SINGAPORE — Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky’s unscheduled appearance at Asia’s biggest security conference dominated proceedings on Sunday after China’s defense chief slammed “separatists” in Taiwan, drawing a sharp response from the government in Taipei.

Dressed in his trademark olive green T-shirt, Mr. Zelensky addressed the last day of the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore, asking for support and participation at a summit in Switzerland later this month aimed at bringing peace to his war-ravaged nation.

“We are convinced that our world wants to be united and be capable of acting in complete harmony,” he said to a ballroom packed full of delegates in formal business wear and military uniforms.

Reuters was first to report that Mr. Zelensky would make an unscripted appearance at the conference, his second visit to Asia since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Earlier, China’s defense chief, Dong Jun, warned that prospects of a peaceful “reunification” of Taiwan were being eroded, and promised to ensure the island would never gain independence.

China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, over the strong objections of the government in Taipei, and last month staged war games around the island in anger at the inauguration of President Lai Ching-te, who Beijing calls a “separatist.”

“Those separatists recently made fanatical statements that show their betrayal of the Chinese nation and their ancestors. They will be nailed to the pillar of shame in history,” Mr. Dong said.

He added that although China was committed to peaceful reunification with Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “will remain a strong force for upholding national reunification.”

Taiwan’s China-policy making Mainland Affairs Council said in response that it deeply regretted the “provocative and irrational” comments, and reiterated that the People’s Republic of China has never ruled the island.

China has repeatedly threatened force against Taiwan at international venues, and its threats violate the United Nations charter, the council said in a statement.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said Mr. Dong’s speech covered little new ground.

“Every year for three years, a new Chinese defense minister has come to Shangri-La,” the official said. “And every year, they’ve given a speech at complete odds with the reality of the PLA’s coercive activity across the region. This year was no different.”

Mr. Dong’s speech came a day after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told delegates the Indo-Pacific region remained a key focus for the United States, even as it grappled with security assistance for Ukraine and the war in Gaza.

“Let me be clear: The United States can be secure only if Asia is secure,” Mr. Austin said. “That’s why the United States has long maintained our presence in this region.”

Mr. Dong and Mr. Austin met for more than an hour on Friday on the sidelines of the conference, their first face-to-face meeting. — Reuters

SEOUL — North Korea sent some 600 balloons carrying trash into South Korea overnight, Seoul said on Sunday, in Pyongyang’s latest move to rile its rival neighbor.

The balloons carrying garbage such as cigarette butts, cloth, paper waste and plastic were found across the capital from 8 p.m. to 10 a.m. (1100 GMT on Saturday to 0100 GMT on Sunday), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

It said the military was monitoring the starting point and conducting aerial reconnaissance to track down and collect the balloons, which have large bags of trash suspended beneath them.

North Korea on Wednesday sent hundreds of balloons carrying trash and excrement across the heavily fortified border as what it called “gifts of sincerity.” Seoul responded angrily, calling the move base and dangerous.

South Korea’s Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said during a meeting with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the Shangri-La security dialogue in Singapore on Sunday that the balloons violated the armistice agreement, according to South Korea’s military.

The two reaffirmed a coordinated response to any North Korean threats and provocations based on the South Korea-US alliance’s combined defense posture, it added.

Emergency alerts were issued in North Gyeongsang and Gangwon provinces and some parts of Seoul on Sunday, urging people not to come into contact with the balloons and to alert police.

South Korea’s National Security Council standing committee will meet on Sunday afternoon to discuss whether to resume blasting loudspeakers at North Korea in response to the trash balloons, Yonhap news agency reported, citing the presidential office. 

South Korea stopped blaring propaganda across the border in 2018 after a rare summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. — Reuters

BEIJING — China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.

The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the United States are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.

The Chang’e-6 craft, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, touched down in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon’s space-facing side at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (2223 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.

The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty,” the agency said in a statement on its website. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”

The successful mission is China’s second on the far side of the moon, a region no other country has reached. The side of the moon perpetually facing away from the Earth is dotted with deep and dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations more challenging.

Given these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the landing phase as a moment where the chance of failure is the highest.

“Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you’re relying on a lot of links in the chain to control what is going on, or you have to automate what is going on,” said Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at the European Space Agency working with China on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads.

“Automation is very difficult especially at high latitudes because you have long shadows which can be very confusing for landers,” Mr. Melville-Kenney added.

The Chang’e-6 probe launched on May 3 on China’s Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan, reaching the lunar vicinity roughly a week later before tightening its orbit in preparation for a landing.

Chang’e-6 marks the world’s third lunar landing this year: Japan’s SLIM lander touched down in January, followed the next month by a lander from US startup Intuitive Machines.

The other countries that have sent spacecraft to Earth’s nearest neighbor are the then-Soviet Union and India. The United States is the only country to have landed humans on the moon, starting in 1969.

SAMPLING THE MOON
Using a scoop and drill, the Chang’e-6 lander will aim to collect 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of lunar material over two days and bring it back to Earth.

The samples will be transferred to a rocket booster atop the lander, which will launch back into space, tag up with another spacecraft in lunar orbit and return, with a landing in China’s Inner Mongolia region expected around June 25.

If all goes as planned, the mission will provide China with a pristine record of the moon’s 4.5 billion-year history and yield new clues on the solar system’s formation. It will also allow for an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region with the moon’s better understood Earth-facing side.

A simulation lab for the Chang’e-6 probe will develop and verify sampling strategies and equipment control procedures, China’s official Xinhua news agency said. It will use a full-scale replica of the sampling area based on exploration results on the environment, rock distribution and lunar soil conditions around the landing site.

China’s lunar strategy includes its first astronaut landing around 2030 in a programme that counts Russia as a partner. In 2020 China conducted its first lunar sample return mission with Chang’e-5, retrieving samples from the moon’s nearer side.

The US Artemis programme envisions a crewed moon landing by late 2026 or later. NASA has partnered with space agencies including those of Canada, Europe and Japan, whose astronauts will join US crews on an Artemis mission.

Artemis relies heavily on private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starship rocket aims this decade to attempt the first astronaut landing since NASA’s final Apollo mission in 1972.

On Saturday Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa canceled a private mission around the moon he had paid for, which was to have used SpaceX’s Starship, citing schedule uncertainties in the rocket’s development.

Boeing and NASA postponed the company’s first crewed launch of Starliner, a long-delayed capsule meant to become the second US space taxi to low-Earth orbit. — Reuters