North Korea is boasting that its new intercontinental ballistic missile is "the world's strongest," a claim seen as pure propaganda after experts assessed it as being too big to be useful in a war situation. The ICBM launched Thursday flew higher and for a longer duration than any other weapon North Korea has tested. But foreign experts still doubt North Korea has functional missiles that can carry warheads to the U.S. mainland. North Korea on Friday identified the missile as a Hwasong-19 and called it "the world's strongest strategic missile" and "the perfected weapon system." But experts say the ICBM and its launch vehicle are oversized. That would make them harder to move and easier for enemies to see.

Ukrainian commanders and soldiers say some new troops refuse to fire at the enemy. Others struggle to assemble weapons or to coordinate basic combat movements. A few have even walked away from their posts, abandoning the battlefield altogether. The commanders made the comments to The Associated Press as Ukraine is losing precious ground along the country's eastern front. The commanders blame the erosion in part on poorly trained recruits drawn from a recent mobilization drive, as well as Russia's clear superiority in ammunition and air power. The recently conscripted Ukrainians are a far cry from the battle-hardened fighters who flocked to join the war in the first year of the full-scale invasion.

After almost 30 months of war with Russia, Ukraine's difficulties on the battlefield are mounting even as its vital support from the United States is increasingly at the mercy of changing political winds. A six-month delay in military assistance from the U.S., the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, opened the door for a push on the front line by the Kremlin's forces. Ukrainian troops are now laboring to check the gains by Russia's bigger and better-equipped army. The next two or three months will likely be the hardest this year for Ukraine, says Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment. Lurking in the background is another nagging worry: How long will the Western political and military support critical for Ukraine's fight endure?

Russia is intensifying its use of cheap glide bombs to lay waste to cities in eastern Ukraine. The latest generation of the retrofitted weapons have devastated Kharkiv, Avdiivka, Chasiv Yar and Vovchansk. Russia has nearly unlimited supplies of the bombs, which are adapted from Soviet-era stockpiles. They are dispatched from airfields just across the border that Ukraine has not been able to hit. An Associated Press analysis of drone footage, satellite imagery, Ukrainian documents and Russian photos shows that Russia has used the explosives to accelerate its destruction of front-line cities this year on a scale previously unseen in the war.