With Russia’s diminished influence in Syria, Ukraine calls on Israel to reconsider its stance and provide essential defensive weapons and technology.

Pope Francis called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as for the release of hostages, adding aid needs to be given to the people “worn out by hunger and by war.”

Associated Press journalists have been covering these conflicts since they began. Now, as 2024 ends and a new year begins, we asked two veteran AP reporters — Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Samya Kullab in Kyiv — to talk about what they saw the past year and what struck them. Here are their accounts:

Pope Francis has called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to end the war triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In his traditional Christmas Day address, the Pope said "boldness [was] needed to open the door" to dialogue "in order to achieve a just and lasting peace" between the two sides.

President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday there was no time left this year to sign a new Ukrainian gas transit deal, and laid the blame firmly on Ukraine for refusing to extend the agreement that brings gas to Slovakia,

Ukraine has claimed to have struck a Russian industrial facility producing fuel for missiles, as Moscow says it has foiled several assassination plots on senior officers.Kyiv said on Thursday that its air force had had carried out a strike in Russia’s Rostov region on a factory which was used to produce solid fuel for ballistic missiles used in attacks on Ukraine.

Back then, in the first weeks of the war, Russia and Ukraine conducted several rounds of talks in person and online aimed at ending the conflict; although a framework for peace called the Istanbul Communiqué was drawn up,

AI warfare may conjure images of killer robots and autonomous drones, but a different reality is unfolding in the Gaza Strip. There, artificial intelligence has been suggesting targets in Israel’s retaliatory campaign to root out Hamas following the group’s Oct.

Where conventional military engagements have not managed to turn the tide, Ukraine is learning from Israel's lengthy history of assassinations to try and undermine the Russian military.

With the collapse of the Assad regime and Russia’s declining influence in Syria, some are saying that an opportunity for a rapprochement between Israel and Ukraine now exists, where it hadn't ...