President Zelensky returns from a meeting with US President Joe Biden without his key demands met.

Vuhledar, a town built around a coal mine (its name comes from the Ukrainian word for coal), sits some 50km (30 miles) south of Pokrovsk, viewed for the past few months as Russia’s main nexus of attack in the east.

While not a transport and logistics hub like Pokrovsk, Vuhledar was heavily fortified and viewed as a crucial bastion at the intersection of Ukraine’s eastern and southern fronts. One prominent Russian war blogger Boris Rozhin said this made the victory “operational, if not operational-strategic.”

“The fact is that this ‘balcony’ [an apparent reference to Vuhledar’s elevated position] was located at the junction of the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk fronts posed a constant threat to the grouping that covered the approaches to Mariupol,” he noted, referring to the southern Ukrainian city that has been in Russian hands since 2022.

Just like Avdiivka, another strategic eastern town which fell in February, Vuhledar is a victim, not of Russian strategic prowess, but brute force attrition.

For two years Ukraine had put up a formidable defense there, as Russia tried and failed several times to take the town.

In February 2023, an attempted Russian assault on Vuhledar led to an uproar among pro-Kremlin military bloggers, as hundreds of Russian troops advanced right into the crosshairs of Ukrainian artillery, launched from the town’s high-rise apartment blocks.

Another Russian blogger, Voenkor Kotenok, alluded to this bittersweet victory Tuesday.

“It’s painful, Vuhledar or rather those who settled there, drank a lot of blood,” he said.

Now, it is Ukraine that will face the difficult questions.

A fresh blow to Ukraine

The fact that Russia was able to bring in sufficient reserves to encircle the town underscores the manpower advantage it still has, four months after Ukraine’s mobilisation law came into force.

“I confidently said that one would have to be a moron to allow our guys to be surrounded, but someone did,” wrote Stanislav Buniatov, a Ukrainian soldier and blogger, in a Telegram post. He claimed soldiers ended up withdrawing from Vuhledar in small groups, taking fire from Russian drones, and that the wounded were left “to be shot by the enemy.”

The timing of this loss will also be keenly felt in Kyiv.

It comes less than two months after Ukraine expanded the battlefield to Russia’s Kursk region – a move designed to ease the pressure on other fronts and help reverse Ukrainian fortunes after Russia spent the spring and summer gradually advancing in the east and opening a new front in the northern Kharkiv region.

It’s also just days since Zelensky returned from a politically-charged diplomatic blitz in the US with the promise of new aid, but no NATO-style security guarantees or permission to use Western missiles in Russia.

Just a week ago Zelensky told US network ABC that “we are closer to peace than we think.” The loss of Vuhledar means Ukraine now has to fight to stop Russia advancing further west, making the prospect of retaking territory even more remote.

There has also been no let-up in Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with the International Energy Agency warning that “this winter will be, by far, its sternest test yet.”

In the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, fears ran high of a regional war. The conflict would not be contained in Gaza, the thinking went –  Hezbollah would attack Israel from the north, the Houthis from Yemen, and Iranian proxies from Iraq. Israel would be forced to respond, it would come into direct conflict with Iran, and the wider war would be upon us.

Nearly one year later, all those things have come to pass. A day after Iran launched its largest ever ballistic missile attack on Israel – and as Israeli troops battle Hezbollah fighters on the ground in Lebanon – regional war is effectively here. The big question now is: Will it escalate, or cool?

Israel’s leaders stand at a juncture. When Iran first staged a missile attack in April, in retaliation for an Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Israel was restrained, striking only an Iranian air defense installation in response.

But Iran’s attack on Tuesday night was unprecedented in its ferocity. Despite some strikes on Israeli bases, damage was minimal, nearly all missiles were intercepted, and one person – a Palestinian man struck by shrapnel in the Israeli-occupied West Bank – was killed.

Iran’s government has “absolutely no interest in a broader war,” government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said Wednesday, adding that the country restrained itself after the assassination in July of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran “despite demands” from its people to respond.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ridden a string of assassinations around the Middle East to a remarkable political rehabilitation. Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon has devastated the civilian population – displacing more than 1 million people – but has achieved a long-coveted goal of at least temporarily neutering a persistent threat to the north. Why not seize the moment to weaken the patron state itself, Iran?

“The elimination of Nasrallah is a necessary condition in achieving the objectives we have set: Returning the residents of the north safely to their homes and changing the balance of power in the region for years,” Netanyahu said in the wake of a massive strike in Beirut last month that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Two days later, he addressed Iranians themselves, saying, “when Iran is finally free, and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think, everything will be different.”

His stance is in tune with Israeli public opinion too. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is leading the charge pushing for a maximalist response to Tehran’s attack, proposing that Israel bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, which the US and others say are responsible for a weapons program, a charge Iran has long denied.

Iran’s two arms to fight Israel – Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – “are temporarily paralyzed,” Bennett said. “So it’s like a boxer out in the ring without arms for the next few minutes. Now is the time that we can attack, because Iran is fully vulnerable.”

That response, of course, carries with it the danger of the unknown. Hezbollah is certainly weakened, but no one knows for certain how much capacity it still has. The US government believes that Iran could build a bomb in just weeks once it decides to do so. Short of the nuclear option, Tehran has other ways of applying further pressure on Israel and its allies. Escalating responses could spiral completely out of anyone’s control and drag allies into the fight.

The former senior Israeli military official explained that “there are always schools of thought.” Bennett’s, according to the official, is that “it’s time to neutralize the whole axis of evil. We started with Hamas, then Hezbollah. It is now the time for Iran, maybe Syria.”

The former official said they had no direct knowledge of Israel’s plans but requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

“Last night it seemed to me like it was going to be an overwhelming response,” they said. “This morning, I am getting messages that they are taking the time to think.”

A more restrained response would see Israel target a military facility, as Iran did on Tuesday in Israel.

“You could hit infrastructure, very similar to what happened in Yemen,” the former official, referring to an Israeli bombing campaign on the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah on Sunday. “National export of oil, or anything else.”

The unknown factor is how far Israel’s most important ally – the United States – will go in supporting its response.

“We have made clear that there will be consequences — severe consequences — for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case,” US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday. “It is too early for me to tell you anything publicly in terms of our assessment or in terms of what our expectations are of the Israelis or the advice that we would give them.”

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (AP) — The Dominican Republic announced Wednesday that it would start massive deportations of Haitians living illegally in the country, expelling up to 10,000 of them a week.

Government spokesman Homero Figueroa told reporters that the government took the decision after noticing an “excess” of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Figueroa said officials have seen an increase in Haitian migrants as a UN-backed mission in Haiti to fight gang violence flounders. He said authorities also agreed to strengthen border surveillance and control, but he did not provide details.

Last year, the Dominican Republic deported more than 174,000 people it says are Haitians, and in the first half of the year, it has expelled at least 67,000 more.

Activists have long criticized the administration of President Luis Abinader for what they say are ongoing human rights violations of Haitians and those of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic. Abinader has denied any mistreatment.

Wednesday’s announcement comes a week after Abinader announced at the UN General Assembly that he would take “drastic measures” if the mission in Haiti fails. It is led by nearly 400 police officers from Kenya, backed by nearly two dozen police and soldiers from Jamaica and two senior military officers from Belize. The US has warned that the mission lacks personnel and funding as it pushes for a UN peacekeeping mission instead.

Gangs in Haiti control 80% of the Port-au-Prince capital, and the violence has left nearly 700,000 Haitians homeless in recent years, while thousands of others have fled the country.

An Israeli military reservist who survived the Nova festival massacre has been hailed as a “hero” by the country’s security minister, for confronting two gunmen behind Tuesday’s shooting and stabbing attack in Tel Aviv.

Seven people were killed and 16 wounded in the attack on Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa, a port neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv, according to Israeli Police.

The incident happened just minutes before Iran launched a barrage of about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, its largest-ever such attack, sending sirens blaring across the country and residents running to bomb shelters.

Video posted online showed Lev Kreitman, who served six months as a reservist with the Israeli military in Gaza, firing a gun at an unknown target before running away. The footage was filmed from a nearby building in Jaffa and appears to show Kreitman wearing a pink shirt, white shorts and flip flops.

In another video, Kreitman was seen walking in the background among Israeli soldiers who were at the scene of the attack.

Recalling Tuesday’s incident, he recalled how he spotted what he described as “two terrorists,” one moving toward him.

“The other goes somewhere else, runs somewhere else, and I’m here, right where we’re standing, I surprised him from the side, shoot,” Kreitman said, adding he understood straight away it was an attack.

“I tried to do my best in the very crazy situation, amid alarms, missiles, and interceptions in the sky,” he said.

Kreitman survived the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival on October 7. The trance festival in southern Israel’s Negev Desert was one target of the militant group’s rampage in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others kidnapped and taken to Gaza.

Israel’s ensuing war against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 people, created a humanitarian catastrophe and left much of the Palestinian enclave in ruins.

Police said Wednesday that two gunmen had begun their “killing spree” by opening fire on passengers aboard a light rail car that had stopped at a station in Jaffa. They had then continued their attack on foot on Jerusalem Boulevard, according to police.

The attackers were stopped by security forces and civilians who used personal guns, police added. “They had an M-16 type weapon, cartridges and a knife in their possession,” police said in a statement.

Medics said they treated victims at several sites on Jerusalem Boulevard, including near train tracks, in the street, at a synagogue and in a butcher’s shop. The injured were taken to hospitals while air-raid alarms sounded in the region and throughout Israel.

Israeli authorities identified the gunmen as Muhammad Mask, 19, who was killed at the scene, and Ahmed Himoni, 25, who was severely injured. Police said the pair were residents of Hebron, a Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank.

Hamas later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Following the incident, the Israel Security Agency and IDF forces arrested a number of suspects accused of being involved in assisting the gunmen in purchasing weapons and entering Israel, according to police.

In a post on X, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called Kreitman a “hero who neutralized the attack” in Jaffa and acted “bravely” in the October 7 attack as he “saved many people.” Ben-Gvir called for more Israelis to arm themselves.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Tuesday’s attack and sent condolences to the families of those who were killed.