Україна має отримати від Великої Британії кредит у 1,7 млрд фунтів стерлінгів на розвиток ВМС
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Threats by the leader of the Serb-majority Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, to break his mini-state away from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country shakily balanced between Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs, is adding to growing regional and international dismay at unfolding developments in the Balkans.
Dodik’s threats combined with a major rearmament program by neighboring Serbia are fueling concerns the Balkans could be heading for conflict.
Serbia started negotiating last month with Israel about buying anti-tank missiles and some European Union officials suspect Belgrade may be in the process of reaching out to Ankara to discuss buying the type of Turkish-made armed drones used with devastating effect by Azerbaijan in its recent clash with Armenia.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic says his Balkan neighbors shouldn’t be alarmed about the rearming, which he casts as an updating of his country’s armed forces, and says Belgrade has no offensive intentions. Earlier this year, he said: “Everyone is rearming and we will also rearm. If everyone else, does it, we must too.”
Alarm rising
But Serbia’s neighbors are unsettled by the rearmament program, which has seen Belgrade increase its defense spending by 70% since 2015, and by what they see as Vucic’s increasing nationalist rhetoric.
Belgrade has also provided strong political backing for Dodik.
Last week Christian Schmidt, the specially appointed High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, warned the U.N. Security Council that the war-scarred Balkans is facing its biggest threat since the ethnic cleansing and wars of the early 1990s. “The prospects of further division and conflict are very real,” he said.
And he urged the international community to curb any threatened separatist actions by Bosnian Serbs.
Alarm is also rising in Western European capitals, with officials noting that Vucic’s arms purchases have served to deepen Serbia’s relations with China and Russia, which is sympathetic to Dodik’s ambitions to separate his mini-state and have it join Serbia.
Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has placed the Balkans on the agenda for next month’s meeting of NATO’s foreign ministers in Riga, according to British officials. Germany has been pressing fellow EU member states to prepare sanctions against Dodik. Heiko Maas, German foreign minister, said Saturday that Berlin wants to see “individual measures against those who question the territorial integrity” of Bosnia.
Maas added: “We will not be able to accept the continuation of this irresponsible policy without taking action.” He accused Republika Srpska of “actively working to destroy Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole state.”
A former British foreign minister, William Hague, warned Tuesday: “History has shown many times that we neglect the western Balkans at our peril.” He said: “For years, the leader of the Serb-majority Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has been undermining the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina with active Russian and Serbian support,” he wrote in a commentary for The Times newspaper. “In recent weeks the situation has become grave. Dodik is coming close to secession from Bosnia,” he added.
Unresolved disputes
He and others fear unresolved disputes from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and simmering tensions between Croatia, which has also been rearming, and Serbia are jeopardizing stability in the Western Balkans. The Balkan disputes also include disagreements over the status of Kosovo, the former Serbian province, which declared independence in 2008 after a war that killed more than 13,000 people, mainly ethnic Albanians.
EU-brokered talks aimed at normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo restarted recently but a cross-border dispute in September prompted by Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti decision not to recognize Serbian automobile license plates saw Belgrade deploy tanks to its border with Kosovo and Vucic announce economic and political sanctions against the former Serb province.
The Serb leader urged the international community to intervene and warned if it didn’t “we will know how to protect our country, there is no doubt about it.” Hundreds of Kosovo Serbs closed a key border road and Kosovo officials dispatched extra police units.
But it is Dodik’s secession talk that is of the most immediate worry for Western powers, say U.S. and European diplomats. They fear that if Dodik tries to tear Bosnia apart it would risk triggering a new Balkans conflict that could all too easily reignite disputes between Serbia and Croatia as well as between Serbia and Kosovo, plunging the Western Balkans into a replay of the vicious inter-ethnic wars that erupted on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The 1995 U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords set up the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia as an international protectorate with complex power-sharing constitutional arrangements among the three principal ethnic groups that make it up. It has two semi-autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska but Dodik has threatened to pull out of Bosnia’s state-level institutions, including the army and has been militarizing his police which could serve as a reconstituted ethnic Bosnian Serb armed force. He has also said he wants to set up a separate judiciary.
The 62-year-old Dodik last month warned he will speed up his secession plans, if Western sanctions are imposed on him, telling Gabriel Escobar, a U.S. envoy, “F*** the sanctions,” according to a leaked transcript of the meeting. “If you want to talk to me, then stop threatening me,” he told Escobar.
Dodik has warned that any NATO military intervention aimed at preventing him from breaking up Bosnia will be opposed by his “friends,” seen as a reference to the rearmed Serbia and Russia. Vucic appeared last month to rein in Dodik, saying, “It is important to preserve peace and show that Republika Srpska is not the source of the problem, but that we are all ready to talk in the region.”
But he added Serbia will not join in any sanctions against Republika Srpska.
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The US Naval Station at Rota in the south of Spain has often been the target of protests by anti-war activists and environmentalists. But ever since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged Spain’s tourism industry, it has been a vastly different scenario. Jon Spier narrates this report by Alfonso Beato in Rota. Producer: Rob Raffaele.
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Мігранти спробували зламати паркан на білорусько-польському кордоні. Польські силовики застосували сльозогінний газ та водомети
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15 листопада у центрі Києва відбулася акція «Порожні стільці» на підтримку ув’язнених Росією українців
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15 листопада голова правління НАК «Нафтогаз України» Юрій Вітренко повідомив, що німецький регулятор допустив «Нафтогаз» до сертифікації «Північного потоку-2»
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«Це викликає занепокоєння, оскільки демонструє, що Росія розробляє нові системи зброї, здатні збивати супутники, нищити важливі космічні можливості базової інфраструктури на Землі»
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Polish border forces on Wednesday said they were attacked with stones by migrants at the border with Belarus and responded by using water cannons against them.
The Border Guard agency posted video on Twitter showing a water cannon being directed across the border at a group of migrants in a makeshift camp in freezing temperatures.
Polish police said one officer was seriously injured. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital and it is likely his skull was fractured after being hit by an object.
The situation marks an escalation in a tense migration and political border crisis where the lives of thousands of migrants are at stake.
Poland’s Defense Ministry said its soldiers and other border forces were attacked with stones and other objects.
The ministry also said that Belarusian forces tried to destroy fencing along the countries’ common border, while the Interior Ministry posted video apparently showing migrants trying to tear down a fence.
There was no way to independently verify what was happening because a state of emergency in Poland is keeping reporters and human rights workers out of the border area. In Belarus journalists face severe restrictions on their ability to report as well, with only a few present at the border.
At one point Tuesday a Polish independent broadcaster, TVN24, was forced to rely on CNN in order to show a picture of the border not filtered through government authorities.
Poland’s parliament is expected Tuesday to take up a legislative proposal that would regulate the ability of citizens to move in the area of the border with Belarus after the state of emergency ends at this end of this month.
The state of emergency was imposed at the beginning of September as a large number of migrants from the Middle East sought to cross into Poland from Belarus.
The border is also part of the European Union’s eastern border, and the EU accuses the authoritarian regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of fomenting a migration crisis in order to pressure the bloc.
The EU has been putting pressure on airlines to stop transporting Syrians, Iraqis and others to Belarus.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is urging its citizens trapped at the border to return home.
Some 200 Iraqi nationals who arrived in Belarus with the intention of crossing into the EU reached out to the Iraqi embassy in Russia and expressed a desire to return to their homeland, an embassy spokesman told the Interfax agency on Tuesday.
The spokesman added that an evacuation flight will take place on Thursday and all those wishing to return to Iraq are already in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, awaiting the flight. There were no issues with transporting the migrants from the border to Minsk, the diplomat told Interfax, and Belarusian authorities have provided all the necessary assistance.
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Russian officials on Tuesday rejected accusations that they endangered astronauts aboard the International Space Station by conducting a weapons test that created more than 1,500 pieces of space junk.
U.S. officials on Monday accused Russia of destroying an old satellite with a missile in what they called a reckless and irresponsible strike. The debris could do major damage to the space station as it is orbiting at 17,500 mph (28,000 kph).
Astronauts now face four times greater risk than normal, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told The Associated Press.
The test clearly demonstrates that Russia, “despite its claims of opposing the weaponization of outer space, is willing to … imperil the exploration and use of outer space by all nations through its reckless and irresponsible behavior,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos wouldn’t confirm or deny that the strike took place, saying only that “unconditional safety of the crew has been and remains our main priority” in a vague online statement released Tuesday.
Russia’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday confirmed carrying out a test and destroying a defunct satellite that has been in orbit since 1982, but insisted that “the U.S. knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities” and called remarks by U.S. officials “hypocritical.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also charged that it is “hypocrisy” to say that Russia creates risks for peaceful activities in space.
Once the situation became clear early Monday morning, the four Americans, one German and two Russians on board the International Space Station were ordered to immediately seek shelter in their docked capsules. They spent two hours in the two capsules, finally emerging only to have to close and reopen hatches to the station’s individual labs on every orbit, or 1 1/2 hours, as they passed near or through the debris.
NASA Mission Control said the heightened threat could continue to interrupt the astronauts’ science research and other work. Four of the seven crew members only arrived at the orbiting outpost Thursday night.
A similar weapons test by China in 2007 also resulted in countless pieces of debris. One of those threatened to come dangerously close to the space station last week. While it later was dismissed as a risk, NASA had the station move anyway.
Anti-satellite missile tests by the U.S. in 2008 and India in 2019 were conducted at much lower altitudes, well below the space station at about 260 miles (420 kilometers.)
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З повідомлень випливає, що привід є технічним
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Він висловив сподівання на допомогу у врегулюванні міграційної кризи з боку Об’єднаних Арабських Еміратів
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З 1 серпня по 1 жовтня ДМС визнала біженцями дев’ятьох афганських громадян, чотирьох – особами, які потребують додаткового захисту
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Центральна виборча комісія на засіданні 9 листопада визнала Козиря, Войцехівського та Кострійчука обраними депутатами
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Germany’s capital, Berlin, joined several German states Monday in limiting access to restaurants, cinemas, museums and concert venues to only people who have been vaccinated or recently recovered, as new COVID-19 cases continue to surge.
The country’s infectious disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, reported Monday that the country’s number of new cases per 100,000 residents in the past seven days climbed to 303, the first time the rate climbed over 300 since the pandemic began. The record comes just one week since an unprecedented jump to over 200 new cases per 100,000 residents.
Only 67.5% of the German population is fully vaccinated. The highly contagious delta variant has run rampant through the unvaccinated population as the temperature drops and people stay indoors.
The German parliament is scheduled to vote Thursday on a new legal framework for COVID-19 restrictions drawn up by the three parties expected to make up the nation’s next ruling coalition — the Social Democrats, the Green Party and the Free Democrats. The plans are reportedly being strengthened to allow for more strict contact restrictions than originally planned.
The coalition, which hopes to finalize its formation and take office early next month, is also expected to introduce a vaccine mandate in some areas, a step that officials have so far resisted.
Reports say the new laws will give Germany’s 16 states a series of options they can apply individually, given that the infection rate varies greatly across the country. Higher rates have been detected in regions with the lowest vaccination rates, namely eastern and southern Germany.
your ad hereBelarus appeared to be moving Monday to de-escalate a long-running standoff with Poland and the European Union. Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said he is preparing to start repatriating around 4,000 asylum-seekers camped out in freezing temperatures at the border with Poland.
“Active work is underway in this area, to convince people —please, return home,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying by state news agency Belta. But he added the caveat: “Nobody wants to go back.”
Poland — as well as Lithuania and Latvia — have been militarizing their borders with Belarus to try to stop record numbers of migrants, mainly from Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, attempting to cross their borders. They accuse Lukashenko of weaponizing human desperation by using asylum-seekers as pawns in reprisal for the EU’s imposing sanctions on Belarus for last year’s disputed elections. The election was widely seen as rigged.
Lukashenko’s remarks came as European Union leaders advanced a raft of new sanctions against Belarus targeting officials, businesses and airlines involved in the organized ferrying of migrants from the Middle East and the Gulf to the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
The sanctions package contains two parts targeting migration facilitators and also those accused of human rights abuses inside Belarus, where Lukashenko has overseen a harsh crackdown on protesters challenging the legitimacy of his rule.
Belavia, the Belarusian state-owned airline, is high on the target list and the company’s existing and future aircraft leasing contracts would be impacted. But ahead of the imposition of new EU sanctions, the airline announced it would stop flying travelers from Dubai who have come from several other Middle Eastern countries. Iraq also announced it is planning a repatriation flight Thursday for Iraqis stranded on the Belarusian-Polish border.
Before a meeting in Brussels of EU foreign ministers to discuss fresh sanctions, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said, “Today we are going to approve a new package of sanctions against Belarusian people responsible for what’s happening … and we are going to launch a framework in order to implement other sanctions to other people, airlines, travel agencies and everybody involved on this illegal push of migrants in our borders.”
Migrant crisis
Borrell told reporters he spoke with the Belarusian foreign minister telling him “The situation on the border was completely unacceptable and that humanitarian help was needed.”
Meanwhile, Poland is calling on NATO to intervene in the migrant crisis on the border with Belarus. “It is not enough just for us to publicly express our concern. Now we need concrete steps and the commitment of the entire alliance,” Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said Sunday. He said Poland, Lithuania and Latvia may request a meeting under Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty which requires member states to consult when the territorial integrity of another is being compromised.
Lukashenko has half-heartedly denied he has been seeking to needle or blackmail Europe by trying to fuel a migrant crisis, but said he was reacting to foreign pressure. “We are not blackmailing anyone with illegal immigration,” he told journalists in Minsk’s Independence Palace in August. “We’re not threatening anyone. But you have put us in such circumstances that we are forced to react. And we’re reacting,” he said.
In October alone, Poland recorded 15,000 attempted illegal border crossings. Last week, the country’s defense minister tweeted that his government had boosted the number of Polish troops sent to the border to 12,000, up from the 10,000 deployed earlier.
Katarzyna Zdanowicz, a spokesperson for the Polish Border Guard, said Monday that the situation at the border in the Kuznica area was “very tense and very dangerous.” She said migrants had been throwing stones at Polish border guards and “weapons” were being “pointed towards our servicemen” with a flare fired at them. Polish officials say Belarusian guards have been encouraging migrants to trample down obstacles and cut wire fences, handing them bolt-cutters.
In the last few days, several airlines and governments have scrambled to avoid being impacted by EU sanctions. Syria’s Cham Wings Airlines suspended flights between Damascus and Minsk Saturday. Turkey said it will ban Syrian, Yemeni, and Iraqi citizens from boarding flights from Istanbul to Minsk. The Iraqi government suspended direct flights between Iraq and Belarus last week.
But NATO officials and EU diplomats appear less than convinced that Lukashenko is sincere about ending the high-stakes standoff, which they see as part of a broader pattern of provocations ultimately authored and stoked by Moscow.
They point to the Belarusian leader’s comment that the migrants do not want to be repatriated. And they say Belarusian authorities Monday encouraged thousands of migrants sheltering in a migrant camp in the village of Bruzgi to join the throng already on the border by circulating a rumor in the camp that the Polish government was about to open the border.
Polish authorities sent out SMS messages saying the information was a “total lie,” and in the text messages: “Poland won’t let migrants pass to Germany. It will protect its border. Don’t get fooled, don’t try to take any action.”
Poland has accused the Kremlin of pulling Belarusian strings and Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has called on Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to intervene, saying he could bring an end to the migrant crisis with a phone call to his ally Lukashenko, who has also raised the prospects of shutting down a pipeline running through Belarus carrying natural gas to Western Europe from Russia.
Russia
In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin rejected accusations that Russia is stoking the migrant crisis, saying Western powers had “a desire to place their own problems at somebody else’s door. It’s their own fault.”
But Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said the migrant crisis is part of a Kremlin strategy of hybrid warfare. He linked it with a Russian military build-up on the border of Ukraine, which is also prompting alarm in Washington, Kyiv, and European capitals.
“When we see migrants used as a weapon, when we see disinformation used as a weapon, when we see gas used as a weapon, and soldiers and their guns, these are not separate elements,” Ukraine’s top diplomat said in an interview with the Politico.eu website.
After meeting with Kuleba, NATO’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg warned Monday that the Russian military build-up near the Ukrainian border has reduced the time the West will have to prepare for any incursion into Ukraine. He said the Western alliance needs to be “realistic” following warnings last week by US intelligence officials that Moscow could be planning a repeat of its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“We see an unusual concentration of troops, and we know that Russia has been willing to use these types of military capability before to conduct aggressive actions against Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. Russia has dismissed talk of an invasion as “alarmist” and accuses Western powers of provoking tensions in the region, saying there has been an uptick in military activity by the West, mirroring the European and American claims against it.
Russia’s defense ministry said last week it had scrambled a Sukhoi SU-30 warplane to intercept a British spy plane, a British Boeing RC-135, when it neared Crimea.
Russia assembled around 100,000 troops near the Ukraine border earlier this year, saying they were there for training. Moscow later announced their withdrawal, but Ukraine claims most of the force remained in the region. Western and Ukrainian officials say more Russian units, including elite ones, have been deployed near the border, with some troop movements happening covertly overnight.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that Washington did not immediately know what to make of the massing of tens of thousands of Russian troops along the Ukraine border. “We’ve seen this before. … What does this mean? We don’t know yet, too early to tell,” he said.
“Everyone is wondering, what’s Putin going to do? I think he loves it when we ask those questions,” said David Kramer, who was assistant secretary of state in the administration of George W. Bush. He said the Kremlin thrives on discomfiting the West by being unpredictable.
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За словами урядової уповноваженої з гендерної політики, українське суспільство «дуже позитивно» ставиться до призначень жінок на керівні посади
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The British government Monday announced Monday an expansion of the nation’s COVID-19 booster shot program to people ages 40 and up, to fight off a potential winter surge of the deadly disease.
Until now, only British residents ages 50 and up, those clinically vulnerable because of underlying conditions, and frontline health workers were eligible for booster shots. But at a news briefing in London, the chairman of Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, Wei Shen Lin, announced the extension to those ages 40 and up who have been fully vaccinated for at least six months.
He said, as with the original booster program, either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines can be used as the booster dose, regardless of the type of vaccine originally received.
The committee also recommended a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for young people between the ages of 16 and 18. In August, the committee had advised only one dose of the vaccine for people of that age group, but would review the data, and were anticipating that a second dose may well be advised. Monday, the committee chairman said that was “indeed the case.”
The chief executive of Britain’s drug regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Dr. June Raine, said they had closely monitored the use of the vaccines in people under 18, and their use raised no additional safety issues specific to this age group.
Speaking via video conference, British Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said the data so far showed that adults over age 60 who have received the booster were achieving over 90% protection against symptomatic illness and he expected protection against hospitalization and death to be even higher.
He said if the booster program is successful and participation numbers are high, it would “massively reduce the worry about hospitalization and death due to COVID at Christmas and for the rest of this winter, for literally millions of people.”
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