As efforts to calm tensions between Moscow and Kyiv continue, civilians along the border are planning what they will do if Russia invades Ukraine. For VOA, Olena Adamenko spoke to residents in the Sumy region of northeast Ukraine in this story narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Mykhailo Zaika
…

your ad here

A Belarusian cross-country skier has fled the country with her family because of fears of reprisals by authorities after she was barred from competition over the family’s political views, she and her father said.

Darya Dolidovich and her family are now in Poland, where she hopes to continue training, Sergei Dolidovich, a seven-time Olympian cross-country skier who also coaches Darya, told Reuters in an interview by video call with his daughter on Tuesday.

Reuters reported last month that 17-year-old Darya was barred from competing for what Sergei and his daughter believe were his participation in street protests against the 2020 re-election of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that opponents said was fraudulent. Lukashenko has denied rigging the vote.

“Darya has been stripped of her right to take part in competitions,” he said. “I don’t see the possibility of her continuing her career in Belarus.”

“We could be accused of staging a demonstration and shouting (opposition) slogans, then just be sent to prison,” he said.

“Three months ago, I couldn’t have imagined, even in a nightmare, that I would end up leaving my country.”

The Dolidovich family’s departure comes a few days into the Beijing Winter Olympics, where the Belarusian national team is under scrutiny following the defection of sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya at the Tokyo Games last year.

Darya, one of the country’s most promising junior cross-country skiers, said last month that the Belarus Ski Union deactivated her FIS code, an individual identifying number required for athletes to take part in competitions run by the International Ski Federation (FIS).

The Belarus Ski Union told Dolidovich’s coaching staff that it deactivated her FIS code in December in response to a decision by the Belarus Cross-Country Skiing Federation, according to a Jan. 31 letter reviewed by Reuters. The letter did not say why that decision was made.

In response to questions from Reuters, the FIS said it had not heard back from Belarusian ski officials since requesting further information last month on the deactivation of Darya Dolidovich’s FIS code.

The Belarus Cross-Country Skiing Federation and the Belarus Ski Union did not respond to requests for comment.

Uncertainty ahead

Darya Dolidovich was supposed to graduate from secondary school this year, but it is unclear how she will pursue her studies in Poland.

“I had planned to finish school in Belarus, but my parents said that we were moving,” she said. “I’m upset, of course. It would have been simpler to stay a few months and finish school.”

Dolidovich said she was keen to continue skiing in the hopes of keeping her Olympic dream alive.

Several elite Belarusian athletes have been jailed or kicked off national teams for voicing opposition views and joining protests that erupted in 2020 over Lukashenko’s re-election.

The repression of Belarusian athletes, including the attempt to forcibly repatriate Tsimanouskaya during the Tokyo Olympics, has drawn international condemnation.

Last week, the United States announced it was imposing visa restrictions on several Belarusian nationals, citing Tsimanouskaya’s case and other instances of what it called extraterritorial counter-dissident activity.

Another Belarusian cross-country skier, Sviatlana Andryiuk, was also stripped of her FIS code, a decision that prevented her from taking part in a qualifying event that could have earned her a berth at the Beijing Olympics.

Andryiuk, who told Reuters last month that she had been accused of being an opposition supporter, described her political views as neutral.
…

your ad here

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the optimal resolution to the Russia-Ukraine crisis is a diplomatic one and that he expects to consult with his counterparts from France, Germany and Britain in the coming days.

“As you all know, we have been engaged in a two-track strategy where we have, on the one hand, been pursuing diplomacy — by far the preferable course, the responsible course — but at the same time building up strong deterrence to dissuade Russia from taking aggressive action,” Blinken told reporters traveling with him to Australia for a meeting of the so-called Quad countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday a resolution could take months. 

“You must not underestimate the tension that surrounds the situation that we are living through, its unprecedented nature,” Macron said in Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “I do not believe this crisis can be solved thanks to a few hours of discussions.”  

Macron had spent five hours talking with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday.

The French leader said his discussions with Putin had helped ensure that “there’s no degradation and no [further] escalation” of the standoff between Russia and Ukraine and the Western alliance supporting the Kyiv government.

“I believe for my part that there are concrete, practical solutions that will allow us to move forward,” Macron said after meeting with Zelenskiy.

Macron acknowledged the crisis is not over, saying, “In adopting this threatening posture, Russia decided to put pressure on the international community.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday there were “seeds of reason” in proposals Macron had made to Putin. Peskov, however, rejected suggestions the crisis had been resolved, saying, “So far, we don’t see and feel the readiness of our Western counterparts to take our concerns into account.”

“In the current situation, Moscow and Paris could not make a deal,” Peskov said. “France is an EU and NATO member. France is not leading NATO,” the 30-nation Western military alliance dominated by the United States.

NATO has rejected Moscow’s demands that it end its expansion into eastern Europe nearest Russia and eliminate the possibility of Ukraine, a one-time Soviet republic, from joining NATO. The West says it is willing to negotiate over the positioning of missiles in eastern Europe and NATO troop maneuvers.

On Monday night, the Russian leader refused to rule out the possibility of invading Ukraine, while leaving the door open to further diplomacy. Putin said he would speak with Macron again by phone after the French president’s talks with Zelenskiy.

For his part, Zelenskiy said after discussions with Macron that he wants Putin to exhibit good intentions by pulling back troops from the Ukrainian border.

“Openness is always great, if it’s true, and not a game, but serious openness, not a joke, and understanding that there is a serious danger,” Zelenskiy told reporters following his talks with Macron.

“I do not really trust words, I believe that every politician can be transparent by taking concrete steps,” Zelenskiy said.

Macron said both Putin and Zelenskiy committed themselves to honoring the Minsk Accords signed in 2014 and 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany. It was a response to Moscow’s 2014 unilateral annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, with the unmet goal of ending the fighting between Kyiv’s forces and Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. About 14,000 have been killed in the last eight years in the region.

“We have now the possibility of advancing negotiations,” Macron told reporters following his talks with the Ukrainian president. 
…

your ad here

The former communist countries of eastern Europe are growing increasingly nervous about what they see as a revanchist Russia, with their governments carefully watching the Ukraine crisis for clues to where else Russian leader Vladimir Putin could stir trouble.

Britain announced Monday that 350 Royal Marine Commandos who were on exercises in Norway will be diverted to Poland to take part in “contingency planning.” The move comes as tensions build around Russia’s deployment of forces on Ukraine’s borders in the biggest military build-up since 1945.

A British defense official said the diversion is about “reassurance to eastern European partners” who fear Putin is using Ukraine as a battering ram in a campaign to upend the post-Cold War security settlement in Europe and reestablish a Russian sphere of influence across Eastern Europe.

And Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Tuesday he is prepared to deploy warplanes to Bulgaria and Romania and warships to the Black Sea. Britain will not “flinch,” he said.

NATO presence

NATO has troops rotating in and out of eastern Europe in what officials in the Western alliance’s headquarters in Brussels describe as a persistent, but not permanent, presence. They say troop deployments have been intentionally light from the Baltics to the Black Sea in a bid to deter but not to provoke Russian aggression.

Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, there have been four battle groups containing a total of 5,000 troops in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, led by the U.S., Germany, Canada and Britain.

 

The United States has ordered a further 3,000 troops to strengthen the defenses of NATO’s eastern allies, with the first arriving Saturday at Rzeszów military base in southeastern Poland. And Germany is preparing to reinforce its small battle group of 1,200 troops currently in Lithuania

NATO is considering a longer-term military posture in eastern Europe, the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday.

“We are considering more longer-term adjustments to our posture, our presence in the eastern part of the alliance. No final decision has been made on that but there is a process now going on within NATO,” he told reporters in Brussels.

Stoltenberg’s remarks were praised by eastern European governments.

“Based on historical experience, we see that only a decisive deterrence policy can stop any potential Russian aggression and based on the very same history, we do see that the policy of appeasement only encourages the potential enemy to do something,” Mariusz Blaszczak, the Polish defense minister, said Monday.

Putin’s next move

Polish analysts say there are real fears in central and eastern Europe that settled borders are now under threat. If Putin decides to add more Ukrainian territory to what he seized in 2014, they ask, what will stop him from using coercive diplomacy or hybrid warfare to manufacture a crisis elsewhere?

Putin has frequently lamented that the breakup of the Soviet Union left 25.3 million ethnic Russians outside the Russian Federation, many of them living in former Soviet republics, including the Baltic states. The presence of a sizable ethnic Russian minority in Ukraine has been used by the Kremlin for leverage, and some leaders of the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Estonia worry the same could happen with their countries.

“In Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, the mood is full of anxiety,” say historian Karolina Wigura and political analyst Jarosław Kuisz.

“The Russian military menace to Ukraine reawakens old traumas and, paradoxically, not only those generated from the east. Another angst is, to put it bluntly, that the West will again abandon us,” they added in a commentary.

“Many citizens of central and eastern Europe have clear memories of living under Moscow’s rule. For them, 30 years of independence is not long enough to banish the worry that we are trapped in a cycle of ever-repeating history,” they added.

NATO deployments — which are dwarfed by Russia’s military buildup — are going some way to steady nerves but there are fears that Putin no longer feels bound by the post–Cold War order, which he believes is against Russia’s national interests. Russian troll factories have long targeted the Baltic states with disinformation using messaging similar to the propaganda focused on Ukraine — namely NATO is occupying them, and Russian minorities are under threat, say analysts.

Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, said recently: “The Baltic states are a NATO peninsula and therefore we have our worries.”

Estonia has been the target of a series of cyber-attacks since 2007, which are blamed on Russia and started amid an Estonian-Russian row about the relocation of a Soviet memorial in Tallinn.

Nearly a quarter of Estonia’s population is ethnic Russian, and while integration has proceeded apace most ethnic Russians send their children to Russian language schools and watch Russian media. The country’s third largest city, Narva, is 80% ethnic Russian and analysts see it as the most likely target for Moscow if the Kremlin decides to foment trouble.

Arvydas Anusauskas, the Lithuanian defense minister, points to the channeling of Russian troops to neighboring Belarus for large-scale military exercises as unnerving and says the drills pose a “direct threat” to his country.

Relations between Lithuania and Russia have also been frosty since the country became the first of the Baltic states, and first Soviet republic, to gain independence in 1990. Russian troops remained in Lithuania for another three years as then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin linked troop withdrawals to issues concerning the Russian minority in the country. Fifteen percent of Lithuania’s population is ethnic Russian. Since independence, Lithuanian leaders have visited Moscow only three times.

“This is now an area full of weaponry. Russian troops that are in the south of his country can be moved very quickly. There are sorts of hybrid attacks under way. Pipelines falling apart. This is how unfortunately these regimes operate. There are no red lines they will not cross,” she said.

Šimonytė questioned Monday’s meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and Putin, displaying wariness about the French president’s diplomatic mission to Moscow. Like other Baltic leaders, she is wary of the idea, apparently mooted by Macron, that Ukraine should be blocked from joining NATO. Reports said Macron suggested Ukraine should remain permanently neutral.

“Neutrality helps the oppressor and never the victim,” Šimonytė said.

Lithuanian defense officials fear the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which is squeezed between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, could become the focus for a dangerous economic and military conflict between Russia and NATO, especially if the Western alliance doesn’t stand up to the Kremlin in the crisis over Ukraine.

“This is a 1938 moment for our generation,” Ingrida Šimonytė, Lithuania’s prime minister, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, a reference to the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the British and French. She fears substantial Russian forces will remain indefinitely in Belarus whatever happens in Ukraine and that would change the security landscape.
…

your ad here

Paris — Plastic has infiltrated all parts of the ocean and is now found “in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale” wildlife group WWF said on Tuesday, calling for urgent efforts to create an international treaty on plastics.

Tiny fragments of plastic have reached even the most remote and seemingly pristine regions of the planet: it peppers Arctic sea ice and has been found inside fish in the deepest recesses of the ocean, the Mariana Trench.

There is no international agreement in place to address the problem, although delegates meeting in Nairobi for a United Nations environment meeting this month are expected to launch talks on a worldwide plastics treaty.

WWF sought to bolster the case for action in its latest report, which synthesizes more than 2,000 separate scientific studies on the impacts of plastic pollution on the oceans, biodiversity and marine ecosystems.

The report acknowledged that there is currently insufficient evidence to estimate the potential repercussions on humans.

But it found that the fossil-fuel derived substance “has reached every part of the ocean, from the sea surface to the deep ocean floor, from the poles to coastlines of the most remote islands and is detectable in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale.”

According to some estimates, between 19 and 23 million tons of plastic waste is washed into the world’s waterways every year, the WWF report said.

This is largely from single-use plastics, which still constitute more than 60% of marine pollution, although more and more countries are acting to ban their use.

“In many places (we are) reaching some kind of saturation point for marine ecosystems, where we’re approaching levels that pose a significant threat,” said Eirik Lindebjerg, Global Plastics Policy Manager at WWF.

In some places there is a risk of “ecosystem collapse,” he said.

Many people have seen images of seabirds choking on plastic straws or turtles wrapped in discarded fishing nets, but he said the danger is across the entire marine food web.

It “will affect not only the whale and the seal and the turtle, but huge fish stocks and the animals that depend on those,” he added.

In one 2021 study, 386 fish species were found to have ingested plastic, out of 555 tested.

Separate research, looking at the major commercially fished species, found up to 30% of cod in a sample caught in the North Sea had microplastics in their stomach.

Once in the water, the plastic begins to degrade, becoming smaller and smaller until it is a “nano plastic,” invisible to the naked eye.

So even if all plastic pollution stopped completely, the volume of microplastics in the oceans could still double by 2050.

But plastic production continues to rise, potentially doubling by 2040, according to projections cited by WWF, with ocean plastic pollution expected to triple during the same period.

Lindebjerg compares the situation to the climate crisis — and the concept of a “carbon budget,” that caps the maximum amount of CO2 that can be released into the atmosphere before a global warming cap is exceeded.

“There is actually a limit to how much plastic pollution our marine ecosystems can absorb,” he said.

Those limits have already been reached for microplastics in several parts of the world, according to WWF, particularly in the Mediterranean, the Yellow and East China Seas (between China, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula) and in the Arctic sea ice.

“We need to treat it as a fixed system that doesn’t absorb plastic, and that’s why we need to go towards zero emissions, zero pollution as fast as possible,” said Lindebjerg.

WWF is calling for talks aimed at drawing up an international agreement on plastics at the U.N. environment meeting, from February 28 to March 2 in Nairobi.

It wants any treaty to lead to global standards of production and real “recyclability.”

Trying to clean up the oceans is “extremely difficult and extremely expensive,” Lindebjerg said, adding that it was better on all metrics not to pollute in the first place.
…

your ad here