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Iran Summons Turkish Ambassador over Erdogan Remarks

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan arrives at a military parade to mark the victory on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in Baku, Azerbaijan December 10, 2020. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan arrives at a military parade to mark the victory on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in Baku, Azerbaijan December 10, 2020. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS
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Iran Summons Turkish Ambassador over Erdogan Remarks

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan arrives at a military parade to mark the victory on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in Baku, Azerbaijan December 10, 2020. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan arrives at a military parade to mark the victory on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in Baku, Azerbaijan December 10, 2020. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS

Iran on Friday summoned Turkey’s ambassador to Tehran over the Turkish president’s remarks during a visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, which Iran deemed offensive and said support a secession of Azeri ethnic parts of Iran.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Turkish Ambassador Derya Ors was summoned following Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “meddlesome and unacceptable” remarks in Baku on Thursday. The official IRNA news agency said Iran has asked Turkey's government for an immediate explanation.

During the visit to Baku, Erdogan attended a parade to celebrate a recent cease-fire agreement that allowed Azerbaijan to reclaim control over broad swathes of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding lands in a conflict with Armenia.

Iran, which borders all three countries, had stayed out of the decades-old conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia and when fighting reignited in September, Tehran urged both sides to seek a peaceful solution.

At the Baku parade, Erdogan, who strongly backs Azerbaijan, reportedly read parts of a poem about how a border tore apart ancient Azeri, or Azerbaijani, lands “by force." It refers to the separation of Azerbaijan between Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan following the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828.

Iran's three northwestern provinces — West Azerbaijan, East Azerbaijan and Ardabil — have a predominantly ethnic Azeri population.

Mohsen Pakaeen, Iran's former ambassador to Baku, said such remarks could harm relations between Azerbaijan and Iran.

“The relations between Tehran and Baku are in very good shape now, but Erdogan’s remarks could raise a series of historical and controversial issues between the two countries,” The Associated Press quoted Pakaeen as saying.

IRNA reported that Pakaeen said the Turkish president was trying to spread pan-Turkism, a political movement dating back to the 1880s.

Iran's foreign ministry said “the era of claiming lands and warmongering empires has long ended,” a reference to the Ottoman Empire.

Earlier in the day, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also criticized Erdogan's remarks in a tweet: “Didn’t he realize that he was undermining the sovereignty of the Republic of Azerbaijan? NO ONE can talk about OUR beloved Azerbaijan.”.

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World

Aid Workers Stand Trial in Greece on Migrant Smuggling Charges

TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)
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Aid Workers Stand Trial in Greece on Migrant Smuggling Charges

TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)

Two dozen aid workers went on trial in Greece on Thursday on charges including migrant smuggling, in a case that rights groups have dismissed as a baseless attempt to outlaw aid for refugees heading to Europe.

The trial on the island of Lesbos comes as EU countries, including Greece - which saw more than one million people reaching its shores during Europe's refugee crisis in 2015-2016 - are tightening rules on migration as right-wing parties gain ground across the bloc, Reuters said.

The 24 defendants, affiliated with the Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), a nonprofit search-and-rescue group that operated on Lesbos from 2016 to 2018, face multi-year prison sentences. The felony charges include involvement in a criminal group facilitating the illegal entry of migrants and money laundering linked to the group's funding.

Among them is Sarah Mardini, one of two Syrian sisters who saved refugees in 2015 by pulling their sinking dinghy to shore and whose story inspired the popular 2022 Netflix movie The Swimmers, and Sean Binder, a German national who began volunteering for ERCI in 2017. They were arrested in 2018 and spent over 100 days in pre-trial detention before being released pending trial.

"The trial's result will define if humanitarian aid will be judicially protected from absurd charges or whether it will be left to the maelstrom of arbitrary narratives by prosecuting authorities," defense lawyer Zacharias Kesses told Reuters.

Greece has toughened its stance on migrants. Since 2019, the center-right government has reinforced border controls with fences and sea patrols and in July it temporarily suspended processing asylum applications for migrants arriving from North Africa.

Anyone caught helping migrants to shore today may face charges including facilitating illegal entry into Greece or helping a criminal enterprise under a 2021 law passed as part of Europe’s efforts to counter mass migration from the Middle East and Asia. In 2023, a Greek court dropped espionage charges against the defendants.

Rights groups have criticized the case as baseless and lacking in evidence. "The case depends on deeply-flawed logic," Human Rights Watch said in a statement. "Saving lives at sea is mischaracterized as migrant smuggling, so the search-and-rescue group is a criminal organization, and therefore, the group’s legitimate fundraising is money laundering."

World

Putin Says Russia Will Take All of Ukraine's Donbas Region Militarily or Otherwise

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS
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Putin Says Russia Will Take All of Ukraine's Donbas Region Militarily or Otherwise

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS

President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia would take full control of Ukraine's Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.

Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, said Reuters.

"Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories," Putin told India Today ahead of a visit to New Delhi, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.

Ukraine says it does not want to gift Russia its own territory that Moscow has failed to win on the battlefield, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.

Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

About 5,000 square km (1,900 square miles) of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.

In discussions with the United States over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said that it wants control over the whole of Donbas - and that the United States should informally recognize Moscow's control.

Russia in 2022 declared that the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of Russia after referenda that the West and Kyiv dismissed as a sham. Most countries recognize the regions - and Crimea - as part of Ukraine.

Putin received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday, and said that Russia had accepted some US proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue.

Russia's RIA state news agency cited Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner had been "very useful" and that it had been based on proposals he and President Donald Trump had discussed in Alaska in August.

World

Seoul Says Six Nationals Held in North Korea, Vows to Help Them

South Korea's presidential office confirmed Thursday that six nationals were being held captive in North Korea. Pedro PARDO / AFP/File
South Korea's presidential office confirmed Thursday that six nationals were being held captive in North Korea. Pedro PARDO / AFP/File
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Seoul Says Six Nationals Held in North Korea, Vows to Help Them

South Korea's presidential office confirmed Thursday that six nationals were being held captive in North Korea. Pedro PARDO / AFP/File
South Korea's presidential office confirmed Thursday that six nationals were being held captive in North Korea. Pedro PARDO / AFP/File

South Korea's presidential office confirmed Thursday that six of its citizens have been captive in North Korea for years, after President Lee Jae Myung appeared unaware of their plight during a briefing with foreign media.

Asked Wednesday about South Koreans detained in the North, Lee replied: "It's my first time ever hearing about this."

Lee's office later followed up with a statement saying that six nationals -- including Christian missionaries and North Korean defectors -- have been held since their arrests "between 2013 and 2016 on charges of espionage, among others".

Four of them have been named by Pyongyang, which has accused them of espionage -- a charge carrying severe penalties, including death, in the authoritarian country, Reuters said.

"In the current situation, where inter-Korean dialogue and exchanges have been suspended for an extended period, the suffering of our people caused by division continues," it said.

"The government will work to address the matter through efforts to swiftly resume inter-Korean dialogue."

At Wednesday's briefing, Lee turned to his national security adviser Wi Sung-lac for help answering the question.

Wi said there had been cases of South Koreans unable to return after entering the North and "other unknown cases", but could not confirm the timing of their arrests.

Lee's apparent lack of awareness made headlines in local media, with one headline in the conservative Chosun Ilbo calling him "clueless".

"It was a symbolic scene that illustrates the status of the issue of South Korean detainees in North Korea," the daily said.

Seoul's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean relations, said Thursday it last raised the issue with Pyongyang in 2018.

The North responded that "relevant domestic institutions are thoroughly reviewing the issue", according to the ministry.

Pyongyang has not commented or taken any action on the matter since, it added.

Since taking office in June, Lee has proposed talks with Pyongyang without preconditions, a sharp reversal from the hawkish stance of his predecessor, who was removed from office over his disastrous declaration of martial law last year.

Pyongyang has remained silent on Lee's overtures.