Russian forces are now just three kilometers (1.9 miles) from the outskirts of the key eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after making advances Wednesday, according to Ukrainian mapping service DeepState. They have also destroyed or captured Ukrainian positions near the city, a Ukrainian army spokesperson said.

“The enemy attacked our fortifications in the Pokrovsk sector west of Vidrodzennia village, south of Novotroitske and, as a result of prolonged fighting, two of our positions were destroyed and one was lost,” Ukrainian military spokesperson Nazar Voloshyn said in televised comments.

Voloshyn added that fighting is ongoing on the outskirts of Shevchenkove, a village in Kharkiv region on Ukraine’s eastern front. Ukrainian military bloggers have reported that the village has fallen to the Russians, a claim that has not been confirmed by Ukrainian or Russian officials.

Data from DeepState, a Ukrainian monitoring group and mapping service, showed Russian soldiers just three kilometers from the southern outskirts of Pokrovsk Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian gas supply regulator Donetskoblgaz has warned that Pokrovsk will be cut off from gas supplies from Thursday due to the “worsening situation.”

“Due to significant damage to gas pipelines and constant hostile attacks, it is impossible to eliminate the consequences of hostilities on the gas distribution system and restore gas supply to customers,” Donetskoblgaz said in a statement Tuesday.

For months, Pokrovsk has been the site of some of the fiercest battles on the eastern front as Russia attempts to close in on the city. It lies around 11 miles from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and is a strategic target for Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that his goal is to seize the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Although not a major city – Pokrovsk had a population of around 60,000 before the war and many have now left since Russia’s full-scale invasion – it sits on a key supply road that connects it with military hubs. It forms the backbone of Ukrainian defenses in the part of Donetsk region that is still under Kyiv’s control. There are currently 11,000 people in Pokrovsk, according to local authorities.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the embattled city in November and met troops defending the city. In a video posted on his social media, Zelensky is seen shaking hands with soldiers and presenting them with awards.

“This is a tense and challenging direction,” he said at the time. “It is only thanks to the strength of our warriors that the east has not been completely occupied by Russia. The enemy is confronted every day.”

The fall of Pokrovsk to Moscow’s forces would mark the largest setback for Ukraine in months and come as Ukraine has struggled to get off the backfoot while Russian troops pile severe pressure on the eastern front lines.

A looming Donald Trump presidency in the United States has raised the risk that military aid from Ukraine’s largest source could stop flowing as the conflict grinds well into its second year.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a $725 million aid package to Ukraine Monday, as the Biden administration rushes to bolster Kyiv in its remaining time in office.

A ten-year-old boy has been killed in a shooting attack in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to the Hadassah Medical Center, after an assailant opened fire at an Israeli civilian bus.

Three others were injured when the bus was shot, according to authorities.

A manhunt is underway for the attacker, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who said the shooting happened in the West Bank on Wednesday night.

“Following the initial report, a terrorist opened fire at an Israeli civilian bus in the area of the el-Khader Junction,” the IDF statement read.

“Israeli security forces are pursuing the terrorist, setting up roadblocks and encircling the area of Bethlehem,” the statement added.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

South Korea’s ruling party has thrown its support behind attempts to impeach embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol over his ill-fated decision to declare martial law that sparked a political crisis and widespread public anger in the country.

The announcement came moments before Yoon delivered a defiant speech on Thursday in which he justified his hugely controversial martial law decision, rejecting growing calls from across the political spectrum for him to stand down.

The People Power Party (PPP) had initially refused to back impeachment, hoping instead Yoon would resign from office.

But its leadership said attempts to persuade Yoon had made no progress.

“We tried to find a better way than impeachment, but that other way is invalid,” party leader Han Dong-hoon said. “Suspending the president from his duties through impeachment is the only way for now, to defend democracy and the republic.”

The main opposition Democratic Party is preparing a new impeachment motion against Yoon, with a vote expected as soon as Saturday.

Last weekend, Yoon survived an impeachment vote after members of the PPP left parliament and boycotted the vote.

The PPP’s reversal dramatically increases the pressure on Yoon and the likelihood that the next impeachment attempt will be successful.

Han said party lawmakers were free to vote according to their “belief and conscience” at the next vote.

“I believe our party members will vote for the country and the people,” he said.

The PPP’s announcement is the latest dramatic turn in what has become a stunning political showdown in South Korea over the past week.

The president’s shocking but short-lived declaration of martial law in a late-night address on December 3 quickly backfired and galvanized many in the vibrant democracy to call for his removal.

Dramatic scenes from that night showed security forces breaking through windows in the National Assembly to try and prevent lawmakers from gathering, and protesters confronting riot police.

Within just six hours, the leader was forced to back down, after lawmakers forced their way past soldiers into parliament to strike down the decree.

In the days since, Yoon has faced intense pressure to stand down, with protesters and opposition figures demanding his impeachment – and support wavering even within his own party and the military.

But he has remained defiant.

“I will fight until the last moment with the people,” Yoon said in Thursday’s speech.

“I apologize again to the people who might have been surprised and nervous due to the short-lived martial law. Please trust in my passionate loyalty for you, the people.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is expected to undergo an additional medical procedure on Thursday as part of his treatment following the emergency surgery he had Tuesday to drain a bleed on his brain.

The president’s doctor, Roberto Kalil, told Reuters the procedure was considered a “complement” to Tuesday’s surgery.

“This involves a catheterization that targets the meninges artery. Why? Because when a hematoma is drained, there is a slight chance that the small arteries in the meninges could cause a minor bleed in the future,” Kalil said.

In previous comments soon after the surgery, Kalil had said it was “important to note that (Lula) did not sustain any brain injury. The hematoma, the bleeding, was not inside the brain; it was outside the brain and has been completely drained.”

Lula – who remains in the hospital’s intensive care unit – spent the “day well, without complications, underwent physiotherapy, walked and received visits from family,” the note released by the hospital says, adding that “the president remains under the accompaniment of the medical team.”

The 79-year-old Lula was operated on Monday due to a brain bleed linked to a fall in October.

The emergency surgery added to health concerns about the aging president, a standard-bearer of the Latin American left who is halfway through his third non-consecutive term.

Lula has curtailed travel in recent months while doctors monitored his recovery from trauma to the back of his head, sustained when he fell at his home in late October, requiring stitches.

Prior to the emergency surgery, Lula had complained of a worsening headache during a congressional event Monday evening in the capital, Brasilia, and was taken to a local hospital for examination, presidential spokesperson Paulo Pimenta said in a radio interview.

An MRI scan detected an intracranial hemorrhage, and Lula was flown to Sao Paulo soon after for the surgery, according to a medical note released by the government.

Slender shoulders, a limp handshake and soft-spoken lisp. Those were the most vivid memories from my meeting with Bashar al-Assad.

It was 2007 and the insurgency against US troops was raging next door in Iraq. Toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a fellow secular Baathist like Assad, had been executed just six months earlier.

But Syria’s then leader, who had succeeded his father Hafez seven years before, represented a stable contrast to the chaos engulfing neighboring Iraq.

Assad met us without a large entourage, folding his long body into a chair at the head of the room. At no stage were we physically searched.

His security team displayed absolute confidence, by staying mostly invisible.

The assumption was that the much-feared Syrian security services had eyes on us from the moment we landed in Damascus, while probably also searching our rooms and listening to us.

Little did I know then that this tall, thin man dressed in a suit would one day be the fiercest opponent of the Arab Spring, surviving where other regional strongmen fell by unleashing a ruthless crackdown that plunged his country into 13 years of civil war, only to then see his dynastic rule collapse in a matter of days.

I was with a group of more than a dozen correspondents and editors from National Public Radio. A fleet of black limousines escorted by motorcycles brought us from a luxury Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus to a mansion on a hill overlooking the city.

During a hour-long discussion conducted almost entirely in English in 2007, Assad flatly denied various allegations against his regime.

No, Syria had no role in a series of assassinations of critics in neighboring Lebanon. He denied the existence of a pipeline of jihadi fighters traversing Syria to fight in Iraq. In response to questions about Syria’s lack of press freedoms and system of one-party rule, he engaged in classic “whataboutism.” He exhibited absolutely no responsibility nor remorse about Syrian human rights violations, instead deflecting and highlighting examples of US abuses in Iraq.

Palaces and prisons

Assad wasn’t nearly as ostentatious as his fellow dictator Saddam, whose monstrous palaces in Iraq were slathered with tacky gold.

But the Syrians now exploring Assad’s abandoned properties have revealed that the former ophthalmologist-turned-president certainly had his own taste for luxury.

One video showed dozens of luxury cars parked in the president’s garage, including a red Ferrari F50, a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce and a Bentley.

Meanwhile, his regime’s reputation for absolute brutality was cemented long ago, during the civil war that ground on for 14 bloody years.

Basat al reeh. Dulab. Falaqa. These were Arabic names for torture techniques repeated to me by Syrians who had been jailed during the regime crackdown on the anti-government uprising that erupted across the country in 2011. We soon became familiar with them.

“We suffered torture all the time,” said Tariq, an opposition activist from the port city of Latakia who recounted to me the 40 days he spent in solitary confinement.

Dulab, Tariq explained from exile in Turkey, involved forcing a victim’s head into a car tire and beating them. Basat al reeh was when a prisoner was tied to a board and beaten. Falaqa involved beating a victim’s feet.

In the opposition-held province of Idlib, I interviewed a dentist in 2012 who was arrested for secretly providing medical care to wounded demonstrators.

He said he endured beatings, near-drownings in buckets of toilet water and electric shocks to his genitals during a 45-day stint in a prison cell built for 60 people, but crammed full of 130 prisoners.

Eventually, Assad’s forces, backed by Iran, Russia and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, succeeded in regaining control of much of Syria.

The prisons stayed full of inmates and the torture continued.

Then, in late November, as the saying goes: “There are decades where nothing happens; and then there are weeks where decades happen.”

A rebel offensive disintegrated Assad’s regime in just under two weeks.

The crowds of Syrians desperate for signs of missing loved ones outside of Saydnaya Military Prison underscore the cruelty of the dynastic Assad dictatorship.

Syrian and Lebanese prisoners have emerged from Syrian dungeons as if resurrected, after having been thought lost for decades.

Cynicism and hypocrisy

During the Assad dynasty’s 53 years in power, Damascus played an incredibly cynical game of regional politics.

This fiercely secular government which bombed its own city of Hama in 1982 to crush a Muslim Brotherhood uprising later funneled Sunni jihadi fighters to Iraq to battle the US occupation. Some of these militants returned to eventually battle the Syrian government. Meanwhile Syria’s closest allies were also Iran – a theocracy – and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite “party of God.”

For decades, Damascus acted as a patron for Kurdish PKK separatists in a long-running insurgency against the government in neighboring Turkey, while also denying many Syrian-born Kurds the full rights of citizenship.

And Syrian officials constantly denounced the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, even as the Syrian military and secret police tormented ordinary people at checkpoints in Lebanon during a Syrian occupation that lasted nearly 30 years.

These ideological contradictions were astounding. They also served to project Syrian power influence far beyond the country’s borders.

The hypocrisy and cynicism displayed by Assad was a family business.

“What do you do in the position that you hold?” she said. “As a mother and as a human being, as I said, we need to make sure that these atrocities stop.”

But three years later, she proudly stood by her husband’s side, ignoring the horrors inflicted by Syrian government forces during the civil war, which included the repeated bombing of hospitals.

There is one memory of a reporting trip to Damascus that still haunts me.

In 2005, I went undercover, posing as a tourist visiting a nightclub on a hill overlooking the city.

There, amid strobe lights and booming dance music, I spoke with 14 and 15 year old girls from neighboring, war-torn Iraq who worked as prostitutes. Some of the boys and girls laboring in this brothel were even younger.

The nightclub stood just a few miles from Assad’s presidential palace.

In a country as ruthlessly controlled by the Syrian secret police – where any sign of dissent was swiftly crushed – it is impossible to imagine that the authorities were unaware of the club’s existence and the work the children were doing there.

It was hard to imagine the slender, lisping man I met ruling this kind of system, and yet Assad governed as president for 24 years.

Wiser men than me have written about the banality of evil.

Based on what I saw long ago during my hour-long audience with a dictator, Bashar al-Assad personified this.