ІНСАЙДЕР УКРАЇНА

European Union leaders have given their unqualified backing to Britain over its accusation that Russia used a nerve agent to try to kill a former double agent and his daughter in Southern England earlier this month. At a two-day summit in Brussels that ended Friday, EU leaders also demanded a permanent exemption from proposed U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Serbia has canceled a women’s World Championship qualifier handball match with Kosovo over security concerns after nationalists announced they would protest the game.

Serbia’s Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic told local media Friday he called off the match to avoid any clashes between nationalist fans and police.

In response, the European Handball Federation (EHF) said it was expelling the Serbian team from the tournament.

Match moved

The game would have been the first documented sporting encounter between Serbia and its former province, Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo as a nation.

“Could we have organized for this match to go ahead? Certainly. But at what cost?” Stefanovic told the news website B92. “We are not ready to have the police beat up people for the sake of a match, which contradicts all our positions.”

The match was originally set to be played Friday in the central town of Kragujevac, but was moved to an isolated sports center in Kovilovo for security reasons. Both teams agreed the game would be played without fans or media because of the security concerns.

Fans, protesters gather

However, some Serbian fans gathered at the Kovilovo sports center Thursday evening, waving Serbian flags and singing patriotic songs. Police were deployed to the venue Friday in anticipation of the game.

Kosovo declared independence in 2008, nearly a decade after a NATO bombing campaign ended a crackdown by Serbian authorities against secessionists in Kosovo, populated mostly by ethnic Albanians.
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Britain’s opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sacked his shadow Northern Ireland minister Friday after he called for a second referendum on Brexit, a move that exposes deep divisions in the party over whether to leave the European Union.

Owen Smith, who challenged Corbyn for the party leadership in 2016, wrote an article in the Guardian newspaper Friday urging his party to reopen the question of whether Brexit was the right decision.

Smith said he was sacked for voicing his opinion that Brexit will damage the economy and threaten the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, which ended decades of armed sectarian conflict in the province.

“Those views are shared by Labour members & supporters and I will continue to speak up for them, and in the interest of our country,” Smith said in a Twitter post.

Labour is narrowly ahead in opinion polls but, like Prime Minister Theresa May’s ruling Conservatives, remains deeply divided on Brexit.

Britain is due to formally leave the EU on March 29, 2019.

Over the last few months, Labour has diverged from the government’s policy on Brexit. Last month it said it wanted to remain in the EU’s customs union — a move that would make commerce with the European Union easier but limit Britain’s ability to strike future trade deals with non-EU countries.

The government has ruled out staying in any form of the customs union.

Corbyn, who supported the “Remain” campaign in the 2016 referendum but with little enthusiasm, has repeatedly said it is not Labour’s policy to offer Britons a vote on any final deal that Britain negotiates with the EU.

Smith will be replaced by a former Labour minister, Tony Lloyd, who returned to parliament last year after quitting in 2012 to become police and crime commissioner in Manchester.

Critics of the move

Some Labour lawmakers criticized Corbyn’s decision to sack Smith.

Pro-EU Labour lawmaker Chuka Umunna said it was “extraordinary” that a shadow cabinet member should be sacked for advocating a Brexit policy that commands the overwhelming support of the party.

“What has happened to our party?” he said on Twitter.

Peter Hain, the former Northern Ireland minister and a Labour lawmaker in the House of Lords, Britain’s unelected upper house, accused Corbyn of carrying out of a “Stalinist purge.”
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At least one person is believed to have been killed Friday after a gunman claiming allegiance to the Islamic State militant group fired shots in a supermarket during an apparent hostage situation in the southwestern French town of Trebes.

“We unfortunately presume one person has been killed, but we cannot bring a doctor on site to check,” said regional police chief Jean-valery Letterman.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said investigators are treating the situation as a terrorist act.

National police said law enforcement authorities had surrounded the suspect at the supermarket and may have taken hostages.
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With the results of Russia’s presidential elections now nearly a week old, Russia’s domestic political analysts and foreign observers alike have largely arrived at the same conclusion: The March 18 contest brought few surprises for Russians and Westerners alike.

While the Kremlin insists the elections were fair and transparent, a number of Russia’s leading political analysts are voicing concerns and predicting a succession crisis in the country in 2024, when Russian constitutional terms limits say Putin, now 65, will be ineligible to seek another consecutive term.

The Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which sent hundreds of election observers to monitor polling, said the election was conducted in an orderly fashion but lacked real choice. Putin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, however, said the results were highly significant — and that they speak for themselves.

“Elections that took place on March 18 demonstrated that our society is fully consolidated,” Peskov said in a statement to the press. “And it is not consolidated because of someone’s attacks, but, rather, thanks to the plans of further development of the country, which the election results demonstrated.”

Compared to Soviet elections

However, a number of Russian political scientists disagree with this assessment. Among them is Dmitry Oreshkina, a political scientist, journalist and the 2001 Person of the Year, according to the Rambler web portal — Russia’s largest.

“[Putin] won. What am I unhappy about? The elections resemble Soviet elections,” Oreshkina said in an interview with VOA’s Russian Service on Thursday.

“Firstly, there was no alternative to Putin,” he added, referring to the fact that although Putin won his fourth term, with 77 percent of the vote from a field of eight candidates, numerous news outlets have reported that his campaign was exempt from most election laws and restrictions.

“Similarly, Soviet ballots only had one name on them,” Oreshkina added. “Secondly, the electorate was [coerced into going] to the polls. People can’t risk taking a political stance. Their bosses tell them they need to go, so they go.”

No real transparency

Ekaterina Shulman, senior lecturer in public policy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, said polling results reported by Kremlin officials lack any real transparency.

“One of the post-elections scandals [in Russia] is the statement of Russia’s internal affairs minister [Sergey Shoigu] that 99 percent of the military and their family members have voted, and 89 percent of those supported Russia’s commander-in-chief,” said Shukman, who is also a host for Echo of Moscow radio. “That is crazy, because the military personnel vote at the same polls as everyone else — with the exception of military communities and military bases abroad — and there’s absolutely no way to know who they voted for. This makes this statement either deeply speculative or proof of fraud.”

Succession crisis?

As for Russia’s future, Kirill Rogov, a political expert and journalist who has championed Russian independent media, believes that the country will face an intractable succession crisis.

“Everything will be focused on what happens in 2024,” he told VOA. “The elites are going to find the succession issue unacceptable, because whoever Putin’s successor is, [this successor] would have to — despite staying loyal to Putin — reshuffle the elites in order to maintain power.”

Oreshkin challenged the notion of any succession within Putin’s lifetime, saying the former KGB spy will continue to lead the country in whatever capacity he sees fit, for as long as he sees fit.

“Who is going to be Putin’s successor? Putin himself. We don’t know yet in what capacity, whether he’ll be prime minister or the leader of a new state, but he’ll find it hard to leave,” Oreshkin said. “And each year it’ll only become harder.”

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service.
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The sale of one Turkey’s largest media conglomerates to a pro-government businessman is being seen as the ruling AKP party strengthening its control of the media.

The sale came as parliament on Thursday passed legislation widening government control of the internet, one of the last remaining platforms for critical and independent reporting.

Dogan Media Company, owns a chain of prominent newspapers and TV channels. The company was reportedly sold to Demiroren Holding, whose owner, Erdogan Demiroren, has close ties to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Demiroren will probably do to Dogan media what he did when he bought independent newspapers Milliyet and Vatan, and turn it into a government mouthpiece,” analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners predicted. “With this sale, there is nothing left in the mainstream media for a guy or girl out there who is seeking independent information, that period is now over in Turkish media.”

“The process of gathering the Turkish media industry in one hand according to the Putin model is completed,” Kadri Gursel, a leading Turkish journalist, tweeted.

​Bitter struggle ends

The sale of Dogan Media ends a prolonged bitter struggle between owner Aydin Dogan and Erdogan.

For decades, Dogan was Turkey’s most powerful media tycoon. With most of Turkey’s media gradually coming under the direct or indirect control of the ruling AKP party, Dogan media remained one of last sources mainstream independent reporting, observers said.

In 2009, Dogan’s Hurriyet newspaper provoked Erdogan with a report on a German court linking prominent AKP party officials to a charity fraud. Shortly afterward, tax authorities placed a multibillion-dollar fine on the media company, nearly bankrupting it.

A series of court cases have also been launched against the media tycoon and other family members, with prosecutors demanding heavy prison sentences for the alleged crimes.

“The prospect of spending rest of his life in jail is what I think finally forced his decision to sell,” analyst Yesilada said. “It’s symbolic because AKP has this mentality of conquest of its enemies. In the end, Dogan surrendered and this should serve as a lesson as to whatever enemies Erdogan has left, if he has a grudge against you, you should run.”

The government denied such allegations, insisting the judiciary is independent.

Internet gains

There are still a number of critical newspapers and satirical magazines, but Dogan media is the only newspaper distributor outside government control. Observers suggest publications critical of the government could face distribution problems in the future.

In Turkey, the internet is increasingly becoming a platform for independent journalism. Many journalists who’ve been fired for reporting critical of Erdogan have continued working on the growing numbers of web publications.

Some news stations have also begun broadcasting on the internet to maintain independence.

New controls on internet, broadcasting

But Thursday’s action by the Turkish parliament put sweeping new legislation in place to control broadcasting on the internet.

“Now considering Dogan Media is being sold, there is not much of the mainstream media let alone independent media, the only area is left is the internet,” law professor Yaman Akdeniz, an expert on cyber freedom at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, said. “People follow not only local produced news media on (the) internet, but also Turkish broadcasts by the BBC, VOA and DW, as news sources. So the government is trying to take action to control these before the elections, which might be early this summer.”

Among the new reforms: the powers of the state regulator for radio and television have been extended to internet broadcasting.

The regulator is controlled by representatives of the ruling AKP party. Under the new legislation, internet broadcasters will have to apply for a license from the regulator.

“Hypothetically, they (the regulators) could declare these programs incite terrorism, so they could close down the programs or revoke their licenses. They could ask (for) the blocking of the website,” professor Akdeniz said.

Observers point out that a growing number of Turkish reporters working overseas are broadcasting internet programs, particularly Germany. The ability of Turkish authorities to impose controls on these is likely limited, observers said.

Well-informed public

Recent surveys found more than 70 percent of Turks have access to the internet, and 70 percent of Turkish youth rely solely on the internet for news.

“The underlying truth (is) these media takeovers and current internet censorship will be completely ineffective,” analyst Yesilada said. “The Turkish public intends to remain well-informed, and despite these shocks within a few years, different networks and ways will develop for them to remain informed.”

Turkish authorities have already banned more than 170,000 websites, but observers point out that Turks have become increasingly savvy on the internet, using various means to circumvent restrictions, such as by using virtual private networks (VPN).

But authorities are quickly becoming adept, too.

“Fifteen VPN providers are currently blocked by Turkey,” cyber rights expert Akdeniz said. “It’s becoming really, really difficult for standard internet users to access banned content. It’s not a simple but a complex government machinery now seeking to control the internet.”
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“I brought tea for you — English tea, from Fortnum and Mason, the very best,” chirped the financial adviser in the foyer of a plush Moscow hotel near the Kremlin.  “You have a package for me, I think,” he added before scurrying off with his Russian client.

The adviser, like many of his British colleagues, has been making routine rounds to reassure clients since the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain, an attempted assassination Britain accuses the Kremlin of orchestrating.

British ministers and their Kremlin counterparts have been threatening further reprisals after retaliatory expulsions of diplomats in response to the Skripal attack.

With Anglo-Russian relations plunging to their lowest point since the Cold War, British financial advisers in Moscow had expected to encounter Russian clients anxious about Britain mounting a retaliatory financial crackdown on Russian money invested in London.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to go after the financial assets in Britain of wealthy Russians connected to the Kremlin.

But it is business as usual in Moscow.

Advisers visiting the Russian capital say oligarchs and other super-wealthy businessmen appear unconcerned, having concluded May is all bark and no bite.  

Part of the reason is Britain has been reluctant in the past to use already existing legislation to probe too deeply the origins of Russian money spent in Britain, fearing it might lead to an exodus of Russian cash out of the country.  Moscow investors also believe Brexit-mired Britain is going to need Russian money even more in the future and chasing it out risks also frightening super-wealthy investors from other countries.

“My clients don’t see it as a threat,” said the adviser who exchanged tea for a package of signed documents.  He asked not to be identified.  “Neither do we.  The new measures being drafted are just repeating legislation that’s already available and will rest largely unused.  What few investigations launched will take forever and then get bogged down in the courts,” he said.

Britain’s past unwillingness to investigate Russian money, and the suspicion Britain isn’t serious this time either, is not helping May convince Britain’s European allies to do more than issue statements of solidarity over the Skripal poisoning.

Norbert Röttgen, chairman of Germany’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, has highlighted the need for Britain “to examine its open stance toward Russian capital of dubious origin” before it starts asking for concrete action by Britain’s allies.

In response to doubts about their determination, British officials say they are likely to ban secretive Scottish limited partnerships that have been used to hide the true ownership of some Russian-origin money. The Scottish-based shell companies have long been a target of transparency campaigners.

May was due to brief  EU leaders Thursday in Brussels on the investigation into the March 4 nerve-agent poisoning of Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.  Both remain in critical condition.

May will warn Russia is a threat to Western democracy, according to British officials.

“The challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come,” she will say, according to extracts released in advance by her office.  “As a European democracy, the United Kingdom will stand shoulder to shoulder with the European Union and with NATO to face these threats together.  United we will succeed,” she will add.

EU leaders are expected to strongly condemn the attack, but fearful of push-back the British government isn’t asking EU partners to agree to fresh sanctions on Russia in addition to the Ukraine-related ones already in effect.

Behind-the-scenes, British officials have sought to persuade their European neighbors to expel undeclared spies among Russian diplomats based in their countries, say European officials.

But it is unclear whether Britain will be successful in persuading other EU countries to agree to point the finger at Moscow.

Several states, including Italy and Greece, appear eager to shield their ties with Russia and are resisting a stark statement of blame.  The United States, France and Germany have said they accept Britain’s assessment Russia is the only plausible culprit.  But Greece, Italy, Cyprus and Austria say the accusation remains to be proven.

They are not alone, even some Putin critics in Russia question whether the Kremlin ordered the attack.  

Outspoken Putin opponent Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB counter-intelligence officer, says he believes Russian intelligence has carried out overseas assassinations in recent years, but he says he “can’t find rational explanations for” the attack on Skripal.

“After the so called ‘umbrella assassination’ of Georgi Markov in London in the late 1970s, the KGB decided to stop all special [assassination] operations abroad.  It seems to me that today the concept has changed and some of the special operations related to the elimination of political opponents has been done with the help of the intelligence,” he told VOA.
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Time to check that mailbox.

Kensington Palace said Thursday that invitations for the wedding between Prince Harry and his American fiancée Meghan Markle have been dispatched.

Some 600 people have been invited to the May 19 nuptials at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. All 600 have also been invited to a lunchtime reception given by Queen Elizabeth II at St George’s Hall.

The invitations, which are beveled and gilded in gold along the edges, feature Prince Charles’ three-feather badge. They were made by Barnard & Westwood, which has held the Royal Warrant for printing and bookbinding since 1985.

Harry and Markle will also celebrate with some 200 guests at a private evening reception given by Prince Charles.

The palace declined to comment as to who is on the list.
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Poland’s government distanced itself Thursday from comments made by the prime minister’s father, who claimed Jews willingly entered ghettos during the German occupation of Poland to get away from their Christian neighbors.

The comment by Kornel Morawiecki, a senior lawmaker and father of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, is the latest episode in weeks of bitterness that have erupted over a controversial new Holocaust speech law.

Kornel Morawiecki claimed in a recent interview that Jews were not forced into ghettos by Germans but went willingly because “they were told there would be an enclave where they could get away from nasty Poles.”

The comment is historically inaccurate. It also seems to minimize the tragedy of the Jews and suggest they partly brought the tragedy upon themselves out of anti-Polish hatred.

The deputy foreign minister, Bartosz Cichocki, said the comment does not reflect the position of the Polish government.

Cichocki has led recent talks in Israel aimed at damage control after an angry dispute triggered by the Polish law, which makes it a crime punishable by up to three years of prison to publicly and falsely blame Poland for German Holocaust atrocities.

The Polish government says it needs a tool to fight cases in which Poland is inaccurately blamed for German crimes that were carried out in occupied Poland during World War II.

Israel and other critics, however, fear that the law – which is in any case unenforceable outside of Poland – is really aimed at trying to stifle research and discussion within Poland into anti-Jewish wartime violence, something that casts a shadow over Polish wartime behavior that was often honorable under conditions of profound suffering.

Amid the heated debates, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has also sparked criticism with comments seen as insensitive and historically wrong.

At a forum of world leaders in Munich last month he listed “Jewish perpetrators” of the Holocaust along with German, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish perpetrators, seeming also to suggest that Jews were partly responsible for their own genocide.
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Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges Wednesday over allegations he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

A judicial official told The Associated Press that investigating judges overseeing the probe had charged the ex-president with illegally funding his successful 2007 campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.

The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

The charges involving illegal campaign funding from a foreign dictator are the most serious faced by a former French president in recent history. They were presented after Sarkozy was questioned for two days by anti-corruption police at a station in Nanterre, northwest of the French capital.

Investigators are examining allegations that Gadhafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros (about $62 million) overall for his presidential election bid.

The sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time — 21 million euros. In addition, the alleged payments would violate French rules barring foreign financing and requiring that the source of campaign funds be declared.

​Innocence proclaimed

Sarkozy, 63, who was France’s president from 2007 to 2012, has repeatedly and vehemently denied any wrongdoing. According to the same source, he again proclaimed his innocence during his questioning by police.

The former president was released Wednesday night but placed under judicial supervision. Details of the restrictions he was ordered to obey have not been revealed.

In the French judicial system, preliminary charges mean Sarkozy is personally under formal investigation in a criminal case. The judges will keep investigating the case in the next weeks and months. 

At the end of their investigation, they can decide either to drop the preliminary charges or to send Sarkozy to trial on formal charges.

Sarkozy had a complex relationship with Gadhafi. Soon after winning the French presidency, he invited the Libyan leader for a state visit and welcomed him to France with high honors. 

But Sarkozy then put France in the forefront of the NATO-led airstrikes against Gadhafi’s troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gadhafi’s regime in 2011.

Sarkozy has faced other campaign-related legal troubles in the past. In February 2017, he was ordered to stand trial after being handed preliminary charges for suspected illegal overspending on his failed 2012 re-election campaign. Sarkozy has appealed the decision.

In 2013, he was cleared of allegations that he illegally took donations from France’s richest woman, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, on the way to his 2007 election victory.

His attorney, Thierry Herzog, did not respond to requests for comment from AP.

Former aide questioned

Sarkozy’s former top aide, the ex-minister Brice Hortefeux, was also questioned Tuesday but was not detained. He said on Twitter that the details he gave investigators “should help put an end to a series of mistakes and lies.”

The investigation got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with France’s BFM TV on Wednesday night. 

He said he personally handed a suitcase containing 2 million euros (about $2.5 million) in cash to Sarkozy at the then-candidate’s apartment and another suitcase with 1.5 million euros (about $1.9 million) to Sarkozy and a close aide at the French Interior Ministry. Sarkozy was interior minister at the time.

Takieddine alleged he gave a third suitcase with 1.5 million euros in cash to the aide alone. He said the money was not meant to finance Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in 2007, but to honor contracts between France and Libya.
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Tear gas was thrown into the Kosovo parliament Wednesday, but it failed to stop lawmakers from approving a major border agreement that is key to eventual membership in the European Union.

Police arrested several opposition politicians who tossed tear gas several times just before voting was to take place, forcing lawmakers to evacuate the chamber.

Despite the tactic, parliament passed the measure 80 to 11.

The deal was hammered out in 2015. It sets Kosovo’s borders with neighboring Montenegro and fulfills a key requirement for Kosovars to enjoy visa-free travel throughout the European Union. It also moves Kosovo one step closer towards EU membership.

Opponents of the deal say it forces Kosovo to give up some of its territory — a claim supporters deny.

Montenegro has already approved the agreement. 
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Russia’s top election official has lashed out at U.S. State Department criticism that in the recent presidential election, Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) denied observer status to 4,500 monitors linked to anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, along with 850 others with ties to Golos, the independent Moscow-based election watchdog.

“This is an absolutely illiterate lie,” CEC Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova was quoted Tuesday as saying to Russia’s state-run TASS news organization. She was responding to a comment by U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, who on Friday tweeted about widespread news reports of election monitoring violations.

“The #Russian Central Election Commission’s decision to deny observer status to over 5,000 independent media observers shows Kremlin authorities fear transparency ahead of the March 18 #elections,” Nauert had tweeted, referring to accounts of Russian police seizing some observer permits and revoking the office lease of Golos’ headquarters.

Pamfilova followed up her charges of “illiterate lies” by saying accreditation had been denied only to monitoring groups that “incorrectly filled out their applications,” and that as of Election Day, “everyone who wanted to, monitored at the polling stations.”

OSCE preliminary report

Nauert discussed the issue of monitors during the daily briefing Tuesday, noting that “the gold standard of monitors,” from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had issued a preliminary report on the election.

She read an excerpt of the report from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. It said the “team noted that the election in Russia took place in an overly controlled legal and political environment marked by continued pressure on critical voices. Restrictions on fundamental freedoms resulted in a lack of genuine competition and an uneven playing field.”

“We saw in the news over the weekend that some people were paid to turn out to vote,” Nauert added. “We’ve seen that opposition leaders have been intimidated, jailed, and other things of the sort. So I would just draw ourselves back to the OSCE preliminary report.”

Financial Times Moscow correspondent Max Seddon on Sunday reported that observers were “beaten up by a mobile gang of toughs at polling stations.” Golos said more than 1,500 violations at polling stations were reported nationwide.

Golos also recorded several cases of people stuffing ballot boxes. Navalny, the onetime opposition candidate who was disqualified from the race because of a conviction for embezzlement, which the European Court of Human Rights dismissed as politically motivated, said data compiled by his observers at polling stations showed that the official turnout of 67.5 percent was inflated by 10 percentage points.

Video monitored

Although Navalny’s thousands of supporters were barred from physically observing polling stations, they were each assigned to monitor streaming public access video footage of individual polling stations that anyone in Russia can access online. While watching, they documented the number of voters and conduct of polling station officials.

The OSCE, which requested 420 short-term observers to monitor polling stations, voting, ballot counts and results, said the election was conducted in an orderly fashion but lacked real choice.

“After intense efforts to promote turnout, citizens voted in significant numbers, yet restrictions on the fundamental freedoms, as well as on candidate registration, have limited the space for political engagement and resulted in a lack of genuine competition,” said OSCE, which was slated to issue its final report on Russia’s electoral process in two months.

On Thursday, Leonid Slutsky, the head of the State Duma’s foreign affairs committee, released the names of 1,300 Kremlin-friendly foreign observers invited to monitor the elections. As expected, they unanimously gave the election their stamp of approval.

The Kremlin-backed observers included Italy’s representative to the European Parliament, Stefano Maullu of the center-right European Peoples Party, who said that the election displayed a good result for democracy in Russia.

Spanish Senator Pedro Argamunt, who was ousted from Europe’s parliamentary assembly after meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, also attended, along with France’s Thierry Mariani, widely perceived as the head of Western European nation’s pro-Russia lobby and a regular visitor to the territorially disputed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, where, in protest, OSCE refused to send observers.

‘Big national team’

After claiming a resounding, and expected, victory in the election, Putin addressed thousands on Manezhnaya Square near the Kremlin late Sunday, hailing those who voted for him as a “big national team” and adding that “we are bound for success.”

Asked whether he would seek the presidency again when next eligible to run, in 2030, the 65-year-old Russian leader snapped, “It’s ridiculous. Do you think I will sit here until I turn 100?” 

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Some information came from Reuters.
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A British parliamentary committee on Tuesday summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions as authorities stepped up efforts to determine if the personal data of social-media users has been used improperly to influence elections.

The request comes amid allegations that a data-mining firm based in the U.K. used information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. The company, Cambridge Analytica, has denied wrongdoing.

However, the firm’s board of directions announced Tuesday evening that it had suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending an independent investigation of his actions. Nix made comments to an undercover reporter for Britain’s Channel 4 News about various unsavory services Cambridge Analytica provided its clients.

“In the view of the board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” the board said in a statement.

Facebook also drew continued criticism for its alleged inaction to protect users’ privacy. Earlier Tuesday, the chairman of the U.K. parliamentary media committee, Damian Collins, said his group has repeatedly asked Facebook how it uses data and that Facebook officials “have been misleading to the committee.”

“It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process,” Collins wrote in a note addressed directly to Zuckerberg. “Given your commitment at the start of the New Year to ‘fixing’ Facebook, I hope that this representative will be you.”

Facebook sidestepped questions on whether Zuckerberg would appear, saying instead that it’s currently focused on conducting its own reviews.

​Personal data

The request to appear comes as Britain’s information commissioner said she was using all her legal powers to investigate the social-media giant and Cambridge Analytica.

Commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s servers. She has also asked Facebook to cease its own audit of Cambridge Analytica’s data use.

“Our advice to Facebook is to back away and let us go in and do our work,” she said.

Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation. However, Denham’s office said the firm failed to meet a deadline to produce the information requested.

Denham said the prime allegation against Cambridge Analytica is that it acquired personal data in an unauthorized way, adding that the data provisions act requires services like Facebook to have strong safeguards against misuse of data.

Chris Wylie, who once worked for Cambridge Analytica, was quoted as saying the company used the data to build psychological profiles so voters could be targeted with ads and stories.

Undercover investigation

The firm found itself in further allegations of wrongdoing. Britain’s Channel 4 used an undercover investigation to record Nix saying that the company could use unorthodox methods to wage successful political campaigns for clients.

He said the company could “send some girls” around to a rival candidate’s house, suggesting that girls from Ukraine are beautiful and effective in this role.

He also said the company could “offer a large amount of money” to a rival candidate and have the whole exchange recorded so it could be posted on the internet to show that the candidate was corrupt.

Nix says in a statement that he deeply regrets his role in the meeting and has apologized to staff.

“I am aware how this looks, but it is simply not the case,” he said. “I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honeytraps,’ and nor does it use untrue material for any purposes.”

Nix told the BBC the Channel 4 sting was “intended to embarrass us.”

“We see this as a coordinated attack by the media that’s been going on for very, very many months in order to damage the company that had some involvement with the election of Donald Trump,” he said.

The data harvesting used by Cambridge Analytica has also triggered calls for further investigation from the European Union, as well as federal and state officials in the United States.
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Despite tensions, sanctions and recriminations between the United States and Russia, two American astronauts will join a Russian cosmonaut blasting off Wednesday from Kazakhstan for the International Space Station.

Even when things get nasty between the two countries, experts say the space program rarely suffers.

The United States has depended entirely on Russia to deliver astronauts to the ISS since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

After President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014 for annexing Crimea, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin suggested U.S. astronauts could get to the International Space Station by trampoline.

But the launches continued.

“The politicians can be very cute and make their statements. But that doesn’t seem to have had an impact on day-to-day work on the International Space Station,” said Cathleen Lewis, a curator in the Space History Department at the National Air and Space Museum.

Cold War collaborators

U.S.-Russia cooperation in space dates back to the mid-1970s, during the Cold War.

In the race to the moon, both sides suffered losses. Three U.S. astronauts died in the first Apollo mission in a fire on the launchpad in 1967; the Soviet Union lost a cosmonaut in a crash later that year.

The two sides agreed to cooperate on a space project. In 1975, an American Apollo spacecraft and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft met in orbit, where cosmonauts and astronauts shook hands.

In addition to the political achievement, it was a major engineering feat to make the two crafts compatible.

“That created a bond, but also the knowledge that we could do this, even in the height of the Cold War, and probably one of the worst periods of the Cold War,” Lewis said. “Both sides could get together and do this, unperturbed by the politics around them.”

Reaching beyond Earth

Today, the United States, Russia and 13 other countries collaborate on the International Space Station.

Lewis says that kind of cooperation will likely be essential as humans reach beyond Earth.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources to make either the moon or Mars habitable for humans,” she said.

For now, collaboration is the only option for ISS crews. However, SpaceX and Boeing expect to bring human launch capability back to U.S. soil in a year or so.
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European officials said this week that significant obstacles remain to a long-delayed trade deal between the European Union and South American trade bloc Mercosur, even as South American officials expressed optimism a deal would be finalized soon.

On the sidelines of a gathering among the finance ministers and central bank governors of the G-20 countries in Buenos Aires, an Argentine Treasury Ministry official said the talks would finish in the first half of this year. An initial target of December 2017 was pushed back after EU countries said they needed more time.

“There are very few points left,” the official said, adding that Argentine Treasury Minister Nicolas Dujovne would meet with French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday.

Farmers in France and some other EU members are resistant to an expected increase in beef and biofuel imports from Mercosur, which also includes Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Le Maire said European producers were concerned about unfair competition.

“For the time [being], the negotiation on the Mercosur [deal] for different reasons is blocked,” Le Maire told reporters. “You cannot explain to a producer that he has to stick to very constraining rules in Germany, France, Spain or Italy, and we’ll [import] exactly the same good that will not be produced in the same manner on another continent.”

Spain’s Economy Minister Roman Escolano, however, said Tuesday that talks were advancing toward a conclusion in “weeks or months.”

“There is growing consensus that the recent difficulties can be overcome and we can reach a deal,” Escolano told reporters.

An EU diplomat said Mercosur resistance to European proposals on automobile exports and geographic product indicators were also sticking points. Europe has also pushed for its companies to gain better access to government procurement contracts within Mercosur.

“I blame the Mercosur side more for this as they spent all of their energy moaning about the lack of ambition, only to find that they hadn’t cleared their lines with their domestic producers,” the source said, adding that the issue was “not beef.”

An official in Brazil’s Foreign Ministry disputed Le Maire’s characterization of the negotiations as “blocked,” noting that France was not a party to the negotiations, led by the European Commission.

Trade issues have overshadowed the G-20 meeting weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, with the world’s financial leaders seeking to endorse free trade and the United States saying it could not sacrifice its national interests.

The EU, Argentina and Brazil have said they plan to seek exemptions from those tariffs, which are expected to take effect Friday.
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