Pope Francis, whose papacy has been marked by efforts to quell a global crisis over sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, said on Tuesday he was committed to stopping the abuse of nuns by priests and bishops, some of whom had used the women as sex slaves.

Francis made his comments on the plane returning from Abu Dhabi in response to a reporter’s question about an article last week in a Vatican monthly magazine about the abuse of nuns in the Catholic Church.

Recently more nuns, encouraged by the #MeToo movement, have been coming forward to describe abuse at the hands of priests and bishops. Last year, the International Union of Superiors General, which represents more than 500,000 Catholic nuns, urged their members to report abuse.

“It is true … there have been priests and even bishops who have done this. I think it is still going on because something does not stop just because you have become aware of it,” Francis said.

“We have been working on this for a long time. We have suspended some priests because of this,” he said, adding that the Vatican was in the process of shutting down a female religious order because of sexual abuse and corruption. He did not name it.

“I can’t say ‘this does not happen in my house.’ It is true. Do we have to do more? Yes. Are we willing? Yes,” he said. Francis said former Pope Benedict dissolved a religious order of women shortly after his election as pontiff in 2005 “because slavery had become part of it [the religious order], even sexual slavery on the part of priests and the founder.” He did not name the group but Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said it was a French order.

Before he became pope, Benedict was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department that investigates sexual abuse. The pope at the time was John Paul.

Then-cardinal Ratzinger wanted to investigate the religious order where women were being abused but he was blocked, Francis said, without saying who prevented the probe.

After he became pope, Ratzinger reopened the investigation and dissolved the order, Francis said.

Pope Francis has summoned key bishops from around the world to a summit later this month at the Vatican to find a unified response on how to protect children from sexual abuse by clergy. Asked if there would be some kind of similar action to confront abuse of nuns in the Church, he said: “I want to move forward. We are working on it.”
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday offered a way to break the deadlock over the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, calling for a “creative” compromise to allay concerns over the future of Irish border arrangements.

The United Kingdom is due under British and European law to leave the EU in just 53 days yet Prime Minister Theresa May wants last-minute changes to a divorce deal agreed with the EU last November to win over lawmakers in the British parliament.

May is seeking legally binding changes to the deal to replace the Northern Irish backstop, an insurance policy that aims to prevent the reintroduction of a hard border between EU-member Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.

While Merkel said she did not want the so-called Withdrawal Agreement renegotiated, she added that difficult questions could be resolved with creativity, the strongest hint to date that the EU’s most powerful leader could be prepared to compromise.

“There are definitely options for preserving the integrity of the single market even when Northern Ireland isn’t part of it because it is part of Britain while at the same time meeting the desire to have, if possible, no border controls,” Merkel said.

“To solve this point you have to be creative and listen to each other, and such discussions can and must be conducted,” Merkel said at a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo.

Merkel said the Irish backstop issue could be solved as part of a discussion over a separate agreement on the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom, offering May a potential way out of the deadlock.

Merkel’s stance on Brexit is driven by an eagerness to preserve the integrity of the EU and its internal market, which are crucial to Germany’s post-war identity and prosperity, while also keeping Britain close to the bloc even after it leaves.

Keen to avoid the economic disruption a no-deal Brexit would bring to Germany’s economy, which slowed sharply last year, Merkel also values Britain as a like-minded partner and wants to keep its security expertise close at hand.

“We can still use the time to perhaps reach an agreement if everyone shows good will,” Merkel said.

Last-minute deal?

Britain’s labyrinthine crisis over EU membership is approaching its finale with an array of options including no-deal Brexit, a last-minute deal, a snap election or a delay.

May said she would seek a pragmatic solution when she tries to reopen talks with Brussels though Brexit-supporting lawmakers in her Conservative Party have warned they will vote against her deal unless there are substantial changes.

In Brussels, a group of British lawmakers met the head of the EU civil service and said Martin Selmayr appeared to indicate that the EU might bind itself to new legal conditions.

While European Commission Secretary General Selmayr, the long-time lieutenant of President Jean-Claude Juncker, had reiterated the EU line that it would not reopen the withdrawal agreement, Labour lawmaker Hilary Benn told reporters: “I got the impression that they might be prepared to consider some additional statement or legal protocol.”

But Selmayr was quick to fire back on Twitter: “On the EU side, nobody is considering this.”

The German EU official said the lawmakers gave “inconclusive” answers when he asked whether any EU assurances could help May win support for her deal.

Selmayr has been in charge of the bloc’s preparations for the event of Britain failing to agree on an orderly withdrawal and his role in meeting the lawmakers was seen by some British commentators as a sign of a harder line from Brussels than that from Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, a former French minister.
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Long before she became just one of the financially destitute legions of street sweepers that dot Moscow’s bitterly cold winter landscape, Shaknoza Ishankulova had simply wanted to do the right thing.

It was 2008, and the recent Uzbekistan National University graduate was ecstatic to secure a teaching post at a Tashkent high school, finally making good use of her diploma in secondary education.

Twenty-two years old and eager to guide younger Uzbeks toward a better life, she was shaken when Uzbekistan’s notoriously vast culture of entrenched corruption revealed itself in the form of a personal mentor and supervisor — a deputy principal at the school who notified her that, if she wished to keep her job, a full third of her weekly salary would have to be kicked back to him.

It was his cut, he explained, for having hired her in the first place.

Years passed before Shaknoza gathered the courage to broach the issue with the school’s principal, a suspiciously wealthy public servant who promptly dismissed the complaint as naively frivolous.

Taking her cue from the anti-corruption initiatives she had seen in Uzbekistan, marketed in the form of public service announcements since 2005, Shaknoza escalated her complaint to Russia’s Ministry of Education, and was summarily placed on paid leave pending further investigation. 

Two years and a cancer battle later, Shaknoza’s case had wound its way through ministry proceedings, leaving her fate in the hands of her employer, who summarily fired her, demanded reimbursement for the two years of salaried leave, and permanently blacklisted her from any professional employment.

Like many unemployed Uzbek nationals, Shaknoza was lured by Moscow’s abundance of service sector jobs that paid more than similar work in Tashkent. After spending nearly a year as a sweeper, she lucked out by landing a relatively well-paid waitressing job, only to lose the position when a Russian supervisor publicly castigated her for making conversation with foreign diners, an experience she attributed to the ethnic workplace discrimination many Uzbeks face in Russia.

Tall and slender with distinctly Asian facial features and straight shoulder-length hair, Shoksana, appearing older than her 34 years, is now a cashier and produce vendor at one of Moscow’s many 24-hour convenience stores.

Speaking with VOA on a frigid afternoon in Moscow, her bare hands balled in fists as she stood stock still in seemingly arctic gales, the former high school teacher said she has done reasonably well for herself when compared to fellow migrants sleeping 10 to a room on the city’s outskirts.

Making $37 per 24-hour shift, each of which is followed by 24 hours off, she said the salary is enough to share a two-room apartment with three other laborers: two Uzbek men and a woman, with whom she shares the bedroom.

After feeding and clothing herself, she says, she sends a small amount home to her mother.

“But it’s not enough to save anything,” she said, explaining that she lacks the resources to get ahead in Moscow and that, as a blacklisted whistleblower, any path back to Tashkent is surely a dead end.

Millions seek opportunity

By 2017, Russia was home to nearly 12 million migrants — the world’s third largest foreign-born population.

Much like in western European nations and the United States, the large numbers of immigrants have triggered unease, and a majority of Russians have become increasingly intolerant of the newcomers.

A 2018 survey by the Washington-based Pew Charitable Trust showed that nearly 70 percent of Russian nationals felt the country should allow fewer or no migrants in the future.

While many of the migrants from China, eastern Europe and the West possess a broad range of professional skill sets, the vast majority of Russia’s lowest-paid laborers hail from impoverished central Asian countries, of which Uzbeks are the largest group.

This makes them the most visible targets of anti-immigrant vitriol.

Some high-level Russian officials have relayed largely context-free statistics that they portray as an immigrant-fueled crime wave for which Uzbeks in particular are to blame.

“If you create a ranking of criminality, you will find citizens of Uzbekistan at the top,” Moscow chief prosecutor Sergei Kudeneyev told Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper in 2014. “They have committed 2,522 crimes; next is Tajikistan, with 1,745 crimes; and in third place there is Kyrgyzstan, whose citizens committed 1,269 crimes.”

“The unremitting crime rates among foreign citizens are causing serious concern, particularly since crimes of this nature draw a lot of public attention,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told a gathering of top security officials in 2016. During the televised statement, the president demanded a swift crackdown on foreign criminals.

Alexander Verkhovsky of SOVA, the Center for Information and Analysis, a think tank in Moscow, questioned the veracity and transparency of these datasets.

“Any statistics on working migrants are very blurry,” he said. “While there are police crime statistics — or at least crime documentation — that may indicate a given perpetrator’s country of origin, that specific data is never published in full.

“In general, data on crimes is organized by categories of crime, and even whether these crimes may have been committed by or against a foreigner,” he said. But by the time police records are internally digested into statistics and prepared for public presentation via the prosecutor’s office, hard data about specific countries of origin has been scrubbed.

“You never get to see the complete data,” he said.

A 2016 report by Columbia University’s Eurasia.org news site suggests migrants who have committed crimes may have acted in response to a series of new Russian laws that drastically increased living costs.

Migrant work permit requirements unveiled in 2015 required applicants to “undergo a battery of tests for HIV, tuberculosis, drug addiction and skin diseases.” Permit holders, the report says, were also required to purchase health insurance, acquire taxpayer identification numbers, and be tested on Russian language, history and laws.

Failure to satisfy requirements within a month of arriving in Russia subjected migrants to a $152 fine.

“Once migrants have jumped through all the hoops, they must pay 14.5 thousand rubles ($219) for their work permit and another four thousand rubles ($61) every month to renew the document,” the report says. “All told, this costs almost $1,000 per year.”

A December 2018 SOVA report on hate crimes that was compiled from official statistics and field research said although attacks targeting foreigners are decreasing, ethnic migrants are among the most vulnerable to violent attacks on Russian soil.

“People perceived as ethnic outsiders constituted the largest group of victims in 2017,” says the report, which recorded 28 ethnically motivated attacks, down from 44 attacks (7 fatal) in 2016.

“Migrants from Central Asia were the most numerous group in this category of victims … followed by individuals of unidentified non-Slavic appearance,” the report states. “Most likely, the overwhelming majority of these people were also from Central Asia, since their appearance was described as Asian.”

Foreigners targeted

All of the migrants VOA spoke with mentioned that they had been intimidated by racists or nationalists, swindled into weeks of free labor by dishonest employers, or were the victims of robbery.

Oibek Usupov, a construction worker from Tashkent, recounted the time he and his brother accepted jobs at an apartment development, wherein the employer required them to sign contracts to work throughout the winter. They received a small advance up front, followed by a handful of paychecks well below what they were promised.

Once the units began selling, the developer said, they would be reimbursed in full. Then payments stopped and, a week before spring, it was announced the project had been bought out by another developer.

The new boss, Usupov told us, said prior contracts weren’t binding because his company hadn’t authorized them.

“We lost months of back pay,” he said.

Adkham Enamov, an Uzbek artist who lives an hour north of Moscow, says he became stranded in Russia after intermediaries who sold his paintings at a famous Moscow arts bazaar disappeared with the profits.

“At the time, my dream was to see Moscow, to sell my paintings in Russia, but I didn’t know that half of Moscow are artists,” he said. “So my current dream is to see my motherland, to return in good health.”

Emanov, 46, who speaks very little Russian, has a 16-year-old son with cerebral palsy. His purpose in Moscow was to cover the medical expenses stacking up in Tashkent.

And then in early 2018, tragedy struck when his 4-year-old daughter, Nama, died from an undiagnosed illness.

“She was buried without me due to the Muslim tradition,” he said, referring to the Sharia ritual of washing and burying the dead within 24 hours of passing. “Well, I sent some money there. Not much.”

After a long, reflective pause, he added, “I should come back being quite rich, but my dream didn’t come true.”
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Catalan pro-independence parties said Monday they would file parliamentary amendments opposing the Spanish government’s 2019 budget proposal, potentially putting at risk the budget and the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists.

Sanchez’s minority Socialist government came to power last June and holds just a quarter of the seats in parliament, meaning it relies on the backing of anti-austerity Podemos, Catalan nationalists and other small parties to pass laws.

The two Catalan parties, ERC and PDeCAT, said they would file full parliamentary amendments against the budget proposal, which faces its first vote next week, unless Sanchez is open to some of their political demands.

Under Spanish parliamentary procedure, such amendments can block the entire budget bill.

Failure by parliament to approve the government’s 2019 budget bill could prompt a snap election before the next scheduled vote in 2020.

PDeCAT, the party that holds the Catalan presidency, wants the government to launch a nationwide dialogue forum between political parties “to address politically the Catalan issue,” their parliamentary spokesperson Carles Campuzano told Reuters.

ERC, the party that has led recent polls in Catalonia, went further and requested an authorized referendum on the region’s independence.

The trial of 12 Catalan independence leaders starts Feb. 12. Spain’s public prosecutor is seeking prison terms of up to 25 years for the leaders on charges of rebellion and misuse of public funds for their role in Catalonia’s failed 2017 breakaway from Spain.

Feb. 12 is also the last day the two parties could withdraw their amendments over the budget proposal.

On Feb. 14, all proposed amendments to the budget bill will be voted on in a simple majority vote. If they pass, the budget proposal would be effectively rejected, raising pressure on Sanchez to call an election.
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Britain, along with Spain, France and Sweden and Denmark on Monday recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the South American country’s interim president. 

The European countries want Venezuela to hold a presidential election as soon as possible to end its political and humanitarian crises. 

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt posted on Twitter: “Nicolas Maduro has not called Presidential elections within 8 day limit we have set. So UK alongside European allies now recognizes @jguaido as interim constitutional president until credible elections can be held. Let’s hope this take us closer to ending humanitarian crisis.”

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Monday in Madrid that “…we are working for the return of full democracy in Venezuela…”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told France Inter Radio that the Venezuelan crisis would end “peacefully” with an early presidential election. 

A “free and fair election” did not bring Maduro to office, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom told Swedish broadcaster SVT. 

Denmark’s Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen tweeted “Denmark recognizes the President of the National Assembly @jguaido as the interim President of #Venezuela until new free and democratic elections take place.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov criticized Monday’s European declarations as “Attempts to legitimize usurped power” and “interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs.”

Maduro on the Spanish television program Salvados, broadcast Sunday said: “We don’t accept ultimatums from anyone. It’s like if I told the European Union: ‘I give you seven days to recognize the Republic of Catalonia, and if you don’t, we are going to take measures.’ No, international politics can’t be based on ultimatums. That was the era of empires and colonies.” 

He also called on U.S. President Donald Trump to refrain from supporting Guaido, saying “You are making mistakes that are going to stain your hands with blood”
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A former lawmaker who is openly gay launched a progressive party in Poland ahead of two elections this year, presenting a program Sunday that includes phasing out coal production and liberalizing the abortion laws.

At an inaugural convention in Warsaw, Robert Biedron announced the new party’s name, Wiosna, or “Spring,” and vowed to work to unify the bitterly divided country. 

“The last years were cold and gloomy. Instead of conversations we got constant conflict; instead of the good of the community, party interests,” Biedron told a crowd of thousands. “Let this finally come to an end. We need a spring that will renew this gloomy landscape.” 

Biedron, 42, has long been the hope of many progressive Poles, thanks to his charisma, energy and relative youth. He got his start in politics as an LGBT activist during the 1990s and became the first openly gay member of parliament in 2011. He most recently served as mayor of Slupsk in northern Poland.

The left-wing political scene in Poland since communism fell in 1989 has been dominated by ex-communists who are now aging and in some cases, have been discredited by corruption scandals. Many of those hoping for a party focused on progressive mainstays like green energy and women’s rights eagerly anticipated the launch of Biedron’s party.

It remains unclear how much support he will be able to muster in an era when right-wing nationalists have gained popularity in Europe. Some of Biedron’s positions also could prove unpopular. 

In a country heavily dependent on coal for jobs and energy, he said he would focus on fighting the associated heavy smog by phasing out coal production by 2035. 

Biedron’s unapologetically secular program included ending the teaching of religion from public schools, a direct challenge to the Catholic Church that holds great sway in Poland. 

Biedron said he wants to give women in the country with Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws the right to terminate pregnancies to the 12th week. Some conservatives already have accused him of trying to make Poland a “civilization of death.” 

“Poland is a woman,” Biedron said. “Her suffering is our suffering.”

At the convention, Biedron presented himself as an alternative both to ruling right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice, and the main opposition party, the centrist pro-business Civic Platform party. He portrayed the new party as a chance for change after years of hostility between the two political camps.

Civil Platform governed from 2007-2015 and oversaw fast economic growth, but Biedron faulted it for ignoring growing economic equality and struggles of many Poles. 

He said his party would raise the minimum pension to 1,600 zlotys ($425) per month, noting some older Poles now get only 1,000 zlotys ($270).

Some activists and critics of the Law and Justice-led government have accused Biedron of further weakening an already divided opposition with poor prospects of unseating the ruling party. 

Biedron told the convention crowd he would continue the legacy of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, a supporter of women and minorities who was fatally stabbed in mid-January amid the heavy ideological animosity.

“We do not want any more of this Polish-Polish war,” Biedron declared. 

However, he also vowed to form a Justice and Reconciliation Commission to hold Law and Justice’s leader and others to account for allegedly violating “the freedom and rights enshrined in the constitution.”

Among those at the convention was 18-year-old Jakub Przybysz. He said he liked Biedron’s goal of separating church and state and legalizing same-sex partnerships that confer some rights. But he sees Biedron confronting an uphill battle.

“Perhaps the time hasn’t come for this yet, but even the smallest change in this direction would be good,” Przybysz said.
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Turkey has maintained low-level contact with the Syrian government, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday, even though Ankara has supported rebels who fought for years to topple President Bashar Assad.

Erdogan has described Assad as a terrorist and said several times during Syria’s eight-year conflict that the Syrian leader must go. But with support from Russia and Iran, Assad had recaptured large parts of Syria from rebel fighters, driving them from most of their former strongholds.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in December Turkey and other countries would consider working with Assad if he won a democratic election, and last month said Ankara was in indirect contact with Damascus via Russia and Iran.

Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey also had direct contacts with the Syrian government.

“Foreign policy with Syria continues at a lower level,” he told broadcaster TRT in an interview, adding that intelligence services operated differently to political leaders.

“Leaders may be cut out. But intelligence units can communicate for their interests,” Erdogan said. “Even if you have an enemy, you should not break ties. You may need that later.”

 
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Nissan announced Sunday it has cancelled plans to make its X-Trail SUV in the UK — a sharp blow to British Prime Minister Theresa May, who fought to have the model built in northern England as she sought to shore up confidence in the British economy after it leaves the European Union.

Nissan said it will consolidate production of the next generation X-Trail at its plant in Kyushu, Japan, where the model is currently produced, allowing the company to reduce investment costs in the early stages of the project.

That reverses a decision in late 2016 to build the SUV at Nissan’s Sunderland plant in northern England, which employs 7,000 workers. That plant will continue to make Nissan’s Juke and Qashqai models. The announcement Sunday made no mention of any layoffs relating to the X-Trail SUV decision.

“While we have taken this decision for business reasons, the continued uncertainty around the UK’s future relationship with the EU is not helping companies like ours to plan for the future,” Nissan Europe Chairman Gianluca de Ficchy said in a statement.

Less than two months before Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union on March 29, Britain still doesn’t have an agreement on what will replace 45 years of frictionless trade. This has caused an enormous amount of concern among businesses in Britain, which fear the country is going to crash out of the vast EU trade bloc without a divorce deal, a scenario economists predict would hurt the U.K. economy.

The Nissan decision, first reported by Sky News, is a major setback for May’s Conservative government, which had pointed to Nissan’s 2016 announcement that Sunderland would make the SUV — months after the country’s Brexit referendum — as proof that major manufacturers still had confidence in Britain’s economic future.

Nissan’s announced its plans to build the X-Trail and Qashqai models in Sunderland after the government sent a letter to company officials offering undisclosed reassurances about its ability to compete in the future.

British politicians have sharply criticized May’s Brexit deal and voted it down in Parliament.

May’s government has refused to rule out a no-deal Brexit, saying the threat strengthens her hand with EU negotiators. Parliament voted last week to give May more time to try to iron out a compromise with the bloc.

Nissan’s change of heart comes just days after Britain’s carmakers issued a stark assessment about Brexit’s impact on the industry, warning that their exports are at risk if the U.K. leaves the EU without an agreement.

Investment in the industry fell 46 percent last year and new car production dropped 9.1 percent to 1.52 million vehicles, in part because of concerns over Brexit, the Society of Motor Manufacturing said.

The group’s chief executive, Mike Hawes, described the threat of a no-deal Brexit as “catastrophic.”

He says the drop in investment is only a foreshadowing of what could happen if the U.K. leaves the EU on March 29 without a deal.

“With fewer than 60 days before we leave the EU and the risk of crashing out without a deal looking increasingly real, UK Automotive is on red alert,” Hawes said Thursday. “Brexit uncertainty has already done enormous damage to output, investment and jobs.”

 
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The newly elected head of the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church has officially assumed office in the capital of Kiev, a month after the church severed its centuries-long ties with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Metropolitan Epiphanius I, 40, was enthroned during a lavish service at St. Sophia Cathedral in central Kiev on Sunday, a month after the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granted independence to a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who is running for re-election in the country’s March 31 presidential race, and his arch-rival Yulia Tymoshenko both attended the ceremony.

In Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church spokesman on Sunday dismissed the Kiev ceremony as a “pathetic spectacle.”

      
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Pope Francis has made dialogue with Islam one of the cornerstones of his papacy. Since he became pope in 2013, he has visited several countries with large Muslim populations. On Sunday he will become the first Pope to go to the Arabian Peninsula when he visits the United Arab Emirates.

Pope Francis was invited by Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan to take part in an interfaith conference. The pope will spend less than 48 hours in the United Arab Emirates and is due to make only two public addresses during his visit.

Pope Francis released a video message last week ahead of his visit.

He paid tribute to the UAE as “a land that is trying to be a model of coexistence, of human brotherhood, and a meeting place among diverse civilizations and cultures, where many find a safe place to work and live freely in the respect of diversities.”

The pope will celebrate an open-air mass in Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Sports City on Tuesday. The stadium can hold 43,000 people but 135,000 tickets have been handed over so thousands are expected to also follow the mass from outside the stadium.

About 10 percent of the population in the United Arab Emirates — nearly one million — are Catholics, most of them foreign workers from Asia.

On Monday, the pope’s day will be entirely dedicated to inter-religious dialogue. He will first visit a mosque, one of the biggest in the world, where he will meet privately with the Council of Elders, an organization based in Abu Dhabi, which aims to promote peace and tolerance among Islamic communities. The Council of Elders organized the Human Fraternity Meeting and Conference where the pope will speak.

The pope said, he is pleased with this meeting offered by the Lord to write a new page in the history of relations among religions and confirm that all are brothers despite our differences.

Pope Francis also said that, “Faith in God unites and does not divide, it draws us closer despite differences, it distances us from hostilities and aversion.”

Since his election, the Pope has already visited half a dozen predominantly Muslim nations. He has condemned using violence in the name of God and urged inter-religious dialogue.

The war in Yemen, in which the UAE is involved as part of a Saudi-led coalition, could cast a shadow on the trip.

 
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday suspended the Cold War-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in response to a similar move by the United States on Friday.

“The American partners have declared that they suspend their participation in the deal. We suspend it as well,” Putin announced during a televised meeting with foreign ministers and military brass.

The U.S. vowed to withdraw from the INF Treaty in six months unless Moscow ended what it called violations of the landmark 1987 arms control pact.

Putin said Russia would start work on creating new missiles, including hypersonic weapons, and told ministers not to initiate disarmament talks with Washington.

During the meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the United States of violating the INF and other arms deals, joining a chorus of Russian defense officials and legislators who condemned Washington for gambling with global security. Yury Baluyevsky, former chief of the General Staff, even said Russia was prepared to respond “militarily.” 

Impact assessments vary

Numerous Moscow-based arms control experts, however, offered a more measured assessment of the standoff.

“U.S. withdrawal from #INF doesn’t presage nuclear crisis on the model of early 60s or early 80s, but it ushers in new strategic environment where stability is no longer regulated by arms control agreements,” tweeted Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow-based Carnegie Center and a former Soviet army official who was directly involved in U.S.-Russia nuclear talks in Geneva.

“In that [environment], survival requires deterrence [plus communication and] restraint,” he wrote. “Cool heads, above all.”

Independent Russian military analyst Aleksandr Goltz, however, offered a much bleaker view.

“My assessment is that for the next three, four or maybe five years, we’re reasonably safe, as it will take the United States years to design, test and deploy medium-range missiles,” said Goltz. “But make no mistake, we are now witnessing the total destruction of all systems of nuclear arms control.

“The problem is that the INF Treaty is very deeply interconnected with the New START Treaty,” he said, referring to a separate arms pact that limits both countries to fewer than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads. “If START does not survive, in 2021 we’ll find ourselves in a situation shaping up for the next Cuban missile crisis.”

WATCH: What’s the INF Treaty Dispute About?

Asked whether there’s a chance the INF treaty could still be saved, Goltz said there was none.

“No, absolutely no chance. Because Trump has said he would only continue with the INF Treaty if China joined, and this is completely impossible,” said Goltz, explaining that 90 percent of China’s arsenal is deployed for medium range, implying that Beijing INF compliance would be tantamount to  eradicating its arsenal.

Blaming both countries for the mutual suspension, he said Russia, in his opinion, stood to lose far more in a new arms race.

“This is an absolute strategic catastrophe for the Kremlin,” he said. “We are returning to the situation of the 1970s or early 1980s, where the U.S. can deploy warheads that reach Moscow or St. Petersburg in six or seven minutes, which is just a strategic disaster. I mean, within minutes you can do nothing.”

Arms control expert Alexei Arbatov, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, however, called himself a “hopeless optimist” who called six months “a very long” time to resolve differences.

“U.S. and Russian officials are centimeters apart on key differences,” he said, describing technical discrepancies that violate INF strike range guidelines.

According to the Washington-based Arms Control Association, the treaty requires the United States and Russia “to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.”

Arbatov said the treaty could be resuscitated immediately if Russia could prove its missiles are technically INF-range compliant, and the U.S. can prove that anti-ballistic launch systems in Poland and Romania aren’t designed to defend against a Russian nuclear assault on Europe. 

“This has been at the surface for quite a long time … but only political hostilities, intransigence and total distrust” between the countries is impeding a swift resolution. 

Neither side liked treaty

“And I blame both sides,” he added. “Americans have never much cared for the treaty, because it doesn’t really concern their security,” he said, alluding to the fact that the INF strike range includes Russia’s European neighbors, but not U.S. soil.

“And Russians never cared for it because many argued that it required Russia to destroy too many missiles and left the country unable to target American missile defenses,” he said. “Neither side was really interested in saving the treaty, for the wrong reasons, and both sides were mistaken. 

“I only hope that during the next six months, the position on both sides will change.”

Asked whether he anticipated any kind of nuclear standoff reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arbatov was dismissive.

“Unless Russia positions nuclear warheads in Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua, then, no, we’re not even close,” he said.

Accusations on both sides 

The U.S. and NATO accuse Russia of violating the INF restrictions by developing land-based, intermediate-range cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and hitting European cities on short notice, but the Kremlin, which last week displayed its missiles to foreign military attaches in Moscow, says the missiles’ short range puts them outside the INF Treaty.

U.S. officials said there was no way of verifying that information because the missiles have been shown publicly only in a “static display” that gives no indication of their flying distance.

On Saturday, Russia’s Lavrov told Putin that the U.S. has been in breach of INF provisions since 1999, a charge the U.S. denies.

“According to our information, the United States started violating that undated treaty in 1999 when it began trials of combat unmanned flying vehicles with specifications similar to those of ground-launched cruise missiles banned by the treaty,” he told Russia’s state-run TASS news outlet.

Lavrov also castigated the U.S. for a Romania-based anti-ballistic missile system capable of firing Tomahawk medium-range cruise missiles. The United States says that system is designed to defend against “rogue” states such as Iran and provides no protection against Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

The INF has largely deepened Russia’s international isolation, and Russia accuses the United States of inventing a false pretext to abandon the treaty in order to develop new missiles. 

Some information for this report came from AP and Reuters. 
…

The United States and Russia are making tit-for-tat moves with their participation in a nuclear treaty, and some politicians and analysts see it as a burgeoning arms race. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Saturday that Russia is suspending its participation in the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Russian move follows similar action Friday by the U.S.
…

Krzysztof Strzemeski watched with unease as a high school friend voiced support for Poland’s nationalist government on social media, followed by hate-filled extremist posts. But when the liberal mayor of Gdansk was stabbed to death in public in January, he could no longer hold back his anger.

“Congratulations for your perseverance sharing right-wing filth,” the 58-year-old university lecturer wrote to his former classmate. The two haven’t communicated since.

Poland’s political fissures have widened in recent months, pitting conservatives — many of them government supporters — against liberal critics who accuse the ruling party of threatening the country’s hard-won democracy by undermining the independence of the judiciary and the media.

In this toxic atmosphere, there has been an increase in hate speech, political threats and, most stunningly, the assassination of popular Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, a critic of the ruling Law and Justice Party’s anti-immigrant policies.

After stabbing Adamowicz during a Jan. 13 charity event, the attacker grabbed a microphone and said that was his revenge against an opposition political party that Adamowicz had once belonged to.

Although there have been suggestions the assailant also had psychological problems, some government critics blamed Poland’s heated political discourse, some of it from state television. Commentators had often vilified Adamowicz for his open acceptance of refugees and gays, and his widow said he had been getting death threats, causing the family to live in fear.

Poles have long spoken of “two tribes” in their central European country. Now, increasingly there is talk of a “Polish-Polish war” — a divide that is greater than at any time since the 1980s, when the Soviet-backed Communist regime tried to crush the Solidarity freedom movement by imposing martial law.

The wedge issues that Poland faces are familiar in many other places: immigration and borders, abortion, the relationship of the nation’s mostly Catholic society to Jews, Muslims and other faiths, and the rights of gays and women.

On one level, it seems to be a microcosm of the political struggles elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. But Poland is also one of the European Union’s largest and most economically dynamic countries, and its course will help shape the continent’s future.

Poland’s current government has aligned itself with other populist, conservative or nationalist figures — U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The Law and Justice Party won the 2015 election amid Europe’s migration crisis and a weariness with the centrist government that had been in power for eight years. Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski vowed more help for the poor, a tough anti-corruption stance and a hard line against Muslim migrants, who he said carried “parasites and protozoa” dangerous to the native European population.

After mass street protests against his party’s plans to overhaul the judicial system, Kaczynski turned his language against internal critics, referring to protesters as “the worst sort of Poles” and “national traitors.” His language was widely denounced as reminiscent of the worst of the last century in Europe.

Last year saw a surge in anti-Semitic rhetoric in Poland after the passage of a controversial Holocaust speech law. Some of that was spoken even by public officials and TV commentators, creating a new normal in what seems to be acceptable speech.

On Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a far-right activist who had been imprisoned for burning an effigy of a Jew in 2015 staged a protest outside the Auschwitz memorial site, saying it was time to “fight Jewry.” Holocaust survivors had gathered for solemn observances not far away.

Muslims, while only a tiny percentage of Poland’s population, have increasingly been taunted, spat on and even assaulted, according to the Never Again association, which monitors such crimes.

Since Adamowicz’s killing, prosecutors have faced criticism for failing to investigate death threats against politicians. Two weeks before his death, the public prosecutor halted proceedings into symbolic “political death notices” that the far-right group All-Polish Youth issued for Adamowicz and 10 other mayors who had pledged support for the integration of migrants.

There also have been dramatic calls on all sides for reconciliation. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has met with opposition leaders and urged more “mutual respect” in public debate.

But state television continues to vilify ideological opponents.

Last week, journalists on a talk show lashed out at Rafal Pankowski, a sociologist and the head of Never Again. One of them called him a “terrible” person, among those “who live from a hatred of their own fatherland.”

Pankowski, who will be honored by the Anti-Defamation League next week for his work fighting anti-Semitism, decried the “climate of hatred in the air” and the fact that taxpayer money was going to fund such “crass propaganda.”

Marcin Makowski, a conservative journalist and commentator, said he believes it’s unfair to put all the blame on the government, recalling instances of harsh political rhetoric used by its opponents that fanned hatred and in some cases seemed to call for violence. When Kaczynski’s brother, President Lech Kaczynski, died in a plane crash in 2010, some even joked about it, Makowski recalled.

“None of them are saints and pretending as such is pure hypocrisy,” Makowski said.

 
…

After seven years detained at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo and ex-youth leader Charles Ble Goude are free men — but there’s a hitch. 

Presiding judge Chile Eboe-Osuji read out the unanimous verdict of the five-judge appeals panel.  

“The conditions set out in the written judgement are imposed to Mr. Gbagbo and Mr. Ble Goude upon their release to a state willing to accept them on its territory and willing and able to enforce the conditions.”

It’s a small victory for ICC prosecutors, after the court’s stunning acquittal of both Gbagbo and Ble Goude last month. Judges said the prosecution’s case was “exceptionally weak” in trying to link the men to election-related violence in Ivory Coast in 2010 and 2011 that left roughly 3,000 people dead.

​Both ICC prosecutors and the chief lawyer for the victims, Paolina Massidda, had argued for the two men’s conditional release. Massidda warned they presented flight risks and said their unconditional release might impact victims’ safety. 

“Victims remain very concerned about the possibility the commission of further crimes and attempts to compromise the integrity of the proceedings if the defendants are released without conditions,” Massidda said.

Gbagbo’s lawyer Emmanuel Altit unsuccessfully argued that conditional release went against the very principle of his client’s acquittal.

He said liberty is an essential human right, and Gbagbo should be freed since he was acquitted. 

Last month’s acquittal has intensified criticism of the ICC, which has convicted only four people in nearly 20 years of operation. One of them — former Congolese vice-president Jean Pierre Bemba — was later acquitted on appeals. 

Critics say the court is ineffective and overly focused on African cases. Supporters note the so-called “court of last resort” is probing other regions of the world — and say the court has insufficient means to realize a daunting mandate.
…

The United States on Friday fired a diplomatic warning shot at Russia, making good on threats to begin its withdrawal from a key arms control agreement and thus taking the next step toward what some politicians and analysts see as a burgeoning arms race.

In a statement, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. was suspending its compliance with the decades-old Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, accusing the Kremlin of willfully breaking the deal.

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity, covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad,” Trump said.

“We will not remain constrained by its terms while Russia misrepresents its actions,” he added.

But later Friday, speaking to reporters, Trump left open the possibility of a deal.

“I hope that we are able to get everybody in a very big and beautiful room and do a new treaty that would be much better,” he said. “Certainly, I would like to see that. But you have to have everybody adhere to it.”

The INF treaty, signed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1987, was the world’s first arms control pact to prohibit an entire class of weapons, banning ballistic and ground-launched cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,420 miles). 

INF violations

Yet the U.S. has been become increasingly vocal about what it says are blatant Russian violations.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials charge those violations date to at least 2014, when Russia began deploying its 9M729 missile following years of tests designed to skirt the treaty’s constraints.

Now, officials say, Russia is fielding multiple military battalions that are equipped with the missile in question.

WATCH: US Backs Away From Key Arms Treaty

“We must respond,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Friday. “We can no longer be restricted by the treaty, while Russia shamelessly violates it.

“We provided Russia an ample window of time to mend its ways and for Russia to honor its commitment. Tomorrow that time runs out,” he said.

Saturday, the U.S. will provide the Kremlin and other former Soviet states with formal notice of its intent to withdraw from the INF Treaty, triggering a six-month window.

Officials say if Moscow refuses to verifiably destroy the missiles, as is expected, the treaty will terminate, and the U.S. will be free to pursue its own intermediate range, ground-launched ballistic or cruise missiles.

Russian denial 

Russian officials reacted quickly to the announcement, denying any treaty violations, while alleging it is Washington that wants to expand its missile arsenal.

The U.S. withdrawal deals “a serious blow to the international arms control system and the system of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which exist for now,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters.

Ryabkov also suggested other arms control agreements, like the New START Treaty, which limits both countries to fewer than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, could be in jeopardy.

“What will come next is a huge question,” the deputy foreign minister told Russian television. “I fear that the New START may share the fate of the INF Treaty.  It may just expire on February 5, 2021, without an extension.”

New arms race?

But U.S. officials held firm, insisting the onus is on the Kremlin to ease tensions.

“Let’s be clear: If there’s an arms race, it is Russia that is starting it,” a senior administration official said Friday.

“We simply cannot tolerate this kind of abuse of arms control and expect for arms control to continue to be viable,” the official said. “We cannot permit a scenario where we are unilaterally bound to a treaty, we are denied the ability to have a military capability to deter attacks.”

Concern, support for US action

In a statement issued shortly after the U.S. announced its plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty, NATO said its members “fully support this action.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter:

At the United Nations, officials expressed concern.

“For the secretary-general, his hope [is] that the parties will use the next six months to resolve their differences through dialogue,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. “The INF is a very important part of the international arms control architecture.”

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty also garnered a mixed response from U.S. lawmakers.

“Russia’s repeated violations over the years demonstrate that the INF is no longer in the best interest of the United States,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. 

But the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, was wary.

“The Trump administration is risking an arms race and undermining international security and stability,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“Russia’s brazen noncompliance with this treaty is deeply concerning,” she said. “But discarding a key pillar of our nonproliferation security framework creates unacceptable risks.” 

Few good choices

Still, some analysts caution that Russian President Vladimir Putin has given the U.S. and its European allies few good options.

“Putin’s decision to build weapons that violate this important arms control treaty is another of his attacks on the peace in Europe,” according to Jorge Benitez, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a global affairs research group in Washington.

“Russia is an aggressive military,” he said. “Europe needs to strengthen deterrence to further dangerous behavior from Moscow.”

The U.S. has already started spending on such deterrence — $48 million on research to develop its own intermediate-range, ground-launched missiles. And officials say there have already been some initial discussions with allies.

“We are some time away from having a system that we would produce, that we would train soldiers or airmen or Marines to deploy,” the senior administration official said, adding that for now, nuclear-armed missiles were not under consideration.

“We are only looking at conventional options at this time,” the official said. “Nothing the United States is currently looking at is nuclear in character.” 

The pursuit of the new missiles, though, could also give the U.S. additional options in countering growing threats from China and Iran. 

Neither Beijing nor Tehran was subject to the INF Treaty, and U.S. officials believe each country has more than 1,000 intermediate-range, ground-launched missiles in its arsenal. 

But some experts warn any increase in the number of such missiles, by the U.S. or Russia, will only escalate missile production and tensions in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. 

VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer and VOA’s Wayne Lee contributed to this report.
…

The Kremlin may have helped Venezuela’s embattled socialist leader Nicolas Maduro swap gold for cash, transporting Venezuelan bullion deposited in Moscow to the United Arab Emirates and then flying U.S. currency into the Venezuelan capital, an investigative newspaper has claimed. 

The report in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta is adding to the fears of pro-democracy activists in Venezuela that the Kremlin will try to make good on its pledge to stand by Maduro to help him survive a popular uprising against him.

Russian officials have condemned U.S. sanctions imposed last month against Venezuela’s vital oil sector, a move aimed at depriving Maduro of the funds he needs to pay his army, which has so far remained loyal to him. The Kremlin says the sanctions are illegal meddling in Venezuela’s domestic affairs. And it rejects, too, the widespread Latin American and European endorsement of the popular protests against Maduro.

Gold swapped for dollars?

Citing unnamed sources in the United Arab Emirates, the newspaper alleged that on Jan. 29, a Russian-operated Boeing 757 cargo plane took Venezuelan gold stored in Russia’s central bank to Dubai. The bullion was replaced with containers full of U.S. dollars and the aircraft, which is owned by the Russian company Yerofei, took off again and flew via Morocco to Venezuela, the paper said.

The director of Russia’s central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, denied the allegation, saying the bank was holding no Venezuelan bullion.

On Friday, a senior Venezuelan official told the Reuters news agency that Caracas plans to sell 29 tons of gold to the UAE in return for euros and said the sale of the nation’s gold began with a shipment of three tons on Jan. 26, following the export last year of $900 million in unrefined gold to Turkey. But the official said Moscow was not involved in the gold-for-cash operation. 

Social media theories

Turkey has been refining and certifying Venezuelan gold since last year after Maduro switched operations from Switzerland, fearing Venezuelan bullion could end up being impounded. 

The Jan. 29 flight, though, is the second unexplained Russian plane to have landed in Caracas since the high-stakes standoff began between opposition leader Juan Guaido and Maduro. A Boeing 777 belonging to a Russian charter company called Nordwind flew from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport on Monday to the Venezuelan capital, according to flight tracking data. Nordwind normally only flies Russian tourists to vacation destinations in the Mediterranean and southeast Asia.

The arrival of the Nordwind jet in Caracas triggered an avalanche of social media theories about what it was doing in the Venezuelan capital. Some anti-Maduro lawmakers claimed that it brought Russian mercenaries to help guard the socialist leader. One theory that prompted jubilation among street protesters was that it was there to spirit Maduro into exile.

The flight also prompted Venezuelan lawmaker Jose Guerra, who previously worked as an economist in Venezuela’s central bank, to warn in a tweet: “We have received information from officials at the Central Bank of Venezuela: A plane arrived from Moscow, with the intention of taking away at least 20 tons of gold. We demand that the Central Bank of Venezuela provide details about what is happening.”

‘Fake news’

Dmitry Peskov, press spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters midweek the reports about Venezuelan gold and the Kremlin were inaccurate and urged journalists to “deal carefully with fake news’ of various kinds.” 

He dismissed Guerra’s claims, saying, according to TASS, “Russia is prepared to promote a settlement to the political situation in Venezuela without meddling in that country’s internal affairs. Russia is categorically against any meddling by third countries in Venezuela’s internal affairs.”

For Moscow and Beijing, the high-stakes standoff between Guaido, who declared himself interim president in late January, and Maduro represents a geopolitical headache. Both Russia and China have lent billions of dollars to Maduro. Russia’s oil-giant Rosneft has stakes in five onshore oil projects, according to Bloomberg News, and has loaned the Maduro government more than $7 billion, which is meant to be repaid in oil deliveries.

The Bank of England this week refused a Venezuelan request for the return of more than one billion dollars’ worth of gold it has on deposit. The refusal came after the United States urged Western countries to block the Maduro government from accessing any assets outside Venezuela’s borders.
…

The Trump administration is poised to announce Friday that it is withdrawing from a treaty that has been a centerpiece of superpower arms control since the Cold War and whose demise some analysts worry could fuel a new arms race.

An American withdrawal, which has been expected for months, would follow years of unresolved dispute over Russian compliance with the pact, known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty. It was the first arms control measure to ban an entire class of weapons: ground-launched cruise missiles with a range between 500 kilometers (310 miles) and 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles). Russia denies that it has been in violation.

U.S. officials also have expressed worry that China, which is not party to the 1987 treaty, is gaining a significant military advantage in Asia by deploying large numbers of missiles with ranges beyond the treaty’s limit. Leaving the INF treaty would allow the Trump administration to counter the Chinese, but it’s unclear how it would do that.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in early December that Washington would give Moscow 60 days to return to compliance before it gave formal notice of withdrawal, with actual withdrawal taking place six months later. The 60-day deadline expires Saturday, and the administration is expected to say as early as Friday that efforts to work out a compliance deal have failed and that it would suspend its compliance with the treaty’s terms.

The State Department said Pompeo would make a public statement Friday morning, but it did not mention the topic.

In a tweet Thursday, the chief spokeswoman for NATO, Oana Lungescu, said there are no signs of getting a compliance deal with Russia.

“So we must prepare for a world without the Treaty,” she wrote.

Withdrawal takes six months

Technically, a U.S. withdrawal would take effect six months after this week’s notification, leaving a small window for saving the treaty. However, in talks this week in Beijing, the U.S. and Russia reported no breakthrough in their dispute, leaving little reason to think either side would change its stance on whether a Russian cruise missile violates the pact.

A Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, was quoted by the Russian state news agency Tass as saying after the Beijing talks Thursday, “Unfortunately, there is no progress. The position of the American side is very tough and like an ultimatum.” He said he expects Washington now to suspend its obligations under the treaty, although he added that Moscow remains ready to “search for solutions” that could keep the treaty in force.

U.S. withdrawal raises the prospect of further deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations, which already are arguably at the lowest point in decades, and debate among U.S. allies in Europe over whether Russia’s alleged violations warrant a countermeasure such as deployment of an equivalent American missile in Europe. The U.S. has no nuclear-capable missiles based in Europe; the last of that type and range were withdrawn in line with the INF treaty.

​Global concern

The prospect of U.S. withdrawal from the INF pact has stirred concern globally. The mayor of Des Moines, Iowa, Frank Cownie, is among dozens of local officials and lawmakers in the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere who signed a letter this week to President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin expressing worry at the “unraveling” of the INF treaty and other arms constraints.

“Withdrawing from treaties takes a step in the wrong direction,” Cownie said in a telephone interview. “It’s wasn’t just Des Moines, Iowa. It’s people from all around this country that are concerned about the future of our cities, of our country, of this planet.”

Unleashing new arms race

The American ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, set the rhetorical stage for Washington’s withdrawal announcement by asserting Thursday that Russia has been in violation for years, including in Ukraine. She said in a tweet and a video message about the INF treaty that Russia is to blame for its demise.

“Russia consistently refuses to acknowledge its violation and continues to push disinformation and false narratives regarding its illegal missile,” she said. “When only one party respects an arms control treaty while the other side flaunts it, it leaves one side vulnerable, no one is safer, and (it) discredits the very idea of arms control.”

Nuclear weapons experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a statement this week that while Russia’s violation of the INF treaty is a serious problem, U.S. withdrawal under current circumstances would be counterproductive.

“Leaving the INF treaty will unleash a new missile competition between the United States and Russia,” they said.

Kingston Reif, director for disarmament at the Arms Control Association, said Thursday the Trump administration has failed to exhaust diplomatic options to save the treaty. What’s more, “it has no strategy to prevent Russia from building and fielding even more intermediate-range missiles in the absence of the agreement.”

Reif said the period between now and August, when the U.S. withdrawal would take effect, offers a last chance to save the treaty, but he sees little prospect of that happening. He argues that Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, is “unlikely to miss the opportunity to kill an agreement he has long despised.”
…

French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin is 36 days into his attempt to cross the Atlantic in a specially built orange barrel.

With no engine, sails or paddles, the unusual craft relies on trade winds and currents to push him 4,800 kilometers from the Canary Islands to Caribbean in about three months.

On Wednesday, he reported awaking to an early spring morning and clear sky with a beautiful crescent moon. However, he said there was not a lot of wind, which was slowing his travels.

He described his journey as a “crossing during which man isn’t captain of his ship, but a passenger of the ocean.”

Savin spent months building his bright orange, barrel-shaped capsule of resin-coated plywood that is strong enough to withstand battering waves and other stresses.

The barrel is 3 meters long and 2.10 meters across. It has a small galley and a mattress with straps to keep him from being tossed out of his bunk by rough seas.

Portholes on either side of the barrel and another looking into the water provide sunlight and a bit of entertainment. The unique craft also has a solar panel that generates energy for communications and GPS positioning.

As he drifts along, Savin is dropping markers in the ocean to help oceanographers study ocean currents. At the end of the journey, Savin will be studied by doctors for effects of solitude in close confinement.

He also posts regular updates, including GPS coordinates tracking the journey, on a Facebook page. 

Savin’s adventure, which will cost a little more than $65,000, was funded by French barrel makers and crowdfunding.

Savin hopes to end his journey on a French island, such as Martinique or Guadeloupe. “That would be easier for the paperwork and for bringing the barrel back,” he told AFP.
…

Greece will bring Macedonia’s NATO accession agreement to parliament for ratification “in the coming days,” the government spokesman said Thursday, which will bring into effect the change of the country’s name to North Macedonia.

Once parliament ratifies the NATO protocol, Greece’s Foreign Ministry will inform Macedonia’s Foreign Ministry of the result, a move which will automatically bring into effect the name change, government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos said. He didn’t give a specific date.

The name change deal, dubbed the Prespa Agreement after the border lake where it was signed last year, ends a 27-year dispute between the two neighbors that had kept the former Yugoslav republic out of NATO and the European Union. Greece argued that the use of the name “Macedonia” implied territorial claims on its own northern province of the same name and usurped Greek history and culture, and had blocked its neighbor’s efforts to join NATO over the issue.

Tzanakopoulos said the nearly three-decade dispute had given rise to “the monster of lies, nationalism and extreme historic revisionism” in Greece. Greek lawmakers’ Jan. 25 ratification of the deal was “a historic milestone for peace, cooperation and stability in the Balkans,” he said during a media briefing, adding that the agreement restores Greece’s “leading role in the Balkans.”

The agreement’s ratification “symbolizes the victory of political courage and respect of the country’s history, over opportunism, nationalism, the taking advantage of patriotism and the commerce of hate,” he added.

The deal has been met with vociferous opposition by many in both countries, with critics accusing their respective governments of making too many concessions to the other side.

Once the deal comes into effect, Macedonia will have a five-year period to implement many of the practical changes it must make, including changing vehicle license plates and issuing new passports.

 
…

At St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Dubai, an effort to transcribe the Bible in the native tongue of its flock saw the holy book presented in 52 languages — a sign of the cosmopolitan welcome awaiting Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to the United Arab Emirates.

The diversity among its parishioners can be seen in its pews and heard in the sermons of St. Mary’s priests, who celebrate Mass and offer prayers in Arabic, English, French, Tagalog, Tamil, Urdu and other languages.

The church, they say, offers an anchor for the Roman Catholics among the UAE’s vast foreign labor force, many of whom live in this federation of seven sheikhdoms alone while their families stay home.

“The whole world meets here in a way,” said the Rev. Lennie Connully, the parish priest of St. Mary’s. “We have people from all over.”

Pope Francis’ visit from Feb. 3 through Feb. 5 marks the first papal visit to the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam. The pontiff will visit Abu Dhabi, the headquarters of the Catholic Church’s Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia, which covers the UAE, Oman and Yemen.

There are nine Catholic churches in this federation of seven sheikhdoms governed by hereditary rulers; four other Catholic churches are in Oman. The Catholic flock’s rapid growth followed the discovery of oil in what was previously known as the Trucial States. Officials consecrated the first Catholic church in Abu Dhabi in 1965.

As Abu Dhabi became a major oil exporter and Dubai grew into the skyscraper-studded city it is today, the Emirates’ rapid economic expansion drew millions of foreigners to everything from white-collar office jobs to hard-hat construction work. Of the over 9 million people now living in the UAE, around 1 million are Emirati while the rest are foreign-born.

In 2010, there were an estimated 940,000 Christians living in the UAE, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, including 750,000 Catholics. The report suggests the number of Christians in the UAE would rise to about 1.1 million by 2020, with Catholics making up the lion’s share. The Catholic Church itself believes there are some 1 million Catholics in the UAE today.

The backbone of that population is Filipino and Indian. Life for them and others can be incredibly difficult as many move to the UAE often leaving their families and loved ones back home.

“The church is a base for them. They are far away from their homes,” Connully said. “They don’t have an extended family to support them. That family atmosphere is created here.”

Rulers in the UAE, which has described 2019 as the nation’s “Year of Tolerance,” have supported the Catholic community in the past by donating land for their churches. However, there are limits in this Muslim nation.

Proselytizing by non-Muslims remains illegal. Islam is enshrined as the UAE’s official religion in the country’s constitution, with government websites even offering online applications to convert. Conversion from Islam to another religion, however, is illegal, the U.S. State Department has warned. Blasphemy and apostasy laws also carry a possible death sentence.

At St. Mary’s and other churches, crosses are for the most part carefully concealed behind compound fences. There are no bells that toll to mark the start of services, though loudspeakers on minarets proclaim the call to prayers, like at the mosque across the street from St. Mary’s.

Despite facing restrictions, Christians in the UAE have never faced the violence that has targeted those in Syria and Iraq during the rise of the Islamic State group and other militants. Coptic Christians, a minority in Egypt that has faced extremist attacks in their homeland, also can safely worship.

In recent years, militant attacks have only exacerbated a “long, slow decline” of Christianity in the wider Middle East that began with mass migrations of the 19th Century, said Robin Darling Young, a professor studying church history at the Washington-based Catholic University of America.

The growth of ultraconservative Islamic beliefs, like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, coupled with the creation of independent states, further fueled that, she said. America’s 2003 war in Iraq and the chaos that followed made it even worse, she said.

“Particularly in areas where Wahhabi Islam is strong, like the Arabian Peninsula, Christians have been subject to more restrictions,” Young said. “The UAE is trying to make itself look better to the West by permitting, under certain restrictions, public Christian worship.”

Catholics in the UAE, however, make a point to thank the UAE’s ruling sheikhs for being able to worship freely. During a recent Mass at St. Mary’s, the Father Andre Francisco Fernandes led worshippers in a prayer asking for God’s blessings upon “the rulers of the UAE,” specifically naming UAE President and Abu Dhabi ruler Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

Fernandes’ sermon that day focused on the parable of the loaves and the fishes, the story of Jesus Christ feeding a crowd of 5,000 with just five loaves of bread and two fish. The priest urged those listening to keep their faith and view the world with an open heart.

“Every day, miracles are happening,” he told parishioners. “We need to believe.”
…

British banking giant Barclays has drawn up plans to shift more than $200 billion worth of assets from London to Dublin amid mounting business alarm that Britain is more likely now to leave the European Union without an exit deal.

With Prime Minister Theresa May’s ruling Conservative government now backing away from a contentious withdrawal agreement negotiated in November and locked in a standoff with Brussels, Britain is heading for a scheduled March 29 departure without any kind of negotiated exit agreement. That means tariffs would have to be imposed on goods moving back and forth across the English Channel. It would also block market access to the EU for banks based in Britain.

British and international firms with European headquarters in London have become increasingly angry with the Brexit crisis. Earlier in January, in at times a testy conference call, 331 business leaders, including from U.S. banking giants and major companies like Amazon and Apple, were assured by senior government ministers that a no-deal exit would be taken off the table and that Britain wouldn’t part company with its largest trading bloc until a deal had been struck.

Since then, though, there has been no resolution to the major differences between Britain and the other 27 EU member states – if anything, frustrations have deepened with EU officials maintaining Monday that they are not prepared to reopen negotiations on the withdrawal agreement, which a deeply divided British House of Commons refused to endorse in January.

The transfer by Barclays of assets belonging to 5,000 clients emerged Monday, when the bank won the court approval required. The judge, Richard Snowden, noted that the transfer was “huge” as it represents nearly a quarter of the assets Barclays holds. “The design of the scheme has been based upon an assumption that there will be no favorable outcome of the current political negotiations between the UK and the EU,” he said.

The bank said in a statement, “Barclays will use our existing licensed EU-based bank subsidiary to continue to serve our clients within the EU beyond 29 March 2019, regardless of the outcome of Brexit. Our preparations are well-advanced and we expect to be fully operational by 29 March 2019.”

Without a deal, British banks and international financial service institutions based in London would have no access to the EU market. Some market analysts estimate that London will lose at least a trillion dollars, and possibly much more, to financial rivals in Europe, including Frankfurt, Dublin and Paris by the end of March as banks flee ahead of Brexit.

Spreading operations

At least 30 banks and financial firms are planning to move their EU headquarters to Germany. Other banks are set to spread their operations across different European cities. At least 10,000 banking jobs are likely to move to Frankfurt, Germany’s fifth biggest city, over the next eight years, industry observers say. Paris is angling for business, too, offering tax incentives for banks to relocate to the French capital, a determined rival to London.

Lloyds, Standard Chartered and Credit Suisse are among the banks that are planning to open offices in Frankfurt because of Brexit. While mainstream banks voice their frustration, hedge funds, many of which donated to anti-EU campaigns during the 2016 Brexit referendum, welcome a no-deal departure, hoping it will open the way for the dismantling of a swathe of regulations on financial services.

Aside from banks, other British businesses are becoming increasingly alarmed at what they might face in the event of a no-deal Brexit. On Monday, British officials acknowledged that businesses will face higher trade tariffs and barriers in dozens of countries because there’s not enough time between now and March 29 to replicate 40 EU trade deals with non-EU countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Leading British Brexiters, including International Trade Minister Liam Fox, have been saying for months that trade deal replications would be easy. Fox once vowed that the agreements would be all complete “one second after midnight” on Brexit day.

On Monday, a British official acknowledged to a parliamentary panel that will not be the case and that hundreds of British firms will lose preferential access, reducing the price competitiveness of their goods. The official declined to provide an “absolute figure” on how many trade deals would lapse because of technical, legal or political problems.

As business fears mount, Prime Minister May has announced a change in her negotiating team with her de facto deputy, David Lidington, a former long-serving Europe minister, taking the lead position in British efforts to persuade Brussels to open up the withdrawal agreement, itself the product of ill-tempered haggling between the EU and London.

But EU leaders have firmly shut the door, so far, to amending or changing the agreement, which would see Britain locked in a customs union with the bloc for several years while it negotiates a vaguely defined free trade settlement.

In the temporary customs union, Britain would be unable to influence EU laws, regulations and product standards it would have to observe. The transition was reached to avoid customs checks on the border separating Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, but British lawmakers fear Britain could be trapped indefinitely in the transition.

Leading Brexiters say if May can get a sunset clause written into the deal to allow Britain to escape the transition agreement, if it wished later, or if the transition were time limited, they might reverse their opposition and back the deal. But that still might not give May the majority she needs to secure parliamentary approval.

The leaders of the 27 other EU member states made clear Monday that they are not prepared to revisit the deal. “A renegotiation is not on the table,” said Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar. “There’s no plan to discuss any changes. The withdrawal agreement is not up for renegotiation and is not going to be reopened,” he added. Both the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, echoed the Irish leader.

 
…

Marie Toussaint has launched a climate petition in France that has attracted skyrocketing support. Ludovic Bayle splits his days between working at a restaurant and moonlighting as a climate activist. And in Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium, students are skipping school, demanding more action against what many Europeans consider one of the biggest threats to their future: climate change.

“Climate is one of the main concerns” in Europe, said Neil Makaroff, European Union policy adviser for the NGO Climate Action Network France. “Citizens are more and more mobilized today. They are taking different actions like marches, petition, litigation.”

Several hundred thousand Europeans took to the streets this past week alone. Students marched in Brussels where the European Union is headquartered, and climate activists briefly occupied the Scottish parliament. At the yearly Davos gathering in Switzerland, Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who is behind the growing school strikes, told the rich and powerful they were to blame for the climate crisis. And in France, dozens of towns held climate marches last weekend, bringing young and old to the streets in sometimes pounding rain.

Climate change, some analysts believe, is also shaping up to be one of the most important issues in upcoming European parliament elections in May.

“People really, really need to wake up,” said Parisian Veronique Weil, who braved whipping rain to join a climate rally at the city’s iconic Place de la Republic. “The seas are rising, countries are going to disappear. … It’s crazy.”

In some ways, Europe seems an unlikely place for a climate revolt. The region is considered among the world’s green leaders, and the EU says it is on track to meet 2030 emissions reduction targets.

French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to “make the planet great again,” launching a “One Planet summit” — now heading for its third edition — and urging American scientists to move to France after the U.S. announced it was pulling out of the Paris climate pact.

But climate activists have criticized Macron, saying France and Europe haven’t done enough. It’s a message echoed by popular French environment minister Nicolas Hulot, who quit Macron’s cabinet last year.

“Besides the nice sentences like ‘make our planet great again,’ our government is really not taking climate very seriously,” said Makaroff of Climate Action Network. “Because no climate action has been really strong in France to curb emissions.”

Now, citizens are taking matters into their own hands.

French environmentalist Marie Toussaint quit her government job two years ago to create a green NGO. In December, she launched a petition with three other groups, threatening to sue the French government for climate inaction. So far, the petition has gathered a record 2 million signatures, and counting.

“We really want to save the climate, to save the planet, but also to save solidarity, to save the people — to be part of the solution,” Toussaint said.

The grassroots uprising is being seen in ways big and small. In the Netherlands, activists sponsoring a similar climate petition won a landmark court ruling last year, ordering the Dutch government to accelerate emissions cuts.  And in Germany, the Greens Party is surging, ranked second in polls behind the ruling Christian Democrats.

In Versailles, just outside Paris, 34-year-old Ludovic Bayle spends most waking hours either waiting tables or working at his unpaid job as a member of Citizens for Climate France, one of the grassroots groups that organized last weekend’s French protests. Launched in September, the chapter has nearly 70,000 members on its Facebook page.

“Of course I’m scared” about climate change, Bayle said. “That’s why it’s so important to act. We need to mobilize to put pressure on decision-makers.”

Last weekend’s climate protests intersected with another citizen’s uprising in France — the yellow vest movement, in its third month. Now embracing broader demands for greater social justice, the yellow vest protests began over a fuel tax hike intended partly to fund climate measures.

As a result, some analysts suggest the yellow vests show that people ultimately are not willing to make sacrifices to curb emissions. But climate activists like Toussaint dismiss that view.

“What we see now is people who are polluting the least are being asked to pay the most,” said Toussaint, who said both movements share similar demands for greater social justice.

The European parliament elections may be an early test of whether climate uprisings can translate into political power. Green parties are gaining strength, but not everywhere. In France, a recent poll placed the Greens a distant fifth in voter intentions, behind a fledging yellow vest party.

Meanwhile, the far-right National Rally Party, with a minimalist green agenda, is surging in second place, and hopes to capture votes from yellow vests, who are a highly disparate group.

Still, Makaroff believes politicians have gotten the message from the streets.

“It would be suicide for political parties not to take up climate issues in the European elections,” he said. 
…

A state-funded Russian film that lionizes a Soviet World War II tank and its crew has become the second highest grossing home-grown production since the collapse of the Soviet Union, part of a Kremlin-backed drive to instill patriotism in young people.

The Kremlin has long put the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany at the heart of a patriotic push to accompany what it casts as the country’s return to greatness under Vladimir Putin who has portrayed Russia as a fortress besieged by the West.

The new film, “T-34,” has been praised by the defense ministry which has shown it to its troops. Its release coincides with heightened tensions with the West, with President Putin warning of a new arms race. An opinion poll by Levada published on Wednesday showed more than half of Russians believe their country faces a foreign military threat.

It also comes as Kremlin critics warn of a growing militarization of society in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, its continued backing for pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine, and deployment in Syria.

“T-34” tells the story of a group of Soviet soldiers who escape a Nazi concentration camp inside a T-34 tank. It is loosely based on real events.

Released on Jan. 1, it has already taken more than 2.1 billion rubles ($31.86 million) at the box office and has been watched by more than 8.3 million people, making it the second most successful domestically produced film in ruble terms since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The highest-grossing film, released last year, told the story of a Soviet Cold War sports victory over the United States.

Raising the flag

Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s culture minister, has suggested people take their children to see “T-34.”

Medinsky, a Putin ally, has angrily likened critics of the film who have questioned its historical accuracy to Soviet wartime traitors.

“It seems to me that here we need to raise and hold the flag,” the TASS news agency cited Medinsky as saying this month, calling for people to feel pride in their country’s wartime achievements.

Some critics have said the film romanticizes war and have likened it to a computer game, suggesting it does too little to bring home the human cost of warfare.

But its director, Alexei Sidorov, said he had tried to make a film that was not too gloomy.

“Yes, it’s war. Yes, it’s death. Every family lost someone.

But we won this war and that’s important,” he said.

Russia estimates that nearly 27 million Soviet citizens – including both soldiers and civilians – perished during World War II. In Russia it has long been known as the Great Patriotic War.

 
…

Athens is aiming to ensure that all the goods and services the local government provides to its residents are free of forced labor, under a pilot project launched on Wednesday that officials and activists hope will set an example across Greece. 

The Athens municipality plans to create a level playing field for its suppliers by working solely with companies that monitor their supply chains and take action to prevent modern slavery, several officials told an anti-trafficking conference. 

As the world strives to meet a U.N. goal of ending slavery and forced labor by 2030, major companies face growing scrutiny and consumer pressure to guarantee their goods are slave-free. 

Yet governments have unparalleled bargaining power to change the business practices of their suppliers and contractors, not just at home but worldwide because of the increasingly global and complex nature of supply chains, experts said at the conference.

“By using the financial power of a city like Athens … there is pressure and leverage in order to change the situation in the labor market, and make the public procurement process fairer,” said Lefteris Papagiannakis, a vice mayor of Athens. 

While public procurement often focuses on environmental issues, the pilot project is an opportunity to bring human trafficking in government supply chains to the fore, he added. 

The scheme will first research and map Athens’ supply chains, then look to design due diligence tools and monitoring systems, according to Fiori Zafeiropoulou, who is leading the project. 

Companies in the dark

Many Greek companies interviewed by officials recently were unaware of how child or forced labor could be part of their supply chains, and would need help to monitor their operations and act if they were to find such cases, Zafeiropoulou said. 

“We want to create a zero-tolerance environment … and a level playing field to ensure all businesses play by the same rules with no unfair advantage for those exploiting victims of trafficking,” Zafeiropoulou said after announcing the plan. 

However, Athens has no dedicated funding for the project and will need to raise cash soon to go beyond just research and mapping, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

If successful, the plan could be extended to other cities in Greece, government ministries and the private sector, and influence other European governments, said Korina Hatzinikolaou, an expert adviser at the national anti-human trafficking office. 

Every year, authorities across the European Union spend about 14 percent of their gross domestic product — at least 1.9 trillion euros ($2.2 trillion) —  on public procurement, according to data from the European Commission. 

In Greece, an estimated 89,000 people are modern-day slaves — about one in 125 of its 11 million population — according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index by the Walk Free Foundation. 

Greece was a front-line country for refugees fleeing war and poverty in Syria and elsewhere until 2016, and thousands of adult and child migrants are at risk of exploitation by traffickers for sex and labor, experts say.
…

European Union leaders have ruled out British Prime Minister Theresa May’s attempt to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s exit from the bloc in March.

The British parliament Tuesday approved May’s request to the EU to re-work the Irish border provision of the current Brexit deal.

But the spokesman for European Council President Donald Tusk immediately ruled out any re-negotiation.

“The Withdrawal Agreement is and remains the best and only way to ensure an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union,” the spokesman said. “We continue to urge the UK government to clarify its intentions with respect to the next steps as soon as possible.”

Britain’s House of Commons rejected May’s Brexit plans two weeks ago, primarily because of the Irish border provision, known as the backstop. 

The backstop would keep Britain in a customs union with the EU in order to keep a free flow of goods between Ireland — an EU member —  and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.

Backstop opponents who still support the idea of Brexit say it means Britain would still be subjected to EU rules, which is the reason they want Britain to leave the EU in the first place. 

Without an agreement in place, Britain faces a “no-deal” Brexit departure.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told a congressional panel in Washington Tuesday that such an outcome “would cause economic disruptions that could substantially weaken the [United Kingdom] and Europe.”

Business leaders are worried that a no-deal Brexit would lead to economic chaos.

British opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn said he believes the British government would have to delay its Brexit departure for three months to allow for more negotiations.

The pact defeated two weeks ago took British and EU negotiators 18 months to reach. Since then, May has pledged to go forward with the agreement and seek some changes to earn the necessary support.

May’s Conservative Party is now supporting what it calls “alternative arrangements” to overcome the concerns about tying Britain’s policies to EU rules.

What is not certain is whether those changes would be enough to win over a majority of parliament. There also is the question of whether the European Union would agree to alter the agreement, something its leaders have repeatedly said throughout the debate in Britain they have no intention of doing.
…

Even in the densely packed Soviet-era apartment blocks at the edge of this faded Siberian industrial hub, little redheaded Masha always seemed to stand out.

“She was quite an unusual kid to some extent — physically quite tall in comparison with her peers, and she was in fact much more physically developed,” says her father, Valeriy Butin, a retired 55-year-old manufacturing engineer.

“Since childhood she had the strongly marked characteristics of a leader,” he says. “She enjoyed giving commands, organizing her peers, her brother and her sister. She has always tried to carry herself as a leader. That was just natural for her.”

Soft-spoken with a patient disposition, Valeriy is also unfailingly polite. Even upon declining initial interview requests, he would nonetheless thank us for asking and apologize for needing time to consider.

Meeting my videographer and me at the cafe beside our hotel, he seems oblivious to patrons who appear to recognize him immediately, even if they don’t dare say so.

After agreeing to the interview, he waits for us out in the car where, through the cafe window, he seems adrift in an aimless stare, his thoughts likely turning to a Virginia jail cell where his daughter, Maria Valeriyevna Butina, has been held in solitary confinement since U.S. officials brought espionage-related charges against her in July.

Despite a December plea bargain, Valeriy, just like his friends and family, still cannot square the foreign media depiction of a confessed foreign agent with his precocious daughter who, until weeks of incarceration, mailed home report cards and research papers — cherished tokens of the myriad academic accomplishments the family has scrapbooked since primary school.

“She was always gifted with a good memory and inquisitive mind, a willingness to research and really grasp something new,” he says, his vocal pitch beginning to tremble. “I have no doubt it was — it is — natural for her.”

The world that shaped Masha

Touching down on the chemically treated Tarmac at Barnaul International Airport in southwestern Siberia, the pilot stops the plane at the end of the runway and pivots the nose onto a massive five-centimeter-thick expanse of plow-scarred ice and snowpack.

Descending the airplane stairs to board a bus idling in the deep freeze of early dawn, passengers trudge through the glare of a single floodlight as four policemen in matching black Ushankas look on in silence. The only sound is an engine and the rhythmic crunching of snow under boots.

Nestled between the northern borders of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, Barnaul lies 228 kilometers due south of Novosibirsk, part of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as the “Gulag Archipelago.”  Like nearly all of its centrally planned neighboring municipalities, the city, which is the administrative seat of the Altai Krai region, immediately evokes memories of its Soviet past. Once known for manufacturing tanks, ammunition and tractors, Barnaul — also like nearly all of its neighbors — has long since seen most of those jobs disappear.

A half-hour from the airport in a flat grid of city blocks where Maria Butina spent her first 20 years, camouflage-clad hunters tote bagged rifles alongside morning commuters with briefcases. For many youth, it’s the kind of place where one aspires to nothing more than one day residing anyplace else.

“The official statistics brought me into a state of dismay,” Maria wrote of regional brain drain in a 2008 essay for a local paper. “Last year the number of people leaving the region was 9,383 more than those who came to my native Altai.”

As an 18-year-old college junior, Maria was a Rotary Club member who had recently been elected to a civic organization comprising “prominent citizens of Russia, representatives of national, regional and interregional NGOs” that aimed to be a conduit between citizens and lawmakers.

“When first elected, I wondered if it would be possible to transform the region into a place with lifelong professional prospects for my peers,” wrote Butina. “Now I’m pretty confident [that]… if someone doesn’t ‘rejuvenate’ the regional elite, programs will neither succeed nor stop the young from leaving.”

Political aspirations

Adjacent to the Krai Administration building in Barnaul’s Soviets Square, the School of Real Politics (SRP) was architecturally designed to contrast with the stodgy edifice beside it that, until just years ago, still hosted regional legislative sessions.

“Maria came to the Real Politics faculty in 2005, where she instantly showed herself as an active leader,” said Konstantin Emeshin, SRP’s founder and, as Valeriy tells it, the personal mentor who perhaps more than any other individual has shaped Maria’s worldview.

Although not affiliated Altai State University, where Maria was concurrently enrolled, Emeshin’s “faculty,” as he called it, appears to be a government subsidized private organization aligned with the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party that mentors and develops aspiring politicians. Altai State University administrators did not respond to multiple inquiries about its relationship with SRP, and Emeshin declined follow-up interview requests to learn more about the organization.

The concept behind SRP, he said, is that “‘real policy’ doesn’t come from the TV set.”

“Television channels as a rule broadcast information as well as propaganda, whereas real politics is always made by [actual] deputies, officials.”

In “real politics,” he said, students are immersed in day-to-day parliamentary life, in government life, communicating directly with officials, even at the highest levels.

After her first year with the political organization, Butina’s SRP peers elected her school coordinator,a coveted position in which the student reports on legislation and wrangles VIPs for on-site events.

Smitten by her boundless energy and networking savvy, Emeshin nominated her for the prestigious Seliger forum for young leaders. The annual lakeside gathering — once dubbed “Russia’s nationalist summer camp” and sometimes attended by President Vladimir Putin — invites participants to give presentations of their work.

Having solicited the sponsorship of local businessmen, Butina would be expected to champion a regional cause.

At the time, Emeshin said, short-barrel arms legalization was strongly supported by Altai regional Governor Alexander Bogdanovich Karlin.

For the daughter of an avid hunter, a personal history of gun ownership suddenly dovetailed with a politically practical regional cause.

The gun rights cause

In Russia, private citizens can be licensed to own long-barreled shotguns, stun guns and gas pistols, but handguns and assault rifles are banned for the broader public.

Like a handful of provincial Russian politicians, Karlin had long framed pistol ownership as a civilian rights issue, but in his economically struggling region it meant more than that: Altai Krai is also home to one the few small-arms bullet manufacturers in Russia.

At Seliger, Butina connected with politically like-minded activists and expanded the pistol rights debate to the federal level, hosting roundtables throughout the country.

“It was no secret that Senator [Aleksandr] Torshin,” long an avid gun rights supporter, “was now in touch with Maria.”

“She knew everybody: [Alexei] Kudrin, [Andrey] Nechayev, she was at the top of public activities of Russia,” said Emeshin, referring to a close Putin ally and a former economic minister respectively.

Emeshin then encouraged Maria to pursue graduate work abroad.

“Having mastered real politics at the city, regional and federal level,” he told her in 2014 Facebook message, “you should certainly master the real politics at the international level.”

For personal friends of Maria, the rapid career developments came as no surprise.

“At the time, she seemed to be quite the young idealist, a person who awakes with an idea of changing the world,” said Lev Sekerzhinsky, a Barnaul-based photographer who was close to Butina before she departed for Moscow. “But unlike most people, she woke up not just with an idea but with some real energy … just a willful determination to implement all the plans to do something good.

“Every day she had to be doing something,” he recalled. “I’ve never met anyone else like her in all my life.”

Asked whether she could have turned that energy against the interests of a foreign nation, he was unconvinced.

“I’ve read trial documents saying she was doing or planning things against the United States, but I’m pretty confident she wanted to improve ties,” he said. “It’s quite a pity if she violated some laws on the way.”

Charges against her

On December 13, Butina pleaded guilty to conspiracy, engaging in unofficial diplomacy and lobbying after building relationships in American conservative circles — including the National Rifle Association — not unlike what she did on behalf of Altai officials at Seliger. She also admitted to working at the behest of her ex-employer, former Senator Torshin, to create back-channel communications between NRA contacts and Russian officials.

“She was playing a role familiar to professional intelligence officers…using her natural network of contacts to spot, meet, and assess potential targets for the Russian espionage apparatus,” writes Atlantic Monthly contributor John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service and an authority on espionage at the Brookings Institution.

Describing modern Russia as “the world’s first intelligence state” and Putin’s actions as “those of a superpowered spy chief,” any Russian national living abroad — especially politically connected former State Duma aides such as Butina — can be tapped to act informally as the “overt face of covert operations.”

Ambitious young professionals who wish to maintain professional options at home, said longtime Russian affairs reporter Danila Galperovich, often have little choice but to accommodate the intelligence inquiries, which, for many, inevitably blurs boundaries between networking, lobbying and espionage.

“Can they be approached at any time? Yeah, absolutely, the same way, if we’re perfectly honest, a congressional aide in Washington can be approached by the CIA,” said Mark Galeotti, a globally renowned expert on Russian intelligence.

“But is there any evidence of her being a spy in the sense of someone who actually works for the Russian intelligence apparatus? For me, the answer is absolutely not,” said Galeotti. “I think what this all simply reflects is the way modern Russia works. That you have all kinds of different individuals and agencies who are pushing their own agendas, but also with an eye on whether their actions are likely to fit the kind of interests that we think the Kremlin has. Because, if you can pull off something that is a value to the Kremlin, then you will be rewarded.”

As Galeotti tells it, Russia’s president sets broad policy directives, “and then all these scurrying little entrepreneurs will use whatever leverage or interest they themselves have — and it may be totally different if you’re an ambassador compared to if you’re a journalist compared to if you’re whatever else” — to further those Kremlin interests.

“If they fail? Well, the Kremlin’s no worse off; it can deny anything and it hasn’t spent a penny,” he said. “But if they succeed, then sometimes the Kremlin will actually reach in and, in effect, takeover an operation, or simply reward them for a job well done.”

Calling Butina “ambitious in a perfectly normal way,” Galeotti said her long history of advocating gun rights made the NRA a logical place to network.

“She has a personal and passionate commitment to this issue of the right to bear arms, and therefore she obviously wants to have connections, she wants to have some sense of meaning,” he said. “Because of the extent to which the NRA and the Republican Party are incestuously intertwined, you can’t really network in one without the other.

For Galeotti, the best way to detect the presence of formal intelligence directives is by identifying a given suspect’s behavioral anomalies.

“Look at friendships pursued that, otherwise, just don’t seem to make sense or seem to fit a pattern,” he said. “Quite frankly, if one looks at what Butina was doing, it all seems pretty consistent with someone who’s just trying to see where she can get, see what she can do.”

Galeotti also said that former Senator Torshin, who declined multiple phone and email requests for interview, has long operated in this gray area between personal ambition and political favor.

“If you operate in Russia, you know this,” said Galeotti. “Everyone is constantly looking for what kind of blat, what kind of connections, what kind of leverage they can find. That’s just the nature of this environment.”

However, Yuri Shvets, a former KGB major who worked in the Washington office of the Soviet First Chief Directorate, the intelligence organization responsible for foreign operations, said the NRA has been a target of Soviet infiltration since at least the 1980s.

“She is certainly an ‘agent’ [of the Russian government], whether an active duty one or just an ‘agent of influence’ that I don’t know,” added Shvets, who defected to the West in the early 1990s. “But after the Anna Chapman story, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything.”

In June, American prosecutors said Butina possessed materials indicating direct communication with a Russian intelligence service, although a December Department of Justice affidavit summarizing charges against Butina cites none.

American parallels

Driving to the Butin family home, Valeriy’s gray late-model Nissan shoots down a snowy stretch of canopied coniferous byway about 32 kilometers west of Barnaul. I tell him that I can see why Solzhenitsyn chose voluntary exile in the U.S. state of Vermont, and that the surrounding pines could pass for a postcard from there.

“I’ve heard it’s lovely,” he said. “But we’ve got more bears.”

Does the lifelong hunter advocate the pistol legalization his daughter championed?

“I’m not as political as my daughter is,” he said after some hesitation. “But I think it’s important that one should at least have the right, if only for personal protection.

“Look at this guy in Kerch,” he said, referring to an October shooting at a polytechnic college in Russian-occupied Crimea that claimed 20 victims.

“This young man bought a gun absolutely legally and goes on rampage, but nobody could do anything because of gun restrictions. What if just one other person there had had a gun?

“Guns are deadly, but someone could be attacked with a frying pan or beaten to death by fists. To me legalization just means you can have an opportunity to protect yourself against these insane people, and they’re everywhere. They’re here and in America, too.”

As the road crests, we bear left down a snow-rutted unpaved access lane leading into a sprawling warren of scattered structures that betray a range of income levels. Some homes are new, some are old or restored, and a handful were abandoned mid-construction, the skeletal rebar-and-cement casualties of Russia’s chronic boom-and-bust economic cycles.

Waiting for Maria

Entering the Butin family drive, an automated steel gate slides open, revealing a low-slung structure all but buried in snow. On setting foot in the entryway, Maria’s younger sister, Marina, crosses the house to greet us and insists on taking our coats.

“You’re from Washington,” she sighs in almost unaccented English. “Such a cool city.”

Placing an arm around a sprightly older woman who emerges from the kitchen, Marina introduces her grandmother.

“This is the American?” she asks Marina, who nods.

“Welcome,” says the older woman, offering a hand and holding tight with a lengthy penetrating stare.”I’ll put on some tea.”

Arrayed on a table are family albums that chronicle the achievements of each Butin child. The photos and clippings show just how much academic engagement and school-based events were an organizing principle in the Butin household, which, until Maria left for university, had been located within a half-block of a primary school.

At only 24, Maria’s younger sister holds multiple degrees from one of Russia’s elite polytechnic universities in St. Petersburg, where she has since joined an electronics manufacturing firm.

Like both of her parents, she is an engineer. Also like both of her parents, she learned of Maria’s incarceration via news reports.

“I was in the car, going to work and I didn’t know what had happened,” says Marina, who says she spoke with her older sister at least once weekly until the arrest.

“I was confused and then heard her name and just pulled over and fell silent,” she recalls. “I thought it was fake news, and then I thought maybe after two days everything would be okay, that this was all a big misunderstanding.”

Since hearing the news on television that same morning, Valeriy says his impression of the accusations is unchanged.

“I can only imagine it must have been Maria’s legal ignorance about the details of these [lobbying] laws that her absolutely friendly activities resulted in such an accusation,” he says, insisting that his daughter was fond of the United States and wanted to see relations improved.”Maria couldn’t possibly wish any harm to the country where she was studying, that she treats with great respect.”

Maria’s mother, Irina, says Maria had often spoken taking “part in some global decisions that are being undertaken for (her) country and to be a public figure.”

“Masha did these things without any deliberate intentions,” she says. “I am confident that any illegal activity resulted from her legal ignorance, her young years, her drive, persistence, and of course some naïveté.”

Although the U.S. indictment refutes that opinion, the family remains hopeful that their daughter will be deported immediately after her mid-February hearing, and that U.S.-Russian ties can be salvaged.

“Our two countries are simply obliged to exist peacefully, at a minimum,” says Valeriy. “But even better, we can have absolutely friendly, good relations.”

Asked what he would say directly to President Donald Trump and other top U.S. officials, Valeriy appeared to have tears welling in his eyes.

“It is difficult to say what one could say to the U.S. president, as well as to the Secretary of State,” he says. “But if something will depend on them, I would ask them to release her as soon as possible.”

Asked if Russian officials have been adequately supportive, he exhales in mild exasperation. Although Russian officials have amplified the case via state-media news interviews, the family says they remain dependent upon crowdfunding to deal with more than $500,000 in legal fees.

Characteristically polite, Valeriy asks us to convey a message to Maria’s defense lawyers.

“I am tremendously grateful for their diligence and impartiality, their faith in the fact that Maria should not be punished,” he said before drawing a parallel to a positive memory from the Cold War.

“There was a situation between our countries, quite a tough one dating back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Yuri Andropov,” he says. “A young American girl named Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Andropov in very human and straightforward tone that ultimately fostered a kind of détente in Cold War tensions. It seems to me there is now some similarity to that situation.”

Regardless of whether her upcoming court ruling can help mend relations, Maria’s younger sister sees the good that is resulting from her sister’s incarceration.

“I want her to stand firm and know that, despite the conditions of solitary confinement, the large distance separating us, she is actually the one keeping us all in the right mind set,” she says. “She reminds us that everything will be tackled, that everything will be okay, that truth and justice will prevail.”

“These are the basics we laid from childhood,” says Irina, calling their family bonds the “thread” to which her daughter holds tight in a Virginia jail.

Even for professor Emeshin, the weighty darkness of a naïve, high-energy extrovert stuck in solitary confinement may yet have one silver lining.

“She is unusually talented, an incredibly clever girl, you can’t deny that,” he said earlier that day. “That’s why she chose the path of public life, why she took charge of the school’s information center, joined our public chamber and quickly leaped to federal-level work.”

For better or worse, he said, she’s found herself in the high-profile international role she always sought.

“Quite a complicated one, yes, but still a real experience,” he said. “She’s now well-known and, like any decent and honest person from this country, she’ll come to occupy a worthy spot in Russia’s political sphere.”

Olga Pavlova in Moscow, Ricardo Marquina in Barnaul, Igor Tsikhanenka in Washington contributed to this report.
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From Sweden to southern Spain, and the Netherlands to Hungary, populist forces have gained seats in recent elections and they now see a chance at power in Brussels itself.

Europe is gearing up for EU parliament elections in May, a vote where the balance of power could shift decisively.

The campaigns are getting under way amid the fevered atmosphere of street protests in France and many other EU states, alongside growing brinkmanship in the negotiations on Britain’s imminent withdrawal from the bloc.

The 751 members of the European Parliament (or MEPs) are directly elected every five years, and they form the legislative body of the bloc which has the power to pass EU laws and approve the appointment of EU commissioners.

Populist forces, backed by the power of street protests, look set to make the coming vote unlike any other in the bloc’s history, according to analyst Michael Cottakis of the London School of Economics. He is also director of the ’89 Initiative,’ which seeks to engage younger generations in European decision-making.

“It’s an opportunity to hit the piñata when the establishment presents it to you and get your policy opinions across,” Cottakis told VOA. “Generally we’ve seen that the European elections have been a sort of locus in which angry, disaffected citizens essentially voice their concerns – the height of a delayed populist political backlash against a long period of economic hardship.”

In France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen is seeking to align her National Rally party with the yellow vest protesters.

Coordinated May assault

Across Europe, populist forces are attempting a coordinated assault on the May elections. Italy’s far-right interior minister recently weighed in on the French protests, posting a video on social media in which he said he hoped “that the French can free themselves from a terrible president, and the opportunity will come on May 26.”

The minister, Matteo Salvini, is trying to form alliances with governments in Hungary and Poland. Their common foe is immigration — but there are major contradictions, says analyst Luigi Scazzieri of the Center for European Reform.

“With Italy wanting other countries to take migrants but Hungary, for example, having absolutely no intention of doing so. So the real question is, will they be able to work together to form an effective group?'”

That’s unlikely, says Michael Cottakis, citing other significant policy differences among Europe’s populist governments.

“Italy is a member of the eurozone, Poland is not. And then in terms of foreign policy, very importantly, Poland is a great believer in the NATO alliance, terrified of Russia, greatly mistrusting of Vladimir Putin; whereas Salvini has openly expressed support.”

Street fights back

Political battle lines are being drawn, colors nailed to the mast. Several hundred self-styled red scarf’ protesters staged counter-demonstrations in Paris Sunday, waving EU flags and voicing support for pro-EU President Emmanuel Macron of France.

In Hungary, the EU flag has been at the forefront of growing anti-government demonstrations. In Germany meanwhile, the Green party has overtaken the far right Alternative for Germany’ party in the polls.

Populists are fast discovering they do not have a monopoly on the street. The real test of strength will come at the ballot box on May 26, a vote that could change the balance of power in Europe.
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The European Union has a message for Prime Minister Theresa May as she plots a path out of the Brexit impasse: Britain needs to decide what it really wants but the negotiated divorce deal will not be reopened.

With less than nine weeks until Britain is due by law to leave the European Union on March 29, there is no agreement yet in London on how and even whether to leave the world’s biggest trading bloc.

Parliament defeated May’s deal two weeks ago by a huge margin, with many Brexit-supporting rebels in her Conservative Party angry at the Irish “backstop,” an insurance policy aimed at preventing a hard border in Ireland if no other solutions can be agreed.

Ahead of Tuesday’s votes in the British parliament on a way forward, lawmakers in May’s party are pushing for her to demand the European Union drop the backstop and replace it with something else.

“It is quite a challenge to see how you can construct from a diversity of the opposition a positive majority for the deal,” EU deputy chief negotiator Sabine Weyand told a Brussels conference organized by the European Policy Center think-tank.

In a note of criticism of May’s strategy, she said there appeared to be a lack of “ownership” in Britain of the agreement struck between the two sides in November, and that there was insufficient transparency in the prime minister’s moves.

“There will be no more negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement,” said Weyand, a German senior civil servant at the European Commission, reiterating the EU stance.

As the Brexit crisis goes down to the line, however, EU officials indicated there might be wriggle room if May came back with a clear, and viable, request for changes that she — and the EU — believe will secure a final ratification.

Wriggle room?

However, Weyand echoed her boss Michel Barnier in saying that Britain could resolve some of the problems caused by opposition to the Irish backstop by changing some of its demands on post-Brexit trade.

Referring to an amendment to May’s proposed next steps on Brexit put forward by senior Conservative lawmaker Graham Brady, who wants “alternative arrangements” to the backstop, Weyand said that the withdrawal treaty already contained that possibility.

“We are open to alternative arrangements” on the Irish border, she said. “The problem with the Brady amendment is that it does not spell out what they are.

“The backstop is not a prerequisite for the future relationship,” she said. “We are open to alternative proposals.”

A source in May’s office said the government would tell Conservative lawmakers to vote in favor of Brady’s amendment if it is selected by the speaker on Tuesday.

Britain remaining in a customs union, or even the EU single market, could help reach a final agreement, Weyand said, adding: “We need decisions on the U.K. side on the direction of travel.”

Weyand said the ratification of the EU-U.K. deal would build the trust necessary to build a new relationship, but ruled out bowing to British calls to set a time limit to the backstop beyond which the insurance policy would lapse.

“A time-limit on the backstop defeats the purpose of the backstop because it means that once the backstop expires you stand there with no solution for this border,” Weyand said.

Impasse 

Speaking to the same conference, a former British envoy to the EU, Ivan Rogers, said he expected the deadlock to persist in the coming weeks, saying it had always seemed likely that the outcome would remain in doubt until much closer to March 29.

Rogers was speaking in a personal capacity, having resigned two years ago after differences with May over the negotiation.

The question for May is whether the EU can offer enough to get a variant of her defeated deal through parliament.

May wants to use a series of votes on Tuesday to find a consensus that lawmakers in her own party could support, just two weeks since her deal suffered the biggest parliamentary defeat in modern British history.

Parliament will vote on proposals made by lawmakers including a delay to Brexit and going back to the EU to demand changes to the Northern Irish backstop.

In essence, May is forcing lawmakers to show their cards on what sort of Brexit, if any, they want. Lawmakers in her own party want her to demand a last-minute change to the withdrawal deal to remove the backstop, which they fear could end up trapping the U.K. in a permanent customs union with the EU.

 
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British officials are war-gaming various strategies for coping with the disruption of Britain leaving the European Union without an exit deal, including declaring a state of emergency and martial law to avert disorder provoked by possible food shortages and energy outages.

Details emerged of Operation Yellow Hammer, the contingency planning underway for a so-called no-deal Brexit, ahead of important parliamentary votes this week that could result in Britain postponing its departure by nine months or even more.

Operation Yellow Hammer has provoked the wrath of hardline Brexiters, who say the war-gaming is excessive and the leaking of what the government is considering is just designed to scare rebel lawmakers into accepting the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement the House of Commons rejected earlier this month.

As the exit day of March 29 looms, the government and businesses are scrambling to prepare for possible chaos wrought by a no-deal exit, which some fear could severely disrupt supply chains, energy networks and basic cross-border services, from banking to travel. Downing Street admits a no-deal exit would bring disruption “but as a responsible government we are taking the appropriate steps to minimize this disruption and ensure the country is prepared.”

Some civil servants have compared the likely disruption to the impact of a war. Defense officials told Sky News Sunday the army is stockpiling food, fuel, spare parts and ammunition in readiness. “An army marches on its stomach. If supply lines break down, they struggle,” an official said.

Earlier this month, nearly 100 trucks took part in a drill to test Britain’s contingency plans for coping with likely customs and security delays in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The port of Dover normally sees 10,000 trucks pass through every day, bringing vital supplies from the continent and sending Britain’s exports to the European Union and beyond. The fear is a large part of southeast England could see unmanageable traffic lines.

Hardline Brexiters, like former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, have dismissed the no-deal Brexit warnings as hysteria. “These doom-laden predictions are so hyperbolical as to suffer from the law of diminishing returns. Brexiteers have, for months, been arguing that a no-deal exit is manageable and government warnings are overblown,” Johnson said recently.

The House of Commons is set to vote Tuesday on whether Britain should delay the March 29 exit if a withdrawal deal that will garner sufficient support from lawmakers cannot be reached with Brussels.

More than a dozen ministers are warning they’ll resign if May fails to commit to avoiding a no-deal Brexit, although they’re prepared to give her two weeks to try to conclude a new withdrawal deal first.

In the event she can’t, parliament would have to pass new legislation to delay an exit. But delaying Britain’s departure would also require unanimous agreement from the 27 other EU member states, and Brussels has warned the exit could only be postponed for a handful of months.

Ironically, rebellious hardline Euro-skeptics in May’s ruling Conservative party, who were key in the heavy defeat of May’s Brexit Withdrawal Agreement earlier this month, appear to be softening their opposition to her deal; while pro-EU Conservative rebels and middle-of the-roaders appear to be moving closer together in an alliance determined now to bury it for good.

May’s proposed deal would see Britain locked in a customs union with the European Union for several years while it negotiates a vaguely defined free trade settlement.

In the temporary customs union, Britain would be unable to influence EU laws, regulations and product standards it would have to observe. The transition was reached to avoid customs checks on the border separating Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, but British lawmakers fear Britain could be trapped indefinitely in the transition.

Leading Brexiters say if May can get a sunset clause written into the agreement to allow Britain to escape the transition agreement later on, if it wished, or if the transition was time-limited, they might reverse their opposition and back the deal.

The possible change of heart is being determined by their fear that pro-EU lawmakers are gaining in parliamentary strength. But it isn’t clear Brussels or the other 27 member states will agree such a clause, they insist there can’t be substantial changes to the deal they agreed on after two years of haggling.

Pro-EU lawmakers across all parties appear emboldened and determined to negotiate a much softer agreement that would see Britain stay in a customs union with the bloc permanently.

 
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The U.S. Treasury has lifted sanctions on three Russian companies connected to Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, reversing a move which wreaked havoc on global aluminum markets last year.

To the Treasury and supporters of the move, it was an example of sanctions working as they should by changing a target’s behavior in nine months under suffocating restrictions on trade. Due to the sanctions, Deripaska, a tycoon who has been close to the Kremlin, agreed to reduce his shareholdings to below 50 percent.

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans, however, worry that Deripaska could retain significant influence, even as he himself stays under sanctions.

Here is a look at Deripaska, his companies, and possible consequences of the Treasury ruling.

Putin ally

With his cropped hair and scruffy beard, Deripaska was a familiar face to Russians long before he was dragged into in the U.S. furor over the 2016 election.

Amid the economic chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse, the trained physicist became a major player on the Russian metals market even before his 30th birthday. Even among Russian billionaire businessman, Deripaska’s also notable for his closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin. A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2006 described him as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”

As special counsel Robert Mueller investigates alleged collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign and Russian interests, Deripaska’s links to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort have come under scrutiny. Manafort, who was convicted last year in the United States of tax and bank fraud, was a former business partner of Deripaska.

The Belarusian model and self-described sex coach Anastasia Vashukevich — known by her pseudonym Nastya Rybka — said last year that she had obtained details of Deripaska’s alleged role in U.S. election meddling while spending time on his yacht. Vashukevich was arrested in Thailand last February and deported this month. She is now in Russia.

Vashukevich earlier indicated she would turn over the recordings she claimed to have if the U.S. could help secure her release, but she later withdrew the offer, suggesting that she and Deripaska had reached an agreement. Deripaska won a Russian defamation suit against Vashukevich and another man last year.

Sanctions collateral damage

The U.S. decision in April 2018 to sanction Rusal — the massive aluminum producer then controlled by Deripaska — had a big impact. Shares in the company plunged over 50 percent, and supply chains around the world were disrupted.

That exposed both the power and the limits of U.S. policy toward Russia, says Tom Adshead of Moscow-based consultancy Macro-Advisory.

Previous sanctions had been written to minimize damage to other sectors of the economy, and in particular Western businesses buying Russian commodities. That changed with Deripaska.

By barring almost any commercial relationship with one of the world’s largest producers of a metal key to international supply chains, U.S. policymakers ensured this time the economic pain would be felt not only in Russia.

“There was collateral damage that wasn’t desirable,” Adshead said. Besides an immediate jump in aluminum prices, that included economic uncertainty for Rusal’s employees outside Russia in countries like Sweden and Ireland.

The Rusal experience could mean the U.S. is more cautious about sanctioning major market players in future, Adshead predicted.

After the sanctions were removed from Rusal on Monday, shares in the company rose to their highest since April, though they remained at only around two-thirds of their value prior to the sanctions.

The price of aluminum largely held steady as other companies have stepped into the void left by Rusal and increased supply, analysts say.

The main winners have been state-owned metal producers in China — just the ones the Trump administration has sought to stymie by imposing tariffs on Chinese aluminum.

Enforcing conditions

The key condition of lifting sanctions on Rusal and Deripaska’s other companies is that the companies “reduced Oleg Deripaska’s direct and indirect shareholding stake in these companies and severed his control,” the Treasury said.

Whether that will actually prove to be the case was a key bone of contention in Congress, which voted this month to try to block the administration’s efforts to remove the sanctions. In the House, 136 Republicans joined Democrats to disapprove the deal while in the Senate 11 Republicans supported the move but fell short of the 60 votes needed.

Deripaska remains a significant minority shareholder — his En+ group says he holds “no more than 44.95 percent” — and other shares are held by smaller shareholders and independent trustees under an agreement with the Treasury.

There’s no other shareholder of the same size and a number of the other shareholders would probably agree with him on many strategic issues,” Adshead said. “Therefore it will almost certainly be run in the way he wants it to be run, but the point is that he no longer has as much freedom or control as he wanted.”

 
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