At least 20 people were killed and nearly 300 others injured by an explosion at a crowded gas station in Nagorno-Karabakh as thousands of people rushed to flee into Armenia, separatist authorities in the region said Tuesday.

More than 13,500 people — about 12% of the region’s population — have fled across the border since Azerbaijan defeated separatists who have governed the breakaway region for about 30 years in a swift military operation, Armenia’s government said Tuesday morning.

Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh scrambled to flee as soon as Azerbaijan lifted a 10-month blockade on the region’s only road to Armenia, causing severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel. While Azerbaijan has pledged to respect the rights of Armenians, many residents feared reprisals.

The explosion took place as people lined up to fill their cars at a gas station outside Stepanakert, the region’s capital, late Monday. The separatist government’s health department said that 13 bodies have been found and seven people have died of injuries from the blast, the cause of which remains unclear.

It added that 290 people have been hospitalized and scores of them remain in grave condition.

Armenia’s health ministry said a helicopter brought some blast victims to Armenia on Tuesday morning, and more flights were expected.

Azerbaijani presidential aide Hikmet Hajiyev said on X, formerly Twitter, that hospitals in Azerbaijan were ready to treat victims, but not if any had been taken to them. Azerbaijan has sent in burn-treatment medicine and other humanitarian aid, he said.

The Azerbaijani military routed Armenian forces in a 24-hour blitz last week, forcing the separatist authorities to agree to lay down weapons and start talks on Nagorno-Karabakh’s “reintegration” into Azerbaijan.

Gasoline has been in short supply in Stepanakert for months, and the explosion further adds to anxiety about whether residents they will be able drive the 35 kilometers (22 miles) to the border.

Cars bearing large loads on their roofs crowded the streets of Stepanakert, and residents stood or lay along sidewalks next to heaps of luggage.

Moscow said that Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh were assisting the evacuation. Some 700 people remained in the peacekeepers’ camp there by Monday night.

Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region within Azerbaijan under the Soviet Union, but separatist sentiment grew in the USSR’s dying years and then flared into war.

Nagorno-Karabakh came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by the Armenian military, in separatist fighting that ended in 1994. During a war in 2020, Azerbaijan took parts of Nagorno-Karabakh along with surrounding territory that it lost of control of during the earlier conflict.

Under the armistice that ended the 2020 fighting, Russia deployed a peacekeeping force of about 2,000 to the region.
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Tensions between Serbia and Kosovo flared anew over the weekend when some 30 heavily armed Serbs barricaded themselves in an Orthodox monastery in northern Kosovo, setting off a daylong gunbattle with police that left one officer and three attackers dead.

Sunday’s clash was one of the worst since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. It came as the European Union and the United States are trying to mediate and finalize yearslong talks on normalizing ties between the two Balkan states.

There are fears in the West of a revival of the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo that claimed more than 10,000 lives and left over 1 million homeless.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti accused Serbia of sending the attackers into Kosovo. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic denied that, saying the men were Kosovo Serbs who have had enough of “Kurti’s terror.”

A look at the history between Serbia and Kosovo, and why the latest tensions are a concern for Europe.

Why are Serbia and Kosovo at odds?

Kosovo is a mainly ethnic Albanian territory that was part of Serbia before it declared independence. The Serbian government has refused to recognize Kosovo’s statehood, even though it has no formal control there.

Some 100 countries have recognized Kosovo’s independence, including the United States and most Western countries. Russia, China and five EU nations have sided with Serbia. The deadlock has kept tensions simmering in the Balkan region following the bloody breakup of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

What are the roots of the conflict?

The dispute over Kosovo is centuries-old. Serbs cherish the area as central both to their religion and statehood. Numerous medieval Serb Orthodox Christian monasteries are in Kosovo, and Serb nationalists view a 1389 battle against Ottoman Turks there as a symbol of their national struggle for independence.

Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians, most of whom are Muslim, meanwhile, view Kosovo as their country and accuse Serbia of occupying it and repressing them for decades.

Ethnic Albanian rebels launched an uprising in 1998 to rid the country of Serbian rule. Belgrade’s brutal response prompted a NATO intervention in 1999, forcing Serbia to pull out and cede control to international peacekeepers.

There are still some 4,500 peacekeepers stationed in Kosovo, a poor country of about 1.7 million people with little industry and where crime and corruption are rampant.

Are tensions running particularly high now?

There are constant tensions between Kosovo’s government and ethnic Serb residents who live mostly in the north of Kosovo and who keep close ties to Belgrade. Mitrovica, the main city in the north, is effectively divided into an ethnic Albanian part and a Serb-held part, and the two sides rarely mix. There are also smaller Serb-populated enclaves in southern Kosovo.

Government attempts to impose more control in the north are usually met with resistance, and the situation deteriorated earlier this year, when Serbs boycotted local elections held the north. They then tried to prevent the newly elected ethnic Albanian mayors from entering their offices.

Some 30 NATO peacekeepers and more than 50 Serb protesters were hurt in the ensuing clashes.

Is there a link to Russia and the war in Ukraine?

Well before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited the breakup of Yugoslavia to justify a possible invasion of a sovereign European country.

Putin, whose troops illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, has repeatedly argued that NATO’s bombardment of Serbia in 1999 and the West’s recognition of Kosovo created a precedent. He has claimed that allows Russia to intervene in Ukraine’s strategic Black Sea peninsula and majority Russian areas in the country’s east.

Western officials have vehemently rejected Putin’s reasoning, saying the NATO intervention in Kosovo was triggered by mass killings and other war crimes committed by Serbian troops against ethnic Albanians. That was not the case in Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

There are fears in the West that Russia, acting through its ally Serbia, is trying to destabilize the Balkans and thus shift at least some attention from its aggression on Ukraine.

What has been done to resolve the dispute?

There have been constant international efforts to find common ground between the two former war foes, but no comprehensive agreement has emerged so far. European Union and U.S. officials have mediated negotiations designed to normalize relations between Serbia and Kosovo since 2012.

The negotiations have led to results in some areas, such as freedom of movement without checkpoints and establishing multiethnic police forces in Kosovo. However, the latter broke down when Serbs pulled out of the force last year to protest Pristina’s decision to ban Serbian-issued vehicle license plates.

After international pressure, Kurti, Kosovo’s prime minister, suspended the decree but that did not bring Serbs back to the Kosovo institutions.

Adding to the difficulty of finding a solution, Kosovo and Serbia both have nationalist leaders. Kurti is often accused by international mediators of making moves that trigger unnecessary tensions.

Vucic, meanwhile, is a former ultra-nationalist who insists Serbia will never recognize Kosovo and says that an earlier deal to give Kosovo Serbs a level of independence must first be implemented before new agreements are made. Vucic has tacitly acknowledged Serbia’s loss of control over Kosovo, but also says the country won’t settle unless it gains something.

What happens next?

International officials still hope Kosovo and Serbia can reach a deal that would allow Kosovo to get a seat in the United Nations without Serbia having to explicitly recognize its statehood. Both nations must normalize ties if they want to advance toward EU membership.

No breakthrough in the EU-mediated negotiations would mean prolonged instability, economic decline and the constant potential for clashes. Any Serbian military intervention in Kosovo would mean a clash with NATO peacekeepers there, and Serbia is unlikely to move in, unless it gains some sort of Russian backing.
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Burkina Faso’s military junta on Monday suspended the French news magazine Jeune Afrique for publishing “untruthful” articles that reported tension and discontent within the country’s armed forces, it said in a statement. 

Jeune Afrique’s suspension marks the latest escalation in a crackdown on French media since the West African country fell under military rule last year. 

The statement accused the publication of seeking to discredit armed forces and of manipulating information to “spread chaos” in the country, following two articles published over the past four days. 

Relations between Burkina Faso and its former colonizer, France, have soured since frustrations over worsening insecurity linked to a jihadist insurgency spurred two military takeovers last year. 

These tensions have led to the expulsion of diplomatic officials, including the French ambassador to the country, and fueled a backlash against foreign media. 

The junta has already suspended French-funded broadcasters Radio France Internationale and France24 for allegedly giving voice to Islamist militants staging an insurgency across the Sahel region south of the Sahara. 

French television channel La Chaine Info, of private broadcaster TF1, was suspended for three months in June for airing a report on the insurgency that “lacked objectivity.” 

In April, two French journalists working for newspapers Le Monde and Liberation were expelled from the country. 
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A new report by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine documents a growing body of evidence of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity committed by Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine.

The report, which was submitted to the U.N. human rights council Monday, presents a picture of widespread violations and abuse against the civilian population and of wanton, large-scale destruction of essential infrastructure.

“The commission is concerned by the continuous evidence of war crimes committed by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine,” said Erik Mose, chair of the commission.

“Well into the second year of the armed conflict, people in Ukraine have been continuing to cope with the loss and injury of loved ones, large-scale destruction, suffering and trauma as well as economic hardship that have resulted from it,” he said. “Thousands have been killed and injured, and millions remain internally displaced or out of the country.”

Russia boycotted the proceedings and was not in the room to respond to these charges. In the past it has denied targeting civilians.

Latest figures from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights put the number of civilian deaths at 9,614 and injuries at 17,535 since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The agency, however, notes the number of casualties is likely to be much higher.

Statistics from UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, show 5.1 million people are displaced within Ukraine and another 6,197,200 have fled to other countries as refugees.

Since it was established in March 2022, the three-member commission has visited Ukraine more than 10 times, gathering information from government authorities and “listening to harrowing testimonies” from victims and witnesses of abuse.

“The commission regrets that all communications addressed to the Russian Federation remain unanswered,” said Mose.

The investigators report that “attacks with explosive weapons in populated areas have led to extensive destruction and damage and have been the leading cause of deaths and injuries among the civilian population.”

They have documented explosive weapons attacks against residential buildings, a railway station, commercial warehouses, medical and other key facilities that have disrupted essential services and supplies.

“In most cases, there seemed to not have been a military presence at the affected sites or in their vicinity,” said Mose.

In Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, regions which had been under prolonged Russian occupation, the commission collected further evidence indicating that the use of torture by Russian armed forces in areas under their control has been widespread and systematic, noting that the principal targets of torture were persons accused of being informants of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Mose told the council that torture mostly took place in various detention centers controlled by Russian authorities and that “the torture was inflicted with such brutality that it caused the death of some of the victims.”

He said the armed conflict has had devastating consequences for children and that the commission is continuing to investigate individual situations of alleged transfers of unaccompanied minors by Russian authorities to the Russian Federation.

“It regrets that there is a lack of clarity and transparency on the full extent, circumstances, and categories of children transferred,” said Mose.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin, addressing the proceedings by video link, lambasted “the massive atrocities committed to a shocking degree by Russia in the course of its war of aggression against Ukraine.”

He spoke with passion and anger about the harm caused to the more than 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been forcibly transferred and deported from their country by Russia’s top leadership.

“Ukrainian children are stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship and put for adoption into Russian families,” he said. “It is a war crime and crimes against humanity that also could amount to crime of genocide in line with the 1948 Genocide Convention.”

Mose said the commission also was “concerned about allegations of genocide in Ukraine.”

For instance, he said that “some of the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide.”

He said the commission is continuing its investigations on such issues.

“We continue our efforts to collect evidence which may be of use for judicial accountability purposes,” he added.
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Senior Biden administration officials arrived in Armenia on Monday, a day after ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh began fleeing following Azerbaijan’s defeat of the breakaway region’s fighters in a conflict dating from the Soviet era.

The visit by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power and U.S. State Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Yuri Kim is the first by senior U.S. officials to Armenia since the Karabakh Armenians were forced into a ceasefire last week.

Power will meet with senior Armenian government officials on the trip, first reported by Reuters, and will affirm the U.S. partnership with the country and “express deep concern for the ethnic Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh and to discuss measures to address the humanitarian crisis there,” a U.S. official said.

Power will be the first USAID Administrator to go to Armenia, the official added.

“The United States is deeply concerned about reports on the humanitarian conditions in Nagorno-Karabakh and calls for unimpeded access for international humanitarian organizations and commercial traffic,” USAID said in the announcement of the trip.

The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond its control, sued for peace last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.

The Armenians are not accepting Azerbaijan’s promise to guarantee their rights as the region is integrated. The Nagorno-Karabakh leadership told Reuters the region’s 120,000 Armenians did not want to live as part of Azerbaijan for fear of persecution and ethnic cleansing.

The Armenian government said that as of 5 a.m. on Monday more than 2,900 people had crossed into the country from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia has prepared space for tens of thousands of Armenians from the region, including hotels near the border, though Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan says he does not want them to leave their homes unless it is absolutely necessary.

Thousands of Karabakh Armenians have been left without food.

The Armenian authorities in the region said late on Saturday that about 150 tons of humanitarian cargo from Russia and another 65 tons of flour shipped by the International Committee of the Red Cross had arrived in the region.

Karabakh has been run by a breakaway administration since a war in the early 1990s amid the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In 2020, after decades of skirmishes, Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, won a 44-day Second Karabakh War, recapturing territory in and around Karabakh. That war ended with a Russian-brokered peace deal that Armenians accuse Moscow of failing to guarantee.
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European businesses in China are increasingly questioning their positions in the face of tough new security laws and a politicization of trade, an EU commissioner warned in Beijing on Monday.

“European companies are concerned with China’s direction of travel,” Valdis Dombrovskis said in a speech at the capital’s Tsinghua University.

“Many are questioning their position in this country.”

He pointed to a new foreign relations law and a recent update to China’s anti-espionage laws as being of “great concern to our business community.”

“Their ambiguity allows too much room for interpretation,” he warned.

“This means European companies struggle to understand their compliance obligations: a factor that significantly decreases business confidence and deters new investments in China,” Dombrovskis said.

The EU trade commissioner is on a multi-day visit to the world’s second-biggest economy, where he is set to meet senior economic officials and press the bloc’s case that it is not seeking an economic decoupling from China.

His trip follows a report by the Chamber of Commerce of the European Union last week that showed business confidence was at one of its lowest levels in decades.

“For decades, European companies thrived in China,” the Chamber’s president Jens Eskelund said.

But, after three “turbulent” years, he said, “many have re-evaluated their basic assumptions about the Chinese market”.

And it comes in the face of mounting trade tensions between the EU and China, following Brussels’ decision to launch a probe into Beijing’s electric car subsidies.

The investigation could see the EU try to protect European carmakers by imposing punitive tariffs on vehicles it believes are unfairly sold at a lower price.

The day after that announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry hit back at the EU’s “naked protectionism” and said the measures “will have a negative impact on China-EU economic and trade relations”.

Speaking in Beijing on Monday, Dombrovskis insisted China remained an attractive investment opportunity for European businesses.

“The EU and China both benefited immensely from being open to the world,” he said. “Trading and cooperating across borders helped to shape our economic and geopolitical strength.”

But, he said, growing challenges for business risked turning “what many saw as a ‘win-win’ relationship in past decades could become a ‘lose-lose’ dynamic in the coming years”.

Ukraine war

China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine also poses a “reputational risk”, he said.

Beijing’s position “is affecting the country’s image, not only with European consumers, but also businesses”, he said.

China has sought to position itself as a neutral party in the Ukraine conflict, while offering Moscow a vital diplomatic and financial lifeline as its international isolation deepens.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin is due to visit China next month.

“China always advocates for each country being free to choose its own development path,” Dombrovskis said.

“So, it’s very difficult for us to understand China’s stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, as it breaches China’s own fundamental principles.”
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