In a landmark ruling, a German Court Thursday convicted a former Syrian intelligence officer of crimes against humanity for his role in state-sponsored torture and murder under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The regional court in the western city of Koblenz found 58-year-old Anwar Raslan guilty of overseeing the murder of 27 people at the al-Khatib detention center in Damascus, also known as “Branch 251”, in 2011 and 2012.

Raslan has denied all charges.

Raslan and another defendant, junior officer Eyad al-Gharib, were put on trial in April 2020. Gharib was accused of helping to arrest protesters and deliver them to the detention center. He was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison last year.

Their trials were the first to address state-led torture during Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011. 

Efforts by the U.N. Security Council to refer Raslan’s and other cases from Syria to the Hague-based International Criminal Court have been blocked by Syria’s main allies, Russia and China. The German court tried the two men under the principle of universal jurisdiction for serious crimes.

Human rights activists hope the trial will set a new precedent. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth told the French news agency, AFP, the verdict was historic, and expressed his hope the trials will allow nations around the world to try suspects for war crimes, and mass atrocities in their own countries.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
…

The European Union’s drug regulator is warning that too many doses of COVID-19 vaccines could eventually weaken the body’s immune system, rendering the extra shots ineffective.

Marco Cavaleri, the head of vaccine strategy for the European Medicines Agency, said earlier this week that booster shots can be administered “once, or maybe twice, but it’s not something that we think should be repeated constantly.” Cavaleri said instead that boosters should be administered just like an annual flu vaccination. 

Cavaleri is the latest health expert to urge against offering a fourth shot of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine in an effort to provide extra protection against emerging variants of the coronavirus. Britain’s Health Security Agency said last week there was “no immediate need” for people to get a fourth shot, as the current booster regimens are providing good levels of protection. The World Health Organization has repeatedly said that providing first doses to poorer nations is a higher priority than richer nations offering boosters.

In China, authorities in the central city of Xi’an have ordered two hospitals to temporarily shut down amid reports they denied treatment for critical patients in two incidents. A pregnant woman suffered a miscarriage after personnel at Gaoxin Hospital refused to admit her because she did not have a valid COVID-19 test. Meanwhile, a woman posted on social media that her father died of a heart ailment after he was refused treatment at Xi’an International Medical Center.

The city of 13 million people, home of the world-famous Terracotta Warrior sculptures, has been under strict lockdown protocols since December, sparked by a wave of COVID-19 infections driven by the delta variant of the coronavirus. Residents have not been allowed to leave their homes unless they have essential jobs or are undergoing testing, which has led to a massive backlash. 

At least three-quarters of all teachers in France walked out of their classrooms Thursday to protest what they said are the government’s inconsistent COVID-19 health protocols for educators and students.  

France’s largest teachers union, SNUipp-FSU, says the strike “demonstrates the growing despair in schools” as the government has issued three changes in coronavirus testing rules in the space of a week. Teachers are also angry over a lack of highly protective masks and air quality monitors.  

Separately, France’s minister of tourism says it will relax restrictions on travelers from Britain effective Friday. Fully vaccinated visitors will not be required to enter into quarantine upon their arrival, nor will they have to provide a compelling reason for traveling to France, but will still have to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test within 24 hours of their trip.  

Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse.
…

When a gunfight erupted during clashes in Diyarbakir in October 2014, video journalist Rojhat Dogru was at the center of the action.

At one point, a little too close. Hit by a bullet, Dogru was rushed to a hospital, where he uploaded footage to the Iraq-based Gali Kurdistan TV while being treated.

The coverage won Dogru an award but now, seven years after the clashes, the video journalist is fighting a life sentence.

A court in Diyarbakir last week issued the sentence after convicting Dogru of “disrupting the unity and integrity of the state.” It further sentenced him to 10 years and 10 months for “attempted deliberate killing,” and a year and three months for “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.”

The verdict has appalled press freedom advocates.

“This is the heaviest punishment I’ve seen recently. There is no murder, no bombing, but it is just news coverage,” Veysel Ok, co-director of Turkey’s Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), told VOA.

Violent clashes

As a Kurdish journalist, Dogru covered events in Diyarbakir and the region for Gali Kurdistan TV, including footage on what is known as the Kobani protests in 2014. That coverage earned him a Southeastern Journalists Association award.

Protests broke out that year after pro-Kurdish groups claimed Ankara was reluctant to help Kurds in Kobani, a city in neighboring Syria besieged by the Islamic State militants.

Police were called in as the protests turned violent, with clashes between supporters of the Free Cause Party, an offshoot of a violent Kurdish Islamist militant group, and PKK supporters. The PKK is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Turkey.

Official figures put the death toll at 37, and an indictment in the mass court case lists hundreds wounded as well as schools and public buildings damaged and over 1,700 homes and businesses looted.

The Turkish government accuses the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) of instigating the protests, and over 100 people, including former HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, have stood trial for the protests.

The HDP denies the charges against it.

From awards to lawsuits

In an interview about his coverage that day, Dogru spoke of the crucial role journalists play in documenting such events.

“I took the footage of the moments when two groups shot each other on the streets in an unbiased and objective way. This footage was crucial in terms of showing that both sides in the conflict had weapons in their hands,” Dogru said in an article published on the MLSA’s website days before the court issued its verdict.

“Although I was injured, I continued to take a video. I even took video of the moments when I was injured with my camera,” Dogru said.

The journalist was left needing treatment for injuries to his chin, stomach and leg.

The first lawsuit against Dogru was filed three years after the clashes, the journalist’s lawyer, Resul Temur, told VOA.

The plaintiff, named in some reports as Ridvan Ozdemir, alleges he was caught in the clashes and injured by a gun fired from Dogru’s direction.

Ozdemir alleged that Dogru shot him, and a case was filed on charges of “disrupting the unity and integrity of the state” and “attempted deliberate killing.”

‘Beyond normal’

Dogru denied the allegation, telling the MLSA “it is beyond normal to shoot with a gun in one hand while taking a footage with the camera in the other.”

He added that an expert witness watched the footage and, in a report filed with the court, said that Dogru had not used a gun.

During the trial, said Temur, the plaintiff did not remember whether Dogru was holding a camera.

“We said that it was strange that he did not remember the camera but remembered the gun,” Temur said.

More charges followed in 2018 when authorities allegedly found Dogru’s number on a PKK member detained by the police in Diyarbakir.

In December of that year, Dogru was held in pretrial detention on accusations of “membership of a terrorist organization.” He was released in February 2019 under judicial control.

A judge in Diyarbakir later combined the legal charges into one case, which reached its conclusion on January 6.

An arrest warrant was also issued for the journalist, who did not attend the hearing in person.

Temur told VOA they have appealed and called the trial “biased.”

‘A heavy price’

The verdict astonished press freedom advocates who believe that a higher court should reverse it on appeal.

“It is against the nature of the job of a cameraman to shoot with one hand and use a gun with another. This was refuted by the expert report [in the court]. So, the punishment is not acceptable,” Mucahit Ceylan, president of the Southeast Journalists Association, told VOA.

“In this region at critical times, [Dogru] risked his own life to cover the news, was injured, and now he is punished,” Ceylan said.

He believes the verdict will be overturned on appeal.

Ok, the MLSA co-director, was also shocked by the heavy sentence.

“Of course, there is a possibility that this will be reverted from the Constitution and European Court of Human Rights, but [until then] he will eventually spend years in prison,” Ok told VOA. “A heavy price will be paid, and there is nothing legal about it.”

This story originated in VOA’s Turkish Service.
…

Efforts to de-escalate tensions along the Russia-Ukraine border shift Thursday to Vienna and a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Permanent Council.

The session follows a bilateral meeting between Russia and the United States in Geneva on Monday and talks Wednesday in Brussels between Russia and NATO.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that after Thursday’s meeting, the parties involved would reflect on the discussions and “determine appropriate next steps.”

Price said Wednesday the United States expects the Russian delegations to the three sets of meetings will “have to report back to [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin, who we all hope will choose peace and security, and knowing that we are sincere, and that we are steadfast when we say we prefer the course of diplomacy and dialogue.”

The United States and its NATO allies have urged Russia to de-escalate tensions and for the situation to be resolved diplomatically, and on Wednesday offered ideas for reciprocal actions to reduce risks, improve transparency and communication and arms control.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. delegation in Brussels, said the NATO-Russia meeting ended with “a sober challenge” for Moscow to reduce tensions and “choose the path of diplomacy, to continue to engage in honest and reciprocal dialogue so that together we can identify solutions that enhance the security of all,” during a press conference.

After the nearly four-hour meeting on Wednesday, Sherman said, “there was no commitment to de-escalate, nor was there a statement that there would not be.”

She added Russia heard loudly and clearly it is very hard to have diplomacy when 100,000 of its troops are massed along the Ukrainian border, and as live fire exercises are being conducted.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he has proposed the idea of a series of meetings with Russia, which asked for time to return with an answer.

“NATO allies are ready to engage in dialogue with Russia, but we will not compromise on core principles, we will not compromise on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every nation in Europe,” Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.

Russia has sought security guarantees such as the withdrawal of NATO troops and military equipment from countries that border Russia, and limiting the expansion of the 30-member NATO alliance. It has also denied it has plans to invade Ukraine.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told reporters Wednesday that the discussions with NATO were deep and substantive, but said Russia does not seriously consider NATO to be a defensive alliance that poses no threat to Russia.

“If NATO opts for the policy of deterrence, we will respond with a policy of counter-deterrence,” Grushko said. “If it turns to intimidation, we will respond with counter-intimidation. If it looks for vulnerabilities in Russia’s defense system, we will look for NATO’s vulnerabilities. It’s not our choice, but we don’t have other options if we don’t overturn this current very dangerous course of events.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy proposed a new international summit to end the crisis.

“It is time to agree in a substantive manner on an end to the conflict, and we are ready to take the necessary decisions during a new summit of the leaders of the four countries,” Zelenskiy said Tuesday in a statement following a meeting with European diplomats.

In Washington, Democratic lawmakers Wednesday proposed a comprehensive sanctions package to deter Russia from further aggression.

The Defending Ukraine Sovereignty Act of 2022 would impose crippling sanctions on the Russian banking sector and senior military and government officials if Putin escalates hostile action against Ukraine.

U.S. President Joe Biden has ruled out a military confrontation with Russia in the event it decides to attack Ukraine, but he says the U.S. and its allies would impose significant economic sanctions if Russia does invade.

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

As the United States and Russia met for talks in Geneva this week, the future security of Europe was at stake. But absent from the negotiating table was the European Union, to the clear frustration of the bloc’s officials.

“On this dialogue, there are not two actors alone. It’s not just U.S. and Russia. If you want to talk about security in Europe, Europeans have to be part of the table,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters January 5.

Borrell made the comments following a visit to the front lines of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels continue to fight Ukrainian forces nearly seven years after Moscow’s forceful annexation of Crimea.

Latecomers

The EU is late to the table, says analyst Liana Fix, a resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington.

“The problem here is that the European Union has not been involved formally in talks in 2014 when the Ukraine crisis started. Back then we had Germany and France in the Normandy format [talks] and no official EU representative,” Fix told VOA.

“On the other side, the European Union should make it clear what it can contribute to the discussion,” she said. “Within the European Union, the question is: Who is more powerful — the member states or the EU as an institution itself? And on the other hand, in Moscow, the EU is not taken seriously.”

There are fears the smoldering war in eastern Ukraine could be about to reignite. In recent months, Russia has massed over 100,000 troops close to the Ukrainian border, prompting Western fears of an imminent invasion. Meanwhile, Moscow complains of a NATO military buildup in Eastern Europe and has warned of the dangers of confrontation.

Those tensions came to a diplomatic head this week. But neither the U.S.-Russia bilateral talks nor Wednesday’s summit between NATO and Russia — the first such meeting in two years — appear to have yielded progress.

Amid a changing world order and rising geopolitical tensions, France is leading a European push for what Paris calls greater “strategic sovereignty,” partly driven by doubts about America’s commitment to NATO that took root during the administration of former President Donald Trump.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin was deliberately trying to bypass the EU.

“He has no consideration for the European Union, and he is totally determined to try to put dents in European unity, which is solidifying,” Le Drian told BFM TV.

Moscow also aims to undermine the transatlantic alliance, argues analyst Petro Burkovskiy, a senior fellow at the Kyiv-based Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

“Russia uses these talks in order to destroy trust between the United States and European partners and tries to demonstrate that the United States [is] ready to discuss its security in Europe and discuss its policy in Europe behind the European partners,” Burkovskiy told The Associated Press.

Key EU role

Without its own military force, the European Union as an institution may not be taken seriously by Moscow — but it does have a key role to play, said Fix.

“When the European Union and the United States now think about sanctions towards Russia in case of an intervention, of an invasion of Ukraine, then it is the European Union that will have to deliver an economic sanctions package and have to deliver the agreement of all member states,” Fix said.

Meanwhile, following talks between NATO and Russian officials Wednesday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the United States’ delegation, said transatlantic allies were united.

“I think one of the things that Russia has done, which it probably did not expect, it has brought all of Europe, NATO and non-NATO allies alike, together, to share the same set of principles, the same ambition, the same hopes and the same commitment to diplomacy,” she told reporters.
…

As the United States and Russia met for talks in Geneva this week, the future security of Europe was at stake. But the European Union was not present – and bloc officials have voiced growing frustration, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
…

A civil lawsuit filed in a U.S. court by a woman who says she was sexually abused by Britain’s Prince Andrew when she was 17 will move forward, following a judge’s ruling Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said lawyers for Prince Andrew failed to challenge the constitutionality of the case brought by Virginia Giuffre in August. Andrew’s lawyers also had argued the allegations were vague.

Kaplan wrote “Giuffre’s complaint is neither ‘unintelligible’ nor ‘vague’ nor ‘ambiguous.’ It alleges discrete incidents of sexual abuse in particular circumstances at three identifiable locations. It identifies to whom it attributes that sexual abuse.”

Andrew’s lawyers had also tried to dismiss the suit, arguing it violated a confidential settlement Giuffre reached with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2009.

Earlier this month, the agreement was unsealed and it revealed Epstein paid Giuffre $500,000 in return for dropping the case without him having to admit fault. In the settlement, she also agreed to “remise, release, acquit, satisfy and forever discharge” parties and “any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant.”

Andrew was not specifically mentioned.

Giuffre asserts she was trafficked by Epstein and his longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell, who was recently convicted of sex trafficking.

Giuffre says the two forced her to perform sexual acts with Andrew.

Andrew denies the charges.

In 2019, Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail while he awaited another trial for sex trafficking. His death was ruled a suicide.

Neither lawyers for Andrew nor Buckingham Palace have commented on the Wednesday ruling.

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press.
…

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted during a NATO summit he attended in June that Western leaders had confirmed his country “will become a member of the Alliance.” 

The Ukrainian leader’s tweet, seen by some Western diplomats as ill-timed and intended to goad Russia, drew a predictably furious response from Kremlin officials. They have long warned that the accession of Ukraine to NATO is unacceptable to Moscow, the crossing of a red line which would be met by retaliatory measures. 

Despite — or because of — Kremlin threats, and a Russian military buildup along the borders of Ukraine, President Zelenskiy has continued to press for Ukraine to be admitted into NATO as soon as possible, saying it is the only way to deter further Russia aggression. Others, including some Western leaders, fear it would do the reverse — invite more Russian aggression. 

At the June summit, Zelenskiy did not get an admission date. And U.S. President Joe Biden, who has been a strong champion in the past for Ukraine to join the Atlantic alliance, scotched talk of an impending admission. “School’s out on that question. It remains to be seen,” he said when reporters asked him about Ukraine joining. 

“In the meantime, we will do all we can to put Ukraine in a position to be able to continue to resist Russian physical aggression,” he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a series of increasingly insistent demands for guarantees that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO.

Some observers question whether what they see as a tamping down by Biden, and senior U.S. and European officials, of Ukraine’s NATO ambitions, is evidence that Russia may already have achieved one of its key goals — namely, to prevent Ukraine from joining the Western alliance.

At best, the White House and European allies are sending mixed messages about NATO membership for Ukraine, they say. “The urgency of Moscow’s ultimatums would suggest that Ukraine is on the verge of NATO membership. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth,” according to Peter Dickinson, editor of UkraineAlert, a newsletter of the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based research group. 

“At this point, the closest Ukraine has ever come to joining NATO is a vague and largely symbolic commitment to future membership received at the alliance’s 2008 summit in Bucharest. While this pledge has been repeated on numerous subsequent occasions, it carries no real weight and is essentially a reaffirmation of the alliance’s standard open-door policy towards all potential new members,” added Dickinson, also an editor of Business Ukraine magazine.

In June, NATO did “upgrade” its relationship with Ukraine, designating the country an Enhanced Opportunities Partner. The EOP program, which was launched in 2014, aims “to support and deepen cooperation between allies and partners, which have made significant contributions to NATO-led operations and missions,” according to NATO. Sweden, Finland, Australia, and Jordan also enjoy the designation. But as NATO states on its website: “Ukraine’s status as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner does not prejudge any decisions on NATO membership.”

After Zelenskiy posted his June tweet, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also sought to downplay the significance of the designation, telling reporters, “Nothing new” had happened. And he referred them to the 2008 NATO conference in Bucharest, where the alliance welcomed the membership aspirations of Ukraine and Georgia. But NATO declined to offer either a membership action plan, or MAP, which would have set them on a definite path to admission.

Then-U.S. President George W. Bush had pushed for NATO to offer MAPs to both countries, but several European members, including Germany, were opposed, fearing to do so would further roil relations with Russia. A British diplomat told VOA opposition from some of America’s partners has not evaporated. “There is little appetite among some members to inherit an open conflict, which NATO would do, if Ukraine became a member,” he said.

Dilemma

With Putin loudly insisting NATO should never admit Ukraine, the Biden administration, and Western alliance partners, are caught in a dilemma, say some analysts and Western diplomats. Many NATO members are not ready to admit Ukraine for a range of reasons, including a worry that Ukraine is still not on top of corruption. But while they do not want to be hurried into making a decision, they are also fearful of being accused of appeasing Russia or Moscow interpreting that they are weak.

The dilemma facing the West has been seized on by Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington research organization, to argue that the U.S. should negotiate with Russia a treaty that renders Ukraine a neutral country.

Lieven acknowledges the idea would be criticized by Western hardliners. “They need to ask themselves, however, whether they are really prepared to contemplate war with Russia; and if not, what they are proposing as a concrete alternative to these proposals,” he wrote for the Quincy Institute, which advocates for a non-interventionist American foreign policy. 

But it is unlikely Ukraine would agree to the erosion of its rights as an independent nation. Zelenskiy has been pushing even harder than his pro-NATO predecessors for a timetable for Ukraine membership, but he has been rebuffed with the latest knock back coming last month when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg sidestepped his request for a schedule for Ukrainian membership.

On his Facebook page, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the meeting between Zelenskiy and Stoltenberg to discuss the strengthening of Ukraine’s armed forces was “very good, positive,” but added, “The only drawback, to be honest, was that we weren’t told the year when Ukraine will become a NATO member, although we asked.”

All this week senior U.S. officials have emphasized that Russian demands for a halt to any further NATO enlargement — and specifically a guarantee that Ukraine never be admitted as a member — are “non-starters.” 

Ambassador Julianne Smith, U.S. permanent representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, added her voice Tuesday, echoing previous dismissals of Russian demands by Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. “We will not allow anyone to slam NATO’s ‘Open Door’ policy shut,” Smith said.

Despite the strong words, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer questions whether the Kremlin has, in effect, already been allowed to exercise a veto on Ukrainian membership because of NATO fears of being bungled into war. He said in a newspaper commentary that Kyiv has had to wait for a long time to join NATO, but it is likely it will have to wait much longer.

“Allies appear unenthusiastic about a MAP now, particularly because there is no good answer to the question, ‘If Ukraine joins NATO tomorrow, does the alliance then find itself at war with Russia?’” 

Pifer suggested Ukraine stop demanding a timetable for membership, saying in “the current circumstances, the answer will either be silence or no. Neither helps NATO-Ukraine relations.” He added, “There should be candor between NATO and Ukrainian officials about the state of play with MAP, as there should be on Washington’s part.” 

A British diplomat who asked not to be identified for this article, told VOA, “Maybe clarity is best avoided at this stage — admitting Ukraine now would inflame tensions and ambiguity keeps Russia guessing, too.
…

China’s expanding sphere of influence and economic reach in Europe is met with a mixture of praise and complaints in the Greek port of Piraeus. Athens reporter Laurent Laughlin has the details.
…

Prime Minister Boris Johnson apologized Wednesday for attending a garden party during Britain’s coronavirus lockdown in 2020, saying there are things his government “did not get right.”

Johnson is facing a tide of anger from public and politicians over claims he and his staff flouted pandemic restrictions by socializing when it was banned. Some members of his Conservative Party say he should resign if he can’t quell the furor.

Johnson acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that he went to the May 2020 garden party at his Downing Street office, though he said that he had considered it a work event to thank staff for their efforts during the pandemic.

“I want to apologize. … With hindsight, I should have sent everyone back inside,” Johnson told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Opponents and allies alike have been demanding Johnson come clean about the “bring your own booze” party, held when Britain was under a strict lockdown imposed by Johnson to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

An invitation to the “socially distanced drinks” gathering was emailed to about 100 people by a senior prime ministerial aide. At the time, people in Britain were barred by law from meeting more than one person outside their household.

Johnson’s lunchtime appearance at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions session in the House of Commons was his first public appearance since details of the party emerged. 

The prime minister struck a tone of contrition, but urged people to await the conclusions of an investigation by senior civil servant Sue Gray into several alleged parties by government staff.

Opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said Johnson’s statement was “the pathetic spectacle of a man who has run out of road.

“His defence … that he didn’t realize he was at a party is so ridiculous that it’s actually offensive to the British public,” Starmer said. “He’s finally been forced to admit what everyone knew, that when the whole country was locked down he was hosting boozing parties in Downing Street. Is he now going to do the decent thing and resign?”

The party scandal adds to a mounting list of troubles for Johnson.

The scandal dubbed “partygate” has become the biggest crisis of Johnson’s two-and-a-half years in power. During the U.K.’s first lockdown, which began in March 2020 and lasted for more than two months, almost all gatherings were banned. Millions of people were cut off from friends and family, and even barred from visiting dying relatives in hospitals. Thousands were fined by police for breaking the ban on gatherings.

So there has been widespread anger at claims Johnson’s Conservative government flouted the rules it had imposed on the rest of the country by holding garden parties, Christmas get-togethers and office quiz nights in Downing Street, which is both the prime minister’s home and his office.

Opposition politicians are calling for Johnson’s resignation. More worryingly for the prime minister, many members of his own party are increasingly concerned about Johnson’s judgment and leadership.

The Conservatives picked Johnson as leader in 2019 for his upbeat manner and popular touch, and despite the serial allegations of rule-bending and dishonesty that have followed him through his twin careers as journalist and politician. The choice appeared vindicated when he led the party to a big election win in December that year.

But support inside the party is being eroded by discontent over continuing pandemic restrictions, which some Conservatives view as draconian. He is also facing disquiet about his judgment after a slew of financial and ethical misconduct allegations against him and his government.

The Conservatives have a history of ousting leaders if they become a liability — and a recent surprising loss in a by-election for a district the party held for more than a century has increased their jitters.

Conservative legislator Christian Wakeford urged Johnson not to “defend the indefensible.”

“It’s embarrassing and what’s worse is it further erodes trust in politics when it’s already low,” Wakeford wrote on Twitter. “We need openness, trust and honesty in our politics now more than ever and that starts from the top!”

Another Conservative lawmaker, Tobias Ellwood, said Johnson needed to apologize and “show some contrition” if he wanted to ride out the storm.

“We can’t allow things to drift, that is not an option,” he told Sky News.
…

Russia and NATO are meeting Wednesday in Brussels with a focus on reducing tensions along the border between Russia and Ukraine. 

NATO objects to Russia troop buildups along the border, saying they undermine European security. For its part, Russia is seeking security guarantees such as limiting the expansion of the 30-member NATO alliance, arguing the inclusion of a country like Ukraine on its border represents a threat. 

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith told reporters ahead of Wednesday’s talks that the NATO side is committed to seeing if diplomacy can de-escalate the situation, and that the overall themes of the discussion would be about “risk reduction, transparency, arms control, and various ways in which we communicate with each other.” 

Smith expressed U.S. solidarity with Ukraine, adding that “Russian actions have precipitated this crisis” and NATO allies were ready to deter further Russian aggression.  

“Should Russia follow the path of confrontation and military action, we’ve made it clear to the Kremlin that we will respond resolutely, including with a range of high-impact economic measures,” Smith said. “As an Alliance, we are prepared to reinforce NATO’s defense on the eastern flank, and we are prepared to impose severe costs for further Russian aggression in Ukraine.” 

Wednesday’s meeting is the second of three opportunities this week for U.S. and European diplomats to speak directly with Russian officials about the situation with Ukraine. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe meets Thursday in Vienna. 

In Geneva on Monday, U.S. and Russian diplomats held their own session, with both sides signaling afterward no major progress. 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday the talks in Geneva were “open, comprehensive and direct,” an assessment echoed by Washington. But Peskov said it was the result that ultimately matters.

“So far, let’s say we see no significant reason for optimism,” he said in a conference call with reporters.  

Victoria Nuland, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, told reporters Tuesday, “We haven’t seen the slightest hint of de-escalation” on Russia’s part. “It is Russia that created this crisis out of whole cloth” by deploying 100,000 troops just across from Ukraine’s eastern border.  

At the Geneva talks, Russia demanded guarantees, rejected by the United States, that NATO halt further eastward expansion toward Russia and curb military deployments in Eastern Europe.    

“NATO poses no threat to Russia. It is a defensive alliance whose sole purpose is to protect its members,” Nuland said.  

Western allies fear that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine after annexing its Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Russia has denied it plans to invade its one-time Soviet satellite state but also has not agreed to U.S. demands that it withdraw troops from the border.  

U.S. President Joe Biden has ruled out a military confrontation with Russia in the event it decides to attack Ukraine, but says the U.S. and its allies would impose significant economic sanctions if it does invade. 
…

Turkey’s economy had a difficult year, with its currency depreciating and inflation skyrocketing. Experts warn that unless President Recep Tayyip Erdogan changes course and reverses his controversial monetary strategy, the situation could worsen. 

Last week, the country’s official Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) reported inflation increased to 36% last month, the highest figure in Turkey for nearly two decades. 

Opposition parties claim the real situation is worse than the official number shows.

Following a series of interest rate cuts by the Turkish Central Bank last year, Turkey’s currency lost over half its value before recovering slightly following a package of measures announced by the government in the last weeks of 2021. 

Finance experts both inside and outside Turkey, as well as opposition parties, blame Erdogan’s insistence on continuing to cut interest rates.

Most economists believe to halt rising inflation, central banks should raise interest rates. But Erdogan has rejected that strategy, arguing that lower interest rates reduce inflation and encourage growth, despite mounting evidence his policy is not working.

Experts predict a higher level of inflation 

In an effort to defend the collapsing lira, the government announced a plan to shield lira deposit holders from possible losses due to the currency’s depreciation. In December, it also boosted the minimum wage by over 50%. 

Despite the government’s efforts, Turkey began the year with price increases on everything from electricity and natural gas to road and bridge tolls and taxi charges. Electricity costs increased by about 125% for commercial customers and 50% for residential customers. The cost of public transportation in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, has increased by more than 30%. 

Erdogan recently stated that the worst had passed and that it is now time to reap the benefits of the government’s efforts. However, experts speaking to Voice of America predict that will not be the case. 

Timothy Ash, an emerging markets sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London, forecasts that inflation in Turkey would likely rise above 50% in coming months.

He claims that the relative stability in the local currency is due to state-backed foreign exchange intervention rather than confidence-building measures like the deposit guarantee plan. According to data from Turkey’s central bank for December, the government sold about $19 billion to back its currency. 

Ash predicts the government will be unable to keep defending its currency with that strategy for too long.

“The central bank of Turkey doesn’t have an infinite pot of money of foreign exchange reserves. Turkey’s net reserves are minus 60 billion. They are spending money they don’t have,” he said.

Applied Economics Professor Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University, who says he measures Turkey’s annual inflation on a daily basis using high frequency data, tells VOA that while it is hard to use standard analysis to make an accurate forecast in cases like Turkey, where there is a big currency crisis, he predicts inflation will stay very elevated. 

‘Turkey charting its own course’

Turkey’s central bank announced last week that it had asked exporters to sell 25% of their hard currency revenues to the bank for lira to support the plunging currency. 

Hanke describes the move as the first aspect of foreign exchange control and says it’s a “bad sign” for Turkish businesses and investor confidence.

Turkey’s finance minister, Nureddin Nebati, said last week the government would prioritize the fight against inflation but added it had abandoned “orthodox policies and was charting its own course” as far as economic policies are concerned. 

Early election talk amid economic pressure 

Experts say the economy will continue to dominate the political agenda in Turkey in 2022, arguing that the economic situation might increase the prospects of an early election. 

Elections in Turkey are scheduled to take place in 2023. But soaring prices have had a huge impact on the lives of Turks, from food prices to medicine and utilities. As Erdogan sees his opinion ratings slide amid the economic pressure, opposition parties see political opportunities in the economic policy struggles. 

But economist Ash warns the country faces grave economic consequences if it does not change course. 

“Unfortunately, Turkey is increasingly looking like an Argentina or Venezuela sort of devaluation-hyperinflation scenario,” he said.

“The currency policy is not sustainable. So, either Erdogan changes course or he loses the elections, and a new administration comes in and changes policy. But if these policies are continued, Turkey faces economic and financial crisis,” Ash said. 

Erdogan said last month Turkey would never again submit its political and economic future to the prescriptions of global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, making Turkey’s economic future highly uncertain. 

This story originated in VOA’s Turkish Service. 

 
…

The Kremlin said Tuesday it has little optimism about a breakthrough on talks with the United States this week about its European security concerns, while Washington said Moscow’s massive troop buildup along the Ukraine border is at the root of current tensions. 

After a day of talks with U.S. diplomats Monday in Geneva, Moscow said it would wait for the outcome of more meetings set for Wednesday in Brussels and Thursday in Vienna before deciding whether it’s worth it to continue negotiations with Washington officials. 

But in the U.S., Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, told reporters, “We haven’t seen the slightest hint of de-escalation” on Russia’s part. “It is Russia that created this crisis out of whole cloth” by deploying 100,000 troops just across from Ukraine’s eastern border. 

At the Geneva talks, Russia demanded guarantees, rejected by Washington, that the West’s 30-country NATO military alliance halt further eastward expansion toward Russia and curb military deployments in Eastern Europe. 

“NATO poses no threat to Russia. It is a defensive alliance whose sole purpose is to protect its members,” Nuland said. 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the first day of talks in Geneva were “open, comprehensive and direct,” an assessment echoed by Washington. But Peskov said it was the result that ultimately matters. 

“So far, let’s say we see no significant reason for optimism,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

NATO and Russia are holding talks in Brussels, while the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is meeting in Vienna. 

“There are still several rounds [of talks] ahead of us, which will allow us to work out a clearer understanding, a clearer picture of where we stand with the Americans,” Peskov said. 

He said Russia is not setting deadlines for the talks but also would not accept dragging them out. 

Western allies fear that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine after annexing its Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Russia has denied it plans to invade its one-time Soviet satellite state but also has not acceded to U.S. demands that it withdraw troops from the border. 

U.S. President Joe Biden has ruled out a military confrontation with Russia in the event it decides to attack Ukraine but says the U.S. and its allies would impose significant economic sanctions if it does invade. 

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. delegation in Geneva, said Tuesday on Twitter, “The United States is committed to working in lockstep with our allies and partners to urge de-escalation and respond to the security crisis caused by Russia.” 

In Monday’s bilateral talks, the two parties discussed “reciprocal action that would be in our security interest and proved strategic stability,” Sherman said. That includes possible limits on both sides on the size and scope of future military exercises in the region.

European Council President Charles Michel reiterated that “we have clearly said that if there was to be a military offensive against Ukraine, there would be a massive reaction from the European Union in coordination with our partners and allies.” 

Estonian Defense Minister Kalle Laanet called the Russian demands to curb NATO expansion, if it wishes to do so, “completely unacceptable,” adding that he expects the alliance members at Wednesday’s meeting to “be very clear in saying that … NATO’s collective defense continues to be a value that is being defended by its members.” 

In Geneva, Russian negotiator Sergei Ryabkov rejected U.S. demands that Moscow pull back its estimated 100,000 troops from the Ukrainian border, saying it had the right to deploy them wherever it wanted.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press. 
…

Europe could see half of its population infected with the omicron variant over the coming weeks, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecasts that more than 50% of the population in the region will be infected with omicron in the next six to eight weeks,” said Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe during a virtual press conference.

The combination of omicron and delta variants has caused more than 7 million new infections in the first week of 2022, he said.

“Today the omicron variant represents a new west-to-east tidal wave, sweeping across the region on top of the delta surge that all countries were managing until late 2021,” he said.

The WHO says omicron spreads more rapidly than delta, but there is not a scientific consensus about how much serious illness and death it causes relative to other variants. It does appear to infect fully vaccinated people.

The rising number of cases has begun to put stress on countries’ health systems.

“The rapid increase in cases will lead to an increase in hospitalizations, may pose overwhelming demands on health care systems and lead to significant morbidity, particularly in vulnerable populations,” the organization said.
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his senior aides have repeatedly claimed that Western powers broke promises they made not to expand NATO as the Soviet Union collapsed.

In his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow in December, Putin accused NATO of deceiving Russia by giving assurances in the 1990s that it would not expand “an inch to the East” — promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification, the Russian leader said.

“They cheated us — vehemently, blatantly. NATO is expanding,” Putin said. He cited former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker as Exhibit One in his indictment and quoted a remark Baker made to Gorbachev in 1990, saying, “NATO will not move one inch further east.” 

The Russian leader has made the claim frequently about NATO skullduggery, accusing Western powers of taking advantage of a weakened, disoriented Russia as the Soviet Union fell apart. And the West’s supposed trickery and violation of a solemn pledge not to expand has figured prominently as an important component in a Putin foreign policy narrative which presents Russia as a victim and aggrieved party.

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, he asked, “What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

And then again in a Kremlin speech after Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, he accused Western leaders of having “lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East.”

After that speech, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said in an essay, “Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO,” but that the story “fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated—not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West.” 

Most authoritative Western scholars and historians who have studied diplomatic memos, the minutes of meetings and transcripts released by both sides since the 1990s dispute the idea that NATO made any formal pledges.

And Western leaders have vigorously protested the Putin narrative, saying there was never any deal about not expanding NATO into central Europe. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, on the eve of bilateral talks between American and Russian diplomats in Geneva, told reporters: “NATO never promised not to admit new members. It could not and would not — the ‘open door policy’ was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO.”

Blinken referred reporters to remarks in 2014 by Mikhail Gorbachev to Russia Beyond, a multilingual project operated by the nonprofit of the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. During the interview, the former Soviet leader was asked why he had not sought a document to legally encode what Baker had said about not moving “one inch further east.”

What Baker meant

Gorbachev explained that the Baker remark was being taken out of context and replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all.” But another issue was discussed: “Making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR [German Democratic Republic] after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context.”

Gorbachev added, “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years.”

But Gorbachev did say in the interview that what has unfolded since 1990 with more countries deciding to join NATO was “a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990,” although he did not elaborate.

Scholars take Gorbachev to mean that the West had portrayed the coming era as one of security cooperation between East and West with the United States working with Russia on the development of a new, inclusive European security arrangement. That inclusive security structure did not materialize, although Putin’s critics argue the blame for that lies more with Russian adventurism, than with NATO. 

Gorbachev also acknowledged in May 1990 when signing off on German reunification that NATO expansion was likely, saying that he was aware of “the intention expressed by a number of representatives of east European countries to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and subsequently join NATO.”

Declassified American, Soviet, German, British and French documents posted online in 2017 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in the American capital suggest Gorbachev had some reason to be disgruntled later.

“The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory,” the Archive notes in its assessment of posted documents. 

Boris Yeltsin became angry when the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states joined NATO in waves from 1997 onward. Yeltsin upbraided then U.S.-President Bill Clinton, who maintained that NATO was not breaking promises and argued, as subsequent U.S. administrations have done, that sovereign independent states have the right to choose whether to join alliances.

Russian diplomats say the principle that countries can choose their alliances should not override Moscow’s essential security needs and concerns. For Moscow, the “old principles of security on the continent are no longer working. NATO expansion has created a new military and political landscape,” Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian international affairs analyst, noted recently.

“Russia will have to change the system,” he argued in a commentary, suggesting that countries adjacent to Russia should “retain their sovereignty but stay out of the geopolitical fray.” 

Western policy makers say that Russia in effect acquiesced to enlargement when in 1997, it and NATO signed the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security. In that political agreement, which was meant to build East-West trust and establish habits of consultation and cooperation, NATO committed to avoid stationing permanent substantial combat forces on the territories of the former Warsaw Pact states which had joined the Western alliance. It could, however, rotate detachments in and out to conduct drills and maintain the interoperability and integration of alliance forces.

Yeltsin wanted a Russian veto on any further expansion included in the Founding Act, but Western leaders rebuffed him. NATO has avoided stationing substantial forces in the central European countries, although some of their leaders have argued, since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, that Russia has been breaking the commitments it made in the Founding Act to show the same restraint as NATO with force deployments, military buildups, and incursions.
…

European Parliament President David Sassoli died on Tuesday in hospital in Italy where he was admitted on Dec. 26, his spokesperson and office said. 

Sassoli, 65, died at 1.15 a.m. his spokesperson, Roberto Cuillo, said on Twitter.  

Sassoli, an Italian socialist and former journalist from Florence, had been hospitalized last month due to a “serious complication” related to his immune system, his office had said on Monday. 

He had been president of the 705-seat parliament since 2019.   

In his inaugural speech, Sassoli had urged Europeans to counter the “virus” of extreme nationalism and called for a reform of EU rules on migration and political asylum. 

His term in the predominantly ceremonial role had been due to end this month. 

Due to illness, he had been unable to chair the Strasbourg-based parliament in recent weeks and had missed the European Commission’s annual state of the union event in September. 
…

The U.S. and Russia have launched “frank and forthright” discussions aimed at de-escalating tensions between the two powers as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to station an estimated 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, the White House said Monday.

“There are two paths for Russia to take at this point, for President Putin to take,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. “He can take the path to diplomacy. There’s two more rounds of talks this week. We’ve seen them as a package of three, which I think they also reiterated from their side. Or there’s a path of escalation. We are surely hopeful, that the path to diplomacy is the path that they will take.” 

Biden is asking Putin to order the troops back to barracks. The White House said, in several recent statements, that the U.S. “will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.” 

“We explained to our colleagues that we have no plans, no intentions to ‘attack’ Ukraine,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters after the talks ended Monday. “There is no reason to fear any escalation in this regard.”

The Kremlin is concerned about the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The collective security alliance was founded to counter the former Soviet Union. Ukraine, a former Soviet state, has been seeking to join NATO, over Moscow’s opposition. Putin says the current troop buildup is necessary for self-defense against an aggressive West, and that he does not plan to invade.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Monday, “We’ve seen no major changes to the force posture by the Russians in the border areas around Ukraine. There continues to be a sizable element there. … If the Russians are serious about de-escalating, they can start by starting to remove some of those troops, decreasing some of that force posture.” 

Diplomats from the United States and Russia met Monday in Geneva. Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden spoke twice by phone in December about the situation in Ukraine; neither is participating directly in this week’s talks.

Monday’s discussions are the first of three rounds of talks planned for this week that will bring the U.S. and Russia to the negotiating table. The other two rounds will involve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Wednesday in Brussels and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Thursday in Vienna. 

In Monday’s bilateral talks, the two parties discussed “reciprocal action that would be in our security interest and proved strategic stability,” said Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. diplomat present. That includes possible limits – on both sides – on the size and scope of future military exercises in the region.

Sherman noted that the two nations did not discuss political unrest in Kazakhstan, where recent fuel-price demonstrations grew into larger protests against pro-Russian authoritarian rule.

The U.S. held firm on a few issues, she said, including against Russia’s demand that Ukraine be denied NATO membership. 

“We will not allow anyone to slam closed NATO’s open-door policy, which has always been central to the NATO alliance. We will not forego bilateral cooperation with sovereign states that wish to work with the United States. And we will not make decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine, about Europe without Europe, or about NATO without NATO,” Sherman said. 

Russia’s Ryabkov said, “Unfortunately we have a great disparity in our principled approaches to this. The U.S. and Russia in some ways have opposite views on what needs to be done.” 

Sherman further conveyed that “if Russia further invades Ukraine, there will be significant costs and consequences well beyond what happened in 2014. We are very ready and aligned with our partners and allies to impose those severe costs.”

She said those costs could include sanctions against key financial institutions, export controls, increased NATO presence in allied territory and more security assistance to Ukraine. 

Ahead of Monday’s U.S.-Russia session, top diplomats from both countries expressed little optimism that tensions between these two longstanding rivals would be eased in one week of discussions. 

“It’s hard to see we’re going to make any progress with a gun to Ukraine’s head,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s State of the Union show.  

Russia has denied it plans to invade Ukraine and demanded an end to NATO expansion and a halt to the alliance’s military exercises in central and eastern European countries that joined it after 1997.  

Washington expects Moscow to promote its own narrative outside of the talks, Psaki said.

“We are preparing ourselves for the possibility and likelihood – no one should be surprised, I should say – if Russia spreads disinformation about commitments that have not been made, or if it goes even further and instigate something as a pretext for further destabilizing activity,” she said. “And so we would continue to urge everyone not to fall for any attempts to push disinformation out there.”

VOA’s Nike Ching and Carla Babb contributed to this report. This report contains content from Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 

 
…

Undocumented Afghan migrants who fled to Turkey to escape the Taliban say they are unable to get treatment and vaccines for the coronavirus.

While officially registered refugees qualify for health care in Turkey, it is believed that thousands of undocumented Afghan migrants are in the country.

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021 following the withdrawal of Western forces prompted thousands to flee to neighboring countries. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals had already left their home country for security reasons or to escape poverty. 

VOA spoke to several refugees in the central Turkish city of Erzurum, which lies on a major route for migrants heading west to Europe and is a stopover for many refugees. Some settle and find work in the region. 

According to the United Nations, Turkey is hosting around 183,000 Afghan asylum-seekers, while 300,000 Afghans are permanently settled there. However, unofficial estimates suggest thousands more Afghan migrants are undocumented, living and working in Turkey under the radar and unable to access basic services such as health care. 

“I am from Badakhshan province in Afghanistan. I came to Turkey two months ago. I am 18 years old. We have no ID cards, so the hospitals don’t treat us,” Afghan migrant Muhammed told VOA. 

Lack of ID card a concern

Muhammed works for a local dairy company in Erzurum along with several other Afghan migrants, including his friend Islam. They live in a small, run-down apartment in the city. 

“There are eight or nine people living in this room. Five people have ID cards, and the rest don’t have ID cards,” Islam said. “If any of those who don’t have an ID card catches coronavirus, the hospitals don’t treat them. Those who have no ID card cannot have a vaccine. If they catch coronavirus, we all will catch coronavirus.” 

Several Afghan migrants told VOA they chose not to register as official refugees, fearing arrest and deportation. Many said the status of Afghan refugees remains unclear, and they want clarification from the government. 

Ramped up border security

In recent months, Turkey has ramped up border security and detained hundreds of Afghan migrants in deportation centers. It’s not clear if Ankara intends to deport the migrants back to Afghanistan. Some migrants report being detained for several weeks before being issued with official refugee status and set free. 

The Turkish government did not respond to VOA questions on the number of undocumented Afghan migrants or on the lack of access to health care. Erzurum officials said any unregistered refugees would be arrested.

The United Nations said Turkey is hosting about 4 million refugees, 3.7 million of whom are Syrians fleeing conflict. 

Refugees are a shared problem

In an email to VOA, Selin Unal, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Turkey, said that other countries must help share the burden of caring for Afghan refugees. 

“UNHCR is calling on neighboring countries to keep their borders open for those forced to flee and are now seeking protection. Since August, UNHCR has received increasing numbers of Afghans in neighboring countries who have approached our office and partners, indicating their intention to seek asylum. Others still in Afghanistan report hoping to reach neighboring countries to access international protection,” Unal said. 

“Turkey has been hosting the largest refugee population in the world since 2014 and its comprehensive legal framework provides the necessary tools to address the needs of the various categories of Afghan citizens currently living on its territory and seeking its protection. This is a challenging time, effective access to registration remains crucial by Afghan nationals seeking international protection in Turkey and UNHCR is working with national authorities to support effective, fair and fast asylum procedures,” the email said. 

The UNHCR did not provide an estimate for the number of undocumented Afghan refugees who are living in Turkey and unable to access health care. 

Memet Aksakal contributed to this report.

 
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he will not allow governments allied with Moscow to be toppled in so-called “color revolutions,” a reference to the series of popular uprisings that have shaken former Soviet republics. 

“We will not allow the boat to be rocked,” Putin said.

During an online meeting with leaders of a Russian-led collective security alliance, Putin blamed last week’s violent unrest in Kazakhstan on “destructive internal and external forces.” He added, “Of course, we understand the events in Kazakhstan are not the first and far from the last attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of our states from the outside.”

Kazakh officials say a 4-year-old girl was among the 164 people who were killed in last week’s protests. Authorities say 5,800 people have been detained. In an effort to halt the protests, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev issued a shoot-to-kill order, enabling security forces to open fire on protesters without warning.

The demonstrations were prompted by a fuel price increase but morphed into a broader protest over the country’s authoritarian rule. Tokayev asked Russia for help in quashing the demonstrations amid concerns about the loyalty of some law enforcement units. Russia and several other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Eurasian intergovernmental military alliance formed in 1994, responded by sending troops, although most are Russian.

“The measures taken by the CSTO have clearly shown we will not allow the situation to be rocked at home and will not allow so-called ‘color revolutions’ to take place,” Putin said. He added that the CSTO contingent would withdraw once order had been re-established and when Tokayev thought the forces were no longer needed.

The Kazakh leader said while order had been restored, the hunt for “terrorists” was ongoing.

Putin alleged Monday that the violent unrest in Kazakhstan was carried out by terrorists trained abroad. He said the violence bore the hallmarks of a Western-coordinated Maidan operation, a reference to the protests that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Moscow leader in 2014.

“Well-organized and well-controlled groups of militants were used,” Putin said at the CSTO meeting. “(They]) had obviously received training in terrorist camps abroad,” he added.

The CSTO consists of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. When requesting military assistance last week, Tokayev invoked Article 4 of the CSTO pact, which commits members to assist each other to defend against “foreign interference.” It was the first time that Article 4 was cited by any CSTO member. 

The Russian Defense Ministry said around 3,000 paratroopers and other service personnel were being flown to Kazakhstan “around the clock,” with up to 75 transport planes being used in the emergency airlift.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has questioned why Russia deployed troops. America’s top diplomat said Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week” that Kazakhstan “has the ability to maintain law and order, to defend the institutions of the state, but to do so in a way that respects the rights of peaceful protesters and also addresses the concerns that they’ve raised — economic concerns, some political concerns.”

Demanding regime change

Sparked by a fuel price increase and cost of living grievances, the protests, which began in the oil-rich western part of the country, rapidly escalated this week into the worst violence Kazakhstan has seen since its independence 30 years ago.

Grievances over fuel prices voiced initially by the protesters grew into a much bigger threat against the government after dozens of people died when Kazakh armed forces opened fire into the crowd. 

Demonstrators have demanded regime change and the departures of Tokayev and the country’s 81-year-old former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, who stepped down two years ago after nearly three decades in power. Nazarbayev, who retained the official title of “leader of the nation,” is still believed to rule behind the scenes. Protesters reference him with chants of “Get out, old man.”

The demonstrations prompted Tokayev to dismiss his Cabinet and Nazarbayev from his position as head of the country’s security council. Authorities also announced the arrest of Karim Massimov, former head of the National Security Committee, on suspicion of high treason.

Russian officials and pro-Kremlin media have been amplifying claims that the West is behind the agitation and trying to foment another color revolution with the goal of disorienting Russia during major Russia-U.S. security talks this week amid fears the Kremlin may be considering invading Ukraine. 

Russia has previously accused Western powers of being behind popular uprisings revolutions in the former Soviet states of Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine. Kazakhstan has vast energy resources. 

Tokayev told Putin during the online meeting that the unrest was an attempted coup and had been planned for years.

“The main goal was obvious: the undermining of the constitutional order, the destruction of government institutions and the seizure of power,” he said, adding that he would provide proof to back up his claims.

Some Russian analysts have also highlighted the risks of Russian troops maintaining any long-term presence in Kazakhstan.

“For now, this is less an armed intervention than a police operation,” said Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, a Kremlin-linked research group. “But if it drags on, consequences for Russia could mount up,” he told the English language newspaper The Moscow Times.

Erica Marat, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, told The New York Times that Tokayev “traded his country’s sovereignty to Russia for his own power and the interests of kleptocratic elites.”

Lawmakers in Kyrgyzstan last week voted to approve the deployment of 150 troops to Kazakhstan as part of the CSTO operation, but some have voiced opposition. Zhanybek Kydykbayev has warned that deploying troops could discredit Kyrgyzstan in the eyes of the Kazakh people as it signaled the government’s support for Tokayev.

“We should avoid getting involved in Kazakhstan’s internal conflict. And Tokayev’s appeal to the CSTO is, in my opinion, just his attempt to hold onto power,” Kydykbayev told local reporters. 

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

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Monday he plans to ask European officials to consider treating COVID-19 more like an endemic illness — a regularly occurring milder disease like the flu — and move away from the detailed tracking system that the pandemic has required.

In an interview with Spain’s Cadena SER radio, Sanchez said deaths as a proportion of recorded cases have fallen dramatically since the initial onset of the pandemic. He said he believes the pandemic has reached a point where the evolution of the disease can “be evaluated with different parameters.”

Sanchez said it would be a gradual, cautious process but said it is time to open the debate “at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level.”

He also confirmed a report from the country’s leading newspaper El País, that Spanish health authorities are already drafting a new monitoring system in which every new infection would not need to be recorded, and that people with symptoms would not necessarily be tested but will continue to receive treatment.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health says a virus, such as the one that causes COVID-19, transitions from a pandemic to an endemic phase when a virus does not go extinct but merely drops in prevalence and severity over a long period of time. 
…

Western policy makers remain as puzzled now as their counterparts were on the eve of the Cold War forty years ago about Russia’s geopolitical intentions. 

Is the Kremlin preparing to launch an invasion of its neighbor Ukraine, which increasingly sees itself as part of the West, if sweeping security guarantees Russia has demanded are rebuffed? Or is the ominous Russian military buildup along Ukraine’s borders an exercise in brinkmanship, a maneuver by President Vladimir Putin to try to wring more than he otherwise would from the United States and European allies at the negotiating table? 

Answers to those questions may start coming Monday when senior U.S. and Russian officials meet in Geneva to start discussing Kremlin demands for NATO to withdraw any military presence from the former Soviet satellite countries of Central Europe and to de-escalate the crisis over Ukraine.

Some eight decades ago, Western policymakers were also trying to decipher the intentions of then-Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a Communist leader whose legacy Putin has done much to try to rehabilitate in Russia. Guy Liddell, a top British intelligence official, lamented in his diary in February 1948 how difficult it was to fathom whether Soviet Russia was planning military aggression.

While the Kremlin proclaimed peaceful intentions and said its maneuvers were “strategically defensive,” Liddell recorded in his diary that Russian actions — from military preparations to propaganda campaigns, from interventions to “attempts at disruption” — were the same that would accompany a “policy planned for aggression” and Western powers therefore had no option but to prepare for the worst and remain vigilant.

Just two weeks later Kremlin-directed communists seized final control over the government of Czechoslovakia. The loss of the last remaining democracy in Eastern Europe concluded the partition of Europe, freezing the two halves of the continent in a four-decade-long Cold War.

Policy makers are split now about what Putin has in mind by camping more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, and whether the military buildup is driven by adventurism or a sense of insecurity, misplaced or not. 

Europe

Some Western diplomats fear Putin intends for talks to fail so he has pretext for pushing deeper into Ukraine, in a repeat of 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and seized a large part of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

They are also wrestling with the options available to them to try to deter Putin from making any dramatic military moves on Ukraine. And while all NATO members, and several of Europe’s non-members, have joined the United States in warning of dire consequences and punitive economic sanctions in the event of a Russian move on Ukraine, there are important nuances between the allies, with some Western leaders sounding tougher than others.

Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who wants a face-to-face meeting with Russian leader Putin later this month, has talked of resetting relations with Moscow and recently spoke of seeking “a new start,” although he also cautioned of severe consequences in the event of another Russian assault on Ukraine. Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, has been much harder and defiant in his public remarks, reiterating his country’s right to join NATO, if Finns decide to, and flatly rejecting Russian demands that NATO admits no new members. 

Sweden, which is not a NATO member but has been deepening military cooperation with the bloc, is also bristling at Moscow’s expansive demands of no further NATO enlargement, with its foreign minister, Ann Linde, underscoring that Moscow has no right to dictate which countries can join the trans-Atlantic military alliance.

“It should not be up to Russia if we could join or if we could not join NATO,” she said Friday.

Ahead of formal talks this week, NATO officials have dismissed Russia’s wide-ranging security demands as impossible and non-starters. The demands include a halt to further NATO enlargement and a roll-back of any alliance military presence in the seven of the eight former Soviet republics and satellite states of Central Europe which joined the Western alliance in waves since 1999. The Kremlin has also demanded the withdrawal of American tactical nuclear weapons from Europe but has not offered any reciprocal constraints on its arsenal of tactical missiles.

The bilateral American-Russian talks in Geneva, which are being led on the U.S. side by senior State department officials, are to be followed this week by Russia-NATO council negotiations in Brussels and a meeting in Vienna of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a body that includes Russia, Ukraine, and all NATO countries. They amount to a week of high-stakes diplomacy not been seen since the Cold War with Putin seemingly determined to make the dialogue about the whole future security architecture of Europe and Western powers trying to limit discussions. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned against “endless discussions, which is something the West knows how to do and is notorious for.” His boss, President Putin, has also said he is not prepared for talks to drag out for “blathering” that last decades. “They will indulge in endless talk about the necessity of negotiations,” he said on Russian television recently.

Some Western policymakers suspect Putin is trying to rush because the brinkmanship might weaken Western resolve and crack its unity. But U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken Sunday told CNN that he worries Putin’s aim is “to re-exert a sphere of influence over countries that previously were part of the Soviet Union.” He added: “We can’t go back to a world of spheres of influence. That was a recipe for instability, a recipe for conflict, a recipe that led to world wars.”

Andrew Marshall of the Atlantic Council, a U.S. research group, says the geopolitical stakes are potentially era-changing. “The outcome of this dispute could decisively rewrite the terms of security on the European continent for an entire generation — just as the decisions of the 1990s did after the end of the Cold War,” he explained in a recent commentary.

Will Putin settle for anything less than a revanchist turning the clock back to when Moscow controlled half of Europe? The Western tactic appears to be to try to draw Putin into the weeds and to discuss some European security arrangements in which both sides have an interest in reaching agreements. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Linde points to arms controls and rules on the size and frequency of military exercises near borders. Linde told Foreign Policy magazine that Moscow’s intentions remain unclear, but “to give diplomacy and dialogue a chance to work is always better than military activities,” she said.

Other analysts believe Putin ultimately is focused on Ukraine and getting it to return to the Russian orbit and that the wider demands over European security architecture are a case of what former U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger once described as the Russian tendency of “kicking all the doors and seeing which fall off their hinges.” 

Russian commentator Vladimir Frolov believes Putin is set on ensuring that Ukraine has “to hammer out its relationship with Russia on Russia’s terms.” But he fears even that a more limited goal is unlikely.

“Escalation remains likely, due to unrealistic requirements being made under artificially short deadlines,” he says.
…

Pope Francis Monday said getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is a “moral obligation” as part of caring for the health of oneself and others and urged on international efforts to vaccinate the world’s population.

In a speech to diplomats assigned to the Vatican, the pope said the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause social isolation and to take lives but noted effective vaccinations have effectively lowered the risks from the disease. He said it was important to vaccinate the general population as much as possible, calling for a broad commitment on the personal, political, and international levels.

The pope said everyone has a responsibility to care for their health and the health around us.

“This translates into respect for the health of those around us. Health care is a moral obligation,” he said Monday.

However, Francis said he recognized the “ideological divides” that exist in the world today, bolstered by “baseless information or poorly documented facts.”  He said such ideological statements severe “the bond of human reason with the objective reality of things.”

“Vaccines are not a magical means of healing, yet surely they represent, in addition to other treatments that need to be developed, the most reasonable solution for the prevention of the disease,” he said.

Pope Francis urged a comprehensive commitment by the international community to ensure the “entire world population can have equal access to essential medical care and vaccines,” and called for all states to work through the World Health Organization to support universal access to diagnostic tools, vaccines and drug treatments.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
…

Diplomats from the United States and Russia met Monday in Geneva, beginning a series of high-level talks this week regarding Moscow’s massive troop buildup along its Ukraine border, and Russian demands for Western security guarantees. 

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said the meeting began just before 9 a.m. local time, while stressing that the U.S. side has been working in consultation with not only Ukraine, but also with NATO and other allies across Europe. 

“The United States is committed to the principle of ‘nothing about you, without you’ when it comes to the security of our European allies and partners, including Ukraine,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We are lashed up at every level with our allies and partners, and we will continue to be in the days and weeks ahead.” 

After the Geneva talks, Russia is due to hold negotiations with NATO in Brussels on Wednesday and at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Thursday in Vienna.

Ahead of Monday’s U.S.-Russia session, top diplomats from both countries expressed little optimism that tensions between their countries would be eased this week.    

“It’s hard to see we’re going to make any progress with a gun to Ukraine’s head,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” show.   

“We’re going to listen to Russia’s concerns” about NATO military exercises in central and eastern Europe, Blinken said, but added, “they’re going to have to listen to ours” about the 100,000 troops Russia has amassed along Ukraine’s eastern flank.    

Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned RIA news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov as saying it was entirely possible that the U.S.-Russia talks could end abruptly after a single meeting.  

“I can’t rule out anything; this is an entirely possible scenario and the Americans… should have no illusions about this,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying. Officials from the two countries held a working dinner Sunday night ahead of the more formal talks on Monday in Geneva.  

“Naturally, we will not make any concessions under pressure and in the course of threats that are constantly being formed by the Western participants of the upcoming talks,” Ryabkov said.  

Blinken reiterated the U.S. threat to impose severe economic sanctions against Moscow in the event it invades Ukraine eight years after its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.    

“Our strong preference is a diplomatic solution, but that’s up to Russia,” Blinken told ABC’s “This Week” show.  

He said there is room for negotiations over military exercises in Europe and renewed arms limitations that he accused Russia of violating in the past.  

The top U.S. diplomat said Russia cannot violate other countries’ borders or dictate whether NATO might accede to Ukraine’s request for membership in the seven-decade-old Western military alliance. He said 60% of Ukrainians favor the country joining NATO.   

Russia has denied it plans to invade Ukraine and demanded an end to NATO expansion and a halt to the alliance’s military exercises in central and eastern European countries that joined it after 1997.  

The United States and NATO have said large parts of the Russian proposals are non-starters.    

Some material in this report came from Reuters. 
…

U.S. and Russian officials are meeting this week to address the tensions along the Russian-Ukrainian border. Michelle Quinn reports. Video editor – Mary Cieslak.
…