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Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She's got to practice. She's waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.

"Of course, I'd like to be in a combat position," said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works at a nonprofit. "With my build and height, I'm not a natural fit for that … so I'm training very hard."

She is among a growing number of Ukrainian women joining the military as Russia's full-scale war on the country nears its fourth year, and troops remain in short supply. This comes as an end to the fighting appears no closer than it was when President Trump took office in January vowing to quickly broker peace.

Mytsiuk said the Ukrainian military has become much more receptive to women since the early days of the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian men were lining up at recruitment centers to become soldiers.

She wanted to sign up, too, but was told she would be best off in the kitchen, she said, "where I could make dumplings."

Mytsiuk, however, plowed ahead. She enrolled at a military university for a second degree, graduating this summer. She looked into several brigades and applied to those with special forces units. She had difficult conversations with her mother and her boyfriend, a soldier. Both strongly oppose her decision.

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The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The deployment of the ship and the strike group it leads – which includes dozens of aircraft and destroyer ships – had been announced nearly three weeks ago, and its arrival marks an escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela.

The regime of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, meanwhile, announced what it called a “massive deployment” of land, sea, air, river and missile forces, as well as civilian militia, to counter the US naval presence off its coast.

The US carrier joins other warships, a nuclear-powered submarine and aircraft based in Puerto Rico, forming the largest US military presence in the region in decades – seen as the biggest since the invasion of Panama in 1989.

Donald Trump has sought to justify the massive military buildup as part of his “war on drugs”, targeting traffickers allegedly smuggling narcotics through Caribbean and Pacific waters. That campaign has included airstrikes on boats that have so far killed at least 76 people in South American waters since September.

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The United Kingdom has suspended some intelligence sharing with the United States, its close ally, over the U.S. military’s lethal strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, since London thinks the attacks are illegal and does not want to be implicated, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday. 

The decision to halt intelligence sharing, which took place earlier this fall, highlights the range of skepticism regarding the Trump administration’s legal justification for the vessel strikes, which so far have killed at least 76 people.

The U.S. garners intelligence from a variety of sources, including the UK, which oversees some territories in the Caribbean and offers information that assists the U.S. in identifying boats suspected of smuggling narcotics in the region. 

The gathered intelligence is normally delivered to the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATFS), based in Key West, Fla., which works on monitoring and detecting suspected illegal trafficking targets and conducting counter-narcotic operations. 

More than a dozen countries, including close U.S. allies, have liaison officers based at JIATFS, which is led by Coast Guard Rear Adm. Jeff Randall.

The Hill has reached out to JIATFS for comment. 

A DOD official told The Hill on Tuesday that the Pentagon does not “discuss intelligence matters.”

A UK government spokesperson told The Hill that it is “our longstanding policy to not comment on intelligence matters.”

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More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war so far, Gaza health officials said Saturday, as both sides completed the latest exchange of bodies under the terms of the tenuous ceasefire.

The latest jump in deaths occurred as more bodies are recovered in the devastated Gaza Strip since the ceasefire began on Oct. 10, and as other bodies are identified. The toll also includes Palestinians killed by strikes that Israel says target remaining militants.

Israel on Saturday returned the remains of another 15 Palestinians to Gaza, according to hospital officials there, a day after militants returned the remains of a hostage to Israel. He was identified as Lior Rudaeff, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’s office. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said that Rudaeff was born in Argentina.

The exchanges are the central part of the ceasefire’s initial phase, which requires that Hamas return all hostage remains as quickly as possible. Families and supporters rallied again Saturday night in Tel Aviv for the return of all.

The truce is aimed at winding down the deadliest and most destructive war ever between Israel and the Palestinian militant group. It began with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.

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Lithuania’s top diplomat, Kęstutis Budrys, delivered a stark message to Western allies from NATO’s eastern flank during his Monday visit to Washington: The era of self-deterrence is over.

The time, he insisted, is now to confront Russian aggression with overwhelming force – and budget.

Speaking at the Hudson Institute after a day of meetings with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Benson and other US officials, Budrys offered a stark, cold-eyed assessment from NATO’s frontline. The West, he argued, has been trapped by a Russian-planted idea: that escalation should always be avoided.

“The only thing that you shouldn’t do is escalate – who created this [mantra]?” Budrys challenged. “You shouldn’t be afraid to escalate. This is what works,” he emphasized.
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Drawing on Lithuania’s long experience with Russian power, Budrys said that Western restraint only invites more aggression.

He paraphrased Lenin’s maxim – that if you probe with a bayonet and encounter mush, push; if you encounter steel, withdraw – to argue that Russia always advances until it meets force.

Every time the West holds back, he warned, “they think we’re weak – pushovers,” he said.

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When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations.

This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over. This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.

For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

To clinch the lucrative contract, Google and Amazon agreed to the so-called winking mechanism, according to leaked documents seen by the Guardian, as part of a joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

Based on the documents and descriptions of the contract by Israeli officials, the investigation reveals how the companies bowed to a series of stringent and unorthodox “controls” contained within the 2021 deal, known as Project Nimbus. Both Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses have denied evading any legal obligations.

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