At a nuclear waste site in Normandy, robotic arms guided by technicians behind a protective shield maneuver a pipe that will turn radioactive chemicals into glass as France seeks to make safe the byproducts of its growing reliance on atomic power.

The fuel-cooling pools in La Hague, on the country’s northwestern tip, could be full by the end of the decade and state-owned Orano, which runs them, says the government needs to outline a long-term strategy to modernize its aging facilities no later than 2025.

While more nuclear energy can help France and other countries to reduce planet-warming emissions, environmental campaigners say it replaces one problem with another.

To seek solutions, President Emmanuel Macron, who has announced plans to build at least six new reactors by 2050, on Friday chairs the first of a series of meetings on nuclear policy that will discuss investments and waste recycling.

“We can’t have a responsible nuclear policy without taking into account the handling of used fuel and waste. It’s a subject we can’t sweep under the rug,” a government adviser told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We have real skills and a real technological advantage, especially over the United States. Russia is the only other country that is able to do what France does in terms of treatment and recycling.”

La Hague is the country’s sole site able to process and partially recycle used nuclear fuel.

France historically has relied on nuclear power for around 70% of its energy, although the share is likely to have fallen last year as the nuclear fleet suffered repeated outages.

Since the launch of the site at La Hague in 1976, it has treated nearly 40,000 tons of radioactive material and recycled some into nuclear fuel that can be reused. The waste that cannot be recycled is mixed with hardening slices of glass and buried for short-term storage underground.

But its four existing cooling pools for spent fuel rods and recycled fuel that has been reused risk saturation by 2030, according to French power giant EDF, which runs France’s 56-strong fleet of reactors, the world’s second biggest after the United States.

Should saturation happen, France’s reactors would have nowhere to place their spent fuel and would have to shut down — a worst-case scenario that led France’s Court of Audit to designate La Hague as “an important vulnerability point” in 2019.

Cool pools and deep clay

EDF is hurrying to build an extra refrigerated pool at La Hague, at a cost of $1.37 billion, to store spent nuclear fuel — a first step before the waste can be treated — but that will not be ready until 2034 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, France’s national agency for managing nuclear waste last month requested approval for a project to store permanently high-level radioactive waste.

The plan, called Cigéo, would involve placing the waste 500 meters below ground in a clay formation in eastern France.

Construction is expected in 2027 if it gets approval. Among those opposed to it are residents of the nearby village of Bure and anti-nuclear campaigners.

Jean-Christophe Varin, deputy director of the La Hague site, told Reuters Orano could be flexible to ensure more recycling is done at the facility and there were “several possible scenarios.”

However, he said they could not be worked on in detail in the absence of a strategic vision. Orano, for which EDF accounts for 95% of its recycling business, says it needs clear direction from the government no later than 2025, to give it time to plan the necessary investments.

The costs are likely to be high. Just keeping up with current operations at La Hague costs nearly $330 million a year.

Options EDF and Orano are considering include finding a way to recycle the used fuel more than once, but critics say the recycling itself creates more radioactive waste and is not a long-term solution. For now, the backup plan is to fit more fuel containers into the existing pools.

After being cooled in a pool for about seven years, used nuclear fuel is separated into non-recyclable leftovers that are turned into glass (4% of the material), plutonium (1%) to create a new nuclear fuel called MOX, on which around 40% of France’s reactors can run, and reprocessed uranium (95%).

The uranium in the past was sent to Russia for reenrichment and return for use in some EDF reactors, but EDF stopped doing that in 2013 as it was too costly.

In spite of the war in Ukraine, which has made many in the West avoid doing business with Russia, EDF is expected to resume sending uranium to Russia this year as the only country able to process it. It declined to confirm to Reuters it would do so.

The facility at La Hague, with its 1980s-era buildings and Star Wars-style control rooms, has its limitations.

“If we had to process MOX fuel in large quantities, the facility today isn’t adapted for it,” Varin said. “For multicycle recycling, the technology is not the same, so the modernization or replacement of installations” would require “significant” investments, he said.
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After struggling through much of 2022 under heavy international sanctions, the Russian economy has rebounded in recent months, as importers found new avenues of trade to bring consumer goods and other products into the country.

An International Monetary Fund report issued this week said the Russian economy would likely grow by 0.3% in 2023, rather than shrinking by 2.3% as it had previously projected.

The United States and its allies reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with a harsh regime of sanctions and export controls that many expected to collapse the Russian economy. In addition, many international businesses sharply reduced their sales to Russia, while others ceased doing business in the country entirely.

New research suggests that alternate supply routes and the ability to substitute goods made in Russia-friendly countries, like China, for Western-made alternatives have brought Russian imports back to prewar levels.

Experts noted that the need to “transship” Western products through friendly third countries has driven up the prices Russians pay for many goods. Additionally, in many cases, Russians are being forced to settle for some lower-quality substitutes, especially in the consumer electronics space.

However, the possibility that widespread shortages within Russia will force the Kremlin to give up on its invasion of Ukraine in the near term looks increasingly remote.

Main goal of sanctions

Western sanctions on Russia were aimed primarily at the Russian military and were meant to make it difficult for the Kremlin to access the supplies and equipment, particularly advanced technology like microprocessors, necessary for the war effort in Ukraine.

“The Russian sanctions are not comprehensive,” Jeffrey J. Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told VOA. “They are designed to impair Russia’s military capability and make it difficult for the Russian regime to continue its military effort, both because of lack of resources over time, and because of growing civilian discontent.”

Russia has been allowed to continue selling many of its main export goods into the global market, including oil, gas, coal, fertilizers, uranium and food, providing cash to fund imports.

In addition to export controls on specific products, the U.S. and its allies levied significant sanctions on the Russian financial sector. This had the effect of complicating many trade-related transactions for products that were not, themselves, subject to sanctions.

Experts said that much of the rebound in trade volume has been the result of merchants finding viable workarounds that allow them to finance the flow of non-sanctioned goods.

Rebounding imports

A recent report from the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington nonprofit, found that while Russian imports plummeted in the months immediately after the invasion, the dollar value of imports had rebounded to near pre-war levels by September.

In the 12 months beginning in October 2021, exports to Russia from the European Union fell by $4.6 billion, or 52%. The U.S. and the United Kingdom, which had far less trade with Russia to begin with, nevertheless cut their exports to the country by 85% and 89%, respectively.

According to Silverado, the difference was made up by a number of countries that dramatically increased their exports to Russia, including China, Belarus, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Uzbekistan.

Additionally, the report found, “Exports from many other countries rebounded from their spring 2022 lows, and some post-Soviet states increased their trans-shipments of goods produced by multinational firms that no longer export the goods directly to Russia.”

For example, the report documents that after Apple and Samsung, two of the world’s largest makers of smartphones, stopped delivering their products to Russia, orders for their products eventually surged in Armenia and Kazakhstan, with the phones being shipped on to Russia.

‘Leakage’ expected

Experts said that while Russian imports of consumer goods may be approaching prewar levels, the blockade on military goods and advanced technology is still working reasonably well, if not perfectly.

Schott, of the Peterson Institute, said that sanctions are not “waterproof” and that all sanctions regimes experience some “leakage.”

“The longer sanctions are in place, the more time there is to try to figure out and negotiate workarounds — that happens everywhere,” he said. “If there’s enough economic incentive, people will take risks to profit from sanctions evasion.”

However, when it comes to military and high-tech gear, Schott said, “I’m not sure the leakage is comparable to what has happened in previous cases that have existed over time. I haven’t seen evidence of extensive violation of the sanctions.”

Measuring effectiveness

Bryan Early, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany, told VOA that even if some sanctioned products are making it through to Russia, the sanctions appear to have been broadly effective in that they have made it more difficult and expensive for Russia to acquire what it needs to continue to prosecute the war.

“Sanctions are never going to be perfect,” he said. “Your baseline is not, ‘Do they disrupt everything?’ It’s, ‘If the sanctions weren’t in place, how easily would these transactions be taking place? And how much more cheaply would they be taking place? And how much more reliable would those trade networks actually be?’”

Early referred to U.S. intelligence reports from last year that said Russia had been scavenging microchips from household appliances for use in military equipment.

“If one of the ways that the Russian government is getting around the multilateral sanctions on semiconductors is by importing additional washing machines through third parties, like Georgia, to use in their military products, yes, that’s a sign that sanctions are being evaded,” he said.

“But it’s also a sign that the sanctions are working very, very well, if the world’s second-largest largest military is importing semiconductors from washing machines through small regional neighbors,” he said.

New sanctions

On Wednesday, in a sign of some sanctions “leakage,” the U.S. Treasury Department barred trade with 22 individuals and companies that it accused of helping Russia’s military evade sanctions. The move was part of an ongoing effort “to methodically and intensively target sanctions evasion efforts around the globe, close down key backfilling channels, expose facilitators and enablers, and limit Russia’s access to revenue needed to wage its brutal war in Ukraine,” the department said in a press release.

Among others, the sanctions targeted Russian arms dealer Igor Zimenkov and his son, Jonatan Zimenkov, as well as several entities the department characterized as “front companies” that do business with the Zimenkovs.

“Russia’s desperate attempts to utilize proxies to circumvent U.S. sanctions demonstrate that sanctions have made it much harder and costlier for Russia’s military-industrial complex to resupply Putin’s war machine,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “It has become increasingly difficult for Russia’s military-industrial complex to resupply the Kremlin’s war machine, forcing it to rely on nefarious suppliers, such as Iran and the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]. By trying to use proxies to circumvent U.S. sanctions, Russia demonstrates that our sanctions are having impact. Our work will continue.”
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Western naval forces are having to adapt to a new threat as Russia and other military powers develop new capabilities to target critical undersea infrastructure such as pipelines and cables.

The vulnerability of such infrastructure has long been recognized. Those concerns turned to reality in September last year, as the Nord Stream pipelines that carried gas from Russia to Germany ruptured spectacularly on the Baltic seabed near the Danish island of Bornholm, sending huge volumes of gas bubbling to the surface.

Swedish investigators found traces of explosives at the site. The West suspects Russia of sabotage. The Kremlin denies this and accuses Western nations of staging the attack.

“There has been a growing awareness of the vulnerability of critical national infrastructure, but the event in the Baltic Sea certainly brought the issue into sharp relief,” said analyst Sidharth Kaushal of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, author of a recent report titled Navies and Economic Warfare.

Subsea defense

Days after the incident, Britain announced plans to enhance its undersea defense capabilities.

“Our internet and energy are highly reliant on pipelines and cables,” British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said October 2. “Russia makes no secret of its ability to target such infrastructure. So for that reason, I can announce we’ve recently committed to two specialist ships with the capability to keep our cables and pipelines safe.”

The first of those vessels is being fitted out by the British navy at a shipyard outside Liverpool and is due to enter service this year. It is designed to act as a “mother ship,” operating remote and autonomous systems for underwater surveillance and seabed warfare.

Millions of kilometers of undersea cables and pipelines carry the energy and data that power the global economy, Kaushal said. “A number of challengers to the West, Russia most notably, are developing bespoke capabilities to target precisely these vulnerabilities, things like special purpose submarines,” he told VOA.

Russia denies sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines. But observers say the Kremlin increasingly sees Western subsea infrastructure as a vulnerability. In December, President Vladimir Putin oversaw the launch of four new naval vessels, including two nuclear-powered submarines. “They have highly accurate weapons and robotic complexes,” Putin announced.

NATO

Faced with that threat, NATO and the European Union last month launched a joint task force on protecting critical infrastructure. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg outlined the alliance’s posture at a meeting of defense ministers in October.

“Any deliberate attack against allies’ critical infrastructure would be met with a united and determined response. … Hybrid and cyberattacks can trigger Article 5 [on collective self-defense], can constitute an armed attack against a NATO ally,” Stoltenberg said October 11.

The West must clarify its rules of engagement, analyst Kaushal said.

“What does one actually do when one observes, for example, a submarine tampering with critical national infrastructure, but not in a way that necessarily leads to an immediate loss of life?” Kaushal said.

“So actually, it’s more a question of how you change organizational practices to deal with this sort of activity.”
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Western naval forces are having to adapt to a new threat as adversaries develop new capabilities to target critical undersea infrastructure such as gas pipelines and cables. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Zimbabwe is attempting to boost its agricultural sector with support from controversial partner Belarus, which is under sanctions for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko visited Zimbabwe this week on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Harare, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe.
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Site of the biggest nuclear accident in history, Chernobyl has become over the years one of the biggest tourist attractions in Ukraine. Despite still harboring high radiation levels, Chernobyl was one of Russia’s first military targets in its invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago. The Russians took control of the plant, the villas, and the small town that lent its name to the region for nearly two months. Now Chernobyl is back under Ukrainian control, but fears of another invasion remain.
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The United States says Russia is violating the New START Treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries. In August, Russia suspended inspections of its nuclear facilities as required by the treaty. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports. Contributed to by Harry Knyagnitsky.
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Ukrainian authorities raided an influential billionaire’s home on Wednesday in what an ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy touted as a sweeping wartime clampdown on corruption that would change the country.

Separate raids were carried out at the Tax Office and on the home of an influential former interior minister, two days before Kyiv hosts a summit with the European Union at which it wants to show it is cracking down after years of chronic corruption.

Ukraine sees Friday’s summit as key to its hopes of one day joining the bloc, a goal that has grown more urgent following Russia’s invasion and has embarked on a political shake-up in which more than a dozen officials quit or were sacked last week.

Security officials searched the home of businessman Ihor Kolomoiskiy, one of Ukraine’s richest men and a one-time Zelenskyy ally, in what several media outlets said was an investigation into possible financial crimes.

Kolomoiskiy could not immediately be reached for comment. He has previously denied any wrongdoing.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) later said it had uncovered a scheme to embezzle more than $1 billion at oil producer Ukrnafta and oil refining company Ukrtatnafta, companies that Kolomoiskiy used to partly own.

Photographs circulating on social media appeared to show Kolomoiskiy, dressed in a sweatsuit, looking on in the presence of at least one SBU officer inside a large wooden home. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the images.

In a statement that did not name Kolomoiskiy, the SBU published the same photographs, but with the person’s face blurred out.

David Arakhamia, a senior member of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, confirmed the search of Kolomoiskiy’s home as well as the separate raids conducted at the Tax Office and at the home of Arsen Avakov, a former interior minister.

Arakhamia said the entire management of the Customs Service was set to be dismissed and that high-ranking defense ministry officials had been served with notices informing them they were suspects in a case. He gave no details.

“The country will change during the war. If someone is not ready for change, then the state itself will come and help them change,” Arakhamia wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Corruption

In a statement, the Prosecutor General’s Office later said, “Corruption in a time of war is looting” and that four senior current and former officials had been served “notices of suspicion,” along with the senior management of Ukrtatnafta.

The head of the State Bureau of Investigation said the law enforcement action was “only the beginning.”

Ukraine’s long-running battle against corruption has taken on vital significance, as Russia’s invasion has made Kyiv heavily reliant on Western support and it needs to carry out reforms to join the 27-nation EU.

Domestic politics has largely been frozen as politicians focus on fighting Russia, but Zelenskyy presided over the first major political shakeup of the war last week after an outcry over a corruption scandal involving an army food contract.

Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that more personnel decisions were in the pipeline and promised reforms that would change Ukraine’s “social, legal and political reality.”

He was elected president in 2019 on an anti-corruption ticket and launched a crackdown on wealthy businessmen known as “oligarchs” in late 2021. The oligarchs took control of swathes of industry during the post-Soviet privatizations of the 1990s and continue to wield influence.

The Ukrainska Pravda media outlet said the search on Kolomoiskiy’s property related to an investigation into the alleged embezzlement of oil products and evasion of customs duties.

Separately, Avakov said his home was searched as part of an investigation into a helicopter crash on Jan. 18 that killed 14 people including Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi.

He said investigators were looking into the purchase six years ago of a model of Airbus helicopter that was involved in the crash, but that “nothing relevant to the interest of the investigation was found.”
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Freddy Versluys does not like to be called an arms dealer. But he does have a big warehouse full of second-hand tanks for sale. 

Standing next to dozens of German-made Leopard 1 tanks and other military vehicles in the chilly warehouse in eastern Belgium, Versluys stressed he is the CEO of two defense companies with a broad range of activities, such as making sensors for spacecraft. 

But buying and selling weapons is part of his business, too. And it’s the tanks that have brought him into the spotlight over the past few days, as he has engaged in a public battle with Belgian Defense Minister Ludivine Dedonder over the possibility of sending them to Ukraine. 

While other Western nations have pledged in recent weeks to send main battle tanks to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion, Belgium has not joined that group, for one reason above all: It doesn’t have any tanks left. It sold the last of them – a batch of 50 – to Versluys’s company more than five years ago. 

Asked why he bought the tanks, Versluys, a silver-haired man in his mid-60s, said that was his company’s business model – it bought unwanted military equipment in the hope that someone else would want it in future. 

“There are still countries in the world who have these Leopard 1 tanks. So there’s always a possibility either to sell spare parts or to sell additional tanks,” he said. 

“Of course, it’s a gamble,” he added. “Maybe tomorrow we will have to scrap them [or] 10 years later they can still be there.” 

Dedonder has said the government has explored the idea of buying back tanks to send to Ukraine. But she has blasted the prices quoted as unreasonable and extremely high. Tanks sold for 10-15,000 euros each are being offered for sale at 500,000 euros, despite not being operational, she has said. 

The spat highlights a predicament faced by Western governments as they scramble to find more weapons for Ukraine after almost a year of intense warfare; arms they discarded as obsolete are now in high demand, and many are now in the hands of private companies. 

Dedonder hasn’t named Versluys’s company, OIP Land Systems, in her accusations. But Versluys is sure he is her target. Dedonder declined a request for an interview. 

Versluys has taken the unusual step of going public to dispute the minister’s assertions, offering a rare insight into the workings of a business that often prefers to keep a low profile. 

Versluys said his firm bought the 50 tanks for about 2 million euros and only 33 were useable. That would mean a unit price of 40,000 euros for 50 tanks, or some 60,600 euros for 33. 

He said his selling price could range anywhere from several hundred thousand to close to a million euros but that would include work to refit the tanks, which he insisted could be highly expensive. 

Replacing the system that controls the gunfire could cost 350,000 euros per tank, replacing asbestos in the engine could cost 75,000 euros, he said. Each tank had to be assessed individually. 

“We still have to look at what is their actual status and what we have to spend on them to make them suitable,” he said. 

As part of his public offensive, Versluys has given journalists tours of his warehouse on the outskirts of the provincial town of Tournai. It resembles a military hypermarket, filled with lines of Leopard 1 tanks in dusty green and black camouflage and scores of other military vehicles, along with shelves stacked with spare parts and piles of webbing. 

In his sales pitch, Versluys also emphasizes that refitted Leopard 1 tanks could be battlefield-ready in months, much more quickly than new models ordered today, which will take years to produce. 

The Leopard 1 is the predecessor of the Leopard 2 tanks that Germany, Poland, Finland and other countries agreed last month to send to Ukraine. It is lighter than the Leopard 2 and has a different type of main gun. The models in Versluys’s warehouse were last upgraded in the 1990s. 

Yohann Michel, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, said Leopard 1 tanks would not be as valuable on the battlefield as their successors. 

But, he said, they could still be of some use in taking on older Russian tanks and in supporting infantry units, particularly if they were refitted to a high standard. 

If Belgium does not buy back the tanks, another country could purchase them for Kyiv. Versluys said he had held discussions with several European governments about that option. 

However, any export of Leopard 1s would require the approval from the Belgian region of Wallonia, where the company is based, and from Berlin, as the tanks were made by German firm KMW. 

Versluys, who worked as an engineer in the Belgian military before going into business, is a smooth salesman.

While he does not like the “arms dealer” label, he said the weapons business is better than its reputation: “Contrary to what people say, it’s quite a civilized market.” 
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A court in Moscow on Wednesday sentenced a Russian journalist in absentia to eight years in prison on charges of disparaging the military, the latest move in the authorities’ relentless crackdown on dissent.

Alexander Nevzorov, a television journalist and former lawmaker, was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the military under a law that was adopted soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine. The law effectively exposes anyone critical of the Russian military action in Ukraine to fines and prison sentences of up to 10 years.

Nevzorov was accused of posting “false information” on social media about the Russian shelling of a maternity hospital in the Sea of Azov port of Mariupol. Moscow has fiercely denied its involvement.

Nevzorov, who moved abroad after the start of the Ukrainian conflict, didn’t have an immediate comment on the verdict.

Prominent opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced in December to 8½ years in prison under the same law. Another leading opposition figure, Vladimir Kara-Murza, has been in custody facing the same charges.
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Russia said Wednesday that supplies of long-range weapons to Ukraine would not deter Russian forces, but would increase tensions and escalate the conflict.

The comments from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came amid reports the United States is preparing a new round of aid that would include longer-range rockets to help Ukrainian forces fight off a Russian invasion.

Reuters reported that according to two U.S. officials briefed on the matter, a weapon called the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb with a range of 150 kilometers was part of the package expected to be announced as soon as this week.

Also expected to be included were Javelin anti-tank weapons, counter-drone and counter-artillery systems, armored vehicles, communications equipment, and enough medical equipment to support three field hospitals.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, tweeted Wednesday that each stage of war requires certain weapons. He said there is already a coalition of partners helping Ukraine obtain and train to use tanks, and that there are “talks on longer-range missiles and attack aircraft supply.”

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleskii Reznikov said Wednesday, a day after meeting with French officials, that he was grateful to France for providing howitzers, air defense missiles and armored vehicles, as well as fuel, equipment and training for Ukrainian soldiers.

Ukraine won a boost last week when the United States and Germany both promised to send tanks to Ukraine, after Germany hesitated for weeks over sending its advanced Leopard 2 tanks.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba estimated Tuesday that a dozen countries have now promised more than 100 tanks, which he described as the “first wave of contributions.”

Ukrainian officials have called on their Western allies to send fighter jets in order to better respond to the Russian attack, but so far, those calls have been met with wariness.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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Thousands of schools in the U.K. are closing some or all of their classrooms, train services will be paralyzed and delays are expected at airports Wednesday in what’s shaping up to be the biggest day of industrial action Britain has seen in more than a decade, as unions step up pressure on the government to demand better pay amid a cost-of-living crisis.  

The Trades Union Congress, a federation of unions, estimated that up to half a million workers, including teachers, university staff, civil servants, border officials and train and bus drivers, will walk out of their jobs across the country. 

More action, including by nurses and ambulance workers, is planned for the coming days and weeks. 

Britons have endured months of disruptions to their daily lives as a bitter dispute over pay and work conditions drags on between unions and the government. But Wednesday’s strikes mark an escalation of disruptive action across multiple key industries. 

The last time the country saw mass walkouts on this scale was in 2011, when well over 1 million public sector workers staged a one-day strike in a dispute over pensions. 

Union bosses say that despite some pay rises, such as a 5% offer the government proposed to teachers, wages in the public sector have failed to keep pace with soaring inflation, effectively meaning workers have been taking a pay cut.  

The Trades Union Congress said Wednesday the average public sector worker is $250 a month worse off compared with 2010, once inflation has been taken into account. 

Inflation in the U.K. stands at 10.5%, the highest in 40 years, driven by skyrocketing food and energy costs. While some expect price rises to slow down this year, Britain’s economic outlook remains grim. On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund said that Britain will be the only major economy to contract this year, performing worse even than sanction-hit Russia. 

The National Education Union said some 23,000 schools will be affected Wednesday, with an estimated 85% fully or partially closed. Others also on strike range from museum workers and London bus drivers to coastguards and border officials manning passport control booths at airports.  

“It’s everybody out … of course there’s going to be some disruption and some queues,” Phil Douglas, director-general of Border Force, told reporters.  

Mick Whelan, general secretary of the train driver’s union ASLEF, said the government must now listen  

“Everybody knows somebody working somewhere that’s out on strike, about to go on strike or being balloted for strike action,” he said. “Quite simply, the government has now got to listen – the people in this country are speaking, and they’re speaking volumes that they want a cost-of-living increase.” 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office acknowledged that Wednesday’s wave of walkouts will cause “significant disruption” to people and maintained that “negotiations rather than picket lines are the right approach.” But union leaders say the government has refused to negotiate and offer enough to halt the strikes.  

Unions have also been angered by the government’s plans to introduce a new law aiming to curb strike disruptions by enforcing minimum service levels in key sectors, including health and transport.  

Lawmakers on Monday backed the bill, which has been criticized by the unions as an attack on the right to strike.  

On Wednesday thousands of people are expected to take part in protests against the bill in London and other cities. 
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Hungary slid to bottom place among EU nations in a corruption index, with graft watchdog Transparency International on Tuesday alleging misuse by “political elites” of state and bloc funds.   

Hungary has been embroiled in a long-running spat with Brussels over corruption and rule of law concerns that have led to the freezing of billions of euros of bloc funding.    

In a bid to unlock the funds, Budapest committed to a range of legal and anti-corruption reforms, including the set-up of a watchdog that includes a Transparency International staff member.   

Hungary replaced Bulgaria as the last among EU and Western European countries in the group’s “Corruption Perceptions Index” report for 2022 launched on Tuesday.   

The report noted “a decade of democratic backsliding and systemic deterioration of the rule of law at the hands of the ruling party.”  

“Evidence is mounting against political elites on their misuse of both state and EU funds,” it said.   

Budapest hit back at Transparency, pointing to a corruption scandal in Brussels that emerged last month with one of the assembly’s vice presidents charged in connection with allegations of bribery.   

“It is interesting that Transparency International did not investigate either the Brussels bureaucracy or the European Parliament,” a government statement said.    

The statement accused the watchdog of “belonging to the Soros network” referring to the 92-year-old Hungarian-born U.S. financier George Soros who Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accuses of meddling in Hungarian and global politics.   

The annual Transparency report ranks 180 countries around the world and territories on a corruption scale since 1995 based on surveys with experts and businesspeople. 
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Anti-corruption efforts in seemingly “clean” advanced economies have stalled even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought to the fore that nation’s role in fostering kleptocracy in recent decades, Transparency International said in a report on Tuesday.

While painting a grim picture of the global fight against corruption, the Berlin-based watchdog put the spotlight on countries that have historically scored high, meaning favorably, on its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

Those countries remain among the “cleanest” in the world. But from Germany to France to Switzerland, most saw their CPI scores drop or stagnate last year.

Five traditionally top-scoring countries — Australia, Austria, Canada, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom — saw a significant decline in their assessments, Transparency International said.

The U.S. scored 69, a “negligible” increase of 2 points, but a Transparency International expert called the rating “troubling.”

Even Denmark, ranked No. 1, was relegated to the “little or no enforcement” category in the fight against foreign bribery.

Cross-border corruption takes many forms, from countries allowing corrupt foreign actors to launder stolen funds through their economies to governments failing to punish companies that bribe foreign officials.

In recent years, investigators have uncovered myriad instances of corrupt money finding its way into Western economies, from nearly $2 billion worth of U.K. property owned by Russians accused of financial crime or with links to the Kremlin, to tens of billions of dollars laundered into Canada each year. 

Transparency International said that while its Corruption Perceptions Index does not capture transnational graft, that form of corruption remains the advanced economies’ “biggest weaknesses.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “made it painfully apparent how inaction on transnational corruption can have catastrophic consequences,” the report says. “Not only have advanced economies helped to perpetuate corruption elsewhere, but they have also enabled kleptocracies to consolidate, threatening global peace and security.”

Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S., said the U.S., thanks to the sheer size of its economy and financial secrecy rules, remains a “major facilitator of corruption internationally.”

“If you take a bribe for a thousand dollars, you put that in your pocket. If you’re trying to steal millions or billions, you need to find, as they say, ‘a more sophisticated investment strategy,’ and hiding it in an economy that’s over 20 trillion dollars makes it a little bit easier to hide,” Kalman said.

Transparency International is not the first organization to call out Western nations for aiding kleptocracy.

Last year, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States was arguably “the best place to hide and launder ill-gotten gains.”

“And that’s because of the way we allow people to establish shell companies,” Yellen said. 

Transparency International said there are signs that the U.S. and other nations are taking the problem seriously but more needs to be done.

In 2021, the U.S. Congress enacted the Corporate Transparency Act, which aims to end the use of anonymously owned companies for money laundering.

Facilitating the transnational corruption, Kalman said, are financial service providers who are not currently subject to anti-money laundering reporting obligations.

“These are the lawyers, the accountants, the money managers, the corporate formation agents, those that create trusts for wealthy people, investment advisers who are currently not covered by any anti-money laundering responsibilities,” Kalman said.

To close the loophole, he said Congress should pass the Enablers Act, which was approved by the House of Representatives last year but fell short in the Senate.

A Justice Department task force created to seize Russian assets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is increasingly targeting enablers and facilitators of sanctions evasions.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against two businessmen, one of them Russian and the other British, for facilitating the ownership and operation of a luxury yacht owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

The $90 million, 255-foot yacht, owned by Viktor Vekselberg, was previously seized by Spanish authorities at the request of the U.S.

The U.S. is also a member of the multinational Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs (REPO) Task Force, which has seized billions of dollars in Russian assets.

“While some governments appear to have finally woken up to the problem that they had helped create, ending top-scoring countries’ complicity in cross-border corruption —originating from Russia and beyond — requires a long-term, concerted effort,” Transparency International said.
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The U.S. accused Russia on Tuesday of violating the nuclear arms control START treaty, contending that Moscow was refusing to allow inspection activities inside Russia.

The treaty, the last major pillar of post-Cold War nuclear arms control efforts, took effect in 2011 and was extended in 2021 for five more years. It sets a limit on the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.

Together, the two countries still account for about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads.

Washington has been trying to preserve the treaty, but ties with Moscow are the worst they have been in decades, the result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago. The U.S. has led Western allies in supplying munitions to Ukraine to help fend off the Russian attack.

“Russia’s refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the treaty and threatens the viability of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control,” the State Department said.

In August, Moscow suspended cooperation with inspections under the treaty. It blamed travel restrictions imposed by Washington and its allies after Russia invaded Ukraine but said it was still committed to complying with the provisions of the treaty.

The State Department said Russia had a “clear path” to comply with the treaty by permitting inspections to continue.

On Monday, Russia told the United States that the treaty could expire in 2026 without a replacement, claiming that Washington was trying to inflict “strategic defeat” on Moscow in Ukraine.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the RIA state news agency that it “is quite a possible scenario” there will be no nuclear arms control treaty after 2026.
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Climate activists in South Africa are protesting a refueling stop by a Russian ship that they say is ignoring a ban on exploring oil and gas in Antarctica.

Protest organizers Greenpeace Africa and Extinction Rebellion say the seismic tests the Akademik Alexander Karpinsky has been conducting in Antarctica for the past 25 years are harmful to marine life like dolphins and whales.

They also say that fossil fuels should stay in the ground if the world is to prevent catastrophic global warming.

The ship’s operator, Polar Marine Geosurvey Expedition, a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned mineral explorer RosGeo, insists it is not exploring for oil and gas in Antarctica but simply conducting research.

South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan isn’t convinced and says it’s vital everyone sees the importance of fighting global warming.

“It’s incredibly Important from a climate change perspective because the oceans there absorb a lot of the Co2 from the atmosphere but it’s also part of regulating the world’s climate and, also the currents and the weather system. But it’s also very much affected by climate change because the ice is melting,” he said.

Cormac says it’s problematic that there isn’t a government for Antarctica but instead an agreement signed in the 1950s, called the Antarctic Treaty System, where 29 countries have decision-making powers.

“Decisions are made by consensus and over the last years, when they tried to declare more marine protected areas, countries like Russia and China block them so it’s not really going anywhere,” he said.

He says terms of the treaty are only binding on the people who’ve signed up to them. And he says policing compliance is almost impossible because there’s no international police force dedicated to this task.

“If there is a big enough dispute, it could be referred to the International Court of Justice. But you know in a situation like this, often countries won’t take on another country like Russia because they think Russia may retaliate in other ways,” he said.

Cullinan is working on a Declaration for the Rights of Antarctica which environmentalists hope will be launched towards the end of this year or early in 2024. He says among other things, they hope it will make it possible for lawyers to represent Antarctica in courts of law.

“Certainly, if you think how important human rights are in the world. Even though you know governments violate rights all the time, just the fact that we’ve got agreed standards of behavior.”

He says a similar rights-of-nature declaration is being worked out for the Amazon rain forest which spreads across several countries.

Meanwhile, in Cape Town, Greenpeace Africa volunteer Elaine Mills says her organization is working on a letter of demand to send to the government.

“The one is that Alexander Karpinsky and other vessels like it are not allowed into South Africa. The second is that the Alexander Karpinsky and vessels like it have to prove that they are engaged in genuine scientific research before they are allowed entry into our ports. The third one is that we want the parties to adopt a treaty that no hydrocarbon extraction will ever be allowed within the Antarctic region,” said Mills.

Contacted by VOA, the South African Ministry and Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment did not provide comment.

South Africa announced Tuesday that it will host representatives of its partners in the BRICS bloc, namely Russia, China, India and Brazil, in Limpopo province on Wednesday and Thursday.

Naval exercises with Russia and China are also planned in February, a few days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Finnish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic unions will quit a global media federation on Tuesday in protest at “corruptive activity,” including allowing Russian state media journalists in Ukraine to stay as members, the Finnish union said.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which represents 600,000 journalists in 146 countries, denounced the accusations as “false, defamatory and damaging.”

The Nordic members accused the IFJ of longstanding undemocratic practices, unethical finances and of allowing the Russian state media representatives to continue as members.

“We call this corruptive activity,” Hanne Aho, the chair of the Union of Journalists in Finland, told Reuters, adding the four Nordic unions would resign from the IFJ on Tuesday.

The leader of the Norwegian Union of Journalists, Dag Idar Tryggestad, said the unions had fought for years to put in place democratic rules on IFJ elections as well as transparency around decisions and spending.

“..we believe this (resignation) is the only thing that can save IFJ. Changes must be forced,” he said.

Both Aho and Tryggestad said the Nordic unions’ latest disappointment resulted from the IFJ not taking action against the Russian Union of Journalists for setting up regional journalists’ associations in Ukrainian territories invaded by Russia.

“They have been able to do so in all tranquility without the international federation expelling the Russian union,” Aho said.

The IFJ said its executive committee had triggered a formal process for suspending and expelling the Russian Union of Journalists. It said expenditure was formally audited every year, adding that it had sought to answer all questions posed by the Nordic unions.

“We entirely reject what are false, defamatory and damaging allegations,” IFJ Deputy General Secretary Jeremy Dear told Reuters in an emailed response.

The Nordic unions also complained about what they said was the IFJ’s non-transparent use of finances, including its decision to hold its world congress last year in Oman, which has limited press freedom, Aho said.

The congress in Oman was organized at the end of May, at a time when journalists were widely accusing FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, of corruption and criticizing it for taking the World Cup to Qatar despite its poor track record on human rights.

“Trappings at the congress were extremely flamboyant so we began to wonder where the money had come from to pay for them,” Aho said, asking if it was appropriate for journalist unions to accept such lavish sponsoring.

Aho said the Union of Journalists in Finland had requested and received IFJ’s budget for the congress, which showed that up to 745,000 euros ($811,000) of the total of 778,000 euros ($844,675) came from Omani ministries and private companies as well as the Oman Journalists’ Association, while IFJ itself paid only 33,000 euros ($35,818) of the expenses.

The IFJ said the amounts included subsidies negotiated by the Oman Journalists’ Association.

“This has been normal procedure used in the hosting of successive IFJ congresses over decades,” it wrote in a statement shared with Reuters.

The IFJ, on its website, says it promotes collective action to defend human rights, democracy and media pluralism.

“IFJ policy is decided democratically at a Congress which meets every three years and work is carried out by the Secretariat under the direction of an elected executive committee,” it says.

 
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Striking workers disrupted French refinery deliveries, public transport and schools on Tuesday in a second day of nationwide protests over President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to make people work longer before retirement. 

Huge crowds marched through cities across France to denounce a reform that raises the retirement age by two years to 64 and poses a test of Macron’s ability to push through change now that he has lost his working majority in parliament. 

On the rail networks, only one in three high-speed TGV trains were operating and even fewer local and regional trains. Services on the Paris metro were thrown into disarray. 

Marching behind banners reading “No to the reform” or “We won’t give up,” many said they would take to the streets as often as needed for the government to back down. 

“We won’t drive until we’re 64!” bus driver Isabelle Texier said at a protest in Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast. 

“For the president, it’s easy. He sits in a chair … he can work until he’s 70, even,” she said. “We can’t ask roof layers to work until 64, it’s not possible.”  

After January 19, when more than a million people took to the streets on the first nationwide strike day, unions said initial data from protests across the country showed a bigger turnout. 

“It’s better than on the 19th. … It’s a real message sent to the government, saying we don’t want the 64 years,” Laurent Berger, who leads CFDT, France’s largest union, said ahead of the Paris march. 

Opinion polls show a substantial majority of the French oppose the reform, but Macron intends to stand his ground. The reform is “vital” to ensuring the viability of the pension system, he said on Monday.  

Some felt resigned amid bargaining between Macron’s ruling alliance and conservative opponents who are more open to pension reform than the left.  

“There’s no point in going on strike. This bill will be adopted in any case,” said 34-year-old Matthieu Jacquot, who works in the luxury sector. 

For unions, who were likely to announce more industrial actions later in the day, the challenge will be maintaining walkouts at a time when high inflation is eroding salaries. 

Though protest numbers appeared to be up, some initial data showed strike participation down on Tuesday from January 19. 

A union source said some 36.5% of SNCF rail operator workers were on strike by midday — down nearly 10% from January 19 — even if disruption to train traffic was largely similar. 

Utility group EDF EDF.PA said 40.3% of workers were on strike, down from 44.5%.  

Unions and companies at times disagreed on whether this strike was more or less successful than the previous one. For TotalEnergies TTEF.PA, less workers at its refineries had downed tools, but the CGT said there were more. 

At a local level, some announced “Robin Hood” operations unauthorized by the government. In the southwestern Lot-et-Garonne area, the local CGT trade union branch cut power to several speed cameras and disabled smart power meters.  

“When there is such a massive opposition, it would be dangerous for the government not to listen,” said Mylene Jacquot, secretary general of CFDT’s civil servants branch.  

The pension system reform would yield an additional 17.7 billion euros ($19.18 billion) in annual pension contributions, according to Labour Ministry estimates. Unions say there are other ways to raise revenue, such as taxing the super rich or asking employers or well-off pensioners to contribute more.  

“This reform is unfair and brutal,” said Luc Farre, the secretary general of the civil servants’ UNSA union. French power supply was down by about 5% or 3.3 gigawatts (GW) as workers at nuclear reactors and thermal plants joined the strike, EDF data showed. 

TotalEnergies said deliveries of petroleum products from its French sites had been halted, but customers’ needs were met. 

The government made some concessions while drafting the legislation. Macron had originally wanted the retirement age to be set at 65, while the government is also promising a minimum pension of 1,200 euros a month. 
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