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JOHANNESBURG — South Africa completed Wednesday the evacuation of 127 troops from the front lines of the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, four of whom were critically wounded, the military said.

Twenty-one soldiers returned Tuesday and 106 more on Wednesday, South Africa National Defence Force [SANDF] spokesman Prince Tshabalala said. 

They were part of a mission deployed by the 16-nation Southern African Development Community [SADC] bloc in 2023 to support the DRC government in the east, where the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group has made significant territorial gains. 

"We have admitted four patients [who are] critical," Tshabalala said. Seventeen others had moderate injuries. Some of the others who returned required "psychological and social intervention". 

The injured soldiers had received treatment in DRC hospitals and travelled through Rwanda for the evacuation, Tshabalala told AFP.

Calls have been mounting for the entire South African contingent to return home after 14 soldiers were killed in the conflict late January.

Most of the 14 were part of the SADC mission but at least two were members of a separate UN-mandated peacekeeping force.

South Africa had deployed more than 1,000 soldiers in the DRC, according to reports and analysts, although officials have not given precise numbers.

It dominates the SADC force, which includes smaller numbers of soldiers from Malawi and Tanzania.

The centre-right Democratic Alliance [DA] party, a coalition partner in the government of national unity, and the radical-left Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] have in a rare unison called for the "immediate" withdrawal of the troops. 

The M23 group has gained control of the South Kivu provincial capital, Bukavu, and Goma, the main city in the country's perennially volatile east.

More than 7,000 people have been killed in the fighting since January, DRC Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka said Monday, although AFP has not been able to verify the figures.

LONDON — UK leader Keir Starmer makes a high-stakes visit to the White House on Thursday to try to convince US President Donald Trump to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of any ceasefire agreement with Russia.

The British prime minister will seek to build on French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to Washington on Monday, when he warned that peace cannot mean the "surrender" of Ukraine.

But the French leader said his talks with Trump on the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine had shown a path forward despite fears of a transatlantic rift.

Starmer in turn will try to perform a diplomatic high-wire act by sticking up for Kyiv without annoying Trump, who has stunned Europe by pursuing talks with President Vladimir Putin's Russian administration.

"Starmer will be very reluctant to publicly critique Trump's stance but he will have to find ways to diplomatically do so, for the sake of Ukraine," said Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group think-tank.

Top of Starmer's wish list is securing assurances from Trump that the US will provide a so-called backstop, possibly in the form of air cover, intelligence and logistics, to support any European troops sent to Ukraine to monitor a ceasefire.

London and Paris are spearheading proposals to send a European "reassurance force" of fewer than 30,000 soldiers to protect Ukraine in the event the war ends.

Vital 'backup'

Macron said Trump had "good reason" to re-engage with Putin, but said it was critical for Washington to offer "backup" for any European peacekeeping force.

Although the Trump administration has ruled out committing US soldiers, Starmer has insisted a US "backstop" is vital to deter Russia from "launching another invasion in just a few years' time".

Starmer will tell his counterpart that Ukraine must be involved in negotiations to end the conflict, after Washington shocked Europe this month by holding discussions with Moscow alone.

The UK premier has already sought to appease Trump by publicly stating his willingness to send British peacekeepers to Ukraine to monitor any truce, while France has pledged the same.

Starmer will also be hoping that his announcement Tuesday that UK defence spending will rise from 2.3 percent to 2.5 percent by 2027 will please Trump, with the US president regularly saying European countries should be paying more towards NATO.

Unlike other European leaders, Starmer has been at pains to avoid publicly disagreeing with Trump.

That stance has been tested though, notably last week when he rejected Trump's claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a "dictator".

 'Bridge'

Trump insists he wants peace and has accused both Macron and Starmer of doing "nothing" to end the Ukraine war over the past three years.

Britain's prime minister hopes to act as a "bridge" between America and Europe, but Trump's unpredictability will make for a nervy meeting in the Oval office.

Their polar opposite personalities may also complicate matters. While Trump is a brash, convention-breaking unilateralist, Starmer is a cautious former human rights lawyer who reveres multilateral institutions.

The meeting also comes with tensions over US steel tariffs and Starmer's controversial decision to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and pay to lease a strategic UK-US military base there.

"The biggest risk is that Trump continues to berate Ukraine and Europe and maybe even the UK, embarrassing Starmer and damaging the UK's credibility," Aspinall said.

Kim Darroch, a former UK ambassador to Washington, said Starmer should play to Trump's ego and insist on the legacy he could have.

"If I were Starmer, I would say to Trump that this is your chance for your place in history," Darroch told BBC radio last week.

"But it has to be a fair deal. If it's a bad deal, you are not going to get that praise, you are going to get a load of criticism and that will be your record in the history books," he said.

Richard Whitman, a UK foreign policy expert, said he thought the best Starmer could do was "play for time".

"We know that Trump is inconsistent and we know that it's perfectly possible his position on Ukraine might change when he finds it really difficult to get a peace deal out of Putin," he told AFP.

VATICAN CITY — A critically ill Pope Francis, battling pneumonia in both lungs, slept well, the Vatican said Tuesday after earlier reporting a "slight improvement" in the health of the 88-year-old.

The Argentine pontiff was admitted to Rome's Gemelli hospital on February 14 with breathing difficulties and bronchitis but his condition has subsequently worsened and faithful around the world have been praying for his recovery.

"The Pope rested well, all night long," said the Vatican in a morning update on the 12th day of the pope's hospital stay.

The Holy See issued a more hopeful statement Monday evening, saying that the pope's "critical clinical conditions... demonstrate a slight improvement".

It said Francis had suffered no respiratory attacks like one on Saturday that required "high-flow oxygen". It said some laboratory tests had improved.

But the pope remains "a fragile patient," as his doctor Luigi Carbone stated Friday, and his medical team have cautioned that it will take time for his drug treatments to show a positive effect.

"Considering the complexity of the clinical picture," his doctors have declined to "decide on the prognosis," the Vatican said Monday.

Francis, who has a special papal suite on the 10th floor of the hospital, has continued to do some work, has moved from his bed to an armchair, and received the Eucharist in the morning.

Hundreds of faithful gathered under rain showers in St Peter's Square on Monday evening, as dozens of cardinals recited prayers for Francis.

Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga,  a former coordinator of the pope's Council of Cardinals,  told La Repubblica daily he felt hopeful that the pope would pull through.

"It's not yet time for him to go to heaven," Maradiaga said.

"He is someone who does not back down in the face of difficulty, does not get discouraged, does not freeze, and does not stop moving forward," he told the paper.

'Breath of fresh air'

Well-wishers have left candles and photos outside the hospital, where a special prayer Monday was led by Gemelli's chaplain.

In Buenos Aires, where the former Jorge Bergoglio served as archbishop before being made pope in 2013,  hundreds of Argentines prayed for the pontif.

Speaking in the plaza where Bergoglio used to rail against injustice and inequality, Archbishop Jorge Garcia Cuerva called Francis's papacy "a breath of oxygen for a world suffocated by violence, suffocated by selfishness, suffocated by exclusion."

"Let our prayer be that breath of fresh air that reaches his lungs so that he can recover his health," he said.

Special prayers for Francis will be celebrated Tuesday evening at an Argentine church in Rome.

Messages of support have also come from world leaders.

At the White House Monday, US President Donald Trump called the pope's health "a very serious situation".

"But we do want him to get well if that's possible," Trump told reporters as he met France's President Emmanuel Macron.

In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro said he had sent the pope a letter "expressing all our admiration," calling Francis "the ethical leader of humanity... loved by all religions".

MOSCOW — Moscow has struck a deal with Kyiv and the Red Cross to evacuate residents from the embattled Kursk region, parts of which have been seized by Ukraine, Russia's rights commissioner said Monday.

Kyiv launched a surprise cross-border assault on the Russian region more than six months ago, capturing dozens of villages and trapping many Russian civilians on the opposite side of the front line.

Some of those residents have now crossed into Ukraine's neighbouring Sumy region and are awaiting evacuation via Belarus, Russian rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said.

"There are people who are already in Sumy today. And there is an agreement with the Red Cross and the Ukrainian side that they will be evacuated through Belarus to Russia," Moskalkova said, according to Russia's RIA news agency.

Moskalkova did not say how many Kursk residents would be evacuated under the agreement.

An official missing persons list compiled by Russian authorities initially recorded only around 500 people unaccounted for in the Ukrainian-occupied zone, but local residents say the number is close to 3,000.

Ukraine says thousands of its own civilians are being held in areas seized and occupied by Moscow since its assault began on February 24, 2022, and that it is providing safe passage to Russians in the Kursk region.

GENEVA — Violence raging in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has killed "more than 7,000 compatriots", many of them civilians, since last month, the Congolese premier said Monday.

The Rwanda-backed M23 armed group has seized large swathes of the mineral-rich eastern DRC,  including the main cities of Goma and Bukavu , in the face of limited resistance from Congolese forces.

"The security situation in eastern DRC has reached alarming levels," Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, stressing that since January, "the deaths of more than 7,000 compatriots" had been registered.

They include "more than 2,500 bodies buried without being identified", she said, adding that another 1,500 bodies were still in the morgue.

Asked at a press briefing on the sidelines of the council whether the dead were civilians or soldiers, she said that "for the moment... we have not yet been able to identify all of these people".

But, she stressed, "there is a significant mass of civilians who are part of these dead".

The M23 movement, supported by some 4,000 Rwandan soldiers, according to UN experts, now controls large tracts of eastern DRC, a troubled region rich in natural resources.

Its rapid advance has sent thousands fleeing.

Fighters took control of the South Kivu provincial capital Bukavu just over a week ago, after first capturing Goma, the capital of North Kivu and the main city in the country's east, last month.

The premier said that more than 3,000 people had been killed in Goma alone.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis, hospitalised in critical condition with pneumonia in both lungs, is in a good mood after a peaceful night, the Vatican and a source said Monday, amid global concern over the pontiff's health.

The 88-year-old head of the Catholic Church was admitted to Rome's Gemelli hospital on February 14 with breathing difficulties and his condition has since worsened.

But the Vatican's morning bulletin said: "The night passed well, the pope slept and is resting".

Francis "woke up and is continuing his treatment", a Vatican source said.

He was "in a good mood", "can get out of bed", "is not in pain" and was eating "normally", the source said.

The longest hospitalisation of Francis's papacy has brought an outpouring of support for the pope with prayers said around the world and tributes left outside the hospital.

His initial bronchitis developed into double pneumonia and on Saturday the Vatican warned for the first time that the pope's condition was critical.

On Sunday it said Francis continues to receive "high-flow" oxygen through a nasal cannula, and blood tests demonstrated an "initial, mild, renal failure, currently under control".

Francis is alert but "the complexity of the clinical picture, and the need to wait for the pharmacological treatments to have some effect, mean that the prognosis remains reserved," it concluded.

Well-wishers left candles outside the Gemelli hospital, where Francis is in a 10th floor papal suite.

The Vatican was to hold a prayer for the pope in St Peter's Square on Monday.

Abele Donati, head of the anaesthesia and intensive care unit at the Marche University Hospital, told the Corriere della Sera daily that renal failure "could signal the presence of sepsis in the early stages".

"It is the body's response to an ongoing infection, in this case of the two lungs", he said.

Professor Sergio Alfieri, who leads the Gemelli medical team treating the pope, warned on Friday that "the real risk in these cases is that the germs pass into the blood", which could result in sepsis, a life-threatening condition.

 'Need his figure' 

Francis's hospitalisation has sparked widespread fears over the pope's recovery.

"At this moment in history, one feels the need for his figure", Jesuit theologian Antonio Spadaro, who is close to Francis, told the Repubblica daily.

There were "many people around the world, including those in positions of responsibility, who are genuinely concerned because they know that Francis is one of the few who is able to connect the dots in a world that seems to be split", he said.

The condition of the pope, who had part of one of his lungs removed as a young man, has fuelled speculation about whether he might resign.

He has always left the door open to following his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who in 2013 became the first pope since the Middle Ages to step down because of his physical and mental health.

But Francis has repeatedly said it was not the time.

Spadaro agreed that a resignation should not be discussed now. "The pope is vigilant, he is exercising his pastoral duty even from his hospital bed, and -- although in a different, less visible manner -- he manifests his presence", he said.

German Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller told the Corriere della Sera "the pope is alive and this is the moment to pray, not think about his successor". 

But had added: "We all must die. There is no eternal earthly life. The pope has a special task, but he is a man like all men".