Month: June 2023

The U.N. expressed concern Friday that no new ships have been registered since June 26 under a deal allowing the safe Black Sea export of grain from Ukraine. “We call on the parties to commit to the continuation and effective implementation of the agreement without further delay,” U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. Moscow said Modi expressed support for what the Kremlin called the Russian leadership’s decisive actions in handling the mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group last Saturday. The call comes after the U.S. and India declared themselves “among the closest partners in the world” last week during a state visit to Washington by Modi. India has yet to condemn ally Russia for the invasion of Ukraine.  
Russian forces hit a school in Serhiivka, Donetsk Oblast on Friday, killing two members of staff and injuring six others, the regional prosecutor’s office reported.

 

More weapons are needed for an effective counteroffensive, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the top officer in Ukraine’s armed forces, said in an interview with The Washington Post. 

Zaluzhny expressed frustration that although Ukraine is expected to rapidly take back Russian occupied territories, it will have to wait — in a best-case scenario — at least until the fall before it receives American-made F-16s.

The Ukrainian commander pointed to NATO’s own doctrine, which calls for air superiority before launching an offensive. Despite that, Western leaders are slow to supply the jets, Zaluzhny complained.

He also said his troops have limited ammunition, adding they have been outshot tenfold at times by the enemy.

So, it “pisses me off,” Zaluzhny said, when he hears that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive in the country’s east and south has started slower than expected — an opinion publicly expressed by Western officials and military analysts. Nevertheless, he remarked his troops have gained some ground — even if they are inching just 500 meters daily.

“This is not a show,” Zaluzhny said Wednesday in his office at Ukraine’s General Staff headquarters. “It’s not a show the whole world is watching and betting on or anything. Every day, every meter is given by blood.”

“Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all,” he said. “But they are being carried out. Yes, maybe not as fast as the participants in the show, the observers, would like, but that is their problem.”

Ukrainian forces have successfully liberated nine settlements in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, according to Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, though the main attack is yet to come.

 

Northern border

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked his senior military leadership to strengthen Ukraine’s northern military sector after the arrival in Belarus of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

“The decision … is for Commander-in-Chief [General Valeriy] Zaluzhny and ‘North’ commander [General Serhiy] Naev to implement a set of measures to strengthen this direction,” Zelenskyy said on the Telegram messaging app.

Zelenskyy did not mention Wagner Group boss Prigozhin in the brief post on Telegram.  

National Security Spokesman John Kirby told VOA the U.S. will “continue to monitor Wagner’s activities wherever they are around the world, and we’re going to continue to hold them properly accountable for the kinds of egregious violent, deadly and illegal conduct that they, that they are still capable of conducting.”

After pushing Russian forces out of northern regions last year, Ukraine took steps to tighten the defense of its border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

Prigozhin flew from Russia into exile in Belarus on Tuesday under a deal negotiated by President Alexander Lukashenko that ended his mercenaries’ mutiny in Russia on Saturday.

Thunberg’s involvement

Zelenskyy met Thursday in Kyiv with Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and prominent European figures who are forming a working group to assess ecological damage from the 16-month-old Russian invasion. Their talks focused on the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. 

“Combating ecocide is one of the points of the Ukrainian Peace Formula, and we must implement each of its points, all aspects of peace,” said Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy also met Thursday with former U.S. vice president Mike Pence, who made a surprise visit in Kyiv. Zelenskyy thanked Pence for his support. “We appreciate that both major U.S. parties, the Republican and Democratic, remain united in their support for Ukraine,” he said and added “we feel the strong support of the people of the United States,” he said.

Zelenskyy also thanked the U.S. for the recent defense assistance packages worth $2.1 billion and $500 million, allocated on June 6 and June 27, respectively, and he emphasized the unprecedented total amount of support provided, which has reached $43.1 billion since February last year. [https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/volodimir-zelenskij-zustrivsya-iz-48-m-vice-prezidentom-ssha-83929]

Pence is the first Republican U.S. presidential candidate to meet with the Ukrainian president during the campaign.

VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this report. Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

A look at the best news photos from around the world.

EU leaders say they’ll support Ukraine for as long as it takes. Ukraine says Russia is gradually reducing the number of personnel at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. The fallout from Wagner’s aborted mutiny has rattled nerves in the Baltic countries.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said Friday that a cybersecurity incident involving one of its IT hardware suppliers has led to the leak of the vendor’s company data. 

“TSMC has recently been aware that one of our IT hardware suppliers experienced a cybersecurity incident that led to the leak of information pertinent to server initial setup and configuration,” the company said. 

TMSC confirmed in a statement to Reuters that its business operations or customer information were not affected following the cybersecurity incident at its supplier Kinmax. 

The TSMC vendor breach is part of a larger trend of significant security incidents affecting various companies and government entities. 

Victims range from U.S. government departments to the UK’s telecom regulator to energy giant Shell, all affected since a security flaw was discovered in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product last month. 

TSMC said it has cut off data exchange with the affected supplier following the incident.

Analysts monitoring Sudan say it might take an internationally supported peacekeeping force to end the ongoing fighting there. That assessment follows multiple failed cease-fire attempts and talks facilitated by Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Until two weeks ago, Hala Alkarib lived in Khartoum, where she’s the regional director for the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa. But she and other colleagues had to relocate because of the horrors created by the ongoing war, including looting.

“I would say 75% or more of Khartoum inhabitants have experienced looting,” Alkarib said. “Our homes were completely looted, our vehicles, our personal properties, our papers and documents were destroyed and burned.”

She said the strategy of the Rapid Support Forces run by General Hamdan Dagalo is not new.

“The presence on the ground inside residential areas being in Khartoum, in Al Fasher, in Nyala or in [El] Geneina, the RSF strategy is to run a war from within and inside civilian residencies,” Alkarib said. “The RSF are the extension of the Janjaweed. It’s been done for over 20 years in rural Darfur, where villagers were terrorized, and infrastructure was completely destroyed.”

Alkarib blames the Sudanese Armed Forces led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, for enabling the RSF to flourish.

“SAF unfortunately, they were for years kind of relying on the RSF to do their dirty work and they were complacent and enabled this criminal organization to grow and right now it grew to the point that it actually threatens the existence of overall Sudan as a state.”

She said it’s unfortunate the international community is not exerting sufficient pressure on countries that could help end the war.

“Seventy-five percent of the causes of this war lies outside of Sudan,” Alkarib said. “UAE [United Arab Emirates] and their significant support to the RSF and Egypt and their position – anti- any type of democratic governance in Sudan and that constantly put them in a position where they support SAF as potential rulers.”

That sentiment was partly echoed by Dr. Edgar Githua, a lecturer at the United States International University and Strathmore University.

“The African Union and the world in general looking at this situation need to step up and need to call out Russia and tell Russia pull out the Wagner group, get it out,” Githua said. “Egypt is an easier group to deal with, the U.S. has a lot of leverage with Egypt. Libya, Khalifa Haftar can be told to back down also, and the UAE can be told to back off.”

Some of the countries mentioned offered to mediate the crisis and denied involvement in the war. Githua said the international community must become more directly involved.

“They are coming to the battlefield with renewed vigor and at some point, the world has no choice but there has to be some external intervention and for me it’ll be a peacekeeping force that creates a humanitarian corridor to just try to restore normalcy.”

The Jeddah talks overseen by the United States and Saudi Arabia were recently suspended and the most recent offer by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, to mediate the crisis also stalled because one of the generals said he didn’t want the Kenyan president leading the group that is made up of South Sudan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

And that’s a problem, said Macharia Munene, professor of History and International Relations at USIU in Nairobi.

“One of the generals, Burhan, has said he doesn’t want anything to do with him, so he’s going nowhere,” Munene said. “He prefers [South Sudan political figure Salva Kiir. Yes, the team is an IGAD team, and he’s supposed to lead the team but if one of the participants, the major player, doesn’t want anything to do about him leading the team, there’s something wrong.”

For now, fighting is showing no signs of letting up.

SAO PAULO — A panel of judges voted Friday to render far-right former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office again after concluding that he abused his power and cast unfounded doubts on the country’s electronic voting system.

The decision, once voting of all judges concludes, will forbid Bolsonaro from running until 2030, upending the 68-year-old’s political future and likely erasing any chance for him to regain power.

Four of the seven judges on the nation’s highest electoral court agreed that Bolsonaro abused his authority by using government communication channels to promote his campaign and sowing doubts about the vote.

“This decision will end Bolsonaro’s chances of being president again, and he knows it,” said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo. “After this, he will try to stay out of jail, elect some of his allies to keep his political capital, but it is very unlikely he will ever return to the presidency.”

The case focused on a July 18, 2022, meeting where Bolsonaro used government staffers, the state television channel and the presidential palace in Brasilia to tell foreign ambassadors that the country’s electronic voting system was rigged.

“Bolsonaro abused the powers of his office by calling the meeting: check. He used government staffers and buildings with an electoral objective: check. And he mixed the country’s interests with those of his campaign: check,” said Márlon Reis, an electoral law expert who helped draft the ineligibility provisions.

Bolsonaro will be able to appeal to the Supreme Court. He also faces other legal troubles, including criminal investigations.

Speaking Thursday to reporters in Brasilia, Bolsonaro was defiant.

“This is an injustice against me, my God in heaven! Show me something concrete I have done against democracy,” he said. “Perhaps my crime was doing the right thing for four years.”

In an interview earlier this week, Bolsonaro recognized that his chances of prevailing were slim. The ruling will remove him from the 2024 and 2028 municipal elections as well as the 2026 general elections. Future criminal convictions could extend his ban by years and subject him to imprisonment.

Former President Fernando Collor de Mello and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were declared ineligible in the past, but Bolsonaro’s case marks the first time a president has been suspended for election violations rather than a criminal offense. Brazilian law forbids candidates with criminal sentences from running for office.

Lula’s eligibility was reinstated by Brazil’s top court following rulings that then-judge and now Sen. Sergio Moro was biased when he sentenced the leftist leader to almost 10 years in prison for corruption and money laundering.

While Bolsonaro aims to be the right’s kingmaker, and his endorsement will carry significant heft, his decision to decamp to Florida for several months at the start of Lula’s term weakened him, according to Thomas Traumann, a political analyst. That is reflected by the limited right-wing outrage on social media throughout the eligibility trial, and no sign of protests.

“There won’t be a mass movement, because he diminished in size. The fact that he went to Florida and didn’t lead the opposition caused him to diminish in size,” Traumann said. “The leader of the opposition is clearly not Bolsonaro.”

FIFA revealed eight different armbands highlighting social causes that sides will be able to wear at the women’s World Cup as world football’s governing body seeks to avoid a row that erupted at last year’s men’s World Cup.

Captains from a number of European countries, including England and Germany, planned to wear a “OneLove” armband in rainbow colors in Qatar in support of LGBTQ rights.

However, they abandoned that stance after being threatened with sporting sanctions just days before the tournament kicked off.

The armband had widely been viewed as a symbolic protest against laws in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal.

The “unite for inclusion” armband for the women’s World Cup is similar in style to the one outlawed with the words alongside a heart shape in rainbow colors.

Other causes highlighted include gender equality, ending violence against women, hunger and the rights of indigenous people.

Captains will be able to wear a different armband for each match corresponding to the cause being promoted or support one cause for the entire tournament.

“Football unites the world and our global events, such as the FIFA Women’s World Cup, have a unique power to bring people together and provide joy, excitement and passion,” said FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

“After some very open talks with stakeholders, including member associations and players, we have decided to highlight a series of social causes – from inclusion to gender equality, from peace to ending hunger, from education to tackling domestic violence – during all 64 matches at the FIFA Women’s World Cup.”

The women’s World Cup, which will be hosted by Australia and New Zealand, begins on July 20.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.