Pakistani authorities are touting the arrival of the first shipment of discounted Russian crude oil as “transformative,” however, analysts say the extent of relief it will bring the country’s crisis-riddled economy is not clear.  

Pakistan’s minister for petroleum, Musadik Malik, told the Reuters news agency that Islamabad paid Moscow for the cargo in yuan, the Chinese currency. The Pakistani government has so far not disclosed the price.

Announcing the arrival of the Russian vessel “Pure Point,” with a little more than 45,000 metric tons of crude oil, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a tweet Sunday night that the country was moving “one step at a time toward prosperity, economic growth and energy security and affordability.”

Authorities at the southern Karachi Port terminal began offloading the cargo Monday morning. Shariq Amin Farooqi, public relations officer for the Karachi Port Trust, told VOA the entire process would take 26 to 30 hours.  

Economic distress  

The discounted crude shipment comes at a time when import-dependent Pakistan faces a severe liquidity crunch. The country spends the biggest portion of its import funds, around $18 billion annually, on energy and fuel. 

According to recent central bank data, foreign exchange reserves were below $10 billion as of June 2, with the State Bank of Pakistan holding less than $4 billion – barely enough to cover a month of select imports.   

Pakistan has been teetering on the brink of default since last year. Its economy has grown at a rate of 0.29% in the fiscal year ending this month, according to government projections, while annual inflation reached a record high of almost 38% last month.  

Russian deal  

As part of what the government in Islamabad has called a “trial” shipment, Pakistan will receive a total of 100,000 metric tons of crude oil from Russia. The second shipment is expected in a few weeks.  

Islamabad began negotiating for discounted crude oil from Moscow last year in a bid to take advantage of the $60 per barrel price cap placed on Russian oil by the United States and its allies to deprive Moscow of funds in the wake of the war on Ukraine.

The deal was finalized in April after Pakistan’s minister for petroleum, Musadik Malik, led a delegation to Moscow late last year and a Russian delegation visited Islamabad in March to cement the details.   

The Pakistani government has so far not disclosed the payment method or the price at which it is acquiring crude from Moscow.

Dubai-based oil trading expert Ahmad Waqar told VOA that for the deal to truly ease Pakistan’s economic pain, it should include purchase on credit as Pakistan is strapped for cash.  

“In my opinion, right now, more than discount we need to get cargo on credit,” Waqar said.

Pakistan traditionally buys the bulk of its energy from Gulf countries with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates its top suppliers. While the Saudis have often supplied fuel on credit, Pakistan’s budget for the next fiscal year starting in July does not include any such facility from its Middle Eastern ally.  

Waqar said he believes the cost of getting cargo all the way from Russia via Oman, instead of from Gulf countries located nearby could also chip away at the possible benefit to Pakistan.    

“Russian cargoes are not as cheap as they used to be, let’s say, 10 months ago when India started buying from Russia…There was a different pricing level at the time. Since then, more international traders started buying and prices went up. It’s not possible to now say that ‘I can get Russian cargo very cheaply,’” Waqar said.  

In the past, petroleum minister Malik also tried to downplay the relief Russian oil could provide to Pakistanis at the pump, however, after the arrival of the cargo, local media quoted him saying Pakistanis will see a reduction in prices in a few weeks.  

How much usable fuel will be produced from the Russian crude is also not clear yet. Pakistan Refinery Limited, tasked with processing it, will submit a report to the government detailing the quality and quantity of the products.   

US approval  

Despite initial pushback from Washington, Pakistan’s neighbors China and India’s energy imports from Russia rose after the war in Ukraine began last year, with the latter seeing its purchases increase almost ten-fold since April 2022.  

Responding to Pakistan’s decision to purchase crude oil from Russia, the State Department in April said that it understood the demand for Russian energy and would not interfere in any country’s decision to buy from Moscow.  

“Countries will make their own sovereign decisions. We have never tried to keep Russian energy off the market,” said spokesperson Vedant Patel.    

The Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Masood Khan, also dismissed concerns that the deal could damage already strained ties between Islamabad and Washington, saying U.S. officials had been consulted.   

“We have placed the first order for Russian oil, and this has been done in consultation with the United States government. There’s no misunderstanding between Washington and Islamabad on this count,” Khan told a gathering at the Washington-based Wilson Center in April.
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Latest developments:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that representatives from the International Criminal Court visited the Kherson region following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
U.S. President Joe Biden is hosting White House talks with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

A Ukrainian official said Monday the country’s troops retook control of Storozhov, a village in the Donetsk region as they conduct a counteroffensive aimed at reclaiming territory seized by Russia.

Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar thanked a marine brigade in a Telegram post, saying the Ukrainian flag was flying over Storozhov.  She said the scene would repeat in every area until Ukrainian forces liberate all of Ukraine’s land.

The development came a day after Ukrainian officials said their troops recaptured three other villages in the area: Blahodatne, Neskuchne and Makarivka.

Ukraine’s armed forces general staff said Monday that during the past day there had been heavy fighting elsewhere in Donetsk, including in Bakhmut, and in the Luhansk region.

NATO drills

In Germany, NATO was beginning the largest air deployment exercise in its history with 250 aircraft from 25 nations.

Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz said last week the exercise had been in planning since 2018 when it was conceived in response to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Highlighting that NATO is a defensive alliance, Gerhartz said the exercise, which will last until June 23, would not involve sending any aircraft toward Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave that borders NATO members Poland and Lithuania.

In addition to NATO members, other participants include Japan as well as Sweden, which has applied to join NATO and received the necessary approval from all but two existing members.

Kakhovka dam

In his nightly video address Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decried Russian attacks on evacuation routes for civilians escaping areas flooded after last week’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine.

“It was an evacuation from Kardashynka, a village on the left bank of Kherson region. … The occupiers created this disaster by blowing up a dam, leaving people to their fate in flooded towns and villages, and then shelling the boats that are trying to take people away,” he said. [[ https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/duzhe-vazhlivo-sho-predstavniki-mizhnarodnogo-pravosuddya-na-83553 ]]

There have also been concerns about the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant after the dam breach dramatically lowered the levels of water available for cooling operations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Sunday it needs to access areas around the plant to verify current water levels.

IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said in a statement he expects IAEA experts will be able to go to the site soon.  He plans to travel the plant this week.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Forensic scientists will on Monday begin the exhumation of 128 victims of the Spanish Civil War from a vast burial complex near Madrid, El Pais newspaper reported.

It will be the first exhumation of its kind involving people whose bodies were moved from elsewhere after the 1936-1939 war and reburied without their families’ permission in the Valley of Cuelgamuros, which was formerly known as Valley of the Fallen.

El Pais reported that forensic scientists have installed a laboratory inside the vast burial site, which includes a monument and 150-meter-high cross, on the outskirts of Madrid prior to the exhumation work beginning.

The remains of some 34,000 people, many of them victims of Franco’s regime, are buried anonymously in the complex. Relatives of those whose remains lie inside have been fighting for years to give their loved ones a burial under their own names near their families.

Purificacion Lapena has been campaigning for the remains of her grandfather Manuel Lapena and his brother Antonio, a blacksmith, to be removed from the mausoleum.

“I have not been told anything about this,” she told Reuters by telephone. In 2016, a court approved the exhumation of the brothers, but seven years later the family is still waiting.

In April, the remains of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of Spain’s fascist Falange movement that supported the Francoist regime, were exhumed from the mausoleum.

His exhumation, which follows the 2019 removal of the remains of dictator Francisco Franco, is part of a plan to convert the complex built by Franco on a mountain near the capital into a memorial to the 500,000 people killed during Spain’s 1936-39 civil war.

At the time of Primo de Rivera’s exhumation, Presidency Minister Felix Bolanos said: “No person or ideology that evokes the dictatorship should be honored or extolled there.”

The Spanish government did not respond to Reuters’ request for confirmation of the report.
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David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November.  

When Smith shared his shape with the world in March, excited fans printed it onto T-shirts, sewed it into quilts, crafted cookie cutters or used it to replace the hexagons on a soccer ball — some even made plans for tattoos.

The 13-sided polygon, which 64-year-old Smith called “the hat,” is the first single shape ever found that can completely cover an infinitely large flat surface without ever repeating the same pattern.

That makes it the first “einstein” — named after the German for “one stone” (ein stein), not the famed physicist — and solves a problem posed 60 years ago that some mathematicians had thought impossible.

After stunning the mathematics world, Smith — a hobbyist with no training who told AFP that he wasn’t great at math in school — then did it again.

While all agreed “the hat” was the first einstein, its mirror image was required one in seven times to ensure that a pattern never repeated.

But in a preprint study published online late last month, Smith and the three mathematicians who helped him confirm the discovery revealed a new shape — “the specter.”

It requires no mirror image, making it an even purer einstein.

‘It can be that easy’  

Craig Kaplan, a computer scientist at Canada’s Waterloo University, told AFP that it was “an amusing and almost ridiculous story — but wonderful.”

He said that Smith, a retired print technician who lives in Yorkshire’s East Riding, emailed him “out of the blue” in November.

Smith had found something “which did not play by his normal expectations for how shapes behave,” Kaplan said.

If you slotted a bunch of these cardboard shapes together on a table, you could keep building outwards without them ever settling into a regular pattern.

Using computer programs, Kaplan and two other mathematicians showed that the shape continued to do this across an infinite plane, making it the first einstein, or “aperiodic monotile.”

When they published their first preprint in March, among those inspired was Yoshiaki Araki. The Japanese tiling enthusiast made art using the hat and another aperiodic shape created by the team called “the turtle,” sometimes using flipped versions.

Smith was inspired back and started playing around with ways to avoid needing to flip his hat.  

Less than a week after their first paper came out, Smith emailed Kaplan a new shape.

Kaplan refused to believe it at first. “There’s no way it can be that easy,” he said.

But analysis confirmed that Tile (1,1) was a “non-reflective einstein,” Kaplan said.

Something still bugged them — while this tile could go on forever without repeating a pattern, this required an “artificial prohibition” against using a flipped shape, he said.

So, they added little notches or curves to the edges, ensuring that only the non-flipped version could be used, creating “the spectre.”

‘Hatfest’

Kaplan said both their papers had been submitted to peer-reviewed journals. But the world of mathematics did not wait to express its astonishment.

Marjorie Senechal, a mathematician at Smith College in the United States, told AFP the discoveries were “exciting, surprising and amazing.”

She said she expects the spectre and its relatives “will lead to a deeper understanding of order in nature and the nature of order.”

Doris Schattschneider, a mathematician at Moravian College in the U.S., said both shapes were “stunning.”

Even Nobel-winning mathematician Roger Penrose, whose previous best effort had narrowed the number of aperiodic tiles down to two in the 1970s, had not been sure such a thing was possible, Schattschneider said.

Penrose, 91, will be among those celebrating the new shapes during the two-day “Hatfest” event at Oxford University next month.  

All involved expressed amazement that the breakthrough was achieved by someone without training in math.

“The answer fell out of the sky and into the hands of an amateur — and I mean that in the best possible way, a lover of the subject who explores it outside of professional practice,” Kaplan said.

“This is the kind of thing that ought not to happen, but very happily for the history of science does happen occasionally, where a flash brings us the answer all at once.”
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Environmental groups and aid agencies say a long road awaits Ukraine when it comes to assessing the real impact of its latest environmental catastrophe. An explosion at a vital dam last week flooded swaths of land in southern Ukraine, threatening a host of ecosystems and even Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has more.
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Former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who dominated politics in Scotland for years, was arrested Sunday by police investigating the finances of the governing, pro-independence Scottish National Party.

Police Scotland said a 52-year-old woman was detained “as a suspect in connection with the ongoing investigating into the funding and finances of the Scottish National Party.”

“The woman is in custody and is being questioned by Police Scotland detectives,” the force said.

U.K. police do not name suspects until they are charged. The BBC and other media outlets identified the arrested woman as Sturgeon. The party did not immediately comment.

Scottish police have been investigating how 600,000 pounds ($745,000) designated for a Scottish independence campaign was spent.

Party treasurer Colin Beattie and former chief executive Peter Murrell were arrested previously and questioned as part of the investigation. Neither has been charged.

Murrell is Sturgeon’s husband, and police searched the couple’s home in Glasgow after his arrest in April.

Sturgeon unexpectedly resigned in February after eight years as Scottish National Party leader and first minister of Scotland’s semi-autonomous government. She said that it was the right time for her, her party and her country to make way for someone else.

Sturgeon left office amid divisions in the SNP and with her main goal — independence from the U.K. for the nation of 5.5 million people — unmet.

Scottish voters backed remaining in the U.K. in a 2014 referendum that was billed as a once-in-a-generation decision. The party wants a new vote, but the U.K. Supreme Court has ruled that Scotland can’t hold one without London’s consent. The central government has refused to authorize another referendum.

Sturgeon’s departure unleashed a tussle for the future of the SNP amid recriminations over the party’s declining membership and divisions about the best path towards independence.
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Huge strides in life expectancy worldwide are bringing new challenges that come with increased longevity, the Dutch health minister told VOA this week.

“If you look at it from a global perspective, we’ve seen that over the past 25 years, on average we added more than five years of global life expectancy,” Ernst Kuipers, Dutch minister of health, welfare and sport, noted during a stop in Washington.

Looking at it another way, the former internist continued, “It actually means that for more than 20 years in a row, every week we added more than a day to the life expectancy of our world population. That is huge!”

Kuipers and a Dutch delegation co-led by the country’s minister of economy are in the U.S. to take part in a trade fair focused on international health and life sciences in Boston.

The Dutch are known to be the tallest people in the world and rank high in the world longevity list. Kuipers looked at the global picture when discussing the worldwide jump in life expectancy in the past quarter century.

While clean water supply, improved hygiene, sanitation conditions, access to vaccines, medicines and medical treatments have contributed to rising life expectancy in low-income countries, breakthroughs in many areas of life sciences have helped prolong life in higher-income countries, he pointed out.

“For example, new drugs in cancer treatment, newly developed interventions to treat cardiovascular diseases, and also improvement in public health.”

The good news about longevity aside, the former doctor pointed out some of the challenges that come with longer lifespans.

“We have an aging population [in the Netherlands], like in most places. People tend to get older, but they live longer usually with certain [health] conditions, with reduced mobility, etc., very similar to here,” Kuipers said.

Kuipers said his country is also experiencing a shortage in health care personnel, even as the number of working men and women affiliated with the health care industry takes up an increasing percentage of the workforce.

“If you look at the Netherlands, at the moment, one out of every six people with a job works in health care,” he said. That figure includes not just nurses or physicians, but also those serving the health care industry in human resources, finance and legal matters.

If the current pattern continues, one in five Dutch jobs will be related to health care by the year 2030, and that number will increase to one in four by the year 2040. Kuipers said this pattern will be very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain, “simply because we’re also going to need people in other areas of society.”

Given that health care is very labor intensive, Kuipers said governments and societies have no choice but to think of ways to meet the demands in a different, yet still effective way, to successfully cope with changing demographics.

In addition to the shortage of manpower, increased life expectancy also requires more money to care for the elderly, causing each country and government to think harder about budget priorities.

“Like the U.S., we have many burning issues, whether it’s energy transmission, preparation for climate change, infrastructure, you name it – the question of how to deliver and provide high-quality, good-access care to everyone while also limiting the increase in budget, that is very, very relevant, like it is here,” the Dutch minister said.

The Netherlands has universal health insurance and caps most people’s out of pocket expenses at 385 euros a year, a little more than 400 U.S. dollars a year.

“So far we [the country as a whole] can still afford this,” he said, “but it’s a continuous debate.”

The problem is especially acute in the case of certain very expensive drugs, the cost of which is increasing “very, very rapidly” and putting the “solidarity underlying our system” under pressure, the minister said.

He cited “orphan drugs,” which are needed by only a small number of people but are often a matter of life and death for those patients.

Kuipers and the Dutch delegation are among over 10,000 health science professionals and government officials from around the world who gathered in Boston this week to exchange ideas and find out the latest in health science at a biotech trade fair put together by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization.
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The southern reach of the Dnipro river is likely to return to its banks by June 16 following a vast flood unleashed by the breach of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam this week, a Russian-installed official said Saturday.

The flood has inundated towns and villages below the dam, trapping residents and sweeping away entire houses on both sides of the Dnipro, which separates Ukrainian-controlled Kherson province from the southern section that Russian forces control.

Vladimir Saldo, who heads the Russian-controlled part, said the water level at Nova Kakhovka, the town adjacent to the dam on the downstream side, had dropped by 3 meters from Tuesday’s peak.

“The pumping of water and garbage collection from the streets have started,” he said.

Late on Saturday, Saldo added that almost 7,000 people had now been evacuated from the flooded districts of Nova Kakhovka, including 323 children, while 77 people have been hospitalized.

He said preliminary calculations by the Russian hydroelectricity producer RusHydro indicated the Dnipro would return to its usual course below the now-destroyed Kakhovka power station by Friday.

Saldo also accused Ukraine of shelling temporary refuges for those displaced by the flood, saying one woman had died as the result of the attacks. He posted a picture of a destroyed building, saying it was a hotel.

Reuters could not independently verify the assertion of shelling, which echoes similar allegations made in recent days. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv. Ukraine has also accused Moscow’s forces of shelling and killing civilians on flooded territory that it controls.

Ukraine has accused Russia of blowing up the hydroelectric power station and dam from inside the plant, which had been under Russian control since the early weeks of Russia’s invasion more than a year ago. Moscow has blamed Ukraine. 
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French judges Saturday handed preliminary charges of attempted murder to a man suspected of stabbing four young children and two adults in a French Alps park, an attack that reverberated across France and beyond. 

The suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian refugee with permanent Swedish residency, has a 3-year-old daughter living in Sweden, regional prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said. Witnesses told investigators that the suspect mentioned his daughter, his wife and Jesus Christ during the attack Thursday targeting a playground in the lakeside town of Annecy. 

The victims, who came from multiple countries, are no longer in life-threatening condition, the prosecutor said. The children, between 22 months and 3 years old, remain hospitalized. 

Police detained the suspect in the lakeside park in the town of Annecy after bystanders — notably, a Catholic pilgrim who repeatedly swung at the attacker with his backpack — sought to deter him. 

The suspected attacker, whose name was not released, was presented to investigating judges in Annecy Saturday and given charges of attempted murder and armed resistance, Bonnet-Mathis said. He is in custody pending further investigation. 

The suspect refused to talk to investigators and was examined by a psychiatrist and other doctors who deemed him fit to face charges, the prosecutor said. She said that the motive remained unclear, but it didn’t appear to be terrorism related. 

Witnesses said they heard the attacker mention his daughter, his wife and Jesus Christ, according to the prosecutor, who said he wore a cross and carried two Christian images with him at the time of the attack. He also had $516 in cash, a Swedish driver’s license, and had been sleeping in the common area of an Annecy apartment building. 

He had traveled to Italy and Switzerland before coming to France last October, and French police are coordinating with colleagues in those countries to learn more about his trajectory, said Damien Delaby, director of the regional judicial police. 

The child victims were two French 2-year-old cousins, a boy and a girl, who were in the playground with their grandmother when the assailant appeared; a British 3-year-old girl visiting Annecy with her parents; and a 22-month-old Dutch girl, according to the prosecutor. 

French President Emmanuel Macron visited the victims and their families, first responders and witnesses Friday. Macron said doctors were “very confident” about the conditions of the two cousins, who were the most critically injured. 

The wounded British girl “is awake, she’s watching television,” Macron added. A wounded Dutch girl also has improved and a critically injured adult — who was both knifed and wounded by a shot that police fired as they detained the suspected attacker — is regaining consciousness, Macron said. 

The seriously injured adult was treated in Annecy. Portugal’s foreign ministry said he is Portuguese and “now out of danger.” He was wounded “trying to stop the attacker from fleeing from the police,” it said. The second injured adult was discharged from a hospital, his left elbow bandaged. 

The pilgrim, Henri, a 24-year-old who is on a nine-month walking and hitchhiking tour of France’s cathedrals, said he’d been setting off to another abbey when the horror unfolded in front of him. The attacker slashed at him, but Henri held his ground and used a weighty backpack he was carrying to swing at the assailant. 

Henri’s father said his son “told me that the Syrian was incoherent, saying lots of strange things in different languages, invoking his father, his mother, all the Gods.” 

The suspect’s profile fueled renewed criticism from far-right and conservative politicians about French migration policies. But authorities noted that the suspect entered France legally, because he has permanent residency status in Sweden. Sweden and France are both members of the EU and Europe’s border-free travel zone. 

He applied for asylum in France last year and was refused a few days before the attack, on the grounds that he had already won asylum in Sweden in 2013, the French interior minister said. 
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Pope Francis’s recovery from surgery is going well but doctors advised him not to deliver his Sunday blessing from a hospital balcony so as not to put strain on his abdominal walls. 

Briefing reporters at the Gemelli hospital Saturday, chief surgeon Sergio Alfieri also said the 86-year-old pope had agreed with doctors’ suggestions that he remain there for at least all next week. 

Francis underwent a three-hour operation to repair an abdominal hernia Wednesday. 

Alfieri said that in 2021, the last time the pope underwent surgery at the same hospital, he did deliver his blessing standing from the balcony, but it was about seven days after the intestinal operation. 

“Each time he gets out of bed and sits in an armchair puts stress on the abdominal walls. Only three days have passed. We asked the Holy Father to be prudent and avoid the strain (of standing at the balcony),” he said. 

He said the pope was taken off intravenous tubes Friday and was now on a semi-solid diet. All medical parameters were within the norm and there were no cardiac problems. 
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The United States and Kosovo are continuing to engage in an unusual public spat, after the staunch U.S. ally’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, resisted calls to take steps that the West says are necessary to de-escalate ethnic tensions in the country’s north.

Tensions flared last week as ethnic Albanian mayors entered municipal buildings with the backing of police, despite having won with only 3.5 percent of the vote in local elections that ethnic Serbs boycotted.

U.S. Special Envoy for the Western Balkans Gabriel Escobar and EU Special Envoy Miroslav Lajcak visited Kosovo and Serbia this week, where they asked the leaders of the two countries to de-escalate, hold quick new elections in northern Kosovo and resume their dialogue.

It’s unclear if they will be able to persuade the two sides. Escobar has called Kurti inflexible and uncooperative, and Kurti complained that Washington and Brussels are biased in favor of Serbia.

What’s at stake is a deal between Kosovo and Serbia aimed at normalizing relations, but so far no concrete steps have been taken.

On Thursday, U.S. Ambassador to Serbia Christopher Hill was blunt in an interview with VOA’s Serbian Service, saying Washington has a problem with Kurti. “He’s not willing to comply, and I think we have some very fundamental issues with him on whether we can count on him as a partner,” he said.

Kurti fired back, complaining in an interview with The Associated Press of bias against his country from the United States and the European Union and tolerance of what he calls Serbia’s authoritarian regime. “Behaving well with an autocrat doesn’t make him behave better. On the contrary,” he told AP.

Hill confirmed a view that many who have followed the Western Balkans and U.S. engagement with Kosovo share these days. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a deep division, really … what we have going right now between Pristina and Washington,” he said.

US approach debated

While analysts agree that the situation is dangerous, they have different opinions on the United States’ open criticism of Kurti.

Luke Coffey, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, said the biggest concern for him has been the way the Biden administration has handled the situation, calling Escobar’s approach “almost reckless.”

“I understand this desire to put pressure on both sides by the U.S. government, but it seems like right now the pressure is disproportionately on Kosovo. … And I think this is unhealthy,” he told VOA Albanian in an interview.

But Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the criticism is justified. “He [Kurti] has taken actions of late that I deem to be needlessly provocative, including … using armed guards to seat ethnic Albanian mayors that were elected with less than 4 percent of the vote. These are not helpful maneuvers,” he told VOA Albanian.

Kupchan said the United States and the EU still need to maintain an even-handed approach, considering that “Serbia has been a difficult player on these issues from the very beginning, that Serbia likely advised Serbs in the north not to participate in the recent elections.”

“So, whereas I do think that the criticism of Kurti is justified, the pressure needs to stay on both Pristina and Belgrade if we’re going to see progress toward normalization and implementation of the agreements, including some form of Serb self-management in Kosovo,” he said.

The U.S. and the EU have asked Serbia to withdraw troops that it sent to the border with Kosovo and to urge protesters to be calm.

But observers notice that there has not been a calling out of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, like there has been with Kurti.

Coffey said the West is trying to appease Serbia, and Vucic is trying to have it both ways.

“He wants to pretend like he is going to get closer to the West and be a productive member of the Euro-Atlantic community, but all the while he is very cozy with Moscow, very cozy with the Kremlin. And Serbia, under his leadership, remains Russia’s main foothold in the Balkans,” he said, adding that this undermines U.S. interests in the region.

When visiting Pristina, special envoy Escobar made sure to distinguish in his remarks between sharp disagreements with the Kosovo government and the overall relationship with the country as a whole. Kupchan said the unique relationship between Kosovo and the United States has not changed.

“By making public statements of this sort, I think the United States is, as I said, trying to create a situation in which there is political public pressure on Kurti to take a different line, and in which I think the United States is also sending a message to Serbs, to Serbia, to the Serbian government, that it is an even-handed player,” he said.

Many disputes

The tensions over local elections are just the latest in a long list of disagreements between Kosovo and Serbia over what each country needs to do to make progress toward normalizing ties, a process spearheaded by the EU with strong support from the U.S.

Kupchan said Western leaders’ frustration stems from the fact that they thought normalization was within reach, and the parties don’t seem to be taking advantage of the opportunity.

“This is, in my mind, the best opportunity that we’ve seen really in a very long time, perhaps even since the initial independence of Kosovo in 2008,” he said.

The issue of self-management of Serbs in northern Kosovo is essentially the Achilles’ heel in this process.

Visiting the region, Escobar repeated that Kosovo needs to establish an Association of Serb Municipalities if it wants to move closer to Euro-Atlantic institutions. Kosovo officials have resisted, talking about more autonomy for Serbs but stopping short of committing to a concrete plan.

“That seems to be the key sticking point here. It is also, in my mind, the key that would lead to a breakthrough in which the Serb majority that lives north of the river would feel that they have a voice in the institutions, the governance of Kosovo, and that they may then be more comfortable integrating into the country,” Kupchan said.

He added that the question is not whether Kosovo has a right to be frustrated, considering that “Belgrade has been sustaining parallel structures and has been manipulating the population inside Kosovo.”

In his view, the main question facing Kosovo is, “What is the best course for the government to take to get to a satisfactory, stable, durable peace in which Serbia forms a normal relationship with Kosovo, and ultimately all the countries of the world, including Serbia, recognize Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state?”

Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence that it declared in 2008, and that came almost a decade after U.S.-led NATO forces intervened to stop ethnic cleansing by the Serbian regime at the time.

Keida Kostreci reported from Washington. Jovana Djurovic reported from Belgrade. Ivana Konstantinovic contributed. Some information came from The Associated Press.
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French President Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by his wife, Brigitte, traveled to the French Alps Friday to be with families of the victims stabbed Thursday in a lakeside park in the city of Annecy. 

The couple’s first stop was a hospital in the French city of Grenoble, where three of the four young children are receiving treatment.  

Government officials said all four children have undergone surgery and are “under constant medical surveillance,” with one child in critical condition. 

The fourth child is being treated in Geneva, in Switzerland.  

It is not immediately clear whether the president and his wife will go to Geneva. 

A man stabbed the children and two adults at the park Thursday morning in an attack Macron said shocked the country. 

All four children suffered life-threatening knife wounds, lead prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said. The youngest is 22 months old, two are 2 years old and the oldest is 3, the prosecutor said.

Police quickly detained the suspect — a 31-year-old Syrian national. French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect has refugee status in Sweden.

“The nation is in shock,” Macron tweeted. He described the assault as an “attack of absolute cowardice.”

 

Video appearing to show the attack circulated on social media. In the video, a man in dark glasses with a blue scarf covering his head wielded a knife as people screamed for help.  

One woman tried to fend off the attacker in the enclosed play park, but she could not stop him from leaning over her stroller and stabbing downward multiple times.  

Two of the young victims were French.  The other two were tourists, one British, the other Dutch. 

Two adults also suffered knife wounds. One of the adults was also injured by a shot fired by police as they were arresting the suspect, Bonnet-Mathis said.  

In Paris, lawmakers paused a debate to hold a moment of silence for the victims.  

The National Assembly president, Yaël Braun-Pivet, said, “There are some very young children who are in critical condition, and I invite you to respect a minute of silence for them, for their families, and so that, we hope, the consequences of this very grave attack do not lead to the nation grieving.”

“Nothing more abominable than to attack children,” Braun-Pivet said on Twitter. 

Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
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