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As the Biden administration and the US Senate look to the US House to take up a bill for aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, experts say U.S. allies are not the only ones in need of the funding boost. As VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb reports, some say the US defense industry desperately needs the boost as well.
Camera: Mary Cielak
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indianapolis, indiana — Semiconductors, or microchips, are critical to almost everything electronic used in the modern world. In 1990, the United States produced about 40% of the world’s semiconductors. As manufacturing migrated to Asia, U.S. production fell to about 12%.
“During COVID, we got a wake-up call. It was like [a] Sputnik moment,” explained Mark Lundstrom, an engineer who has worked with microchips much of his life.
The 2020 global coronavirus pandemic slowed production in Asia, creating a ripple through the global supply chain and leading to shortages of everything from phones to vehicles. Lundstrom said increasing U.S. reliance on foreign chip manufacturers exposed a major weakness.
“We know that AI is going to transform society in the next several years, it requires extremely powerful chips. The most powerful leading-edge chips.”
Today, Lundstrom is the acting dean of engineering at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, a leader in cutting-edge semiconductor development, which has new importance amid the emerging field of artificial intelligence.
“If we fall behind in AI, the consequences are enormous for the defense of our country, for our economic future,” Lundstrom told VOA.
Amid the buzz of activity in a laboratory on Purdue’s campus, visitors can get a vision of what the future might look like in microchip technology.
“The key metrics of the performance of the chips actually are the size of the transistors, the devices, which is the building block of the computer chips,” said Zhihong Chen, director of Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center, where engineers work around the clock to push microchip technology into the future.
“We are talking about a few atoms in each silicon transistor these days. And this is what this whole facility is about,” Chen said. “We are trying to make the next generation transistors better devices than current technologies. More powerful and more energy-efficient computer chips of the future.”
Not just RVs anymore
Because of Purdue’s efforts, along with those on other university campuses in the state, Indiana believes it’s an attractive location for manufacturers looking to build new microchip facilities.
“Purdue University alone, a top four-ranked engineering school, offers more engineers every year than the next top three,” said Eric Holcomb, Indiana’s Republican governor. “When you have access to that kind of talent, when you have access to the cost of doing business in the state of Indiana, that’s why people are increasingly saying, Indiana.”
Holcomb is in the final year of his eight-year tenure in the state’s top position. He wants to transform Indiana beyond the recreational vehicle, or “RV capital” of the country.
“We produce about plus-80% of all the RV production in North America in one state,” he told VOA. “We are not just living up to our reputation as being the number one manufacturing state per capita in America, but we are increasingly embracing the future of mobility in America.”
Holcomb is spearheading an effort to make Indiana the next great technology center as the U.S. ramps up investment in domestic microchip development and manufacturing. “If we want to compete globally, we have to get smarter and healthier and more equipped, and we have to continue to invest in our quality of place,” Holcomb told VOA in an interview.
His vision is shared by other lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Todd Young of Indiana, who co-sponsored the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which commits more than $50 billion in federal funding for domestic microchip development.
‘We are committed’
Indiana is now home to one of 31 designated U.S. technology and innovation hubs, helping it qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in grants designed to attract technology-driven businesses.
“The signal that it sends to the rest of the world [is] that we are in it, we are committed, and we are focused,” said Holcomb. “We understand that economic development, economic security and national security complement one another.”
Indiana’s efforts are paying off.
In April, South Korean microchip manufacturer SK Hynix announced it was planning to build a $4 billion facility near Purdue University that would produce next-generation, high-bandwidth memory, or HBM chips, critical for artificial intelligence applications.
The facility, slated to start operating in 2028, could create more than 1,000 new jobs. While U.S. chip manufacturer SkyWater also plans to invest nearly $2 billion in Indiana’s new LEAP Innovation District near Purdue, the state recently lost bidding to host chipmaker Intel, which selected Ohio for two new factories.
“Companies tend to like to go to locations where there is already that infrastructure, where that supply chain is in place,” Purdue’s Lundstrom said. “That’s a challenge for us, because this is a new industry for us. So, we have a chicken-and- egg problem that we have to address, and we are beginning to address that.”
Lundstrom said the CHIPS and Science Act and the federal money that comes with it are helping Indiana ramp up to compete with other U.S. locations already known for microchip development, such as Silicon Valley in California and Arizona.
What could help Indiana gain an edge is its natural resources — plenty of land and water, and regular weather patterns, all crucial for the sensitive processes needed to manufacture microchips at large manufacturing centers.
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Washington — On a near daily basis, Scott Cullinane talks with members of Congress about Russia’s war in Ukraine. As a lobbyist for the nonprofit Razom, part of his job is to convince them of Ukraine’s need for greater U.S. support to survive.
But as lawmakers debated a $95 billion package that includes about $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, Cullinane noticed an increase in narratives alleging Ukrainian corruption. What stood out is that these were the same talking points promoted by Russian disinformation.
So, when The Washington Post published an investigation into an extensive and coordinated Russian campaign to influence U.S. public opinion to deny Ukraine the aid, Cullinane says he was not surprised.
“This problem has been festering and growing for years,” he told VOA. “I believe that Russia’s best chance for victory is not on the battlefield, but through information operations targeted on Western capitals, including Washington.”
The Post investigation is based on more than 100 documents collected by a European intelligence service.
The files exposed a Kremlin-linked campaign in which “political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions,” the Post reported.
Social media
One of the main methods for spreading such disinformation is social media, according to Roman Osadchuk, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and an expert on propaganda and influence campaigns.
“The process begins with a Russian publication on a small website or social media account. This is then picked up by a small Russian Telegram channel, which is subsequently shared by a larger channel with more subscribers,” Osadchuk said.
From there, someone will translate the content into English and share it, for example, on X.
“This is how Russian disinformation can quickly spread within the English-speaking X community,” Osadchuk said.
In an article published April 8, The Washington Post cited Microsoft and the social media intelligence company Graphika as saying that some articles created within this operation could have been first published on sites known as doppelgangers.
Osadchuk told VOA that these are deceptive replicas of legitimate media websites. They feature fake articles and are often taken down, only to be replaced by clones with slightly different web addresses.
“Nobody would know about these sites’ existence unless they are promoted on social media platforms. However, as soon as they detect them, social media block them. So, Russians quickly replace banned sites with their clones,” he said.
Worldwide effect
In interviews with U.S. media, two influential Republicans said they believe the propaganda has influenced their base and some of their colleagues.
“It is absolutely true. We see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner said in an interview with CNN.
In an interview with the U.S. news website Puck, Michael McCaul, head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “Russian propaganda has made its way into the U.S., unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
Serhiy Kudelia, a political scientist at Baylor University, says the Kremlin messaging is effective because it plays on existing fears.
He says the disinformation seeks to reinforce already held beliefs such as the wastefulness of aid to Ukraine, or fuels existing anger and energizes opposition to sending assistance.
“When such alignment occurs, it is easier to push through disinformation and invented news stories that would be accepted as credible by a large number of people, including members of Congress, since they reinforce their prior beliefs,” Kudelia said.
“Once fabricated stories enter mainstream public debates, they become almost impossible to debunk or separate truth from lies,” he said.
The disinformation campaign is similar to ones seen in Europe. Both seek to decrease support for Ukraine, undermine public trust in their institutions and polarize society, says Jakub Kalenský, a senior analyst at Helsinki-based European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats.
Kalenský, who is deputy director of the center’s Hybrid Influence team, believes the Kremlin’s disinformation activities have a significant effect on politics worldwide.
“This is why Russia employs thousands of people for this activity. This is why they spend billions every year, because they see it works,” he said.
But Olga Belogolova, director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, says that it is hard to know how effective these propaganda efforts are.
“Russian influence operations are not necessarily always designed to get people to believe anything in particular, but to get them to believe nothing at all,” she told VOA. Belogolova added that claims of the efforts being successful in swaying opinion “is not only irresponsible, it’s dangerous.”
Countermeasures needed
Last month, the U.S. Treasury Department issued sanctions on two people and two companies that it says are connected to a “foreign malign influence campaign.” They include Moscow-based Social Design Agency, its founder Ilya Gambashidze, Russia-based Group Structura LLC and its CEO Nikolai Tupikin.
The Social Design Agency and Gambashidze are believed to be involved in the campaign described in the Post article on April 8.
Kalenský advises governments on countering disinformation and says its success requires countermeasures.
These include strengthening detection and documentation of Russian disinformation campaigns, increasing awareness and resilience of audiences to the propaganda efforts, and preventing the aggressor from exploiting weaknesses of social media and societies.
“Finally, we need to impose higher costs on the information aggressors. So far, they are almost unopposed in conducting their aggression,” Kalenský said.
For Cullinane, the Russian disinformation campaign makes his job harder. He says the debate about the role the U.S. should play in the world appears to be shifting and invoking pre-World War II isolationism.
But he remains resolute. Part of his work is finding what resonates most with each lawmaker.
“Some offices focus very much on the human rights situation in Ukraine. Many members are very moved by the plight of religious communities in occupied territories of Ukraine and the persecution they face at the hands of the Russian military,” Cullinane said. “Other offices are very intrigued by the military reform and the military innovation brought about by an active war in Ukraine.”
The national security spending bill is currently awaiting approval in the House.
This story originated in VOA’s Ukraine Service.
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In Telangana state, India, a man is desperately trying to get his brother back from the front lines in Ukraine after he was duped into working for Russia during its invasion of the country. Experts explain why Russia is using such subterfuge in its war effort. Henry Wilkins reports.
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The Midwestern state of Indiana aspires to become the next great technology center as the United States ramps up investment in domestic microchip development and manufacturing. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Indianapolis. Videographer: Kane Farabaugh, Adam Greenbaum
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London — The wife of Julian Assange said Thursday her husband’s legal case “could be moving in the right direction” after President Joe Biden confirmed the U.S. may drop charges against the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder.
It came as supporters in several cities rallied to demand the release of Assange, on the fifth anniversary of his incarceration in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison.
Biden said Wednesday that his administration is “considering” a request from Australia to drop the decade-long U.S. push to prosecute Assange for publishing a trove of classified American documents. The proposal would see Assange, an Australian citizen, return home rather than be sent to the U.S. to face espionage charges.
Officials have not provided more details, but Stella Assange said the comments are “a good sign.”
“It looks like things could be moving in the right direction,” she told the BBC, saying the indictment was “a Trump legacy and really Joe Biden should have dropped it from day one.”
Assange has been indicted on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over his website’s publication of classified U.S. documents almost 15 years ago. American prosecutors allege that Assange, 52, encouraged and helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks published, putting lives at risk.
Australia argues there is a disconnect between the U.S. treatment of Assange and Manning. Then-U.S. President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence to seven years, which allowed her release in 2017.
Assange’s supporters say he is a journalist protected by the First Amendment who exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange has been in prison since 2019 as he fought extradition, having spent seven years before that holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid being sent to Sweden over allegations of rape and sexual assault.
The relationship between Assange and his hosts eventually soured, and he was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. British police immediately arrested and imprisoned him in Belmarsh for breaching bail in 2012.
The U.K. government signed an extradition order in 2022, but a British court ruled last month that Assange can’t be sent to the United States unless U.S. authorities guarantee he won’t get the death penalty.
A further court hearing in the case is scheduled for May 20.
Assange was too ill to attend his most recent hearings. Stella Assange has said her husband’s health continues to deteriorate in prison and she fears he’ll die behind bars.
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Rome — Nine people, including a baby, have died after their boat capsized while trying to cross the Mediterranean in stormy weather, and another 15 people are feared missing, Italy’s coast guard said on Thursday.
The Italian coast guard said it received a cooperation request from the Maltese search and rescue (SAR) authority after the boat capsized approximately 50 kilometers southeast of the island of Lampedusa on Wednesday.
The coast guard said it dispatched its own patrol boat to the scene, which “rescued 22 survivors and recovered 9 deceased individuals, including a baby.”
The rescue operations “were particularly challenging due to adverse weather and sea conditions in the area with waves up to 2.50 meters,” the coast guard said.
The nationality of the boat’s passengers was not known but Lampedusa, which sits in the Mediterranean between Tunisia, Malta and the larger Italian island of Sicily, is the first port of call for many migrants seeking to reach the European Union.
“New terrible shipwreck near Lampedusa during a rescue operation,” UNHCR Communication Officer Filippo Ungaro posted on X late on Wednesday. The survivors, taken to Lampedusa, were “in a state of hypothermia and shock,” he added.
An aircraft from the Italian coast guard was conducting aerial searches for the missing in the area of the shipwreck.
In a separate operation, the Italian coast guard said it rescued 37 migrants “who were at the mercy of the waves aboard a small wooden boat about 7 meters long” off the coast of Lampedusa on Wednesday.
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ISTANBUL — Turkish police have seized the third largest haul of cocaine in the country’s history, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced Thursday, as groups monitoring organized crime warned that the country was becoming an entry point for drugs reaching Europe.
Some 608 kilograms of cocaine, most of it in liquid form, were confiscated in an operation across three provinces, Yerlikaya posted on the social media platform X. Nearly 830 kilograms of precursor chemicals used to process the drug were also seized.
Yerlikaya said the police operation targeted an international gang allegedly led by a Lebanese-Venezuelan national, who was among four foreign members of the “organized crime group” detained, along with nine Turks.
“The amount of cocaine seized in the … operation was the third-largest amount of cocaine seized at one time in Turkey,” the minister added.
Groups monitoring organized crime say Turkey is growing as a transit hub for cocaine coming from South America to Europe as security at ports such as Rotterdam in the Netherlands becomes tighter.
In a report dated October last year, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said a 44% rise in cocaine seizures in Turkey between 2021 and 2022 was not reflected in data on domestic consumption, “suggesting that the country is likely to serve as a drug corridor.”
Officials made Turkey’s largest seizure — 1.1 tons of cocaine hidden in a consignment of bananas from Ecuador — at the Mediterranean port of Mersin in 2021.
Since coming to office in June last year, Yerlikaya has overseen a clampdown on organized crime in Turkey to counter claims the country has become a haven for foreign gangsters.
He regularly posts details of the latest police operation to target drug traffickers, fraudsters and other criminals.
Thursday’s social media post included a video, overlaid with dramatic music, showing apparent surveillance footage, large plastic containers and a pressing machine.
The operation was led by anti-narcotics officers based in Kocaeli, which lies southeast of Istanbul, but also included investigations in Tekirdag to Istanbul’s northwest and in the Mediterranean province of Antalya.
The gang used vineyards in Tekirdag and Antalya to store chemicals and process the cocaine, which had been disguised in fertilizer, according to Yerlikaya. A shotgun was also recovered by police, he added.
“We will not tolerate poison traffickers, organized crime groups and gangs, whether national or international,” the minister wrote.
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WASHINGTON — The tenacity of Ukrainian troops will soon be no match for Russia’s manpower and missiles should U.S. lawmakers fail to approve additional security assistance for Ukraine, the top American general in Europe told lawmakers, part of a stark warning about the direction of the more than two-year-old conflict.
U.S. military officials have warned repeatedly in recent weeks that Russian forces have been able to make incremental gains in Ukraine and that without renewed U.S. backing, Ukraine’s forces will eventually falter.
Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday, the commander of U.S. European Command described the battlefield in blunt terms.
“If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine will run out of artillery shells and will run out of air defense interceptors in fairly short order,” said General Christopher Cavoli, explaining that Kyiv is dependent on the United States for those key munitions.
“I can’t predict the future, but I can do simple math,” he said. “Based on my experience in 37-plus years in the U.S. military, if one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses.”
Cavoli also said the failure of U.S. lawmakers to approve a $60 billion supplemental security package is already giving Russia a significant advantage.
“They [Ukraine] are now being outshot by the Russian side 5-to-1,” he told lawmakers. “That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks.
“We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically,” Cavoli said.
Multiple U.S. officials have warned that Ukraine’s military has been forced to ration artillery and air defense capabilities as Kyiv waits for U.S. lawmakers to approve the supplemental assistance.
“We are already seeing the effects of the failure to pass the supplemental,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander told the panel, testifying alongside U.S. European Command’s Cavoli.
“We don’t need to imagine,” she said, blaming the lack of U.S. provided artillery for why “the Russian attacks are getting through.”
That supplemental defense package passed in the U.S. Senate back in February, but leadership in the House of Representatives has so far refused to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote.
During a press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said lawmakers were continuing to “actively discuss our options on a path forward.”
“It’s a very complicated matter at a very complicated time. The clock is ticking on it, and everyone here feels the urgency of that,” Johnson said. “But what’s required is that you reach consensus on it, and that’s what we’re working on.”
House Democrats, however, have voiced frustration with Johnson’s refusal to call a vote.
“The House has waited months now to approve the security package to help protect Ukraine,” said Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “Weeks ago, we were too late. And now every day is at an extreme cost to our ability to deter Russia.”
Another Democrat on the committee, Representative Elissa Slotkin, scolded Johnson, saying he needs to call a vote despite opposition from a small group of House Republicans.
“We do need to get it over the finish line,” she said. “I accept that he’s at risk of losing his job over that choice, but that’s what leadership is — it’s the big boy pants and making tough choices.”
Some Republicans, though, chastised Democratic lawmakers for what they described as misguided priorities.
“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of Americans who are dying, fentanyl overdoses, child and human sex trafficking, not to mention 178-plus countries that are crossing our border,” said Republican Representative Cory Mills.
“But, oh wait, that’s not the priority. Let’s secure Ukraine’s borders,” he said.
VOA’s Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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BRUSSELS — European Union lawmakers approved Wednesday a major revamp of the bloc’s migration laws aimed at ending years of division over how to manage the entry of thousands of people without authorization and depriving the far right of a vote-winning campaign issue ahead of June elections.
The members of the European Parliament voted on the so-called Pact on Migration and Asylum, regulations and policies meant to help address the thorny issue of who should take responsibility for migrants when they arrive and whether other EU countries should be obliged to help.
The proceedings were briefly interrupted by a small but noisy group of demonstrators in the public gallery who wore shirts marked “this pact kills” and shouted “vote no!”
The 27 EU member countries must now endorse the reform package, possibly in a vote in late April, before it can enter force.
The plan was drawn up after 1.3 million people, mostly those fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, sought refuge in Europe in 2015. The EU’s asylum system collapsed, reception centers were overwhelmed in Greece and Italy, and countries further north built barriers to stop people entering.
But few have admitted to being happy with the new policy response to one of Europe’s biggest political crises, and even the lawmakers who drafted parts of the new regulations are unwilling to support the entire reform package.
“I’m not going to open a bottle of champagne after this,” Dutch lawmaker Sophie i’nt Veld, who drew up the assembly’s position on migrant reception conditions, told reporters on the eve of the plenary session in Brussels. She said she planned to abstain from some of the votes.
In’t Veld described the pact as “the bare minimum” in terms of a policy response, but she does not want to torpedo it by voting against. “We will not have another opportunity to come to an agreement,” she said.
Swedish parliamentarian Malin Bjork, who worked on refugee resettlement, said that the pact does not respond to “any of the questions it was set to solve.”
She said the reform package “undermines the individual right to seek asylum” in Europe because it would build on plans that some EU countries already have to process migrants abroad. Italy has concluded one such deal with Albania.
“We cannot have a situation where people systematically, in their thousands, die on their way seeking protection and refuge in Europe,” Bjork told reporters.
The new rules include controversial measures: facial images and fingerprints could be taken from children from the age of 6, and people may be detained during screening. Fast-track deportation could be used on those not permitted to stay.
“The pact will lead to more detention and de facto detention at the EU’s external borders, including for families with children, which is in clear violation of international law,” said Marta Gionco from Picum, a network of migrant rights defense organizations.
Mainstream political parties want to secure agreement on the pact ahead of Europe-wide elections on June 6-9. Migration is likely to be a campaign issue, and they believe the new reforms address concerns about an issue that has been a consistent vote-winner for far-right parties.
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WASHINGTON — The United States restricted trade with five companies on Wednesday that it said help produce and procure drones for use by Russia in Ukraine and by Iran-backed Houthis in Red Sea shipping attacks.
The companies from Russia and China were among 11 additions to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which means suppliers need licenses before shipping goods and technology to them.
Russia has intensified its drone and missile strikes against Ukrainian energy facilities in recent weeks, causing significant damage and threatening a repeat of the blackouts experienced in the first year after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The Commerce Department added a Chinese entity, Jiangxi Xintuo Enterprise Company, for supporting Russia’s military through the procurement, development and proliferation of Russian drones, it said.
Shenzhen Jiasibo Technology Company of China was cited for being part of a network procuring aerospace components, including drone applications, for an aircraft company in Iran. Three Russian entities — Aerosila JSC SPE, Delta-Aero LLC, and JSC ODK-Star — were added for being part of the network.
“These components are used to develop and produce Shahed-series UAVs which have been used by Iran to attack oil tankers in the Middle East and by Russia in Ukraine,” the Federal Register notice said, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles.
Attacks on ships, including oil tankers, by Iranian-backed Houthis have disrupted global shipping through the Red Sea. Yemen’s Houthi militia say they are retaliating against Israel’s war against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza.
Companies are added to the U.S. Entity List when Washington deems them a threat to U.S. national security or foreign policy. Suppliers must then be granted licenses, which are likely to be denied, before shipping goods to entities on the list.
The two United Arab Emirates citations, Khalaj Trading LLC and Mahdi Khalaj Amirhosseini, were added for apparently violating Iran sanctions by exporting or trying to export items from the United States to Iran through UAE, according to the posting.
Four Chinese entities were cited for acquiring U.S. items to support China’s military modernization efforts, it said. They are LINKZOL (Beijing) Technology Company, Xi’an Like Innovative Information Technology Company, Beijing Anwise Technology Company and Sitonholy (Tianjin) Company.
U.S.-Chinese military contacts resumed late last year, but tensions continue due to fundamental differences over Taiwan and the South China Sea that remain dangerous potential flashpoints.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pumped billions into buying and developing equipment as part of his modernizing efforts to build a “world-class” military by 2050, with Beijing’s outsized defense budget growing at a faster pace than the economy for some years.
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Inexpensive first-person view – or radio controlled – drones have become a powerful weapon in Ukraine’s war against Russian invaders. As the country presses the West for more military aid, many Ukrainian civilians are stepping in to help by making homemade attack drones. Lesia Bakalets has the story from Kyiv.
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British Foreign Secretary David Cameron met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington to help push for a new aid package for Ukraine. He also met with former President Donald Trump in Florida, as VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.
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ORSK, Russia — Russia and Kazakhstan ordered more than 100,000 people to evacuate after swiftly melting snow swelled rivers beyond bursting point in the worst flooding in the area for at least 70 years.
The deluge of melt water overwhelmed scores of settlements in the Ural Mountains, Siberia and areas of Kazakhstan close to rivers such as the Ural and Tobol, which local officials said had risen by meters in a matter of hours to the highest levels ever recorded.
Late on Tuesday, levels of the Ural River in Orenburg, a city of around 550,000, reached 9.31 meters (30.54 feet) exceeding the critical level of 9.30 meters (30.51 feet), the regional governor said. He urged residents in areas at risk to evacuate.
“I am calling for caution and for those in flooded districts to evacuate promptly,” Denis Pasler said on Telegram.
City residents paddled along roads as though they were rivers. Dams and embankments were being strengthened.
Upstream on the Ural, floodwaters burst through an embankment dam in the city of Orsk last Friday.
Regional officials said water levels in Orsk had subsided by 21 centimeters (.68 feet) and now stood at 9.07 meters 29.75 feet), still well over the official danger level of about 7 meters (22.96 feet). Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said water levels had declined in a number of areas but described the situation as “still difficult.”
The Ural is Europe’s third-longest river, which flows through Russia and Kazakhstan into the Caspian.
Evacuation order
Sirens in Kurgan, a city on the Tobol River, a tributary of the Irtysh, warned people to evacuate immediately. Regional officials said floodwaters would continue to rise for three days and predicted a “difficult situation” until the end of April.
A state of emergency was also declared in Tyumen, a major oil-producing region of Western Siberia, the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world. Russian news agencies said Emergencies Minister Alexander Kurenkov had arrived in the city as part of a regional tour assessing flood danger.
“The difficult days are still ahead for the Kurgan and Tyumen regions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “There is a lot of water coming.”
Tyumen is about 200 kilometers (124.27 miles) north of Kurgan.
President Vladimir Putin spoke to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan, where more than 86,000 people have been evacuated because of the flooding. Tokayev said the flooding was probably the worst in 80 years.
The most severely hit areas are Atyrau, Aktobe, Akmola, Kostanai, Eastern Kazakhstan, Northern Kazakhstan and Pavlodar regions, most of which border Russia and are crossed by rivers originating in Russia such as the Ural and the Tobol.
Russians beg for help
In Russia, anger boiled over in Orsk when at least 100 Russians begged the Kremlin chief for help and chanted “shame on you” at local officials who they said had done too little.
The Kremlin said Putin was being updated on the situation but had no immediate plans to visit the flood zone as local and emergency officials were doing their best to tackle the deluge.
In Kurgan, a region with 800,000 residents, drone footage showed traditional Russian wooden houses and the golden kupolas of Orthodox Churches stranded alongside an expanse of water.
Russian officials have said some people ignored calls to evacuate. Kurgan Governor Vadim Shumkov urged residents to take the warnings seriously.
“We understand you very well: It is hard to leave your possessions and move somewhere at the call of the local authorities,” Shumkov said. “It’s better that we laugh at the hydrologists together later and praise God for the miracle of our common salvation. But let’s do it alive.”
In Kurgan, water levels were rising in the Tobol. Russia said 19,000 people were at risk in the region.
Rising waters were also forecast in Siberia’s Ishim River, also a tributary of the Irtysh, which along with its parent, the Ob, forms the world’s seventh-longest river system.
It was not immediately clear why this year’s floods were so severe as the snow melt is an annual event in Russia. Scientists say climate change has made flooding more frequent worldwide.
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Washington — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles Brown Jr. testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday about the Pentagon’s $850 billion budget for 2025 as questions remained as to whether lawmakers will support current spending needs for Israel or Ukraine.
The Senate hearing was the first time lawmakers on both sides were able to question the Pentagon’s top civilian and military leadership on the administration’s Israel strategy following the country’s deadly strike on World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid workers in Gaza. It also follows continued desperate pleas by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that if the U.S. does not help soon, Kyiv will lose the war to Russia.
In their opening statements, both Austin and Brown emphasized that their 2025 budget is still shaped with the military’s long-term strategic goal in mind — to ready forces and weapons for a potential future conflict with China. About $100 billion of this year’s request is set aside for new space, nuclear weapons and cyber warfare systems the military says it must invest in now before Beijing’s capabilities surpass it.
But the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are challenging a deeply-divided Congress and have resulted in months of delays in getting last year’s defense budget through, which was only passed by lawmakers a few weeks ago.
Austin’s opening remarks were temporarily interrupted by protesters lifting a Palestinian flag and shouting at him to stop sending weapons to Israel. “Stop the genocide,” they said, as they lifted their hands, stained in red, in the air.
The Pentagon scraped together about $300 million in ammunition to send to Kyiv in March but cannot send more without Congress’ support, and a separate $60 billion supplemental bill that would fund those efforts has been stalled for months.
“The price of U.S. leadership is real. But it is far lower than the price of U.S. abdication,” Austin told the senators.
If Kyiv falls, it could imperil Ukraine’s Baltic NATO member neighbors and potentially drag U.S. troops into a prolonged European war. If millions die in Gaza due to starvation, it could enrage Israel’s Arab neighbors and lead to a much wider, deadlier Middle East conflict — one that could also bring harm to U.S. troops and to U.S. relations in the region for decades.
The Pentagon has urged Congress to support new assistance for Ukraine for months, to no avail, and has tried to walk a perilous line between defending its ally Israel and maintaining ties with key regional Arab partners. Israel’s actions in Gaza have been used as a rallying cry by factions of Iranian-backed militant groups, including the Houthis in Yemen and Islamic Resistance groups across Iraq and Syria, to strike at U.S. interests. Three U.S. service members have already been killed as drone and missile attacks increased against U.S. bases in the region.
Six U.S. military ships with personnel and components to build a humanitarian aid pier are also still en route to Gaza but questions remain as to how food that arrives at the pier will be safely distributed inside the devastated territory.
Lawmakers are also seeing demands at home. For months, a handful of its far-right members have kept Congress from approving additional money or weapons for Ukraine until domestic needs like curbing the crush of migrants at the southern U.S. border are addressed. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is already facing a call to oust him as speaker by Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene because Johnson is trying to work out a compromise that would move the Ukraine aid forward.
On Israel, the World Central Kitchen strike led to a shift in tone from President Joe Biden on how Israel must protect civilian life in Gaza and drove dozens of House Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to call on Biden to halt weapons transfers to Israel.
Half the population of Gaza is starving and on the brink of famine due to Israel’s tight restrictions on allowing aid trucks through.
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NYON, Switzerland — This week’s Champions League games will go ahead as scheduled despite an Islamic State terror threat, the governing body of European soccer said Tuesday.
A media outlet linked to the terror group has issued multiple posts calling for attacks at the stadiums hosting quarterfinal matches in Paris, Madrid and London on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“UEFA is aware of alleged terrorist threats made towards this week’s UEFA Champions League matches and is closely liaising with the authorities at the respective venues,” UEFA said in a statement. “All matches are planned to go ahead as scheduled with appropriate security arrangements in place.”
There are two matches scheduled to be held in Madrid. Real Madrid hosts Manchester City on Tuesday, and Atletico Madrid welcomes Borussia Dortmund on Wednesday.
Arsenal plays Bayern Munich in London on Tuesday, and Paris Saint-Germain hosts Barcelona the following day.
“I want to reassure the public that we have a robust policing plan in place for tonight’s match [in London] and we continue to work closely alongside the club’s security team to ensure that the match passes peacefully,” Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Ade Adelekan said.
France Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said police have considerably reinforced security around the Parc des Princes in Paris.
“We have seen, among others, a statement from the Islamic State, which is particularly targeting stadiums. It’s not new,” Darmanin said. “This morning, we asked the general director of interior security to communicate the information we have with the other [security] services of the other countries hosting the quarterfinals.”
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow on March 22 in which 144 people were killed.
The return matches in the Champions League are scheduled for next week.
PSG defender Danilo said he and his teammates “need to concentrate on the soccer,” but coach Luis Enrique said the threat was worrying.
“Who wouldn’t be concerned by that? Of course we’re concerned,” the PSG coach said. “We hope it’s only a threat and that nothing will happen.”
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STRASBOURG, France — Europe’s highest human rights court will rule Tuesday on a group of landmark climate change cases aimed at forcing countries to meet international obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The European Court of Human Rights will hand down decisions in a trio of cases brought by a French mayor, six Portuguese youngsters and more than 2,000 members of Senior Women for Climate Protection, who say their governments are not doing enough to combat climate change.
Lawyers for all three are hoping the Strasbourg court will find that national governments have a legal duty to make sure global warming is held to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
Although activists have had successes with lawsuits in domestic proceedings, this will be the first time an international court has ruled on climate change.
A decision against any of the countries involved could force them to reduce net emissions to zero by 2030. The EU, which doesn’t include Switzerland, currently has a target to be climate-neutral by 2050.
The decisions have “the potential to be a watershed moment in the global fight for a livable future. A victory for any of the three cases would be one of the most significant developments on climate change since the signing of the Paris Agreement,” said Gerry Liston, a lawyer with the Global Legal Action Network, which is supporting the Portuguese students.
“The extreme heat waves, the rainfalls, followed by heat waves, it is just choking us with greenhouse effects. And what worries me is the frequency in which they started happening more and more. That’s what really scared me. And, I thought to myself, well, what can I do?” 16-year-old André dos Santos Oliveira told reporters ahead of the decision.
Together with five more young people, Santos Oliveira took Portugal and 32 other nations to court, arguing the failure to stop emissions violated their fundamental rights.
At the other end of the age spectrum, a group of Swiss retirees are also demanding their government do more. Senior Women for Climate Protection, whose average age is 74, say older women’s rights are especially infringed on because they are most affected by the extreme heat that will become more frequent due to global warming.
Earth shattered global annual heat records in 2023, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold, and showed more signs of a feverish planet, Copernicus, a European climate agency, said in January.
In all three cases, lawyers argued that the political and civil protections guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights are meaningless if the planet is uninhabitable.
The countries facing the legal challenges hope the cases will be dismissed. They say the blame for climate change cannot rest with any individual country.
Switzerland is not alone in being affected by global warming, said Alain Chablais, representative of the country at last year’s hearings. “This problem cannot be solved by Switzerland alone.”
Acknowledging the urgency of the climate crisis, the court fast-tracked all three cases, including a rare move allowing the Portuguese case to bypass domestic legal proceedings.
Judgments from the European Court of Human Rights aren’t legally binding against all 46 of its member states, but they set a legal precedent against which future lawsuits would be judged.
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