After NATO foreign ministers expressed solidarity against any Russian aggression toward Ukraine, the United States on Wednesday confirmed plans for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to hold separate meetings with his counterparts from both countries.

A State Department official said the meetings with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will take place Thursday in Stockholm, Sweden on the sidelines of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ministerial gathering.

Kuleba on Wednesday urged NATO to pursue a three-prong strategy to deter Russia that includes preparing economic sanctions and boosting military support to Ukraine.

Both Russia and Ukraine in recent days have accused the other side of massing troops in the area along their shared border. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 and has backed separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told members of parliament Wednesday that the only way to resolve the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region is through direct negotiations with the Russian government.

“We must tell the truth that we will not be able to stop the war without direct negotiations with Russia,” Zelenskiy said.

Blinken on Tuesday warned Russia that “any renewed aggression would trigger serious consequences,” while in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his military may be forced to respond if NATO’s expansion of Ukraine’s military infrastructure crosses “red lines.”

 

Karen Donfried, the top U.S. diplomat for European Affairs, told reporters in a telephone briefing Friday that Blinken would also use the OSCE talks to raise the issue of Russian occupation of Ukrainian and Georgian territories, as well as the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

On Tuesday in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned his military may be forced to respond to the Western-led expansion of Ukraine’s military infrastructure if “red lines” were crossed by NATO.

“If some kind of strike systems appear on the territory of Ukraine, the flight time to Moscow will be 7-10 minutes, and five minutes in the case of a hypersonic weapon being deployed. Just imagine,” said Putin.

“We will have to then create something similar in relation to those who threaten us in that way. And we can do that now,” Putin added.

The Russian leader noted his military had just successfully tested a new sea-based hypersonic missile that would be in service at the beginning of next year.

 

Donfried also said while in Stockholm Blinken would also be discussing the situation in Belarus.

The European Union accuses Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of enticing thousands of migrants, mainly from the Middle East, to travel to Belarus and try to cross into Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in order to destabilize those countries. The EU says Lukashenko is retaliating for sanctions it imposed against his government.

Blinken said Tuesday the U.S., in coordination with the EU, is preparing additional sanctions against Belarus for what he called “its ongoing attacks on democracy, on human rights, on international norms.”

In response to a question from VOA, Blinken said he and Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics focused “on the actions unfortunately Belarus has been taking both in terms of repressing its own people and their democratic aspirations as well as using migration as a weapon to try to sow division and destabilization in Europe.”

“We are in close coordination with the European Union preparing all U.N. sanctions,” Blinken told reporters.
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The United States is reaching out to allies in response to Russia’s military build-up along its border with Ukraine.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke by phone with Polish Minister of National Defense Mariusz Blaszczak Tuesday to discuss what the Pentagon has repeatedly described as Moscow’s “unusual military activity.”

The two also shared concerns about the situation along Poland’s border with Belarus, where Polish officials have accused the Belarus regime of using thousands of migrants to raise tensions.

They “discussed ways to enhance deterrence along NATO’s Eastern Flank,” according to a U.S. Defense Department readout of the call.

Austin made the call while en route to Seoul for talks with his South Korean counterpart.

Ukrainian intelligence officials say Russia has positioned about 90,000 troops along the border with Ukraine and in Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

Multiple U.S. officials have said Washington and its European allies are planning for “a number of contingencies,” fearing Moscow’s saber-rattling may be more than tough talk.

 

U.S. officials have called U.S. support for Ukraine “rock solid” and are considering a number of tools to deter Moscow.

Separately, a top British intelligence official warned Tuesday that Moscow is engaging in increasingly “brazen activity.”

“We and our allies and partners must stand up to and deter Russian activity which contravenes the rules-based international system,” MI6 Chief Richard Moore said during a speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

“Moscow should be in no doubt of our support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, within its internationally-recognized borders, including Crimea,” Moore added.

Russian officials, for their part, have accused the U.S. and its allies of stoking tensions in the region.

Russia’s TASS news agency quoted Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu last week as saying Moscow was “witnessing a considerable increase in the U.S. strategic bombers’ activity near the Russian borders.”

Shoigu also alleged U.S. strategic bombers “practiced employing nuclear weapons against Russia actually simultaneously from the western and eastern directions.”

The U.S. has provided Ukraine with $2.5 billion in security assistance since 2014, including $400 million in 2021 alone.

Recent deliveries include patrol boats for the Ukrainian navy and 80,000 kilograms of ammunition for Ukrainian forces.
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The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has condemned the sentencing of a journalist who works for the independent network. 

The news network learned on Tuesday that Andrey Kuznechyk had been tried and convicted of petty hooliganism one day after his arrest, RFE/RL told VOA. 

Four men in plain clothing detained the journalist outside his Minsk apartment on November 25. The men, believed to be Belarusian security agents, searched the journalist’s home and took him away, along with electronic devices belonging to Kuznechyk and his wife, according to RFE/RL. 

When his wife called the local prison to see if Kuznechyk was being held there, she said officials denied the journalist was there. 

Kuznechyk, who denies wrongdoing, was sentenced to 10 days in prison.

RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said Belarus should immediately release the journalist. 

“The regime of Alexander Lukashenka continues its effort to crush all independent media in Belarus. Andrey was kidnapped by agents of the regime for nothing more than being a journalist,” Fly said in a statement. 

RFE/RL and VOA are both independent news networks under the U.S. Agency for Global Media. 

Media crackdown 

Media in Belarus have come under increasing pressure since Lukashenko claimed victory in contested elections in August 2020. 

At least 480 journalists were detained in 2020 and a further 245 violations against the media, including arrests, fines and attacks, were recorded in 2021 by the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ).

Authorities have raided newsrooms and journalists’ homes, stripped correspondents of accreditation, blocked access to news websites for local and foreign media, including RFE/RL, Tut.by and Deutsche Welle (DW), and applied legal pressures to civil society, including the BAJ and PEN Belarus.

 

The Belarusian embassy in Washington did not respond to VOA’s request for comment. 

The country’s Information Ministry in October said it had blocked websites that were spreading extremist content. 

But DW’s director general, Peter Limbourg, said the accusations were “ridiculous.” 

“The heavy use of independent news outlets clearly shows that people in Belarus no longer trust the government-controlled media,” Limbourg said in a statement at the time. “We protest against the suspension of our offering because the people there have a right to objective information on the situation in their country.” 

Kuznechyk is not the first RFE/RL journalist to be detained in Belarus since the contested elections. 

Six of the network’s journalists were detained for 15 days while covering protests in August 2020, and a further six were briefly jailed in November 2020. In July, authorities raided the outlet’s Minsk bureau and searched the homes of some of its journalists. 

While most are detained for relatively brief periods, Ihar Losik, a blogger and consultant for the media outlet, has been in prison for more than 520 days. 

Losik is on trial with five others on accusations of using social media to “disrupt social order.” 

A verdict is expected in the closed-door trial on December 14, according to a Facebook post by one of the defendant’s relatives. 

The journalist has been allowed to see his wife only once since being detained and has been prevented from seeing his young daughter or parents, RFE/RL said. 

Separately, independent blogger Raman Pratasevich is awaiting the outcome in his case as well.

Pratasevich was arrested in May after Belarus diverted a passenger jet carrying him. 

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in late November that Pratasevich is under house arrest at an undisclosed location. 

“The physical and psychological pressure to which Raman Pratasevich has been subjected for the past six months constitutes inhuman treatment and even torture,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said in a statement. 

The watchdog has referred his case to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. 

Pratasevich is editor of the Telegram channel Nexta, which Belarus declared “extremist” in October 2020. News websites, including the popular Tut.by, have similarly been labeled extremist by authorities. 

Journalists who work for such sites and their audiences risk criminal prosecution for sharing what authorities deem as extremist content, a charge which can carry a prison term of up to seven years, RSF reported.
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The migrant crisis on Poland’s border, which Western powers accuse Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of engineering, caught international attention in November. But asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border aren’t alone in being shunted back and forth across Europe’s land and sea borders, say rights organizations and other monitors.

Throughout the year, irregular migration to Europe has been increasing, with more than 160,000 migrants entering the European Union this year, mostly through the Balkans and Italy. That’s a 70% jump from 2020, when pandemic travel restrictions are thought to have impacted the mobility of would-be migrants, and a 45% increase over the previous pre-pandemic year.

And with irregular migration picking up again, rights campaigners say the EU and national governments are increasingly skirting or breaking international humanitarian laws in their determination to prevent war refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants from entering or remaining on the continent.

They say European leaders appear determined to avoid a repeat of 2015, when more than a million asylum seekers from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia arrived in Europe, roiling the continent’s politics and fueling the rise of anti-migrant political parties.

Reports have multiplied of refugees and migrants being forcibly pushed back over the EU’s external borders. So, too, have reports of refugees being prevented from filing asylum applications. Poland passed a law in August stipulating that migrants who cross the border are to be “taken back to the state border” and “ordered to leave the country immediately,” preventing them from making an asylum application.

Pushbacks breach both European human rights laws and the 1951 Geneva Convention, which outline the rights of refugees as well as the legal obligations of the 146 signatory states to protect them.

Signatory states aren’t allowed to impose penalties on refugees who enter their countries illegally in search of asylum, nor are they allowed to expel refugees (without due process). Under the convention, refugees should not be forcibly returned, technically known as “refoul,” to the home countries they fled. Asylum seekers are meant to be provided with free access to courts, and signatory states are required to offer refugees administrative assistance.

The EU, its border agency, Frontex, and the bloc’s national governments, say they do observe international humanitarian law, but according to several recent investigations by rights organizations, the rules are now being flouted routinely and systematically.

“EU member states have adopted increasingly restrictive and punitive asylum rules and are focusing on reducing migration flows, with devastating consequences,” Amnesty International warned recently.

“We are witnessing tremendous human suffering caused by the EU-Turkey deal and by the EU-Libya cooperation, both of which are leaving men, women and children trapped and exposed to suffering and abuse,” the rights organization says in reference to deals struck with Turkey and Libya to block migrants heading to Europe and readmit them when they are ejected from Europe.

In the case of Libya, migrants are often returned to detention camps run by militias where Amnesty International and others have documented harrowing violations, including sexual violence against men, women and children. In a report published earlier this year, Amnesty noted, “Decade-long violations against refugees and migrants continued unabated in Libyan detention centers during the first six months of 2021 despite repeated promises to address them.”

Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch nonprofit journalism consortium, has documented dozens of instances in which Frontex surveillance aircraft were in the vicinity of migrant boats later intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard. “There is a clear pattern discernible. Boats in distress are spotted, communications take place between European actors and the Libyan Coast Guard,” Lighthouse researchers said in a report this year.

Frontex has routinely denied the allegations but lawmakers in the European Parliament accused the agency, after a four-month investigation, of failing to “fulfill its human rights obligations.” In the Balkans, the Border Violence Monitoring Network and other NGOs say they have gathered testimony from hundreds of refugees who allege they have been beaten back into Bosnia-Herzegovina across the Croatian border by baton-wielding men whose uniforms bear no insignia.

Europe’s peripheral countries have also been erecting border fences and building walls with the prospects of more Afghan refugees appearing on their borders acting as a spur. Greece has completed a 40-kilometer wall along its land border with Turkey and installed an automated surveillance system to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe. Other countries are following suit and have been pushing the EU to help with funding.

Critics say the wall-building now contrasts with the criticism European leaders leveled four years ago against then-U.S. President Donald Trump over his plan to build a wall on America’s southern border with Mexico. “We have a history and a tradition that we celebrate when walls are brought down and bridges are built,” admonished Federica Mogherini, then the EU’s foreign policy chief.

While migrant advocates complain of rights violations, calls are mounting in Europe for changes to be made to both the Geneva Convention and the bloc’s humanitarian laws. Critics of the convention say it was primarily drawn up to cope with population displacement in Europe in the wake of the Second World War. They say it fails to recognize the nature and scale of the much more complex migration patterns of the 21st century, which could see numbers swell because of climate change.

Last week in Budapest, Balázs Orbán, a deputy minister in the Hungarian government, said the current EU migration laws should be replaced. The current legal system is “catalyzing the influx of illegal migrants, and not helping to stop them on the borders,” he said. “This framework was created during the time of the Geneva Convention in 1951, when refugees from the Soviet Union needed to be accommodated for. Now, times have changed,” he added. 
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Russia against taking any “escalatory actions” toward Ukraine, saying Tuesday that “any renewed aggression would trigger serious consequences.”

Speaking to reporters alongside Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics during a visit to Riga, Blinken said the United States is “very concerned” about Russian troop movements along the border with Ukraine.

Concerns about Russia’s military build-up are due to be discussed later Tuesday and Wednesday during a NATO ministerial meeting in Riga. Blinken said he would have a lot more to say on the topic after those consultations with NATO allies.

Ahead of the ministerial talks, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called on Russia to reduce tensions in the region, saying the military buildup is “unprovoked and unexplained.”

“Any future Russian aggression against Ukraine would come at a high price and have serious political and economic consequences for Russia,” Stoltenberg said Monday.

The talks in Riga also come as NATO members Latvia, Lithuania and Poland deal with a border crisis with neighboring Belarus.

The European Union accuses Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of enticing thousands of migrants, mainly from the Middle East, to travel to Belarus and try to cross into Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in order to destabilize the European Union. The EU says Lukashenko is retaliating for sanctions it imposed against his government.

Blinken said Tuesday the United States, in coordination with the EU, is preparing additional sanctions against Belarus for what he called “its ongoing attacks on democracy, on human rights, on international norms.”

“As long as the regime in Belarus refuses to respect its international commitments, undermines peace and security in Europe, continues to repress and abuse its own people who are simply seeking to live in freedom, we will continue to put pressure on the regime and we will not lessen our calls for accountability,” Blinken said.

Another main focus of work at the NATO ministerial meeting is updating what the group calls its Strategic Concept, which was last changed a decade ago.

Stoltenberg said it is important to revisit the strategic document given the changed nature of the threats NATO faces, what he called a “more dangerous world.”

“We see the behavior of Russia, we see cyber, we see terrorist threats, we see proliferation of nuclear weapons,” Stoltenberg said. “And we see the security consequences of China which is now becoming more and more a global power.”

Blinken is scheduled to travel Wednesday to Sweden to meet with fellow ministers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and to discuss bilateral ties with Swedish officials.

Some information for this report came from Reuters. 
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A far-right former TV pundit with multiple hate-speech convictions officially entered the race for France’s presidency on Tuesday and warned his supporters that they will likely be called racists for backing his anti-immigration and anti-Islam views that have already shaken up the election campaign.  

The launch of Eric Zemmour’s run for the presidency made official a candidacy that had been gathering steam for months before it then stumbled of late — notably after the 63-year-old raised a middle finger at a woman who did likewise to him over the weekend.  

That flash of temper — which Zemmour later acknowledged on Twitter was “very inelegant” — cast fresh doubt on the temperament and electability of the author and former journalist who has polled in low double digits since September despite having no hands-on political experience. Zemmour has drawn comparisons in France to former U.S. President Donald Trump because of his rabble-rousing populism and ambitions of making the jump from the small screen to national leadership.

Name-dropping Joan of Arc, Napoléon Bonaparte, Gen. Charles de Gaulle and others who shaped France’s history, Zemmour announced his candidacy in a pre-recorded video, reading from notes and speaking into a large microphone. The pose evoked imagery of radio addresses that De Gaulle famously delivered during World War II as he urged France to rally to his call against Nazi Germany.

But the message Zemmour delivered was far from that of the wartime leader who later served as president from 1959-1969. Along with images of people on filthy streets and in ramshackle shantytowns, he drove home his view of France as a country mortally threatened by immigration and “in the process of disappearing.”  

“You feel that you are no longer in the country that you knew,” Zemmour said. “Your feel like foreigners in your own country. You are exiles, from the inside.”

The people that Zemmour was shown meeting in the video and the campaign supporters and crowds filmed at his rallies were nearly all white. And the vast majority of people shown doing jobs in the video — a mathematics teacher, a nuclear worker, cooks, suited business leaders, a butcher, a cattle farmer and others — were nearly all white men.

People of color, in contrast, were shown lining up for food handouts, pushing into a crowded train, milling around in a litter-strewn tent city and on a street corner and, in a scene at the start, seemingly taking part in a street deal. Other images showed Paris streets filled with Muslims kneeling down in prayer. Images of women protesting, some with breasts bared, were cut with violent scenes of people attacking police.

“It is no longer time to reform France but to save it,” Zemmour said. “That is why I have decided to stand in the presidential election.”  

He warned supporters to brace for a bruising campaign.

“They will tell you that you are racist,” he said. “They will say the worst things about me.”  

Zemmour joins a crowded spectrum of candidates, from far left to far right. President Emmanuel Macron is expected to seek a second term but hasn’t yet declared his candidacy.
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