The United States and its allies are planning to provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets and train Ukrainian pilots to fly them, the White House said Friday, a turnaround from President Joe Biden’s monthslong refusal of requests from his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the aircraft.

In a statement provided to VOA, a senior administration official said on Friday Biden informed G-7 leaders that the United States will support a joint effort with allies and partners to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation fighter aircraft, including F-16s, to further strengthen and improve the capabilities of the Ukrainian air force.

The training, set to begin in the coming weeks, will take place at sites in Europe and require months to complete, said the official.

“As the training unfolds, in the coming months, we will work with our allies to determine when planes will be delivered, who will be delivering them and how many,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during a Saturday press briefing in Hiroshima, Japan, where the G-7 summit is being held.

Sullivan said the fighter jets will not be used for a planned counteroffensive against Russia.

Zelenskyy welcomed Biden’s decision, saying in a tweet it would “greatly enhance our army in the sky.”

Describing the plans to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 jet fighters as a “historic decision,” Zelenskyy said he would discuss the details with Biden when they meet on the sidelines of the G-7 summit Sunday.

Confirmation of Zelenskyy’s in person attendance came as G-7 leaders from United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan and the European Union, reaffirmed their “commitment to stand together against Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.”

In a statement, the group pledged to “mobilize all our policy instruments and, together with Ukraine, make every effort to bring a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine as soon as possible,” underscoring that it cannot be realized without “the complete and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops.”

China economic coercion

Measures are set to be announced later Saturday to respond to what the group calls China’s “economic coercion” – the use of punitive trade practices to coerce countries over political disputes.

“These economic security tools will include steps to build resilience in our supply chains. They will also include steps to protect sensitive technology like export controls and outbound investment measures,” Sullivan said in the same briefing.

Sullivan said that the communique set to be released later Saturday will note that each country has its own independent relationship and approach to Beijing but all are united and aligned around a set of common concerns. It will indicate that G-7 countries seek to cooperate with China on matters of mutual interest.

G-7 members are “looking to de-risk not de-couple from China,” he said, referring to efforts to limiting reliance and vulnerability on Beijing.

From Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday responded to the planned measures. “If the G-7 summit wants to discuss the issue of economic coercion, it might as well first discuss how the United States coerces the other six member states,” he said.

Alternative to Belt and Road

The G-7 statement in Hiroshima shows a growing alignment by members on how to deal with Beijing, beginning with the group’s 2021 summit in Cornwall, U.K., when China was mentioned for the first time.

In Cornwall, the group adopted a plan to support lower- and middle-income countries in building better infrastructure called “Build Back Better World,” as an alternative to China’s development juggernaut the Belt and Road Initiative.

At the 2022 G-7 summit in Elmau, Germany, the plan was relaunched as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.

Under the relaunched plan, G-7 countries aim to mobilize a total of $600 billion by 2027 in global infrastructure investments.
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New developments:

U.S. President Joe Biden has endorsed plans to train Ukrainian pilots on U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets, The Associated Press reports.
Russia has added International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan to its wanted list. Khan prepared an arrest warrant last March for President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges, Russian media reported on Friday.
The Pentagon has overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by at least $3 billion, said Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh. The accounting error will allow the Defense Department to send more weapons without asking Congress for additional money.
Russia is targeting Ukrainian military facilities and supplies to disrupt a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of the Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate, told the Ukrainian news portal RBK.

Heavy fighting continues in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, with Ukraine on Friday claiming incremental advances against Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Russian paramilitary forces there.

“The enemy is trying to regain what they have lost … but our forces are repulsing the attacks,” Deputy Ukrainian Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said in televised remarks. She noted that Russian forces had “made some progress” inside Bakhmut but said they did not control the city.

“It’s very difficult to carry out combat missions there, and every meter [of advance] is like 10 kilometers in other conditions,” she said.

Both Russia and Ukraine said the other has sustained heavy losses in the area. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told Ukrainian news portal RBK that Russia has suffered about 70,000 casualties in and around Bakhmut. His assertion could not be independently verified, Reuters said.

Moscow regards its assault on Bakhmut, a city of about 70,000 before Russia’s full-scale invasion nearly 15 months ago, as a springboard to capturing the rest of the industrial Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

Training on F-16s

During the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima on Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden endorsed plans to train Ukrainian pilots on U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets in Europe in the coming weeks. According to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Biden discussed with G-7 allies the training as a precursor to sending fourth-generation fighter jets to Ukraine in the months ahead, AP reports.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will join the G-7 Summit in Japan on Sunday, either in person or virtually. If he does attend in person, it would be the farthest he has traveled from his country since the war began in February of last year.

The G-7 leaders also laid out new sanctions against Moscow on Friday.

“Our support for Ukraine will not waver,” they said in a statement released after closed-door meetings. They promised “to stand together against Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.”

“Russia started this war and can end this war,” they said.

Military facilities increasingly targeted

Russia is increasingly targeting Ukraine’s military facilities and munitions supplies to disrupt preparations for a Ukrainian counterattack, a senior Ukrainian military intelligence official said.

After months of attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, Russian forces are increasingly training their sights on areas where air defense equipment is located, according to Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate.

“Now they have completely different priorities — to disrupt our plans and preparations for active [military] action during the spring-summer campaign,” he told the Ukrainian news portal RBK on Friday.

He said the Russians were striking decision-making centers, supply routes and places where large quantities of ammunition, equipment, fuel or troops were concentrated, according to Reuters.

Skibitskyi also said Russian aviation was targeting areas on or near the front line more often than before, echoing Ukrainian fighters’ reports that Russian forces were pounding supply lines to try to halt the Ukrainian advances.

Russia did not immediately comment on Skibitskyi’s remarks.

Kyiv under fire

Kyiv was again targeted by Iranian-made drones overnight Friday — the 10th attack since the start of the month — but all of them were destroyed by the capital’s air defenses, Serhiy Popko, the head of the Kyiv military administration, said Friday.

“With such tactics, the Kremlin is trying to exhaust our air defense, as well as to psychologically influence the civilian population,” Popko said.

Separately, Ukrainian air defense said Friday it had shot down six cruise missiles, 16 out of 22 drones and one cruise missile overnight, without specifying the location, RFE/RL reported.

Explosions also were heard in the western city of Lviv and in Zelenskyy’s hometown Kryviy Rih in the southeast, seriously wounding a 64-year-old woman.

“Several explosions occurred in [the central Ukrainian city of] Kryvyi Rih. The enemy hit a private industrial enterprise. Several buildings caught fire at once,” the president’s office said in a statement.

According to RFE/RL, the latest attacks came as officials in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv reported Friday that three civilians were killed, and 16 others were wounded by Russian shelling the previous day.

Two people were killed and nine more were wounded in Donetsk, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of Donetsk regional administration.

One man was killed and two were wounded in a rocket attack on a village in Kharkiv, regional Governor Oleh Synyehubov said.

Patriot system fixed

In Washington, a Pentagon spokeswoman said a Patriot missile-defense system damaged in a Russian airstrike on Kyiv several days ago has been repaired.

“What I can confirm is that one Patriot system was damaged, but it has now been fixed and is fully back and operational,” Sabrina Singh told a news briefing.
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As Greece gears up for uncertain parliamentary elections Sunday, the country’s media landscape is as polarized as ever and press freedom remains in crisis, experts say.

Against a backdrop of political tension and hemorrhaging media freedom, Greeks will vote May 21 to fill all of parliament’s 300 seats for the next four years. The election — which analysts say is unlikely to bring about an outright winning party in the first round — is among the country’s most unpredictable in years.

This election will also take place against a backdrop of general frustration with the Greek government — in particular, frustration over issues of rule of law and government spying, polarized media and a slow-moving justice system that doles out unduly lenient punishments, analysts told VOA.

“The rule of law includes an independent judiciary and an independent media landscape. And at this point, it seems that both are problematic,” Greek freelance reporter Matthaios Tsimitakis told VOA from Athens.

To Tsimitakis, the plight of press freedom is intimately linked to broader threats facing the rule of law in Greece.

The upcoming elections in Greece will be a big test for Greek democracy and the Greek political system on whether it can ensure political stability in the aftermath, according to Thanos Dimadis, executive director of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States.

“I am afraid that the lack of political unity and extreme polarization fed by the opposition political parties may result in a new circle of political instability in the country, which can create a dangerous cocktail along with its fragile economy, the inefficient judiciary system, and the partisanship of the media,” Dimadis, who previously worked as a journalist in Greece, told VOA.

For the second consecutive year, Reporters Without Borders this month ranked the birthplace of democracy last in the European Union in terms of press freedom. The press freedom group ranked Greece 107 in the world out of 180 countries in terms of media freedom.

In an emailed statement, Greece’s Washington embassy said, “For Greece, free and independent media constitute a foundation of peaceful, inclusive and resilient societies; journalists and media professionals speak truth to power and hold those in power accountable.”

“Greece attaches high priority to the protection and promotion of media freedom and the safety of journalists and media actors at the national and international levels,” the statement continued.

“The Greek media has always been partisan,” said Nick Malkoutzis, co-founder of the Greek think tank MacroPolis.

The media landscape is heavily tilted in favor of the ruling conservative New Democracy party, Malkoutzis said. The three main parties are the ruling New Democracy party, the main leftist opposition Syriza party, and the socialist party Pasok.

“It’s certainly been the case over the last few years that Greeks have really low trust in their media,” Malkoutzis added.

“The vast majority of the Greek society does not care — unfortunately — for the status of the freedom of the press in the country because,” Dimadis said, “people dismiss media and journalists as partisan elements affiliated with the parties in the left and the right of the political spectrum.”

But the relatively niche issue of media freedom is connected to broader questions of rule of law that Greek people do care about, experts on Greek politics and media freedom told VOA.

In 2010, Greek reporter Socrates Giolias was shot and killed outside his house. More than a decade later in 2021, another prominent Greek journalist named Giorgos Karaivaz was shot and killed outside his home in an Athenian suburb.

At the end of April, two brothers were arrested on suspicion of having helped to carry out the hit on Karaivaz, but little progress has been made in either investigation.

“It’s completely outrageous that two years later, no one has been brought to justice,” Tsimitakis said about the killing of Karaivaz.

Greece’s Washington embassy told VOA that Athens “has been doing everything to shed light” on Karaivaz’s brutal assassination.

“The Minister of Citizen Protection of the Hellenic Republic, Mr. Panagiotis Theodorikakos, has repeatedly emphasized that no criminal act will remain unsolved and this certainly applies to the assassination of a journalist,” the embassy statement continued.

Meanwhile, the Greek government has also come under fire for its use of spyware to target more than a dozen journalists and politicians.

Even though these are serious problems, press freedom isn’t weighty enough to have a real impact on the outcome of the elections — in part because press freedom is a political issue in Greece, mainly because of what it means for Greece’s international reputation, some analysts said.

“Journalists murders and journalists under surveillance — is not really beneficial to the image of the country,” said Attila Mong, who covers Greece at the press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Chrysanthos Tassis, a Greek political scientist at the Democritus University of Thrace, said that “freedom of the press is a very critical issue that helps to provide an alternative political agenda.”

A lot more is at stake than whether a second round of elections will need to take place later in the summer.

“Greece faces a problem of democracy and of freedom of the press,” Tassis said. “I think it’s in critical condition.”
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he landed Friday in Saudi Arabia, host of an Arab League summit attended by long isolated Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a close Russian ally.

The previously unannounced visit is Zelenskyy’s first to the Middle East since Moscow’s invasion in February 2022, giving the Ukrainian leader an opportunity to address leaders in the region that has been far less united in its support of Kyiv than staunch Western allies.

“Arrived in Saudi Arabia. I will speak at the Arab League summit,” Zelenskyy said on Twitter, adding he plans to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other leaders.

He arrived in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah one day after Assad, whose government is being readmitted to the Arab League after its suspension in 2011 over the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators that led to civil war.

The summit in Saudi Arabia comes at a time when the world’s biggest oil exporter is flexing its diplomatic muscle across the Middle East and beyond.

An Arab League official told AFP Zelenkyy’s invitation came from Saudi Arabia, not the bloc. Saudi officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Syria’s return

Earlier on Friday, Assad met Tunisian President Kais Saied, Syria’s official SANA news agency said, kicking off a series of bilateral talks before the summit is expected to officially open at 2:00 pm (1100 GMT).

“This summit is very important,” Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said after reaching Jeddah earlier this week, adding the Syrian delegation was “here to make this summit a success.”

Main streets in Jeddah were lined with the flags of Arab League member states including Syria, as Al-Riyadh newspaper declared on Friday it would be “the summit of all summits.”

The meeting follows a frenetic stretch of high-stakes diplomacy triggered by the kingdom’s surprise Chinese-brokered rapprochement deal with Iran announced in March.

Since then, Saudi Arabia has restored bilateral ties with Syria and ramped up a push for peace in Yemen, where it leads a military coalition against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

Riyadh also played a leading role in evacuating civilians from Sudan when fighting erupted there last month, and it is currently hosting representatives of Sudan’s warring parties in a bid to hammer out a cease-fire.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has become, in the eyes of all observers, the peacemaker and the icon of harmony, calling for an end to differences and the elimination of conflicts,” Kuwaiti writer Jawad Ahmed Bukhamseen gushed in an op-ed this week in the private Saudi newspaper Okaz.

Not every country in the region has been eager to mend ties with Assad.

Qatar said this month it would not normalize relations with Assad’s government but noted this would not be “an obstacle” to Arab League reintegration.

On Thursday, the emir of Qatar, a fierce critic of the Syrian leader, announced he would lead his country’s delegation to Jeddah.

Ukrainian ‘kiss of life’

Doha has called for accountability for “war crimes” in Syria, but the emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, made no comment on Qatar’s expectations for the summit.

While Qatar and some other countries will be represented by their leaders, the president of another Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates, will be absent.

The UAE’s Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan has sent his brother and vice president, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, to Jeddah instead, official news agency WAM said.

Beyond challenges facing the Middle East, the Arab League summit should also take on issues like the war in Ukraine and “the global economic crisis”, Khaled Manzlawiy, the bloc’s assistant secretary general for political affairs, wrote on Wednesday in the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

“Indeed, the entire world is undergoing a perilous stage in history as the maps of international relations are redrawn,” he wrote, adding that Arab unity can give the region “a voice that is heard not only in the region but also across the globe.”

Global preoccupation with Ukraine could amount to “a kiss of life for the League to play its role as a coordinating station for efforts to resolve conflicts in the region,” Egyptian analyst Rabha Seif Allam told AFP.

From Riyadh’s perspective, a successful summit would involve concrete commitments from Syria on issues including war refugees and the captagon trade, said Torbjorn Soltvedt of the risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft.

Yet Arab League summits “have more often than not been characterized by internal disagreement and indecisiveness,” he added.

“The bar for success will therefore be low.”
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Members of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies at this year’s summit will place more sanctions on Russia and crack down on those helping it to evade them — a move aimed at hampering Moscow’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine. VOA White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara is traveling with President Joe Biden and reports from Hiroshima, Japan, where the summit begins Friday.
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Britain this week called for reform of the European Court of Human Rights, after judges there blocked flights carrying asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. There has been a sharp rise in the number of migrants arriving in small boats on Britain’s shores – and the government believes the policy of sending them to Rwanda will dissuade many from making the dangerous journey. But as Henry Ridgwell reports, many analysts say Britain’s European allies have little appetite for reforming the court.
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Chinese special envoy Li Hui arrived in Kyiv this week to discuss efforts by his country to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian analysts say Kyiv has no illusions about China’s ability to deliver a peace agreement, but say it is important for Ukraine to maintain a dialogue with China. Anna Chernikova reports from Kyiv. VOA footage by Eugene Shynkar.
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A top Republican lawmaker said Wednesday the funding priorities for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) do not go far enough in addressing the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Biden administration has requested $32 billion in foreign assistance for USAID — $3 billion more than the amount appropriated by Congress in 2023.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul said in a hearing with USAID administrator Samantha Power that it is not clear how the agency plans to spend the requested $400 million in the fund for countering Chinese influence.

“Our foreign aid must serve as a clear alternative to the CCP and our adversaries while also saving lives and projecting U.S. global leadership around the world,” McCaul said.

Budget hearings with agency heads are an annual exercise on Capitol Hill, with funding requests serving as a starting point for negotiations.

“The People’s Republic of China and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin are ready to step in — whether through opaque loans on unfavorable terms or with mercenaries in tow,” Power told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “An international order that values democracy and human rights and respects international borders is not a given. Indeed, authoritarian actors are challenging and aiming to reshape it. We have to invest in the stable and more humane world that we need.”

Power told lawmakers that House Republicans’ budget legislation addressing the looming debt ceiling crisis would cause significant harm to USAID’s worldwide mission and America’s global influence. Last month, the Republican-majority House of Representatives passed legislation that has no chance of adoption in the Democratic-majority U.S. Senate. But their proposal, if passed, would increase the debt limit in return for cuts to government spending, including decreasing USAID funding by up to 22%.

“China and Russia aren’t slashing their international affairs budget by nearly one-third. In fact, they are growing and expanding their foreign assistance programs as a means to advance their national interests and exert influence on the global stage. We’re losing ground,” Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking member on the committee, said Wednesday.

On Sunday, McCaul told ABC News “This Week” that “defaulting is not the right path to go down. … Our adversaries look at this very closely. They look at when we’re divided. … I think they would love nothing more, particularly China, to see us default in our full faith and credit under the Constitution.”

He added that Republicans have laid out a plan to avoid it.

“I think we were reasonable,” McCaul said. “We’re willing to raise the debt ceiling, but we want meaningful spending cuts and capping spending … at 2022 levels.”

Power said 2019 USAID funding had increased at half the rate that its programming had grown. According to public opinion polls, many Americans perceive the investment in foreign aid to be much higher than it actually is. Surveys consistently show that the public believes 25% of the U.S. budget is spent annually on foreign assistance when in fact, it is less than 1%.

“It absolutely goes without saying that nothing that I’m proposing here should come at the expense of the appropriate investments in our defense and in the competition that we are in with the PRC globally,” Power told lawmakers.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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The U.N. special rapporteur for Myanmar said Wednesday that Myanmar’s military has imported at least a $1 billion worth of weapons and weapons materials since overthrowing the democratically elected government in February 2021, with Russia as the junta’s top supplier.

“Russia and China continue to be the main suppliers of advanced weapons systems to the Myanmar military, accounting for over $400 million and $260 million respectively since the coup, with much of the trade originating from state-owned entities,” Tom Andrews said.

He told reporters at a news conference at U.N. headquarters that weaponry provided by Russian suppliers has been used to commit probable war crimes and crimes against humanity in Myanmar. 

“These weapons, and the materials to manufacture more of them, have continued to flow uninterrupted to the Myanmar military despite overwhelming evidence of its responsibility for atrocity crimes,” he said.

The military seized power on February 1, 2021, alleging massive election fraud after their political party gained only 33 of 498 contested parliament seats. Since then, the U.N. human rights office says at least 3,000 civilians have been killed, more than 17,500 detained and more than a million displaced as the military pursues its brutal crackdown to retain power. The United Nations says at least 17.6 million people in Myanmar require humanitarian assistance.

The special rapporteur presented his latest report, “The Billion Dollar Death Trade:  International Arms Networks that Enable Human Rights Violations in Myanmar,” in which he used both private and public sources, including trade databases, to identify more than 12,500 unique purchases or recorded shipments from multiple sources directly to the junta or known Myanmar arms dealers working on the military’s behalf.

The networks and companies he identified in these transfers operate in Russia, China, Singapore, Thailand and India.

“The diversity and volume of goods provided to the Myanmar military since the coup is staggering,” Andrews told reporters. “I identified fighter jets, attack helicopters, reconnaissance and attack drones, missile systems, tank upgrades, radio and communications equipment, radar complexes, and components for naval ships.”

Russian weaponry

Moscow is by far Myanmar’s largest arms dealer, conducting more than $400 million in transfers from 28 Russian entities, including from state-owned ones, since the February 2021 coup. The report says 16 of those suppliers have been sanctioned by some countries for their role in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The special rapporteur says more than half of the confirmed arms exports from Russia to the junta come from the state-controlled Rosoboronexport. It has shipped at least $227 million worth of equipment and materials to the Myanmar military since the coup, including SU-30 fighter jets and rocket launch systems, as well as supplies for MiG-29 fighter jets. 

“The Russian Mi-35 helicopter was reported to be the most sighted aircraft, including in strikes against schools, medical facilities, and civilian homes and infrastructure,” Andrews says in his report. “MiG-29 and Yak-130 aircraft have also been used extensively since the coup, with Yak-130 jet fighters seen in attacks in Chin, Kachin, Kayin, Mon, and Shan States and Sagaing Region.”

Andrews, an independent human rights expert, whose mandate comes from the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, says under international humanitarian law, Russia has an obligation to deny further transfers of its weapons, since it should know the Myanmar military is systematically committing violations of international humanitarian law with them.

Chinese entities, including state-owned ones, are the second-largest supplier to Myanmar’s military, having sent $267 million in spare parts, communications equipment, missiles, tanks and fighter jets, which Andrews says also violates international arms treaties and conventions.

The special rapporteur said he presented his findings to the countries identified in his report, including Russia and China.

“In all cases, there was not a specific rebuttal about any of the facts that I have identified from anybody,” he said.

An emailed request for comment from VOA to the Russian mission early Wednesday was unanswered as this story was published.

Regional arms flows

ASEAN members Singapore and Thailand both supported the regional bloc’s “five-point consensus” for ending the fighting in Myanmar and moving toward talks, as well as a 2021 U.N. General Assembly resolution calling on nations not to arm Myanmar. But while Andrews emphasized the governments are not implicated in his report, arms dealers have extensively used their banking and shipping sectors to facilitate hundreds of millions of dollars in arms transfers. 

The special rapporteur says Singapore has become a major hub for spare parts, raw materials, and manufacturing equipment sent to the Myanmar military that feed its domestic arms factories. Transactions have totaled at least $254 million since the coup. Its banks have been used extensively by arms dealers. Thailand-based entities have conducted $28 million in arms transfers.

He said both countries have received his report and are looking into it.

Neighbor India is also called out for supplying $51 million worth of arms and related materials to the military since the coup. The special rapporteur says both Indian state-owned and private entities are involved in the weapons transfers. 

In the report, India told the special rapporteur that it shares a 1,700-kilometer-long border with Myanmar, and any arms transfers that may have been made to Myanmar were based on commitments made to the civilian government before the coup and centered upon India’s domestic security concerns. But Andrews says shipments continued after the coup.

Blatant behavior

The Myanmar military does not try to hide its purchases. More than $947 million of arms-related trade Andrews identified went directly to entities controlled by the Myanmar military. An additional $58 million was funneled through Myanmar-based military suppliers or sanctioned arms dealers.

Despite Western economic sanctions and arms embargoes, and a U.N. General Assembly resolution calling on all member states “to prevent the flow of arms into Myanmar,” Andrews says aircraft, weapons and other materials continue to get to the junta because of poorly coordinated international sanctions.

“If you don’t enforce sanctions, you don’t have sanctions,” he said.

He also urged countries to target the source of the military’s foreign currency, which it uses to purchase weapons — specifically its lucrative oil and gas sector — and to sanction its foreign trade bank.

“We know that these weapons transfers — we know where they are going and we know how they are being used,” Andrews said. “Since we know how they are being used, we have an obligation to stop aiding and abetting these human rights violations.” 
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Britain’s Prince Harry, his wife Meghan and her mother were involved in a “near catastrophic car chase” involving paparazzi photographers, a spokesperson for the prince said on Wednesday.

It occurred after the couple had attended an awards ceremony held in New York by the Ms. Foundation for Women, where Meghan was honored for her work.  

Pictures that have appeared on social media have shown Harry, Meghan and her mother, Doria Ragland, in a taxi.  

“Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms Ragland were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD (New York Police Department) officers.”

Harry and Meghan stepped down from their royal roles in 2020 and moved to the United States partly because of what they described as intense media harassment.

The prince has long spoken out about his anger about press intrusion which he blames for the death of his mother Princess Diana, who was killed when her limousine crashed as it sped away from chasing paparazzi in Paris.

 
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The symbolism will be palpable when leaders of the world’s rich democracies sit down in Hiroshima, a city whose name evokes the tragedy of war, to tackle a host of challenges including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions in Asia.

The attention on the war in Europe comes just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy completed a whirlwind trip to meet many of the Group of Seven leaders now heading to Japan for the summit starting Friday. That tour was aimed at adding to his country’s weapons stockpile and building political support ahead of a widely anticipated counteroffensive to reclaim lands occupied by Moscow’s forces.

“Ukraine has driven this sense of common purpose” for the G-7, said Matthew P. Goodman, senior vice president for economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He said the new commitments Zelenskyy received just ahead of the summit could push members of the bloc to step up their support even further. “There’s a kind of peer pressure that develops in forums like this,” he explained.

G-7 leaders are also girding for the possibility of renewed conflict in Asia as relations with China deteriorate. They are increasingly concerned, among other things, about what they see as Beijing’s growing assertiveness, and fear that China could could try to seize Taiwan by force, sparking a wider conflict. China claims the self-governing island as its own and regularly sends ships and warplanes near it.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also hopes to highlight the risks of nuclear proliferation during the meeting in Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first atomic bombing.

The prospect of another nuclear attack has been crystalized by nearby North Korea’s nuclear program and spate of recent missile tests, and Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine. China, meanwhile, is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal from an estimated 400 warheads today to 1,500 by 2035, according to Pentagon estimates.

Concerns about the strength of the global economy, rising prices and the debt limit crisis in the U.S. will be high on leaders’ minds.

G-7 finance ministers and central bank chiefs meeting ahead of the summit pledged to enforce sanctions against Russia, tackle rising inflation, bolster financial systems and help countries burdened by heavy debts.

The G-7 includes the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada and Italy, as well as the European Union.

That group is also lavishing more attention on the needs of the Global South — a term to describe mostly developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America — and has invited countries ranging from South American powerhouse Brazil to the tiny Cook Islands in the South Pacific.

By broadening the conversation beyond the world’s richest industrialized nations, the group hopes to strengthen political and economic ties while shoring up support for efforts to isolate Russia and stand up to China’s assertiveness around the world, analysts say.

“Japan was shocked when scores of developing countries were reluctant to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine last year,” said Mireya Solís, director of the Center for East Asian Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution. “Tokyo believes that this act of war by a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council is a direct threat to the foundations of the postwar international system.”

Getting a diverse set of countries to uphold principles like not changing borders by force advances Japan’s foreign policy priorities, and makes good economic sense since their often unsustainable debt loads and rising prices for food and energy are a drag on the global economy, she continued.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also be attending. His country, which is overtaking China as the world’s most populous and sees itself as a rising superpower, is playing host to a meeting of the much broader group of G-20 leading economies later this year.

For host Kishida, this weekend’s meeting is an opportunity to spotlight his country’s more robust foreign policy.

The Japanese prime minister made a surprise trip to Kyiv in March, making him the country’s first postwar leader to travel to a war zone, a visit freighted with symbolism given Japan’s pacifist constitution but one that he was under domestic pressure to take.

Another notable inclusion in Hiroshima is South Korea, a fellow U.S. ally that has rapidly drawn closer to its former colonial occupier Japan as their relations thawed in the face of shared regional security concerns.

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to hold a separate three-way meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.

Sung-Yoon Lee, an East Asia expert at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said that meeting sends a message to China, Russia and North Korea of “solidarity among the democracies in the region and their resolve to stand up to the increasingly threatening autocracies.”

Biden had been expected to make a historic stop in Papua New Guinea and then travel onward to Australia after the Hiroshima meeting, but he scrapped those latter two stops Tuesday to focus on the debt limit debate back in Washington.

The centerpiece of the Australia visit was a meeting of the Quad, a regional security grouping that the U.S. sees as a counterweight to China’s actions in the region. Beijing has criticized the group as an Asian version of the NATO military alliance.

The decision to host the G-7 in Hiroshima is no accident. Kishida, whose family is from the city, hopes the venue will underscore Japan’s “commitment to world peace” and build momentum to “realize the ideal of a world without nuclear weapons,” he wrote on the online news site Japan Forward.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people, then dropped a second on Nagasaki three days later, killing another 70,000. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, effectively ending World War II and decades of Japanese aggression in Asia.

The shell and skeletal dome of one of the riverside buildings that survived the Hiroshima blast are the focal point of the Peace Memorial Park, which leaders are expected to visit.
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European leaders on Tuesday pledged to hold Russia to account for its war against Ukraine and unveiled a mechanism to track the losses and damage inflicted by Moscow’s forces.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were among those who underlined their support for Ukraine in a rare meeting of the Council of Europe rights body as it convenes in Iceland for a two-day summit.

They were joined via video link by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the heels of his tour of European capitals to secure more weapons and aid before an anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces.

The Reykjavik meeting unveiled a new Register of Damages, a mechanism to record and document evidence and claims of damage, loss or injury incurred as a result of the Russian invasion.

‘Moment to push back is now’

The meeting also sought to address other issues, including the plight of thousands of children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territories from Ukraine since the start of the war in what Kyiv and its allies condemn as illegal deportations.

“The moment to push back is now. Democracies like ours must build resilience, so that we can out-cooperate and outcompete those who drive instability,” Sunak said in a speech.

“We will hold Russia accountable for the horrendous war crimes that have been committed and we must also learn the lessons of this war by being prepared to confront threats to our societies before they become too big to deal with,” he added.

Echoing those remarks, Scholz said the council was important “to punish the war crimes of the Russian occupiers and to demand accountability for the enormous damage that Russia inflicts on Ukraine day after day.”

Macron’s office said the council is looking at how the Council of Europe Development Bank could help meet the needs of struggling Ukrainians.

Cyberattacks

Ahead of the leaders’ arrival, several Icelandic public institutions and private sector websites, including the parliament, government and supreme court, were briefly hit by cyberattacks.

The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057 claimed responsibility for the attacks in a post on Telegram, mentioning specifically the Council of Europe meeting and a speech by Zelenskyy.

It is only the fourth summit of the 46-member Council of Europe since it was founded after World War II.

Its democratic values are upheld by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, where citizens can take governments to court in case of human rights violations.

Russia’s membership was suspended the day after it invaded Ukraine. Moscow then left the body hours before a vote to expel it.

Turkey faces removal from the CoE after it failed to implement a 2019 court ruling to release jailed businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala.

Sunak also met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the summit. The leaders agreed to strengthen cooperation on migration with a new working arrangement between British agencies and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, a readout from Sunak’s office said.

Sunak will also make the case for reforming the European Court of Human Rights’ power to block British migrant deportation flights to Rwanda, plans that have been criticized by opponents, charities and religious leaders as inhumane.
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