Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven major industrialized nations meet on Monday for an annual gathering, with Europe and Japan seeking clarity

from the United States on an array of issues, especially Syria.

The two-day summit in Tuscany comes as the United States moves a Navy strike group near the Korean peninsula amid concerns over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and as the West’s relations with Russia struggle to overcome years of mistrust.

But the civil war in Syria is likely to dominate talks, with Italy hoping for a final communique that will reinforce United Nations’ efforts to end six years of conflict.

The meeting will give Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Canada and Japan their first chance to grill the new U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on whether Washington is now committed to overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Mixes messages

President Donald Trump had hinted he would be less interventionist than his predecessors and more willing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses if it was in U.S. interests.

Given this, the U.S. attack on Syria last week in retaliation for what it said was a chemical weapons attack by Assad’s forces on Syrian civilians confounded many diplomats.

However, there is uncertainty over whether Washington now wants Assad out, as many Europeans are pushing for, or whether the missile strikes were simply a warning shot.

The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said over the weekend that regime change in Syria was a priority for Trump, while Tillerson said on Saturday the first priority was the defeat of Islamic State.

The mixed messages have confused and frustrated European allies, who are eager for full U.S. support for a political solution based on a transfer of power in Damascus.

“The Americans say they agree, but there’s nothing to show for it behind (the scenes). They are absent from this and are navigating aimlessly in the dark,” said a senior European diplomat, who declined to be named.

Libyan worries

The foreign ministers’ discussions will prepare the way for a leaders’ summit in Sicily at the end of May.

Efforts to reach an agreement on statements and strategy ahead of time – a normal part of pre-meeting G-7 diplomacy – has gone very slowly, partly because of a difficult transition at the U.S. state department, where many key positions remain unfilled.

Some issues, such as trade and climate change, are likely to be ducked in Tuscany. “The more complicated subjects will be left to the leaders,” said an Italian diplomat, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

However, the foreign ministers will talk about Libya.

Italy is hoping for vocal support for a United Nations-backed government in Tripoli, that has struggled to exert its influence in the city, let alone in the rest of the violence-plagued north African country.

The Trump administration has not yet defined a clear policy and Rome fears Washington may fall into step with Egypt, which supports general Khalifa Haftar, who operates in eastern Libya.

The struggle against terrorism, relations with Iran and on-going instability in Ukraine will also come up for discussion, with talks due to kick off at 4.30 p.m. (1430 GMT).
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Swedish authorities have arrested second person in connection with Friday’s truck attack in Stockholm that killed four people and wounded 15 others.

There were no immediate details about the additional suspect and how that person is connected to the 39-year-old Uzbek national suspected of ramming a stolen truck into an upscale shopping hub

The suspected terrorist was previously known to Swedish intelligence services, but authorities say he was not a part of any ongoing investigations.

“Nothing indicates we have the wrong person,” said the head of Sweden’s national police, Dan Eliasson, in comments to reporters Saturday. “On the contrary, suspicions have strengthened as the investigation has progressed.”

Photos taken at the scene Friday showed the vehicle was a truck belonging to beer maker Spendrups, which said its truck had been hijacked earlier in the day.

Witnesses say the truck drove straight into the entrance of the Ahlens Department Store on Drottninggatan, the city’s biggest pedestrian street, sending shoppers screaming and running. Television footage showed smoke coming out of the store after the crash.

Following the attack, Stockholm’s central train station was evacuated and nearby buildings were locked down for hours. Police say they have increased security at the country’s borders.

Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf expressed his condolences for the victims and their families in a brief statement.

“We follow developments but as of now our thoughts go to the victims and their families,” he said. The king cut short a visit to Brazil on Friday to return home.

A number of European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and London’s mayor, Saddiq Khan, have released statements indicating their solidarity with Sweden.

“One of Europe’s most vibrant and colorful cities appears to have been struck by those wishing it — and our very way of life — harm,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

French President Francois Hollande voiced his “horror and indignation” over the assault. Paris’ Eiffel Tower went dark for five minutes Friday to honor the victims of the attack.

The U.S. State Department also condemned the attack, adding, “Attacks like this are intended to sow the seeds of fear, but in fact they only strengthen our shared resolve to combat terrorism around the world.”
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Tens of thousands of Swedes turned out in Stockholm Sunday for what they called a “lovefest” after Friday’s terrorist truck attack killed four people and injured 15.

A 39-year-old Uzbek believed to have extremist sympathies is under arrest for allegedly ramming a stolen truck into a crowd at the Ahlens department store.

“Fear shall not reign. Terror cannot win,” Mayor Karin Wanngard told a crowd estimated at 50,000.

One woman held a poster reading: “We don’t respond with fear, we respond with love.”

Friday’s attack apparently had little effect on liberal Sweden’s global reputation as an open and welcoming society.

One participant at Sunday’s rally told the Associated Press that the fact the suspect is a refugee means nothing.

“This is a sick individual and has nothing to do with his refugee status. I think most Stockholmians realize that just because you are a refugee or a Muslim doesn’t mean you are a terrorist.”

Police arrested the Uzbek-born suspect hours after the truck attack. He was known to intelligence services since last year when he disappeared before he could be deported after his application for asylum was rejected. Authorities knew he had pro-extremist sympathies.

But no group has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack and no motive is known.

Police say they have arrested a second person in connection with the attack, but have given no further information.

Photos taken at the scene Friday showed the vehicle was a truck belonging to beer maker Spendrups, which said its truck had been hijacked earlier in the day.

Witnesses say the truck drove straight into the entrance of the Ahlens Department Store on Drottninggatan, the city’s biggest pedestrian street, sending shoppers screaming and running. Television footage showed smoke coming out of the store after the crash.
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Pope Francis, who is scheduled to visit Egypt later this month, decried Sunday’s blast at a Coptic Church in Egypt’s Nile Delta that killed 21 worshippers and wounded dozens more.

At the end of his Palm Sunday Mass, the leader of the world’s Roman Catholic Church said, ” I pray for the dead and the victims. May the Lord convert the hearts of people who sow terror, violence and death and even the hearts of those who produce and traffic in weapons.”

Earlier, in his homily, Francis denounced the suffering in the world today.

He said those who ” . . . suffer from slave labor, from family tragedies, from diseases . . . They suffer from wars and terrorism, from interests that are armed and ready to strike.”

Before the beginning of the Mass, Francis and a group of cardinals, holding elaborately braided palm fronds, walked through the crowd at Saint Peter’s Square.

In Jerusalem, worshippers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher celebrated Palm Sunday by waving palm branches during the procession next to the newly restored Tomb of Jesus.

The church in Jerusalem’s Old City is believed to be the burial site of Jesus.

Palm Sunday marks Jesus’ triumphant entry in Jerusalem more than 2,000 years ago and the beginning of the Christian Easter Holy Week.

 
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Norwegian police set off a controlled explosion of a “bomblike device” found in central Oslo Saturday, a suspect is being held in custody, and the security police are investigating, authorities said.

A Reuters reporter described a loud bang shortly after the arrival of Oslo’s bomb squad.

“The noise from the blast was louder than our explosives themselves would cause,” a police spokesman said, while adding that further investigation would be conducted at the scene.

The device had appeared to be capable of causing only a limited amount of damage, the police said earlier.

Police declined to give information about the suspect.

Norway’s police security service said in a tweet it had taken over the investigation from local police.

Oslo’s Groenland area, a multi-ethnic neighborhood that is home to popular bars and restaurants as well as several mosques, is also where the city’s main police station is located, less than a kilometer from where the device was found.

In neighboring Sweden, a truck Friday plowed into crowds in Stockholm, killing four people and wounding 15 in what police said was an apparent terror attack.

In 2011, right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik set off a car bomb in Oslo that killed eight people and destroyed Norway’s government headquarters, before going on a shooting rampage that killed 69 people at nearby Utoeya island.
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Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, canceled plans Saturday to visit Moscow, just hours before he was due to depart London, as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Syria.

Russian leaders, who have dubbed as illegal the U.S. action to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for its use of chemical weapons, ramped up the war of words late Friday when the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned America was “one step away from military clashes with Russia.”

In an apparent show of force, a Russian frigate armed with cruise missiles, reportedly was heading into the Mediterranean. According to Russian state media, the ship, the Admiral Grigorovich, will dock at Tartus on the Syrian coast.

Russia also has pledged to bolster Syria’s air defenses.

News of the cancelation of the British foreign minister’s trip was relayed first by Johnson himself, who tweeted: “I will now not travel to Moscow on Monday 10 April.” He said his priority was to hold talks with Western allies about Syria and Russia’s support for Assad.

British officials say that Johnson’s trip was called off after the British foreign minister consulted his American counterpart, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who himself is due to visit the Russian capital in a few days.

They said Johnson wants to spearhead efforts to help shape a “coalition of support” against Russian activity in Syria. In a statement later, Johnson said, “Developments in Syria have changed the situation fundamentally.”

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman described the cancelation as “absurd.”

Johnson was due to hold talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and the two diplomats were expected to hold a joint news conference.

“It seems that our Western colleagues live in their own kind of reality in which they first try to single-handedly make collective plans, then they single-handedly try to change them, coming up with absurd reasons,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a statement.

“Unfortunately, stability, and consistency have long stopped being the hallmark of Western foreign policy,” she added.

As the diplomatic turmoil unfolded, activists Saturday claimed Syrian government warplanes had again struck Khan Sheikhoun, the rebel-held town targeted earlier in the week in an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the London-based pro-opposition watchdog that gathers information from activists on the ground, claimed a woman was killed and three people wounded after being machine-gunned by jets in an eastern neighborhood.

The warplanes carrying out Saturday’s alleged raid are believed to have flown from al-Shayrat, the airbase targeted Thursday by the U.S. in a punitive barrage of 59 Cruise missiles strike, the greatest show of America firepower in more than a decade. Tuesday’s chemical attack left scores dead, including children and women, according activists. U.S. officials so far have not commented on the claimed raid. In addition, there was no confirmation by other monitors.

There also was an unconfirmed report of a U.S.-led raid against the Islamic State in the countryside around Raqqa, the terror group’s de facto capital in Syria. The observatory quoted local activists as saying missiles struck the village of Hanida, to the west of the city.

 
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Officials say the top US diplomat will urge Russia to rethink its continued support for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. More from Nike Ching.
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson heads to Moscow on April 12, just days after the United States launched missile strikes on a Syrian airbase in response to a Syrian chemical weapons attack that killed civilians.

Officials say the top U.S. diplomat will urge Russia to rethink its continued support for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, said on Saturday he had canceled a visit to Moscow that was scheduled for April 10. “Developments in Syria have changed the situation fundamentally,” said Johnson in a statement.

Secretary of State Tillerson is scheduled to travel to Moscow on Wednesday, after he attends the G-7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Italy from April 9 to 11.

The State Department did not respond to VOA’s inquiry on whether Tillerson’s Moscow trip has been changed or canceled since the U.S. military strikes.  

Analysts say Washington needs the diplomatic follow-up, though, after the military action.

The top U.S. diplomat, known as a man of few words, had harsh comments for Russia, which Washington blamed for failing to rein in its ally, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

“Either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent,” said Tillerson on Thursday night. He was referring to the Kremlin’s failure to prevent the Assad government from allegedly conducting a poison gas attack that killed scores of people in rebel-held Idlib province.

In 2013, the Syrian government agreed to surrender its chemical weapons under the supervision of the Russia government. Prior to the recent gas attack, Tillerson said Assad’s future would be decided by the Syrian people. After the attack, he took aim at Assad’s government and Russia’s support for him.

Experts said the U.S. military strike could complicate Tillerson’s diplomatic mission to Moscow, and that an escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Russia over the future of Assad also is possible. 

“For sure this means further immediate bumps in the bilateral relationship,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst told VOA.

He said despite the fact that the missile strikes were quite limited and Washington had warned Moscow ahead of time so that Russian soldiers would not be in danger, Moscow’s reaction was rather strong.

Herbst, now director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, said Russia’s decision to suspend the de-confliction mechanism, which is intended to avoid accidents, was not well considered.

“While de-confliction serves the interest of both U.S. and Russian, it is more important to Moscow” because U.S. conventional forces are far superior and “Russian forces are more at risk in case of an incident,” said Herbst.

“The strikes undoubtedly change the tone of the conversation, given the de-confliction protocols, between Russia and the U.S. have been suspended in Syria,” Michael Kofman from Center for Naval Analyses told VOA.

Professor Doga Ulas Eralp of American University in Washington told VOA on Friday that Tillerson “now has to scramble to broker a deal” that would allow a sustainable coordination mechanism between the two countries “if the U.S. is determined to escalate its military engagement in Syria.”

Middle East Institute scholar Daniel Serwer told VOA the military strikes “shoot the Syria agenda item to the top.” The key question is whether Tillerson can get something going with the Russians on a political solution in Syria,” he added.

Former U.S. officials say the Syrian chemical attack is a major challenge to the nascent relationship between the Trump administration and the Kremlin.

“It is vital that the U.S. corrects course and that the current administration moves quickly from a set of alarming and ignorant comments to having a real policy and strategy for managing and mitigating Putin’s negative impacts on world peace and security,” said former U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Daniel Baer.

Alexei Arbatov, director of the Center of International Security at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, told VOA’s Russian service that while the U.S. missile strike in Syria complicates U.S.-Russian relations, “the reaction of the Russian Foreign Ministry thus far has been quite restrained, and it is not rejecting the possibility of agreements and cooperation with the United States.”

While Washington is willing to work with Moscow in areas of practical cooperation, the State Department said Secretary Tillerson will make it clear the U.S. is committed to holding Russia accountable when international norms are violated.

 
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Kosovo President Hashim Thaci bowed to pressure from traditional allies the United States and NATO on Friday by putting off plans to establish an army strongly opposed by the country’s minority Serbs.

Nearly two decades after the Kosovo war, relations between Serbia and the ethnic Albanian-majority government in Kosovo remain strained. Serbia continues to regard Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, as a renegade province.

Thaci last month found a way to bypass Serb opposition in parliament to constitutional amendments required for an army by drafting changes to an existing law on the Kosovo Security Forces that would allow the KSF to acquire heavy weapons. This would effectively turn it into a military force.

But Washington and NATO, which has kept forces in Kosovo since intervening in 1999 to stop Serbia’s killings of ethnic Albanian civilians in a counter-insurgency campaign, voiced concern that the move could unravel Kosovo’s fragile peace.

The Pristina government ordered the creation of a national army in 2014 but minority Serb deputies said they would block the required constitutional amendments.

On Friday, Thaci – a former Kosovo guerrilla commander – sent a letter to parliament asking it not to vote on his amendments so as to allow Western diplomats more time to convince Serbs to approve the amendments.

“The representatives of the Serb community should not think for any single second that Kosovo will not create its armed forces,” Thaci told a conference in the capital Pristina attended by the U.S. ambassador and other West European envoys.

The KSF is currently a lightly armed, 2,500-member force trained by NATO and tasked with crisis response, civil protection and disposal of ordnance from the 1999 conflict.

NATO and the United States do not oppose the creation of an army in principle but say the constitution must be changed first, which would require the votes of 11 Serb deputies in the 120-seat parliament.

“We do not expect the people of Kosovo to wait forever on this [formation of the army], nor do we believe any party should veto,” U.S. Ambassador Greg Delawie said.

“Kosovo needs a legitimate capability to defend itself before KFOR [NATO mission] can consider leaving.” KFOR retains around 4,500 troops in Kosovo.
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Hundreds of thousands of children are paying a heavy price in the three-year conflict between the government of Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern part of the country.

Although the war has taken thousands of lives and injured many more, the U.N. children’s fund said the conflict has been all but forgotten by the world and become an “invisible crisis” to all except those forced to suffer from ongoing violence, abuse and deprivation. 

Among those hardest hit are the more than 200,000 children living along the “contact line,” a 15-kilometer zone that divides government and rebel-controlled areas where the fighting is most intense.

“These are children that are surviving death, that are living constantly with the sound of shelling, that have witnessed death. Some children have even witnessed the death of loved ones,” said Giovanna Barberis, UNICEF’s Ukraine representative.

Barberis has frequently traveled to the contact line and seen the hardships and suffering of the children, who live in a state of constant fear and uncertainty. The trauma has taken a huge emotional and psychological toll, according to Barberis.

“Parents, teachers, school directors and psychologists describe striking behavior changes among children as young as 3 years old,” she said. “Children are very anxious. They wet their beds. They have nightmares. In some cases, they act quite aggressively and often withdraw from their families and friends.”

Barberis said some children no longer seek safety in bomb shelters because they think such attacks are “normal now.”

“Families and children are getting used to living in a very abnormal and exceptional situation,” she said. “But this does not mean that they cope well with the situation.”

Escalating hostilities

There have been multiple violations of the Minsk peace agreement since it was signed in September 2014 by representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics.

In its latest report on the situation in Ukraine, the U.N. Human Rights Mission found that a sharp escalation of hostilities between January 29 and February 3 had “a devastating impact” on all aspects of life for civilians living along the contact line. It said seven civilians were killed and 46 wounded in those six days.

In addition, “Several hundreds of people are isolated and deprived of basic necessities,” according to the report. The nearest grocery store is seven kilometers away, and children crossing the contact line have “to walk up to three kilometers to go to school.”

UNICEF’s Barberis told VOA that it often was not safe to go to school, so children had difficulty gaining regular access to education.

“We have estimated that from the beginning of the conflict, something like 740 schools were damaged or destroyed,” she said, “and just these last few weeks, when we had the deteriorating situation of the areas along the contact line … something like seven schools were damaged.”

Barberis said children in eastern Ukraine require urgent and sustained support to help them come to grips with the daily trauma of war. However, she noted, UNICEF has received less than one-third of the $31.2 million it needs to support children and families affected by the conflict.

“Children should not have to live with the emotional scars from a conflict they had no part in creating,” Barberis said.
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Russia on Friday condemned the U.S. strike on a government-controlled air base in Syria, saying it would bolster Syria’s air defenses in response. President Vladimir Putin’s office called the action a “significant blow” to the Russia-U.S. relationship. The tension comes just ahead of a visit to Russia by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from Moscow.
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A few days before the July 2014 missile attack on Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, a Ukraine Army-operated Buk missile launcher was located not near fighting in the east, as Moscow has long insisted, but hundreds of kilometers to the west.

That’s what a team of journalists and researchers at Bellingcat, a Britain-based investigative website, has concluded after lengthy analysis of digital images taken by a Ukrainian army chaplain.

Bellingcat, which specializes in using open-source information such as social media posts to analyze conflicts, was one of the first groups to produce evidence debunking key elements of the Russian government’s claim that Ukrainian forces shot down MH17 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard. Bellingcat’s conclusion — that Moscow doctored images in order to buttress allegations that Kyiv was responsible for the single worst atrocity of the war — was later corroborated by arms control researchers at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey in California.

Bellingcat’s new report says metadata from a series of digital images prove that the exact same Buk missile launcher that Moscow claims was within striking range of MH17 on the day of the attack was actually stationed at Mirgorod Air Base in Poltava, central Ukraine — well outside of firing distance.

“The only operational Buk missile launcher observed within firing range of MH17 on July 17, 2014, was the Russian Buk 332, from the Kursk-based 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade,” a surface-to-air combat unit of the Russian ground forces that was stationed in eastern Ukraine at the time, Bellingcat reported.

Kyiv-based political scientist Yuri Lesnichiy of the Institute of Analysis and Forecasting says the new information will prove vital to undercutting the Kremlin narrative surrounding the tragedy.

“Such high-profile investigations … carry across particular information and the Kremlin finds it difficult to twist the facts that the Europeans will believe in,” he told VOA’s Russian Service.

Immediately after MH17 was shot out of clear blue skies over the frontlines in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported that Russian-backed separatists had successfully shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft. They retracted the story upon learning that it was a civilian airliner that had been brought down.

In March, Ukraine asked the United Nations’ highest court to order Russia to stop funding and equipping pro-Russian separatists. In that filing, they cited a September 2016 six-country investigation team led by the Netherlands, which said MH17 had been shot down with a Russian-manufactured Buk surface-to-air missile from an area controlled by pro-Russian forces.

Russia denies sending troops or military equipment to eastern Ukraine and has dismissed findings of the September 2016 probe as biased and politically motivated.

This report was translated by Svetlana Cunningham and produced in collaboration with VOA’s Russian Service.
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