Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine ended Tuesday with both sides stressing the importance of the negotiations and indicating a willingness to compromise.

Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, hosted the fifth round of Ukrainian and Russian peace talks. The Russian delegation described the more than four hours of talks as positive. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin pledged a reduction in military operations.

To increase mutual trust and aid negotiations, he said, a decision was made to reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas.

The Russian delegation said further steps on reducing military operations would be discussed on their return to Moscow. Tuesday’s talks focused on Russia’s demand that Ukraine should become neutral and end its aspirations to join NATO. The Ukrainian delegation proposed that eight countries should guarantee its security, including Poland, Israel, and Turkey, in exchange for neutrality.

Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak, speaking to reporters, said international guarantors are key to accepting neutrality.

He said intensive consultations are underway on various issues, the most important of which is agreement on international security guarantees for Ukraine. That agreement, Podolyak added, is necessary to end the war.

The delegations also discussed proposals on the disputed status of the self-proclaimed breakaway republics of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, which Russia annexed.

Ukraine demands their return, while Moscow calls for their international recognition as independent states and Crimea as Russian sovereign territory. Among the proposals discussed was that Crimea’s status would be subject to a 15-year consultation period.

But the Ukrainian delegation insisted such a step would only be possible in the event of a complete cease-fire. Expectations had been low ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, but Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu claimed the talks had achieved the most progress since the start of the war.

Analyst Sinan Ulgen said the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Istanbul underline the importance of Turkey, which has been careful to maintain good ties with both sides during peace efforts.

“As a result of this balanced policy, Turkey is one of few actors that can play a constructive diplomatic role right now. That diplomatic role can be best described as ‘good office,’ which is more than a facilitator but less than a mediator,” Ulgen saud.

But analysts suggest that a meeting of the Ukrainian and Russian presidents is key to ending the conflict. While Kyiv says it’s ready for such a summit, Moscow insists it would only be possible if there are concrete proposals to discuss. Tuesday’s meeting may turn out to be the first step in that process.
…

your ad here

The International Committee of the Red Cross reports a misinformation and disinformation campaign is being waged on social media to discredit its humanitarian work in Ukraine.

The Swiss-based organization warns the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is deepening. It finds the level of death, destruction and suffering inflicted upon the civilian population since Russia invaded the country February 24 abhorrent and unacceptable.

Relentless bombing of the port city of Mariupol has demolished civilian homes and infrastructure. It has displaced tens of thousands of people, depriving them of food, water, and medical care.

Spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross Ewan Watson said civilians in Mariupol and other frontline areas are making life and death decisions to flee when there is no agreement that would allow them to leave safely.

He said a surge of misinformation and disinformation is jeopardizing ICRC efforts to protect and distribute humanitarian aid to people trapped by conflict.

“We are seeing deliberate targeted attacks using false narratives and disinformation to discredit the ICRC. And this has the potential to cause real harm for our teams and our Red Cross, Red Crescent movement partners working on the ground and for the people we serve,” he said.

Watson said a huge flow of misinformation and disinformation is being orchestrated across social media channels targeting the ICRC. For example, one claim that has no basis in truth, he said is the agency’s alleged role in forced evacuations.

“The ICRC has not been involved with any forced evacuation, forced transfers of civilians into Russia from Mariupol or any other Ukrainian city…The ICRC does not want to open an office in southern Russia to filter Ukrainians as many reports are alleging. So, that is absolutely false. We are not opening a refugee camp or any other type of camp,” said the spokesman for the ICRC.

Watson said the ICRC operates on the basis of impartiality and neutrality. He said it expects the warring parties to fulfill their obligations under International Humanitarian Law to protect civilians and limit military operations to exclusively military objectives.
…

your ad here

The Netherlands announced Tuesday it is expelling 17 Russian diplomats, characterizing them as a “threat to national security.”

The foreign affairs ministry said the reason for the expulsions was information indicating the 17 are “secretly active as intelligence officers.”

The ministry added that the “intelligence threat against the Netherlands remains high. The current attitude of Russia in a broader sense makes the presence of these intelligence officers undesirable.”

It said it took the move after consulting with several other countries.

Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said the country was prepared should Russia take retaliatory measures against Dutch officials in Russia.

Similar actions have been taken recently by the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Montenegro.

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters
…

your ad here

In a sign that sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine may be starting to bite, Russian tanker ships carrying oil and petroleum products have been observed turning off systems that broadcast their identity and location, a practice known as “going dark” and which is often associated with efforts to evade sanctions. 

In the days and weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and a broad coalition of other countries imposed sweeping sanctions on Russian goods, including petroleum products. Experts say that by going dark, ships may be able to discharge cargo, often via ship-to-ship transfers at sea, without attracting the attention of law enforcement authorities. 

According to data gathered by Windward Ltd., an Israeli firm that uses artificial intelligence to assess maritime risk, the number of incidents of Russia-affiliated ships going dark on a daily basis has increased dramatically since the introduction of sanctions. 

This is especially true with regard to tankers carrying Russian crude oil. Prior to the invasion, Windward tracked two or three incidents per day of tankers loaded with Russian crude disabling their identification systems. It is now documenting about 20 a day. 

“We’re seeing a synchronized effort across Russian shipping and trading to systemically hide where their cargoes are going,” Ami Daniel, Windward CEO, told VOA. 

That is not to say the practice of “going dark” is being dictated by the Kremlin. The ships involved are almost all privately owned and not technically answerable to the government in Moscow. Neither the Russian government nor the various companies who own the ships in question have issued public statements about the practice. 

Automatic Identification System 

A treaty, known as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, requires large ships to have an Automatic Identification System (AIS) in operation at all times, with some specific exceptions. The AIS provides other ships and coastal authorities with the vessel’s name, heading, speed and other information.

“AIS should not be turned off, as a general matter,” Attorney Neil Quartaro, a partner in the trade and transportation group at the law firm Cozen O’Connor, told VOA. 

Quartaro said that the few exceptions include areas where broadcasting details about a ship’s speed and heading could create a security risk.  

“The primary area where it is acceptable to turn off your AIS is in something called the ‘high risk area,’ which is essentially the area off the coast of Somalia,” Quartaro said. Pirate activity is prevalent in that region, as well as a few other spots around the world, where cargo ships have been boarded and the crews held for ransom. 

Ship-to-ship transfers 

Quartaro said that it is not uncommon for ships attempting to evade sanctions to turn off their AIS equipment while, for instance, performing a ship-to-ship transfer of crude oil that originated in a sanctioned country.  

“If you’re operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and you’re anywhere close to Trinidad and Tobago or Aruba, and you turn off your AIS, anybody looking at that is going to suspect that you’re engaging in an illegal transfer of oil product out of Venezuela, which happens all the time,” Quartaro said. 

Similarly, he said, it is common for empty tankers to leave a port in the Middle East, turn off their AIS equipment, and then reappear a few days later with a load of crude oil bound for Pakistan. In such cases, he said, the oil probably originated in Iran, which is under heavy sanctions. 

Deceptive shipping practices 

In 2020, the U.S. departments of State and Treasury, as well as the Coast Guard, issued an advisory that included seven different shipping practices that were characterized as “deceptive” and associated with illicit shipping and the evasion of sanctions.  

No. 1 on the list is disabling or manipulating AIS equipment.  

“Although safety issues may at times prompt legitimate disablement of AIS transmission, and poor transmission may otherwise occur, vessels engaged in illicit activities may also intentionally disable their AIS transponders or manipulate the data transmitted in order to mask their movement,” the advisory warned. 

Others deceptive practices include falsifying registrations and cargo manifests, creating intentionally complex ownership structures, and making unscheduled stops and detours. 

Sign of desperation 

The potential downside of engaging in deceptive shipping practices is significant, which suggests that willingness to engage in it could be a sign of desperation. 

Large companies that have significant business interests in the United States, for example, do not want to get caught up in an investigation of sanction evasion. For that reason, they pay companies like Windward to identify vessels that have engaged in suspicious activity, in order to avoid doing business with them in the future. 

However, the importance of oil exports to the Russian economy may make some shippers more willing to take risks. 

Russia’s exports of petroleum products are a large contributor to the economy. In 2021, according to figures released by the Russian central bank, the country took in $490 billion from petroleum sales. Crude oil accounted for $110 billion of the total, and other oil products made up an additional $69 billion. 

Daniel, of Windward, said his company expects to see Russian shippers resorting to additional methods of bypassing sanctions in the near future. 

“We expect Russia to adopt many of these deceptive shipping practices, and not just in the tanker segments. Across all the segments, because of the huge pressure they’re under,” he said. 

 
…

your ad here

Delegation members attending peace talks between Ukraine and Russia suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.  

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team, including Crimean Tatar lawmaker Rustem Umerov, were affected, according to the paper, which cited people familiar with the matter. 

It said the delegation members showed symptoms that included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands. Those affected have since improved their health, and their lives are not in danger, according to the report. 

Investigators for the open-source collective Bellingcat were also involved in sourcing the Journal’s report. 

Bellingcat said its sources have confirmed the events, and cited experts who investigated the matter and concluded that “poisoning with an undefined chemical weapon” was the most likely cause. 

The experts said the choice of toxin and dose indicates it “most likely was intended to scare the victims, as opposed to cause permanent damage.” 

The Wall Street Journal said it was not clear who was behind the suspected poisoning but said those targeted blamed hard-liners in Moscow seeking to disrupt the negotiations. 

Asked Monday about the report, Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said, “There is a lot of speculation, various conspiracy theories,” according to Reuters. 

Reuters reported that Umerov, who was cited as one of the targets of the suspected poisoning in the Journal report, urged people not to trust “unverified information.” 

The Kremlin has not commented on the report. 

Abramovich is a billionaire Russian businessman with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and is one of numerous oligarchs under sanctions from Western countries. 

Last week, the Journal reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked U.S. President Joe Biden not to include Abramovich in Western sanctions, arguing that the Russian could help to negotiate a peace deal. 

Some information in this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 

 
…

your ad here

Jeff Horenstein has seen his fair share of injury and death as an emergency room physician in Massachusetts — and ironically far more than working as a medical volunteer on the Polish side of the border across from the western Ukraine town of Lviv at a refugee reception camp run by NGOs at Medyka in south-east Poland.

“Most people we see here are dehydrated or their elderly and want us to check them out and need reassurance; they are worried they are running low on their medications,” he says. “Serious cases bypass us. We get kids complaining of belly-ache,” he adds. He’s also treated a couple of foreign fighters, who sustained shrapnel wounds in shelling in eastern Ukraine. “They decided not to go back in,” he says.

What takes the physician aback aren’t the injuries or ailments he gets to see working with the NGO Sauveteurs Sans Frontières, or Rescuers Without Borders, but the stories Ukrainian refugees tell him.

The physician from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston shakes his head as he tells me about an 81-year-old woman from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city which has been besieged since Russia invaded on February 24 and has been pummeled daily with shelling and missiles.

“She decided to get out because she figured she would die, if she stayed,” he said. “And she went up to a Russian soldier and told him she wanted to go to Poland and could give him $20,000 in cash, her life savings. She said she had no idea whether he would shoot her or not. He took the money, and after a while came back and handed her back $2000, took her to the next checkpoint, hugged her and she was passed on checkpoint by checkpoint until she reached Ukrainian-controlled territory,” he added. “She told me that she felt bad that she didn’t take the neighbors’ kids but hadn’t wanted to get them killed, if things had gone wrong,” he says.

Hope

As Jeff tells me this, one of his colleagues interrupts saying, “You don’t see that every day,” as he took a quick snap of a man walking by pulling a 12-foot wooden cross aided by a small wheel attached to the bottom with the top of the crucifix resting on his shoulder. Oklahoma-native Keith Wheeler has been carrying his cross across the world for 37 years passing through 185 countries and more than 40 war zones.

“Here’s the thing,” the disarmingly charming 61-year-old Wheeler tells me. “People need food, people need water, people need medicine. But more than anything people need hope. And you can’t put a price tag on hope,” he adds. In recent years the self-styled pilgrim cross-bearer has trudged through lands that are, as he puts it, traditionally hostile toward Christians, including Libya and Syria, where some jihadists considered abducting him, but thought better of it. He shows me a picture of them. He has been beaten in some countries, including the United States. He often ends up roughing it, sleeping under bridges. But strangers are often hospitable and invite him into their homes, including once in a royal palace in the Gulf, where he was befriended by a prince.

“I should be dead,” he says. “Peace starts with forgiveness,” he says as a parting gift to me.

Wars attract all sorts and every sort, from the charitable and kindly to criminals and opportunists; oddballs to philanthropists; pacifists to war junkies. And they can all be encountered in the bedraggled, improvised camp just across from Ukraine that sometimes seems a cross between a chaotic local craft fair and the kind of circus that springs up around rock music festivals. The difference is no one is selling anything but giving things away — from freshly cooked food to steaming cups of tea and coffee, from blankets and clothing to toys and candy for the kids.

“Hold on,” shouts a frustrated British volunteer to his companions after they have trouble persuading kids to take proffered candy. “Wait till I have looked up how to say For Free in Ukrainian.” Already dazed refugees emerge from Ukraine into a winding path of tents and small marquees, and they run a gauntlet of charity and hospitality, which at first adds to their disorientation, but as they relax it prompts smiles. They are offered, too, counsel on how to reach where they want to go.

There is a cacophony of languages. The volunteers and charities come from the four corners of the earth — from across Europe, the United States, Australia, Latin America, Israel; there are Sikhs from India and diaspora Chinese opponents of China’s communist government. The camp is semi-organized anarchy, and some volunteers acknowledge its shortcomings and impracticality, and they say more systemization is needed at every level of the humanitarian effort, but its point, they say, is to show Ukrainians they aren’t alone.

And who are these volunteers? They are from all walks of life and all ages. Some are idealistic; others highly realistic. Most are a mixture of both. Some have reached crossroads in their own lives. One European woman told me she was going through a midlife crisis. “I could brood on a beach somewhere, or come here and be useful,” she said. Some volunteers have connections with Ukraine; many have none at all. All are moved by the plight of those caught up in the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

There’s John, a firefighter from New Jersey, who collected $70,000 from relatives, co-workers and neighbors and joined a friend who set up a feeding station for refugees. He can fix most mechanical problems. “Sometimes I just slip a little money in the bags of the elderly when they aren’t looking,” he says.

And there’s Texan mother-of-four Katie Stadler, a 38-year-old, who once tried but was unable to adopt a Ukrainian teenager who subsequently died. “I was already involved with Ukraine— it has a big orphan crisis. And so, I had already fallen in love with the country and the people. I couldn’t watch what was happening and not do something to help,” she says.

Even before flying to Poland from her home town of Fort Worth, Katie was funneling money to a pastor in the Odessa region, who bought a van and drove food kits around to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave and took other people who did want to leave to the borders. After two weeks she was “laying in bed one night and I said to my husband Matt, ‘I’m going to go over there’ and he said, ‘I was waiting for you to say that.'”

In Warsaw one ex-Special Forces humanitarian worker questioned why Katie, who had no experience as an aid worker, had come. He growled: “Why are you here?” But Katie has earned plaudits for her energy and enthusiasm from some experienced charity workers, including Heath Donnelly, CEO of the charitable foundation of movie producer and international restaurateur Ciro Orsini and actor Armand Assante. “She has kick started a lot of things done here,” he says.

At Warsaw’s central train station, Katie says she “made friends with the volunteers (who) are running the transportation kiosk and when people can’t pay and there’s no way for them to utilize government funds, I pay with my PayPal,” she says. With donations from friends, relatives and neighbors, she has helped 12 families being sheltered at a church in Warsaw and paid the air fares for 30 families.  On the border, she helps Heath. “These kids and these families that are coming out need to see that humanity is still good and people are still good,” she says.
…

your ad here