President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that his "Victory Plan", intended to bring peace to Ukraine while keeping the country strong and avoiding all "frozen conflicts", was now complete after much consultation, Reuters reported.

Zelenskiy pledged last month to present his plan to U.S. President Joe Biden, presumably next week when he attends sessions of the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly.

While providing daily updates on the plan's preparation, Zelenskiy has given few clues of the contents, indicating only that it aims to create terms acceptable to Ukraine, now locked in conflict with Russia for more than 2-1/2 years.

"Today, it can be said that our victory plan is fully prepared. All the points, all key focus areas and all necessary detailed additions of the plan have been defined," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.

"The most important thing is the determination to implement it.

There was, Zelenskiy said, no alternative to peace, "no freezing of the war or any other manipulations that would simply postpone Russian aggression to another stage".

On Tuesday, the president said a meeting with top commanders had produced "good and strong content" in military terms, "precisely the kind that can significantly strengthen Ukraine".

Zelenskiy has used as the basis for negotiations a peace plan he presented in late 2022 calling for a withdrawal of all Russian troops, the restoration of Ukraine's post-Soviet borders and a means to bring Russia to account for its invasion, read the report.

The plan was the focal point of a "peace summit" hosted by Switzerland in June with participants pledging to convene a second summit later this year. Russia was not invited to the June summit and branded it as meaningless, though Ukraine and its allies say Moscow could attend the next gathering.

Zelenskiy has rejected any notion of negotiations while Russian troops occupy nearly 20% of the country's territory.

Russia has repeatedly said it is willing to negotiate, but rules out discussions while Ukrainian forces remain in its Kursk region after it launched an incursion into the area last month.

Sweden, which has been known for years for its welcoming policy toward migrants, plans to increase its cash offer of $978 to about $34,000 to those who voluntarily return home.

Last week, the Swedish government said it would raise the 10,000 krona ($978) per adult to 350,000 krona ($34,000) and simplify the process involved in applying for the grant.

The government said this is in a bid to create incentive for migrants to return home.

This increase is expected to come into effect in 2026.

Sweden is one of a number of European countries taking a harder stance on immigration.

Sweden, with a population of 10.6 million people, had more than 250,000 refugees in mid-2023.

One politician, Ludvig Aspling, said in an interview recently that only 70 people applied for the grant last year, and only one got it.

However, 16,000 migrants from Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East left Sweden voluntarily last year without the grant.

Addressing a press conference last week, Sweden’s migration Minister Johan Forssell described the new policy as a “paradigm shift” in the Nordic country which in 2015 opened its borders to 162,877 asylum seekers, mostly of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi descent as a “humanitarian superpower”.

According to AFP news agency a number of other European countries already have schemes that pay migrants to return to their home countries, with offers of around $2,000 in Germany, $2,800 in France, $1,400 in Norway and more than $15,000 in Denmark.

The move however by Sweden has sparked widespread condemnation in the country from Swedes who took to social media to voice their objections.

One social media user, named only user-cb3l said: “They (migrants) will take the money but never leave. It's too late for band aid solutions.”

Somali78 was quite upfront about what he would do and said:
“I will take it and I will never leave.”

Susann Leinonen said: “Now more people come to my country for the money and I have to work for more years.”

Featherface01 meanwhile said on social media that “they'll take that 34k, leave Sweden and show up in Britain a week later.”

Tehmudjinkhan2207 queried whether this was a good idea. He said: “I’m Swedish, I don’t understand why we need to throw money at every single person in the world. When you hand out free money, every single scammer in the world will come here to take advantage. Criminal gangs will find ways to abuse this easily.”

But Johnmash327 warned: “I'm in Africa, once our brothers hear this, you'll regret this bad idea i'm telling you.”

Israel's Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.

The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.

The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand, but gave no more details.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts, Reuters reported.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday that "the resistance will continue today, like any other day, its operations to support Gaza, its people and its resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that the criminal enemy (Israel) should await in response to Tuesday's massacre".

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.

The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the firm's brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm. The company in a statement named BAC as the firm, but Hsu declined to comment on its location.

"The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it," Hsu told reporters at the company's offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.

Gold Apollo said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.

"We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.

Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group's operations told Reuters this year.

But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level."

"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.

The source said 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone "undetected" by Hezbollah for months.

Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode.

Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.

Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized or dead. One Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group's "biggest security breach" since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas erupted on Oct. 7.

"This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades," said Jonathan Panikoff, the U.S. government's former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.

Break Your Phones

In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan that aimed to address gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure. 

Around 170 fighters had already been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

In a televised speech on Feb. 13, the group's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury or lock them in an iron box.

Instead, the group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group's various branches - from fighters to medics working in its relief services.

The explosions maimed many Hezbollah members, according to footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters. Wounded men had injuries of varying degrees to the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip where the pagers were likely worn.

"We really got hit hard," said the senior Lebanese security source, who has direct knowledge of the group's probe into the explosions.