Очолити його має людина, яка є «визнаним фахівцем у галузі міжнародного права» та спеціалізується на воєнних злочинах, злочинах проти людяності, геноциду, агресії
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Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, Western nations have sidelined a raft of Russian artists, dancers and musicians with links to President Vladimir Putin. That includes star opera singer Anna Netrebko, who was dropped by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Netrebko, however, is making a comeback of sorts with an appearance Wednesday night in Paris — underscoring a broader debate over the limits of cultural boycotts.
Soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska received a standing ovation starring earlier this month in Puccini’s Turandot. The Ukrainian singer took her curtain call at New York’s Metropolitan Opera draped in her country’s flag.
Celebrated Russian sorprano Anna Netrebko was originally tapped for the role. But the war in Ukraine changed that. Netrebko has condemned the conflict, but not Russian President Vladimir Putin.
She publicly endorsed Putin’s reelection in 2012, although not in 2018. In 2014, she was photographed alongside a Russian-backed separatist leader from Ukraine’s Donbas region. She recently told Le Monde newspaper her intentions hadn’t been political, and said she was uninformed about the area’s history.
Now Netrebko is back on stage — singing at the Paris Philharmonic with another Russian, mezzo-soprano Elena Maximova. Beyond a last-minute appearance in Monaco, the event is considered her formal return to the Western stage.
The Paris Philharmonic declined an interview request. But in a statement, it said that while it has canceled artists formally linked to the Russian government, it aims to keep ties whenever possible with those who are not. After Netrebko’s criticism of the war, it noted, Russia’s Duma, the lower house of parliament, called her a traitor.
The Paris institution has a different position from the Metropolitan’s, where Netrebko will not be singing for the foreseeable future.
Russian singers aren’t the only ones under Western scrutiny. Dancers and other Russian artists are being boycotted for their ties to Moscow. It’s a very different situation from Cold War days, when artists from the United States and the former Soviet Union were often welcomed on each other’s stages.
“The two superpowers were in a competition for hearts and minds the world over, and they were attempting to demonstrate to the world and to one another’s populations that theirs was the superior system,” said Kenneth Platt, a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “So from the perspective of each of the superpowers, it was their interest to showcase their culture and to engage their cultural exchanges.”
Today, it will be hard for Russia to overcome Western revulsion over its reported atrocities in Ukraine. Still, Platt is one who does not support a blanket boycott of Russian artists.
“My basic position on canceling and national identities is if you want to cancel people, cancel them because they are in support of the war, or aligned with this inimical Russian state or because their books and films are pro-war. Not because they are Russians, or their books are Russian,” he said.
That’s also the position of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, who spoke to France 24 TV at the Cannes Film Festival going on now. The festival has banned Russians with official ties to the Kremlin and slotted time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to speak at the venue via video link.
“Yet I do not agree with excluding those Russian authors, artists, filmmakers who are against this war, who are just like the rest of the civilized world — just trying to fight against the evil,” he said.
Loznitsa is not in lockstep with some of his compatriots who back a broader ban of Russian artists.
Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania’s Platt has his doubts about Netrebko’s operatic return.
“I think Ms. Netrebko has a prominent public voice,” he said. “I would want her to see her using that voice far more vociferously to condemn this war and Putin’s dictatorial regime in the strongest possible terms — much more so than she has done — before welcoming her back into the limelight.”
The Paris Philharmonic has also welcomed Ukrainian musicians who fled the war in their homeland, It’s working with the head of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra to place them in various French orchestras. Some have already performed in concerts in recent weeks.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to be having an unanticipated impact in cyberspace — a decrease in the number of ransomware attacks.
“We have seen a recent decline since the Ukrainian invasion,” Rob Joyce, the U.S. National Security Agency’s director of cybersecurity, told a virtual forum Wednesday.
Joyce said one reason for the decrease in ransomware attacks since the February 24 invasion is likely improved awareness and defensive measures by U.S. businesses.
He also said some of it is tied to measures the United States and its Western allies have taken against Moscow in response to the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve definitively seen the criminal actors in Russia complain that the functions of sanctions and the distance of their ability to use credit cards and other payment methods to get Western infrastructure to run these [ransomware] attacks have become much more difficult,” Joyce told The Cipher Brief’s Cyber Initiatives Group.
“We’ve seen that have an impact on their [Russia’s] operations,” he added. “It’s driving the trend down a little bit.”
Just days after Russian forces entered Ukraine, U.S. cybersecurity officials renewed their “Shields Up” awareness campaign, encouraging companies to take additional security precautions to protect against potential cyberattacks by Russia itself or by criminal hackers working on Moscow’s behalf.
And those officials caution Russia still has the capability to inflict more damage in cyberspace.
“Russia is continuing to explore options for potential cyberattacks,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Matthew Hartman told a meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week.
“We are seeing glimpses into targeting and into access development,” Hartman said, noting Russia has for now held back from launching any major cyberattacks against the West. “We do not know at what point a calculus may change.”
FBI cyber officials have likewise voiced concern that it could be a matter of time before the Kremlin authorizes cyberattacks targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, including against the energy, finance and telecommunication sectors.
U.S. and NATO officials on Wednesday also cautioned that it would be a mistake to think that just because there have been few signs of “catastrophic effects” that Russia has not tried to leverage its cyber capabilities to its advantage.
“It has been happening and it’s still happening,” said Stefanie Metka, head of the Cyber Threat Analysis Branch at NATO. “There’s a lot of cyber activity that’s happening all the time and probably we won’t know the full extent of it until we turn the computers back on.”
Said the NSA’s Joyce: “If you look at Ukraine, they have been heavily targeted. What we’ve seen are a number of wiper viruses, seven or eight different or unique wiper viruses that have been thrown into the ecosystem of Ukraine and its near abroad.” Wiper viruses are viruses that erase a computer’s memory.
These included a cyberattack against a satellite communications company, which hampered the ability of Ukraine’s military to communicate and had spillover effects across Europe.
But with help from the U.S. and other allies, Ukraine was able to mitigate the impact, Joyce said.
“The Ukrainians have been under threat and under pressure for a number of years, and so they have continued to adapt and improve and develop their tradecraft to the point where they mount a good defense and, equally as important, they mount a great incident response,” he said.
Some cybersecurity experts say that ability to respond might be one of the biggest take-aways, so far, from the invasion.
“Resiliency matters,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the former chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, at Wednesday’s virtual forum. “The Ukrainians have gotten really, really good at rebuilding networks, quickly mitigating damage.”
Another key lesson, he said, is the limitations of cyber.
“If you’ve got kinetic options, if you can create a crater somewhere, take out a substation, take out a communication system, that’s what you’re going to prefer to use,” Alperovitch said. “That’s what’s easiest [to do] to get lasting damage.”
your ad hereПодоляк вважає, що такий указ потрібний Володимиру Путіну виключно як «елемент тотального пропагандистського впливу» на внутрішню аудиторію
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У дипломатичному відомстві України наголошують, що «указ президента Росії є юридично нікчемним та не матиме правових наслідків»
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Pope Francis on Wednesday said he was “heartbroken” by the shooting at a school in Texas that killed at least 19 children and two teachers, calling for greater controls on weapons.
The crowed in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly general audience applauded his appeal, made a day after worst school shooting in the United States in nearly a decade.
“I am heartbroken by the massacre at the elementary school in Texas. I pray for the children and the adults who were killed and for their families,” Francis said of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
“It is time to say ‘enough’ to the indiscriminate trafficking of weapons. Let us all make a commitment so that tragedies like this cannot happen again,” he said.
Speaking from the White House hours after the shooting, a visibly shaken President Joe Biden urged Americans to stand up to the politically powerful gun lobby, which he blamed for blocking enactment of tougher firearms safety laws.
Francis has often taken on the weapons industry. In 2015 he said people who manufacture weapons or invest in weapons industries are hypocrites if they call themselves Christian.
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У Єврокомісії зауважують, що поки російська агресія проти України триває, надзвичайно важливо, щоб обмежувальні заходи ЄС були повністю реалізовані
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other senior officials bear responsibility for a culture of rule-breaking that resulted in several parties that breached the U.K.’s COVID-19 lockdown rules, a report into the events said Wednesday.
Revelations that Johnson and his staff repeatedly flouted the rules they imposed on others have elicited outrage in Britain and led to calls from opponents for the prime minister to resign.
Johnson said he took “full responsibility for everything that took place” but that he would not step down.
In her report into the “partygate” scandal, senior civil servant Sue Gray said the “senior leadership team … must bear responsibility” for a culture that allowed events to take place that “should not have been allowed to happen.”
Gray investigated 16 gatherings attended by Johnson and his staff in 2020 and 2021 while people in the U.K. were barred from socializing, or even from visiting sick and dying relatives, because of coronavirus restrictions.
Gray said there had been “failures of leadership and judgment in No. 10,” a reference to the address of the prime minister’s office.
“Those in the most junior positions attended gatherings at which their seniors were present, or indeed organized,” she said.
A separate police investigation resulted in 83 people getting hit with fines, including Johnson — making him the first British prime minister ever found to have broken the law while in office.
Speaking to lawmakers after the report was published, Johnson said he was sorry but again insisted again that he did not knowingly break any rules.
The prime minister said he was “humbled” and had “learned a lesson” but that it was now time to “move on” and focus on the government’s priorities.
Critics, some of them inside Johnson’s Conservative Party, have said the prime minister has lied to Parliament about the events. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament are expected to resign.
Johnson said Wednesday that when he told Parliament last year that no rules were broken and there were no parties, “it was what I believed to be true.”
The British media and opposition politicians have found that hard to square with staff member’s accounts of “bring your own booze” parties and regular “wine time Fridays” in the prime minister’s 10 Downing St. office at the height of the pandemic.
Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said Gray’s report was a “catalogue of criminality.” Starmer said Johnson’s government had “treated the sacrifices of the British people with utter contempt.”
Much of Gray’s 37-page report was devoted to a detailed account of the events, including a May 2020 party in the Downing Street garden to which “the Prime Minister brought cheese and wine from his flat” and a party the following month at which “one individual was sick” and “there was a minor altercation between two other individuals.”
At another party — held the night before the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip — revelers in the garden broke a swing belonging to Johnson’s toddler son Wilf and partied until 4 a.m.
“Many will be dismayed that behavior of this kind took place on this scale at the heart of government,” Gray wrote. “The public have a right to expect the very highest standards of behavior in such places and clearly what happened fell well short of this.”
Johnson has clung on to power so far, partly because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine diverted public and political attention. Some Conservatives who considered seeking a no-confidence vote in their leader decided it would be rash to push Johnson out in the middle of the war, which is destabilizing Europe and fueling a cost-of-living crisis.
The prime minister got a further reprieve when the Metropolitan Police told him last week that he wouldn’t be getting any more fines even though he attended several events under investigation.
But Gray’s conclusions could revive calls from Conservative lawmakers for a no-confidence vote in the leader who won them a big parliamentary majority just over two years ago. Under party rules, such a vote is triggered if 15% of party lawmakers — currently 54 people — write letters calling for one.
If Johnson lost such a vote, he would be replaced as Conservative leader and prime minister. It’s unclear how many letters have been submitted so far.
Environment Secretary George Eustice defended the prime minister on Wednesday but acknowledged that the “boundary between what was acceptable and what wasn’t got blurred, and that was a mistake.”
“The prime minister himself has accepted that and recognizes there were of course failings and therefore there’s got to be some changes to the way the place is run,” Eustice told Times Radio.
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Частина Херсонської та Запорізької областей перебувають під російською окупацією.
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Роман Абрамович виставив футбольний клуб на продаж на початку березня
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«Ми боролися з питанням закриття неба. Потім, крок за кроком, це питання забули. Хтось забув – ми не забули»
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For full coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, visit Flashpoint Ukraine.
The latest developments in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. All times EDT:
4:30 a.m.: Lithuania’s defense ministry said Wednesday that it will transfer 20 M113 armored personnel carriers, military trucks and de-mining vehicles to Ukraine.
“The coordinated help from us and the allies is the deciding factor for the Ukrainian victory,” Reuters reported, citing defense minister Arvydas Anusauskas’ statement.
The vehicles are worth a total of 15.5 million euros, said the ministry. Previously, Lithuania has provided military support to Ukraine worth 100 million euros, the report added.
4:00 a.m.: The United States said it will not extend a waiver, set to expire Wednesday, that allowed Russia to pay back its debts to international investors.
The Treasury Department had let Russia use U.S. banks to make the payments, saying that was a temporary measure meant to provide an “orderly transition” and allow for the investors to sell their stakes.
Closing that pathway raises the prospect that Russia may default on its debt.
3:40 a.m.: Speaking by video link to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Zelenskyy used part of his address Wednesday to express his condolences to the family members of those killed Tuesday in a mass shooting at a U.S. elementary school.
“As far as I know, 21 people were killed, including 19 children. This is terrible, to have victims of shooters in peaceful time,” he said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also expressed his condolences saying “as a nation that goes through the pain of losing innocent young lives, Ukraine shares the pain of our U.S. friends. We stand in solidarity with you at this difficult time.”
3:25 a.m.: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said Wednesday that his country is ready to provide a humanitarian corridor for vessels carrying food to leave Ukraine, Reuters reported, citing the Interfax news agency.
The news agency quoted Rudenko saying Russia plans to discuss possibilities of prisoner exchange with Ukraine after surrendered prisoners are put on trial for war crimes, a demand made by Russia and separatist officials, according to Reuters.
2:50 a.m.: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiyy said on Wednesday that he was only willing to talk directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin and not via intermediators, Reuters reported.
He added that if the Russian President “understands reality” there was the possibility of finding a diplomatic way out of the conflict. Speaking to an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelenskyy said that his country will fight until it recovers all its territory.
Zelenskyy added that a first step toward talks with Russia would be for Russian forces to withdraw back to the lines that were in place before Russia launched its invasion in late February. There has been no sign of movement toward a negotiated end to the conflict in recent weeks with both sides accusing the other of not being willing to engage in talks.
Questions have swirled about whether a negotiated solution with Putin is possible. VOA’s Dora Mekouar has the story.
2:40 a.m.: Delegations from Sweden and Finland were in Ankara on Wednesday for talks with Turkish officials about the two nations’ applications to join NATO, which have been met with opposition from Turkey.
Turkey accused Sweden and Finland of harboring people linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group and followers of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey says orchestrated a 2016 coup attempt.
NATO bids need approval from all of the alliance’s current members. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said he is confident any objections will be overcome and both Sweden and Finland will be welcomed into the alliance.
The Associated Press has an update on scheduled talks with Turkish officials as delegations from the two countries are set to discuss obstacles to joining the NATO alliance.
1:50 a.m.: As Russian forces bombarded eastern Ukraine, including Severodonetsk in the Luhansk region, Zelenskyy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak pushed foreign governments to take action to pressure Russia to end its fighting in Ukraine.
“The duration of this war depends on the speed of imposing energy sanctions and weapons supply,” Podolyak said in a Twitter post Wednesday.
Podolyak’s post followed Zelenskyy’s message late Tuesday in which he said sending Ukraine rocket-propelled grenades, tanks, anti-ship missiles and other weapons is “the best investment” to prevent future Russian aggression.
1:15 a.m.: The British defense ministry said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is significantly impacting the global grain supply due to lack of “merchant shipping activity in or out of Odesa since the start of the war” in its daily intelligence report published Wednesday.
“Russia’s subsequent naval blockade of key Black Sea ports has deterred the commercial shipping industry from operating in the area,” the report said, adding “overland export mechanisms are highly unlikely to substitute for the shortfall in shipping capacity caused by the Russian blockade.”
12:15 a.m.: As the war entered its fourth month on Wednesday, Russian forces were relentlessly bombarding the industrial city of Severodonetsk while attempting its encirclement, a key goal of recent fighting in the Donbas region, the Agence France-Presse reported.
Russian troops are advancing in eastern Ukraine, pounding key cities and aiming “to destroy everything there,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday, as Moscow signaled it was digging in for a long war against its neighbor, the AFP said.
12:01 a.m.: Russian-born tennis star Daria Saville, who plays for Australia, says she cannot go back to Russia because she spoke publicly against its invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reported.
“I can’t really go back to Russia,” she said to the media at the French Open.
Saville wore yellow and blue, the colors of Ukraine, at the Paris Open in March and urged Vladimir Putin to stop the war and the Russian army to return home in a post on social media.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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Міністр подякував компанії за закриття російських пропагандистських каналів на YouTube та блокування низки для користувачів із Росії
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Prominent Ukrainian anti-corruption campaigners say they have seen no signs that their armed forces are misusing Western military supplies in the three months since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a country long perceived as among the world’s most corrupt.
The head of the Ukrainian government’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP), Oleksandr Novikov, told VOA in a May 17 interview that his counterparts at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), a sister agency, had not opened any new investigations into high level corruption in the Ukrainian military since the full-scale Russian invasion started on February 24.
Novikov’s NACP, one of Ukraine’s three main official anti-corruption bodies, develops regulations aimed at preventing corruption and seeks to ensure compliance. NABU investigates corruption and prepares cases for prosecution, while the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) charges and prosecutes suspects.
Novikov appointed NABU’s last chief, Artem Sytnyk, as his deputy earlier this month. Asked if there have been any recent government investigations of high-level corruption in the military, Novikov said, “I know NABU did not have any new cases since February 24.”
Asked for a comment, NABU emailed VOA to say that its acting director, Gizo Uglava, who replaced Sytnyk last month, could not discuss the matter “due to its sensitivity.”
Novikov said each delivery of Western military aid is monitored by a separate intelligence officer of the Security Service of Ukraine. He said the SSU monitoring is part of Kyiv’s “rigorous process that guarantees the integrity” of those supplies.
Ukraine’s handling of the Western military aid is under increasing scrutiny in the U.S., which last week approved sending more weapons and equipment to Kyiv after supplying several billion dollars’ worth of security assistance in recent months to help it repel the Russian invaders.
Corruption had been rampant in the Ukrainian defense industry until 2014, leaving the military unable to function effectively that year as Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and helped pro-Russian separatists seize parts of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
U.S. Ambassador Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017 to 2019, told VOA there was an improvement after 2014 as the U.S., Canada and other nations advised Kyiv in fighting corruption within its defense establishment.
But Ukraine still had much work to do to improve its global reputation prior to February 24. It ranked a lowly 122 out of 180 countries in the 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, a Berlin-based research group whose annual corruption rankings are among the world’s most influential. Ukraine’s CPI ranking had been even lower at 144 in 2013.
In an article published last month, CNN cited U.S. defense officials and analysts as saying the lack of U.S. military personnel inside Ukraine means Washington has few ways to track how Kyiv uses Western military supplies, which they fear could be trafficked in the long run.
There are no indications of Western military supplies in Ukraine being diverted in recent months, according to a former U.S. official involved in training and equipping Ukraine’s armed forces after 2014. The source spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the issue.
The executive director of Transparency International’s Ukraine branch, Andrii Borovyk, told VOA that he also has not seen any concrete reports of recent corruption in the Ukrainian military.
His group had appealed to Ukrainians in an April 29 statement to report such activity to relevant authorities.
Speaking via Zoom on May 18, Borovyk said one reason for the lack of corruption reporting is Ukraine’s martial law, under which the government has stopped publishing details about what it is buying and for what prices. “I’m not saying there is no corruption. In this uncertain situation, I’m sure there are people who want to profit from government procurement processes,” he said.
The SSU reported on May 19 that it busted a scheme by local officials to illegally sell more than 1,000 bulletproof vests that had been produced by a Ukrainian company for provision to Ukrainian security personnel at no cost. The SSU said the vests were worth $407,000.
The rarity of such public reporting about military-related corruption, Borovyk said, also reflects a shift in priorities for Ukraine’s independent and governmental anti-corruption campaigners.
“We all work only toward one aim, which is for a victory against Russia,” Borovyk said. “If we will not have a country, where are we going to fight corruption? We want to build up the rule of law here in Ukraine.”
Yuri Nikolov, another Ukrainian anti-corruption researcher who co-founded independent group Nashi Groshi (Our Money), told VOA in a May 19 interview that he believes Russia’s full-scale invasion has effectively forced corrupt actors in the Ukrainian military to stop illicit behavior.
“That [Western] military hardware is the only thing that will protect our lives,” Nikolov said. “That’s why we are not interested in stealing it. It is more needed in the battlefields.”
Volker, now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said theft of Western military supplies under such circumstances would be viewed by many Ukrainians as treason, a much more serious offense than the petty or systemic corruption that existed before.
The assertion that wartime pressures have stamped out military corruption in Ukraine is viewed skeptically by former U.S. diplomat James Wasserstrom, who served as an anticorruption advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and led a U.S. government oversight team that reported on corruption in Afghanistan.
Wasserstrom later worked in Ukraine from 2016 to 2019 as an international expert for an independent committee monitoring defense sector corruption. That committee evolved into Ukraine’s Independent Anti-Corruption Commission, known by its Ukrainian acronym NAKO, and is a partner organization of Transparency International.
Speaking to VOA on May 18, Wasserstrom was unimpressed by NACP chief Novikov’s assertion that SSU intelligence agents were safeguarding Western military supplies. He noted a 2017 NAKO study citing Ukrainian media accusations that Ukrainian security service personnel were involved in illegal trading of goods between government-controlled territory and regions run by pro-Russian separatists.
“I’ve heard nothing that would indicate any change in SSU behavior in the last three years,” Wasserstrom said, adding that assigning the agency to monitor Western military aid is “like putting a fox in charge of the henhouse.”
Wasserstrom also was skeptical about independent campaigner Borovyk’s assertion that Ukraine’s anti-corruption organizations have been so pre-occupied with helping their armed forces to fight Russian invaders that investigating corruption within those Ukrainian forces is not a priority. He noted that his former investigative committee had worked in Kyiv while the Ukrainian military was fighting pro-Russian separatists in the east.
“Just because you’re fighting a war does not mean that you have to tolerate corruption. You don’t need to. It’s a false choice,” he said.
Wasserstrom said he believes the lack of public reporting about corruption in Ukraine’s military is a result of many Ukrainians feeling that speaking out about corrupt activity would be as treasonous to their nation’s war effort as engaging in the activity itself. “So I’d be shocked if you found anybody who would admit to any of this,” he said.
Borovyk said whoever may have engaged in corruption in the past three months will be investigated eventually. “These people should understand that when we get the victory against Russia, we will find all of them.”
He also vowed that his group will keep pressing the Ukrainian government for stronger reforms, including the appointment of a credible new leader for the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. “Regarding those who are against these reforms or are trying to slow them down, how else can I describe them as internal enemies,” he said.
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«Виробити такий формат гарантій, який справді працюватиме. Причому працюватиме не кілька місяців чи років, а протягом життя багатьох поколінь наших українців»
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24 травня колишній канцлер Німеччини заявив у соцмережах, що «деякий час тому» повідомив «Газпрому», що його не цікавить ця посада
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Ця ліцензія дозволяла Москві продовжувати виплачувати відсотки та основну суму боргу і запобігати дефолту за своїм державним боргом
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Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is hosting its second annual Africa Day campaign to promote Africans who are making a global impact.
The content producer for the film project, South African filmmaker Tarryn Crossman, said Meta identified eight innovators, creators and businesspeople on the continent whose stories the company wanted told for the “Made by Africa, Loved by the World” campaign.
Crossman’s company, Tia Productions, teamed up with Mashoba Media to find four fellow filmmakers in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their job was to make two- to three-minute documentaries about the subjects.
“So, for example we did Trevor Stuurman here in South Africa,” Crossman said. “He’s a visual artist and his line was, I just loved so much, he says: ‘Africa’s no longer the ghost writer.’ We’re telling our stories and owning our own narratives. That’s kind of the thread amongst all these characters. They all have that in common.”
Nairobi-based filmmaker Joan Kabangu made a movie about Black Rhino VR, a Kenyan virtual reality content producing company which has worked with international brands.
“They are the pioneers around creating VR content, 360 content, augmented mixed reality kind of content in Kenya, in the wider Africa. And it’s a company which is run by a young person and everybody who is working there is fairly young. And they are really getting into how tech is being used to elevate the way we are creating content in 2022, going forward,” Kabangu said.
Of Meta’s Africa Day campaign she said, “I feel it’s celebrating the good in Africa.”
In Ghana, Kofi Awuah’s movie making has been delayed by floods in the capital, Accra. But he is determined to finish. His innovator is designer Selina Beb, whose work can be seen on Instagram and is sold online, often to buyers in the U.S. and Britain.
“She’s very unique,” Awuah said. “Based on material she uses and even the processes she uses are kind of things that tell a Ghanian or African story. For instance, she uses a certain kind of stone that you can find only in the northern parts of Ghana.”
Awuah said being a part of the campaign is the chance of a lifetime.
“My manager called me to tell me that we gotten a contract from Meta and I almost, like I had a heart attack,” she said. “When that call came, I felt this is the moment for me to express myself to the millions or billions of people who are using Facebook, who are using social media.”
Meta will also be hosting free virtual training sessions throughout the week. These include training on monetization, cross-border business and branded content.
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