U.S. troops have been on the ground supporting the Kosovo Force, or KFOR, ever since. And while the overall security situation has improved greatly over the years, there are concerns that renewed unrest could make it more dangerous for those deployed here.
Late last month, Texas Army National Guard soldiers handed over leadership of Regional Command East’s headquarters at Camp Bondsteel to the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.
Outgoing commander Col. Ross Walker of the 56th Infantry Brigade Combat Team told Stars and Stripes that the command is “postured to handle anything right now.”
When asked whether he thought Kosovo had become a more dangerous deployment for troops, he said, “the short answer would be no,” adding that most Kosovars, regardless of their ethnicity, respect the peacekeepers’ presence.
Nevertheless, analysts and others in Kosovo are concerned that ongoing tensions could lead to further clashes and possibly spiral into a larger armed conflict, which peacekeepers could get dragged into.
Kosovo for many Serbians remains a part of their national identity, and a 1389 Serbian victory over the Ottoman Empire in Kosovo is a prominent part of nationalist folklore.
Most ethnic Serbs in Kosovo don’t accept Pristina’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia and still see Belgrade as their capital. They’ve been calling for more autonomy.
Last April, they refused to participate in local elections, and ethnic Albanians, who make up more than 90% of Kosovo’s population, won seats in several Serb-majority municipalities.
The results led to protests at government buildings. In May, ethnic Serbs attacked and injured dozens of KFOR soldiers protecting the buildings. No American soldiers were hurt, but three Hungarian troops were shot and one had his leg amputated.
Months later, a shootout in September between dozens of heavily armed Serbian nationalist militants and Kosovo special forces in the northern village of Banjska left an officer and three gunmen dead, in what’s been described as one of the most significant security incidents in the western Balkans in more than a decade.
Kosovo’s interior minister Xhelal Svecla told The Associated Press at the time that a large cache of weapons had been found and that the gunmen had planned to arm hundreds of people, with the intention of seceding.
Svecla accused Serbia of direct involvement, a claim Belgrade denied.
“There is still a lot that’s unclear about what exactly was happening there,” Marko Prelec, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said in a telephone interview. “And it’s still too soon to say that it’s over.”
Prelec believes there will be “a plausible threat” to safety and security in Kosovo for at least another year.
KFOR is the third security responder in Kosovo after the Kosovo Police and the EU Rule of Law mission, respectively.
Kosovars generally respect NATO peacekeepers, as they don’t take a position on Kosovo’s independence, Prelec said, echoing Walker’s assessment.
A handful of countries supporting KFOR, including Greece and Romania, don’t recognize Kosovo’s sovereignty.
While ethnic Serbs may not be pro-NATO, many appear to see the international peacekeepers as filling a trust gap between their communities and Kosovo government forces.
On a patrol in late February, U.S. soldiers were warmly welcomed by people in Babush, an ethnic-Serbian enclave in Ferizaj municipality.
The soldiers were part of a liaison monitoring team. They go out, listen to residents’ concerns and try to help find solutions to problems. These problems are often non-political, like figuring out how to fix a building at risk of collapsing.
The monitoring teams complement KFOR squads that are focused on reacting quickly to potential violence.
First Lt. Joseph Mabry, who led the liaison team in Ferizaj, said community engagement can go a long way in maintaining peace.
“The ability for us to support the people here is what builds that sense of community and stability that will build a better future,” Mabry said.
But at the moment, Kosovo’s future looks uncertain.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Albin Kurti posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, which he said showed Serbian troops near a Kosovo border area and accused Belgrade of “waiting for the best possible opportunity to invade.”
Serbia’s Defense Ministry rejected the claim as disinformation.
The situation nearly a year after the KFOR troops were injured remains fragile, according to NATO, which says it will keep about 1,000 more peacekeepers in Kosovo indefinitely as a result.
The additional personnel “quadrupled KFOR’s presence in northern Kosovo and tripled the number of patrols,” NATO said in a statement following a Stars and Stripes query.
But after a quarter-century, some critics question whether peacekeeping is the most effective use of U.S. troops.
“It’s not a very good use of American taxpayers’ money, or the forces they raise, to have them sitting there doing community tasks,” said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “We need a military to do military things, not pretend that they are the Peace Corps.”
Today, the number of KFOR troops sits at a little over 4,600, including about 600 Americans.
Bandow believes European allies could cover the relatively modest number of U.S. troops and that now would be an appropriate time for NATO to hand over its longest-standing mission to the European Union.
But Marta Kepe, a senior defense analyst at Rand Corp., says the U.S. military has a strong symbolic value for Kosovo that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Opinion polls show the U.S. is the most trusted international actor in Kosovo, and Americans on the ground, including soldiers, have a unique position of trust, which could be useful as security concerns start to grow again 25 years into the mission.
“We have a high respect for KFOR,” teacher Ismet Balaj said during a visit by soldiers to his school in an ethnic Albanian village in Ferizaj. “Especially for American KFOR.”
]]>Division commander Maj. Gen. Chris Norrie was among the speakers at the ceremony, which was held in the wake of the 80th anniversary of a string of battles between U.S. and allied troops and dug-in German forces trying to stop an advance on Rome.
“They fought for their Italian, Canadian and British allies with them, for their families so far away from them, and most importantly, for the liberation of Italy from the enemies of freedom,” Norrie said in a division statement Wednesday.
Three division soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions during the battle, according to the statement.
The new memorial is on the grounds of an Italian military monument and is one of many such sites in the mountainous area between Naples and Rome.
Nearby is one marking a cave that provided refuge to Audie Murphy, a former 3rd Infantry soldier who became one of the most celebrated American heroes of World War II and later a Hollywood icon.
Based at Fort Stewart, Ga., the division saw extensive action in the war, taking part in battles in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany.
The division’s soldiers have helped defend Europe in the present as well, including a recent nine-month rotation in Poland to shore up the eastern flank of NATO.
Both the division and the Society of the Third Infantry Division have maintained ties to former sites around the Continent where key battles took place decades ago.
The 1943 and 1944 skirmishes, which included the Battle of Mignano Pass, also notably marked the first time that Italian troops saw action against their former German allies.
Italy changed sides after longtime fascist leader Benito Mussolini was removed from power. Several high-ranking Italian officers based at commands in Rome or Naples attended the unveiling of the memorial.
]]>“Their statements about our alleged intention to attack Europe after Ukraine is sheer nonsense,” Putin said late Wednesday, referring to warnings in the U.S. and Western Europe that Russia could turn its sights on other countries unless it is stopped.
He noted that the U.S. defense budget is more than 10 times higher than Russia’s. “In view of that, are we going to wage a war against NATO? It’s ravings,” he told military pilots during a visit to an air base.
Ukraine is awaiting the delivery of F-16s, which will increase military pressure on Russia, from its Western partners. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last year that 42 F-16s had been promised. Ukrainian pilots have been training in the West for months on how to fly the warplanes.
The F-16s require a high standard of runways and reinforced hangars to protect them from bombing attacks when they are on the ground. It is not clear how many Ukrainian air bases can meet those requirements, and Russia would be certain to quickly target a few that could accommodate them once the jets arrive.
Putin warned Ukraine’s Western allies against providing air bases in their countries from where the F-16s could launch sorties against the Kremlin’s forces. Those bases would become a “legitimate target,” he said.
“F-16s are capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and we will also need to take that into account while organizing our combat operations,” Putin added.
Military analysts have said the arrival of F-16s won’t be a game-changer in view of Russia’s massive air force and sophisticated air defense systems, though Ukrainian officials have welcomed them as an opportunity to hit back at Russia’s air dominance.
Putin insisted the F-16s “won’t change the situation on the battlefield.”
“We will destroy their warplanes just as we destroy their tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, including multiple rocket launchers,” he said.
F-16s can be used to bolster Ukraine’s capability to target Russian facilities with long-range missile strikes. Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year came up short in part because it took place without air cover, placing its troops at the mercy of Russian aviation and artillery.
Russia has maintained air dominance in the war with Ukraine, though the provision of sophisticated Western air defense systems has forced Russian warplanes to avoid Ukrainian skies and launch attacks while remaining over Russian-controlled territory.
The Kremlin currently has a battlefield edge in weapons and troops, yielding recent incremental gains at points on the around 620-mile front line, as Kyiv awaits more promised Western military support and mulls a broader mobilization.
Russia fired salvoes of drones and missiles overnight at southern and eastern regions of Ukraine, authorities said Thursday, injuring more than a dozen people as the Kremlin’s forces persevered with attritional attacks designed to wear down Ukrainian defenses.
Air defense systems intercepted 26 out of 28 Shahed drones, Ukraine’s air force said. Russian forces also launched five missiles overnight, it said.
The regular bombardment of Ukraine by the Kremlin’s forces during the war has recently gained momentum, with missile barrages of the capital Kyiv and strikes on energy facilities across the country. The attacks also aim to weaken Ukrainian morale and act as retribution for Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian soil.
One of Russia’s goals is to “deplete Ukraine’s inventory of ground-based air defense,” according to a recent military assessment published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
That would erode some of Ukraine’s combat ability as it waits on pledged but delayed military support from the West, including ammunition for its artillery and air defenses.
“Kyiv is confronted by the threat that an attritional war in the air domain will increasingly favor Russia without adequate support from the U.S. and its allies,” the IISS said. “Ukraine’s ability to continue to counter Russian air threats and impose costs on the Russian Aerospace Forces remains important to the outcome of the war.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defense Minister Rustan Umerov both pleaded with foreign allies on Thursday to send more air defense systems and missiles.
The Ukrainian Mission to NATO said it convened an extraordinary ambassador-level meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at the alliance’s headquarters on Thursday in response to Russia’s missile attacks on critical infrastructure.
“Ukraine urgently requires more air defense and interceptors,” especially Patriot systems that can intercept ballistic missiles, Kuleba said in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter. Ukraine is the only country in the world targeted by ballistic missiles almost daily, he said.
Authorities in the Mykolaiv region, near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, said 12 people were injured and six residential buildings were damaged in a Russian strike on the city on Wednesday afternoon with a ballistic missile.
In an overnight attack on the southern Ukraine region of Zaporizhzhia, Shahed drones struck a residential area, lightly injuring two women aged 72 and 74, according to regional Gov. Ivan Fedorov. Rescue services said seven buildings were damaged.
The Black Sea city of Odesa repelled three missile and drone attacks, officials said.
Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine
Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal.
]]>It left a big impression on Sanders, a 12-year-old Ramstein student. Instead of trash-talking like the previous two contestants, Sanders stayed humble when asked how he thought he’d do against the outside linebacker.
“I was terrified from the start because he’s very strong, he’s big,” Sanders said afterward.
He took a contested pass on the first play near the goal line of the short, makeshift field around the 50-yard line. On the next play, he cut across the middle, surviving the 6-foot-3, 270-pound Judon trying to drag him away. It meant that Sanders had scored on the pro at the Matthew Judon Football ProCamp on Saturday.
“I beat an NFL player in a 1-v-1,” Sanders said of the story he can tell his classmates and others for life.
It’s one story among many to be told about meeting Judon, who came out for multiple events over the weekend in the largest U.S. overseas military community.
The four-time Pro Bowler, who has totaled 66.5 sacks in an NFL career that started in 2016 with the Baltimore Ravens before joining New England in 2021, was active during the camp, which had about 180 participants.
He took in drills with the kids, unsparingly at times. Judon bulldozed one player while defending a pass during one drill. He couldn’t hold back his excitement at having taken the brunt of a hit by the pro player, shouting it out to the other participants as he ran back in line.
On Friday, Judon was scheduled to meet with staff and patients at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the military’s largest overseas hospital.
And earlier Saturday, Judon signed autographs at the Kaiserslautern Military Community Center in the Ramstein Air Base Main Exchange, where about 50 people showed up, most of whom were Patriots fans.
Chief Warrant Officer 3 Anthony Salame traveled about 70 miles from Wiesbaden to Ramstein with his three sons — Jaxon, 11; Weston, 9; and Logan, 4 — just to see Judon.
“He’s, in my opinion, the best player on the Patriots,” Jaxon Salame said. “So, it’s pretty sick (to meet Judon).”
Anthony Salame, a Templeton, Mass., native, came wearing a Jerod Mayo jersey. The Patriots drafted Mayo in the 2008 NFL Draft, and he played in New England until his retirement after the 2015 season.
The jersey wasn’t lost on Judon, though. Mayo is his new boss, taking over from legendary coach Bill Belichick.
“We just talked quick. (Judon’s) excited for it,” Salame said of Mayo taking over. “Bill was instrumental for the Patriots, but Mayo was brought up by him, groomed to be the next coach.”
Kris Olympia also made the trek to Ramstein to see Judon.
An Army staff sergeant stationed in Baumholder, Germany, Olympia brought his children Khaiden, Kalani and Khailey to the signing event.
“This is their first time seeing a football player,” Olympia said. “I want them to keep watching more football as they grow older.”
]]>Zelenskyy dismissed Oleksii Danilov, who served as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, thanking him for his service in a video address late Tuesday. He gave no reason for the shake-up and said, without providing details, that Danilov will be “reassigned to another area.”
Zelenskyy replaced Danilov with Oleksandr Lytvynenko, who served as the head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
The National Security Council is a policy coordination body that includes top officials and is chaired by Zelenskyy. Danilov had held his position since October 2019, a few months after Zelenskyy became president.
Danilov’s dismissal comes as exhausted Ukrainian troops struggling with a shortage of personnel and ammunition are facing a growing Russian pressure along the front line that stretches over 620 miles.
The reshuffle follows February’s decision by Zelenskyy to fire the country’s chief military officer, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, replacing him Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi. Tensions between Zaluzhnyi and the president grew after Ukraine’s much-touted 2023 counteroffensive failed to reach its goals.
Earlier this month, Zaluzhnyi was named Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.
]]>The accusation by Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, seemed intended to deflect attention from his agency’s failure to prevent the attack, in which at least 139 people were killed, and to fan anti-Ukrainian rhetoric even as officials presented an increasingly convoluted narrative of what transpired Friday night.
“We think the act was prepared by the radical Islamists, but of course, the Western special services have aided,” Bortnikov told state media reporters, singling out the United States and Britain. “And the special services of Ukraine have a direct relation to this.”
Ukraine has strongly denied having any involvement in the attack. On March 7, the United States issued a warning of a potential terrorist attack in Russia, urging Americans there to avoid mass gatherings, based in part on intelligence reporting about the possible activity inside Russia of the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), the Afghanistan and Pakistan arm of the militant group. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking to the FSB board a week ago, dismissed that warning as an attempt by the West to “destabilize Russia.”
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, and Russia has charged four suspects, all citizens of Tajikistan, with carrying out the rampage. Bortnikov on Tuesday confirmed that the United States had passed on information about a potential attack but said it was “of general nature.”
“We responded to this information and took appropriate measures to prevent such things,” Bortnikov said. “Unfortunately, the actions we carried out in relation to specific groups and specific individuals - this information was not confirmed at that time,” he added. He did not provide any details about what groups the FSB targeted.
According to Bortnikov, the FSB received reports that preparations were underway for an attack in early March, before Russia’s presidential election, which was held March 15 to 17, but “unfortunately, what happened later was already the next stage,” he said.
The FSB previously had ISIS-K on its radar.
In October, Bortnikov warned a meeting of the heads of security services in Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) nations, a group of 10 former Soviet republics, that ISIS-K had more than 6,500 members and could initiate attacks outside Afghanistan “in the near future.”
On Tuesday, however, Bortnikov accused the CIA and Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency of interfering in Afghanistan with the goal of creating instability on the southern border of CIS countries, including Tajikistan. “The CIA and MI6 are restoring their intelligence presence in a number of key Afghan provinces,” Bortnikov said.
“The main efforts are focused on forming a belt of instability along the CIS’s southern borders. To this end, fighters keep being recruited from international terrorist organizations operating in Iraq, Syria, and some other Asian and African countries and transferred to northern Afghanistan,” he said.
After Russia’s military intervened in Syria beginning in 2015 to support Bashar al-Assad against Islamist and opposition militias, including the Islamic State, the FSB focused on the threat Islamist extremists posed to Russia.
But in recent years, especially since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the FSB’s main effort has shifted to countering Ukrainian sabotage against Russian railways, pipelines and other infrastructure, as well as arresting liberal, pro-democracy and antiwar activists.
As Bortnikov pointed fingers at Kyiv, Washington and London, a timeline of Friday’s attack presented to Putin by Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee, Russia’s main law enforcement body, raised new questions about the law enforcement response as the assault unfolded.
Bastrykin, in the presentation to Putin on Monday evening, said the attack lasted 13 minutes. But Russian news outlets reported that specialized police units did not arrive until more than an hour after the shooting started, and then waited more than 30 minutes before entering the building. At that point, the attackers had long escaped.
The attackers “arrived at the concert hall at 6:45 p.m.,” Bastrykin said. “They waited for the spectators to gather. At 7:58 p.m. they opened fire on visitors on the street and entered the Crocus City Hall building.”
He continued: “They shot at everyone they saw, regardless of gender and age. Using gasoline they brought with them in plastic bottles, they set the room on fire. At 8:11 p.m., they left the building.”
SOBR and OMON, Russia’s special police response units, were alerted at 8:33 p.m. and arrived at 9:06 p.m., according to the Tass state news agency. A journalist with another outlet, Ostorozhno Novosti, who was at the scene reported that officers began entering the building at 9:39 p.m.
The nearest police department is located about one and a half miles from Crocus City Hall. A spokeswoman for Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry, Irina Volk, later dismissed complaints that police arrived too late, asserting that the first group of officers was at the scene “five minutes after reports of shooting were received.”
Volk also urged the media to “only trust official statements.”
The description of the suspects’ getaway car - a 2007 white Renault - quickly appeared on Telegram channels with links to law enforcement. The four alleged attackers were caught several hours later, some 250 miles from Moscow in the Bryansk region near the border with Ukraine and Belarus.
The suspects were able to drive roughly five hours despite Moscow being one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world with 221,000 closed-circuit cameras installed, many of which are equipped with facial recognition technology.
Such cameras have been used widely to track down protesters opposing the invasion of Ukraine, for example, or mourners of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Russian media geolocated videos showing law enforcement arresting the suspects near the village of Khatsun. At that location, the highway forks, with one road to Ukraine and another to Belarus. Putin on Saturday said the suspects were heading to Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin ally, injected more confusion into Moscow’s version of events by saying that the perpetrators initially planned to cross into Belarus. Lukashenko’s remarks contradicted Putin’s assertion that Ukraine “had prepared an escape window” at the border.
“They understood that they couldn’t enter Belarus,” Lukashenko said. “Therefore, they turned away and went to the Ukrainian-Russian section of the border.”
At a press briefing Tuesday, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was asked to explain the Kremlin’s version of events - that radical Islamists had done the bidding of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish. Peskov said the entire matter was under investigation but replied that Zelensky “is a peculiar Jew” who “in many ways shows sympathy to the nationalist spirit that permeated the leadership of the Kyiv regime.”
Russian officials have also placed blame on the private security company that was protecting Crocus City Hall, saying guards were unarmed even though the company had an arsenal of weapons.
“This entire arsenal is stored in the building next door to Crocus, but the guards on duty did not carry,” said Alexander Khinshtein, a member of parliament. “Their emergency response group is also based there; however, they did not go to the site after the terrorist attack.”
In addition to the four alleged shooters, Russia has charged three men with assisting the attackers by providing transportation. Iam Islomov, the brother of Dilovar Islomov, one of the men, told Russian outlet Verstka that his sibling “knows nothing about the attack” and had sold his car to a client who claimed it would be used as a taxi.
According to vehicle registration records reviewed by The Washington Post, the car was sold earlier this year and repainted white from dark gray.
On Tuesday, Russia arraigned an eighth suspect, a citizen of Kyrgyzstan who rented an apartment to one of the gunmen. The suspect, Alisher Kasymov, said that he posted an online ad and denied having any knowledge that his tenant had links to radical Islamist groups.
Two of the alleged gunmen, Shamsidin Fariduni and Saidakram Rajabalizoda, briefly traveled to Turkey in late February and returned to Russia on March 2 on the same flight, according to a senior Turkish security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The official said he believed that “both individuals became radicalized in Russia given the short amount of time they spent” in Turkey.
According to brutal interrogation videos leaked on various pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, Fariduni said he was contacted on Telegram by “an assistant of an imam” about a month before the attack and offered the equivalent of about $5,000 to “kill people.”
Baza and 112, both Telegram channels linked to Russian law enforcement, published a photograph of Fariduni allegedly inside Crocus City Hall on March 7. The 112 channel alleged that he was scouting the location.
Kareem Fahim in Istanbul contributed to this report.
]]>Ukraine’s navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk told The Associated Press that the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky that was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was part of the Ukrainian navy before Russia captured it while annexing the Black Sea peninsula in 2014.
Pletenchuk has previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship.
He told the AP that the weekend attack, which was launched with Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot.
Russian authorities reported a massive Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol over the weekend but didn’t acknowledge any damage to the fleet.
Pletenchuk said that with the latest attack, a third of all warships that Russia had in the Black Sea before the war have been destroyed or disabled. At the same time, he acknowledged that just two of about a dozen of Russian missile carrying warships have been sunk and pledged that Ukraine will continue the strikes.
“Our ultimate goal is complete absence of military ships of the so-called Russian Federation in the Azov and Black Sea regions,” Pletenchuk told the AP.
Successful Ukrainian drone and missile strikes have provided a major morale boost for Kyiv at a time when its undermanned and under-gunned forces are facing Russian attacks along the more than 600-mile front line.
Challenging Russia’s naval superiority also has helped create more favorable conditions for Ukrainian grain exports and other shipments from the country’s Black Sea ports.
Moscow officials have kept mum on most of Ukrainian claims, but previous navy losses have been confirmed by Russian military bloggers and media who have harshly criticized the military brass for its slow and sloppy response to the threat.
Earlier this month, Russian media reported that the navy chief, Adm. Nikolai Yevmenov, had been fired and replaced with Adm. Alexander Moiseyev, the commander of Russia’s Northern Fleet. The Kremlin hasn’t yet announced the reshuffle, but last week Moiseyev was presented as the new acting navy chief during a ceremony at a Russian naval base.
]]>The two countries’ governments said in a joint statement the money will be spread over the next four years to protect the rainforest. It will be a collaboration of state-run Brazilian banks and France’s investment agency. Private resources will also be welcomed, Brazil and France said.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are meeting this week to revive the relationship between the countries after years of frictions with former President Jair Bolsonaro, deepen cooperation to protect the rainforest and boost trade.
Macron started his three-day visit to Brazil in the Amazon city of Belem, where he met his long-time ally Lula. The French president then took a boat to the Combu island to meet with Indigenous leaders.
Both Macron and Lula saw a protest by Greenpeace Brazil with banners that read “No oil in the Amazon.” Brazil’s government has contemplated allowing the tapping of oil in a region close to the Para state, where Belem lies.
Lula said during a speech that Macron’s visit is part of a global effort to beef up rainforest protections.
“We want to convince those who have already deforested that they need to contribute in an important way to countries that still have their forests to keep them standing,” Lula said in a speech next to the French president.
Macron’s office prior said to the trip that a potential European trade deal with the South American bloc Mercosur won’t be on the agenda. The French president is an opponent of such an agreement as long as South American producers don’t respect the same environment and health standards as Europeans, after farmers raised concerns during protests across France and Europe.
The French president decorated Indigenous leader Raoni Metuktire with the prestigious Legion of Honor medal for efforts at conserving the rainforest.
“You were in Europe and I promised to come here to your forest and be with your people in this forest that is coveted,” Macron told the Indigenous leader, according to French radio RFI. “President Lula and I have a common cause for one of our friends in this land that belongs to you.”
Lula and Macron will seek to “set a common course” to fight both climate change and poverty, Macron’s office said, as Brazil is to host the summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in Rio de Janeiro in November and UN climate talks in Belem next year.
On Wednesday, Macron and Lula will launch a diesel-powered submarine built in Brazil with French technology at the Itaguai shipyard outside Rio de Janeiro. The French president will then head to metropolis Sao Paulo to meet with Brazilian investors. On Thursday, the French president will head to Brasilia to again meet with Lula.
Corbet reported from Paris.
]]>Without offering any evidence, Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, followed similar allegations by President Vladimir Putin, who linked the attack to Ukraine even as he acknowledged that the suspects who were arrested were “radical Islamists.”
The IS affiliate claimed it carried out the attack, and U.S. intelligence said it had information confirming the group was responsible. French President Emmanuel Macron said France also has intelligence pointing to “an IS entity” as responsible for the attack.
But despite the signs pointing to IS, Putin insisted on alleged Ukrainian involvement — something that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected, accusing the Kremlin leader of trying to drum up fervor as his forces fight in Ukraine.
Bortnikov alleged that Western spy agencies also could have been involved in the deadliest terror attack on Russian soil in two decades, even as he acknowledged receiving a U.S. tip about the attack.
“We believe that radical Islamists prepared the action, while Western special services have assisted it and Ukrainian special services had a direct part in it,” Bortnikov said without giving details.
He repeated Putin’s claim that the four gunmen were trying to escape to Ukraine when they were arrested, casting it as a proof of alleged involvement by Kyiv.
But that assertion was undercut slightly by Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who said Tuesday the suspects were headed for Ukraine because they feared tight controls on the Belarus border.
Russia is still reeling from the attack Friday in which gunmen killed 139 people in the Crocus City Hall, a concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow. Health officials said about 90 people remain hospitalized, with 22 of them, including two children, in grave condition.
The four men accused of carrying out the attack appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday on terrorism charges and showed signs of severe beatings. One appeared to be barely conscious during the hearing.
The men are citizens of Tajikistan, authorities said, and were identified as Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32; Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, 30; Shamsidin Fariduni, 25; and Mukhammadsobir Faizov, 19. They were charged with committing a terrorist attack resulting in death, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
A senior Turkish security official confirmed Tuesday that two of them spent a “short amount of time” in Turkey before traveling together to Russia on March 2.
One of the suspects, Fariduni, entered Turkey on Feb. 20, checked into a hotel in Istanbul’s Fatih district the next day, and checked out Feb. 27, the official said. The other, Rachabalizoda, checked into a hotel in the same district on Jan. 5, checking out on Jan. 21.
The official said Turkish authorities believe the two “became radicalized in Russia” because they were not in Turkey for long. There was no warrant for their arrest so they were allowed to travel freely between Russia and Turkey, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make public statements.
The Islamic State group, which lost much of its ground after Russia’s military action in Syria, has long targeted Russia. In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian jetliner over the Sinai desert, killing all 224 people aboard, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
On Monday, Putin warned that more attacks could follow, alleging possible Western involvement. He didn’t mention the warning about a possible imminent terrorist attack that the U.S. shared confidentially with Moscow two weeks before the raid.
Three days before the attack, Putin denounced the U.S. Embassy’s March 7 notice urging Americans to avoid crowds in Moscow, including concerts, calling it an attempt to frighten Russians and “blackmail” the Kremlin ahead of the presidential election.
Bortnikov said Russia was thankful for the warning but described it as very general.
“The information about preparations for terror attacks in large gatherings of people was of a general nature,” he said. “Of course, we reacted to that information and took corresponding measures to prevent such incidents.”
He added that the FSB acted on the tip, targeting a group of suspects he didn’t identify but which eventually proved false.
“We are thankful, of course, but we would like to see more specifics,” Bortnikov said.
Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed.
]]>It was Russia’s third big missile attack on Ukraine in the past four days, and the second to target the capital, Kyiv.
The governor of the Lviv region, Maksym Kozytskyi, said on the Telegram platform that critical infrastructure was hit, but he didn’t specify what precisely was struck. No deaths or injuries were reported.
Later, authorities said that rescuers had just put out a fire at a critical infrastructure facility in the Lviv region, which had been attacked with missiles and drones at night and in the morning.
The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Serhiy Popko, said Russia used cruise missiles launched from Tu-95MS strategic bombers. An air alert in the capital lasted for more than two hours as rockets entered Kyiv in groups from the north.
He said the attacks were launched from the Engels district in the Saratov region of Russia.
According to preliminary data, there were no casualties or damage in the capital, he said.
Armed Forces Operational Command of Poland, a member of NATO, said in a statement that there was a violation of Polish airspace at 4:23 a.m. (0323 GMT) by one of the cruise missiles launched by Russia against towns in western Ukraine.
The object entered near Oserdow, a village in an agricultural region near the border with Ukraine, and stayed in Polish airspace for 39 seconds, the statement said. It wasn’t immediately clear if Russia intended for the missile to enter Poland’s airspace. Cruise missiles are able to change their trajectory to evade air defense systems.
Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz later told reporters in a televised news conference that the Russian missile would have been shot down had there been any indication that it was heading towards a target in Poland.
He said that Polish authorities monitored the attack on Ukraine and were in contact with Ukrainian counterparts. Polish and NATO F-16s were activated as part of the strategic response.
He said the missile penetrated Polish airspace about a half-mile to around a mile as Russia was targeting the region around Lviv in western Ukraine.
“As last night’s rocket attack on Ukraine was one of the most intense since the beginning of the Russian aggression, all the strategic procedures were launched on time and the object was monitored until it left the Polish airspace,” he said.
On the diplomatic front, the Polish foreign ministry said that it would “demand explanations from the Russian Federation in connection with another violation of the country’s airspace.”
“Above all, we call on the Russian Federation to stop the terrorist air attacks on the inhabitants and territory of Ukraine, end the war, and address the country’s internal problems,” the statement read.
Andrzej Szejna, a deputy foreign minister, told the TVN24 broadcaster that the foreign ministry intended to summon the Russian ambassador to Poland and hand him a protest note.
Henryk Zdyb, the head of the village of Oserdow, said in an interview with the daily Gazeta Wyborcza that he saw the missile, saying it produced a whistling sound.
“I saw a rapidly moving object in the sky. It was illuminated and flying quite low over the border with Ukraine,” he told the paper.
Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, there have been a number of intrusions into Polish airspace, triggering worry in the European Union and NATO member state and reminding people of how close the war is.
“We have to come to terms with the fact that the war is taking place right next to us, and we are part of the confrontation between the West and Russia,” commentator Artur Bartkiewicz wrote in the Rzeczpospolita newspaper Sunday.
In 2022, two Poles were killed in a missile blast. Western officials blamed those deaths on a Ukrainian air defense missile that went astray, but also accused Russia of culpability because it started the war, with the Ukrainian missiles launched in self-defense.
On Saturday night, one person was killed and four others were wounded in a Ukrainian missile attack on Sevastopol on the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula, city Gov. Mikhail Razvozhaev said on his Telegram channel.
Vanessa Gera reported from Warsaw, Poland.
]]>A court statement said two of the suspects accepted their guilt in the assault after being charged in the preliminary hearing, though the men’s condition raised questions about whether they were speaking freely. There had been earlier conflicting reports in Russian media outlets that said three or all four men admitted culpability.
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court formally charged Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32; Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, 30; Shamsidin Fariduni, 25; and Mukhammadsobir Faizov, 19, with committing a group terrorist attack resulting in the death of others. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The court ordered that the men, all of whom are citizens of Tajikistan, be held in pre-trial custody until May 22.
Russian media had reported that the men were tortured during interrogation by the security services, and Mirzoyev, Rachabalizoda and Fariduni showed signs of heavy bruising, including swollen faces,
Rachabalizoda also had a heavily bandaged ear. Russian media said Saturday that one of the suspects had his ear cut off during interrogation. The Associated Press couldn’t verify the report or the videos purporting to show this.
The fourth suspect, Faizov, was brought to court from a hospital in a wheelchair and sat with his eyes closed throughout the proceedings. He was attended by medics while in court, where he wore a hospital gown and trousers and was seen with multiple cuts.
Court officials said Mirzoyev and Rachabalizoda admitted guilt for the attack after being charged.
The hearing came as Russia observed a national day of mourning for the attack Friday on the suburban Crocus City Hall concert venue that killed at least 137 people.
The attack, which has been claimed by an affiliate of the Islamic State group, is the deadliest on Russian soil in years.
Russian authorities arrested the four suspected attackers Saturday, with seven more people detained on suspicion of involvement in the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an address to the nation Saturday night. He claimed they were captured while fleeing to Ukraine, something that Kyiv firmly denied.
Events at cultural institutions were canceled Sunday, flags were lowered to half staff and television entertainment and advertising were suspended, according to state news agency RIA Novosti. A steady stream of people added to a makeshift memorial near the burned-out concert hall, creating a huge mound of flowers.
“People came to a concert, some people came to relax with their families, and any one of us could have been in that situation. And I want to express my condolences to all the families that were affected here and I want to pay tribute to these people,” Andrey Kondakov, one of the mourners who came to lay flowers at the memorial, told AP.
“It is a tragedy that has affected our entire country,” kindergarten employee Marina Korshunova said. “It just doesn’t even make sense that small children were affected by this event.” Three children were among the dead.
Rescuers continued to search the damaged building and the death toll rose as more bodies were found as family and friends of some of those still missing waiting for news. Moscow’s Department of Health said Sunday it had begun identifying the bodies of those killed via DNA testing, saying the process would take at least two weeks.
Igor Pogadaev was desperately seeking any details about his wife, Yana Pogadaeva, who went to the attack concert. The last he heard from her was when she sent him two photos from the Crocus City Hall music venue.
After Pogadaev saw the reports of gunmen opening fire on concertgoers, he rushed to the site, but couldn’t find her in the numerous ambulances or among the hundreds of people who had made their way out of the venue.
“I went around, searched, I asked everyone, I showed photographs. No one saw anything, no one could say anything,” Pogadaev told AP in a video message.
He watched flames bursting out of the building as he made frantic calls to a hotline for relatives of the victims, but received no information.
As the death toll mounted Saturday, Pogodaev scoured hospitals in the Russian capital and the Moscow region, looking for information on newly admitted patients.
His wife wasn’t among the 182 reported injured, nor on the list of 60 victims authorities had already identified, he said.
The Moscow Region’s Emergency Situations Ministry posted a video Sunday showing equipment dismantling the damaged music venue to give rescuers access.
Putin has called the attack “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspects as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.
Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant to an Islamic preacher via a messaging app and paid to take part in the raid.
Putin didn’t mention IS in his speech to the nation, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault to stoke fervor for Russia’s fight in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year.
U.S. intelligence officials said they had confirmed the IS affiliate’s claim.
“ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
The U.S. shared information with Russia in early March about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow, and issued a public warning to Americans in Russia, Watson said.
The raid was a major embarrassment for Putin and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.
Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.
IS, which fought against Russia during its intervention in the Syrian civil war, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, the IS Afghanistan affiliate said that it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.
The group issued a new statement Saturday on Aamaq, saying the attack was carried out by four men who used automatic rifles, a pistol, knives and firebombs. It said the assailants fired at the crowd and used knives to kill some concertgoers, casting the raid as part of the Islamic State group’s ongoing war with countries that it says are fighting against Islam.
In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
]]>This weekend, a very different Vladimir Putin addressed a nation shocked by a massacre at a rock concert on Moscow’s outskirts. His image as a tough leader was badly dented by gunmen who mowed down dozens of victims, unchecked by police or security.
Appearing on TV on Saturday, hours after the attack that killed 137 people and wounded over 100, he sought to make it serve his political goals by alleging a link between the gunmen and Ukraine, saying the assailants planned to flee there. He made no mention of the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility, or of Kyiv’s denial of involvement.
It’s not the first time in his nearly a quarter-century in power that Putin has tried to use a failure by his security services to achieve his aims.
The 71-year-old former KGB officer came to power on the final day of 1999 while spearheading a war to crush separatists in the mostly Muslim republic of Chechnya who had mounted an incursion into a neighboring province.
He also blamed Chechens for a series of apartment building bombings in Russia, burnishing his macho persona with a famous pledge to hunt down terrorists: “If we catch them in the outhouse, we will flush them down the toilet.”
Some Kremlin critics alleged the apartment bombings in 1999 could have been staged by Russian security agencies in a false flag operation to help Putin’s rise and rally broad support for the war in Chechnya. The claims were never independently proven and were strongly rejected by Putin and Kremlin officials.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alluded to them as he dismissed Moscow’s allegations of a Ukrainian connection in Friday’s attack, accusing Putin of using his own citizens as “expendables.”
Long after the battles in Chechnya died down, Russia suffered a series of deadly attacks, including the 2002 siege at a Moscow theater and the 2004 hostage crisis at a school in Beslan in southern Russia. Other attacks targeted public transportation, as well as plane and airport bombings linked to Chechen separatists, and later to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.
But these have been rare in more recent years as Moscow-backed regional strongman Ramzan Kadyrov used his feared security forces to stabilize Chechnya. Friday’s attack revived the sense of Russian vulnerability that Putin has sought to replace with strong control and domestic stability, despite the war in Ukraine.
Kremlin critics assailed Putin for focusing Russia’s massive police and security services on stifling political opponents, human rights groups and LGBTQ+ activists while leaving the country unprotected from threats by armed extremists.
Maria Pevchikh, a top associate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny who died in an Arctic penal colony last month, said the security agencies were “too busy fighting politicians, activists and journalists, so they didn’t have time left to deal with terrorists.”
Many commentators wondered how the attackers could conduct their deadly raid and leave the entertainment complex without any police response. Officials said the suspected gunmen were arrested hours later in the western Bryansk region as they headed for Ukraine.
“What happened is unique in that for the first time in Russia, during a terror attack of this scale, security forces were unable to prevent the terrorists’ action in any way: they freely entered the building, killed and wounded scores of people, and calmly left the scene of the massacre,” political analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev wrote in a commentary. “Years of tightening security and trillions of rubles were spent in vain.”
U.S. officials confirmed the claim of responsibility by the Islamic State affiliate and also said they had shared information earlier this month with Russia about a planned assault in Moscow, adding there was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever.
But three days before the attack, Putin denounced the U.S. warning as an attempt to frighten the Russians and “blackmail” the Kremlin ahead of the presidential election.
Mark Galeotti, head of the Mayak Intelligence consultancy, said Putin had suffered a major blow to his image as the “tough defender of the motherland.”
He said the raid — the deadliest attack on Russian soil in two decades — would eat at Putin’s legitimacy, creating “that slow and accelerating sense that this is no longer the Putin that was, that he’s no longer really fit for the times, that he’s no longer able to deliver on his promises.”
Galeotti countered allegations by some Kremlin critics that a slow and bungled official response to the attack was a possible sign of a false flag operation, arguing it’s always challenging for authorities to avert such bloodshed.
“It’s often quite difficult to identify terrorist plots, especially relatively small-scale ones, before they happen,” he said in a podcast. “Sometimes terrorists will always get through, regardless of how able your counterintelligence officers, how many police you’ve got, how many cameras you have.”
Putin did not mention the Islamic State group and instead said the suspected gunmen were arrested while trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” provided to them in advance, even though they reportedly were seized nearly 90 miles from the Ukrainian border.
If Putin follows up on his statement by directly blaming Ukraine for staging the attack, he will likely use it as justification for even fiercer strikes.
Putin said after the election that Moscow would seek to expand its gains in Ukraine to create a buffer zone to protect Russia from long-range strikes and cross-border raids. He also warned that recent Ukrainian attacks on the border regions “won’t be left unpunished.”
Hours before Friday’s concert hall bloodshed, the Russian military unleashed a barrage on Ukraine’s energy system, crippling its largest hydroelectric plant and leaving over 1 million without power in what the Russian Defense Ministry described as “strikes of retribution.” More strikes followed over the weekend.
Russian hawks responded to the concert hall raid with calls for even harsher action — but against Ukraine, not militant extremist threats.
Konstantin Malofeyev, owner of a virulently nationalist media outlet, urged the Kremlin to give Ukrainians 48 hours to leave major cities before using “all means” to attack.
Alexander Dugin, a hard-line ideologist whose daughter was killed in a 2022 car bombing blamed on Ukraine, called for a “full mobilization” to “liberate” Kyiv and other big cities.
Putin ordered a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists in September 2022 while the Russian army retreated under a swift Ukrainian counteroffensive, The highly unpopular move prompted hundreds of thousands to flee Russia to avoid being drafted.
Last year, the military opted for ramping up recruitment of volunteers attracted by relatively high wages and other benefits. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that over 540,000 signed military contracts last year.
Russian hawks also have pushed for tough steps like restoring capital punishment, which was outlawed when Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1997. After Friday’s attack, some lawmakers said they will consider introducing the death penalty, even though the country’s Constitutional Court has forbidden it.
“The issue will be thoroughly considered, and the resulting decision will answer society’s mood and expectations,” said Vladimir Vasilyev, a senior lawmaker with the main Kremlin party, United Russia.
]]>British soldiers carried photos of pilots murdered on Hitler’s orders at a ceremony that was also attended by the British ambassador to Poland and marked the culmination of observances that lasted all weekend.
During World War II, the Nazi POW camp held captured Allied air force personnel, including British, American and Polish soldiers among others, and British airmen led the escape effort. At the time the area was part of Germany but now lies in western Poland.
The ceremony Sunday also included a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft and four F-16 fighters of the Polish Air Force flying over the town of Żagań and the ceremony site, according to Polish media reports.
Most of the soldiers who escaped from Stalag Luft III on the night of March 24, 1944, faced a tragic end. Only three made it to safety. The others were recaptured and 50 of them were executed.
Though it largely failed it came to be known as the “Great Escape,” and was celebrated in a 1963 film starring Steve McQueen that was highly fictionalized.
More recently the escape was featured in an episode of the American war drama miniseries “Masters of the Air” on Apple TV+.
A new exhibition at the U.K. National Archives in London also pays tribute to the escapees.
The prisoners spent a year secretly digging three tunnels named Tom, Dick and Harry. The Germans discovered the first tunnel but the other two remained.
The plan was to get 200 men out through tunnel Harry, but on the night of the escape, the first man who emerged realized the tunnel did not extend as far beyond the wire as they had anticipated. Only 76 made it out before a guard noticed footprints in the snow.
Three men — two Norwegian pilots and a Dutch one— were the only ones who successfully escaped.
Adolf Hitler was so incensed by the escape that he ordered the 73 recaptured men executed, and the Nazis eventually settled on killing 50 — all in violation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners.
After the war, the murders of the allied airmen were part of the Nuremberg trials and several Gestapo officers were sentenced to death.
]]>Riccardo Muti was conducting the Italian premiere of William Schuman’s Ninth Symphony, subtitled “Le Fosse Ardeatine,” which the New York-born Jewish composer wrote in 1968 after visiting the Ardeatine Caves in Rome.
There, on March 24, 1944, 335 people were shot to death as a reprisal for an attack by partisans that killed 33 Nazi soldiers on a street in Rome.
In an interview ahead of the performance, Muti said Schuman was completely overwhelmed by the experience of visiting the caves and said it was particularly appropriate now to finally bring the symphony to Italy.
“This is a tragic story that young people have to know, especially in today’s world where every day we read about such tragic events,” Muti told The Associated Press. “This cry of pain that comes from the score of ‘Le Fosse Ardeatine’ I think can be a wakeup call, just as at a certain point a funeral bell appears in the score.”
Muti led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the symphony in 2019, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the massacre. On Sunday, the 80th anniversary, he was leading the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra, which he founded and directs, alongside musicians from the Carabinieri orchestra at Rome’s Parco della Musica auditorium.
In other commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of the massacre, Premier Giorgia Meloni issued a note Sunday saying it was necessary to remember what she called “one of the most profound and painful wounds inflicted on our national community.”
President Sergio Mattarella on Friday visited the site itself, which has now been turned into a memorial honoring the 335 dead. The tombs carry the names, and in some cases the photos, of the victims.
In notes that accompanied the original recording of the symphony, composer William Schuman said the piece doesn’t attempt to depict the events of 1944. But Schuman, who died in 1992, said that its three sections were “directly related to emotions engendered by” his visit to the site, including his thoughts about the “promise and aborted lives of the martyrs.”
Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield contributed.
]]>Kyiv strongly denied any involvement in Friday’s assault on the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk, and the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility.
Putin did not mention IS in his speech to the nation, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault to stoke fervor for Russia’s war in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year.
U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the claim by the IS affiliate.
“ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
The U.S. shared information with Russia in early March about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow and issued a public warning to Americans in Russia, Watson said.
Putin said authorities detained a total of 11 people in the attack, which also wounded more than 100. He called it “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspects as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.
Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant to an Islamic preacher via a messaging app and paid to take part in the raid.
Russian news reports identified the gunmen as citizens of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that is predominantly Muslim and borders Afghanistan. Up to 1.5 million Tajiks have worked in Russia and many have Russian citizenship.
Tajikistan’s foreign ministry, which denied initial Russian media reports that mentioned several other Tajiks allegedly involved in the raid, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the arrests.
Many Russian hard-liners called for a crackdown on Tajik migrants, but Putin appeared to reject the idea, saying “no force will be able to sow the poisonous seeds of discord, panic or disunity in our multi-ethnic society.”
He declared Sunday a day of mourning and said additional security measures were imposed throughout Russia.
The number of dead stood at 133, making the attack the deadliest in Russia in years. Authorities said the toll could still rise.
The raid was a major embarrassment for the Russian leader and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.
Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.
The assault came two weeks after the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a notice urging Americans to avoid crowded places in view of “imminent” plans by extremists to target large Moscow gatherings, including concerts. Several other Western embassies repeated the warning. Earlier this week, Putin denounced the warning as an attempt to intimidate Russians.
Investigators on Saturday combed through the charred wreckage of the hall for more victims. Hundreds of people stood in line in Moscow to donate blood and plasma, Russia’s health ministry said.
Putin’s claim that the attackers tried to flee to Ukraine followed comments by Russian lawmakers who pointed the finger at Ukraine immediately after the attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angrily rejected Moscow’s accusations as an attempt by Putin and his lieutenants to shift the blame to Ukraine while treating their own people as “expendables.”
“They are burning our cities — and they are trying to blame Ukraine,” he said in a statement on his messaging app channel. “They torture and rape our people — and they blame them. They drove hundreds of thousands of their terrorists here to fight us on our Ukrainian soil, and they don’t care what happens inside their own country.”
Images shared by Russian state media showed emergency vehicles still gathered outside the ruins of the concert hall, which could hold more than 6,000 people and hosted many big events, including the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant that featured Donald Trump.
On Friday, crowds were at the venue for a concert by the Russian rock band Picnic.
Videos posted online showed gunmen in the venue shooting civilians at point-blank range. Russian news reports cited authorities and witnesses as saying the attackers threw explosive devices that started the fire, which eventually consumed the building and caused its roof to collapse.
Dave Primov, who survived the attack, told the AP that the gunmen were “shooting directly into the crowd” in the front rows. He described the chaos in the hall as concertgoers raced to escape: “People began to panic, started to run and collided with each other. Some fell down and others trampled on them.”
After he and others crawled out of the hall into nearby utility rooms, he said he heard pops from small explosives and smelled burning as the attackers set the building ablaze. By the time they got out of the massive building 25 minutes later, it was engulfed in flames.
“Had it been just a little longer, we could simply get stuck there in the fire,” Primov said.
Messages of outrage, shock and support for the victims and their families streamed in from around the world.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the U.S. condemned the attack and noted that the Islamic State group is a “common terrorist enemy that must be defeated everywhere.”
IS, which lost much of its ground after Russia’s military action in Syria, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, IS’s Afghanistan affiliate said it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.
The group issued a new statement Saturday on Aamaq saying the attack was carried out by four men who used automatic rifles, a pistol, knives and firebombs. It said the assailants fired at the crowd and used knives to kill some concertgoers, casting the raid as part of IS’s ongoing war with countries that it says are fighting Islam.
In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacation-goers returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
The group’s Afghanistan affiliate is known variously as ISIS-K or IS-K, taking its name from Khorasan Province, a region that covered much of Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia in the Middle Ages.
The affiliate has thousands of fighters who have repeatedly carried out attacks in Afghanistan since the country was seized in 2021 by the Taliban, a group with which they are at bitter odds.
ISIS-K was behind the August 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul airport that left 13 American troops and about 170 Afghans dead during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal. They also claimed responsibility for a bomb attack in Kerman, Iran, in January that killed 95 people at a memorial procession.
On March 7, just hours before the U.S. Embassy warned about imminent attacks, Russia’s top security agency said it had thwarted an attack on a synagogue in Moscow by an IS cell and killed several of its members in the Kaluga region near the Russian capital. A few days before that, Russian authorities said six alleged IS members were killed in a shootout in Ingushetia, in Russia’s Caucasus region.
Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo in Washington and Colleen Long in Wilmington, Delaware, contributed to this report.
]]>Singapore’s government has announced a tax on air fares to fund purchases of pricey sustainable aviation fuel, while neighboring Malaysia has authorized carriers to charge people a carbon levy from next month.
In Europe, airlines this year lose one quarter of their free emissions allowance, the first in a series of reductions that’s already estimated to be adding to ticket prices.
“We’ve entered a new era,” said Rico Luman, a transport, logistics and automotive economist at ING Groep NV in Amsterdam. “Flying will turn more expensive.”
While the policies differ from country to country, the common goal is to clean up an aviation industry that for a century has relied on fossil fuels to function. Airline chiefs fret that unless they show they’re serious about cutting emissions right now, they’ll face fines, flying limits or - worst of all - be grounded completely.
Sustainable aviation fuel, a cleaner-burning liquid made from waste oils or agricultural feedstock, is the industry’s primary means of reaching its 2050 net zero target. But the new fuel is in short supply and can be more than double the price of normal jet kerosene, leaving airlines little choice but to pass the cost onto passengers.
It means little price respite for flyers who’ve been whacked by soaring prices since air travel resumed after the pandemic. Now, they’ll have to pay to neutralize aviation’s carbon footprint, too.
“That change is expensive,” Kiri Hannifin, Air New Zealand Ltd.’s chief sustainability officer, said in an interview this week. “We do need to start talking to Kiwis about what flying is doing, why it’s impactful, why we’ve got to change.”
Air New Zealand wants sustainable fuel to account for around 20% of its total fuel consumption by 2030, one of the most ambitious targets of its kind anywhere in the world. Delta Air Lines Inc., Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., and Qantas Airways Ltd. are among those with a 10% target by the end of the decade.
Singapore, Malaysia
Sustainable aviation fuel can cut emissions by as much as 80%. The greener fuel is essential to reduce emissions from long-haul flights, the source of most air-travel pollution, because electric planes don’t have sufficient range. Hydrogen propulsion isn’t expected to make a meaningful impact for decades.
With time running out, air-travel levies or mandates to buy or supply sustainable aviation fuel are rippling across the globe from Japan and Singapore to the European Union and the UK. The measures are designed to forcefully accelerate emissions reductions and assure green fuel suppliers that there will be buyers for their new, relatively expensive product.
“Voluntary measures have largely failed,” said Dan Rutherford, director of research at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The most effective policies are those that apply equally to all airlines instead of singling out carriers from a certain country, he said.
Singapore, for instance, aims to have all departing flights take off with 1% sustainable aviation fuel in jets’ tanks from 2026, rising to between 3% and 5% by 2030. The levy will vary depending on the length of the flight and the class of travel. An economy flight to London in 2026 would rise by S$16 ($12) under the policy.
Malaysia will in April allow airlines flying in and out of Kuala Lumpur to impose a carbon levy, either to pay for sustainable fuel or to fund carbon offsets. Details of the policy appeared in a local Bernama media report this month that was later confirmed by the transport ministry.
Under the European Union’s ReFuelEU initiative, conventional jet kerosene must be blended with 2% sustainable aviation fuel in 2025, gradually increasing to 70% by 2050. The UK also plans to mandate SAF use next year.
It’s not just the price of fuel that passengers will absorb. The cost of buying new, less-thirsty aircraft is also dripping down into fares. Qantas, which has started to receive the first of dozens of next-generation planes on order, last week said it’s raising fares on most domestic routes by an average of 2% to 3%.
Price hikes
According to ING’s Luman, this year’s reduction to aviation’s free emissions allowance in the EU may be adding €8 ($8.75) to the price of a return flight between London and Rome. The extra cost would be more than €30 in 2026 at current carbon prices, he said. Luman cautioned that it’s hard to isolate the precise impact of the policy because other factors including a lack of capacity are also pushing up fares.
The International Air Transport Association calculates that aviation’s transition to net zero will require investment of as much as $5 trillion through 2050. Even those with the most to lose are acknowledging that passengers can’t escape the bill.
“It pains me to suggest that travelers are going to have to pay more,” Margy Osmond, chief executive officer of Tourism & Transport Forum Australia, said at a renewable aviation fuels conference in Canberra this week. “There’s going to be an additional cost to aviation. That’s all there is to it.”
With assistance from Ram Anand.
]]>That the Russian president made the link either way, in spite of Islamic State claiming responsibility and the United States warning Russia beforehand of the plotting by the jihadi group, speaks volumes. It is the kind of thing Kremlinologists will pore over when it comes to deciphering Putin’s true intentions about where his war against Russia’s neighbor is headed in its third and potentially decisive year.
“The obvious route for the Kremlin to spin this is that it’s something to do with the war in Ukraine,” said Charles Lichfield, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center in Washington.
History shows that Putin’s modus operandi is a firm response.
He did so when one-time acolyte Yevgeny Prigozhin led a mutiny with his mercenary group last summer that threatened to become the biggest threat to Putin’s quarter-century rule. It happened also more than two decades ago when a Muslim insurgency spilled over at his door in the form of Chechen gunmen seizing around 1,000 hostages in a theater, one traumatic moment that everyday Russians will compare to what Americans felt on Sept. 11 and a narrative that will surely be reactivated now.
The takeaway from both episodes is clear, according to Western officials speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss their interpretation of events. Prigozhin died in somewhat mysterious circumstances in a plane crash two months after his insurrection. And Putin’s reputation as a leader bringing order and stability to chaos was in part built over his tough-guy reaction to the theater hostage crisis.
That would have come rushing back into the collective consciousness when reports broke Friday night about gunmen with automatic weapons raiding the Crocus City concert hall around 8:15 p.m. local time. The death toll was at least 133 people by the time Putin gave his first public remarks less than 24 hours later.
The Russian leader laid the groundwork carefully. A “window,” he said, had been prepared for four suspects to cross the border into Ukraine. The four were arrested by Russian security services.
That’s even as officials in Kyiv preemptively denied any role and called the attack a false-flag operation by the Kremlin. Islamic State posted a photograph of the men the group said carried out the assault. U.S. and European officials indicated Saturday they had no reason to doubt the militant outfit’s claim.
All this foreshadows potentially ominous decisions about the Kremlin’s plans to step up attacks on Ukraine, after Putin claimed an unprecedented 87% support in last week’s presidential election and as rumors swirl about another large-scale mobilization of troops to try to seize more Ukrainian territory.
In the aftermath of the concert hall attack Putin leaned into the political messaging for a domestic audience, one that is increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. Russia has been heavily sanctioned by Ukraine’s allies for its invasion, while Putin has denuded the remaining political opposition and stifled the media.
“They were trying to hide and were moving toward Ukraine,” Putin said in his five-minute televised address. He was referring to the suspects he said were attempting to flee. “Based on preliminary information, a window for crossing the border was prepared for them by the Ukrainian side.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in response that the Russian leader was seeking to condemn others for the Moscow shooting. “What happened yesterday in Moscow is obvious: Putin and the other scum are just trying to blame it on someone else,” he said on his Telegram channel.
The tragedy was a throwback to an earlier time in Putin’s reign when suicide bombings, most of them blamed on Islamists from within Russia or its neighbors, killed scores of people. It shattered the illusion of security in Moscow that Putin has sought to cultivate since he invaded Ukraine.
Islamist groups have targeted Russia in the past citing what they call the anti-Muslim policies of the Kremlin. The seizure of a school in Beslan in the south of the country led to more than 330 fatalities, many of them children, in 2004. In 2010, twin suicide attacks in Moscow subway stations killed at least 40, while a suicide bomber killed 15 in the St. Petersburg subway in 2017.
Putin’s comments so far likely reflect his effort to control the narrative in Russia about his decision to invade Ukraine.
The ground offensive has come at an economic cost even as his bet to try and outlast what he calls the “the West” is taking form, and has probably defied the doom sayers about what sanctions could do to stop him. The U.S. Congress has withheld funds, Europe has fallen short of its commitments to send weapons and Ukraine is repeatedly warning it is running low on ammunition.
So what comes next? Russia has said it doesn’t plan another mobilization after a 2022 draft of 300,000 reservists provoked an exodus of people from the country and triggered a spike in public anxiety about the war. But Putin needs more people on the front lines.
His defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, was shown last week touring a munitions plant that was expanding production of large bombs and artillery. He unveiled plans to create two new armies and 14 divisions by the end of the year, without indicating where Russia would find the nearly half a million troops to serve in them.
That is where current events and Putin’s careful messaging come into play — rallying his troops and focusing Russians on a common enemy.
Putin declared Sunday a national day of mourning and vowed to pursue anyone responsible for ordering and organizing the incursion.
The death toll is set to keep rising. Russian state media will keep playing horrifying images and reminding the public that it is the biggest single loss of life since the Nord-Ost theater disaster. At least 170 people including dozens of attackers died during that botched rescue mission.
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]]>Sgt. Brandon Livingston, 28, assigned to the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, was sentenced at court-martial on Friday to 33 months in prison and a reduction in pay grade to E-1.
Livingston also was acquitted of aggravated assault and obstruction of justice in the death of his 5-month-old son Kaleb on March 5, 2022.
The saga involving Livingston, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, began at around 1 a.m. on March 5, when emergency responders were called to his Vilseck home to treat his son, who was in distress, prosecutors said during the trial.
The boy was taken to a German clinic in the Bavarian city of Weiden, where he was treated for blunt force trauma to the head, a skull fracture and brain hemorrhaging. He died a short time later.
Doctors found evidence of rib and leg fractures that showed signs of healing, which pointed to a pattern of abuse, prosecutors said.
Both Livingston and his wife, Lilli, were arrested by U.S. military police, Oberpfalz police told Stars and Stripes previously.
German prosecutors accused Lilli Livingston, a German national, of failing to prevent the abuse. She was convicted last year of negligent homicide by omission and received a suspended sentence of one-and-a-half years of probation.
Lilli Livingston accused her husband of abusing the child at least three times in the couple’s home in the Amberg-Sulzbach district, Bavarian news site Onetz reported at the time.
The court-martial began March 11, with Judge Lt. Col. Thomas Hynes presiding.
Over the course of the trial, the prosecution tried to pinpoint the time of Kaleb’s injuries and place him in his father’s care, while the defense focused on Lilli Livingston’s actions.
The panel of officers and senior enlisted leaders deliberated for around five hours Thursday before finding the sergeant guilty of battery on a child under the age of 16, said Jason Treffry, a spokesman for the 7th Army Training Command.
Brandon Livingston entered the court for sentencing Friday in his service dress uniform. The prosecution telephoned a child abuse specialist that revisited Kaleb’s injuries, and then called Lilli Livingston to the stand.
“I can’t describe how much this hurts me,” she said as she broke down. “I’m shattered.”
The defense called an array of character witnesses from family to former soldiers that described the sergeant as peaceful and a good leader. Brandon Livingston later wept as he delivered a statement to the judge.
“I will miss you daily, Kaleb,” he said. “I know you’re looking down on us with your grandmother.”
Maj. Brett Erland, a member of the prosecution, criticized Brandon Livingston during sentencing arguments for exhibiting a lack of remorse.
“All along, he knew his child was in pain and he did it again,” he said.
Defense counsel Capt. Patrick Hitt declined to comment at the conclusion of the trial.
Brandon Livingston has 90 days to appeal, Treffry said. Any sentence over two years is automatically reviewed by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals.
He will most likely serve his sentence at either the Joint Regional Confinement Facility or Disciplinary Barracks, both located at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Treffry said.
]]>Friday’s attack on the Crocus City Hall, for which an Islamic State faction in Afghanistan claimed responsibility, followed several years of quiet. However, its scale and cruelty placed it among the most violent and shocking of attacks on Russian soil.
Here’s a look at major attacks since Putin became Russia’s prime minister for the first time in August 1999:
Apartment Bombings
Over a two-week period in September 1999, four apartment buildings were bombed in Moscow and two other cities, killing a total of 307 people. Officials blamed militants from the separatist region of Chechnya.
But serious doubts about the claim of Chechen involvement arose when officials reported sacks of explosives attached to a detonator in an apartment building in Ryazan. Three men with cards identifying them as members of the Federal Security Service, which Putin had headed until becoming prime minister a month prior, were detained on suspicion of planting the material.
The security service later claimed it had been conducting a drill and the sacks contained harmless material. But by then, Putin had used the incident to justify launching an air assault on the Chechen capital, beginning the second full-scale war in the region.
Theater Crisis
About 40 Chechen militants on Oct. 23, 2002 stormed a Moscow theater where a popular musical was underway, taking some 850 people hostage and planting explosives in the auditorium. They demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya.
Russian special forces elected not to storm the theater because of its difficult layout and the presence of explosives in the hall. Over the next two days, prominent politicians and journalists arrived at the theater to negotiate with the hostage-takers.
On the morning of the fourth day, Russian forces pumped an unidentified sleeping gas into the building’s ventilation system, killing the assailants. At the same time, 132 hostages died, mostly from the effects of the gas.
School Seizure
Assailants directed by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev stormed into a school in the Russian town of Beslan, near Chechnya, on the morning of Sept. 1, 2004, the first day of school, when many children were accompanied by their parents. The number of hostages held by the militants was estimated at about 1,100. The militants demanded Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya and held most of the hostages in the school’s auditorium.
Two days later, a severe explosion shook the building and Russian forces rushed in. When the fighting was over, 334 civilians were dead or fatally wounded, more than half of them children, along with 31 attackers.
Public Transport
Russia’s subways, with large numbers of people in restricted spaces, were frequent targets.
A suicide bomber killed 41 people on a Moscow subway train in February 2004. Five months later, one day before the Beslan attack, a female suicide bomber blew herself up outside a Moscow subway station, killing 10 people and her accomplice; the bomb may have been intended for a train but detonated prematurely.
Suicide bombings of two Moscow subway trains about 40 minutes apart in March 2010 killed about 40 people.
In 2013, suicide bombers targeted a train station and a bus on consecutive days in Volgograd, killing 34 people in all.
Fifteen people died in a suicide bombing in 2017 of the St. Petersburg subway, one of the world’s deepest systems.
Air Transport
A week before the Beslan school seizure, suicide bombers destroyed two airliners on the same night, killing all 90 passengers and crew aboard. Both planes had taken off from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.
Suicide bombers also attacked the airport in 2011, killing 37 people.
In 2015, a bomb blew up a Russian charter airliner flying tourists home from the Egyptian resort Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 passengers. A faction of the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
]]>The operation took place Thursday night at the port of Lavrio, 43 miles southeast of Athens, the coast guard said.
On the yacht, the coast guard found 3.75 million capsules of Nervigesic, a brand name used by Indian pharmaceuticals firm HAB Pharma for pregabalin. The capsules were packaged in 500 cardboard boxes weighing nearly 3.15 tons, the statement said.
Pregabalin is used to treat nerve pain caused by a variety of conditions, such as diabetes and shingles, and also to treat a type of seizure called partial seizure because it has its origin at a single location in the brain.
The raid was ordered based on information from Greece’s “National Intelligence Agency about the activity of networks of Egyptian nationals in Greek territory,” the statement said.
The yacht and its contents remain at the Lavrio port while local authorities conduct an investigation, the coast guard said.
]]>Some 715,000 barrels of crude are due to arrive Friday at the port of Matanzas in Russia’s first oil shipment to Cuba in a year. The island is facing blackouts and food shortages that have sparked mass migration and soured the national mood, with anger boiling over into the largest street protests since 2021 earlier this month.
The Cuban government blames its woes on the U.S. trade embargo imposed after the 1959 revolution. Brazil, the Caribbean Community and other regional allies are urging Washington to ease sanctions, but that’s a tough sell during an election year in which Republican nominee Donald Trump is talking up regime change in Havana should he win his rematch against President Joe Biden.
Now mired in one of its worst economic slumps since the fall of the Soviet Union, the communist-run nation finds itself — once again — beholden to its backers at the Kremlin.
“What we need is for the fuel, wheat and fertilizer Russia has been offering to get here as quickly as possible,” Cuban economist Omar Everleny Perez said by phone from Miami. “There’s obviously a lot of political goodwill between Russia and Cuba, but in practice we’re not seeing the benefits on the street yet.”
For decades the Soviet Union was Cuba’s biggest supporter. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 it led to years of hardship known on the island as its “special period.” By some measures, the country is suffering a second version today as inflation soars, the economy crumbles and hunger grips large swathes of the population.
The government’s once enviable social safety net is also in tatters. It recently asked the United Nations for powdered milk to feed children — a first for Cuba. Chronic wheat shortages have meant a lack of bread and government food rations, which have been steadily reduced, are often delayed by weeks, Perez said.
Cuba and Russia signed a deal last year that was supposed to ease some of the island’s suffering, but it’s been off to a slow start as Vladimir Putin’s government prosecutes its war in Ukraine. That could change when a Gabon-flagged ship beneficially owned by Russia’s Sovcomflot PJSC, which is sanctioned by the U.S., pulls into harbor.
The vessel left the Baltic coast on March 9 and its cargo will begin supplying Havana’s refineries. It will likely cover demand “for about 35 days,” said Jorge Piñon, a researcher at the University of Texas Energy Institute who tracks oil shipments to the island.
It’s Russia’s biggest since September 2022, according to trade intelligence firm Kpler. And it should help tame island-wide blackouts that have been exacerbated by the fuel crunch.
“Cuba is short on oil, with a total deficit of around 100,000 barrels per day,” Piñon said in an interview. “We expect Russian oil to continue coming at a tanker per month — enough to keep the Havana refinery running at this rate.”
Havana had little choice but to return to Russia’s orbit after some of its other allies pared back support.
Longtime backer Venezuela has reduced fuel deliveries to about 35,000 barrels per day, according to Piñon, down from about 80,000 in 2020. And while Mexico is donating about 25,000 barrels daily, it’s facing domestic pressure to begin charging the cash-strapped island given state-run Petroleos Mexicanos — which denies it’s sending crude to Cuba — has financial woes of its own. Mexico’s presidency, finance ministry and Pemex didn’t respond to requests for comment.
By contrast, trade between Moscow and Havana is booming again, with some 100 Russian companies starting operations in Cuba over the past year. Russian tourism surged 340% in 2023 — more than any other nationality, aided in part by the island’s rollout of the Mir payment card issued by Russia’s central bank. Even so, Cuba has only recovered about half of its pre-pandemic visitors, sapping a critical source of hard currency.
Last year’s agreement was designed to bolster Russia’s participation in the island’s economy. And Cuba’s trade and investment minister, Ricardo Cabrisas, was back in Moscow last week hoping to build on that success.
Brazil is also stepping up as President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pushes to repair relations with Havana that frayed under his predecessor. His government has expressed great concern about economic deterioration in Cuba and has teamed up with the United Arab Emirates to send powdered milk, rice, soybeans and corn to the island, with the first dairy shipment arriving last month.
Lula regularly presses American officials to loosen restrictions on Cuba, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity because the discussions aren’t public. But so far those calls — including to reverse Trump’s 2021 decision to put Cuba back on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism — have fallen on deaf ears.
Cuba’s inclusion on the list has been a powerful deterrent to foreign investors and financial institutions. While Biden initially said he would undo Trump’s aggressive tightening of sanctions, changes have been modest. Even a limited step to allow more U.S. financial support of small businesses on the island was shelved last year amid political blowback after it was publicly floated by the administration.
For his part, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel — who used his X account to congratulate Putin on his reelection the same day protests broke out — has acknowledged the food and power problem his country is facing. But he maintains it’s Washington’s fault for trying to bar producers, shipping agencies and banks from doing business with the island.
“The fundamental problem we’re having is the energy persecution the country is facing,” he said in a televised interview in the days after this month’s protests. “And also because we don’t always have the hard currency necessary to buy the products.”
On the ground, things have never been more difficult. “You can’t find food, you can’t find rice — and if you do find it, you can’t afford it,” said Juan Gonzales, who lives in Santiago de Cuba, the site of some of the largest demonstrations this month.
Echoing government talking points, the 68-year-old muertero, or spiritualist, added that the protests were about food and power — not toppling the six-decade-old communist regime.
“Things are really hard here, but we’re moving forward,” Gonzales said by phone. “Long live the revolution.”
With assistance from Catherine Traywick, Dina Khrennikova, Simone Iglesias and Maya Averbuch.
]]>Chokri Belaid, the 48-year-old leader of the Popular Front coalition, was a prominent critic of the Islamist Party Ennahda that ascended to power after 2011 uprisings toppled the country’s longtime dictator. His assassination was among a spate of violent episodes that provoked protests in 2013 and became emblematic of Tunisia’s early struggles to reconcile its celebrated secular traditions with the revival of long suppressed religious ultraconservatives.
A criminal court tasked with handling terrorism cases handed down 23 sentences for Belaid’s murder. The sentences, in addition to the death penalties and life sentences, ranged in length from two to 120 years, a public prosecutor said outside of the court.
Belaid’s brother Abdelmajid Belaid called the sentences “a positive step” and said that supporters were still awaiting the trial of those suspected of planning the assassination.
Belaid’s case was reopened last month after a former investigating judge was arrested on suspicion of concealing certain files. Wednesday’s sentencing came after hours of late night delays and lengthy deliberations due to “the complexity of the very thorny case,” said Mohamed Jmour, a member of Belaid’s defense committee.
Before his death, Belaid had earned a following for his forceful denunciations of Ennahda, which rose to power after President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in 2011. Belaid’s supporters blamed Islamists for taking an overly accommodating approach toward extremists after his assassination and later decried the slow pace of the investigation.
Ennahda leaders subsequently took a harder line against fundamentalists and classified Ansar al Sharia as a terrorist group when another left-wing politician, Mohammed Brahmi, was slain later that year. Law enforcement killed several alleged members of the al-Qaida-linked group suspected of involvement in Belaid’s death.
Several members of Ansar al Sharia were among those sentenced for Belaid’s murder on Wednesday.
The assassinations and subsequent unrest set off a political crisis for Tunisia as it struggled to transition from dictatorship to democracy. The country teetered on the brink until a Nobel Prize-winning quartet of civil society groups negotiated with various parties to prevent the nascent government’s institutions from unraveling. Though bringing the killers to justice has been a rallying cry for President Kais Saied, authorities during his tenure have quashed protests by Belaid’s supporters, including on the 2021 anniversary of his assassination.
Two dozen defendants were ultimately charged in a sprawling case that took years to investigate and bring to trial. One died in prison. Of the 23 defendants sentenced on Wednesday, five were acquitted.
Aymen Chtiba, a deputy prosecutor in the terrorism court’s judicial unit, said the dismissals had to do with the similarity of sentences already handed down against some defendants in other cases.
Tunisia has not put anyone to death since 1991 though Saied has publicly said he supports reviving executions for certain crimes, including murder.
Metz reported from Rabat, Morocco.
]]>Salwan Momika, 37, has staged several burnings and desecrations of the sacred book of Islam in Sweden over the past few years.
“I am on my way to Norway,” Momika said in an interview published Wednesday by Swedish tabloid Expressen. “Sweden only accepts terrorists who are granted asylum and given protection, while philosophers and thinkers are expelled.”
Videos of Momika’s provocative Quran burnings got worldwide publicity and raised anger and criticism in several Muslim nations, leading to riots and unrest in many places. He is currently being investigated by Swedish authorities for incitement against ethnic groups in Sweden.
According to Expressen, Momika is one of the reasons why Sweden’s NATO membership, which was finalized earlier this month, got delayed by months. Among other countries, his actions got wide publicity in NATO member Turkey, which vetoed Stockholm’s bid to join the military alliance for a lengthy period.
Sweden’s migration authorities revoked Momika’s residence permit in October, saying he had provided incorrect information on his application and he would be deported to Iraq. But his deportation has been on hold for security reasons, because according to Momika, his life could be in danger if he were returned to his native country.
Swedish media reported that Momika was granted a residence permit in 2021. In connection with last year’s deportation decision, Momika was granted a new temporary residence permit that expires on April 16, according to Expressen.
“I am moving to a country that welcomes me and respects me. Sweden doesn’t respect me,” Momika told the newspaper, adding that he had already entered Norway and was on his way to the capital, Oslo.
There was no immediate comment available from Norwegian authorities.
]]>The Friday night massacre in Crocus City Hall, a sprawling shopping and entertainment venue on the northwestern outskirts of Moscow, was the deadliest extremist attack on Russian soil in nearly two decades. At least four gunmen toting automatic rifles shot at thousands of concertgoers and set the venue on fire.
An affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the violence, while U.S. intelligence said it had information confirming the group was responsible. French President Emmanuel Macron said France also has intelligence pointing to “an IS entity” as responsible for the attack.
The updated fatalities from Russia’s Emergencies Ministry didn’t state the number of wounded, but Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said earlier Wednesday that 80 people were in hospitals and another 205 had sought medical treatment from the attack.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or the FSB, said it had arrested 11 people the day after the attack, including four suspected gunmen. The four men, identified as Tajik nationals, appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday on terrorism charges and showed signs of severe beatings. One appeared to be barely conscious during the hearing.
Russian officials, however, have insisted that Ukraine and the West had a role, claims that Kyiv vehemently denies. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of trying to drum up fervor as his forces fight in Ukraine.
FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov has also alleged, without providing evidence, that Western spy agencies could have been involved. He repeated Putin’s claim that the four gunmen were trying to escape to Ukraine when they were arrested, casting it as proof of Kyiv’s alleged involvement.
But that assertion was undercut by Belarus’ authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who said Tuesday that the suspects were headed for Ukraine because they feared tight controls on the Belarus border.
The Islamic State group, which lost much of its territory following Russia’s military action in Syria after 2015, has long targeted Russia. In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian jetliner over the Sinai desert, killing all 224 people aboard, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It has recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
The United States warned Moscow two weeks before the massacre about a possible imminent attack. Three days before the tragedy, Putin denounced the U.S. Embassy’s notice on March 7 urging Americans to avoid crowds in Moscow, including concerts, calling it an attempt to frighten Russians and “blackmail” the Kremlin before the Russian presidential election.
Bortnikov said Russia was thankful for the warning but described it as very general.
]]>The airstrikes caused widespread damage, hitting several residential buildings and damaging the city’s institute for emergency surgery.
Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukraine in recent days, launching several missile barrages on the capital Kyiv and hitting energy infrastructure across the country in apparent retaliation for recent Ukrainian aerial attacks on the Russian border region of Belgorod. Such sporadic attacks, however, have been common throughout the war.
The Kharkiv region cuts across the front line where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in battles for over two years since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The region is frequently attacked with missiles and drones.
Sergey Bolvinov, head of the investigative police department in Khakiv, said in a Telegram post that Wednesday’s attack marked the first time aerial bombs were used since 2022. Regional governor Oleh Syniehubov also reported the use of aerial bombs.
The recent escalation comes as exhausted Ukrainian troops struggle with a shortage of personnel and ammunition and face growing Russian pressure along the front line that stretches over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).
On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sacked one of his top security officials, replacing him with the head of Ukraine’s foreign spy agency in a new reshuffle.
Zelenskyy dismissed Oleksii Danilov, who served as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, thanking him for his service in a video address late Tuesday. The president gave no reason and said, without providing details, that Danilov will be “reassigned to another area.”
Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Lytvynenko, who served as head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
The National Security Council is a policy coordination body that is chaired by Zelenskyy. Danilov had held his position since October 2019, a few months after Zelenskyy took office.
The dismissal follows Zelenskyy’s decision in February to fire Ukraine’s chief military officer, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and replace him with Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi. Tensions between Zaluzhnyi and the president grew after Ukraine’s much-touted 2023 summer counteroffensive failed to reach its goals. This month, Zaluzhnyi was named Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.
]]>The Republican speaker has indicated he will attempt to push for approval of tens of billions in wartime funding for Ukraine, as well as Israel, once the House returns in April. Yet it will be perhaps his most difficult task since he took the speaker’s gavel late last year.
“We’ll turn our attention to it and we won’t delay on that,” the Louisiana representative said of the Ukraine package at a news conference last week.
Still, Johnson has waited to act at a time when Russia is renewing its missile attacks on Kyiv. In Ukraine’s eastern regions, soldiers are running low on ammunition as they attempt to hold off a surge of Russian soldiers to the frontlines. European leaders and analysts are warning that the conflict could grow into a much larger clash that involves NATO allies and direct American military involvement if Russia prevails in Ukraine.
Johnson is facing dilemmas himself in Congress. Should funding for Ukraine’s government be loans or a typical grant? Should the $95 billion package that the Senate approved for Ukraine, Israel and other allies be handled as one or broken into pieces? And how decisively should he push for the House to act when his own leadership position is being threatened?
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called it “devastating” that the House has departed for a two-week break with the aid package left unresolved. He, along with many Democrats, called on Johnson to allow a vote on a Senate-approved bill.
“If you’re serious about helping Ukraine, you just put the bill on the floor and let’s vote -- let the House have its will,” he said.
But hardline conservatives in the House, adamantly opposed to aid for Ukraine, are already frustrated with Johnson’s willingness to work with Democrats to pass legislation — so much so that it could cost him his job. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican from Georgia, has filed a motion to vacate Johnson as speaker and warned him not to put Ukraine funding on the House floor.
“He should not bring funding for Ukraine,” Greene told reporters on the Capitol steps just after she filed the motion to vacate.
Meanwhile, an old guard of Republican defense hawks has put increasing pressure on Johnson to advance an aid package in some form. Most Democrats have indicated support for the Senate-passed legislation. However, a growing number of Democrats have raised concerns about Israel’s deadly campaign in Gaza, and a significant number of them are expected to oppose any funding for offensive weaponry for Israel.
The dynamic leaves Johnson with a shifting and unpredictable House at a time when he will need to win broad, bipartisan support. Before becoming speaker, Johnson was deeply skeptical of approving funding for Ukraine and voted repeatedly against it. But now, occupying one of the most powerful positions in Washington, Johnson is poised to become a crucial ally for Kyiv at a time when America’s commitments abroad are in doubt.
“We understand the role that America plays in the world. We understand the importance of sending a strong signal to the world that we stand by our allies and we cannot allow terrorists and tyrants to march through the globe,” Johnson said.
Fond of quoting former President Ronald Reagan, Johnson has repeatedly cited “peace through strength” as one of his guiding principles. In private, he has indicated he will work towards a vote on Ukraine aid once the House returns in April, according to two people who discussed the private conversations on the condition of anonymity. But he has revealed little about how he intends to do it.
One idea Johnson has raised is splitting the funding for Ukraine and Israel into separate votes, which could allow him to navigate the fractures in support for the two countries between Republicans and Democrats.
Senior Republicans are also working on a package that would loan Ukraine money to keep its government operating. Most of the money in the package would be allocated for purchasing weaponry from U.S. defense manufacturers, then sending them to Ukraine. The group of GOP defense hawks has also advanced legislation called the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians, or REPO Act, which would allow the U.S. to tap frozen Russian central bank assets to compensate Ukraine for damages from the invasion.
“I would like to be doing it as soon as possible. I think the situation in Ukraine is dire,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, who is leading the push as the Republican chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
But McCaul added that Johnson is in “a very difficult spot” as Greene’s ouster threat hangs over his head.
For now, Greene has not asked that the motion immediately be brought up for a vote, meaning that it could remain little more than a threat. Also, other conservatives have suggested they do not want to force an ouster of Johnson, even as they express displeasure about how he had led the House. Democrats too have suggested they could protect Johnson from being ousted as speaker, especially if he is being punished for bringing the funding for Kyiv to the floor.
Still, some Republicans have quietly worried that Johnson will not be able to muster the support for Ukraine, especially if he has to gain the two-thirds support to bring the bill under a streamlined process. A small group of Republicans has worked to gain support for a “discharge petition” — a seldom-successful procedural tool that can circumvent the speaker’s control over which bills come up for a vote by gaining 218 member signatures, representing a majority of the House.
“This is the only way you’re going to get a bill passed and you can do it with 218 votes,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a centrist Republican who has advanced the discharge petition drive.
Democrats have tried the discharge petition approach as well, but that effort was intended more to put pressure on the speaker.
Meanwhile, the mood in Kyiv has grown tense as the city withstands missile attacks and officials await word from Washington on approval of the aid, said Shelby Magid, deputy director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, which advocates for American cooperation with Europe.
“So many Ukrainians know the names of members of Congress and the different procedures now,” she said during a trip to Kyiv last week. “Their lives depend on it.”
]]>Before this summer’s Paris Olympics, an exhibit in the French capital shows how the games have been a “mirror of society” since the beginning of the 20th century.
Historian Paul Dietschy, one of the curators, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that “this exhibit tries to show ... this relationship between ideology, power and the Olympic Games.”
The exhibit at the Shoah Memorial, in central Paris, features photos, documents and Olympic items as well as film archives from the past century. It opens to the public on Friday and is scheduled to last until mid-November, organizers said.
It notably highlights the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which was used by Nazi Germany for propaganda purposes; the 1968 Mexico Olympics, where Black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists to protest racial injustice in the U.S.; and the 1972 Munich Olympics, which was the scene of a brutal attack on 11 Israeli team members who were killed by Palestinian militants.
Dietschy said the exhibit sought to show the historic and political significance of the Olympics “through the life of big stars or champions like Alfred Nakashe, who was a Jew from Algeria competing in swimming and who was deported to Auschwitz” concentration camp during World War II. Nakashe competed with the French team in Berlin in 1936 and in the first postwar Summer Olympics in London in 1948 after surviving the Holocaust.
The exhibit also tells the stories of athletes who embody Olympic values like Jesse Owens, the U.S. Black athlete who won four Olympic gold medals in Berlin.
Historian Caroline François, one of the curators, stressed that “the 1936 Games are emblematic with Jesse Owens’ story, because he is both an immense champion who left his mark on the history of sport ... but also because of his personality, his career, his close ties to German champion Luz Long.”
“Owens embodies this struggle to confront Hitler and the Nazi ideology ... But he himself was a victim of racism and segregation in the United States,” she said.
The exhibit also addresses the issue of how Olympic stadiums were turned into internment camps during World War II. Following the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, the country was ruled by a government commonly known as Vichy France, which collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The displays feature photos of the Vel d’Hiv stadium outside Paris, where French police herded about 13,000 people on July 16-17, 1942 before they were deported to Auschwitz. The stadium had been used for boxing, wrestling and weightlifting during the 1924 Paris Olympics.
International politics, again, are expected to be on the agenda of the Paris Olympics this year.
The International Olympic Committee said earlier this month that Russian and Belarusian athletes won’t be allowed to take part in the traditional parade at the opening ceremony in the French capital.
Russia and Belarus are barred from team sports at the Olympics because of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, and the IOC has laid out a two-step vetting procedure for individual athletes from those countries to be granted neutral status. Those athletes must first be approved by the governing body of their individual sport and then by an an IOC-appointed review panel.
Amid the Israel-Hamas war, IOC President Thomas Bach recently said that Israel faces no threat to its Olympic status and added: “Since the heinous attack on the Israeli team (during the 1972 Munich Olympics), there were always special measures being taken with Israeli athletes.”
In recent times, totalitarian and democratic powers have been competing, including through sports, Dietschy said.
“So the Olympic Games of Paris are a huge moment, because we will see if the peace values will be respected,” he said. “We’ll see if sports can be also a way of spreading universal democratic values.”
“The context (now) is more tense as a war is spreading in the world. Maybe the (Paris) Games will be a moment of peace,” Dietschy said hopefully.
]]>Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said at a news conference that an agreement was reached among France, Ukraine and Denmark to finance the Caesar self-propelled 155 mm howitzers, which will enable France to “quickly deliver” them.
France has also set a goal to deliver 80,000 shells for 155 mm guns to Ukraine this year — up from 30,000 delivered since the beginning of the war on Feb. 24, 2022, he said.
In addition, Lecornu said, France is participating in an effort to identify available stocks of gunpowder and ammunition that could be bought from countries outside the European Union, a plan initiated by the Czech Republic to further support Kyiv.
Under the plan, the Czechs seek to obtain 800,000 artillery shells for Ukraine. Czech leaders previously said the first shells should be delivered to Ukraine no later than June. At least 18 countries have joined the initiative, according to officials in Prague.
Earlier this month, Germany, France and Poland vowed to procure more weapons for Kyiv and step up production of military equipment, promising that Ukraine can rely on the trio of European powers as it tries to overcome a shortage of military resources.
Lecornu argued that European countries should reduce their reliance on the U.S. to ensure the continent’s security. He said he expects the issue to be a campaign topic before the European Parliament election in June.
“We know that part of Europe’s security agenda should from now on fall on Europeans,” Lecornu said. “That’s an absolute necessity.”
“To me ... it’s not right that the U.S. taxpayer should have to pay so much for the Europeans’ security,” he said.
Lecornu’s comments come as many in Europe have raised concerns that the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House would weaken the NATO alliance, after his remarks threatening not to come to the defense of allies in the event of an attack by Russia.
Even if U.S. President Joe Biden stays in office, EU leaders worry that the long, slow U.S. pivot to Asia to focus on an ever-more assertive China will pick up speed and increasingly leave Europe to take care of its own security. U.S. efforts to get new funds to arm Ukraine have stalled in Congress.
]]>The arrangement is central to a deal that state-owned operator Deutsche Bahn reached Monday with the GDL union, which represents many of its drivers and some other workers, after five months of negotiations punctuated by strikes.
Several pay disputes in the German transport sector have coincided recently, and this was the most consistently disruptive. Others have involved local transport workers, ground staff and cabin crew for Lufthansa and airport security staff.
The rail strikes led to most long-distance and many regional trains being canceled, in some cases for days at a time in Europe’s biggest economy.
The main sticking point was GDL’s demand for working hours to be reduced without a pay cut. Some smaller private operators that operate regional services agreed to the demand, but Deutsche Bahn initially balked.
The two sides’ deal foresees standard working hours being reduced to 35 hours in four stages from 2026 to 2029. But employees will be able to choose anything from a 35- to 40-hour week, with those who choose to work longer getting more pay.
The agreement also features a pay rise totaling 420 euros ($455) per month in two stages and a one-time payment of 2,850 euros to compensate for inflation.
Deutsche Bahn personnel chief Martin Seiler described it as “an intelligent compromise” offering the company flexibility and extra capacity “in the difficult labor market environment.” The company had pointed to the difficulty of recruiting more drivers to cover gaps created by a shorter week.
GDL chairman Claus Weselsky said the shorter work week was “urgently necessary” to attract more employees to the railway.
]]>Governments around the world have repeatedly pledged to save migrants’ lives and fight smugglers while tightening borders. Yet 10 years on, a report by the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project published Tuesday shows the world is no safer for people on the move.
On the contrary, migrant deaths have soared.
Since tracking began in 2014, more than 63,000 have died or are missing and presumed dead, according to the Missing Migrants Project, with 2023 the deadliest year yet.
“The figures are quite alarming,” Jorge Galindo, a spokesperson at IOM’s Global Data Institute, told The Associated Press. “We see that 10 years on, people continue to lose their lives in search of a better one.”
The report says the deaths are “likely only a fraction of the actual number of lives lost worldwide” because of the difficulty in obtaining and verifying information. For example, on the Atlantic route from Africa’s west coast to Spain’s Canary Islands, entire boats have reportedly vanished in what are known as “invisible shipwrecks.” Similarly, countless deaths in the Sahara desert are believed to go unreported.
Even when deaths are recorded, more than two-thirds of the victims remain unidentified. That can be due to lack of information and resources, or simply because identifying dead migrants is not considered a priority.
Experts have called the growing number of unidentified migrants around the world a crisis comparable to mass casualties seen in wartime.
Behind each nameless death is a family facing “the psychological, social, economic and legal impacts of unresolved disappearances,” a painful phenomenon known as “ambiguous loss,” the report says.
“Governments need to work together with civil society to make sure that the families that are left behind, not knowing the whereabouts of their loved ones, can have better access to the remains of people who have died,” Galindo said.
Of the victims whose nationalities were known to IOM, one in three died while fleeing countries in conflict.
Nearly 60% of the deaths recorded by the IOM in the last decade were related to drowning. The Mediterranean Sea is the world’s largest migrant grave with more than 28,000 deaths recorded in the last decade. Thousands of drownings have also been recorded on the U.S.-Mexico border, in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Gulf of Aden and increasingly in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea where desperate Rohingya refugees are embarking on overcrowded boats.
“Search and rescue capacities to assist migrants at sea must be strengthened, in line with international law and the principle of humanity,” the report says.
Currently on the Mediterranean “the large majority of search and rescue is done by nongovernmental organizations,” Galindo said.
When the Missing Migrants Project began in 2014, European sentiment was more sympathetic to the plight of migrants, and the Italian government had launched “Mare Nostrum,” a major search-and-rescue mission that saved thousands of lives.
But the solidarity didn’t last, and European search and rescue missions were progressively cut back after fears that they would encourage smugglers to launch even more people on cheaper and deadlier boats. That’s when NGOs stepped in.
Their help has not always been welcomed. In Italy and Greece, they have faced increasing bureaucratic and legal obstacles.
Following the 2015-2016 migration crisis, the European Union began outsourcing border control and sea rescues to North African countries to “save lives” while also keeping migrants from reaching European shores.
The controversial partnerships have been criticized by human rights advocates, particularly the one with Libya. EU-trained and funded Libyan coast guards have been linked to human traffickers exploiting migrants who are intercepted and brought back to squalid detention centers. A U.N.-backed group of experts has found that the abuses committed against migrants on the Mediterranean and in Libya may amount to crimes against humanity.
Despite the rise of border walls and heightened surveillance worldwide, smugglers always seem to find lucrative alternatives, leading migrants and refugees on longer and more perilous routes.
“There’s an absence of safe migration options,” Galindo said. “And this needs to change.”
Brito reported from Barcelona, Spain.
]]>In the real world, its reach extends to countries where Elon Musk’s satellite-enabled service has no agreement to operate, including territories ruled by repressive regimes.
A Bloomberg News investigation identified wide-spanning examples of Starlink kits being traded and activated illegally. How they are smuggled and the sheer availability of Starlink on the black market suggests that its misuse is a systemic global problem, raising questions about the company’s control of a system with clear national security dimensions.
In Yemen, which is in the throes of a decade-long civil war, a government official conceded that Starlink is in widespread use. Many people are prepared to defy competing warring factions, including Houthi rebels, to secure terminals for business and personal communications, and evade the slow, often censored internet service that’s currently available.
Or take Sudan, where a year-long civil war has led to accusations of genocide, crimes against humanity and millions of people fleeing their homes. With the regular internet down for months, soldiers of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are among those using the system for their logistics, according to Western diplomats.
“It is deeply concerning because it’s unregulated and headed by a private company,” Emma Shortis, a senior researcher in international and security affairs at the Australia Institute, an independent think tank in Canberra, said of the Starlink system. “There’s no accountability on who has access to it and how it’s being used.”
Starlink delivers broadband internet beamed down from a network of roughly 5,500 satellites that SpaceX started deploying in 2019. With some 2.6 million customers already, Starlink has the potential to become a major moneymaker for SpaceX, a company that began as Musk’s way to fulfill his dream of exploring Mars and has now become the most important private-sector contractor to the U.S. government’s space program and a dominant force in national security.
Musk, until recently the world’s richest person, has said there will be a cap to how much money SpaceX’s launch services business will make, while Starlink could eventually reach revenue of $30 billion a year. Starlink plans to launch tens of thousands of additional satellites to connect places that are too remote for ground-based broadband or that have been cut off by natural disasters or conflict.
But given the security concerns around a private American company controlling internet service, SpaceX first needs to strike agreements with governments in each territory. Where there are none, people are “proceeding to use Starlink without the proper coverage — that is quite illegal and of course should not be allowed, but it’s difficult to control and manage,” said Manuel Ntumba, an Africa geospatial, governance and risk expert based in New York.
In central Asia, where Starlink deals are rare, a government crackdown on illicit terminals in Kazakhstan this year has barely made a dent on its use. All it did was lead to higher prices on the black market, according to a trader who imports the gear and who didn’t want to speak publicly for fear of retribution. Prior to the government intervention, customers were able to buy the company’s equipment and have it shipped via the local postal service, the trader said.
SpaceX didn’t respond when asked to comment on a written list of questions submitted on Thursday. “If SpaceX obtains knowledge that a Starlink terminal is being used by a sanctioned or unauthorized party, we investigate the claim and take actions to deactivate the terminal if confirmed,” the company said in a post on X in February.
The growing black market for Starlink has emerged in regions with patchy connectivity, where the allure of high speed, dependable internet in an easy-to-use package is strong for businesses and consumers alike.
In many ways, it’s Starlink’s effectiveness as a communications tool that has made it such a sensitive matter. The U.S. military is a customer: The Air Force has been testing terminals in the Arctic, calling them “reliable and high-performance.”
Those same properties made it vital to Ukraine’s military in its defense against invading Russian forces. SpaceX provided the technology to Kyiv in the early days of Russia’s invasion, and Starlink has since become crucial to the Ukrainian communications infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Defense later struck a deal with Starlink to supply Ukraine with equipment, the terms of which were not made public.
Then in February of this year, Ukraine said that Russia was deploying Starlink in its own war efforts, while unverified posts on X, Musk’s social network, appeared to show Russian soldiers unpacking kits. Two House Democrats wrote a letter to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell pressing her on Ukraine’s claims. “To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia,” Musk wrote on X.
It’s the uncertainty about where the satellite dishes are landing that has security officials around the world concerned.
Starlink kits are being sold for use in Venezuela, where individuals and entities have been subject to U.S. sanctions for almost a decade, most recently under President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian rule. A map of coverage areas on Starlink’s website shows the South American nation blacked out. Yet social media ads promote package deals for Starlink equipment, which is widely available and admired for its reliability and portability in a country of isolated cattle ranches and gold mines.
SpaceX should be able to prevent Russian use of Starlink in occupied Ukraine, since “basically every single transmitter can be identified,” said Candace Johnson, director at NorthStar Earth & Space Inc., a Montreal company that in January successfully launched four satellites — on a rocket from SpaceX competitor Rocket Lab USA Inc. — to identify and track objects in space.
“There needs to be more accountability: to your country, to your company, to your shareholders, to your stakeholders,” said Johnson, who is also a partner with Seraphim Capital, a venture-capital firm that invests in space startups.
In North Africa, Starlink’s use in Sudan shows how terminals arrive in a country subject to international sanctions.
There has been no internet in Sudan since early February. Both the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces have blamed each other for cutting the service while the CEO of Zain Sudan, a mobile operator, said his company’s engineers had been prevented from reaching parts of the country to reconnect the network due to insecurity and a lack of fuel.
To bypass the blackout, members of the RSF and local business owners have smuggled Starlink devices into Sudan’s Darfur region using an organized network that registered the units in Dubai before transporting them into Uganda by airplane and then by road to Sudan via South Sudan, according to interviews with Western diplomats and business owners using the devices.
Gold miners in remote areas along the borders of South Sudan and the Central African Republic were provided with Starlink services even prior to the war by traders working in South Darfur’s Nyala City. Starlink says on its website that a “service date is unknown at this time” for Sudan.
Haroun Mohamed, a trader in Nyala who transports goods across the border to Chad and South Sudan, said the use of Starlink by RSF soldiers and civilians was widespread. “Ever since the eruption of war in Darfur, a lot of people are bringing in Starlink devices and use it for business,” he said. “People are paying between $2 or $3 per hour, so it’s very good business.”
In South Africa, where Musk was born, the government hasn’t yet approved Starlink’s application to operate. But that hasn’t prevented a flourishing trade in terminals there. Facebook groups feature providers that offer to buy and activate the kits in Mozambique, where it is licensed, and then deliver them over the border to South African customers.
There were enough users of the service in the country as of Nov. 28 that the regulator felt the need to issue a statement reminding people that Starlink has no license for South Africa. Unlawful use could result in fines of as much as 5 million rand ($265,000), or 10% of annual turnover.
Regulators in other countries in Africa have issued similar warnings. Ghana’s National Communications Authority in December released a statement demanding that anyone involved in selling or operating Starlink services in the country “cease and desist immediately.”
In Zimbabwe, authorities threatened raids in response to online advertising for Starlink equipment, H-Metro newspaper reported in January. Prices for Starlink gear on the black market ranged from $700 to $2,000, according to local technology blog Techzim. Government officials in Ghana and Zimbabwe have recently said they hope to allow licensed service.
Countries have different reasons for declining to cooperate with Starlink, including stipulations that it have a local partner and concerns around data use.
Starlink service is currently available — legally — in eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the U.S. company has big plans to build its user base. It is working with local marketing partners such as Jumia Technologies AG, an e-commerce company backed by Pernod Ricard SA that has an agreement to sell Starlink equipment for residential use in Nigeria and Kenya. There has been significant demand, with the first shipment to Nigeria selling out in a few hours, according to Chief Commercial Officer Hisham El Gabry.
“Jumia is aware that there are some unofficial distributors of these kits,” El Gabry said in an interview. While the number of devices is not yet at an alarming level, “it is a point of discussion between us and Starlink that this needs to be brought under control,” he said.
Jumia verifies customers, and cancels orders if they are going to traders or unverified sources, according to El Gabry. While “that device could eventually end up with bad actors,” Starlink can monitor where these devices are connecting from. “If they pick up it’s connecting from a particular militant group for instance, they can enforce that control,” he said.
One Facebook group of people complaining they’d been cut off suggests that Starlink has recently de-activated some of the equipment smuggled into South Africa. Still, social media groups point to a workaround, with terminals re-registered in a country like Malawi and reactivated. Customers can then make use of Starlink’s roaming services, with a subscription paid through the website.
The company offers a global roaming service with a monthly charge of $200. Customers in South Africa can expect to pay about 12,000 rand ($630) for a kit.
In Venezuela, customers similarly get around the ban by paying for the global service plan using an international credit card, according to people familiar with the market, who said its use is now “normalized.”
President Joe Biden’s administration could tighten the export controls that apply to Starlink to keep them out of the hands of American adversaries, according to a former U.S. government official. A security consultant who provides training to companies on the restrictions said the real key is trying to geolocate kits when they are turned on and blocking the ones that are in violation of U.S. export controls. That would require the company to cooperate, the person said, asking not to be named discussing commercially sensitive matters of national security.
A State Department spokesperson said that satellite constellations like Starlink are a key tool for providing connectivity and bridging digital divides. “We encourage companies to take appropriate measures to seek licenses for operating in nations around the world,” they said.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is providing assurance to some countries that it will work with them to keep its Starlink services out of certain areas.
SpaceX has reassured Israel that it can geolocate and turn off individual terminals when it detects illegal use, according to an Israeli government official.
In Yemen, meanwhile, Starlink kits are openly for sale on social media, bought in countries such as Singapore or Malaysia, then activated on roaming. Customers pay via bank transfers in other countries or at the port of arrival. Prices are higher in Houthi-controlled areas, said one seller who asked not be named for safety reasons. That’s because telecoms are controlled by the Houthis, who profit from the revenues, and have warned of “severe actions” against those caught using Starlink.
Facebook and WhatsApp groups offer the equipment regardless — along with tips on how to conceal the dish.
With assistance from Fabiola Zerpa, Daniel Flatley, Mohammed Alamin, Mohammed Hatem, Andreina Itriago Acosta, Nariman Gizitdinov, Ray Ndlovu, Eric Johnson and Jake Rudnitsky.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
Visit bloomberg.com.
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]]>Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances within three weeks about what will happen to him. The ruling means the legal saga, which has dragged on for more than a decade, will continue — and Assange will remain inside London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has spent the last five years.
Judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson said the U.S. must guarantee that Assange, who is Australian, “is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed.”
The judges said that if the U.S. files new assurances, “we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal.” The judges said a hearing will be held May 20 if the U.S. makes those submissions.
The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday.
Assange’s supporters say he is a journalist protected by the First Amendment who exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan that was in the public interest.
Assange’s wife Stella Assange said the WikiLeaks founder “is being persecuted because he exposed the true cost of war in human lives.”
“The Biden administration should not issue assurances. They should drop this shameful case, which should never have been brought,” she said outside the High Court in London.
The ruling follows a two-day hearing in the High Court in February, where Assange’s lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said American authorities were seeking to punish him for WikiLeaks’ “exposure of criminality on the part of the U.S. government on an unprecedented scale,” including torture and killings.
The U.S. government said Assange’s actions went beyond journalism by soliciting, stealing and indiscriminately publishing classified government documents that endangered many people, including Iraqis and Afghans who had helped U.S. forces.
The judges rejected six of Assange’s nine grounds of appeal, including the allegation that his prosecution is political. They said that while Assange “acted out of political conviction … it does not follow however that the request for his extradition is made on account of his political views.”
The judges also said Assange could not appeal based on allegations, made by his lawyers, that the CIA developed plans to kidnap or kill Assange during the years he spent holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to prevent him from trying to flee.
The judges said “plainly, these are allegations of the utmost seriousness,” but concluded they had no bearing on the extradition request.
“Extradition would result in him being lawfully in the custody of the United States authorities, and the reasons (if they can be called that) for rendition or kidnap or assassination then fall away,” the ruling said.
They accepted three grounds or appeal: the threat to Assange’s freedom of speech, Assange’s claim that he faces disadvantage because he is not a U.S. citizen, and the risk he could receive the death penalty.
U.S. authorities have promised Assange would not receive capital punishment, but the judges said that “nothing in the existing assurance explicitly prevents the imposition of the death penalty.”
Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, said that “even if we receive the assurances, we’re not confident we can rely on them.”
Assange, 52, a computer expert, has been indicted in the U.S. on charges over Wikileaks’ publication in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
U.S. prosecutors say he conspired with U.S. army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one charge of computer misuse. If convicted, his lawyers say he could receive a prison term of up to 175 years, though American authorities have said any sentence is likely to be much lower.
Assange’s wife and supporters say his physical and mental health have suffered during more than a decade of legal battles and confinement.
“My concerns about the precarious mental health of Julian Assange and his unfitness to be extradited, as well as the potential for him to receive a wholly disproportionate sentence in the United States, have not been assuaged by the court,” said Alice Jill Edwards, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, an independent expert for the world body.
Assange’s legal troubles began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him about allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women. In 2012, Assange jumped bail and sought refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.
The relationship between Assange and his hosts eventually soured, and he was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. British police immediately arrested and imprisoned him for breaching bail in 2012. Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
A U.K. district court judge rejected the U.S. extradition request in 2021 on the grounds that Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. Higher courts overturned that decision after getting assurances from the U.S. about his treatment. The British government signed an extradition order in June 2022.
Associated Press writers Brian Melley in London and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
]]>The effort ramped up sharply over the past year as the U.S. and Europe strained to deliver weapons and other aid to Ukraine, which is up against a much bigger Russian military backed by a thriving domestic defense industry.
The Ukrainian government budgeted nearly $1.4 billion in 2024 to buy and develop weapons at home — 20 times more than before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
And in another major shift, a huge portion of weapons are now being bought from privately owned factories. They are sprouting up across the country and rapidly taking over an industry that had been dominated by state-owned companies.
A privately owned mortar factory that launched in western Ukraine last year is making roughly 20,000 shells a month. “I feel that we are bringing our country closer to victory,” said Anatolli Kuzmin, the factory’s 64-year-old owner, who used to make farm equipment and fled his home in southern Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022.
Yet like many aspects of Ukraine’s war apparatus, its defense sector has been constrained by a lack of money and manpower — and, according to executives and generals, too much government red tape. A more robust private sector could help root out inefficiencies and enable factories to churn out weapons and ammunition even faster.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Russia controls nearly a quarter of Ukraine and has gained momentum along the 620 mile front line by showing a willingness to expend large numbers of troops to make even the smallest of advances. Ukrainian troops regularly find themselves outmanned and outgunned, and this has contributed to falling morale.
“You need a mortar not in three years, you need it now, preferably yesterday,” said Taras Chmut, director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, an organization that has raised more than $260 million over the past decade to equip Ukrainian troops with machine guns, armored vehicles and more.
WARTIME ENTREPRENEURS
Kuzmin, the owner of the mortar factory, fled the southern city of Melitopol in 2022 after Russia invaded and seized his factory that mostly made spare parts for farm equipment. He had begun developing a prototype for mortar shells shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, when it illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula.
Kuzmin took over a sprawling warehouse in western Ukraine last winter. His long-term goals include boosting production to 100,000 shells per month and developing engines and explosives for drones.
He is just one of many entrepreneurs transforming Ukraine’s weapons industry, which was dominated by state-owned enterprises after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Today, about 80 percent of the defense industry is in private hands — a mirror image of where things stood a year ago and a stark contrast with Russia’s state-controlled defense industry.
Each newly made projectile is wrapped in craft paper and carefully packed into wooden crates to be shipped to Romania or Bulgaria, where are loaded with explosives. Several weeks later, they’re shipped back and sent to the front.
“Our dream is to establish a plant for explosives,” said Kuzmin, who is seeking a partner to make that happen.
OBSTACLES TO GROWTH
Ukraine’s surge in military spending has occurred against a backdrop of $60 billion in U.S. aid being held up by Congress and with European countries struggling to deliver enough ammunition.
As impressive as Ukraine’s defense sector transformation has been, the country stands no chance of defeating Russia without massive support from the West, said Trevor Taylor, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
“Ukraine is not capable of producing all the munitions that it needs for this fight,” Taylor said. “The hold up of $60 billion of American help is really proving to be a significant hindrance.”
Russia is also pumping more money into its defense industry, whose growth has helped buffer its economy from the full brunt of Western sanctions. The country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, recently boasted of huge increases in the manufacture of tanks, drones and ammunition.
“The entire country has risen and is working for our victory,” he said.
Compared with last year, Ukraine’s output of mortar shells is about 40 times higher and its production of ammunition for artillery has nearly tripled, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries. There has also been a boom in drone startups, with the government committing roughly $1 billion on the technology — on top of its defense budget.
“We now produce in a month what we used to produce in a year,” said Vladislav Belbas, the director general of Ukrainian Armor, which makes a wide array of military vehicles.
For the Ukrainian army’s 28th brigade, which is fighting near Bakhmut, delays in foreign weapon supplies haven’t yet posed any problems for troops “because we are able to cover our need from our own domestic production,” said Major Artem Kholodkevych.
Still, domestic weapons factories face a range of challenges — from keeping up with changing needs of battlefield commanders, to their own vulnerability to long-range Russian missile strikes.
But perhaps the greatest immediate hindrance is a lack of manpower.
Yaroslav Dzera, who manages one of Ukrainian Armor’s factories, said he struggles to recruit and keep qualified workers, not least because many of them have been mobilized to fight.
CUTTING THROUGH RED TAPE
Weapons companies say another roadblock to growth is bureaucracy.
The government has tried to become more efficient since the war began, including by making its process for awarding contracts more transparent. But officials say the country has a long way to go.
Shortly before he was replaced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s former top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, highlighted the problem in an essay he wrote for CNN, saying Ukraine’s defense sector remained “hamstrung” by too many regulations and a lack of competition.
In spite of the challenges, one success story has been Ukraine’s drone industry. Ukrainian-made sea drones have proven to be an effective weapon against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.
There are around 200 companies in Ukraine now focused on drones and output has soared — with 50 times more deliveries in December compared with a year earlier, according to Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a standoff over whose got better drones or missiles, said Serhii Pashynskyi, head of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries trade group.
“We have a war of only two resources with Russia — manpower and money,” he said. “And if we learn to use these two basic resources, we will win. If not, we will have big problems.”
Associated Press reporter Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report.
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