The EU was quick to hit Russia with sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine — but it took time and an escalation of measures before Moscow started to feel any real damage.
Since the war started in late February last year, November was the first month when the value of EU imports from Russia was lower than in the same month of 2021. Until then, the bloc had been sending more cash than before the conflict — every month, for nine months. More recent data is not yet available.
The main reason behind this? Energy dependency on Russia and skyrocketing energy prices. But that’s not the whole story: Some EU countries were much quicker than others to reduce trade flows with Moscow — and some were still increasing them at the end of last year.
Here is a full breakdown of how the war has changed EU trade with Russia, in figures and charts:
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Rescue workers were searching for two missing people after an avalanche swept across ski trails in western Austria on Sunday, the dpa news agency reported.
Initially up to 10 people were feared missing based on video from a witness, but eight of those individuals had been identified and were no longer feared buried, dpa reported citing a spokesman of the rescue team.
About 200 rescue workers were searching the avalanche site near the town of Zuers.
The avalanche occurred at around 3 p.m. (1400 GMT) on the 2,700-meter (nearly 9,000-foot) high Trittkopf mountain between Zuers and Lech am Arlberg, and the cascading snow reached as far as nearby ski trails.
The avalanche followed days of snow in the high alpine region and unseasonably warm weather on Christmas Day. The local mountain rescue service had rated the avalanche danger as “high.”
Officials said one person could be recovered quickly. Searchlights were set up on the snow mass to continue the search after darkness fell, and dogs were being used to try to find the missing.
Up to 10 people were initially feared missing based on a video from a witness, but rescue workers say eight of those have been identified and were no longer feared buried.
Rescue workers have launched a search for two people who went missing after an avalanche swept across ski trails in western Austria.
The avalanche occurred at about 3pm (14:00GMT) on Sunday in the Lech/Zuers free skiing area.
Initially, up to 10 people were feared missing based on video from a witness, but eight of those individuals had been identified and were no longer feared buried, the DPA news agency reported, citing a spokesperson for the rescue team.
One of those rescued was injured and flown to a hospital in the city of Innsbruck.
Another was hurt but was able to free himself and go to another hospital, regional security councillor Christian Gantner told the Austrian Press Agency (APA).
Six other people spotted in the video were uninjured.
The fate of the final two was unknown, APA reported.
About 200 rescue workers were searching the avalanche site near the town of Zuers.
Searchlights were set up on the snow mass to continue the search after darkness fell on Sunday, and dogs were being used to try to find the missing.
The avalanche occurred on the 2,700-metre (nearly 9,000-foot) high Trittkopf mountain between Zuers and Lech am Arlberg, and the cascading snow reached as far as nearby ski trails.
It followed days of snow in the high alpine region and unseasonably warm weather on Christmas Day.
The local mountain rescue service had rated the avalanche danger as “high”.
At least 10 people were buried in an avalanche on Sunday near the mountainous villages of Lech and Zurs in Austria, according to a statement from the state-run Austrian Press Agency.
The avalanche happened Sunday afternoon in the open ski area of the villages.
One person has been rescued so far according to the police, the agency said.
“Ten winter sport enthusiasts” were buried, according to the statement.
A search and rescue operation is in progress with more than 100 people involved, including avalanche search dogs and helicopters.
“We do everything we can to save the winter sports enthusiasts,” the Lech Municipality spokesperson said, according to the Austrian Press Agency. “Searchlights were requested so that the search could continue in the dark,” the statement said.
Three years into the COVID-19 crisis, which upended lives across the globe and led the EU to promise to work better together when the next health crisis emerged, countries have once again been involved in a political tug-of-war.
China’s decision to lift its zero-COVID policy has led to a surge in cases that has alarmed the world. But early attempts at a joint EU response were dashed when Italy announced its own border control measures on arrivals from China.
While the EU is now inching toward a coordinated approach on travel measures for arrivals from China — including pre-departure testing, masks on flights and testing wastewater for possible new variants — and is set to hold a meeting of its crisis response body on Wednesday, it comes after countries one-by-one announced unilateral measures for travelers arriving from China.
“It is disappointing to me that — despite three years of pandemic — there still is not a coordinated EU united response,” said Marion Koopmans, head of the Erasmus MC’s department of viroscience.
So why did European unity fall at the first hurdle? Here’s what you need to know.
What measures are in place for arrivals from China?
Here’s a brief rundown of a fast-moving situation. Most countries have announced some form of testing, with Italy testing travelers arriving from China and isolating those that are positive. Spain is testing and carrying out temperature checks, and from Tuesday, imposing COVID certificates, and France requires negative tests before traveling from China, masks on planes and PCR tests on arrival for all passengers.
Sweden became the latest EU country to announce plans to implement restrictions, saying Tuesday that it was “preparing to introduce travel restrictions requiring a negative COVID-19 test for entry to Sweden from China.”
Across the Channel, the U.K. announced Friday it would require a negative test before travel and would also be taking samples from arrivals.
Belgium, however, has taken a different tack, testing the wastewater from planes twice a week and sequencing the samples to search for new variants.
All this could change on Wednesday, however, with the EU’s crisis response body meeting to discuss (finally) a coordinated response.
A Chinese traveler leaves the arrival hall of Rome Fiumicino airport on December 29, 2022 after being tested for COVID-19 | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images
Why the different responses?
There are multiple factors at play — bitter experience, fear of new variants, concerns about China’s secrecy, and good old economics.
Italy, the first to strike out alone, has said its rules will ensure “surveillance and identification of any variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population.” This decision seems to be driven by the psychology that Italy was hit incredibly hard by COVID-19 in 2020, said Elizabeth Kuiper, associate director and head of the social Europe and well-being program at the European Policy Centre think tank.
France has justified its decision by saying the government has taken “health control measures in order to ensure the protection of the French population.” As well as testing, they will also be sequencing positive test results to screen for new variants, according to the prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, potentially belying a mistrust of information coming out of China.
Over in the U.K., the government has no qualms about saying its decision is due to the “lack of comprehensive health information shared by China.” The health ministry said that if there is an improvement in the sharing of information and greater transparency “then temporary measures will be reviewed.”
Others have held back. For Austria, which has so far resisted pressure from countries like Italy to coalesce around bloc-wide travel measures, any restriction on China arrivals would be a massive blow. The Austrian government has said that China’s reopening “heralds the return of the most important Asian source market for the coming tourism seasons.”
This is “a clear example of how countries are trying to balance the economic consequences of COVID and public health concerns,” said Kuiper.
Didn’t EU countries agree to work together?
One of Europe’s key lessons from the pandemic was supposed to have been to respond collectively to health threats. It was so important to countries that the EU Health Union was established. But the disagreements over China show that the “default to knee-jerk national responses hasn’t entirely gone away,” said Paul Belcher, consultant in European public health and adviser to the European Public Health Alliance.
This disorderly response has raised questions over whether EU coordination has taken the right form. A central part of the EU Health Union is the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), which was established precisely to enable Europe to respond quickly and appropriately during a health crisis. But it sits within the European Commission rather than independently — which has tied its hands somewhat, argued the European Policy Centre’s Kuiper.
“If HERA would have been an independent agency, they could have taken a stronger EU position concerning the need for travel restrictions for passengers coming from China,” Kuiper said. Without this leadership, countries have taken measures based on national motivations, she said.
Can we believe Chinese data?
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that in order to make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation on the ground the WHO “needs more detailed information” | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
Concerns about China’s transparency on COVID-19 are nothing new but as the country opens its borders, even the World Health Organization, which usually declines to point the finger at specific countries, has called for more information.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that in order to make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation on the ground the WHO “needs more detailed information.”
What China is doing is sharing genetic sequence data on the international database GISAID, “which is laudable,” said David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “But they are not sharing the epidemiological data that will help understand the transmissibility and virulence that goes along with each sequence information and thus leaving a gap in our understanding,” he said.
Meanwhile, China isn’t pleased with the global response. “Some countries have implemented entry restrictions targeting only Chinese travelers. This has no scientific basis, and some practices are unacceptable,” a spokesperson said.
What does the science say?
“There is no scientific consensus on what to do, whether it makes sense to test everyone at arrival or not,” said Steven Van Gucht, head of the scientific service of viral diseases at the Belgian national institute for public and animal health. “The current discussion is a mixture of the scientific debate, but it’s also political.”
One of the major concerns is that new variants could emerge from China. Some scientists say this is unlikely as China is behind the curve on new variants. “Because China’s variants have been and gone in the rest of the world, the threat of these viruses coming back out of China and causing waves is pretty unlikely,” said virologist Tom Peacock of Imperial College, London. Initial sequencing out of Italy has indicated that there were no new COVID variants among Chinese visitors.
Koopmans said that — based on what has been shared so far — the variants circulating in China are not so different from what’s being seen in other parts of the world, but “there are no reasons to assume they are ‘less fit.’”
However, if a new variant did emerge, it’s unlikely travel restrictions would completelystop the spread. For Koopmans, travel restrictions “in the past have shown they are not very effective at delaying transmission of variants.”
One way of quickly spotting the arrival of new variants without targeting individual passengers is to test wastewater from toilets on airplanes or at airports, something that European Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides has called for — and which is on the table for Wednesday’s meeting.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
BERLIN — Railway workers in Austria are set to hold a one-day strike on Monday after a failed round of talks in pay negotiations.
The Austria Press Agency reported Sunday that both sides said the fifth round of talks on pay for some 50,000 employees of about 65 railway operators, including the main national operator OeBB, had failed.
That means that there will be no regional, long-distance or night trains on Monday, and that only buses and other public transport run by municipal authorities will run.
Labor union vida has called for an extra 400 euros ($416) per month for railway employees, which it says is equivalent to an average 12% increase.
Employers have said that would amount to a 13.3% raise and is too much. OeBB said employers were offering an 8.44% increase and strongly criticized the strike.
Like many other countries, Austria has seen inflation surge this year following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The country’s annual inflation rate hit 11% in October.
KIRCHSCHLAG IN DER BUCKLIGEN WELT, Austria (AP) — A hot air balloon crashed twice Saturday on the eastern edge of the Alps in Austria, injuring nine people as a hard landing apparently bounced the pilot and the co-pilot out of the basket and sent several passengers back into the sky on their own, authorities said.
Sonja Kellner of the Lower Austrian Red Cross told news agency APA that two of the occupants were seriously injured in the crash in the Bucklige Welt region, an area named for its hilly landscape. They were found with two other slightly injured passengers at Untereck.
The other five passengers were found with minor injuries near Stang, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) away.
The Kurier daily newspaper reported that the accident occurred as the balloon was about to land on a meadow. It apparently descended too quickly and bounced off the ground, knocking four people out of the basket, including the pilot and co-pilot. They were dragged along for a few meters (yards) before the balloon took off again with its five remaining passengers.
Still, the pilot was able to instruct the passengers in the sky by phone on how to make an emergency landing. The balloon eventually came to a halt in a forest, Kurier reported.
The two seriously injured passengers were taken by helicopter to local hospitals.
KIRCHSCHLAG IN DER BUCKLIGEN WELT, Austria — A hot air balloon crashed twice Saturday on the eastern edge of the Alps in Austria, injuring nine people as a hard landing apparently bounced the pilot and the co-pilot out of the basket and sent several passengers back into the sky on their own, authorities said.
Sonja Kellner of the Lower Austrian Red Cross told news agency APA that two of the occupants were seriously injured in the crash in the Bucklige Welt region, an area named for its hilly landscape. They were found with two other slightly injured passengers at Untereck.
The other five passengers were found with minor injuries near Stang, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) away.
The Kurier daily newspaper reported that the accident occurred as the balloon was about to land on a meadow. It apparently descended too quickly and bounced off the ground, knocking four people out of the basket, including the pilot and co-pilot. They were dragged along for a few meters (yards) before the balloon took off again with its five remaining passengers.
Still, the pilot was able to instruct the passengers in the sky by phone on how to make an emergency landing. The balloon eventually came to a halt in a forest, Kurier reported.
The two seriously injured passengers were taken by helicopter to local hospitals.
LIVERPOOL, England — On the long picket line outside the gates of Liverpool’s Peel Port, rain-soaked dock workers warm themselves with cups of tea as they listen to 1980s pop.
Dozens of buses, cars and trucks honk in solidarity as they pass.
Dockers’ strikes are not new to Liverpool, nor is depravation. But this latest walk-out at Britain’s fourth-largest port is part of something much bigger, a great wave of public and private sector strikes taking place across the U.K. Railways, postal services, law courts and garbage collections are among the many public services grinding to a halt.
The immediate cause of the discontent, as elsewhere, is the rising cost of living. Inflation in the United Kingdom breached the 10 percent mark this year, with wages failing to keep pace.
But the U.K.’s economic woes long predate the current crisis. For more than a decade, Britain has been beset by weak economic growth, anaemic productivity, and stagnant private and public sector investment. Since 2016, its political leadership has been in a state of Brexit-induced flux.
Half a century after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger looked at the U.K.’s 1970s economic malaise and declared that “Britain is a tragedy,” the United Kingdom is heading to be the sick man of Europe once again.
The immediate cause of Liverpool dockers’ discontent that brought them to strike is the rising cost of living. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Here in Liverpool, the “scars run very deep,” said Paul Turking, a dock worker in his late 30s. British voters, he added, have “been misled” by politicians’ promises to “level up” the country by investing heavily in regional economies. Conservatives “will promise you the world and then pull the carpet out from under your feet,” he complained.
“There’s no middle class no more,” said John Delij, a Peel Port veteran of 15 years. He sees the cost-of-living crisis and economic stagnation whittling away the middle rung of the economic ladder.
“How many billionaires do we have?” Delij asked, wondering how Britain could be the sixth-largest economy in the world with a record number of billionaires when food bank use is 35 percent above its pre-pandemic level. “The workers put money back into the economy,” he said.
What would they do if they were in charge? “Invest in affordable housing,” said Turking. “Housing and jobs.”
Falling behind
The British economy has been struck by particular turbulence over recent weeks. The cost of government borrowing soared in the wake of former PM Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget on September 23, with the U.K.’s central bank forced to step in and steady the bond markets.
But while the swift installation of Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, as prime minister seems to have restored a modicum of calm, the economic backdrop remains bleak. Spending and welfare cuts are coming. Taxes are certain to rise. And the underlying problems cut deep.
U.K. productivity growth since the financial crisis has trailed that of comparator nations such as the U.S., France and Germany. As such, people’s median incomes also lag behind neighboring countries over the same period. Only Russia is forecast to have worse economic growth among the G20 nations in 2023.
In 1976, the U.K. — facing stagflation, a global energy crisis, a current account deficit and labor unrest — had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. It feels far-fetched, but today some are warning it could happen again.
The U.K. is spluttering its way through an illness brought about in part through a series of self-inflicted wounds that have undermined the basic pillars of any economy: confidence and stability.
The political and economic malaise is such that it has prompted unwanted comparisons with countries whose misfortunes Britain once watched amusedly from afar.
“The existential risk to the U.K. … is not that we’re suddenly going to go off an economic cliff, or that the country’s going to descend into civil war or whatever,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London. “It’s that we will become like Italy.”
Portes, of course, does not mean a country blessed with good weather and fine food — but an economy hobbled by persistently low growth, caught in a dysfunctional political loop that lurches between “corrupt and incompetent right-wing populists” and “well-intentioned technocrats who can’t actually seem to turn the ship around.”
“That’s not the future that we want in the U.K,” he said.
Reviving the U.K.’s flatlining economy will not happen overnight. As Italy’s experience demonstrates, it’s one thing to diagnose an illness — another to cure it.
Experts speak of an unbalanced model heavily reliant upon Britain’s services sector and beset with low productivity, a result of years of underinvestment and a flexible labor market which delivers low unemployment but often insecure and low-paid work.
“We’re not investing in skills; businesses aren’t investing,” said Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “It’s not that surprising that we’re not getting productivity growth.”
But any attempt to address the country’s ailments will require its economic stewards to understand their underlying causes — and those stretch back at least to the first truly global crisis of the 21st century.
Crash and burn
The 2008 financial crisis hammered economies around the world, and the U.K. was no exception. Its economy shrunk by more than 6 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. Five years passed before it returned to its pre-recession size.
For Britain, the crisis in fact began in September 2007, a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when wobbles in the U.S. subprime mortgage market sparked a run on the British bank Northern Rock.
The U.K. discovered it was particularly vulnerable to such a shock. Over the second half of the 20th century, its manufacturing base had largely eroded as its services sector expanded, with financial and professional services and real estate among the key drivers. As the Bank of England put it: “The interconnectedness of global finance meant that the U.K. financial system had become dangerously exposed to the fall-out from the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market.”
The crisis was a “big shock to the U.K.’s broad economic model,” said John Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. Productivity took an immediate hit as exports of financial services plunged. It never fully recovered.
“Productivity before the crash was basically, ‘Can we create lots and lots of debt and generate lots and lots of income on the back of this? Can we invent collateralized debt obligations and trade them in vast volumes?’” said James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum and a former adviser to Labour’s left-wing former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.
A post-crash clampdown on City practises had an obvious impact.
“This is a major part of the British economy, so if it’s suddenly not performing the way it used to — for good reasons — things overall are going to look a bit shaky,” Meadway added.
The shock did not contain itself to the economy. In a pattern that would be repeated, and accentuated, in the coming years, it sent shuddering waves through the country’s political system, too.
The 2010 election was fought on how to best repair Britain’s broken economy. In 2009, the U.K. had the second-highest budget deficit in the G7, trailing only the U.S., according to the U.K. government’s own fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
The Conservative manifesto declared “our economy is overwhelmed by debt,” and promised to close the U.K.’s mounting budget deficit in five years with sharp public sector cuts. The incumbent Labour government responded by pledging to halve the deficit by 2014 with “deeper and tougher” cuts in public spending than the significant reductions overseen by former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
The election returned a hung parliament, with the Conservatives entering into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The age of austerity was ushered in.
Austerity nation
Defenders of then-Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity program insist it saved Britain from the sort of market-led calamity witnessed this fall, and put the U.K. economy in a condition to weather subsequent global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.
“That hard work made policies like furlough and the energy price cap possible,” said Rupert Harrison, one of Osborne’s closest Treasury advisers.
Pointing to the brutal market response to Truss’ freewheeling economic plans, Harrison praised the “wisdom” of the coalition in prioritizing tackling the U.K.’s debt-GDP ratio. “You never know when you will be vulnerable to a loss of credibility,” he noted.
But Osborne’s detractors argue austerity — which saw deep cuts to community services such as libraries and adult social care; courts and prisons services; road maintenance; the police and so much more — also stripped away much of the U.K.’s social fabric, causing lasting and profound economic damage. A recent study claimed austerity was responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
Under Osborne’s plan, three-quarters of the fiscal consolidation was to be delivered by spending cuts. With the exception of the National Health Service, schools and aid spending, all government budgets were slashed; public sector pay was frozen; taxes (mainly VAT) rose.
But while the government came close to delivering its fiscal tightening target for 2014-15, “the persistent underperformance of productivity and real GDP over that period meant the deficit remained higher than initially expected,” the OBR said. By his own measure, Osborne had failed, and was forced to push back his deficit-elimination target further. Austerity would have to continue into the second half of the 2010s.
Many economists contend that the fiscal belt-tightening sucked demand out of the economy and worsened Britain’s productivity crisis by stifling investment. “That certainly did hit U.K. growth and did some permanent damage,” said King’s College London’s Portes.
“If that investment isn’t there, other people start to find it less attractive to open businesses,” former Labour aide Meadway added. “If your railways aren’t actually very good … it does add up to a problem for businesses.”
A 2015 study found U.K. productivity, as measured by GDP per hour worked, was now lower than in the rest of the G7 by a whopping 18 percentage points.
“Frankly, nobody knows the whole answer,” Osborne said of Britain’s productivity conundrum in May 2015. “But what I do know is that I’d much rather have the productivity challenge than the challenge of mass unemployment.”
‘Jobs miracle’
Rising employment was indeed a signature achievement of the coalition years. Unemployment dropped below 6 percent across the U.K. by the end of the parliament in 2015, with just Germany and Austria achieving a lower rate of joblessness among the then-28 EU states. Real-term wages, however, took nearly a decade to recover to pre-crisis levels.
Economists like Meadway contend that the rise in employment came with a price, courtesy of Britain’s famously flexible labor market. He points to a Sports Direct warehouse in the East Midlands, where a 2015 Guardian investigation revealed the predominantly immigrant workforce was paid illegally low wages, while the working conditions were such that the facility was nicknamed “the gulag.”
The warehouse, it emerged, was built on a former coal mine, and for Meadway the symbolism neatly charts the U.K.’s move away from traditional heavy industry toward more precarious service sector employment. “It’s not a secure job anymore,” he said. “Once you have a very flexible labor market, the pressure on employers to pay more and the capacity for workers to bargain for more is very much reduced.”
Throughout the period, the Bank of England — the U.K.’s central bank — kept interest rates low and pursued a policy of quantitative easing. “That tends to distort what happens in the economy,” argued Meadway. QE, he said, is a “good [way of] getting money into the hands of people who already have quite a lot” and “doesn’t do much for people who depend on wage income.”
Meanwhile — whether necessary or not — the U.K.’s austerity policies undoubtedly worsened a decades-long trend of underinvestment in skills and research and development (Britain lags only Italy in the G7 on R&D spending). At British schools, there was a 9 percent real terms fall in per-pupil spending between 2009 and 2019, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Xu. “As countries get richer, usually you start spending more on education,” Xu noted.
Two senior ministers in the coalition government — David Gauke, who served in the Treasury throughout Osborne’s tenure, and ex-Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable — have both accepted that the government might have focused more on higher taxation and less on cuts to public spending. But both also insisted the U.K had ultimately been correct to prioritize putting its public finances on a sounder footing.
It was February 2018 before Britain finally achieved Osborne’s goal of eliminating the deficit on its day-to-day budget.
Austerity was coming to an end, at last. But Osborne had already left the Treasury, 18 months earlier — swept away along with Cameron in the wake of a seismic national uprising.
***
David Cameron had won the 2015 election outright, despite — or perhaps because of — the stringent spending cuts his coalition government had overseen, more of which had been pledged in his 2015 manifesto. Also promised, of course, was a public vote on Britain’s EU membership.
The reasons for the leave vote that followed were many and complex — but few doubt that years of underinvestment in poorer parts of the U.K. were among them.
Regardless, the 2016 EU referendum triggered a period of political acrimony and turbulence not seen in Westminster for generations. With no pre-agreed model of what Brexit should actually entail, the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU became the subject of heated and protracted debate. After years of wrangling, Britain finally left the bloc at the end of January 2020, severing ties in a more profound way than many had envisaged.
While the twin crises of COVID and Ukraine have muddled the picture, most economists agree Brexit has already had a significant impact on the U.K. economy. The size of Britain’s trade flows relative to GDP has fallen further than other G7 countries, business investment growth trails the likes of Japan, South Korea and Italy, and the OBR has stuck by its March 2020 prediction that Brexit would reduce productivity and U.K. GDP by 4 percent.
Perhaps more significantly, Brexit has ushered in a period of political instability. As prime ministers come and go (the U.K. is now on its fifth since 2016), economic programs get neglected, or overturned. Overseas investors look on with trepidation.
“The evidence that the referendum outcome, and the kind of uncertainty and change in policy that it created, have led to low investment and low growth in the U.K. is fairly compelling,” said professor Stephen Millard, deputy director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
Beyond the instability, the broader impact of the vote to leave remains contentious.
Portes argued — as many Remain supporters also do — that much harm was done by the decision to leave the EU’s single market. “It’s the facts, not the uncertainty that in my view is responsible for most of the damage,” he said.
Brexit supporters dismiss such claims.
“It’s difficult statistically to find much significant effect of Brexit on anything,” said professor Patrick Minford, founder member of Economists for Brexit. “There’s so much else going on, so much volatility.”
Minford, an economist favored by ex-PM Truss, acknowledged that “Brexit is disruptive in the short run, so it’s perfectly possible that you would get some short-run disruption.” But he added: “It was a long-term policy decision.”
Where next?
Plenty of economists can rattle off possible solutions, although actually delivering them has thus far evaded Britain’s political class. “It’s increasing investment, having more of a focus on the long-term, it’s having economic strategies that you set out and actually commit to over time,” says the IFS’ Xu. “As far as possible, it’s creating more certainty over economic policy.”
But in seeking to bring stability after the brief but chaotic Truss era, new U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has signaled a fresh period of austerity is on the way to plug the latest hole in the nation’s finances. Leveling Up Secretary Michael Gove told Times Radio that while, ideally, you wouldn’t want to reduce long-term capital investments, he was sure some spending on big projects “will be cut.”
This could be bad news for many of the U.K.’s long-awaited infrastructure schemes such as the HS2 high-speed rail line, which has been in the works for almost 15 years and already faces a familiar mix of local resistance, vested interests, and a sclerotic planning system.
“We have a real problem in the sense that the only way to really durably raise productivity growth for this country is for investments to pick up,” said Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. “And the headwinds to that are quite significant.”
For dock workers at Liverpool’s Peel Port, the prospect of a fresh round of austerity amid a cost-of-living crisis is too much to bear. “Workers all over this country need to stand up for themselves and join a union,” insisted Delij.
For him, it’s all about priorities — and the arguments still echo back to the great crash of 15 years ago. “They bailed the bankers out in 2007,” he said, “and can’t bail hungry people out now.”
Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer flanked by their children, all members of the singing Von … [+] Trapp family, in this publicity handout from the 1965 film adaption of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music.
Bettmann Archive
The Trapp family’s history is an immigrant success story filled with overcoming hardship and adapting to the realities of a new land and culture. While the outlines of the Trapp family’s real-life story matched The Sound of Music, the movieended when the family’s immigration journey to America began.
Maria von Trapp, played by Julie Andrews in the film, worked with and fell in love with the children, married the captain and the family left Austria. However, Hollywood movies and real life are not the same. The family did not like the portrayal of Georg, the father/captain, who, according to Maria and the children, was loving and outgoing, not stern and reclusive as portrayed in the movie.
Maria was religious, as the movie showed. “The only important thing on earth for us is to find out what is the will of God and to do it,” she wrote in her memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Maria recalled saying those words to the Reverend Mother shortly before being assigned as a tutor for Baron von Trapp, who would become her future husband. Contrary to the depiction in the movie, Maria was not the governess to all the children, and she married Georg more than a decade before World War II. She writes in her memoir that her love of the children inspired her to marry Georg. There were 10 children, rather than the seven portrayed in the movie.
The family became singers and toured Paris, London, Brussels and elsewhere, even once singing for the Pope. The war interrupted their musical ambitions in Austria.
On March 11, 1938, the family celebrated daughter Agatha’s birthday. Over the radio, they heard Austria’s chancellor say, “I am yielding to force. My Austria—God bless you!” The next morning, Maria saw German soldiers “on every street corner.”
The Trapp children felt the impact of the Nazi takeover of Austria. Children were forbidden to sing songs in school with the word Christ or Christmas in the name. Soon after the takeover, daughter Lorli told Maria her first-grade teacher wanted to speak with her. The teacher told Maria: “When we learned our new anthem yesterday Lorli didn’t open her mouth. When I asked her why she didn’t sing with us, she announced in front of the whole class that her father had said he’d put ground glass in his tea or finish his life on a dung heap before he would ever sing that song. Next time I will have to report this.” Lorli also refused to raise her hand in a “Heil Hitler” salute. Maria feared the family would be placed in a concentration camp.
Austria’s Navy Department asked Georg to come out of retirement and command a submarine. Soon after, the Trapp family was asked to sing at a celebration for Adolf Hitler’s birthday. In both cases, Georg’s answer was “No.”
After these refusals, Georg gathered the family together for a pivotal moment in their lives. “Children, we have the choice now: Do we want to keep the material goods we still have, our home with the ancient furniture, our friends, and all the things we’re fond of?—Then we shall have to give up the spiritual goods: Our faith and our honor. We can’t have both anymore. We could all make a lot of money now, but I doubt very much whether it would make us happy. I’d rather see you poor but honest. If we choose this, then we have to leave. Do you agree?”
The children answered, “Yes, father.”
“Then, let’s get out of here soon,” said Georg. “You can’t say no three times to Hitler.”
Real life diverged from the film The Sound of Music. “The family did not secretly escape over the Alps to freedom in Switzerland, carrying their suitcases and musical instruments,” writes Joan Gearin, an archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration. “As daughter Maria said in a 2003 interview printed in Opera News, ‘We did tell people that we were going to America to sing. And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing.’”
Gearin notes the family traveled to Italy, not Switzerland. Georg, Maria’s husband, was an Italian citizen by birth. “The family had a contract with an American booking agent when they left Austria,” writes Gearin. “They contacted the agent from Italy and requested fare to America.”
Maria describes their first impressions of America. “Bewildered—completely bewildered—that’s what we all were when three taxis spilled us out on Seventh Avenue at 55th Street . . . All the instruments in their cases . . . the big trunks with the concert costumes and our private belongings . . . the tallest houses in Vienna have five or six stories. When the elevator took us to the 19th floor, we simply couldn’t believe it.”
The family began a series of concerts, but their agent, Mr. Wagner, canceled the remaining tour events when he found out Maria was eight months pregnant. “What a blow! Fewer concerts meant less money, and we needed every cent,” writes Maria. She gave birth to a son, Johannes, around Christmas.
Money became an issue since what the family earned mostly went to repaying Mr. Wagner the cost of the boat tickets, which he had advanced. Their visitor visa expired in March. The visa stipulated they could only earn money by performing concerts. Fortunately, the family’s agent had lined up more concert dates. However, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) thwarted those plans.
“One morning came the fatal letter,” writes Maria. “The Immigration and Naturalization Service informed us that our application for an extension of temporary stay was not granted, and we had to leave the United States at the latest March 4. This was a cruel blow. We had burned all our bridges behind us, and would never dare go back home again, and now America would not allow us to stay here. . . . One thing was certain: We had to leave.”
The family traveled by boat to Europe and performed small concerts in Sweden and elsewhere. Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 cut short their concert plans.
Their agent, Mr. Wagner, provided another advance for tickets to the United States, which meant the family was headed once more to America. After arriving at the dock in Brooklyn, Maria made a mistake that almost cost the family their sanctuary. When an immigration officer asked Maria how long she intended to stay in America, instead of saying “six months,” Maria said, “I’m so glad to be here—I want to never to leave again!”
This mistake landed the family in an immigration detention facility. Reporters and photographers came to Ellis Island and published articles about the Trapp family being held in detention. After the fourth day, the family was questioned at an immigration court hearing, focusing on whether they planned to leave. Given the judge’s tone, Maria was pessimistic after the hearing. Perhaps only due to the outside pressure and publicity, the family was released from detention.
During their second tour in America, the family learned the hard facts of show business. Their agent, Mr. Wagner, scheduled them in large concert halls but did a poor job publicizing the events. Wagner told the family he didn’t think they had sufficient appeal to American audiences and decided not to renew his contract to represent them. Without representation, the Trapp family had no chance of success and no way to remain in America. The family had reached another moment of crisis.
With much effort, they found another potential agent. However, he said his representation was contingent on changing the family’s act to appeal to a wider American audience, not just those primarily interested in choral or classical music. He told them he would need $5,000 in advance for publicity and advertising. At the time, the family had only $250 in their bank account. The entrepreneurial family got to work. They met with a wealthy couple who, after hearing their story and listening to them sing, promised to lend them half the money. The Trapp family found another sponsor for the other $2,500. They were back in business.
Their new agent changed the name from the Trapp Family Choir, which he considered sounded “too churchy,” to the Trapp Family Singers. To earn money before the new tour would start, the family made handicrafts, such as children’s furniture, wooden bowls and leather works.
The family’s entrepreneurial streak continued when they bought a farm in Vermont and added a music camp on the grounds. During World War II, the family ran afoul of government regulators at the War Production Board, who said the family had used “new” rather than “second-hand” lumber in violation of the law. Maria thought she would be put in prison until the regulators relented after she showed them the lumber had been purchased 18 months before. Vermont’s governor attended the camp’s grand opening, which featured the Trapp family singing the Star-Spangled Banner. Today, the farm and lodgings remain a tourist attraction.
Two of the Trapp family returned to Europe—fighting as soldiers for the U.S. Army during World War II. It was an ironic twist. Rather than their father being pressed into service as a submarine commander for the German war effort, the sons fought against Germany in Western Europe. After the war, the family regained ownership of their Austrian home, which had been confiscated to serve as a headquarters for (SS Reich Leader) Heinrich Himmler. The family sold the home to a church group and raised money to help Austrians impoverished by the war and Germany’s occupation.
The Trapp family overcame tragedy in America. In 1947, Maria’s husband, Georg, passed away. He died of pneumonia surrounded by his family.
The Trapp family continued to perform, and eventually took on outside performers to replace some of the children who had gone on to other careers in America, including in medicine. The great-grandchildren of Maria and Georg continue to sing in America.
Maria von Trapp’s proudest day in America came in 1948, when she became a U.S. citizen. “Then came the big day in May when we were summoned to the courthouse in Montpelier—the five years of waiting for over,” writes Maria. “What a mixed group it was, waiting there in the courtroom: Italians, Croatian, Syrians, English, Irish, Polish, and we Austrians. The clerk called the roll. Then the judge entered the room. We all rose from our seats. Then we were asked to raise our right hand and repeat the solemn oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America. After we had ended, ‘So help me God,’ the judge bade us sit down, looked at us all, and said: ‘Fellow citizens.’ He meant us—now we were Americans.”
BELGRADE, Serbia — Austria and Hungary will help Serbia curb migrant crossings at its southern border, Hungary’s foreign minister said Thursday, citing an “explosion” in the number of people entering European countries without authorization in recent months.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Hungary and Austria would supply Serbia with both equipment and personnel to better secure its border with North Macedonia. He spoke after delegations from the three countries met in Belgrade.
“It is our common interest to move the defense line toward the south and that is why we agreed to join forces,” Serbian media quoted Szijjarto as saying.
“There has been an explosion in the number of migrants, and it really can be compared with 2015,” when more than 1 million people entered Europe, he said.
Thursday’s meeting followed one the leaders of Austria, Hungary and Serbia held earlier in the week on developing a joint strategy to curb migration.
Migrants from the Asia, Africa and the Middle East who manage to reach Greece from Turkey then move north along the so-called Balkan route toward North Macedonia and further into Serbia before reaching the borders of European Union members Hungary or Croatia.
The journeys are long and often dangerous. Bodies floated amid splintered wreckage in the water off a Greek island on Thursday as the death toll from the sinking of two migrant boats hundreds of miles apart rose to at least 21, with many still missing.
Hungary erected a wire fence on its border with Serbia in 2016 to stop unauthorized crossings and faced criticism for its anti-immigration policies. Migrants looking to enter Hungary now seek help from people smugglers to cross. Serbian police reported Wednesday that they detained a number of suspected smugglers following a raid near the border.
“Serbia, Hungary and Austria share a joint problem because of the migration crisis and huge pressure at the borders,” Serbian Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin said.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised this week that Belgrade would align its visa policies with the EU’s to stop Serbia’s visa-free arrangements with some countries from being used for unauthorized migration.
Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said his country received 58,000 asylum requests so far this year from people from Tunisia, Morocco, India and other countries whose citizens are not eligible for protection.
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Follow AP’s coverage of global migration: https://apnews.com/hub/migration
International travel may still have its challenges.
But finding a solid hotel for a business trip isn’t one of them.
CNBC Travel and the market data firm Statista today release aranking of the “Best Hotels for Business Travelers” in Europe.
This is the first ranking of its kind between CNBC and Statista, who are also releasing hotel rankings in the Middle East today. Asia-Pacific rankings were published in September.
In total, we analyzed more than 10,000 four- and five-star hotels in 117 locations to produce lists corporate travelers can trust. We did this using a three-step process:
Asking business travelers and hotel industry professionals to answer a CNBC reader survey which ran from May 3 to June 7, 2022.
Reviewing more than 1 million hotel data points, which included objective information (location, business facilities, food, leisure activities and room characteristics) and subjective reviews (gathered from Google, TripAdvisor, Expedia and similar websites).
Weighting the data to prioritize the hotel characteristics deemed most important in the reader survey.
For full details about our research methodology, click here.
Canal House Suites at Sofitel Legend The Grand Amsterdam
Hotel Okura Amsterdam
Sofitel Legend The Grand Amsterdam
Conservatorium Hotel
Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam
Source: Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam
The Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam tied for the highest scores for customer reviews among Europe’s largest financial centers, a distinction it shared with Rome’s Villa Spalletti Trivelli. Travelers rave about the canal-side location, but they say it’s the smaller points — the turndown service, fresh tulips in the room, the luxurious bedding — that make it one of Amsterdam’s finest hotels.
In a city with ample competition from major hotel brands, the owner-run Louisa’s Place — named after Queen Louise of Prussia — topped our list. Built around 1900, the boutique hotel in West Berlin has 47 spacious rooms, each with high ceilings and separate bedrooms.
Steigenberger Wiltcher’s location on the prestigious Avenue Louise — and its style, aptly described as “luxurious simplicity” — make it a favorite with business travelers in Belgium. Travelers can take an online tour of the hotel before visiting, virtually walking the hallways to peer into its restaurants and ballrooms.
Charlottehaven has hotel apartments in two areas — the larger units in the “Garden” and the newer apartments in the “Tower” which have 180-degree views of the city. The hotel combines kitchens, laundry areas and other comforts of a house with the amenities of a hotel. Nearby metro and train stations make it easy to commute around the city too.
Scoring 3.78 (out of a possible 4 points), the five-star Merrion hotel in the center of Dublin tied for the second highest overall score in Europe. Its 142 rooms and suites are inside four restored Georgian townhouses dating to the 1760s. There’s also a two-star Michelin restaurant — Ireland’s first — plus two bars, a spa and six meeting spaces.
The Sofitel Frankfurt Opera is on Opera Square, or the Opernplatz, near the city’s famed opera house. In addition to its central location, the hotel wins over business travelers for the small touches that make for seamless stays: complimentary car valets and minibar beverages, 24-hour room service and stylish rooms outfitted with Illy espresso machines and Bose sound systems.
Marble bathrooms, down pillows and balconettes with unobstructed views of Lake Geneva — these are some of the reasons the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues Geneva consistently ranks among the city’s most luxurious places to stay. Business travelers can take meetings to the next level with private tours of the nearby Patek Philippe Museum or helicopter tours over Mont Blanc — with all details organized by the hotel.
The Langham London is a U.K. institution. It’s got a West End location, restaurants helmed by the two-Michelin starred chef Michel Roux Jr., and a bar, Artesian, that was named the world’s best four times in a row. Travelers who book executive rooms or higher get access to The Langham Club, which comes with perks like private check-ins, pressing services, all-day dining options and private meeting spaces.
It’s rare for a small property to outrank major hospitality companies, but Gran Hotel Ingles has done exactly that. “Pure luxury” is how the 48-room hotel is described by travelers, from its sleek interior to its cocktail weekend events accompanied by live music. Opened in 1886, the hotel is said to be Madrid’s oldest.
The website for Hotel Viu Milan leads off — not with its rooms or restaurants — but with one word: bleisure. That’s because this hotel is serious about blending business stays with relaxation: morning yoga on the terrace, aperitives after work and dinner at the on-site restaurant Morelli, helmed by the Italian Michelin-starred chef Giancarlo Morelli.
The Thief Hotel on Tjuvholmen, or “Thief Islet,” takes its name from its seedy past as a hotbed of criminals. Now it’s an upmarket neighborhood known for art and architecture. Art features prominently in the hotel too, as do designer furniture and upmarket Nordic cuisine.
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European far-right politicians just stormed to victory in Italy, after achieving historic results in France and Sweden.
“Everywhere in Europe, people aspire to take their destiny back into their own hands!” said Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally Party.
But if you think there is a new wave of right-wing radicalism sweeping Europe, you’d be wrong. Something else is going on.
Analysis by POLITICO’s Poll of Polls suggests far-right parties in the region on average did not increase their support by even one percentage point between the start of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in February and today.
POLITICO looked at the median and average increase of all parties organized in right-wing European Parliament groups of Identity and Democracy, the European Conservatives and Reformists or unaffiliated parties with political far-right positions.
Overall, the results indicate that if an increase in support occurred for far-right parties, it happened several years ago.
The Sweden Democrats’ first surge happened after the 2014 election, when the party grew from around 10 percent to 20 percent, the same one-fifth share of the vote they received in this year’s election. The far-right Alternative for Germany AfD in Germany grew fast in 2015 and 2016 reaching 14 percent in POLITICO’s polling tracker. In Italy, the Northern League overtook Forza Italia for the first time in early 2015, and peaked in 2019 at 37 percent before starting a downward trend ending on 9 percent in last month’s election. In the Italian election, voters mostly switched between rival right-wing camps.
The far-right has moved from the fringes of politics into the mainstream, not only influencing the political center but also entering the arena of power.
“There is a normalization of far-right parties as an integral part of the political landscape,” said Cathrine Thorleifsson, who researches extremism at the University of Oslo. “They have been accepted by the electorate and also by other, conventional parties.”
Cooperation between the center-right and the extreme-right has become less taboo.
“The rise of far-right parties is only part of the story. The facilitating and mainstreaming of far-right parties as well as the adoption of far-right frames and positions by other parties is at least as important,” tweeted Cas Mudde, a leading scholar on the issue.
This may risk destabilizing Europe even more than winning a couple of percentage points in the polls.
Italy’s far-right firebrand Giorgia Meloni is a clear-cut example. While her party draws its origin from groups founded by former fascists, she’ll now lead the EU’s third-largest economy.
Leader of Italian far-right party “Fratelli d’Italia” (Brothers of Italy), Giorgia Meloni | Pitro Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images
In Sweden, the center-right party has started coalition talks for a minority government which would have to draw on opposition support, most likely from the far-right Swedish Democrats. Far-right parties have also entered governments in Austria, Finland, Estonia and Italy. Other countries are likely to follow.
George Simion, the leader of Romania’s far-right party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), celebrated Meloni’s win in Italy, saying his party is likely to follow in their footsteps.
Spain heads to the ballot box next year and socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez may have a tough time winning re-election. The conservative People’s Party is between five and seven points ahead of the Spanish socialists in all the published polls, but it is unlikely to garner enough votes to secure a governing majority outright.
That means it may have to come to an agreement with far-right party Vox, whose leader, Santiago Abascal, is an ally of Meloni’s. While the People’s Party previously refused to govern with Vox, last spring its newly elected leader, Alberto Núnez-Feijóo, greenlit a coalition agreement with the ultranationalist group in Spain’s central Castilla y León region.
Tom Van Grieken, the right-wing Belgian politician, also pointed to Spain as the next likely example, especially because of the possible cooperation with the PP. “All over Europe, we see conservative parties who are considering breaking the cordon sanitaire,” he said, referring to the refusal of other parties to work with the far-right. “They are tired of compromising with their ideological counterparts, the parties at the left end of the spectrum.”
Chairman of Vlaams Belang party Tom Van Grieken | Stephanie Le Coqc/EFE via EPA
This didn’t happen overnight. The far-right worked hard to shrug off their extremist, neo-Nazi image.
“In some of the reporting on the Swedish Democrats, you’d think they’ll deport people on trains as soon as they’re in power. Come on, these parties have changed,” said one EU official with right-wing affiliations.
The far-right invested in “image adjustment and trying to tread carefully with some issues, while unashamedly catering to others,” said Nina Wiesehomeier, a political scientist at the IE University of Madrid. “This is particularly obvious in Italy right now, with Meloni sticking to the slogan of ‘God, homeland, family,’ as a continuation, while having tried to purge the party from more radical elements.”
In Belgium’s northern region of Flanders, the right-wing Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) explicitly dismisses the label “extreme-right.” Just like his counterparts in Italy, Sweden and France, Van Grieken, the party’s president, denounced the more extremist positions of his group’s founding fathers and moderated his political message to make voting for the far-right socially acceptable.
Overt racism is taboo. Instead, the rhetoric changes to criticizing an open-door migration policy. By carefully catering to centrist voters, the far-right aims for a bigger slice of the cake, while still riding on the anti-establishment discontent.
“There is a clear fault line between the winners of globalization and the nationalists,” Van Grieken told POLITICO. “This comes on top on the concerns about mass migration, whether it’s in Malmö, Rome or other European cities.”
Perfect storm
Now, the time is right to capitalize on that transformation.
As Europe is battling record inflation and Europeans fear exorbitant heating bills, governments warn about the political implications of a “winter of discontent.”
“It’s a massive drainage of European prosperity,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told POLITICO recently. “In the current situation, it’s hard to believe in progress, it’s very hard to make progress. So there’s a very pessimistic feeling.”
The current war in Ukraine is the latest in a succession of crises — in global finance, migration and the pandemic. Experts argue that this is key to understanding the rising support for the far-right.
“Such existential crises have a destabilizing effect and lead to fear,” said Carl Devos, a professor in political science at Ghent University. “Fear is the breeding ground for the far-right. People tend to translate that fear and outrage into radical voting behaviour.”
Migration and identity politics are less prominent in the media because of the Ukraine war and rising energy prices, but they’re still key issues in right-wing debate.
In Austria, the coalition parties fought over whether or not asylum seekers should receive climate bonuses. In the Netherlands, the death of a baby at the asylum center Ter Apel led to a renewed debate over the overcrowded migration centers.
The combination of those issues is likely to feed into more right-wing wins across the continent. “The far-right offers nationalist, protectionist solutions to the globalized crises, said Thorleifsson. “We see how the migration issue was momentarily off the agenda during the pandemic, but now it’s back.”
Aitor Hernández-Morales, Camille Gijs and Ana Fota contributed reporting.
