Boris Johnson announced his resignation on Thursday, triggering a search for a new British leader.

Below is how the process to find Johnson’s successor will work:

Candidates putting themselves forward for the leadership, and there could be many, must be nominated by other Conservative lawmakers. How many nominations they require will be set out by the committee in charge of running the contest. In 2019 it was increased to eight nominations to speed up the process.
Conservative lawmakers then hold several rounds of votes to whittle down the field. Each time they are asked to vote for their favored candidate in a secret ballot, and the person with the fewest votes is eliminated.
This process is repeated until there are two candidates remaining. Votes previously have been held every Tuesday and Thursday, but parliament is due to break for its six-week summer recess on July 21 so the process may have to be accelerated.
The final two candidates are then put to a postal ballot of the wider Conservative Party membership, with the winner named the new leader.
The leader of the party with a majority in the House of Commons is the de facto prime minister. He or she does not have to call a snap election, but has the power to do so.

How long will it all take?

The duration of the leadership contest can vary, depending on how many people put themselves forward. Theresa May became leader less than three weeks after David Cameron resigned in 2016 and all other contenders dropped out mid-race.

Johnson faced former health minister Jeremy Hunt in the run-off ballot of Conservative members to replace May in 2019 and took office two months after May announced her intention to resign.

Speaking outside Downing Street, Johnson said he would remain in office until a new prime minister is elected, but some Conservative members of parliament want Johnson to be replaced immediately.
…

Ukrainian refugees have spread across Europe and the world since Russia invaded their homeland in February, but Polish officials estimate less than half of them have stayed in Poland. But as Greg Flakus reports from the Polish border town of Medyka, many are choosing to stay close to make quick visits across the border – and return home for good when the time comes.
…

In a major policy address at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore Wednesday, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said major countries with “influence” on Russia should use it to end the war in Ukraine.

Describing the invasion as “unprovoked,” “illegal,” “immoral” and “inhumane,” Wong urged China, which has not condemned the invasion, to help end the conflict in Ukraine.

“To grow its international influence beyond military strength, China needs to wield this strength with restraint and legitimacy,” said Wong. “The region and the world is now looking at Beijing’s actions in relation to Ukraine.”

Australia has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russian officials, including politicians and members of the military.

Wong also told reporters in Singapore that Australia’s new center-left administration was promising regional partners greater action to combat climate change.

“The new Australian government has been elected with [a] much greater level of ambition on climate change,” said Wong. “…We see this as an enormous economic opportunity for our countries as well.”

Wong’s speech highlighted Australia’s commitment to peace and prosperity in Southeast Asia.

Susannah Patton, an analyst at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the address also was aimed at finding common ground on regional relations with China.

“I think the speech was very much an attempt by Penny Wong to try and recast Australia’s relationships with Southeast Asia in a more positive way and to try and identify shared interests, even though Australia and Southeast Asia increasingly see China in very different terms,” said Patton.

Australian relations with China have sunk to new lows in recent years. There have been disputes over human rights, democracy in Hong Kong, and Beijing’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea. There has been friction this year over China’s attempts to further its trade and security agendas in the Pacific.

Australia’s Labor government wants to ditch the often-hostile tone toward China of the previous center-right administration.

Wong has promised a more considered approach. Reports have said it is possible she could meet her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit this week in Bali, Indonesia.
…

Russian influence peddlers appear to have narrowed their focus as they continue attempts to sow disunity and undermine Western efforts to support Ukraine, according to new research from the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. 

While traces of Russian influence operations can be found targeting many of the countries that have been backing Ukraine with weapons, financial support or other aid, it appears the most intense efforts have centered on a handful of countries viewed by the Kremlin as perhaps the most vulnerable. 

“We believe that France, Germany, Poland, and Turkey are the primary targets of this influence narrative based on observed influence activities,” Recorded Future said in the report, released Thursday. 

The report’s authors said they made the determination based, in large part, on how various Russian-backed influence networks all seemed to coalesce around certain themes, as if to chip away at existing concerns and divisions in each of the four countries. 

“They do have a pretty good pulse on what some of those issues are or what some of those concerns are 100 days into this (war),” Brian Liston, a senior cyberthreat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, told VOA. 

And while it is difficult to determine the extent to which these Russian influence operations are “chipping away” at the pro-Ukraine coalition, Liston said, it is likely the Kremlin is willing to be patient. 

“I think they view this as an opportunity to try to drill into some of those disagreements and grievances and try to fracture out that coalition piece by piece and hopefully in the hope that it will crumble,” he said. 

The approach is one U.S. officials have seen before. 

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that “malign foreign powers,” including Russia, were taking a page out of the Kremlin’s election interference playbook and again seeking to amplify divisions in American society. 

The department’s most recent National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin, issued last month, echoed the concerns about Russia, further warning that Moscow could soon bolster its disinformation campaigns with an eye toward the 2022 midterm elections. 

Recorded Future said Russia might be laying similar groundwork in France, Germany, Poland and Turkey. 

“Attempts to stir internal discontent toward a country’s existing leadership will very likely precede future attempts to engage in malign influence during election cycles and other target-specific political milestones, in hope of projecting a candidate, party, or platform more in alignment with, or at least less abrasive to, Russia’s strategic objectives in Ukraine,” the report said. 

In each case, the Russian-backed media outlets, influencers and troll farms have tailored their messages in the hopes of generating a following among key audiences. 

“(In) France specifically, about not going too far or maybe President (Emmanuel) Macron wanting to bargain with Russia,” Liston said. 

Recorded Future found that in Germany, Russian influence campaigns have been twofold, drilling down on debates over whether the country is not doing enough or perhaps doing too much to support Ukraine, while also seeking to create alarm over Ukrainian refugees coming into the country. 

In Turkey, Russian operatives found a host of so-called wedge issues to their liking. 

Starting in late May, Recorded Future found multiple examples of pro-Russian media and pro-Russian influence networks harping on Turkey’s concerns about Finland and Sweden moving to join NATO. Multiple articles focused on the Finnish and Swedish arms embargoes against Turkey, as well as on Turkish demands that both countries extradite individuals linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. 

Additionally, Recorded Future said a Russian troll farm known as Cyber Front Z spread memes on Telegram designed to amplify Turkey’s concerns while portraying Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as dead set against NATO expansion. 

At the same time, Russian-backed outlets like Sputnik and the Red Spring Information Agency targeted Turkish tensions with Greece, playing up Ankara’s concerns about Greek activity in contested sections of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. 

Russian influence operations aimed at Poland, in the meantime, have sought to stoke historical tensions. 

One of the more prominent themes, the report said, are suggestions “Poland is planning to use Russia’s war with Ukraine to its advantage to reintegrate historically Polish lands back under its control.” 

The report found that elements of the alleged conspiracy were disseminated by the Russian state-backed media outlet RT in late April, using quotes from the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. 

To further back up such assertions, Recorded Future said, pro-Russian Telegram accounts in May began circulating a document — likely forged — stating that Polish and Lithuanian troops were planning an invasion for later in the month. 

Additional reports on the alleged invasion plans soon followed on other Russian media sites such as RIA Novosti and TV Zvezda, Recorded Future said. 

The findings also seem to lend credence to a possible Ukrainian intelligence success. 

Last month, Ukraine’s security service published an alleged Russian intelligence analytical note detailing plans to support Russian’s invasion of Ukraine with information warfare. 

“We saw a lot of overlap,” Liston, of Recorded Future, told VOA. “Stirring internal discontent, economic concerns, trying to tie Ukraine back to the origins of Nazism, fascism.” 

“Based on what we were seeing in those sources already versus what was in the note, we had a pretty good feeling that this was an authentic analytic propaganda manual,” he said.
…

As evacuees from Mariupol and other occupied Ukrainian cities make their way through Russia to third countries, they are beginning to tell stories of their harrowing journeys and of mixed treatment at the hands of Russian authorities.

Vlad Shorohov, 25, is a former Mariupol resident. A former reporter and restaurant manager, he was able to escape the artillery-ravaged city by evacuating through Russia to Finland, where he is currently working in construction.

Shorohov left Mariupol on March 20 with his mother, grandmother, a niece, and other family members and neighbors after spending three weeks in the icy basement of a high-rise building not far from the Azovstal steelworks. At the time they were without food, water or electricity.

The nine people in Shorohov’s group left their shelter after a night of heavy shelling by Russian forces. He recalled learning about an evacuation organized by the Russians from a passerby. They made their way to the meeting place, where the Russian military instructed them to walk single file to a checkpoint seven kilometers away.

“We stayed there in the open and under fire for nine hours. No one controlled the queue,” he told VOA. “They looked at the passports and said: ‘Here is your bus; it will take you to Novoazovsk,’ ” a town in the occupied territory of the Donetsk oblast just inside the border with Russia.

The group, unlike some others, was allowed to remain together en route to the village of Oleksandrivske, where the members settled in a school building. From there, they proceeded to the village of Siedovo to join relatives but were stopped at a checkpoint and told to return to Oleksandrivske to wait for their so-called “filtration” procedure.

Denis Kochubey, a speaker of the Mariupol City Council, told VOA that the council has received numerous reports of people going through filtration in the occupied territory of Ukraine and at the Russian border. He said some Ukrainians have been singled out for “deep filtration” — a process that involves lengthy questioning and often beatings. The procedure is used primarily against men, especially those that had served in the armed forces.

“If a person even has a tattoo, some Ukrainian symbols, even a yellow-blue T-shirt, some literature in the Ukrainian language, carelessly said the word in Ukrainian, this may be a reason to filter hard,” said Kochubey.

In the case of Shorohov’s group, one man was pulled aside at the checkpoint outside Siedovo, where he was questioned for two hours and robbed of more than half his cash. But rather than return to Oleksandrivske, they then made their way to the Russian frontier where they told the border guards they had already been filtered and were allowed through.

Their time in Russia was less eventful. They arrived in the southern city of Taganrog, spent a night at a friend’s place, and then traveled by train and taxi to the border with Finland. Shorohov was subjected to heavy questioning at the Russian side of the border crossing, which included checking his phone data and lasted for over six hours. Still, he was allowed to leave.

Another Mariupol resident, Kateryna Vovk, who left the city a day before Shorohov with her husband and a 3-year-old child, told a similar story. Their food was running out; they had no clean water and couldn’t find safe passage out of the city. They learned about the Russian evacuation from a neighbor and arrived at the village of Nikolske, which was occupied by Russian forces. There, the family spent a night at a school gym sleeping in chairs. There was little food. The next day, eight buses arrived.

“The drivers were Russian military. About 600 to 800 people tried to leave. Naturally, everyone would not fit in, and a stampede began. The drivers said that they wouldn’t take the men. Almost on my knees, I persuaded the military to take all of us on the bus,” Vovk told VOA.

They, too, were taken to Taganrog, the city with the biggest camp for Ukrainians. After filtering – which in their case was limited to questioning – the family was sent to a large school gymnasium so packed with people that Vovk says she had a panic attack.

The family left Taganrog as soon as possible, taking the first train, and arrived after about 24 hours in the Vladimir Oblast, east of Moscow. There, they were taken to a hotel in the city of Kovrov by local volunteers who, she recalled, were friendly, respectful and well-organized.

“Then came people from the investigative committee who took our testimonies. They said that we would be the injured party in a war crime on the part of Ukraine,” she said.

Vovk recalled that volunteers also helped them leave Russia. Just as in Shorohov’s case, her family found it harder to leave Russia than enter, but in the end they were allowed to cross into Estonia.

“At the border, the Russian customs officers behaved terribly. They questioned men in a separate room for four hours, checked their phones, read their correspondence, stripped them down to their underpants, examined their tattoos,” she said.

In March, Ukraine closed its embassy and consulates in Russia. At the same time, more than a million Ukrainian citizens crossed the border with Russia, according to the U.N. refugee agency. The UNHCR lists more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees in Russia on its regularly updated portal.

A UNHCR spokesperson explained to VOA that the organization doesn’t distinguish between Ukrainians who came to Russia willingly or otherwise. “We are aware of reports of forced deportations, but we do not have the means to verify such reports,” she said.

Russian media say more than 2.1 million people have arrived in Russia from Ukraine, including temporarily occupied territories. Russian authorities characterize them as refugees and say they have been provided with material assistance valued at about $72 million.

Ukrainian authorities consider those people deported or forcibly removed. Iryna Vereshchuk, the deputy prime minister for reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, told Ukrainian media that 1.2 million Ukrainians, including 240,000 children, have been forcibly deported to Russia since the beginning of the war.

Since February 24, Russian forces have disrupted half of the humanitarian corridors organized by Ukrainian authorities, she said at a briefing.

Many find it hard to leave Russia because they lack documents and money or are moved to remote parts of the country, said Oleksandra Matviychuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer and a head of the Center for Civil Liberties.

“In one case, a family was taken to Vladivostok. The wife was pregnant, and the husband had no documents. They didn’t want their child to be born in Russia and receive Russian documents,” she told VOA.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has an office in Moscow that, they said in an email to VOA, “is supporting the work of the Russian Red Cross, including a program to provide cash assistance to people who had to leave their homes as a result of the conflict.”

But many Ukrainians had to flee their homes on short notice without their documents. For them, replacing the missing documents might be the most challenging task, said Matviychuk and the Russian volunteers who spoke to VOA.

According to a volunteer in St. Petersburg, whom VOA is not naming for security reasons, Russian volunteer organizations provide cash and practical assistance to Ukrainian citizens seeking to leave the country, including paying for an overnight stay and train or bus tickets.

“It is not difficult to leave [Russia] if you have documents,” she said. “But it is impossible to leave with the copies of documents” or with electronic documentation, which is common in Ukraine. It becomes even more challenging for families with newborns, who might have no documents at all, she explained.

In these and similar cases, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommends contacting Ukrainian embassies in nearby countries or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of Consular Services hotline for assistance.

“When there is nothing at all, the territory is captured, and there is no access to their documents and various systems, it also imposes difficulties in helping these people,” said Oleg Nikolenko, an MFA spokesman.

He said the Ukrainian government is doing what it can to help. Also, Kyiv is hoping for international assistance.

“The possibility of involving a third country, which could, for example, help with consular services, is being considered,” he said.

Nikolenko said that since the beginning of the full-scale war, several hundred Ukrainian citizens have contacted Ukrainian consulates asking for help.

Not all Ukrainians want to leave Russia, according to Matviychuk, volunteers and Ukrainian authorities. Out of nine people in Shorohov’s group, four stayed behind in Russia. Some Ukrainians join their relatives in Russia, finding employment and reasonable accommodation. Others, said Matviychuk, are not going anywhere because of the emotional trauma they experienced.

“They were in bomb shelters for several weeks under Russian bombarding, without food, water or electricity. They lost their relatives or loved ones. They found themselves in an aggressor country, not knowing what they must do. I’m afraid many people have no internal will to struggle and escape these circumstances,” said Matviychuk.

Some information for this report came from Ukrainian TSN and the Russian Tass agency.
…

Europe is repatriating increasing numbers of its Islamic State-linked women and children, who have languished for years in Syrian camps. The latest influx arrived in France this week, in a move welcomed by rights groups as positive but not enough.

The 51 women and children who landed in Paris Tuesday amount to the French government’s biggest intake of citizens linked to the Islamic State terror group to date. Their arrival underscores a sea change in France’s longstanding policy of case-by-case repatriations.

“This is a welcome and long overdue step, but it’s clearly not enough,” said Letta Tayler, a counterterrorism specialist for Human Rights Watch.

Like other rights groups, HRW has long advocated for countries to bring their citizens home from Iraq and Syria.

“These children and mothers are living in horrific conditions,” Tayler said. “They lack sufficient food, clean water, medical care, education.”

The shift to repatriations is also happening elsewhere in Europe. Last month, Belgium flew home 22 women and children. Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands have organized similar returns in recent months.

Among the latest repatriated to France is Emilie Konig, a Muslim convert from Brittany, who became a notorious Islamic State recruiter. Her lawyer said she wants to cooperate with French authorities.

“Women will go directly to jail, either because they are to undergo trial or because they are suspected to have taken part in terrorist acts,” said Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist and jihadist expert.

Khosrokhavar said that’s the near-term fate of most women returnees here and likely elsewhere in Europe. The children will be sent to live with relatives or put in homes.

“The problem is what will be done afterwards? Because some will come out of jail,” Khosrokhavar said.

Khosrokhavar said another major problem is children, who have been traumatized and will require psychiatric or psychological treatment.

Some of them do not speak French,” Khosrokhavar said. “They have to be resocialized. But who is going to resocialize them?”

A few years ago, France counted as Western Europe’s biggest exporter of jihadists to the Middle East. Today, there’s little popular appetite to see them return home — especially men, who carried out much of the brutality, including terrorism. Many died in battle, but some are at large or detained in Syrian camps.

“The number of men is at least a few hundred, at least if not more,” Khosrokhavar said. “So, the major problem will be with men. Their sheer number. And of course, the violence.”

But repatriation advocates say bringing jihadi fighters and affiliates home is not just the right move, but also the smart one. HRW’s Tayler agrees.

“There is a growing consensus, including in the security sector, that the risk is greater in leaving these detainees in northeast Syria, rather than bringing them home,” she said.

With thousands of people from dozens of nations still detained far from home, Tayler said, it’s a problem that won’t be resolved anytime soon.
…