The United States is threatening automatic sanctions to deter Russia and any other current or future adversary from interfering in the country’s elections.

President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Wednesday, signing an executive order that mandates a range of economic sanctions and other penalties against any person, group or country assessed to have meddled with the upcoming midterm elections November 6.

The order comes eight weeks before voters go to the polls and covers attacks on America’s election infrastructure, such as voting machines and voter databases, cyber attacks against candidates or political organizations, and disinformation campaigns.

It also comes as the White House is trying to take a tougher line against Moscow after Trump publicly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of his country’s involvement in any interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, contrary to the findings of the U.S. intelligence community.

“It’s a further effort, among several that the administration has made, to protect the United States against foreign interference in our elections and really our political process more broadly,” National Security Adviser John Bolton said Wednesday while briefing reporters.

“We felt it was important to demonstrate the president has taken command of this issue, that it’s something he cares deeply about,” Bolton added.

Russian meddling attempts

There have been ongoing concerns about attacks or disinformation campaigns, fueled in part by Trump’s own attacks against the ongoing special counsel investigation into Russia’s activities and into possible collusion with Trump’s own campaign staff.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

But in a statement late Wednesday, the president said his executive order makes clear the United States “will not tolerate any form of foreign meddling in our elections.”

“When it comes to foreign policy, my administration has delivered decisively and taken action where previous administrations have not,” Trump said. “By signing this Executive Order, I am adding to my record of implementing the strongest measures to date of any United States president to protect our electoral system.”

​​Automatic sanctions

The new executive order gives U.S. intelligence agencies 45 days after an election to report any efforts to meddle with the outcome.

The U.S. attorney general and the Department of Homeland Security will then have 45 days to review those findings. If they agree with the assessment, it would trigger automatic sanctions.

Those sanctions could include blocking access to property and interests, restricting access to the U.S. financial system, prohibiting investment in companies found to be involved, and even prohibiting individuals from entering the United States.

Additionally, the order authorizes the State Department and the Treasury Department to add on additional sanctions, if deemed necessary.

A key State Department official praised the executive order as a good start.

“I applaud the attempt to make it harder to evade, to let something fall away and not be countered,” Michele Markoff, the State Department’s Deputy Coordinator for Cyber, said during a panel discussion in Washington Wednesday.

“We’re setting up a process or a mechanism where if we see something, we’re going to say something,” she said. “The way we have been doing it [until now] is fingernail-pulling.”

Some former officials also praised the order as a “step in the right direction.”

Growing skepticism

“I think it’s going to be good,” said Sean Kanuck, a former intelligence officer for cyber issues, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Still, Kanuck said the executive order alone is likely not enough.

“I don’t know that it will be a complete solution,” he said. “I doubt it will completely change the incentive-cost-benefit analysis of the other side.”

Other cyber analysts are even less optimistic.

“The July Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin has a visual effect that is searing and long lasting,” said Laura Galante, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has previously worked with the U.S. government.

“Words, and those words in Helsinki, probably speak louder than executive action,” she said.

Additional measures possible

Key lawmakers are likewise cautious.

“An executive order that inevitably leaves the president broad discretion to decide whether to impose tough sanctions against those who attack our democracy is insufficient,” Mark Warner, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

“If we are going to actually deter Russia and others from interfering in our elections in the future, we need to spell out strong, clear consequences, without ambiguity,” Warner added.

“Today’s announcement by the administration recognizes the threat, but does not go far enough to address it,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said in a joint statement Wednesday.

But Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Republican Richard Burr expressed hope the new executive order will “send a clear message” to Russia, Iran and others.

Not just Russia

Trump administration officials said Wednesday they have not ruled out working with lawmakers on additional measures, but said they did not want to have to wait for legislation to be approved before having a chance to act.

And while some of the proposed legislation focuses on Russia, the officials said it was important to take a broader view.

“We have seen signs of not just Russia, but from China, of capabilities, potentially from Iran, and even North Korea,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told reporters Wednesday.

“In terms of what the influence is and will be, we continue to analyze all that,” Coats added. “This is an ongoing effort here, and it has been for a significant amount of time, and will continue on a, literally, 24-hour-a-day basis until the election.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that he wanted to sign a formal peace treaty with Japan ending hostilities from World War II by the end of the year without conditions.

Seventy-three years after the war concluded, the two countries remain technically at war because of a territorial dispute over four Pacific islands.

“Let us sign the peace treaty … and later we will continue to talk about all of our disagreements as friends on the basis of a peace treaty,” Putin said at an economic conference in Vladivostok.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared open to a treaty, saying it was “not normal” that one still hasn’t been signed after seven decades.

“Japan and Russia — both President Putin and myself — share the same position and determination to solve our territorial disputes,” he said.

But a Japanese government spokesman said Japan’s position had not changed and that the issue of sovereignty over the islands needed to be resolved before signing any treaties with Russia.

The Soviet Union seized the four islands north of Hokkaido and east of Sakhalin in the closing days of World War II.

Russia calls the islands the Kurils, while Japan calls them the Northern Territories. Russia has sovereignty over the islands. Japan wants them back.

The islands are rich in minerals and rare metals, and its waters are excellent fishing grounds. 

Putin and Abe have met more than 20 times to discuss the dispute.

Abe has proposed making the islands a joint economic zone, which could lead to a settlement.
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British, French and German fighter jets simulated flight interceptions over Western Europe on Wednesday as part of NATO drills to deter Russian planes from entering allied airspace and to showcase European efforts to integrate their air defenses.

 Fighter pilots carrying air-to-air missiles from 10 NATO nations took turns to simulate the interception of a Belgian air force transport plane en route to Spain, performing visual inspections of the aircraft’s status by hovering off the wings at speeds of 900 km/hour (560 mph).

Some 60 NATO jets, mainly from European allies, are on alert to defend alliance airspace, as NATO deals with a dramatic increase in Russian air activity on its borders since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, with a record 870 interceptions in the Baltics alone in 2016

 

This month, Moscow is holding its largest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some 1,000 aircraft.

 “NATO is relevant. This is not theoretical,” said Spanish Air Force Lieutenant General Ruben Garcia Servert on board the Belgian military transport plane, as Italian Eurofighters flew close to the cockpit to simulate interceptions. They later included British Typhoons and French Mirages.

 “We have not always been successful in showing the taxpayer that we have the means and the capabilities to protect the population,” he told Reuters during a rare mid-air public display of flight interceptions.

 European allies hope such displays highlight how their air forces are defending Europe in the face of sharp criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump, who at a summit in July railed against Europeans for not spending enough on defense and ports.

 Able to divert, force to land or potentially even shoot down combat aircraft, NATO says its so-called air policing is not directed at Russia. But showdowns between rival warplanes in the Baltic and Black Sea are intensifying.

Two U.S. jets escorted two Russian bombers over the Arctic Ocean on Sept. 7 in the latest incident, while Russia has scrambled fighter jets to intercept nuclear-capable U.S. bombers in interceptions that have echoes of the Cold War.

Analysts warn that any collisions in the air over the Mediterranean, Baltic or Black Sea could risk the start of a wider conflict with Russia.

‘Single sky’ defenses 

Both sides accuse the other of dangerous pilot behaviour, but NATO says Russian warplanes regularly fly without respecting international safety norms, such as responding to air traffic control and requests to identify themselves. Russia says all its flights are conducted in accordance with international law.

“We have seen aircraft coming to our borders without flight plans, without any kind of controls … safety regulations, entering into our area,” Garcia Severt said.

“We have seen frequent activities in the Black Sea, but not only, sometimes we have seen aircraft flying around Europe,” he said, referring to Russian bombers off Portugal’s coast.

NATO will hold its biggest exercise since 2002 in October and November in Norway, called Trident Juncture, and involving non-NATO Finland and Sweden, with more than 40,000 troops.

While tensions with Russia have already prompted NATO to deploy multinational land battalions in Poland and the Baltics, NATO is also pushing to integrate its air forces, despite political resistance over issues of sovereignty.

Under an agreement being negotiated, individual NATO countries’ air forces would defend each other’s airspaces, regardless of the country they are in, under a “single sky” concept that could see Portuguese planes defending Spanish airspace, for example.

Today, each nation defends its own airspace, unless, as in the case of the Baltics, it does not have fighter planes.
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The last time Britain accused two Russians of an assassination, one of them ended up in the Russian parliament.

The case of Andrei Lugovoi, a key suspect in the 2006 killing of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, shows how the two alleged Russian military intelligence operatives accused by Britain of poisoning ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal could have lucrative careers in Russia if they go public.

President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday the men – who British authorities said used the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – appeared to be innocent. He suggested they tell their story “to some media outlet.”

Hours later, Russian state TV said it had spoken with Petrov and that he planned to comment on the case next week. Previous cases show that could be an improbable springboard into parliament or a network TV show.

When some Russians have been accused of crimes abroad, political and business leaders have embraced them and made them celebrities.

Andrei Lugovoi

Accused of poisoning Litvinenko with the radioactive substance polonium, Lugovoi, a former KGB officer, parlayed his newfound fame into a political career. In 2007, he was elected to parliament on the ticket of the nationalist LDPR party, which has strong Kremlin ties.

Since then, he’s given his name to the Lugovoi Law – a 2014 measure allowing authorities to block “extremist” websites without a court ruling – and he’s a regular commentator on the Skripal case for state TV.

Lugovoi argues Skripal’s poisoning had nothing to do with Russia and blames Britain for harboring what he calls defectors.

“As long as you keep welcoming all kinds of scum on your territory, you’re going to keep having problems,” he said in March on a popular talk shows.

The Russian constitution bans extraditing criminal suspects, and Lugovoi’s status as a lawmaker makes him immune from prosecution at home. A fellow suspect, Dmitry Kovtun, has kept a lower profile.

Anna Chapman

When the FBI rounded up 10 Russian sleeper agents in 2010 and sent them home in a spy swap, one caught the eye of the tabloids.

The then-28-year-old Chapman, who was married to a British man, later launched a modeling career in Russia, and was briefly on the board of the youth arm of a pro-Putin political party.

She’s best known, however, as the host of “Chapman’s Secrets,” a long-running show mixing anti-U.S. rhetoric with conspiracy theories and mysticism.

“Why does official science still not concede that unidentified flying objects are alien spaceships?” she said one episode. “Our hypothesis that alien intelligence has long colluded with the ruling elite was recently and unexpectedly confirmed. What are politicians and soldiers keeping quiet about? I, Anna Chapman, will reveal this secret.”

More than 400 episodes have been made. Last week, guests speculated the U.S. was training Eastern European guerrillas to invade Russia, and another – introduced as a shaman – suggested intelligent trees caused hikers to go missing out of spite for humanity.

“It’s incredible, but the living forest from the movie ‘Avatar’ isn’t the director’s make-believe,” Chapman summarized.

Maria Butina

Accused of working as an undeclared foreign agent in the U.S., Butina is fast becoming a cause celebre at home.

She was a relatively obscure gun-rights activist in Russia before she started making political contacts among Republicans and National Rifle Association members in the U.S. Now, Butina’s photo is the avatar on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s social media profiles.

Government rhetoric portrays her as a martyr to U.S. paranoia and a victim of poor conditions in the Washington, D.C., jail where she’s being held pending trial.
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Nataša Kandić, the formidable Serbian human rights campaigner and Nobel Peace prize nominee, shrugs. “Nobody likes the truth,” she says.

For almost three decades Kandić has been a thorn in the side of those who butchered, raped and tortured during the Balkans wars of the 1990s. She documented abuses and massacres. She protested what was unfolding, cajoling and informing a shocked world, insisting it pay attention to the return of genocide to Europe, and to do something about it.

The evidence she gathered was used in the preparation of many indictments issued by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, including a video of Bosnian-Serb paramilitaries executing a number of captives, which helped prove Serbia’s role in the Srebrenica massacre of 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

She has drawn the praise of human rights activists across the world, but in her home country she has seen by many as a traitor and drawn the hatred of the Serbs’ wartime leaders and their followers, including a new generation of ethnic nationalists who glorify ethnic cleansing and the Balkans conflict, which marked the first large-scale slaughter of civilians in Europe since the Nazi era.

During an interview in downtown Belgrade at the Humanitarian Law Center, an NGO she founded in 1992, she said, “The majority of public opinion is without respect for human rights. Truth is not so nice for people and politicians because Serbia bears responsibility for many war victims, wrongdoing, bad relations with neighbors, especially Kosovo. And we don’t have politicians who are willing to take responsibility for the wrong decisions of Serbia. All of them participated in making decisions in 1991 at the beginning of the war.”

Asked during the interview about continuing threats against her she answers indifferently: “It is the normal situation with killing and with war crimes.”

Despite the threats, she takes few safety precautions.

 

When she sat down with VOA, her only guard was an inquisitive tabby cat. Kandić is neatly dressed in white, frail physically but sturdy in argument, and she remains motivated and determined. Asked if it might not be time to retire, she responds: “I will not be quiet.”

Hours after she spoke with VOA, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić lauded Serbia’s wartime leader Slobodan Milošević, describing him in a speech as “a great Serbian leader” whose “aims were certainly the best.” Vučić criticized former Serbian officials, who he dubbed pro-Western, for handing over Slobodan Milošević and his generals to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

His remarks prompted outrage in neighboring Balkan states where Milosevic’s ultranationalist policies during the breakup of Yugoslavia prompted bloodshed and destruction, and the deaths of at least 120,000 people in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.

For Kandić, Vučić’s remarks are not a surprise. Like many human rights activists and war victims in the Balkans she is frustrated with the halting progress made with transitional justice since the end of the Balkans conflict. She believes punishments and prosecutions, acknowledgement, and the apportioning of guilt are necessary to advance reconciliation.

She laments the ending of the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which wrapped up its work last year. She says the court changed the landscape of international humanitarian law and its legacy is important, but she worries “there is no other body to build on that legacy.”

Kandić says Western countries have neglected human rights in the Balkans and is urging them to back her calls for the establishment of a regional commission “to register all of the victims, to oblige states to name the victims and with a mandate to collect information to establish the identities of 130,000 victims; to establish the facts about how they lost their lives and organize public recognition.”

She asks, “How can you establish the rule of law without punishing the people who committed the crimes in the past?”

Kandić clearly is fearful of backsliding amid rising nationalist sentiment across the Balkans. “For example, in Kosovo, all the leaders were very active in the war, they were on the top level, they were war leaders. In Serbia, all current opposition leaders were very close to Milosevic.”

She is not alone nursing worries. In the Serbian-controlled Republika Srpska, one of the two legal entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Aleksandra Letić of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, bewails an increase in nationalist rhetoric, fanned by the politicians, especially before Bosnia-wide elections next month.

“Everybody, in particular the international community, is pretending that the pink elephant [a euphemism for hallucination] is not running through the streets of Bosnia Herzegovina,” she says.

A new generation of youngsters are thrilling to the idea of Serbian ultra-nationalism and there is little effort to pull them the other way, she says. “In Bosnia Herzegovina monuments are raised to the perpetrators, but the victims are neglected. We have only one official monument for the victims in Republika Srpska and that was built because of international pressure.”

“What is concerning is that those who are actually supporting war criminals, supporting the ideology of those who actually committed war crimes are young people born after the war,” says Letić. She adds the young generation should be the driving force for progress towards an open and democratic society, but is “deeply involved in nationalistic and chauvinistic behavior.”

The schools, she laments, do not teach what the war criminals did to get convicted. “Some of the history text books end before the peak of the Balkans conflict,” she complains.

 

 
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European Union legislators took the unprecedented step Wednesday to begin process of imposing sanctions on Hungary for presenting a “systematic threat” to the bloc’s Democratic values.

The European Parliament voted 448-197 to launch an Article Seven process, which could result in the suspension of Hungary’s EU voting rights.

The vote dealt a serious blow to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, further isolating him from powerful allies in the midst of his ambitious effort to push Europe toward Hungary’s version of an “illiberal democracy.”

Orban managed during his eight years in office to deflect his critics, who contend Hungary’s electoral system is irregular, media freedom and judicial independence are waning and refugees and asylum-seekers are abused.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto condemned the vote as “nothing less than the petty revenge of pro-immigration politicians.” He also said Hungary was considering legal actions because the vote was tainted by “massive fraud” since abstentions were not included in the final count.

There were 48 abstentions, so the 448 votes in favor of the sanctions exceeded the two-thirds needed only because it was based on 645 votes.  If the abstentions were counted, there would have been a total of 693 votes.

Judith Sargentini, a Dutch politician who presented the European Parliament’s report recommending the sanctions process, welcomed the results of the vote.

“Viktor Orban’s government has been leading the charge against European values by silencing independent media, replacing critical judges, and putting academia on a leash,” she said. “The Hungarian people deserve better.  They deserve freedom of speech, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice and equality, all of which are enshrined in the European treaties.”

With European Parliament elections in May, the dispute over Hungary and Poland, which faces a similar sanctions process that was initiated by the European Commission last year, highlights tensions between nationalists and federalist camps on the continent.

 
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