Ukraine’s key allies are meeting in Brussels on Friday with a noticeable absence at the table: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is only attending virtually.

The Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which was created by former US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during the Biden administration, is a group of roughly 50 nations that meet regularly to discuss bolstering military support for Ukraine.

It will mark the first time a US defense secretary has not attended the meeting in person since the group was established in 2022 just months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which comes amid a series of policy shifts by the Trump administration seen as moving closer to Moscow.

Top Trump official Steve Witkoff arrived in St. Petersburg on Friday for negotiations with Russia, according to the Kremlin.

Russian state media and Axios reported that Witkoff is expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin later on Friday, but the Kremlin spokesman declined to comment on reports of a possible meeting.

Meanwhile in Brussels, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group will be chaired by British Defense Secretary John Healey for the second time, alongside German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

Pistorius said ahead of Friday’s meeting that it was the Trump administration’s decision to attend virtually and was “not his business” to comment on the signal that sends.

Speaking in Berlin earlier this week, Pistorius said: “There is a new unpredictability in our transatlantic relations.”

“The United States keep up their commitment to NATO but they quite rightly demand a stronger European contribution in the alliance,” Pistorius, who is widely expected to remain in his post in the new German coalition government, said Wednesday. “We will do this together with our European partners and NATO allies, and we will have to provide significantly more leadership as we go along.”

Ahead of the meeting in Brussels, the British defense minister offered strong words of support for Ukraine and called for putting “even more pressure on Putin.”

“Our commitment is to put Ukraine in the strongest position to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and deter future Russian aggression,” Healey said in a statement.

Germany will provide a further €11 billion ($12.5 billion) in military support to Ukraine through 2029, including IRIS-T mobile air defense missile systems and PATRIOT missiles, Ukraine’s defense minister said Friday from Brussels. The United Kingdom and Norway will also jointly give an additional $589 million in military aid, to provide maintenance to vehicles and hundreds of thousands of drones.

Air defense is Kyiv’s priority, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said ahead of the meeting.

“We just need to address the shortage of air defense systems to make our sky protection stronger,” Zelensky said. “Our partners can help with this and also speed up the implementation of all agreements reached earlier. Patriots that remain unused in storage with our partners should be protecting lives.”

Ukraine’s military chief Oleksandr Syrskyi told Ukrainian media on Thursday that Russia has “already begun” its new offensive against the Sumy and Kharkiv regions.

Meanwhile, a new United Nations report revealed this week that Ukraine experienced a significant increase in civilian casualties from Russian attacks in March.

The number of civilian casualties was 50% higher than the previous month, with at least 164 people killed and 910 injured in March, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said his nation is “not afraid,” in his first public comments on the escalating trade war with the United States that has tanked international markets and fueled fears of a global recession.

“There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation,” Xi told Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing on Friday, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

“For over 70 years, China’s development has relied on self-reliance and hard work — never on handouts from others, and it is not afraid of any unjust suppression,” Xi added. “Regardless of how the external environment changes, China will remain confident, stay focused, and concentrate on managing its own affairs well.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Japan’s largest yakuza crime syndicate has pledged to end its longstanding war with a rival faction and refrain from causing “trouble,” authorities said, as the mafia-like groups contend with falling membership and increased police crackdowns.

The Yamaguchi-gumi, one of the world’s largest and wealthiest crime gangs, has been embroiled in a bloody feud with splinter groups since 2015, when more than a dozen factions broke away to form the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi.

Since then, intensifying violence between the two warring crime organizations has seen rival gangsters gunned down or stabbed in dozens of incidents, according to police.

The armed conflict, often erupting on public streets in cities across central and western Japan, has put pressure on authorities to toughen restrictions on the gangs.

“Yakuza” is a blanket term for Japan’s organized crime groups, which sit in a gray area in the country. Though they are not outlawed, the groups are regulated and monitored by authorities.

In 2020, police formally designated the Yamaguchi-gumi and its splinter group as gangs at war – giving officers the ability to increase surveillance, restrict their activities, including prohibiting the use of their offices and ability to raise funds.

“Their conflicts have become serious and unpredictable,” the National Police Agency said in 2021. In the past five years, police have also put several other gangs under close surveillance.

It is unclear whether the rival splinter group, Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, has responded to the ceasefire pledge. Police said they would be “closely monitoring the movements of both groups” as the declaration to end the turf war may be one-sided.

Membership to yakuza groups across Japan has been in decline over recent decades. In 2024, the number of members of organized crime syndicates stood at 18,800, hitting a record low and falling below 20,000 for the first time, according to police data.

Those official figures show the number of active members of the Yamaguchi-gumi gang have almost halved since 2014 – falling from 6,000 then to just 3,300 at the end of last year. The Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi had around 120 members last year.

As yakuza membership falls, however, Japanese authorities are contending with a new criminal phenomenon: the “tokuryu.”

These anonymous gangs are not affiliated with a yakuza family, operating individually or in ad hoc groups. About 10,000 members of tokuryu gangs were investigated last year, with police linking them to violent robberies in Tokyo, and fraud schemes involving romance scams and investments on social media.

A major Australian IVF clinic has apologized for giving the wrong embryo to a woman who then gave birth to another couple’s baby, blaming the mix-up on “human error.”

Monash IVF, which operates more than 100 clinics across Australia, said in a statement staff were “devastated” by the mistake, believed to be the first of its kind in Australia.

It’s not clear whether either of the couples suspected a mix-up before the clinic discovered the error in February.

“On behalf of Monash IVF, I want to say how truly sorry I am for what has happened,” said CEO Michael Knaap in the statement.

“We will continue to support the patients through this extremely distressing time,” he added.

Monash IVF has not named the couples involved, nor has it responded to questions about when the baby was born, or who has custody of the child, out of respect for the couples’ privacy.

The error occurred at Monash IVF’s Brisbane clinic, in the state of Queensland, where the law recognizes the birth mother and her partner as the child’s legal parents.

Alex Polyakov, a clinical associate professor at the University of Melbourne and a fertility consultant at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital, said it was the first incident of its kind in four decades of IVF in Australia.

“Australia’s regulatory framework for assisted reproductive technology is internationally recognized for its stringency and thoroughness,” he said in written comments.

“The probability of such an event occurring is so low that it defies statistical quantification.”

How did it happen?

The mistake was discovered in February after the birth parents requested to transfer their remaining embryos to another IVF provider.

After an extra embryo was found in their storage compartment, an internal inquiry discovered they’d received the wrong embryo.

It’s not clear how the error was made but according to the Monash IVF statement, another patient’s embryo was “incorrectly thawed and transferred to the birth parents.”

Knaap, the company’s CEO, said he was confident it was “an isolated incident.”

“We are reinforcing all our safeguards across our clinics – we also commissioned an independent investigation and are committed to implementing its recommendations in full,” he added.

The Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) said in a statement that it was “aware of the serious incident” and its immediate thoughts were with the families affected.

It said such incidents are rare and require “the highest standards of transparency.”

Similar errors have been made in the United States, including a recent case where a White woman discovered she’d been given the wrong embryo after giving birth to a Black infant.

This is not the first time Monash IVF has been accused of wrongdoing.

Last year, the company agreed to pay 56 million Australian dollars ($35 million) to settle a class action suit brought by 700 former patients.

The patients alleged the company didn’t disclose the risk of false positives in genetic testing on embryos, which led them to discard potentially viable embryos.

Taiwan prosecutors on Friday for the first time charged a Chinese ship captain with intentionally damaging undersea cables off the island in February, after a rise in sea cable malfunctions alarmed Taiwan officials amid tensions with China.

Prosecutors say the man was captain of the Chinese-crewed Hong Tai 58, registered in Togo, which Taiwanese authorities detained after suspecting the ship had dropped anchor near an undersea cable off southwestern Taiwan, damaging it.

The prosecutors’ office in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan said they had charged the ship’s Chinese captain, whom they identified only by his family name, Wang, with being responsible for damaging the cable.

Wang has said he is innocent, but refused to provide details of the ship’s owner and “had a bad attitude”, the prosecutors said in a statement.

Seven other Chinese nationals detained at the same time will not be charged and will be transported to China, prosecutors said, adding that the case was the island’s first prosecution over damaging sea cables.

Reuters was not able to determine the ship’s ownership or immediately locate a lawyer representing the captain.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China has previously accused Taiwan of “manipulating” possible Chinese involvement in the case, saying it was casting aspersions before the facts were clear.

Taiwan has reported five cases of sea cable malfunctions this year, compared with three each in 2024 and 2023, according to its digital ministry.

Taiwan’s coast guard has in recent months stepped up efforts to protect its sea cables, including monitoring a “blacklist” of close to 100 China-linked ships registered to a country other than that of its owner near Taiwan, officials familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Taiwan said in January it suspected a China-linked ship of damaging an undersea cable off its northern coast; the ship owner denied the accusations.

Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, has repeatedly complained about “grey zone” Chinese activities around the island, designed to pressure it without direct confrontation, such as balloon overflights and sand dredging.

Taipei was alarmed after another Chinese-linked ship was suspected of damaging a different cable this year, prompting the navy and other agencies to step up efforts to protect the undersea communication links, which are vital to the island’s connections to the rest of the world.

Taiwan, whose government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, has pointed to similarities between what it has experienced and damage to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.