Heading a delegation, the Iranian vice president arrived in Yerevan on Tuesday morning at the invitation of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
Aref is going to deliver an address to the conference and hold meetings with a number of foreign prime ministers on the sidelines of the event.
The Eurasian Economic Forum, being held in Yerevan on September 30 and October 1, coincides with the meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council, attended by the heads of the EAEU member states and observers. It also marks the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union.
The theme of the ongoing forum is “10 years of the EAEU, Prospects and Priorities”, Kazinform News Agency reported.
The agenda of the forum includes economic cooperation among the EAEU member states, comprehensive cooperation and technological cooperation, digitalization, transport infrastructure and logistics development, domestic market quality and support for entrepreneurship, international cooperation and the EAEU’s strategic development.
A series of EAEU-Iran events are planned to be held on the sidelines of the forum, involving the representatives of business community, public sector, industrial companies, transport and logistics of Iran.
In addition, a business dialogue between the EAEU and Iran, a roundtable meeting on the instruments for promoting trade and investment between the EAEU and Iran, a roundtable meeting for Iran’s industrial, transport and logistics companies, and an event for agricultural companies will be organized as well.
The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) earlier reported that its television anchor Safaa Ahmad was killed on Tuesday in “treacherous Israeli aggression” targeting the Syrian capital.
Footage posted on social media appeared to show a car engulfed in flames on a street surrounded by apartment blocks.
It was not clear if the presenter was among the three civilian casualties referred to by state media.
The spillover of fighting into Lebanon and Syria has stoked fears that the war in the Gaza Strip could escalate into a broader regional conflict.
The latest planned increase in spending will take Russia’s defence budget to a record 13.5tn rubles (£109bn) in 2025, according to draft budget documents published on Monday on the parliament’s website. That is about 3tn rubles more than was set aside for defence this year, which was the previous record.
Taken together, spending on defence and security will account for about 40% of Russia’s total government spending – or 41.5tn rubles in 2025.
The 2025 budget suggests Putin has embraced what economists have dubbed “military Keynesianism”, marked by a significant rise in military spending, which has fuelled the war in Ukraine, spurred a consumer spending boom and driven up inflation.
“This increase is confirmation the economy has switched to a war footing, and, even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, channeling money to the army and a bloated defence sector will remain a top priority,” the Bell, a leading Russian outlet specialising on the economy, wrote in its newsletter.
“It’s clear that spending on the military and security will exceed combined expenditure on education, healthcare, social policy and the national economy,” it added.
According to the draft budget, social spending is expected to decrease by 16% from 7.7tn rubles this year to 6.5tn rubles next year.
The massive Russian investment in the military has worried European war planners, who have announced NATO underestimated Russia’s ability to sustain a long-term war. Meanwhile, Ukraine is facing uncertainty over the level of future support from its closest allies.
This has increased confidence in Moscow, where on Monday Putin boasted that “all goals set” in what Russia calls its special military operation “will be achieved”.
Putin’s speeches over the last year have been marked by growing confidence as Russian troops make creeping gains in eastern Ukraine.
Recently, he has taken a hardline stance, demanding Ukraine’s unconditional surrender and calling for the “denazification of Ukraine, its demilitarization, and neutral status”.
Analysts believe the long-term economic outlook for Russia is far gloomier than it was before the invasion.
The Kremlin’s pivot toward China and other markets, sanctions-busting and other workarounds cannot make up for direct access to western markets or technology.
Russia’s military spending boom has sent inflation surging at home, forcing the central bank to raise borrowing costs, while the country struggles with acute labour shortages as Moscow pumps fiscal and physical resources into the military.
“Those 66 percent of damaged buildings in the Gaza Strip account for 163,778 structures in total,” it said.
The last assessment, based on images from early July, determined that 63 percent of structures in the Palestinian territory had been damaged.
The damage now included “52,564 structures that have been destroyed; 18,913 severely damaged; 35,591 possibly damaged structures; and 56,710 moderately affected”, UNOSAT revealed.
Gaza City has been notably affected, with 36,611 structures destroyed, it added.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 41,600 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 96,000 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.
According to the head of the Red Crescent Society of Kerman Province, Reza Fallah, the bodies of 15 individuals have been recovered.
Fallah provided an update on the rescue operations, stating that as of Wednesday morning, the bodies of the deceased, including 7 women, 7 children, and a man, were retrieved by Red Crescent rescuers.
The search operation for other missing individuals continues.
Fallah noted that dozens of rescue personnel from the adjacent cities of Anbarabad, Kahnuj, Jiroft, Sarduieh, Bam, and the provincial capital are actively involved in the search and rescue operations at the site of the incident.
The disaster follows several days of heavy rainfall that caused the river to overflow, leading to widespread devastation in the region.
The sudden surge of water inundated homes, swept away vehicles, and disrupted daily life in Jiroft and surrounding areas.
The local authorities have urged residents to remain vigilant and follow safety guidelines to prevent further casualties.
Yahya Saree said in a televised statement on Monday that the unmanned aerial vehicle was targeted with a locally made surface-to-air missile.
According to Saree, this is the eleventh such aircraft that Yemeni air defenses have shot down since the start of the operations in support of Palestinians in Gaza amid the Israeli regime’s genocidal war.
He went on to note that the Israeli enemy, with the US support, launched 17 airstrike on several civilian structures, including sea port facilities and power plants, in Yemen’s western province of Hudaydah on Saturday, leaving five people dead and another 57 injured.
Saree further added that such criminal aggression will never deter Yemenis from performing their religious, humanitarian and moral duties toward Palestinian and Lebanese nations.
This crime will be responded by Yemeni forces enhancing their retaliatory operations in the near future, the spokesperson pointed out.
The Yemeni group has carried out dozens of attacks on ships with links to Israel in a show of solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s 11-month-old war on the Gaza Strip. Houthis have stressed that they will not stop their attacks until unrelenting Israeli ground and aerial offensives in the besieged enclave end.
Pezeshkian made the remark in a meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin of Russia who arrived in Tehran for an official visit on Monday, amid heightened tensions in the region.
Mishustin was accompanied by a high-ranking delegation of officials and heads of economic organizations.
Pezeshkian said the agreement to turn Iran into a transit and gas hub in the region is a prime example of joint cooperation aimed at securing common interests and achieving sustainable development, convergence and economic leap in the region.
He added the exchange of diplomatic delegations between Iran and Russia will boost bilateral interaction.
Pezeshkian further underscored that regional cooperation within international organizations such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will boost the power of independent countries, including Iran, Russia and China, to counter US unilateralism.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that Moscow’s trade links with Tehran were developing.
“The only thing I can say is that our trade and economic relations with Iran are developing. They are developing in all areas, and in trade too. The volume of trade is growing mutually.”
Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian president warned that Israel is intensifying tensions with the direct support of the United States in order to prepare the ground for increasing the presence of the United States in the region.
This poses a “common threat to the interests of the regional countries and nations”, he said.
The Russian prime minister, for his part, said Moscow is keen to improve interaction with Iran, particularly in the fields of energy, industry, transportation, agriculture, health and cultural issues.
Mishustin added the two countries have succeeded in increasing trade exchanges but still they enjoy enormous capacities to secure common interests.
He underlined the importance of strengthening bilateral cooperation in line with efforts to build a new world order which will be beneficial to everyone.
He invited the Iranian president to take part in the BRICS summit in Russia next month.
The Russian premier expressed concern over the escalation of tensions in the region and said the US supports mounting conflicts in different parts of the world with the purpose of securing its own interests.
Therefore, he emphasized, independent countries like Iran and Russia, should accelerate cooperation to counter such measures.
A statement from the Israeli army stated that it was targeting villages in localised raids near the border that “pose an immediate and real threat to Israeli settlements on the northern border”.
Heavy shelling, air strikes and drone strikes preceded the operation in southern Lebanon and strikes southern Beirut continued as the ground incursion began.
Israel’s air force and infantry forces accompanied Israel’s ground forces according to the statement in an operation titled “Northern Arrows”.
Earlier on Monday, reports claimed that Lebanese troops had pulled back five kilometres from their positions on the southern border while the Israeli military declared three areas in northern Israel as “closed military zones”.
But, Lebanon’s army on Tuesday denied reports it had withdrawn from southern border positions by several kilometers following Israel’s ground incursion into the country.
Such reports were inaccurate, the Army Command said.
In a public address on Monday from Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Hezbollah remained defiant.
“We are quite ready, if the Israelis want a ground incursion, the resistance forces are ready for that,” Qassem declared.
Israeli tanks and soldiers have been massing at the northern border for days, according to open-source imagery.
Israel has also been conducting commando-style raids against Hezbollah inside Lebanon which analysts say are designed to lay the groundwork for a larger deployment of forces.
The US State Department on Monday confirmed that Israel is conducting “limited” ground operations in southern Lebanon.
“This is what they have informed us that they are currently conducting, which are limited operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure near the border,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.
The US has maintained that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hezbollah, accusing the group of provoking Israel, but stated that it is committed to a diplomatic solution and is seeking a ceasefire.
US President Joe Biden said on Monday that he wanted a “ceasefire now”.
The US took further steps to bolster its military posture.
The Pentagon announced the US was sending to the Middle East “a few thousand” more troops who would come from multiple fighter jet squadrons.
Meanwhile, United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres stressed he opposed “any invasion of Lebanon”.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is no longer able to patrol southern Lebanon as a result of fighting, the UN noted.
Hezbollah and Israel both exchanged fire across the border.
Since Sept. 23, Israel has launched massive airstrikes against what it calls Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, killing more than 900 people and injuring over 2,700 others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Several Hezbollah commanders have been killed in the Israeli raid, including Nasrallah.
Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 41,600 people, mostly women and children, following a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7 last year.
The international community has warned that Israeli attacks in Lebanon could escalate the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war.
Zelensky’s path to prevailing in the conflict with Russia reportedly includes four key clauses: NATO-like Western security guarantees for Ukraine, the continuation of Kiev’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region to serve as a territorial bargaining chip, deliveries of “specific” Western-made advanced weapons, and international financial aid for Ukraine. Officials in Kiev promised to release the contents of the plan to the public, but said that some details would remain secret.
However, when the Ukrainian leader attempted to showcase his roadmap in the US, he faced a “tepid reception”, according to the WSJ. The paper noted that the administration of US President Joe Biden remains “wary of making moves that Moscow could perceive as escalation, expressed skepticism and said they wanted more details”.
While the US announced a new military assistance package for Kiev, it has so far refrained from “grant[ing] Zelensky’s main request: permission to strike into Russia with longer-range missiles”, the WSJ noted.
The paper added that Kiev’s failure to negotiate a significant increase in US assistance “points to a perilous road ahead”, especially as Ukrainian lines remain under strong pressure in Donbass. The daily assessed that without a “major surge” in military support, Ukraine’s goal of reclaiming all the territory it claims as its own “appears distant”.
A Bloomberg report last week also claimed that Western officials did not believe that Zelensky’s “victory plan” would deliver a breakthrough in the conflict, as it contained no “real surprises” and largely amounted to a “wish list”.
Commenting on the roadmap, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that it does not contain any specifics and offers nothing to Kiev’s Western backers.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that if the West decides to allow Ukraine to use foreign-made long-range weapons to strike deep into the country, this will mean that NATO is “waging war” against Moscow.
Last week, the Russian leader also proposed that the national nuclear strategy be updated to stipulate that “aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state” shall be regarded as a “joint attack” and an action crossing the nuclear threshold.
The implication of the change is that it would apply to a possible Ukrainian attack on Russian soil with weapons supplied by the US, Britain, or France.
The US official told the daily that Israel’s planned campaign would be “smaller than its last war against Hezbollah in 2006” and would focus on “clearing out militant infrastructure along the border to remove the threat to Israeli border communities”.
Earlier, US officials had confirmed that Israeli soldiers conducted special operations raids in Lebanese territory near the border Monday morning.
One official described those raids to CNN as “very precise, very targeted, very small raids” – of the kind where “you go in, you go out” to specifically target Hezbollah.
Two sources familiar with the matter also claimed that Israeli special forces have carried out small raids into Lebanese territory in recent days as part of preparations for a potential ground offensive.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant indicated that Israel is expected to launch a ground offensive in Lebanon.
“The next phase in the war against Hezbollah will begin soon,” Gallant told mayors of Israeli northern border communities on Monday.
“It will be a significant factor in changing the security situation and will allow us to complete the important [mission] of returning the residents to their homes,” he added.
Meantime, the US president called for a ceasefire when asked about reports that Israel is preparing for a “limited” ground invasion of Lebanon.
Joe Biden, asked if he was comfortable with Israel’s plan, replied: “I’m comfortable with them stopping.”
He did not elaborate on how the US plans to halt the conflict, or on the fact that it continues to provide Israel with weapons and billions of dollars in aid.
Also on Monday, Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem stressed that the group’s fighters are prepared in case Israel decides to launch a ground invasion of Lebanon.
Since Sept. 23, Israel has launched massive airstrikes against what it calls Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, killing more than 900 people and injuring over 2,700 others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Several Hezbollah commanders have been killed in the Israeli raid, including its leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 41,600 people, mostly women and children, following a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7 last year.
The international community has warned that Israeli attacks in Lebanon could escalate the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war.
