Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will spend an extra 5 billion pounds ($6 billion) to replenish ammunition stocks and fund the next phase of a submarine pact with the United States and Australia in an update to Britain’s foreign policy framework.

With his government unveiling the update to Britain’s national security and international policy, Sunak, on a visit to the U.S., will also set out an “ambition” to increase defense spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product in the longer term.

Sunak hailed the move as a way “to ensure we are never again vulnerable to the actions of a hostile power,” but his offer of 5 billion pounds is less than half of what some in his governing Conservative Party say is needed to be able to support Ukraine against Russia, while not leaving Britain vulnerable.

He said his previous increases to defense spending showed he was a man of his word and described the new commitments as a “strong and positive statement.”

“As the world becomes more volatile and competition between the states becomes more intense, the U.K. must be ready to stand our ground,” he said in a statement.

“We will fortify our national defenses, from economic security to technology supply chains and intelligence expertise, to ensure we are never again vulnerable to the actions of a hostile power.”

The Ministry of Defense said British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace was “delighted” with the settlement, especially in the tough economic times, and said it would maintain the upward trajectory after the government invested heavily in recent years.

The unveiling of the updated Integrated Review has been choreographed to coincide with Sunak’s visit to San Diego to agree to the next steps in a landmark defense agreement, AUKUS, with the United States and Australia.

Countering China

Meeting U.S. President Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Sunak will want to underline that the increase in spending will only bolster the AUKUS pact.

Some of the new spending will go toward programs that will help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines for the first time, part of efforts to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.

“As I will discuss with our American and Australian allies in the U.S. today, the U.K. will remain a leading contributor to NATO and a reliable international partner, standing up for our values from Ukraine to the South China Sea,” he said in the statement.

But Sunak is under pressure at home to offer more help to the defense ministry to combat the impact of inflation and spur production of ammunition and other military hardware to replace weapons sent to Ukraine to help Kyiv push back Russian forces.

Britain and other Western countries have scaled up their pledges of military aid for Ukraine this year, with promises of tanks and armored vehicles, as well as longer-range weapons. London has also offered to train Ukrainian soldiers on war planes rather than delivering fighter jets as yet.

While Sunak’s foreign minister, James Cleverly, is due to unveil the updated strategy, the British leader will hope to set the tone in San Diego, saying the “refresh” will set out how Britain has adapted its approach on China.

When the Integrated Review was published in 2021, it described China as a “systemic competitor” — a term some in Sunak’s party says was mealy-mouthed and should be toughened to call Beijing a “threat.”

Sunak said Sunday China presented an “epoch defining challenge” to the global order but it would not be a “smart or sophisticated foreign policy to reduce” the relationship with Beijing to just two words, such as labeling it “a threat.”

Instead, Britain will seek to engage China and be robust in defending the things it cares about, he said.

Officials say the document would most probably mention Taiwan for the first time. The island, increasingly concerned about the threat from China, was left out of the earlier document which was published in 2021.
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From the Vatican, Pope Francis sent a message of solidarity with Ukraine as Russian attacks in the city of Bakhmut and other regions intensified. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias looks at the logistical challenges Ukrainian forces are still facing on the battlefield. Video editor: Marcus Harton.
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Thousands of people protested Sunday against safety deficiencies in Greece’s railway network nearly two weeks after dozens were killed in the country’s deadliest train crash. 

The demonstrators also demanded punishment for those responsible for the head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train that killed 57 people Feb. 28. Police said that more than 8,000 people in Athens gathered outside Parliament Sunday to protest. 

The protesters later marched to the offices of privatized train operator Hellenic Train. The company, which has been owned by Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane since 2017, isn’t responsible for the maintenance of the railway network. State-owned Hellenic Railways oversees upkeep. 

Authorities shut down four subway stations on two lines running through central Athens because of the protest. 

The rally was organized by civil servants, a pro-communist union and university students. 

In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, about 5,000 people demonstrated, listened to speeches and shouted slogans, such as “we will be the voice for all the dead.” 

Sunday’s rallies, which passed off without serious incident, weren’t as well-attended as similar events earlier in the week, when more than 30,000 had turned out in Athens and more than 20,000 in Thessaloniki. Police said four people were detained in Athens. 

A memorial service was conducted for 12 students who attended Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University, Greece’s largest, who were killed in the train crash. 

An inexperienced stationmaster accused of placing the trains on the same track has been charged with negligent homicide and other offenses, and the country’s transportation minister and senior railway officials resigned the day after the crash. 

Revelations of serious safety gaps on Greece’s busiest rail line have put the center-right government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the defensive. He has pledged the government’s full cooperation with a judicial inquiry into the crash. 

Elections are due later this spring and opinion polls released over the past week have shown the ruling conservatives’ lead over the left-wing opposition shrink almost by half compared with polls published before the crash. 
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his daily address Saturday that Russia “has become a synonym for terror and will be an example of defeat and fair punishment for this terror.”

Zelenskyy said Russian shelling Saturday “took the lives of people in Kherson who simply went to a store to buy groceries. Three Ukrainians died.”

A sanctioning decree has been published, Zelenskyy said, with more than 280 companies and 120 people “who, through gambling business schemes, worked against Ukraine, withdrew funds from our state and financed various Russian schemes.”

The British Defense Ministry said Sunday in its intelligence update on Ukraine that Russia is suffering “extremely heavy casualties,” but their impact is not being felt in the richest cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Instead, the report said, the death rate as a percentage of the population in the Eastern regions is “30-40 times higher than in Moscow.”

Ethnic minorities are taking the biggest hit, according to the ministry. In the southern Astrakhan region, about 75% of the casualties are among minority Kazakhs and Tartars.

According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the mounting casualties for Russia are having an impact in Moscow and are reflected in a loss of government control over the country’s information sphere. The think tank said that Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed “infighting in the Kremlin inner circle.” Due to that strife the Kremlin has effectively ceded control over the country’s information space. Russia President Vladimir Putin has been unable to readily regain control of it, said the ISW.

The British ministry said that while Russia continues to look for ways to increase its combat personnel, that “insulating the better-off and more influential elements of Russian society will highly likely remain a major consideration.”
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Ukraine’s foreign minister urged Germany in an interview published on Sunday to speed up supplies of ammunition and to start training Ukrainian pilots on Western fighter jets.

Dmytro Kuleba told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that ammunition shortages were the “number one” problem in Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion.

He said German weapons manufacturers had told him at the Munich Security Conference last month they were ready to deliver but were waiting for the government to sign contracts.

“So the problem lies with the government,” Kuleba was quoted as saying.

Kuleba made clear he did not expect Western allies to give Ukraine the fighter jets it has been asking for any time soon.

But he said Ukrainian pilots should be trained anyway, so they would be ready once that decision was taken, the paper wrote.

If Germany were to train Ukrainian pilots, that would be a “clear message of its political engagement,” he said.

Separately, Kuleba said Ukraine would keep defending the town of Bakhmut, the focus of a Russian onslaught for the last six months.

“If we withdrew from Bakhmut, what would that change? Russia would take Bakhmut and then continue its offensive against Chasiv Yar, so every town behind Bakhmut could suffer the same fate.”

Asked how long Ukrainian forces could hold onto the town, he declined to give a specific answer, comparing them to people defending their house against an intruder trying to kill them and take everything they own.

Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation” to combat what it describes as a security threat from Ukraine’s ties to the West, an argument that Kyiv and the West reject.
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Pope Francis celebrates the 10th anniversary of his election Monday, far outpacing the “two or three” years he once envisioned for his papacy and showing no signs of slowing down.

On the contrary, with an agenda full of problems and plans and no longer encumbered by the shadow of Pope Benedict XVI, Francis, 86, has backed off from talking about retiring and recently described the papacy as a job for life.

History’s first Latin American pope already has made his mark and could have even more impact in the years to come. Yet a decade ago, the Argentine Jesuit was so convinced he wouldn’t be elected as pope that he nearly missed the final vote as he chatted with a fellow cardinal outside the Sistine Chapel.

“The master of ceremonies came out and said, ‘Are you going in or not?'” Francis recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I realized afterward that it was my unconscious resistance to going in.”

He was elected the 266th pope on the next ballot.

Sex abuse

Francis had a big learning curve on clergy sex abuse, initially downplaying the problem in ways that made survivors question whether he “got it.” He had his wake-up call five years into his pontificate after a problematic visit to Chile.

During the trip, he discovered a serious disconnect between what Chilean bishops had told him about a notorious case and the reality: Hundreds or thousands of Chilean faithful had been raped and molested by Catholic priests over decades.

“That was my conversion,” he told the AP. “That’s when the bomb went off, when I saw the corruption of many bishops in this.”

Francis has passed a series of measures since then aimed at holding the church hierarchy accountable, but the results have been mixed. Benedict removed some 800 priests, but Francis seems far less eager to defrock abusers, reflecting resistance within the hierarchy to efforts to permanently remove predators from the priesthood.

The next frontier in the crisis has already reared its head: the sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse of adults by clergy. Francis is aware of the problem — a new case concerns one of his fellow Jesuits — but there seems to be no will to take firm action.

Significance of synods

When the history of the Francis pontificate is written, entire chapters might well be devoted to his emphasis on “synodality,” a term that has little meaning outside Catholic circles but could go down as one of Francis’ most important church contributions.

A synod is a gathering of bishops, and Francis’ philosophy that bishops must listen to one another and the laity has come to define his vision for the Catholic Church: He wants it to be a place where the faithful are welcomed, accompanied and heard.

The synods held during his first 10 years produced some of the most significant, and controversial, moments of his papacy.

After listening to the plight of divorced Catholics during a 2014-15 synod on the family, for instance, Francis opened the door to letting divorced and civilly remarried couples receive Communion. Calls to allow married priests marked his 2019 synod on the Amazon, although Francis ultimately rejected the idea.

His October synod has involved an unprecedented canvassing of the Catholic faithful about their hopes for the church and problems they have encountered, eliciting demands from women for greater leadership roles, including ordination.

Latin Mass

Catholic traditionalists were wary when Francis emerged as pope for the first time on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica without the red cape that his predecessors had worn for formal events. Yet they never expected him to reverse one of Benedict’s signature decisions by reimposing restrictions on the old Latin Mass, including where and who can celebrate it.

While the decision directly affected only a fraction of Catholic Mass-goers, his crackdown on the Tridentine Rite became the call to arms for the anti-Francis conservative opposition.

Francis justified his move by saying Benedict’s decision to liberalize the celebration of the old Mass had become a source of division in parishes. But traditionalists took the renewed restrictions as an attack on orthodoxy, one that they saw as contradicting Francis’ “all are welcome” mantra.

“Instead of integrating them into parish life, the restriction on the use of parish churches will marginalize and push to the peripheries faithful Catholics who wish only to worship,” lamented Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society’s U.K. branch.

While the short-term prospects for Francis relenting are not great, the traditionalists do have time on their side, knowing that in a 2,000-year-old institution, another pope might come along who is more friendly to the old rite.

Role of women

Francis’ quips about the “female genius” have long made women cringe. Women theologians are the “strawberries on the cake,” he once said. Nuns shouldn’t be “old maids,” he said. Europe shouldn’t be a barren, infertile “grandmother,” he told European Union lawmakers — a remark that got him an angry phone call from then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But it’s also true that Francis has done more to promote women in the church than any pope before him, including naming several women to high-profile positions in the Vatican.

That’s not saying much given only one in four Holy See employees is female, no woman heads a dicastery, or department, and Francis has upheld church doctrine forbidding women from the priesthood.

But the trend is there and “there is no possibility of going back,” said María Lía Zervino, one of the first three women named to the Vatican office that helps the pope select bishops around the world.

LGBTQ faithful

Francis’ insistence that long-marginalized LGBTQ Catholics can find a welcome home in the church can be summed up by two pronouncements that have bookended his papacy to date: “Who am I to judge?” and “Being homosexual is not a crime.”

In between making those historic statements, Francis made outreach to LGBTQ people a hallmark of his papacy more than any pope before him.

He ministers to members of a transgender community in Rome. He has counseled gay couples seeking to raise their children Catholic. During a 2015 visit to the U.S., he publicized a private meeting with a gay former student and the man’s partner to counter the conservative narrative that he had received an anti-same-sex marriage activist.

“The pope is reminding the church that the way people treat one another in the social world is of much greater moral importance that what people may possibly do in the privacy of a bedroom,” said Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for greater acceptance of LGBTQ Catholics.
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Dozens of vehicles collided in a pileup in Hungary, causing numerous injuries and setting several of the vehicles on fire Saturday.

Police said the collision, which involved five tractor-trailers and 37 other vehicles, occurred on the M1 highway around 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Budapest, Hungary’s capital.

The pileup caused 19 vehicles to catch fire and resulted in 36 injuries, including one that was life-threatening and 13 that were serious, police said.

Hungary’s National Directorate for Disaster Protection said in a statement that the fires had been extinguished and that four rescue helicopters as well as fire and rescue teams from numerous nearby cities had arrived at the scene to treat the injured.

Authorities blocked traffic in both directions of the M1 as recovery and cleanup operations continued into the evening.

National ambulance service spokesperson Pal Gyorfi declined to give a potential cause of the accident, according to Hungarian TV station M1.

The operator of Hungary’s highways, the Hungarian Concession Infrastructure Development Plc., wrote in a Facebook post that a localized dust storm may have caused a sudden reduction in visibility.
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It was called Silicon Valley Bank, but its collapse is causing shockwaves around the world.

From winemakers in California to startups across the Atlantic Ocean, companies are scrambling to figure out how to manage their finances after their bank suddenly shut down Friday. The meltdown means distress not only for businesses but also for their workers whose paychecks could get tied up in the chaos.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said Saturday that he’s talking with the White House to help “stabilize the situation as quickly as possible, to protect jobs, people’s livelihoods, and the entire innovation ecosystem that has served as a tent pole for our economy.”

U.S. customers with less than $250,000 in the bank can count on insurance provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Regulators are trying to find a buyer for the bank in hopes customers with more than that can be made whole.

That includes customers such as Circle, a big player in the cryptocurrency industry. It said it has about $3.3 billion of the roughly $40 billion in reserves for its USDC coin at SVB. That caused USD Coin’s value, which tries to stay firmly at $1, to briefly plunge below 87 cents Saturday. It later rose back above 97 cents, according to CoinDesk.

Across the Atlantic, startup companies woke up Saturday to find SVB’s U.K. business will stop making payments or accepting deposits. The Bank of England said late Friday that it will put Silicon Valley Bank U.K. in its insolvency procedure, which will pay out eligible depositors up to 170,000 British pounds ($204,544) for joint accounts “as quickly as possible.”

“We know that there are a large number of startups and investors in the ecosystem who have significant exposure to SVB UK and will be very concerned,” Dom Hallas, executive director of Coadec, which represents British startups, said on Twitter. He cited “concern and panic.”

The Bank of England said SVB UK’s assets would be sold to pay creditors.

It’s not just startups feeling the pain. The bank’s collapse is having an effect on another important California industry: fine wines. It’s been an influential lender to vineyards since the 1990s.

“This is a huge disappointment,” said winemaker Jasmine Hirsch, the general manager of Hirsch Vineyards in California’s Sonoma County.

Hirsch said she expects her business will be fine. But she’s worried about the broader effects for smaller vintners looking for lines of credit to plant new vines.

“They really understand the wine business,” Hirsch said. “The disappearance of this bank, as one of the most important lenders, is absolutely going to have an effect on the wine industry, especially in an environment where interest rates have gone up.”

In Seattle, Shelf Engine CEO Stefan Kalb found himself immersed in emergency meetings devoted to figuring out how to meet payroll instead of focusing on his startup company’s business of helping grocers manage their food orders.

“It’s been a brutal day. We literally have every single penny in Silicon Valley Bank,” Kalb said Friday, pegging the deposit amount that’s now tied up at millions of dollars.

He is filing a claim for the $250,000 limit, but that won’t be enough to keep paying Shelf Engine’s 40 employees for long. That could force him into a decision about whether to begin furloughing employees until the mess is cleaned up.

“I’m just hoping the bank gets sold during the weekend,” Kalb said.

Tara Fung, co-founder and CEO of tech startup Co:Create that helps launch digital loyalty and rewards programs, said her firm uses multiple banks besides Silicon Valley Bank so was able switch over its payroll and vendor payments to another bank Friday.

Fung said her firm chose the bank as a partner because it is the “gold standard for tech firms and banking partnerships,” and she was upset that some people seemed to be gloating about its failure and unfairly tying it to doubts about cryptocurrency ventures.

San Francisco-based employee performance management company Confirm.com was among the Silicon Valley Bank depositors that rushed to pull their money out before regulators seized the bank.

Co-founder David Murray credits an email from one of Confirm’s venture capital investors, which urged the company to withdraw its funds “immediately,” citing signs of a run on the bank. Such actions accelerated the flight of cash, which led to the bank’s collapse.

“I think a lot of founders were sharing the logic that, you know, there’s no downside to pulling up the money to be safe,” Murray said. “And so, we all did that, hence the bank run.”

The U.S. government needs to act more quickly to stanch further damage, said Martín Varsavsky, an Argentinian entrepreneur who has investments across the tech industry and Silicon Valley.

One of his companies, Overture Life, which employs about 50 people, had some $1.5 million in deposits in the financially embattled bank but can rely on other holdings elsewhere to meet payroll.

But other companies have high percentages of their cash in Silicon Valley Bank, and they need access to more than the amount protected by the FDIC.

“If the government allows people to take at least half of the money they have in Silicon Valley Bank next week, I think everything will be fine,” Varsavsky said Saturday. “But if they stick to the $250,000, it will be an absolute disaster in which so many companies won’t be able to meet payroll.”
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Iran has reached a deal to buy advanced Su-35 fighter planes from Russia, Iranian state media said on Saturday, expanding a relationship that has seen Iranian-built drones used in Russia’s war on Ukraine.

“The Sukhoi-35 fighter planes are technically acceptable to Iran, and Iran has finalized a contract for their purchase,” the broadcaster IRIB quoted Iran’s mission to the United Nations as saying in New York.

The report did not carry any Russian confirmation of the deal, details of which were not disclosed. The mission said Iran had also inquired about buying military aircraft from several other, unnamed countries, IRIB reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran last July, stressing closer ties in the face of Western pressure over the war in Ukraine.  

Iran has acknowledged sending drones to Russia but says they were sent before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Moscow denies that its forces use Iranian-built drones in Ukraine, although many have been shot down and recovered there.

Iran’s air force has only a few dozen strike aircraft: Russian jets, as well as aging U.S. models acquired before the Iranian revolution of 1979.

In 2018, Iran said it had started production of the locally designed Kowsar fighter for use in its air force. Some military experts believe the jet is a carbon copy of an F-5 first produced in the United States in the 1960s.
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Russia is trying to buy “anything, anywhere”—including from Southeast Asian countries like Myanmar to get weapons for its invasion of Ukraine—according to the head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence Kyrylo Budanov.

In a recent interview with VOA, the top Ukrainian intelligence official said, “There are certain efforts to buy through third countries. Large-scale withdrawal of weapons. Now they are trying with Myanmar.”

The Myanmar junta has denied the accusation. A spokesperson for the Myanmar junta, Major General Zaw Min Tun, told VOA Burmese by phone on Wednesday, “Russia is a country that sells weapons to the world. That kind of accusation is impossible and illogical.” He declined to offer any further comment on the subject.

Yadanar Maung, spokesperson for the human rights advocacy group Justice for Myanmar — also known as JFM — said in a statement to VOA, “The Myanmar junta and the Russian regime are key allies, complicit in each other’s atrocity crimes. The junta supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has openly offered Myanmar as a base for Russian business to access Asian markets, which bypasses sanctions.”

JFM says it has been monitoring what it says is a close relationship between Russia and the Myanmar junta since the coup in February 2021. The group identified 19 Russian businesses that should be sanctioned for supplying arms and equipment to the Myanmar military in its report of March 2022. 

During a visit by the Myanmar junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing to Russia last July, one of several trips he has made there since the 2021 coup in his country, Russia and Myanmar declared they were deepening their defense cooperation. A press statement by Russia’s Defense Ministry on July 12, 2022, read that “the meeting [between Myanmar’s military leader, Min Aung Hlaing and top Russian defense officials] … confirmed the mutual disposition to consistently build up multifaceted cooperation between the military departments of the two countries.”

VOA recently reported on the junta’s renewed nuclear energy ties with Russia raising concerns in the region and globally.

Russian munitions

In an assessment on Russia, the Pentagon stated that after more than a year of fighting in Ukraine and facing strong sanctions from the West, Russia would run out of serviceable ammunition sometime in 2023.

Testifying on Wednesday in Washington before the Senate Intelligence Committee, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines argued that Russia lacks the troops and ammunition to make major advances this year. “If Russia does not initiate a mandatory mobilization and identify substantial third-party ammunition supplies, it will be increasingly challenging for them to sustain the current level of offensive operations in the coming months.”

Haines also said at the Reagan National Defense Forum last December, “Russia doesn’t have enough ability to replace those weapons on its own.”

According to reporting this month by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Kremlin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a co-founder and owner of the mercenary group Wagner, also indicated problems with the ammunition supply. “I am worried about ammunition and the ammunition hunger not only as far as Wagner goes, but all the units of the Russian Army.”

As of last September, the Russian military was still capable of producing “a lot of ammunition,” said a top NATO military adviser, despite being hampered by Western sanctions. However, “some of the components they need for their weapon systems come from the Western industry,” said Rob Bauer, chair of NATO Military Committee.

There are reports that Russia continues to buy weapons and ammunition from countries such as Iran and North Korea; however, the Iranian government, a close ally of Russia, denied this, stating that Iran “has not and will not” provide weapons to be used in the invasion of Ukraine.

“For Russia, almost the only country that actually supplies more or less serious weapons is Iran,” Budanov told VOA. “There was information that something was coming from North Korea, but we have no confirmation of that.”

“Russia is just trying to buy anything, anywhere,” he said. “Because their problems are significant. Serbia, which everyone in Russia hoped for, refused to supply weapons. There are certain efforts to buy through third countries. Large-scale withdrawal of weapons. Now they are trying with Myanmar, we will see what will come of it in time.”

Myanmar opposition concerns

Myanmar’s shadow civilian government, the National Unity Government, also known as NUG, has expressed concern about a “possible collaboration between Russia and [the] Myanmar army on the war in Ukraine,” Kyaw Zaw, a spokesperson for the NUG president’s office, told VOA via zoom.

“We think that Russia might use the Myanmar army and its cronies as middlemen to buy weapons from other countries because the Myanmar military does not have [the] ability to support arms for the Russian army,” he said.

“Despite the Western countries targeting sanctions against the Burmese military regime,” Kyaw Zaw said, “they are weak and ineffective due to loopholes, which Russia and the Myanmar military might be trying to exploit through cooperation.”

Responding to a question about whether China or India may be working through Myanmar to send arms and ammunition to Russia, he said, “There is no good reason for our government, the NUG, to accept a situation where Myanmar is being used to compete with powerful countries.”

Regarding the potential for Myanmar to be implicated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kyaw Zaw told VOA, “We are concerned about the news. We [are] worried the move may affect our country, as well as regional stability and global peace and security.”

Western countries, including the U.S., have raised concerns over the potential arming of Russia through its geostrategic partnership with China. However, “China had declared it won’t supply Russia with weapons for its war against Ukraine,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during his news conference with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in Berlin earlier this month. He suggested that Berlin has received bilateral assurances from Beijing on the issue.

JFM recently published a report about India’s exports of weapons to the Myanmar army.

The report states that the Indian state-owned arms company, “Yantra’s exports of 122mm barrels to Myanmar follows several other known exports of weapons and weapons components from Indian companies after the Myanmar military’s attempted coup, including exports of fuses and a remote-controlled weapon station.”

“Russia remains a major supplier of arms to the junta,” JFM’s Maung told VOA. “If Russia is exploring using the junta to help it resupply arms for its war in Ukraine, it shows yet again how the junta is a threat to the world that requires a global response.”
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More than 1,000 migrants were brought ashore to southern Italy on Saturday after coastguards launched major rescue operations for three boats struggling in rough seas off Calabria.

One coastguard vessel brought 584 people to the city of Reggio Calabria, while another escorted a packed fishing boat carrying 487 migrants into the port of Crotone, close to the scene of a February 26 shipwreck that killed at least 74 people.  

Local officials said a further 200 migrants had been picked up off the coast of Sicily and would be ferried to Catania later in the day.

More than 4,000 people have reached Italy since Wednesday, compared to about 1,300 for the whole of March last year, as the country’s conservative government struggles to contain the influx, despite repeated promises to stem the flow.

The coastguard dispatched eight boats on Friday to various rescue operations, while a naval patrol boat was also called in to prevent any repeat of last month’s disaster, when a migrant ship broke apart a stone’s throw from the Calabrian coast.

The body of a young girl was recovered on Saturday, bringing the death toll to 74. Seventy-nine people survived the shipwreck, but around 30 are still missing, presumed dead.  

Prosecutors are investigating whether Italian authorities should have done more to prevent the disaster. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has rejected the suggestion and looked to pin the blame entirely on human traffickers.

Her cabinet on Thursday introduced tougher jail terms for people smugglers and promised to open up more channels for legal migration. Late last year, it cracked down on charity rescue boats, accusing them of acting as a taxi service for migrants.

The measure has led to a sharp reduction in the number of rescue ships patrolling off North Africa, where the majority of the migrants set sail.

Departures have nonetheless picked up dramatically, however, with roughly 17,000 migrants reaching Italy by boat so far this year against some 6,000 in the same period of 2022.
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The BBC faced an escalating crisis Saturday over its suspension of former soccer star and program host Gary Lineker for comments criticizing the British government’s new asylum policy.

As a growing number of players and presenters rallied to Lineker’s support, Britain’s national broadcaster faced allegations of political bias and suppressing free speech, as well as praise from some Conservative politicians.

Presenters of the BBC’s lunchtime “Football Focus” and early evening “Final Score” said they would not appear on the programs in solidarity with Lineker, who was suspended from hosting the popular late-night highlights show “Match of the Day” over a Twitter post that compared lawmakers’ language about migrants to that used in Nazi Germany.

The BBC pulled “Football Focus” from its schedule Saturday, replacing it with an episode of antiques show “Bargain Hunt.” One of the network’s radio stations, 5 Live, did not air one of its lunchtime shows after a presenter withdrew from hosting. It was replaced with pre-recorded content.

After a slew of Lineker’s colleagues announced they wouldn’t appear on the show without him, the BBC said “Match of the Day” would be aired Saturday without presenters or pundits.

There will not be any post-match player interviews, either. The Professional Footballers’ Association said some players wanted to boycott the show as a gesture of support, and as a result “players involved in today’s games will not be asked to participate in interviews with ‘Match of The Day.’”

The union said it was a “common sense solution” to avoid players facing sanctions for breaching their broadcast commitments.

Play-by-play commentators scheduled to work games Saturday also said they would not do so.

“Match of the Day,” which is broadcast Saturday nights and shows highlights of Premier League games played that day, has been a national institution since the 1960s. Lineker, its chief presenter since 1999, is the network’s highest-paid star, as well as one of English soccer’s most lauded players.

Lineker, whose club career included spells with Barcelona, Tottenham, Everton and Leicester, was the leading scorer at the 1986 World Cup and finished his international career with 48 goals in 80 matches for England.

The controversy began with a tweet Tuesday from Lineker’s account — which has 8.7 million followers — describing the government’s plan to detain and deport migrants arriving by boat as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.”

The Conservative government called Lineker’s Nazi comparison offensive and unacceptable, and some lawmakers said he should be fired.

On Friday, the BBC said the 62-year-old Lineker would “step back” from “Match of the Day” until “we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media.” Lineker has yet to comment publicly.

The 100-year-old BBC, which is funded by a license fee paid by all households with a television, has a duty to be impartial in its news coverage, and BBC news staff are barred from expressing political opinions.

Lineker, as a freelancer who doesn’t work in news or current affairs, isn’t bound by the same rules, and has sometimes pushed the boundaries of what the BBC considers acceptable. Last year, the BBC found Lineker had breached impartiality rules with a tweet about the Conservatives’ alleged Russian donations.

BBC neutrality has come under recent scrutiny over revelations that its chairman, Richard Sharp — a Conservative Party donor — helped arrange a loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021, weeks before Sharp was appointed to the BBC post on the government’s recommendation.

Former BBC Director-General Greg Dyke said the network had “undermined its own credibility” by appearing to bow to government pressure.

“The perception out there is going to be that Gary Lineker, a much-loved television presenter, was taken off air after government pressure on a particular issue,” Dyke told BBC radio.

Keir Starmer, leader of the main opposition Labour Party, said the BBC was “caving in” to political pressure from Conservative lawmakers.

“They got this one badly wrong and now they’re very, very exposed,” he said.
…

Russia’s Wagner Group is in control of the eastern portion of the Ukranian Donbas town of Bakhmut, while Ukranian forces are holding on to the western part of the town, according to an intelligence report Saturday from the British Defense Ministry.

With Ukranian forces firing from fortified buildings, the update said, “this area has become a killing zone likely making it highly challenging for Wagner forces attempting to continue their frontal assault westwards.”

The Defense Ministry said, however, that the Ukrainian forces and their supply lines to the west remain vulnerable to Russian attempts to outflank Ukraine forces from the north and south.

Moscow has said capturing Bakhmut is a step toward the Russian military seizing all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Ukraine’s capital had largely restored power Friday, a day after Russia fired a barrage of missiles across the country, which damaged infrastructure and energy supplies.

The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Serhii Popko, said power and water had been restored in the capital, but said about 30% of city residents were still without heat. He said repair work was continuing.

Ukrainian authorities said that power was fully restored in the southern region of Odesa and that 60% of residences in the second-largest city of Kharkiv that suffered power outages were back online by Friday.

However, authorities said that significant damage to power supplies remained in the wider Kharkiv region, as well as in Ukraine’s northwestern Zhytomyr region.

Russia’s missile attacks killed at least six people Thursday in Ukraine and damaged critical infrastructure across the country.

It was the largest such attack on Ukraine in three weeks, with Ukrainian forces saying they shot down 34 of the 81 missiles that Russia fired, far less than the usual ratio, as well as four Iranian-made drones. The Russian onslaught also included the use of hypersonic Kinzhal cruise missiles.

While missile salvos have become a common Russian military tactic, such onslaughts have also become less frequent since the fall.

The British Defense Ministry said Friday that the interval between such strikes will likely grow. It said Russia needs time “to stockpile a critical mass of newly produced missiles directly from industry before it can resource a strike big enough to credibly overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.”

The Russian Defense Ministry said the attacks were in retaliation for an alleged Ukrainian attack on the Bryansk region of western Russia. Ukraine has denied carrying out the assault.

Moscow said it hit military and industrial targets in Ukraine Thursday “as well as the energy facilities that supply them.”

In other developments Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended the funeral in Kyiv of one of Ukraine’s best-known fighters and commanders who died in fighting near Bakhmut. Dmytro Kotsiubailo, 27, was killed a few days ago in battle.

Western support

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, who made an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Friday, also attended the funeral of Kotsiubailo, along with thousands of mourners.

During a news conference in Kyiv, the Finnish leader accused Russia of carrying out war crimes and said Russian leaders must be held accountable.

“Putin knows he will have to answer for his crime of aggression,” Marin said.

Russia has denied deliberately targeting civilians or carrying out war crimes.

Also Friday, the White House accused Russia of stirring unrest in Moldova.

White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said U.S. intelligence shows that individuals with ties to Russian intelligence are planning to stage protests in Moldova in the hopes of toppling that country’s pro-Western government.

“As Moldova continues to integrate with Europe, we believe Russia is pursuing options to weaken the Moldovan government probably with the eventual goal of seeing a more Russian-friendly administration in the capital,” Kirby said.

Moldova is a western neighbor to Ukraine. Like Ukraine, the country was once part of the Soviet Union and has had to navigate both historic ties to Russia as well as recent moves toward Europe, including ambitions of joining the European Union.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
…

After Russia invaded Ukraine, guerrillas from Belarus began carrying out acts of sabotage on their country’s railways, including blowing up track equipment to paralyze the rails that Russian forces used to get troops and weapons into Ukraine.

In the most recent sabotage to make international headlines, they attacked a Russian warplane parked just outside the Belarusian capital.

“Belarusians will not allow the Russians to freely use our territory for the war with Ukraine, and we want to force them to leave,” Anton, a retired Belarusian serviceman who joined a group of saboteurs, told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

“The Russians must understand on whose side the Belarusians are actually fighting,” he said, speaking on the condition that his last name be withheld for security reasons.

More than a year after Russia used the territory of its neighbor and ally to invade Ukraine, Belarus continues to host Russian troops, as well as warplanes, missiles and other weapons. The Belarusian opposition condemns the cooperation, and a guerrilla movement sprang up to disrupt the Kremlin’s operations, both on the ground and online. Meanwhile, Belarus’ authoritarian government is trying to crack down on saboteurs with threats of the death penalty and long prison terms.

Activists say the rail attacks have forced the Russian military to abandon the use of trains to send troops and materiel to Ukraine.

The retired serviceman is a member of the Association of Security Forces of Belarus, or BYPOL, a guerrilla group founded amid mass political protests in Belarus in 2020. Its core is composed of former military members.

During the first year of the war, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko realized that getting involved in the conflict “will cost him a lot and will ignite dangerous processes inside Belarus,” said Anton Matolka, coordinator of the Belarusian military monitoring group Belaruski Hajun.

Last month, BYPOL claimed responsibility for a drone attack on a Russian warplane stationed near the Belarusian capital. The group said it used two armed drones to damage the Beriev A-50 parked at the Machulishchy Air Base near Minsk. Belarusian authorities have said they requested the early warning aircraft to monitor their border.

Lukashenko acknowledged the attack a week later, saying that the damage to the plane was insignificant, but admitting it had to be sent to Russia for repairs.

The iron-fisted leader also said the perpetrator of the attack was arrested along with more than 20 accomplices and that he has ties to Ukrainian security services.

Both BYPOL and Ukrainian authorities rejected allegations that Kyiv was involved. BYPOL leader Aliaksandr Azarau said the people who carried out the assault were able to leave Belarus safely.

“We are not familiar with the person Lukashenko talked about,” he said.

The attack on the plane, which Azarau said was used to help Russia locate Ukrainian air defense systems, was “an attempt to blind Russian military aviation in Belarus.”

He said the group is preparing other operations to free Belarus “from the Russian occupation” and to free Belarus from Lukashenko’s regime.

“We have a two-headed enemy these days,” said Azarau, who remains outside Belarus.

Former military officers in the BYPOL group work closely with the team of Belarus’ exiled opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran against Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential election that was widely seen as rigged.

The disputed vote results handed him his sixth term in office and triggered the largest protests in the country’s history. In response, Lukashenko unleashed a brutal crackdown on demonstrators, accusing the opposition of plotting to overthrow the government. Tsikhanouskaya fled to Lithuania under pressure.

With the protests still simmering a year after the election, BYPOL created an underground network of anti-government activists dubbed Peramoha, or Victory. According to Azarau, the network has some 200,000 participants, two-thirds of them in Belarus.

“Lukashenko has something to be afraid of,” Azarau said.

Belarusian guerrillas say they have already carried out 17 major acts of sabotage on railways. The first took place just two days after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine.

A month later, then-Ukrainian railways head Oleksandr Kamyshin said there “was no longer any railway traffic between Ukraine and Belarus,” and thanked Belarusian guerrillas for it.

Another group of guerrillas operates in cyberspace. Their coordinator, Yuliana Shametavets, said some 70 Belarusian IT specialists are hacking into Russian government databases and attacking websites of Russian and Belarusian state institutions.

“The future of Belarus depends directly on the military success of Ukraine,” Shametavets said. “We’re trying to contribute to Ukraine’s victory as best we can.”

Last month, the cyberguerrillas reported hacking a subsidiary of Russia’s state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor. They said they were able to penetrate the subsidiary’s inner network, download more than two terabytes of documents and emails, and share data showing how Russian authorities censor information about the war in Ukraine.

They also hacked into Belarus’ state database containing information about border crossings and are now preparing a report on Ukrainian citizens who were recruited by Russia and went to meet with their handlers in Belarus.

In addition, the cyberguerrillas help vet Belarusians who volunteer to join the Kastus Kalinouski regiment that fights alongside Kyiv’s forces. Shametovets said they were able to identify four security operatives among the applicants.

Belarusian authorities have unleashed a crackdown on guerrillas.

Last May, Lukashenko signed off on introducing the death penalty for attempted terrorist acts. Last month, the Belarusian parliament also adopted the death penalty as punishment for high treason. Lukashenko signed the measure Thursday.

“Belarusian authorities are seriously scared by the scale of the guerrilla movement inside the country and don’t know what to do with it, so they chose harsh repressions, intimidation and fear as the main tool,” said Pavel Sapelka of the Viasna human rights group.

Dozens have been arrested, while many others have fled the country.

Siarhei Vaitsekhovich runs a Telegram blog where he regularly posts about Russian drills in Belarus and the deployment of Russian military equipment and troops to the country. He had to leave Belarus after authorities began investigating him on charges of treason and forming an extremist group.

Vaitsekhovich said his 15-year-old brother was recently detained in an effort to pressure him to take the blog down and cooperate with the security services.

The Russian Federal Security Service “is very unhappy with the fact that information about movements of Russian military equipment spills out into public domain,” Vaitsekhovich said.

According to Viasna, over the past 12 months at least 1,575 Belarusians have been detained for their anti-war stance, and 56 have been convicted on various charges and sentenced to prison terms ranging from a year to 23 years.

Anton says he understands the risks. On one of the railway attacks he worked with three associates who were each sentenced in November to more than 20 years in prison.

“It is hard to say who is in a more difficult position — a Ukrainian in a trench or a Belarusian on a stakeout,” he said.
…

U.S. President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Friday sought to minimize differences over a Washington plans to subsidize American companies — a concept that has frustrated many in Europe. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
…

Russia’s repeated use of advanced hypersonic missiles as part of its bombardment of Ukraine may be getting the bulk of the West’s attention, but United States defense officials say it is China that has the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal.

“While both China and Russia have conducted numerous successful tests of hypersonic weapons and have likely fielded operational systems, China is leading Russia in both supporting infrastructure and numbers of systems,” the Defense Intelligence Agency’s chief scientist for science and technology told U.S. lawmakers Friday.

“Over the past two decades, China has dramatically advanced its development of conventional and nuclear-armed hypersonic missile technologies and capabilities through intense and focused investment, development, testing and deployment,” said the DIA’s Paul Freisthler, testifying in front of the House Armed Services Committee.

Unlike ballistic missiles, which fly at hypersonic speeds but travel along a set trajectory, hypersonic weapons are highly maneuverable despite flying at Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound.

According to U.S. defense officials, that high-speed maneuverability makes hypersonic weapons especially difficult to detect and, therefore, difficult to stop.

According to the DIA and information gathered by the Congressional Research Service, China operates two research sites for hypersonic weapons, with at least 21 wind tunnels. Some of the wind tunnels can test vehicles flying at speeds of up to Mach 12.

China’s hypersonic arsenal includes the DF-17, a medium-range ballistic missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle that has a range of 1,600 kilometers.

It also has the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, which also carries a hypersonic glide vehicle. During a test of the system in July 2021, the hypersonic weapon circumnavigated the globe, prompting a top U.S. defense official to compare the incident to the start of the original space race in the 1950s.

Beijing also has the DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle, with a range of close to 2,000 kilometers, and the Starry Sky-2, a nuclear capable hypersonic prototype.

Russia’s missile attack against Ukraine on Friday included about six of Moscow’s hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. The Kinzhal travels at speeds of up to Mach 10 and has a range of about 2,000 kilometers.

Russia also has the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which it claims can travel at speeds of more than Mach 20 with a range of more than 10,000 kilometers, and the ship-launched Zircon hypersonic missile, with a top speed of Mach 8 and a range of 1,000 kilometers.

The DIA’s Freisthler said Friday that Moscow is also developing an air-launched hypersonic missile (the Kh-95) and has announced plans to place a hypersonic glide vehicle on its Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile.

The U.S. military has been developing a range of hypersonic weapons, all of which are still in testing or development. Officials have said that, unlike China and Russia, Washington has no plans to arm any of its hypersonic weapons with a nuclear warhead.
…

Former England soccer captain Gary Lineker has been taken off the air by the BBC after his comments on Britain’s migration policy sparked a furious spat between the government and the corporation’s highest-paid presenter.

Lineker was told there has to be an agreement on his use of social media before he can return, the BBC said on Friday.

BBC Director General Tim Davie said it had taken “proportionate action.”

The dispute overshadowed a migration deal struck between British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron, with the BBC accused of bowing to political pressure.

On Tuesday, Britain announced details of a new law stating that migrants arriving in small boats across the English Channel would be prevented from claiming asylum and deported either back to their homeland or to so-called safe third countries.

It drew criticism from opposition parties, charities and the United Nations’ refugee agency for its impact on refugees.

Lineker, who has previously hosted refugees in his home, retweeted a post featuring a video of Interior Minister Suella Braverman talking about the law, with the comment “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.”

Challenged by a respondent, he said: “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

Lineker faced a backlash to his comments, which were criticized by Sunak’s spokeswoman as “not acceptable,” but said he would “continue to try and speak up for those poor souls that have no voice.”

The BBC said after talks with Lineker and his team that it had decided he would step back from presenting its flagship “Match of the Day (MOTD)” soccer highlights program “until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media.”

After four of the show’s regular pundits, former England players Ian Wright, Alan Shearer, Jermaine Jenas and Micah Richards, said they did not wish to appear on the program without Lineker, the BBC said Saturday’s edition would “focus on match action without studio presentation or punditry.”

“Gary Lineker off air is an assault on free speech in the face of political pressure,” the opposition Labour Party said, calling for the BBC to rethink its decision.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the BBC’s move “indefensible.”

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: “Individual cases are a matter for the BBC.”

Lineker has hosted “MOTD” for more than 20 years, and the charismatic 62-year-old has never been afraid to voice his opinions about political issues.

But the BBC said it considered his recent social media activity to be a breach of its guidelines.

“We have never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone, or that he can’t have a view on issues that matter to him, but we have said that he should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies,” it added.

The BBC, funded by what is in effect a $192 (159 pounds) annual “license fee” tax on all television-watching households, has a central presence in British cultural life. It says it is committed to being politically impartial.

Last year the BBC’s complaints unit ruled Lineker had failed to meet editorial standards on impartiality when he sent a tweet asking whether the governing Conservative Party would give back money from Russian donors.

BBC Chair Richard Sharp is under pressure for failing to declare his involvement in facilitating a loan for former Prime Minister Boris Johnson shortly before he was appointed to the role. His appointment, made on the recommendation of the government, is now being reviewed by Britain’s public appointments watchdog.
…

Britain will pay France around 480 million pounds ($577 million) over three years to try to stop migrants traveling in small boats across the English Channel as the two allies took a major step Friday to end years of bickering in the post-Brexit era.

At a summit designed to rebuild ties, French President Emmanuel Macron greeted British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with smiles and mutual backslapping before they agreed to work more closely together.

Describing it as a “moment to reconnect,” Macron said at a joint news conference that relations had been strained by Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Sunak said the time had come for a new relationship, an “entente renewed,” a reference to the Entente Cordiale of the early 20th century that had smoothed over diplomatic relations between the European powerhouses.

“If we are honest the relationship between our two countries has had its challenges in recent years,” Sunak said. “Today we have taken cooperation to an unprecedented level.”

The two agreed to move forward on nuclear energy cooperation, reaffirmed their backing for Ukraine and vowed to strengthen inter-operability of their military forces, including through the development of future missiles and air defense systems.

But for Sunak, migration was the focus as he looked to tout the deal as another achievement after agreeing to new terms with Brussels on Northern Ireland in February.

In office since October, he has made stopping small boats a priority after the number of migrants arriving on the south coast of England soared to more than 45,000 last year, up 500% in the last two years.

He has proposed new legislation to bar those arriving in small boats from claiming asylum, but for this he needs France’s cooperation to intercept the boats and break the people-trafficking rings behind the flow of arrivals from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and others.

As part of the new deal, Britain will help fund a detention center in France while Paris will deploy more French personnel and enhanced technology to patrol its beaches. Officers from both countries will also look to work with countries along the routes favored by people traffickers.

A British official said London was contributing 30 million euros over three years for the detention center, with the official adding that detained migrants would be sent back to their home countries if they were safe, or to the last country they transited through if their home countries were unsafe.

Firming ties from energy to Ukraine

“We will develop operational needs and will reinforce coordination,” Macron said, while adding that to go further and address the issue of whether migrants could be returned to France would require agreement across the whole bloc.

While the number of applications for asylum in the United Kingdom hit a 20-year high of nearly 75,000 in 2022, it was still below the European Union average. And many EU members are themselves at odds over how to handle migrants, and whether they should be returned to the first EU country they arrived in.

The meeting was the first summit of Europe’s two biggest military and nuclear powers – both permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – in five years.

Ties between the two counties have been strained by Brexit, and were particularly difficult during the British premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, with Truss at one point declining to say whether Macron was a “friend or foe.”

Sunak and Macron struck up a personal rapport at the COP27 summit in Egypt in November during their first face-to-face meeting, two weeks after Sunak became prime minister, with their warm relationship labeled “Le Bromance” in British newspapers.

The two former investment bankers, who offered each other Rugby Union shirts ahead of a crunch Six Nations match in London on Saturday, were accompanied by seven ministers on each side in Paris and met business leaders from both countries to deepen their economic relationship.

Energy partnerships

British energy supplier Octopus Energy said after the summit that it would invest 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in the French green energy market over the next two years, while the countries signed two energy partnerships, emphasizing nuclear power as a secure source of low-carbon energy.

“France and the U.K. are working together so that never again can the likes of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin weaponize our energy security,” Sunak said.

With the war in Ukraine, it was also an opportunity for two of Kyiv’s biggest backers to reaffirm their support.

Both leaders emphasized that for now it was imperative to ramp up military support for Ukraine and train its forces to give it an edge on the battlefield and put it in the best position for the day when talks to end the war begin.

“The priority is [the] military,” Macron said.
…

In a dramatic turn of events, Georgian lawmakers have voted to drop a controversial “foreign agents” bill just days after its first reading sparked massive protests over fears the legislation, which mirrored a similar law in Russia, and would have severely restricted dissent and the activity of civil society groups in the country and push it toward authoritarianism. 

Parliament on March 10 voted in the second reading of the draft, a day after the ruling Georgian Dream party announced it was withdrawing the proposed legislation in the face of the protests. 

Lawmakers voted 35-1 against the bill, thus canceling it. The legislation can be brought back within 30 days, but only if it contains changes. 

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of the Georgian capital over the legislation, and another gathering is planned for March 10, though it is likely to be more celebratory than protest. 

Police had met the demonstrators with tear gas, stun grenades, and water cannons while detaining dozens. 

Georgia’s Interior Ministry said on March 10 that all 133 people who were detained during the protests had been released. It added that almost 60 police officers were injured in clashes during the demonstrations. 

The protests began on March 7 as parliament took up the “foreign agents” legislation despite warnings from critics that the bill, which would force civil society organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to be classified as “foreign agents,” mirrors Russian legislation that has been used to stifle opposition voices and the independent media. 

Georgian Dream officials said the legislation was aimed at bringing transparency and that it needed to hold consultations to “better explain” the law’s purpose in the future. 

In Georgia, anti-Russian sentiment can often be strong. Russian troops still control around one-fifth of Georgia’s territory, most of it taken during a lightning war in 2008 that was ostensibly about breakaway efforts in two northeastern regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 

By suddenly announcing that the bill was being “unconditionally” withdrawn, Georgian Dream deescalated the current crisis — but tensions are likely to persist over the ruling party and its opponents’ competing visions for the heavily polarized Caucasus country and its nearly 5 million residents. 

The opposition has often criticized Georgian Dream for being too closely aligned with Moscow, and the Kremlin’s current war against another former Soviet republic, Ukraine, has heightened those concerns. 

The introduction of the legislation prompted rebukes from several corners, including diplomats from the European Union and the United States. 

Georgia has been moving toward joining the European Union, but EU officials said the “foreign agents” law would complicate that membership path. Last year, the bloc declined to grant candidate status to Georgia, citing stalled political and judicial reforms. 

President Salome Zurabishvili has said she would veto the bill, although parliament could have overridden her veto. 

Speaking on March 10, French President Emmanuel Macron said Georgia was under pressure while expressing hope that the country could find a “path towards greater serenity” and that there is a “calming down of regional tensions.” 

“Georgia is under some heavy pressure and I hope it can find calm,” he said at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Paris. 

Macron dismissed Russian claims that protests in the Caucasus country were orchestrated by the West. 

“There is a tendency in the Kremlin, which is not new, to imagine that every public demonstration is a foreign manipulation because the fundamental belief is that there is neither public opinion nor free people,” Macron said. 

“As an old democracy, we have the right to believe the opposite.” 

Some information for this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presses. 
…

The European Union wants to hold joint naval exercises as part of plans published Friday to step up its efforts to protect critical infrastructure at sea. 

Concerns about threats to Europe’s maritime infrastructure were heightened by attacks in September on the Nord Stream pipelines, which left them spewing natural gas into the Baltic Sea. 

The EU has updated its maritime security strategy, outlining plans to hold an annual naval exercise from 2024 and coordinate member countries’ national efforts to protect gas pipelines, undersea data cables, offshore wind farms and other critical maritime infrastructure. 

EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius told Reuters that planning had been underway before the Nord Stream blasts, but had been strengthened in response to them. 

“After that, member states were very clear that we need to further strengthen cooperation, build capacity, ensure that our critical infrastructure is better protected,” he said. 

The EU plan sets out to increase cooperation between the EU and NATO, expand coastal patrols and improve efforts to identify threats early — such as by using EU satellite programs to detect unidentified vessels. 

The EU will also produce a risk assessment, disaster recovery plans and regional surveillance plans, according to the strategy. 

“The threat level is increasing,” Sinkevicius said.

Energy infrastructure is a particular concern, as Europe expands its offshore wind farms and its use of liquefied natural gas terminals to replace Russian pipeline gas.

The Netherlands said a Russian ship detected at an offshore wind farm in the North Sea last month was part of attempts by Moscow to gain intelligence to sabotage infrastructure.

Improved surveillance of maritime areas should also help countries monitor and respond to environmental degradation and the effects of climate change such as sea level rise.

Authorities in Sweden, Germany and Denmark are investigating the blasts on the Nord Stream pipelines, which were constructed to supply Russian gas to Europe. They have said the explosions were deliberate but have not said who might be responsible. 
…

Following the wave of missiles strikes that Russia launched Thursday against Ukraine, the British Defense Ministry said Friday that the intervals between such strikes will likely grow.

The ministry said that Russia needs time “to stockpile a critical mass of newly produced missiles directly from industry before it can resource a strike big enough to credibly overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.”

Russia launched the barrage of missile attacks across Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least six and leaving hundreds of thousands without heat and electricity.

It was the largest such attack on Ukraine in three weeks, with Ukrainian forces saying they shot down 34 of the 81 missiles that Russia fired, far less than the usual ratio, as well as four Iranian-made drones.

“No matter how treacherous Russia’s actions are, our state and people will not be in chains,” Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy said in his daily address.

He also said he met with members of Ukraine’s cultural committee to discuss “ways to strengthen the capacity of Ukrainian culture to communicate with the world to ensure support for Ukraine.”

“Diplomacy, journalism, and culture are the three areas that do the most to make the world understand our struggle and help us,” he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the attacks were in retaliation for a recent assault on the Bryansk region of western Russia by what Moscow alleged were Ukrainian saboteurs. Ukraine has denied the claim and warned that Moscow could use the allegations to justify stepping up its own assaults.

Moscow said it hit military and industrial targets in Ukraine “as well as the energy facilities that supply them.” Nearly half of the households in the capital of Kyiv were left without heat as were many in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, where the regional governor said 15 Russian strikes hit the city.

About 150,000 households were left without power in Ukraine’s northwestern Zhytomyr region. In the southern port of Odesa, emergency blackouts occurred because of damaged power lines.

Among the weapons fired were six hypersonic Kinzhal cruise missiles, Ukrainian air force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said.

Nuclear power fears

Thursday’s attack also knocked out the power supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest. The plant’s operator, Energoatom, said diesel generators were being used to run the plant and that there was enough fuel available to continue for 10 days. The plant was later reconnected to the electrical grid.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi called for urgent action, noting the plant’s power supply had been cut for a sixth time since Russia invaded Ukraine more than a year ago.

“I am astonished by the complacency – what are we doing to prevent this happening? We are the IAEA; we are meant to care about nuclear safety,” Grossi said. “Each time we are rolling a dice. And if we allow this to continue time after time then one day our luck will run out.”

Important stretch

Top U.S. intelligence officials, testifying before lawmakers Thursday, cautioned that the war between Russia and Ukraine is entering a critical period.

“The next four, five, six months are going to be crucial on the battlefield to Ukraine,” CIA Director William Burns told members of the House Intelligence Committee.

“Any prospect for a serious negotiation, which [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin I don’t think is ready for today, is going to depend on progress on the battlefield,” Burns said. “Therefore, I think, analytically, what’s important is to provide all the support that we possibly can, which is what the president and our Western allies are doing for the Ukrainians as they prepare for a significant offensive in the spring.”

During Senate testimony Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said Russia’s military has been so badly damaged that it is unlikely Russian forces will be able to make any significant territorial gains for the rest of the year.

But Haines also cautioned Ukraine forces have suffered casualties as well and have been forced to draw heavily on their reserves due to what she described as a grinding war of attrition.

US outreach

Zelenskyy on Wednesday invited the top U.S. House lawmaker to visit Kyiv to see “what’s happening here” in an interview broadcast on CNN.

“Mr. [Kevin] McCarthy, he has to come here to see how we work, what’s happening here, what war caused us, which people are fighting now, who are fighting now. And then after that, make your assumptions,” Zelenskyy told the news outlet through an interpreter.

Responding to CNN, House Speaker McCarthy said, “I don’t have to go to Ukraine or Kyiv” to understand it. He said he received information in briefings and other ways.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 of last year, the United States has sent nearly $100 billion in military, economic and relief aid to Ukraine. That aid was sent when the Democratic Party controlled both chambers in Congress.

The Republican Party took control of the U.S. House after the November midterm elections. Some Republicans have expressed opposition to sending additional arms and financial aid to Ukraine.

McCarthy has said he supports Ukraine, but that House Republicans will not provide “a blank check” for additional U.S. assistance to Kyiv without closer scrutiny of how it is being spent.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
…

U.S. President Joe Biden will meet European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Friday at the White House to discuss potential sanctions against China amid concerns that Beijing is preparing to send weapons to Russia, and Europe’s frustration over Washington’s plans to subsidize American companies under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Biden and von der Leyen also will discuss U.S.-EU coordination to combat the climate crisis through investing in clean technology based on secure supply chains, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

The meeting is the latest in a flurry of high-level diplomacy with European leaders to coordinate support for Ukraine in defending itself one year after Russia’s invasion. Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington last week. Last month, he traveled to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then to Warsaw to visit Polish President Andrzej Duda and leaders of the Bucharest Nine.

‘De-risk this dependency’

Amid the war on Ukraine, Europe is racing to end its reliance on Russia for fossil fuels by ramping up its domestic renewable energy production. To do so, it would need more access to critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and rare earth metals, the majority of which are processed by China.

“China produces 98% of Europe’s supplies of rare earths,” von der Leyen said during a joint news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Kingston, Ontario, earlier this week. “Europe needs to de-risk this dependency.”

Von der Leyen, however, has been more cautious in joining the Biden administration in warning China not to arm Moscow in its war effort. During a news conference with Scholz in Meseberg, Germany, earlier this month, she said “no evidence so far” suggested that China was doing so and that the issue of sanctions against Beijing was a “hypothetical question.”

Discriminatory subsidy

Another key topic is the Biden administration’s plan to provide American companies with $369 billion in green subsidies and tax credits aimed at cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which the EU views as discriminatory. A special task force was set up in October to address these concerns and avoid a trans-Atlantic subsidy race.

Biden and von der Leyen are expected to begin negotiations to allow the EU to have a status similar to that of a free trade partner so that it may be exempt from an Inflation Reduction Act clause that requires a certain percentage of minerals used in manufacturing batteries to be domestically produced or come from a free trade partner.

The EU and Canada have been working toward establishing a “green alliance” to grow respective economies that are “climate-neutral, circular and resource-efficient.” Biden is expected to coordinate on the effort in his visit to Canada later this month.
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Shots were fired inside a building used by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, and several people were killed or wounded, police said.

The shooting took place in the Gross Borstel district, a few kilometers north of the downtown area of Germany’s second-biggest city.

“We only know that several people died here; several people are wounded, they were taken to hospitals,” police spokesman Holger Vehren said.

He said he had no information on the severity of the injuries suffered by the wounded.

Police did not confirm German media reports — which named no sources — of six or seven dead.

The scene of the shooting was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall, a modern, three-story building next door to an auto repair shop.

Vehren said police were alerted to the shooting about 9:15 p.m. local time and were on the scene quickly.

He said that after officers arrived and found people with apparent gunshot wounds on the ground floor, they heard a shot from an upper floor and found a fatally wounded person upstairs who may have been a shooter. He said police did not have to use their firearms.

Vehren said there was no indication that a shooter was on the run and that it appeared likely that the perpetrator was either in the building or among the dead.

Two witnesses interviewed on television, whose names weren’t given, said they heard 12 shots.

Police had no information on the event that was under way in the building when the shooting took place.

They also had no immediate information on a possible motive. Vehren said that “the background is still completely unclear.”

Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher tweeted that the news was shocking and offered his sympathy to the victims’ relatives.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are part of an international church, founded in the United States in the 19th century and headquartered in Warwick, New York. It claims a worldwide membership of about 8.7 million, with about 170,000 in Germany.

Members are known for their evangelistic efforts that include knocking on doors and distributing literature in public squares. The denomination’s distinctive practices include a refusal to bear arms, receive blood transfusions, salute a national flag or participate in secular government.
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Rights groups are warning that independent Turkish media face fines and arrests over critical reporting of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s handling of February’s deadly earthquakes. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
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