The United States said Thursday that the Chinese balloon shot down by the U.S. military over the weekend was capable of collecting intelligence signals and was part of a Chinese military surveillance program around the globe.

“The high-altitude balloons’ equipment was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment onboard weather balloons,” a senior State Department official said in a statement, dismissing Beijing’s contention that the downed balloon was collecting weather data.

The comments came as the FBI continues to collect wreckage from the balloon that was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on Saturday over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South Carolina.

“These kinds of activities are often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army,” the State Department official said. “We are confident that the balloon manufacturer has a direct relationship with China’s military and is an approved vendor of the PLA, according to information published in an official procurement portal for the PLA.”

The official said the manufacturer “advertises balloon products on its website and hosts videos from past flights, which appear to have overflown U.S. airspace and airspace of other countries. These advertised balloon videos seemingly have similar flight patterns as the balloons” identified by the U.S. as having violated the airspace of dozens of countries.

“It had multiple antennas to include an array likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications,” the official said of the balloon parts recovered. “It was equipped with solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors.”

The official added that from China’s “messaging and public comments, it’s clear that they have been scrambling to explain why they violated U.S. sovereignty and still have no plausible explanation—and have found themselves on their heels.”

Asked about the State Department assessment, a senior FBI said he could not definitively say whether the balloon was collecting signals intelligence, noting that FBI specialists have thus far recovered only “a very small portion” of the balloon’s payload.

“I don’t think we’re in a position, based on what we’ve seen, based on the facts that we have at the FBI and what the personnel have examined, to give you a determination,” the official said during a press call with reporters. “It’s just too early for us.”

The FBI was in contact with the U.S. military’s Northern Command as early as February 1 because of suspicion the balloon had an electronics payload, the official said.

FBI specialists arrived on the scene late Sunday to examine the debris, transporting the first batch of evidence to its lab in Quantico, Virginia, on Monday, the official said.

The little evidence that the FBI has gathered so far consists of the balloon and canopy, some wiring and “a very small amount” of electronics, the official said.

The balloon payload has sunk to the seabed, and FBI and Navy dive teams continue to search for evidence and bring it to the surface for potential transportation to Quantico.

“I think it’s very early for us to assess what the intent was, and how the device is operating,” the official said.

China on Thursday dismissed the U.S. accusations as “information warfare against China.” Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning repeated Beijing’s insistence that the large, unmanned balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that was accidentally blown off course and that the U.S. had “overreacted” by shooting it down.

“It is irresponsible,” Mao said at a daily briefing.

The State Department and defense officials have heightened their criticism of Beijing’s surveillance efforts as U.S. forensic experts examine parts recovered following the shootdown. They say China has flown the surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries across five continents.

The U.S. says it has identified five such Chinese balloon flights over the U.S. in recent years, including three during the administration of former President Donald Trump that went undetected at the time, and one earlier during the White House tenure of President Joe Biden. The most recent flight traversed the continental U.S. for eight days, passing over key military installations before it was shot down.

The U.S. said it is exploring a reprisal against Chinese entities linked to the balloon-spying operation.

“We will also look at broader efforts to expose and address [China’s] larger surveillance activities that pose a threat to our national security, and to our allies and partners,” the State Department said.

VOA State Department Bureau Chief Nike Ching contributed to this report.
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Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine should serve as a warning to potential Asian aggressors like China and North Korea
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Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles on Thursday told Parliament that the controversial AUKUS submarine deal with the U.S. and the U.K. enhances Australian sovereignty and does not increase dependence on the United States as claimed by critics. The pact was signed by Australia, the United States and Britain in September 2021 but has been condemned by China.

Marles said that receiving at least eight nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact will “dramatically enhance” Australia’s sovereignty, rather than erode it.

Marles argued that Australia needed British and American expertise to enhance its military capabilities.

China accused Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of fueling military confrontation when the AUKUS accord was signed in 2021.

The alliance has been criticized by former Australian Prime Ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating, who have said the deal would erode the country’s sovereignty.

Turnbull told local media last week that the government had to determine whether the submarines could be “operated, sustained and maintained by Australia without the support or supervision of the U.S. Navy.”

Jordon Steele-John, a Greens party senator, has also criticized the accord. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. On Thursday that it makes Australia increasingly dependent on the U.S. and Britain.

“Either of those two nations could decide they no longer wish to participate in such a project or pact, leaving our capacity literarily dead in the water,” he said. “The Australian community is very rightly concerned about the greater integration and inter-reliance that this will create.”

Specific details of the trilateral accord will be released soon. British politicians have reportedly suggested that the AUKUS project should be expanded to include India and Japan.

In response, China’s foreign ministry said it was “seriously concerned and opposed” to the military pact. Beijing has previously accused Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of fueling military confrontation when the AUKUS accord was signed in 2021.

Australia has been trying to rebuild its fractured relationship with China in recent months. Analysts say it is a delicate enterprise, given the tensions over trade and other geopolitical issues.

On Thursday, Australia said it would be removing hundreds of Chinese-made security cameras at official buildings across Australia.

Marles conceded there was a potential security problem that needed to be addressed. There is no evidence so far of any breaches of national security, but Marles said the devices would be taken down.

Britain and America have done the same thing because of concerns the equipment could contain spyware.
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Last November, Northeastern University student Andre Neto Caetano watched the live, late-night launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a cellphone placed on top of a piano in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in California.

“I had, not a flashback, but a flash-forward of seeing maybe Artemis 4 or something, and COBRA, as part of the payload, and it is on the moon doing what it was meant to do,” Caetano told VOA during a recent Skype interview.

Artemis 1 launched the night before Caetano and his team of scholars presented their Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator (COBRA) rover project at NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The team hoped to impress judges assembled in the remote California desert.

“They were skeptical that the mobility solutions that we were proposing would actually work,” he said.

That skepticism, said Caetano, came from the simplicity of their design.

“It’s a robot that moves like a snake, and then the head and the tail connect, and then it rolls,” he said.

NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge prompted teams of college students to compete to develop solutions for the agency’s ambitious goals in the upcoming Artemis missions to the moon, which Caetano explains are “extreme lunar terrain mobility.”

Northeastern’s COBRA is designed to move through the fine dust, or regolith, of the lunar surface to probe the landscape for interesting features, including ice and water, hidden in the shadows of deep craters.

“They never could … deploy a robot or a ground vehicle that can sort of negotiate the environment and get to the bottom of these craters and look for ice water content,” said professor Alireza Ramezani, who advises the COBRA team and has worked with robotic designs that mimic the movements of real organisms, something Caetano said formed a baseline for their research.

“With him building a robot dog and robot bat, we knew we wanted to have some ‘bioinspiration’ in our project,” Caetano said.

Using biology as the driving force behind COBRA’s design was also something Ramezani hoped would win over judges in NASA’s competition.

“Our robot sort of tumbled 80 to 90 feet (24-27 meters) down this hill and that … impressed the judges,” he told VOA. “We did this with minimum energy consumption and within, like, 10 or 15 seconds.”

Caetano said COBRA weighs about 7 kilograms, “so the fact that COBRA is super light brings a benefit to it, as well.”

Ramezani added that COBRA is also cost-effective.

“If you want to have a space-worthy platform, it’s going to be in the order of $100,000 to $200,000. You can have many of these systems tumbling down these craters,” he said.

The Northeastern team’s successful COBRA test put to rest any lingering skepticism, sending them to the top of NASA’s 2022 BIG Idea competition and hopefully — in the not-too-distant future — to the top of NASA’s Space Launch System on its way to the moon.

“I’m not saying this, our judges said this. It’s potentially going to transform the way future space exploration systems look like,” said Ramezani. “They are even talking to some of our partners to see if we can increase technology readiness of the system, make it space worthy, and deploy it to the moon.”

Which is why, despite his impending graduation later this year, Caetano plans to continue developing COBRA alongside his teammates.

“Because we brought it to life together, the idea of just fully abandoning it at graduation probably doesn’t appeal to most of us,” Caetano said. “In some way or another, we still want to be involved in the project, in making sure that … we are still the ones who put it on the moon at some point.”

That could happen as soon as 2025, the year NASA hopes to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the Artemis program.
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The U.S. military is planning to set up a training center in Europe to teach NATO allies how to field High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, a top U.S. general told VOA, amid increased demand for the systems in Eastern Europe following the weapon’s successes in Ukraine.

“We’re still in the preliminary stages here, but it would be an area that we would maybe pull in several countries to one location,” V Corps commander Lieutenant General John Kolasheski, who is responsible for U.S. Army operations along NATO’s eastern flank, told VOA in an exclusive interview late Tuesday.

The news came as the State Department on Tuesday approved the potential sale of 18 HIMARS launchers to Poland, along with hundreds of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems and dozens of Army Tactical Missile Systems. The Polish government requested the sale, worth an estimated $10 billion.

The proposed HIMARS program would be available to NATO countries that are approved for foreign military sales of the long-range artillery systems, which include nations such as Estonia, Poland and Romania on NATO’s eastern side.

“They [NATO] see the brutality of what has taken place in Ukraine, and there is a sense of urgency, there’s a sense of purpose, and all 30 nations are united to come together to this effective defense of NATO terrain,” Kolasheski said.

Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told VOA earlier this week that “one of the biggest lessons learned” from the war in Ukraine is that “long fire is extremely important.” HIMARS have been credited with shifting the momentum of the war.

Estonia has purchased six HIMARS units that are expected to be delivered in the 2024-25 time frame. An American HIMARS platoon is providing extra defensive capabilities in the Baltics, and Pevkur said the platoon also is allowing Estonian forces to begin training on the rocket systems “today” so they will be ready to use them “from day one.”

Poland’s Abrams Academy

Kolasheski said the proposed HIMARS academy would be “a similar construct” to the Abrams Tank Training Academy, which opened near Poznan, Poland, last year to familiarize Polish forces with the U.S.-made Abrams main battle tanks. Poland was the first European ally to acquire the Abrams, purchasing 250 M1A2 Abrams tanks last year and 116 M1A1 Abrams tanks in January.

Part of the Abrams program includes a type of apprenticeship, where Polish forces are attached to Army tank units to study how to service and fire the tanks, according to Kolasheski.

Since the Abrams academy opened last summer, a class of Polish tank operators and a class of maintainers have graduated from it.

Poland has fast become a military hub for U.S. forces in Eastern Europe and has been an outspoken advocate for sending Western tanks to Ukraine.

‘Existential threat’

Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said Saturday that Poland had begun training Ukrainian military forces on the German-made Leopard 2 tanks.

Asked whether the Abrams Tank Training Academy in Poland would be used to train Ukrainians, Kolasheski told VOA there was still “no decision on that right now.”

After President Joe Biden announced last month that the U.S. would provide Ukrainian forces with Abrams tanks, the Pentagon has since said it will first need to procure the tanks because there isn’t an excess available in U.S. stocks. The move will delay the tanks’ delivery.

Leopard 2 tanks and British-made Challenger 2 tanks, however, are expected to arrive on the Ukrainian battlefield as soon as Ukrainian training is complete.

“Tanks are much awaited … and I really hope that we are not too late for that,” Estonia’s Pevkur told VOA.

Asked whether it was realistic to expect Ukrainian forces to operate Leopard 2 or Challenger tanks within a few months, Kolasheski replied, “I think it is.”

“They’re very, very motivated. They’re very eager. I mean, this to them is an existential threat,” he said.

VOA asked the Pentagon for access to U.S. forces training Ukrainians in Germany and to the Abrams Tank Training Academy in Poland, but the request was denied. 
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A naturalized U.S. citizen who became so enamored with Islamic State that he abandoned his wife and child to join the terror group in Syria, eventually rising to the rank of emir, faces life behind bars after being convicted of all charges against him.

The U.S. Justice Department announced Wednesday that a jury has found the now 46-year-old Ruslan Maratovich Asainov guilty on five counts, including conspiracy to provide material support, receiving and providing training, obstruction of justice and support to a terror group that led to the death of one or more persons.

Asainov “was so committed to the terrorist organization’s evil cause that he abandoned his young family here in Brooklyn, New York, to make an extraordinary journey to the battlefield in Syria,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.

“Even after being captured [Asainov] still pledged his allegiance to ISIS’ murderous path,” Peace added. “There is no place in a civilized world for the defendant’s bloody campaign of death and destruction.”

Asainov was captured by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces following the fall of Baghuz, the Islamic State’s last shred of territory in Syria, in March 2019.

He was extradited to the U.S. in July 2019 and was immediately charged with providing support to the terror group.

Training camps

According to court documents, Asainov, a naturalized citizen who came to the U.S. from Kazakhstan, traveled to Syria in late 2013, where he began fighting with IS as a sniper.

Eventually, he became one of the terror group’s emirs, responsible for establishing training camps for IS recruits and for teaching them how to use weapons.

He also began communicating with a confidential informant for the FBI, asking for money while periodically sending the informant photos of himself and other IS fighters in combat gear.

“We [IS] are the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed,” he wrote in one communication, adding he wished to die on the battlefield.

In other messages, officials say Asainov talked about fighting in places like Kobani, Deir el-Zour and Tabka.

In addition to the messages, U.S. officials said some of the evidence against Asainov was based on interviews with “at least one other individual who provided material support and resources to ISIS during part of the same time period as the defendant.”

More American IS

Since 2016, the U.S. has repatriated at least 39 citizens from Syria and Iraq, including 15 adults and 24 children.

Of the adults, at least 11 have been charged with crimes. U.S. officials told VOA that some of the adults were not charged because they were minors when they were brought by their families to join IS.

Notable convictions include those of 37-year-old Samantha El-Hassani, who was sentenced to more than six years in prison after she took her children to Syria to join IS.

Her four children, who also came back with her from Syria, were placed in the custody of officials with the U.S. state of Indiana.

Omer Kuzu pleaded guilty to providing material support to IS in September 2022.

And in June 2017, the U.S. brought back Mohamad Jamal Khweis of Alexandria, Virginia. Khweis was later found guilty of providing material support to IS.

IS Foreign Fighters

Despite ongoing efforts to repatriate IS foreign fighters and their families, U.S. officials estimate that the U.S.-backed SDF still holds about 2,000 foreign fighters in make-shift prisons across northeastern Syria, along with another 8,000 Iraqi and Syrian IS fighters.

Both numbers have remained essentially unchanged since October 2019.

A report released Tuesday by the Defense Department Inspector General raised concerns about the state of the prisons in Syria, noting, “many detention facilities were not built to hold detainees and their long-term viability is poor.”

U.S. counterterrorism officials estimate that, in total, more than 45,000 foreign fighters flocked to Syria and Iraq following the start of the Syrian civil war, including 8,000 from Western countries.
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