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Kim Jong Un has pledged his support to Russia in what he has described as the “fight against imperialism”.

The North Korean leader praised Russia and its president for a fighting a “sacred war” against “hegemonic forces” – thought to be a reference to the West.

“We will always support the decisions of President Putin and the Russian leadership … and we will be together in the fight against imperialism,” Kim told Mr Putin via a translator.

Putin and Kim conversation details emerge – latest updates

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un shake hands during their meeting at the Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. (Vladimir Smirnov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
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Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un meet at the Vostochny cosmodrome. Pic: AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un examine a launch pad of Angara rockets during their meeting at the Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
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Mr Putin and Mr Kim examine a launch pad of Angara rockets. Pic: AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un examine a rocket assembly hangar during their meeting at the Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. Russian Federal Space Corporation Roscosmos CEO Yuri Borisov is on the left. (Artyom Geodakyan, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
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The pair toured Russia’s Vostochny cosmodrome. Pic: AP

Mr Putin, meanwhile, listed economic cooperation, humanitarian issues and the “situation in the region” among the agenda items for their talks.

It comes after the pair shook hands as they met at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia’s biggest domestic space launch centre.

The two leaders are holding talks – their first in person since 2019 – at the site in Siberia.

Mr Putin is believed to be seeking ammunition from heavily militarised North Korea for his invasion of Ukraine – which he has himself compared to the conquests of Russia’s former imperialist monarch, Peter the Great.

Russia has its own imperial ambitions

Vladimir Putin has in the past lamented the loss of Russia’s own empire.

Spanning much of northern Eurasia between the early 1700s until the Soviet revolution in 1917, the Russian Empire was the third largest in the history of the world – behind only the British and Mongol Empires in terms of land mass.

The empire was founded at the end of the rule of Peter I, often known as Peter the Great, who built it through a mixture of reform, diplomacy and conquest.

Mr Putin has previously drawn comparisons between his own presidency and the rule of Peter the Great.

Speaking after visiting an exhibition to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Peter’s birth last year, the Russian president also drew a parallel to his invasion of Ukraine.

“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,” he said.

“It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [them].”

Referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he said: “Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.”

Mr Putin also previously called the collapse of the Russian Empire’s successor, the USSR, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and lamented the loss of “territory of the former Russian Empire” during its fall.

Experts believe Kim is seeking Russian technical assistance for his efforts to develop military reconnaissance satellites.

The meeting came hours after North Korea fired two ballistic missiles toward the sea, extending a highly provocative run of North Korean weapons testing since the start of 2022.

Mr Putin welcomed Kim, who arrived at the facility in a limousine, having travelled from Pyongyang in his special armoured train with his influential sister Kim Yo Jong.

Read more:
Kim has little to lose in his meeting with Putin
North Korea simulates ‘scorched earth’ nuclear strike

A South Korean TV channel shows Putin and Kim's meeting. Pic: AP
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A South Korean TV channel shows Putin and Kim’s meeting. Pic: AP

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Putin welcomes Kim to Russia

Pak Thae Song, chairman of North Korea’s space science and technology committee, and navy Admiral Kim Myong Sik, who are both linked with North Korean efforts to acquire spy satellites and nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines, also travelled in the delegation, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

Mr Kim and Mr Putin shared a handshake that lasted about 40 seconds following the North Korean leader’s arrival, with the Russian president saying he was “very glad to see” him.

In this photo taken from video released by governor of the Russian far eastern region of Primorsky Krai Oleg Kozhemyako telegram channel on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023, North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, foreground, steps down from his train after crossing the border to Russia at Khasan, about 127 km (79 miles) south of Vladivostok.(Governor of the Russian far eastern region of Primorsky Krai Oleg Kozhemyako telegram channel VIA AP)
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Kim Jong Un, foreground steps down from his train after crossing the border into Russia. Pic: AP

Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrives to attend a meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un at the Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. (Vladimir Smirnov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
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Kim Yo Jong also travelled as part of the North Korean delegation

During the tour of the space centre, Mr Kim peppered a Russian space official with questions about the rockets.

In August, North Korea’s second attempt to launch a reconnaissance satellite failed due to an error in the booster’s third stage, according to the country’s state-controlled media.

In late May, a North Korean rocket carrying a spy satellite also plunged into the sea soon after lift-off.

Asked whether Russia will help North Korea build satellites, Mr Putin was quoted by Russian state media as saying: “That’s why we have come here.”

“The DPRK leader shows keen interest in rocket technology. They’re trying to develop space, too,” he added.

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.

The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.

chart

Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.

In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.

‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’

Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.

“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”

Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.

By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.

chart

Names were previously added to the list without verification

Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.

The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.

Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?

A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.

These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.

“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”

More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote - and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters

04 April 2025, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: Stock exchange traders watch their monitors on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange while the display board with the Dax curve shows falling prices. US President Trump had issued a huge tariff package against trading partners around the world. The European Union and China have already announced countermeasures. Photo by: Arne Dedert/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
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Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off

These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

Aerial view of a ro-ro terminal for vehicle shipment in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT
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Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP

Cargo containers line a shipping terminal at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
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Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

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Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy’s home city

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Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy's home city

At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.

Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.

Ukraine’s president said Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih showed Russia “does not want a ceasefire”.

“The whole world sees it,” said Mr Zelenskyy.

“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.

“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.

Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.

Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.

Latest updates: President’s home city hit by missile attack

Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.

They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.

Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.

“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
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Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
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Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’

It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.

Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.

“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.

Read more:
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UK in talks with Brazil over ‘potential sale’ of warships

In March, the US agreed a proposed 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine after talks in Saudi Arabia. Later, Washington negotiated a limited ceasefire about energy infrastructure with Russia.

Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.

He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.

“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.

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