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Australia will buy three nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States as part of a three-nation, multi-decade deal with Great Britain that is aimed at strengthening the allies’ presence in the Asia-Pacific region as China grows bolder militarily.

President Joe Biden says the decision to share sensitive U.S. nuclear technology with Australia is a big deal — and a necessary one. He spoke Monday in San Diego, California.

“As we stand at the inflection point in history where the hard work of enhancing deterrence and promoting stability is going to affect the prospects of peace for decades to come, the United States can ask for no better partners in the Indo-Pacific, where so much of our shared future will be rooted,” Biden said at Naval Base San Diego, flanked by both countries’ leaders. “Forging this new partnership, we’re showing again how democracies can deliver our own security and prosperity, and not just for us, but for the entire world.”

The multi-decade deal will see American and British nuclear-powered submarines rotating into Australian waters as soon as 2027. By the early 2030s, Australia will buy at least three — and as many as five — American nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines designed to hunt and attack other subs. And the three nations will work together to develop a new nuclear attack submarine — a project that could take two decades.

Biden stressed that the deal concerns nuclear propulsion, not arms, and the leaders pledged to adhere to their nuclear non-proliferation agreements.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the deal, which could cost nearly $150 billion (as much as $200 billion Australian dollars) will create jobs and boost innovation and research.

“The AUKUS agreement we confirm here in San Diego represents the biggest single investment in Australia’s defense capability in all of our history, strengthening Australia’s national security and stability in our region,” he said.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also announced that his nation would increase military spending to 2.5% of their GDP, to meet growing threats worldwide.

“The last 18 months, the challenges we face have only grown: Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” he said. “China’s growing assertiveness, the destabilizing behavior of Iran and North Korea. All threaten to create a world defined by danger, disorder and division. Faced with this new reality it is more important than ever that we strengthen the resilience of our own countries.”

Beijing has criticized the partnership and accuses Washington of “provoking rivalry and confrontation.”

“This trilateral cooperation constitutes serious nuclear proliferation risks, undermines the international non-proliferation system, exacerbates arms race and hurts peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific,” said Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry. “It has been widely questioned and opposed by regional countries and the wider international community. We urge the US, the UK and Australia to abandon the Cold War mentality and zero-sum games, honor international obligations in good faith and do more things that are conducive to regional peace and stability.”

But analysts say China’s aggression in the Pacific region prompted this decision.

“This is really more a response to the very aggressive military buildup that China has had, as opposed to anything we’re doing that would be provoking to China,” Mark Kennedy, director of the Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition at the Wilson Center, told VOA.

Because the three countries are democracies and have free-speech protections, there are vocal critics — and analysts expect legislators in all three nations to probe the terms of the deal as it evolves and question its impact on sovereignty issues and government spending.

“There’s criticism, as well there should be, of this deal everywhere because that’s how democracies do policy, right?” Charles Edel, the inaugural Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA. “The ambitions are really, really large, but they’re also very large bets that are being placed.”

And, he said, it’s a sign that Australia’s ties with the U.S. are stronger than ever.

“The real importance here is that nuclear propulsion technology is truly the crown jewel of America’s technological strength,” he said. “We’ve only shared it once in all of American history, and that was almost four decades ago with the British, despite being asked by multiple countries. I think it’s the closeness of the U.S.-Australian relationship, which makes this possible… That can only happen with countries where there is a very deep reservoir of trust.”
…

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged Monday to increase military funding by 5 billion pounds ($6 billion) over the next two years in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “epoch-defining challenge” posed by China. 

The increase, part of a major update to U.K. foreign and defense policy, is less than military officials wanted. Sunak said the U.K. would increase military spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product “in the longer term,” but didn’t set a date. Britain currently spends just over 2% of GDP on defense, and military chiefs want it to rise to 3%. 

The extra money will be used, in part, to replenish Britain’s ammunition stocks, depleted from supplying Ukraine in its defense against Russia. Some will also go toward a U.K.-U.S.-Australia deal to build nuclear-powered submarines. 

“The world has become more volatile, the threats to our security have increased,” Sunak told the BBC during a visit to the U.S. “It’s important that we protect ourselves against those.” 

Sunak met U.S. President Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in San Diego on Monday to confirm next steps for the military pact, known as AUKUS, struck by the three countries in 2021 amid mounting concern about China’s actions in the Pacific. 

Under the deal, the U.K. and Australia will build new nuclear-powered, conventionally armed subs from a British design, with U.S. technology and support. Most of the U.K. construction will take place in shipyards at Barrow-in-Furness in northwest England, with the first subs completed by the late 2030s. Australia will also buy up to five Virginia-class subs from the U.S. 

The three leaders said the submarine plan “elevates all three nations’ industrial capacity to produce and sustain interoperable nuclear-powered submarines for decades to come, expands our individual and collective undersea presence in the Indo-Pacific, and contributes to global security and stability.” 

Britain last produced a defense, security and foreign policy framework, known as the Integrated Review, in 2021. 

The government ordered an update in response to an increasingly volatile world. The new report, released Monday, said “there is a growing prospect that the international security environment will further deteriorate in the coming years, with state threats increasing and diversifying in Europe and beyond.” 

Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine upended European security order, and the review said Russia poses “the most acute threat to the U.K.’s security.” 

The U.K. is also increasingly concerned about what the government calls “the epoch-defining challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party’s increasingly concerning military, financial and diplomatic activity.” 

The defense review said that “wherever the Chinese Communist Party’s actions and stated intent threaten the U.K.’s interests, we will take swift and robust action to protect them.” 

U.K. intelligence agencies have expressed growing concern about China’s military might, covert activities and economic muscle. Ken McCallum, head of domestic spy agency MI5, said in November that “the activities of the Chinese Communist Party pose the most game-changing strategic challenge to the U.K.” MI5 said in January 2022 that a London-based lawyer had tried to “covertly interfere in U.K. politics” on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party — including by channeling money to an opposition Labour Party lawmaker. 

Concern about Beijing’s activities has sparked a government-wide catch-up campaign on China, including Mandarin-language training for British officials and a push to secure new sources of critical minerals that are essential to technology. 

The review doesn’t brand China itself a threat to the U.K., and Sunak has stressed the need for economic ties with China, to the annoyance of more hawkish members of the governing Conservative Party. 

“We are sliding towards a new Cold War,” said Conservative lawmaker Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the House of Commons Defense Committee. “Threats are increasing, but here we are staying on a peacetime budget.”

Speaking as he traveled to the U.S., Sunak said China’s Communist government “is increasingly authoritarian at home and assertive abroad — and has a desire to reshape the world order.”

But, he added, “you can’t ignore China” given the size of its economy.

“It’s right to engage with China, on the issues that we can find common ground and make a difference on, for example climate change, global health, macroeconomic stability,” he said.

“That’s the right approach whilst being very robust in defending our values and our interests.” 
…

While the world sees images of house-to-house combat like those from Bakhmut, most of the front lines in the Ukrainian war are a very different reality. Dug into trenches or under the cover of trees, Ukrainian soldiers experience long waits for orders or word of an enemy attack.

This reporter went into the trenches in the small town of Velyka Novosilka in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region to get a firsthand glimpse at everyday life for the soldiers, who are not only battling occasional Russian strikes but also boredom.

The heavy snow brings a sense of tranquility to the trenches, Sergey tells me, looking intently at the open field that separates us from the Russians. He is a lieutenant and commander of this system of trenches in the southern Donbas area near the town of Velyka Novosilka.

We are less than 2 kilometers from Moscow’s troops. A mine-laden open field separates us from them.

“On a day like this, everything is calmer. Everything is less intense. They can’t see what’s happening here, and we can’t see what’s happening there,” Sergey says, his eyes focused on the field. We are inside one of the many observation points in this complex of more than 2 kilometers of trenches.

‘Things are different around here’

Outside, under the thick snow, a Ukrainian soldier walks through the narrow corridors of the trenches like a tiger trapped in a cage. He has a routine. First, he goes to an observation point where a .50-caliber machine gun is camouflaged and raises the binoculars toward the open field. Then, he looks at the gray sky, searching for a drone. He uses the binoculars again and heads to another observation post. He repeats these movements in the same order, at the same time and at the same pace over and over again.

“People think of war as a constant battle, with shots and explosions all the time, but that’s not always the case,” Sergey says in the bunker he shares with the soldiers in their spare time.

It’s dark and cold. Only a candle lights the place. A soldier sleeps. Near him, a cat feeds three kittens born not long ago in this trench.

“We’ve been here at this point for three months. Before that, we were 800 meters in another line of trenches. But in December, we had to retreat. Their artillery was very accurate,” Sergey says.

Since then, he and his men have been here watching and waiting.

“Sometimes they shoot. Sometimes they threaten to advance. But this isn’t Bakhmut. Things are different around here,” he says.

Bakhmut is an exception. The small town that has become a symbol of this second year of the war is an open battlefield, with Russians and Ukrainians fighting neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, house by house. In recent months, tens of thousands of men and women on both sides of the conflict have given their lives for Bakhmut. Despite Russian advances, fierce fighting continues there.

But beyond Bakhmut, hundreds of cities and towns form part of a front line stretching from the north of Donbas to the south of Ukraine in Kherson. About 1,000 kilometers of trenches, rivers and other obstacles separate Ukrainian troops from Russian soldiers. Although skirmishes are daily, most of the front lines have been static for months, with no advances and no retreats.

Boredom under the trees

A few kilometers away, the thick snow brings boredom to the team lead by Ivan, a young book editor from Kharkiv who was swallowed up by the war last year. He and a group of six other soldiers are in charge of one of three artillery pieces in a forest region near Vuhledar, also in southern Donbas.

“On days like this, we rarely receive the command to shoot. Our drones can’t see what’s happening on the other side, and they can’t see us,” Ivan says. “We only get orders to shoot when there is some action. But most of the time, that’s it — wait, wait, wait.”

On days like this, they spend most of their time in a bunker about a kilometer from a 2S3 Akatsiya, the self-propelled artillery gun built during the Soviet era that is used by both sides in this conflict.

“We stayed here waiting for the command. When we received the order, we were ready to fire in less than two minutes,” Ivan says.

He and his soldiers rarely have an idea what they are shooting at or whether they hit the target.

“We are 6 kilometers away from Russian troops and have an 18-kilometer range, so only our command center can know what we are shooting at and how we are shooting it,” he tells me inside a bunker where soldiers play games offline on their cellphones and warm their socks by ovens. The phones don’t have connections, to prevent the Russians from intercepting their calls or geolocating them.

The weather changes, and Ivan’s radio is abuzz with orders from the Ukrainian command center to the other artillery teams. He says his well-equipped “neighbors” are receiving orders to fire.

“They have Western guns. They have more range than us,” he says.

He decides to take his soldiers closer to the Akatsiya, believing that a fire order is imminent. Around us, the booms of cannon fire are heard. Soon, the radio command comes. The soldiers run inside the gun turret, making the last coordinate adjustments.

Ivan advises me to open my mouth to help equalize the pressure caused by the explosion. He warns it will be loud. Suddenly, a ball of fire comes out of the mouth of the Akatsiya’s long cannon. After the boom, the smoke fills the forest like a morning mist.

“You need to get out of here now,” Ivan tells me. “They may have our location.”

We leave, avoiding the muddy road and seeking cover from trees.

War secrets

The sound of artillery has become routine for Sasha, a 36-year-old farmer who looks like an imposing lumberjack from a cartoon animation. He has been stationed for nine months in Velyka Novosilka.

“It never stops. It’s all the time,” Sasha says inside one of the few houses still intact at the entrance to this ghost town, home to only 150 civilians still living under a deactivated fire department unit.

He spends his days and nights here with a colleague. The two are responsible for reporting to Novosilka’s command post who enters and who leaves through the western access of the small town. It’s a tedious routine, punctuated by the spikes in tension when bombs fall nearby.

“We’re constantly digging a deeper and deeper hole in here. We never know when they’re going to hit us,” he says.

Sasha comes from a small village near Dnipro, not far from Velyka Novosilka. He joined the war when his stepfather died in combat at the start of the Russian invasion.

“But he was already fighting in the Donbas since 2015. He spent years in the war, but he never really told me what the war was,” Sasha says.

He says he only now realizes that his stepfather hid a lot from him about war.

“We only understand what war is when we experience it. In general, everything is very different from what we hear. They don’t tell us everything,” he says.

Today, he does the same with the young people in his village when he has time off.

“It’s best to let them know what it’s like here for themselves,” he says.

Amulet

The snow afforded a lull in the trenches that are under Sergey’s command. The thickest flakes fell from the trees, exposing the pieces of wood torn apart by the bullets. Soon, the tranquility is gone. The soldiers are silent. One of them thinks he heard a small drone flying overhead. Suddenly, a gunfight erupts. The sound of bullets cutting through the air shatters the silence of a quiet snowy afternoon. And as soon as it begins, it ends.

“The mortars will come soon. Let’s go to a shelter,” Sergey tells me. “Don’t worry, it’s just a provocation. Soon, everything will return to normal.”

Sergey is confident he will return home after this war. He deposits part of his faith in an amulet he carries between his uniform and the bulletproof vest he wears — a small candle, lightly burned, no more than an inch long. It was a gift from his father’s best friend, a former Red Army fighter in Afghanistan.

“That candle protected him for several years there, and he gave it to me as a gift. I have faith that I will be protected by it, too,” Sergey says.

The friend returned alive but without both legs. I ask Sergey if it this a sign of luck, to live in a bed for the rest of one’s life. Sergey is honest.

“The most important thing is to come back home alive, no matter how,” he says.
…

Tens of thousands of junior doctors went on strike across England on Monday to demand better pay, kicking off three days of widespread disruption at the U.K.’s state-funded hospitals and health clinics. 

Junior doctors — who are qualified but in the earlier years of their career — make up 45% of all doctors in the National Health Service. Their walkout means that operations and appointments will be canceled for thousands of patients, and senior doctors and other medics have had to be drafted in to cover for emergency services, critical care and maternity services. 

The British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, says pay for junior doctors has fallen 26% in real terms since 2008, while workload and patient waiting lists are at record highs. The union says burnout and the U.K.’s cost-of-living crisis are driving scores of doctors away from the public health service. 

The union said newly qualified medics earn just 14.09 pounds ($17) an hour. 

“All that junior doctors are asking is to be paid a wage that matches our skill set,” said Rebecca Lissman, 29, a trainee in obstetrics and gynecology. “We love the NHS, and I don’t want to work in private practice, but I think we are seeing the erosion of public services.” 

“I want to be in work, looking after people, getting trained. I don’t want to be out here striking, but I feel that I have to,” she added. 

Other health workers, including nurses and paramedics, have also staged strikes in recent months to demand better pay and conditions. NHS figures show that more than 100,000 appointments have already been postponed this winter as a result of the nurses’ walkouts. 

Stephen Powis, medical director of NHS England, said the 72-hour strike this week is expected to have the most serious impact and will cause “extensive disruption.” 

He said some cancer care will likely be affected, alongside routine appointments and some operations. 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told reporters Sunday it was “disappointing that the junior doctors’ union are not engaging with the government.” The doctors’ union said officials have refused to engage with their demands for months, and that a recent invitation to talks came with “unacceptable” preconditions. 

The doctors’ strike this week will coincide with mass walkouts by tens of thousands of teachers and civil servants Wednesday, the day the government unveils its latest budget statement. 

A wave of strikes has disrupted Britons’ lives for months, as workers demand pay raises to keep pace with soaring inflation, which stood at 10.1% in January. That was down from a November peak of 11.1% but is still the highest in 40 years. 

Scores of others in the public sector, including train drivers, airport baggage handlers, border staff, driving examiners, bus drivers and postal workers have all walked off their jobs to demand higher pay. 

Unions say wages, especially in the public sector, have fallen in real terms over the past decade, and a cost-of-living crisis fueled by sharply rising food and energy prices has left many struggling to pay their bills. 
…

As Russia tries to control the narrative on the war in Ukraine, online news providers and aggregators find themselves in tricky territory.

Apps and even people who share information online have been hit with penalties. A Russian court in July fined Google more than $370 million for refusing to remove information about the war, including from YouTube. And earlier this month, a Siberian court sentenced a freelance journalist to eight months’ corrective labor for “knowingly distributing” what it called “false information” about the army in social media posts.

Andrei Novashov, who had worked for media outlets including the RFE/RL Siberia Realities project, is also barred from posting online for a year.

Kirill Goncharov, an opposition politician for the Yabloko party in Moscow, told VOA that since February 2022 Russia has been pursuing a goal of a complete “cleansing” of the internet.

Even discussions on Russian social media sites such as Vkontakte, or VK, can create legal issues, Goncharov said.

“The internet in Russia is censored, but this is actually part of the big picture — absolutely everything is censored here, from the media to entertainment content,” he said.

Lev Gershenzon, the founder of The True Story, an independent news aggregator, told VOA that data from the Russian portal Li.ru appears to show smartphone users in Russia being redirected to sites known for pushing pro-Kremlin narratives.

According to media analysts, Russian search engines Yandex and Mail.ru tend to promote pro-Kremlin media sources on the war. But data on the analytics website Li.ru suggests that the trend is also seen with Android users accessing their Google feed.

Between January and March of this year, Android Google referrals on Li.ru showed users being directed to outlets that media analysts have said publish biased, pro-Kremlin coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine or are known for pro-Kremlin narratives.

Gershenzon, who until 2012 was a head at the Yandex news division, said the data shows millions of clicks per day from Google and Yandex directing users to such sites.

“These are most likely referrals from the Google Discover service,” Gershenzon told VOA. “When an Android user, for example, opens a new page in the Google Chrome browser on his phone … he has not searched for anything yet, but some ‘interesting’ headers have been generated already.”

If users follow those links, he said, they could “be influenced by the ‘pro-Kremlin’ point of view.”

A spokesperson for the Google media team said the company could not comment on “third-party analytics reports” and that they were unclear where the date was coming from or how it was being tracked.

Google’s press office didn’t respond to VOA questions on whether the company makes efforts to exclude websites that promote disinformation on the war in Ukraine from its news feed on smartphones in Russia or to change its algorithms for users in Russia to prioritize more credible media.

Goncharov said he doesn’t think the blame lays with Google and that the company is “helping a lot to fight against fake news and Russian propaganda.”

But, said Goncharov, “The Kremlin allocates huge funds for spreading propaganda on the internet. Large agencies receive contracts from the Kremlin and work in this direction. They do ‘sowing,’ fill the internet with information that is beneficial to the Kremlin, and as a result, users receive this information.”

VOA could not independently verify the Li.ru data, but to get a snapshot of what users see on their phones, VOA asked five people in different Russian cities to screenshot their personalized news feeds.

In comparing the top recommendations for each feed, VOA found that around 12 of the 40 articles in those screenshots were linked to pro-Russian war narratives. One link referred the user to an independent media outlet. The remainder were for non-political articles though many of those recommended websites had pro-Kremlin narratives elsewhere on their homepages.

Staying online

Even with the obstacles, Russians can still bypass internet censorship through Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, and other means.

One such project is Samizdat Online.

The idea for Samizdat Online was realized shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, says its co-founder, Yevgeny Simkin.

“I thought ‘What is [Russian President Vladimir] Putin doing effectively?’ It turned out that [it was] very little. But his propaganda is indeed extraordinarily effective,” Simkin told VOA. “I quickly realized that the most important thing for Russians now is to access all the information which Roskomnadzor is blocking.”

Since February 2022, the media regulator Roskomnadzor has blocked access to thousands of news websites, including the Russian-language services of the VOA, BBC and Deutsche Welle (DW), and some social media, including Facebook.

Samizdat Online operates in several languages and gives users in several countries access to information blocked in their homeland.

“We see a pretty serious flow of users from Belarus, a huge contingent from Russia and from Iran, which we also included,” said Simkin. “We don’t discriminate against autocrats; we try to expose them all in the same way.”

Samizdat Online publishes about 15 articles per day from 50 publications, translating them into different languages.

A unique feature is that access to the materials does not require a VPN. Each article has a unique link, which makes attempts to block access ineffective.

Simkin said that his site’s name — which means “self-publishing”— is a call back to Soviet history when pamphlets were made without the authorities’ knowledge.

“We rely on historical samizdat, which helped people,” said Simkin. “And our mechanism is exactly the same: Those links we create can be sent to anyone. The people who receive them don’t need any additional mechanisms to click on them and read what’s there.”

Simkin said that in theory, social networks such as Facebook that are currently blocked in Russia, could be added to the Samizdat Online system. He expects that in the future, such schemes will be actively used to bypass blocking.

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service.
…

The BBC called a truce Monday in its showdown with sports commentator Gary Lineker, reversing its suspension of the former soccer great for a tweet that criticized the U.K. government’s contentious new migration policy.

The about-face followed a weekend of chaos and crisis for Britain’s publicly funded national broadcaster, which faced a huge backlash after sidelining one of its best-known hosts because he expressed a political opinion.

“Gary is a valued part of the BBC and I know how much the BBC means to Gary, and I look forward to him presenting our coverage this coming weekend,” BBC Director-General Tim Davie said.

Lineker, 62, said he was “glad that we have found a way forward.”

The furor stems from a plan announced last week by Britain’s Conservative government to try to stop tens of thousands of migrants a year from reaching the country in small boats across the English Channel. A new bill will bar asylum claims by anyone who reaches the U.K. by unauthorized means and will compel the government to detain and deport them “to their home country or a safe third country.”

The legislation has been condemned by refugee groups and the U.N., and the government concedes it may breach international law.

Lineker, one of England’s most lauded players and the corporation’s highest-paid television presenter, was suspended after he described the plan as “immeasurably cruel” and called the government’s language “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” 

The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail — two right-leaning newspapers long critical of the BBC — expressed outrage over what they described in headlines as Lineker’s “Nazi” comment, although he had not used the word.

The Conservative government called Lineker’s comparison offensive and unacceptable, and some lawmakers said the BBC should sack him.

The broadcaster announced Friday that Lineker would be “stepping back” until he agreed to keep his tweets within BBC impartiality rules.

Critics accused it of suppressing free speech, and the BBC was forced to scrap much of its weekend sports programming after commentators, analysts and Premier League players refused to appear on air as a show of support for Lineker.

The flagship “Match of the Day” program was reduced from the usual 90 minutes of highlights and analysis to a 20-minute compilation of clips from the day’s games, without commentary or punditry. Other TV and radio soccer shows were pulled from the schedule on Saturday and Sunday as the boycott spread.

Davie insisted Monday that the BBC “did the right thing” by suspending Lineker, but there would now be an independent review of its social media rules to address “gray areas” in the guidelines.

“Between now and when the review reports, Gary will abide by the editorial guidelines,” he said.

Davie said the BBC “has a commitment to impartiality in its Charter,” as well as a commitment to freedom of expression.

“That is a difficult balancing act to get right,” he said.

The furor reflects the distinctive nature of U.K. media, where newspapers are highly opinionated and news broadcasters are required to be balanced — especially the taxpayer-funded BBC, which has a duty to be impartial.

The crisis dramatically illustrated the pressures long faced by the 100-year-old BBC in an increasingly polarized political and media world. Those on the right often sense a leftist slant in the broadcaster’s news output, while some liberals accuse it of having a conservative bias.

Opposition politicians accuse the government of political meddling by pushing for Conservative-friendly bosses for the BBC. Davie is former Conservative local-government candidate. BBC chairman Richard Sharp is a Conservative Party donor who helped arrange a loan in 2021 for then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, weeks before Sharp was appointed to the BBC post on the government’s recommendation.

The Conservatives also periodically suggest changing the BBC’s funding model. It gets much of its money from a license fee paid by all households with a television.

The opposition Labour Party’s culture and media spokeswoman, Lucy Powell, said the Conservatives “have long wanted to undermine the BBC.”

“As well as a review of the BBC’s social media guidelines, this saga should prompt the government to examine how it protects and promotes a truly independent and impartial BBC,” she said.

As part of its commitment to impartiality, the BBC bars news staff from expressing political opinions.

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

James Harding, a former BBC director of news, said the corporation has got into a “muddle” over the issue of impartiality.

He said it was important that the broadcaster “that delivers news and information that informs the country is impartial,” but added: “You can’t get to a world in which the BBC is policing the opinions of every writer, director, musician, sports personality, scientist, business entrepreneur.”

Lineker said it had been “a surreal few days” and thanked colleagues for their support. And he showed no signs of stopping his use of social media.

“A final thought: however difficult the last few days have been, it simply doesn’t compare to having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away,” he tweeted to his 8.8 million followers. “It’s heartwarming to have seen the empathy towards their plight from so many of you.” 
…

The battle for eastern Ukraine’s Bakhmut featured fierce fighting Monday, according to both sides, as the months-long struggle for control of the area raged on.

Ukraine’s military said it was using artillery, tanks and other weapons to repel Russian attempts to capture the city.

Britain’s defense ministry has assessed in recent days that Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group controls most of the eastern part of Bakhmut, with Ukrainian forces holding the western portion.

Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin described the situation Sunday as “very tough” with the fighting getting more difficult the closer his forces get to the city center.

Russia has targeted Bakhmut as a key part of its wider goal to seize the Donbas region.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to defend Bakhmut, while some allies, including U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have cautioned that a Ukrainian defeat would not amount to a turning point in the conflict.

Some information for this story came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
…

Pope Francis marks 10 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church on Monday celebrating Mass with cardinals in the chapel of the Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel where he has lived since his election. 

The Argentina-born Francis, 86, became the first Latin American pontiff on March 13, 2013, succeeding Benedict XVI who had become the first pope in six centuries to resign. 

“It seems like yesterday,” he said in a podcast by Vatican News broadcast on Monday. “Time flies. When you gather up today, it is already tomorrow.” 

When it was recorded at his residence on Sunday, he asked: “What’s a podcast?” according to Vatican News reporter Salvatore Cernuzio. When it was explained to him, he said “Nice. Let’s do it.” 

The former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has sought to project simplicity into the grand role and never took possession of the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace used by his predecessors, saying he preferred to live in a community setting for his “psychological health.” 

He has invited all the cardinals who are in Rome with him to the Mass on Monday. 

A persistent knee ailment has forced Francis to alternate between a cane and a wheelchair, but he appears to be in good overall health. 

“You don’t run the Church with a knee but with a head,” he reportedly told an aide after he began occasionally using a wheelchair in public for the first time last May. 

Cardinal electors 

Francis has said he would be ready to step down if severe health problems prohibited him from running the 1.38-billion-member Church. But he has also said he thinks popes should try to reign for life and that being emeritus pope – as Benedict was – should not become a “fashion”. Benedict resigned on health grounds but lived nearly 10 more years. 

With his 10 years as pontiff, Francis has now reigned longer than the 7.5 years average length of the previous 265 pontificates. He has visited 60 states and territories, clocking up almost 410,000 kilometers. 

But he has not returned to his native Argentina, an absence that has prompted much speculation. 

He has named about 64% of the so-called cardinal electors who are under 80 and thus eligible to enter a conclave to elect his successor after he dies or resigns. 

Francis marks the anniversary having outlasted conservative opposition within the Church that has several times demanded his resignation and which is now at a crossroads, seeking new direction following the deaths of two of its leading figures. 

The longest papacy is believed to be that of St. Peter the apostle, the first pope, estimated to have lasted about 35 years. 

The longest papacy in recent centuries was that of Pius IX, which lasted more than 31 years between 1846 and 1878. After that comes the papacy of John Paul II, who reigned for more than 26 years between 1978 and 2005. 
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The BBC’s sports coverage was hit with a second day of severe disruptions Sunday as dozens of staff refused to work in solidarity with top soccer host Gary Lineker, who was suspended by the broadcaster after he tweeted criticism of the British government’s asylum policy. 

The news corporation is reeling from huge fallout and questions over its impartiality after it suspended Lineker, one of English soccer’s most lauded players and the corporation’s highest-paid presenter, on Friday after he compared the Conservative government’s language about migrants to that used in Nazi Germany. 

He was referring to the government’s plans to stop migrants from arriving in small boats on U.K. shores by introducing tough new laws that would detain asylum seekers, deport them and ban them from ever re-entering the U.K. 

Immigration and “taking back control” of Britain’s borders has been a hot-button issue in the U.K. since voters backed Britain’s exit from the European Union. Like his predecessors in recent years, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made stopping the English Channel migrant crossings one of his top priorities. But his latest plans have drawn swift condemnation from the U.N.’s refugee agency and many rights groups, which call the policies unethical and unworkable. 

Pressure is mounting on the BBC to resolve the crisis, with growing calls for its bosses to step down over allegations of political bias and suppressing free speech. 

The controversy has impacted the BBC’s sports programs, with dozens of sports presenters and reporters walking out of their jobs Saturday and Sunday in support of Lineker. 

A look at who Lineker is, the debate surrounding his comments and how it’s affected the BBC: 

Who is Lineker and what did he say? 

Lineker, 62, is one of Britain’s most influential media figures and was paid $1.6 million by the BBC last year. 

One of England’s greatest strikers with 48 goals in 80 international appearances, he was a household name in Britain even before he became chief presenter of the soccer highlights show “Match of the Day” in 1999. 

In a post Tuesday to his 8.7 million followers on Twitter, Lineker described the government’s new plan to detain and deport migrants arriving by boat as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s.” 

How did the BBC and others react? 

The BBC — which has prominently covered the Lineker controversy — said the presenter breached its social media guidelines and said he was to step back from presenting “Match of the Day.” 

While BBC news staff are barred from expressing political opinions, Linker is a freelancer who doesn’t work in news or current affairs. However, in guidelines updated in 2020, the BBC said presenters with a “significant public profile” had responsibility to avoid taking sides on party political issues or political controversies. 

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

In a BBC interview, the broadcaster’s director-general Tim Davie flatly rejected a suggestion that Lineker was suspended due to pressure from the governing Conservative Party. 

Many who supported Lineker said he had a right to express his opinion online. 

“I cannot see why you would ask someone to step back for saying that,” said Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, who is known for being outspoken about current affairs. “If I understand it right, it is a message, an opinion about human rights and that should be possible to say.” 

Others say the corporation’s impartiality rules seem muddled, pointing out that Lineker did not face discipline when he criticized the Qatar government’s rights record during the World Cup last year. 

“It seems that they want to pick and choose when they want to be partial, criticizing others or criticizing other countries or other political parties or other religions seems to be okay,” former England soccer player John Barnes told Sky News. 

How has the BBC been affected? 

The 100-year-old BBC is under scrutiny particularly because it is a public corporation — it is mostly funded by a license fee paid by all households with a television — and is expected to be independent. 

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

More immediately, the decision to suspend Lineker has triggered a mass walkout of BBC sports presenters and reporters in solidarity with their colleague. 

On Saturday, several daytime soccer shows were pulled at the last minute and “Match of the Day,” regarded as something of a British institution since the 1960s, aired with no commentary and only featured shortened footage. Usually lasting around an hour and a half, Saturday’s “Match of the Day” only aired for 20 minutes. 

Sunday’s coverage of the Women’s Super League aired without commentary from regular BBC presenters and “Match of the Day 2” was also expected to run in a reduced format. 

Davie apologized for the disruption and said bosses are “working very hard to resolve the situation and make sure that we get output back on air.” 
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Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has ordered the closure of the Vatican Embassy in Managua and that of the Nicaraguan Embassy to the Vatican in Rome, a senior Vatican source said Sunday. 

Nicaragua signaled that the move, which came a few days after Pope Francis compared the Nicaraguan government to a dictatorship, was “a suspension” of diplomatic relations. 

The Vatican source said that while the closures do not automatically mean a total break of relations between Managua and the Holy See, they are serious steps toward that possibility. 

Ortega’s administration has been increasingly isolated internationally since he began cracking down heavily on dissent following street protests that erupted in 2018. Ortega called the protests an attempted coup against his government. 

Bishop Rolando Alvarez, a vocal critic of Ortega, was sentenced to more than 26 years in prison in Nicaragua last month on charges that included treason, undermining national integrity and spreading false news. 

Alvazez was convicted after he refused to leave the country along with 200 political prisoners released by Ortega’s government and sent to the United States. Alvarez refused to board the plane and was stripped of his citizenship. 

In an interview published last week with Latin American online news outlet Infobae ahead of Monday’s 10th anniversary of his pontificate, the pope pointed to Alvarez’s imprisonment and likened what was happening in Nicaragua to the “1917 Communist dictatorship or that of Hitler in 1935.” 

Staff in both embassies had been down to barebones for years with only a chargé d’affaires for the Vatican in Managua and almost no one for Nicaragua in Rome. 

The relationship between the Nicaraguan Catholic Church and the government has been severely strained since the crackdown on the anti-government protests in 2018, when the Church acted as a mediator between both sides. 

The Church had called for justice for more than 360 people who died during the unrest. 

Nicaraguan Bishop Silvio Baez, also a critic of the government, went into exile in 2019. 

A year ago, the Vatican protested to Nicaragua over the effective expulsion of its ambassador, saying the unilateral action was unjustified and incomprehensible. 

Archbishop Waldemar Sommertag, who had been critical of Nicaragua’s slide away from democracy, had to leave the country suddenly after the government withdrew its approval of the envoy.  
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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will spend an extra 5 billion pounds ($6 billion) to replenish ammunition stocks and fund the next phase of a submarine pact with the United States and Australia in an update to Britain’s foreign policy framework.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Countering China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex abuse

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

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

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

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

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

Significance of synods

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

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

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

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

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

Latin Mass

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

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

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

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

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

Role of women

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

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

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

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

LGBTQ faithful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian munitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myanmar opposition concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They got this one badly wrong and now they’re very, very exposed,” he said.
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Russia’s Wagner Group is in control of the eastern portion of the Ukranian Donbas town of Bakhmut, while Ukranian forces are holding on to the western part of the town, according to an intelligence report Saturday from the British Defense Ministry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine, guerrillas from Belarus began carrying out acts of sabotage on their country’s railways, including blowing up track equipment to paralyze the rails that Russian forces used to get troops and weapons into Ukraine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belarusian authorities have unleashed a crackdown on guerrillas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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