While the scale and target of Biden’s promised response is not yet clear, any unilateral move is likely to draw blowback from key allies in the Middle East who worry about sparking a regional war.
Turkey, a key NATO ally, has denounced Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has accused the U.K. and the U.S. of trying to turn the Red Sea into a “sea of blood.”
“Turkey does not want to be drawn into this conflict because it shares a border with Iran,” said Selin Nasi, a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. “If the U.S. as its main ally in NATO gets involved in this military conflict directly then Turkey has to choose a side, and that will mean it’s harder to maintain a balanced approach — like it has done with the war in Ukraine.”
The challenge for Biden is how to retaliate without risking escalation by Iran and its partners in the region. Conversely, doing nothing — especially after having said he would avenge the deaths of the three U.S. soldiers — would leave him vulnerable to a charge of weakness from Trump.
“Iran’s leadership probably calculates that the United States will be reticent to fulsomely respond in any manner that would risk escalation of tensions in the Middle East and spark the region-wide [conflict] the Biden administration has admirably tried to prevent the past three months,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former U.S. deputy national intelligence officer.
But the U.S. may have “to undertake a more fulsome response to restore deterrence,” he added.
Jamie Dettmer, Jeremy Van der Haegen and Laura Kayali contributed reporting.
Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets at Israel on Saturday in retaliation for the targeted killing of a Hamas leader in Beirut this week amid mounting fears of a larger regional war, according to media reports.
Hezbollah said in a statement Saturday that it targeted an Israeli air surveillance base in northern Israel with 62 missiles as an “initial response” to the suspected Israeli strike on January 2 that killed senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The Israeli military said around 40 rockets were fired from Lebanon at its territory.
Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, said earlier this week that the killing of al-Arouri will “not go unpunished.”
Israel’s military said it responded to the Hezbollah rocket attacks with a drone strike on “the terrorist cell responsible for the launches toward the area of Metula.”
The escalation comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has embarked on his fourth diplomatic tour of the Middle East as the Israel-Hamas war reaches its three-month mark and amid growing international criticism of Israel’s strategy. Yemen’s Houthi militants have also increased their attacks on cargo ships and fuel tankers in the Red Sea.
Blinken met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Saturday. U.S. officials said Blinken was seeking Turkish buy-in, or at least consideration, of potential monetary or in-kind contributions to reconstruction efforts and some form of participation in a proposed multi-national force that could operate in or adjacent to the territory, the Associated Press reported.
Turkey has been harshly critical of Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the prosecution of the war and the impact it has had on Palestinian civilians.
In addition, officials said, Blinken will stress the importance Washington places on Ankara ratifying Sweden’s membership in NATO, a long-delayed process that the Turks have said they will complete soon. Sweden’s accession to the defense alliance is seen as one critical response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who was in Lebanon on Saturday, warned that it was imperative to avoid the Israel-Hamas war growing into a regional conflict.
Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostages, some of whom have been released.
Israel has for the last three months bombed the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, resulting in nearly 23,000 people dying and around 59,000 others being injured, according to the Palestinian enclave’s health authorities.
In another warning, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday that Gaza has become “uninhabitable” for its nearly 2.3 million inhabitants and repeated that “a public health disaster is unfolding” in the enclave.
BRUSSELS — In early August, Bulgarian officials spotted something they weren’t sure was legal.
Barrels of Russian oil were arriving in the country priced above a $60 limit allies had adopted to sap Moscow of critical revenue for its war in Ukraine.
Bulgaria was in an unusual position among its partners. It had been given an exemption to European Union sanctions barring most imports of Russian oil, ostensibly to ensure the country wouldn’t face acute energy shortages even though the EU’s broader policy aimed to crush Russia’s main cash artery following its full-scale assault on Kyiv.
But could Bulgaria still import Russian oil if it was above the price cap? Customs officials in Sofia wanted to know for sure, so they reached out to EU officials asking for “clarification,” according to a private email exchange dated August 4 and seen by POLITICO.
The answer: Let it in.
“Crude oil imported based on these derogations does not need to be at or below $60 per barrel,” came the EU’s reply.
Green light in hand, Bulgaria proceeded to import Russian crude exclusively above the price cap from August until October, according to confidential customs data seen by POLITICO. The shipments were worth an estimated €640 million, according to calculations by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) think tank. The cash went to Russian energy firms, which pay the taxes helping fill the Kremlin’s war chest.
The sanctions gap is emblematic of the broader flaws that have corroded the EU’s attempt to stymie the billions Russia earns from energy exports. Roughly a year after adopting the initial penalties, legal loopholes have combined with poor enforcement and a mushrooming parallel trade to keep Moscow’s fossil fuel revenues flowing, and feeding almost half of Vladimir Putin’s war-hungry budget.
Russian oil is likely winding up as fuel in Europe via new routes. Enforcement across the Continent is scattered and reliant on inconsistent data. And a whole new black market has sprung up to insure, ship and hide Russia’s fuel as it travels the world.
The sanctions, in other words, have come up short. Russia’s oil export earnings have dropped just 14 percent since the restrictions were imposed. And in October, Russia’s fossil fuel revenues hit an 18-month high.
It also appears the EU has run out of steam to do much about it. The latest EU sanctions package, set to be finalized at a leaders’ summit this week, is mostly focused on administrative tweaks that experts say will do little to curb widespread evasion. Absent are any efforts to drop the level of the oil price cap further.
“The whole sanction mechanism works only if you keep adopting on a regular basis decisions that close loopholes and impose new sanctions,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told POLITICO. “Every actor in the world has the capacity to adapt.”
The Bulgarian oversight
The reason behind Bulgaria’s price cap loophole is arguably a clerical oversight.
When the EU wrote the G7 nations’ price cap into law, officials expressly forbade EU shipping firms and insurance companies from trafficking Russian oil above the $60 threshold to non-EU countries. The aim was to squeeze the Kremlin’s revenues while keeping global oil flows steady.
But officials never thought to impose similar rules on shipments to EU countries, partly because Brussels had banned Russian seaborne crude oil imports that same day.
Except for Bulgaria.
The backdoor has meant millions in extra revenue for Moscow. According to CREA, Russian oil export earnings from Bulgarian sales between August to October — a third of which came from sales above the price cap — raised around €430 million in direct taxes for the Kremlin. All Russian-origin shipments delivered during this time — priced between $69 and $89 per barrel — relied on Western help, including from Greek ship operators and British and Norwegian insurers.
And it was all technically legal.
The situation “reveals that Bulgaria has aided Russia to exploit this glaring loophole to maximize the Kremlin’s budget revenues from these oil sales without any apparent benefits for Bulgarian consumers,” said Martin Vladimirov, a senior analyst at the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) think tank, which has studied the issue.
More broadly, Bulgaria’s exemption from the Russian oil ban has been lining the pockets of both Russia’s largest private oil firm, Lukoil, which dominates Bulgaria’s fuel production with its sprawling Black Sea refinery, and the Kremlin itself.
More broadly, Lukoil’s crude oil imports to Bulgaria raked in over €2 billion in export revenues for Russia since the sanctions went into effect in February, according to a new CREA and CSD analysis. And the Kremlin has made €1 billion in direct taxes from the sales, POLITICO revealed last month.
There is now mounting pressure to mend these money-making fissures.
Bulgaria has vowed to cut short its opt-out from the Russian oil ban by six months, provisionally moving the deadline up to March.
And Kiril Petkov, the former prime minister who leads one of two parties controlling Bulgaria’s current governing coalition, told POLITICO the price cap workaround should “absolutely” be closed too. He vowed to pressure the government and ask the European Commission, the EU’s executive in Brussels, to do so, while insisting that Bulgaria is accelerating its efforts to shake off its Russian energy ties, unlike nearby countries like Slovakia.
Bulgaria proceeded to import Russian crude exclusively above the price cap from August until October, according to confidential customs data seen by POLITICO | Robert Ghement/EPA-EFE
“We do not like the $60 loophole that was created by the EU Commission derogation,” Petkov said. “We don’t want Putin to receive any euro that he doesn’t have to.”
The Bulgarian case “highlights one of the many loopholes that make sanctions less effective at lowering Russian export earnings used to finance the Kremlin’s war chest,” according to Isaac Levi, who leads CREA’s Russia-Europe team.
Bulgaria’s finance ministry and Lukoil didn’t respond to requests for comment.
‘Not all rainbows and unicorns’
A major challenge is poor monitoring and enforcement.
In October, a report commissioned by the European Parliament found EU sanctions enforcement is “scattered” across over 160 local authorities, while capitals have “dissimilar implementation systems” that include “wide discrepancies” in penalties for violations.
That assumes you can find a breach to begin with. Even those involved in shipping oil get only limited access to information on trades, according to Viktor Katona, chief crude analyst at the Kpler market intelligence firm.
Insurers, for example, rely on a single document from firms buying and selling oil cargoes pledging the sale is not above $60 per barrel, which amounts to a “declaration of faith,” he said.
The EU’s upcoming 12th package of sanctions is trying to crack down on this problem with new rules forcing traders to actually itemize specific costs. The goal is to prevent buyers from purchasing Russian oil above the limit and then hiding the extra costs as insurance or transport fees. But few in the industry have high hopes the added paperwork will stop the workaround.
Several EU countries with large shipping industries are also reluctant to tighten the price cap, making things even trickier. During the latest round of sanctions, Cyprus, Malta and Greece once again raised concerns over calls to strengthen the restrictions, according to two EU diplomats, who like others in the story were granted anonymity to speak freely.
A diplomat from a major maritime EU nation said stricter sanctions would only push Russia to use more non-Western operators to ship oil. Instead, the diplomat argued, the focus should be on broadening the countries adhering to the price cap. Currently, the G7, the EU and Australia are on board.
“It would be stupid to push for price caps, and then other shipping registers do not abide by it because they are not EU members,” the diplomat said, adding that “all that will be achieved is the total destruction of the shipping industry.”
Meanwhile, EU countries are still allowing Russian oil cargoes to cross their waters on their way elsewhere.
CREA research on behalf of POLITICO found that 822 ships transporting Moscow’s crude transferred their cargo to another ship in EU territorial waters — the majority in Greek, but also Maltese, Spanish, Romanian and Italian waters — since the oil sanctions kicked off last December. The volumes were equivalent to 400,000 barrels per day.
A Commission spokesperson defended the EU sanctions, noting Russia has been forced to spend “billions of dollars” to adapt to the new reality, including on new tankers, and its oil extraction and export infrastructure as Western demand shriveled.
That has caused “serious and ongoing economic and policy consequences,” the Commission spokesperson said. And CREA did find that the oil price limit has stripped the Kremlin of €34 billion in export revenues, equivalent to roughly two months of earnings this year.
Others point out that teething issues are normal — it’s the first time the EU has deployed sanctions at such a scale.
“Let’s be fair … all of the sanctions measures are unprecedented, so there’s an element of learning by doing it, as well,” said one of the EU diplomats. “We don’t live in a perfect world: it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.”
Deep dark waters
Instead of accepting the tough rules designed to drain its finances, Moscow has sparked a sanctions circumvention arms race, looking for loopholes as part of what one senior Ukrainian official has described as a “cockroach strategy.”
To ensure it can sell its fossil fuels at whatever price it can get, in violation of the oil price cap and other restrictions, Russia has presided over the creation of a parallel shipping market that, through a mixture of law-breaking and law-bending, is lining the pockets of its state energy firms and oligarchs.
A “shadow fleet” of aging tankers has emerged, mysteriously managed through a network of companies that obscure their ownership, frequently trading their cargo of fuel with other ships at sea. To help them escape the jurisdiction of Western sanctions while meeting basic maritime requirements, a cottage industry of murky insurance firms has sprung up in countries like India.
“When they were introduced, the sanctions seemed to be having an effect for a very short time. But now the state of play is most of the sanctions that have beeninplace have not really worked — or they’ve been very limited in terms of what they’ve been able to do,” said Byron McKinney, a director at trade and commodity firm S&P.
As Russian trades move increasingly away from Western operators and traders, that makes tracking them even more difficult, said Katona, the Kpler oil analyst.
“Every single” Russian type of oil now trades above the price cap, he said, while CREA estimates only 48 percent of Russian oil cargoes were carried on tankers owned or insured in G7 and EU countries in October.
“It’s like coming to a party and telling everyone not to drink alcohol, but not coming to the party yourself,” Katona said. “How do you make sure that no one’s drinking?”
At the same time, countries like India have increased their imports of cheap Russian crude by 134 percent, CREA found, processing it and then selling it everywhere. That means European consumers could unknowingly be filling up their cars with fuel produced from Russian crude, bankrolling Moscow’s armed forces at the same time.
The waning West?
The EU is well aware of the problem.
“Unless you have big players like India and China as part of it, effectiveness sooner or later fades away,” conceded one senior Commission official.
“It shows us the limits of what the tools of Western players can achieve at a global level,” the official added, noting it’s “a lesson in how much the [global] power balance has changed compared to 10 or 20 years ago.”
Expectations are low, however, that India or China — or Turkey, another critical shipping country — will come around to the price cap any time soon.
And back in Brussels, political leaders seem to be throwing up their hands. When EU leaders gather for their summit on Thursday, the sanctions package they’re expected to endorse will do little to stanch the flow of Russia’s energy cash, omitting any measures targeting Russian oil or lowering the price cap.
Until such steps are taken, Russia’s finances won’t truly wither, said Alexandra Prokopenko, an economist and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
“The oil price is now the only real channel of transmission for external risk,” she said. “Russia will feel extremely bad if the average price on its oil is $40 or $50 per barrel — that would be painful for its budget and for Putin’s ability to finance expenditures.”
Getting to that point, however, was never going to be easy.
“The Russian economy was quite a big animal,” Prokopenko said, “that makes it hard to shoot it with a single shot.”
Victor Jack and Giovanna Coi reported from Brussels. Gabriel Gavin reported from Yerevan.
Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting from Brussels.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Some countries at the COP28 climate talks are lying about the potential for capturing the greenhouse gases fossil fuels emit, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said.
Kerry was speaking at an event on Friday evening on the sidelines of the U.N. COP28 climate talks in Dubai, where the nations of the world are wrangling over the draft of a pledge to end fossil fuel use.
The deal has been forcefully opposed by fossil fuel-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia. Negotiators from Riyadh argue carbon pollution can be largely captured and buried using scrubbing technology that Kerry said remains largely unproven at the needed scale.
“There are people here who want to just continue business as usual. And the great facade is: ‘Oh no, we’ll be able to capture everything,’” said Kerry, his voice hoarse from a chest cold. “No scientist tells me we can capture it all. Can’t do it. Can we capture some? Yes, and by the way, I’m for it.”
Kerry said it was up to the gas industry “to show us they can capture all those emissions, to tell us whether it’s really going to be part of the future. But don’t lie to people and tell them it’s green. And don’t pretend to people that that’s the main alternative.”
Kerry said the next few days of talks, which are scheduled to end Tuesday, would be “absolutely critical. Without any question whatsoever.”
A draft text released on Friday by the United Arab Emirates government, which is hosting the conference, included several options for a deal between almost 200 countries to “phase out” fossil fuels — a phrase being pushed by small island states, the U.S. and the European Union. But it also included an option for no deal at all, which is the result many countries, including Saudi Arabia, China and Russia prefer.
“I am concerned that not everyone is engaging in a constructive manner,” German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said in a statement shared with reporters.
Saudi negotiators have pushed for the deal to focus on the emissions that cause climate change, rather than the fuels that cause the emissions, UAE chief negotiator Hana Al Hashimi told reporters Saturday. That necessitates the use of carbon capture — but countries are divided over how much the technology can be used, versus the need to simply stamp out the use of the fuels.
The EU is arguing for the deal at COP28 to include a stipulation that carbon capture and storage (CCS) only be used for the hardest sectors to cut out the use of fossil fuels, such as the manufacture of cement.
“Make no mistake, we cannot CCS ourselves out of the problem,” said EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra at a press conference Friday, adding that carbon capture and storage was “a minor part of the solution space.”
Advocates for a fossil fuel phase-out deal believe it will scare investors away from fossil fuel projects. “One thing I know to absolute certainty,” Kerry said, “we are not going to go back to the old energy paradigm, you can absolutely bank on that. We are not going back.”
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Now the real work starts.
The first few days of the COP28 climate conference featured so many lofty declarations and flashy promises that you’d be forgiven for asking what delegates are still doing here. But the main negotiations have only just gotten underway.
At the core of this year’s summit sits something called the “Global Stocktake,” often abbreviated to GST — a nondescript name that conceals its vital role in international climate efforts.
In short, it’s about drawing up a report card on where the world stands eight years after signing the Paris Agreement, and how countries plan to fix their inevitable shortcomings. That plan coming out of COP28 will help determine whether the world can stave off the worst impacts of climate change or careen toward unlivable temperatures.
German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan called the stocktake the “heart” of the Paris climate accord; Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, labeled it a “lifeline” for especially vulnerable countries like his native Samoa.
The outcome of this obscure process is also what high-ranking ministers will be haggling over when they arrive for the second week of COP28 — and what the United Arab Emirates hosts will be judged on in the end.
“What makes this COP unique as compared to the previous COPs? First and foremost, it’s the Global Stocktake,” EU lead negotiator Jacob Werksman told reporters on Monday.
So what is it? Let’s take a look.
What are we even talking about?
The Global Stocktake broadly refers to a thorough assessment of how much progress countries are making toward the Paris Agreement targets, which committed countries to limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and ideally to 1.5C compared to the pre-industrial era.
The process consists of three components. The first stage, gathering all the relevant information, began two years ago. The second phase, evaluating that data, ended this summer.
The final task — the response to this assessment — concludes at COP28. That’s the hard part.
Under the Paris accord’s terms, countries have to conduct this exercise every five years.
Hang on, the assessment already happened?
Yup. You’ll sometimes hear that countries will conduct an assessment of their climate efforts while in Dubai, but the United Nations already published its report summarizing the findings in September — concluding that the world is falling short of its Paris goals.
“That assessment has been done, it is clear we are not on a track,” Morgan told a press conference in Dubai last week. With current efforts, she noted, “we will see a temperature rise of 2.5C to 2.9C.”
She added: “That is unimaginable.”
Beyond 1.5C, climate impacts like extreme weather or sea-level rise get substantially worse. Scientists warn that overshooting that threshold risks triggering irreversible tipping points like dramatic polar ice loss, which would further exacerbate warming.
So what’s happening at COP28?
Negotiators in Dubai are discussing what countries should do with that report, which gave strict instructions to retain any hope of hitting the 1.5C target: First, cut 43 percent of greenhouse gas emissions this decade (compared to 2019 levels), thenhit net-zero emissions by 2050.
But there are profound divisions over how to get there.
“The first component is taking stock of what the gaps are,” said Tom Evans, who tracks the stocktake negotiations in Dubai for think tank E3G. “Second, what do you do about these gaps? And that’s where the political flashpoints are.”
What could that response look like?
A lot of things, but the idea is for everyone from the Paris Agreement — that’s nearly 200 countries — to endorse a coherent plan by the summit’s end.
Again, not easy.
The document is expected to both look back at what went wrong and then look ahead with guidelines on how to remedy those shortcomings. That roadmap should include a climate wish list — everything from cutting emissions to preparing communities for climate change fallout to financing for both.
So … words on a page. Does that even matter?
It does, for a few reasons.
First, the text will give clear directions to countries as they draw up their next climate action plans. The Paris Agreement requires governments to submit new plans by COP30, which takes place in Brazil in 2025.
Second, those words send a powerful signal to markets, local governments and more. If nearly 200 countries agree on a text that says a coal phaseout is necessary, investors will take the hint.
With the stocktake, “we have the opportunity to take a set of decisions … that finds the clarity that business leaders need to invest in the future,” Morgan said.
The outcome will also test the Paris accord’s integrity. These regular check-ins and the requirement to then update climate plans are meant to ensure everyone is upping their efforts over time.
“The effectiveness of the Paris Agreement is at stake,” Evans said.
And what do countries want?
The end result should set out what to do about planet-warming fossil fuels, as well as efforts to prepare for a warmer future and steps to ensure poorer countries have the resources to do that, as well.
“No one is trying to tear the whole thing down,” said Evans.
That doesn’t mean countries are close to an agreement.
Urgent calls for a fossil fuel “phaseout” — a much-debated term — are especially contentious.
Many developing countries say they need more financial support to back ambitious language on fossil fuels and other efforts to reduce emissions.
German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan called the stocktake the “heart” of the Paris climate accord | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Meanwhile, the EU, the U.S. and climate-vulnerable countries are trying to ensure new plans don’t exempt any industries and cover all greenhouse gasses, not just carbon dioxide — something China recently said it was on board with.
Going in the other direction, several countries whose economies depend on oil and gas exports — Russia and Saudi Arabia among them — are trying to push for language that would allow for the continued use of fossil fuels.
What’s the UAE’s role here?
The UAE is running the show and must shepherd the stocktake to a conclusion. At some point, the officials in charge will have to produce a draft text for countries to accept or reject.
COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber — who, controversially also helms the UAE’s state-run oil giant — has repeatedly insisted he would push for the “most ambitious response possible” to the stocktake. But he has remained vague on what that might look like.
Still, Evans said, “They’re aware that it’s the centerpiece of their COP. The shine of those early pledges will fade, and they’ll need to produce something.”
How are the negotiations going?
There are already some rocky signs.
As of Monday evening, negotiators hadn’t produced a detailed draft text, despite spending some 10 hours talking behind closed doors on Sunday.
A text outlining possible “building blocks” was released on Friday, but it’s more of a broad summary that left all the hard questions unanswered. Regarding the energy sector, for example, options included “phasedown/out fossil fuels” and “phasedown/out/no new coal.” In other words: All options are on the table.
What’s next?
Over the coming days, negotiators will try to agree on as many sections of the text as possible, but their bosses will take over in the summit’s second week to resolve the thornier questions.
This week’s talks will “inevitably lead to some very important political questions for ministers to resolve in the second week,” said Werksman, the EU negotiator. “Exactly what those questions are, we can’t fully speculate on — but we imagine that the issue of how we’re going to address fossil fuels will be top of the list.”
Technically the deadline is December 12, but if past COPs are any guide, overtime is possible.
Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”
The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.
“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.
Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.
Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.
“On the Itikit — Okusykan stretch in Buryatia, while driving through the tunnel, the locomotive crew of the cargo train noticed smoke from one of the diesel fuel tanks. The train was stopped, and two fire extinguishing trains were sent from nearby towns to help. The movement of trains was not interrupted, it was organized along a bypass section with a slight increase in travel time,” Russia’s state railroad company RZHD said in a statement on Thursday.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
LONDON — World leaders will touch down in Dubai next week for a climate change conference they’re billing yet again as the final off-ramp before catastrophe. But war, money squabbles and political headaches back home are already crowding the fate of the planet from the agenda.
The breakdown of the Earth’s climate has for decades been the most important yet somehow least urgent of global crises, shoved to one side the moment politicians face a seemingly more acute problem. Even in 2023 — almost certainly the most scorching year in recorded history, with temperatures spawning catastrophic floods, wildfires and heat waves across the globe — the climate effort faces a bewildering array of distractions, headwinds and dismal prospects.
“The plans to achieve net zero are increasingly under attack,” former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, who set her country’s goal of reaching climate neutrality into law, told POLITICO.
The best outcome for the climate from the 13-day meeting, which is known as COP28 and opens Nov. 30, would be an unambiguous statement from almost 200 countries on how they intend to hasten their plans to cut fossil fuels, alongside new commitments from the richest nations on the planet to assist the poorest.
But the odds against that happening are rising. Instead, the U.S. and its European allies are still struggling to cement a fragile deal with developing countries about an international climate-aid fund that had been hailed as the historic accomplishment of last year’s summit. Meanwhile, a populist backlash against the costs of green policies has governments across Europe pulling back — a reverse wave that would become an American-led tsunami if Donald Trump recaptures the White House next year.
And across the developing world, the rise of energy and food prices stoked by the pandemic and the Ukraine war has caused inflation and debt to spiral, heightening the domestic pressure on climate-minded governments to spend their money on their most acute needs first.
Even U.S. President Joe Biden, whose 2022 climate law kicked off a boom of clean-energy projects in the U.S., has endorsed fossil fuel drilling and pipeline projects under pressure to ease voter unease about rising fuel costs.
Add to all that the newest Mideast war that began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
On the upside, investment in much of the green economy is also surging. Analysts are cautiously opining that China’s emissions may have begun to decline, several years ahead of Beijing’s schedule.And the Paris-based International Energy Agency projects that global fossil fuel demand could peak this decade, with coal use plummeting and oil and gas plateauing afterward. Spurring these trends is a competition among powers such as China, the United States, India and the European Union to build out and dominate clean-energy industries.
But the fossil fuel industry is betting against a global shift to green, instead investing its profits from the energy crisis into plans for long-term expansion of its core business.
The air of gloom among many supporters of global climate action is hard to miss, as is the sense that global warming will not be the sole topic on leaders’ minds when they huddle in back rooms.
“It’s getting away from us,” Tim Benton, director of the Chatham House environment and society center, said during a markedly downbeat discussion among climate experts at the think tank’s lodgings on St James’ Square in London earlier this month. “Where is the political space to drive the ambition that we need?”
Fog of war
The most acute distraction from global climate work is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The conflagration is among many considerations the White House is weighing in Biden’s likely decision not to attend the summit, one senior administration official told POLITICO this month. Other leaders are also reconsidering their schedules, said one senior government official from a European country, who was granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive diplomacy of the conference.
The war is also likely to push its way onto the climate summit’s unofficial agenda: Leaders of big Western powers who are attending will spend at least some of their diplomatically precious face-time with Middle East leaders discussing — not climate — but the regional security situation, said two people familiar with the planning for COP28 who could not be named for similar reasons. According to a preliminary list circulated by the United Arab Emirates, Israeli President Isaac Herzog or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend the talks.
A threat even exists that the conference could be canceled or relocated, should a wider regional conflict develop, Benton said.
The UAE’s COP28 presidency isn’t talking about that, at least publicly. “We look forward to hosting a safe, inclusive COP beginning at the end of November,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement. But the strained global relations have already thrown the location of next years’ COP29 talks into doubt because Russia has blocked any EU country from hosting the conference, which is due to be held in eastern or central Europe.
The upshot is that the bubble of global cooperation that landed the Paris climate agreement in 2015 has burst. “We have a lot of more divisive narratives now,” Laurence Tubiana, the European Climate Foundation CEO who was one of the drafters of the Paris deal, said at the same meeting at Chatham House.
The Ukraine war and tensions between the U.S. and China in particular have widened the gap between developed and developing countries, Benton told POLITICO in an email.
Now, “the Hamas-Israel war potentially creates significant new fault lines between the Arab world and many Western countries that are perceived to be more pro-Israeli,” he said. “The geopolitical tensions arising from the war could create leverage that enables petrostates (many of which are Muslim) to shore up the status quo.”
Add to that the as yet unknown impact on already high fossil fuel commodity prices, said Kalee Kreider, president of the Ridgely Walsh public affairs consultancy and a former adviser to U.S. Vice President Al Gore. “Volatility doesn’t usually help raise ambition.”
The Biden administration’s decisions to approve a tranche of new fossil fuel production and export projects will undermine U.S. diplomacy at COP28, said Ed Markey, a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
“You can’t preach temperance from a barstool, and the United States is running a long tab,” he said.
U.N. climate talks veterans have seen this program before. “No year over the past three decades has been free of political, economic or health challenges,” said former U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa, who now heads the consulting firm onepoint5. “We simply can’t wait for the perfect conditions to address climate change. Time is a luxury we no longer have — if we ever did.”
The EU backlash
Before the Mideast’s newest shock to the global energy system, the war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s energy dependence on Russia — and initially galvanized the EU to accelerate efforts to roll out cleaner alternatives.
But in the past year, persistent inflation has worn away that zeal. Businesses and citizens worry about anything that might add to the financial strain, and this has frayed a consensus on climate change that had held for the past four years among left, center and center right parties across much of the 27-country bloc.
In recent months, conservative members of the European Parliament have attacked several EU green proposals as excessive, framing themselves as pragmatic environmentalists ahead of Europe-wide elections next year. Reinvigorated far-right parties across the bloc are also using the green agenda to attack more mainstream parties, a trend that is spooking the center.
Germany’s government was almost brought down this year by a law that sought to ban gas boilers — with the Greens-led economy ministry retreating to a compromise. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has joined a growing chorus agitating for a “regulatory pause” on green legislation.
If Europe’s struggles emerge at COP28, the ripple effect could be global, said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank.
The “EU has established itself as the global laboratory for climate neutrality,” he said. “But now it needs to deliver on the experiment, or the world (which is closely watching) will assume this just does not work. And that would be a disaster for all of us.”
U.K. retreats
The world is also watching the former EU member that stakes a claim to be the climate leader of the G7: the U.K.
London has prided itself on its green credentials ever since former Prime Minister May enacted a 2019 law calling for net zero by 2050 — making her the first leader of a major economy to do so.
According to May’s successor Boris Johnson, net zero was good for the planet, good for voters, good for the economy. But under current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the messaging has transformed. Net zero remains the target — but it comes with a “burden” on working people.
In a major speech this fall, Sunak rolled back plans to ban new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030, bringing the U.K. into line with the EU’s 2035 date. With half an eye on Germany’s travails, he said millions of households would be exempted from the gas boiler ban expected in 2035.
In making his arguments for a “pragmatic” approach to net zero, Sunak frequently draws on the talking points of net zero-skeptics. Why should the citizens of the U.K., which within its own borders produces just 1 percent of global emissions, “sacrifice even more than others?”
The danger, said one EU climate diplomat — granted anonymity to discuss domestic policy of an allied country — was that other countries around the COP28 negotiating table would hear that kind of rhetoric from a capital that had led the world — and repurpose it to make their own excuses.
Sunak’s predecessor May sees similar risks.
“Nearly a third of all global emissions originate from countries with territorial emissions of 1 per cent or less,” May said. “If we all slammed on the brakes, it would make our net zero aspirations impossible to achieve.”
Trump’s back
The U.S., the largest producer of industrial carbon pollution in modern history, has been a weathervane on climate depending on who controls its governing branches.
When Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, it created a major drag on Biden’s promise to provide $11.4 billion in annual global climate finance by 2024.
Securing this money and much more, developing countries say, is vital to any progress on global climate goals at COP28. Last year, on the back of the pandemic and the energy price spike, global debt soared to a record $92 trillion. This cripples developing countries’ ability to build clean energy and defend themselves against — or recover from — hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires.
Even when the money is there, the politics can be challenging. Multibillion-dollar clean energy partnerships that the G7 has pursued to shift South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and India off coal power are struggling to gain acceptance from the recipients.
Yet even more dire consequences await if Trump wins back the presidency next year.
A Trump victory would put the world’s largest economy a pen stroke away from quitting the Paris Agreement all over again — or, even more drastically, abandoning the entire international regime of climate pacts and summits. The thought is already sending a chill: Negotiations over a fund for poorer countries’ climate losses and damage, which Republicans oppose, include talks on how to make its language “change-of-government-proof” in light of a potential Trump victory, said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of island states.
More concretely for reining in planet-heating gases, Trump would be in position to approve legislation eliminating all or part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden’s signature climate law included $370 billion in incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and other carbon-cutting efforts – though the actual spending is likely to soar even higher due to widespread interest in its programs and subsidies – and accounts for a bulk of projected U.S. emissions cuts this decade.
House Republicans have attempted to claw back parts of Biden’s climate law several times. That’s merely a political messaging effort for now, thanks to a Democrat-held Senate and a sure veto from Biden, but the prospects flip if the GOP gains full control of Congress and White House.
Under a plan hatched by Tubiana and backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, countries would in the future log their state and local government climate plans with the U.N., in an attempt to undergird the entire system against a second Republican blitzkrieg.
The U.S. isn’t the only place where climate action is on the ballot, Benton told the conference at Chatham House on Nov. 1.
News on Sunday that Argentina had elected as president right-wing populist Javier Milei — a Trump-like libertarian — raised the prospect of a major Latin American economy walking away from the Paris Agreement, either by formally withdrawing or by reneging on its promises.
Elections are also scheduled in 2024 for the EU, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Russia, and possibly the U.K.
“A quarter of the world’s population is facing elections in the next nine months,” he said. “If everyone goes to the right and populism becomes the order of the day … then I won’t hold out high hopes for Paris.”
Zack Colman reported from Washington, D.C. Suzanne Lynch also contributed reporting from Brussels.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
MÁLAGA, Spain — The leader of Israel’s center-left Labor Party says something has gone “very wrong” with the political left around the world, with supposed progressives now aligning themselves with Islamist militants who oppose the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.
Over a month after Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and captured some 240, Israeli officials revised their death toll downwards as Israel wages a retaliatory war against Hamas in Gaza, which has now killed more than 11,000 Palestinians — according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Mass protests have been held in cities across the EU and U.S. calling for an immediate cease-fire, with many using the slogan “from the river to the sea,” regarded by many Jews and Israelis as a call for the annihilation of the state of Israel but by Palestinians and their supporters as anon-violent rallying cry against the occupation.
At the protests and on university campuses, some protestors describing themselves as left-wing have expressed support for Hamas — proscribed as a terror organization by the U.S., EU and U.K. Tensions in the left-wing camp have already boiled over in France and Britain. The far-left France Unbowed party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for example, avoids describing Hamas as terrorists and was the only major political party not to attend a rally against rising antisemitism last weekend. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, the U.K. Labour Party leader, has been pummelled by the left of his party for refusing to call for a cease-fire.
“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Labor leader Merav Michaeli told POLITICO in an interview. “It became very, very clear in this attack that people who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women [and] the LGBTQ+ community,” she said on the fringes of an international meeting of Socialist and social democrat parties in Spain.
Some politicians on the far left have primarily blamed Israel for the the latest cycle of violence.
“The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way,” Michaeli told POLITICO, adding that Israel has some “very strong allies” on the center-left.
“I fail to see how shouting jihad and calling for a mass murder of Jews is pro-Palestinian,” she added. “It’s important for me to emphasize to them that when you do not very strongly go against Hamas, and what it does in Gaza including to its own people, you are complicit.”
Israel has imposed a total siege on Gaza, allowing only a trickle of humanitarian aid into the densely-inhabited territory and obliging hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to move south to escape daily bombardments.
Michaeli, a transport minister in the previous Israeli government, is a long-time critic of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is leading a far-right coalition and formed a war cabinet with centrist Benny Gantz after October 7. Michaeli called during the interview for Netanyahu to “go now.”
But she also sought to focus attention on the trauma suffered by Israeli society in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
“When I’m speaking to people outside of Israel, then they need to understand that even the biggest peace activists and even the biggest believers in the two state solutions are now under a horrible attack,” she said.
Protesters demand immediate ceasefire in Gaza at Place de la Republique in Brussels | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images
Labor and its antecedent political movements dominated Israeli politics for some 30 years after the birth of the nation in 1948, with members including such prominent politicians as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and EhudBarak. But as Israel shifted to the right, Labor was sidelined as a political force, with now only four members – including Michaeli herself — in the 120-seat Knesset.
“The way to rebuild Israel is to take it back,” she said, before correcting herself: “It’s not even back, it’s to put it on the Zionist democratic, liberal path.” Michaeli explained that this means pushing for a two-state solution as outlined under the Oslo accords that Rabin, her predecessor as Labor Party leader, negotiated in the 1990s.
Cease-fire divisions
At the meeting in Spain, calls by some national parties from countries such as France, Ireland and Belgium for a cease-fire in Gaza divided delegates and did not make it into the final agreed text. The left more broadly has been rocked by divisions over how to respond to the war in Gaza.
Michaeli, whose party is a mere observer to the Party of European Socialists, could not directly negotiate the final text that was agreed upon in Málaga.
But she said: “[Calling for a] cease-fire now is giving permission to Hamas to continue rearming itself, continue stealing food, water, medicine and fuel from its own people and yes, rebasing itself.” She suggested that calls for a cease-fire were being influenced by “PR” for Hamas.
She put the blame for thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza on Hamas, rather than on the Israeli army, whose actions she defended.
“They are dying because Hamas is using them as human shields, because they have based everything from equipment to missiles to their headquarters in the midst of the most civilian functions there are,” Michaeli said.
She criticized what she perceived as a lack of support among EU politicians to push for the release of some 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas. “I would have loved to hear more about that than just a mention, at least as much as they’re talking about the humanitarian needs in Gaza,” she said.
TEL AVIV — Benjamin Netanyahu scrambled to quell a revolt by religious nationalists and settler leaders within his increasingly unruly governing coalition demanding he reverse a decision to let two fuel trucks per day enter Gaza — a concession the Israeli prime minister made amid growing U.S. and international pressure.
Rebellious coalition partners demanded to have more say over the conduct of the war after Netanyahu’s decision was announced Friday. They argued there should be no delivery of fuel, however limited, to the Palestinian coastal enclave — or any other humanitarian concessions — until Hamas frees the 240 Israeli hostages the group seized on October 7, when gunmen launched an attack on southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, Israeli officials say.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right settler leader, insisted the war cabinet be expanded from three people, including Netanyahu, so that all seven parties in the coalition government have a seat. Smotrich said allowing fuel in “is a grave mistake.”
In recent weeks, as Western allies attempt to persuade Netanyahu to restrain Israeli military action — which has killed nearly 11,500 Palestinians in 42 days, according to separate counts by both the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas-run government in Gaza, a number which some Israeli officials dispute — he has to contend with coalition partners who are set against conceding.
The religious nationalists and settler leaders also were critical of his decision last week, made again after arm-twisting by the Biden administration, to pause for a few hours daily its aerial bombardment and ground operations to allow Palestinians to flee south from the most intense fighting in northern Gaza.
The eruption within the coalition government over the fuel concession illustrates the dilemma Netanyahu faces in trying to balance far-right religious nationalists in his government and Israel’s Western allies, who are increasingly pressing him to ease the plight of Gaza civilians. The majority of Palestinians in Gaza, which has been under air, land and sea blockade by Israel since 2007 — when Hamas wrested power over the Strip from Fatah — relied heavily on humanitarian aid before the war, including fuel to clean water, operate sewage systems and power now-shut-off telecommunications. Egypt has upheld a blockade on its border crossing at Rafah with Gaza since 2007.
Israeli officials say the decision to let in small amounts of fuel daily, a fraction of the fuel allowed before the war, was allowed as a gesture to Western allies and to avoid a breakdown of Gaza’s sewage and water systems, which would risk spreading disease, impacting civilians and Israeli troops.
“If plague were to break out, we’d have to stop the war,” National Security Council chairman Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters Friday.
But Itamar Ben Gvir, the minister overseeing Israel’s police, dismissed that argument, saying “so long as our hostages don’t even get a visit from the Red Cross, there’s no sense in giving the enemy humanitarian gifts.” Permitting fuel, he said, “broadcasts weakness, gives oxygen to the enemy and allows [Hamas Gaza leader Yahya] Sinwar to sit comfortably in his air-conditioned bunker, watch the news and continue to manipulate Israeli society and the families of the abductees.”
Scrounging for fuel
Israel cut off all fuel deliveries to Gaza at the start of the war, forcing the enclave’s only power plant to shut down, and it has been highly reluctant to allow fuel into Gaza, claiming it could be used to keep generators working to pump oxygen into Hamas’ huge network of tunnels. “For air, they need oil. For oil, they need us,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said as the war commenced.
But civilians need fuel as well. Gaza hospitals have been scrounging to find fuel to run their generators to power incubators and other life-saving equipment. And the U.N. has been urging fuel deliveries. Midweek, Israel allowed in a small amount to keep United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid delivery trucks operating.
Netanyahu has agreed to no more than 140,000 liters being transported every two days into Gaza.
An official in the prime minister’s office told POLITICO: “60,000 liters of fuel (about two trucks) were approved, which is about 3.5 percent of the amount that came in before the war, in order to prevent a humanitarian crisis and enable the continued destruction of Hamas-ISIS. It will prevent the sewage system from collapsing. The long-term policy will be discussed tonight in the cabinet.”
President Biden asked Netanyahu for a “pause longer than three days” to allow for negotiations over the release of some hostages held by Hamas | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
President Joe Biden expressed frustration last week about how long it took to get Israel to agree on brief humanitarian pauses. He had asked the Israeli leader not only for daily pauses but also for a “pause longer than three days” to allow for negotiations over the release of some hostages held by Hamas. On the latter he has so far been rebuffed but on the former, he said it had “taken a little longer than I hoped.”
Netanyahu has struggled to keep his rambunctious far-right coalition partners in line. Last week he urged ministers to pipe down and “be careful with their words” when they talk about the war on Hamas. “Every word has meaning when it comes to diplomacy,” the prime minister said at a full cabinet meeting. “We must be sensitive,” he added, saying speaking out of turn harms Israel’s international legitimacy.
His warning came after his agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, envisaged the displacement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip becoming a permanent uprooting. He dubbed it the “Gaza Nakba of 2023,” a reference to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, known as the nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). “That’s how it’ll end,” Dichter said during a television interview.
Just days earlier, Amihai Eliyahu, the heritage minister, prompted an outcry in Israel and abroad when he suggested one option in the war could be to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Netanyahu quickly disavowed the comment, and then suspended Eliyahu from cabinet meetings.
And on Thursday, before the coalition eruption over Netanyahu’s backtracking on previous pledges not to allow a drop of fuel to enter Gaza, Ben Gvir said the West Bank should be flattened like Gaza following an attack by Hamas gunmen on a checkpoint south of Jerusalem.
“We need to deal with Hamas in the West Bank, and the Palestinian Authority which has similar views to Hamas and its heads identified with Hamas’ massacre, exactly like we are dealing with Gaza,” Ben Gvir said.
Netanyahu’s coalition partners are unlikely though to walk out of the government. None of the seven parties will want to set in motion the circumstances for a snap election. A poll Friday found that the Netanyahu-led coalition would be roundly beaten if elections for the Knesset were held today.
The Israeli prime minister isn’t getting any boost from the war, unlike Benny Gantz, a retired general and one of the leaders of the center-right National Unity party. He agreed to serve in the war cabinet for the duration of the fight, despite personal and political differences with Netanyahu. When asked who they would prefer as prime minister, 41 percent of respondents said Gantz; only 25 percent said Netanyahu.
The World Health Organization described Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital as a “death zone,” after a U.N. team visited the largest medical complex in the Palestinian enclave on Saturday.
“The team saw a hospital no longer able to function: no water, no food, no electricity, no fuel, medical supplies depleted,” WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote on social media.
He announced WHO was trying to set up an urgent evacuation plan from the current situation, which was described as “unbearable and unjustifiable,” and called for a cease-fire.
Some 290 patients, including 32 babies in extremely critical condition, were left at al-Shifa, according to the U.N.-led mission, which accessed the facility briefly. The team also saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital, it said.
Meanwhile, the White House said the U.S. was working “hard” to get a deal between Israel and Hamas that would see the release of hostages seized by the militant group in exchange for a five-day pause in the fighting, after the Washington Post reported that the two sides are close to agreement on a U.S.-brokered deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. officials said no deal had been reached yet.
More than 11,500 Palestinians have been killed, while another 2,700 have been reported missing, according to Hamas-run health authorities in the Gaza Strip, following the group’s attack into southern Israel six weeks ago, which triggered the war. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Around 1,200 people have been killed on the Israeli side, mainly civilians from Hamas’ attack, in which the group also took 240 hostages back into Gaza.
Israel has repeatedly said the al-Shifa hospital houses a Hamas command center and announced it would soon release photos of the military’s findings of the hospital which include a tunnel shaft, Israel’s spokesman Daniel Hagari said during a news conference Saturday evening.
Last winter, Europeans faced exorbitant energy bills as the Continent rapidly weaned itself off Russian gas. This year the EU is better prepared — but now a second war also threatens to roil its energy markets.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas threatens to disrupt Europe’s relationships with the Middle East, or even draw Iran into direct confrontation with Israel and its Western partners. While markets are relatively calm for now, either of those scenarios could cause chaos.
Nevertheless, Europe is “equipped to face oil and diesel global market tightness,” Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson told POLITICO in an interview. Officials have learned lessons from Russia’s war on Ukraine, and are working to build “a good understanding of all our vulnerabilities to best address them and how we can be prepared for any incidents or emergencies.”
EU officials have held a slew of meetings with oil-producing nations in recent weeks, both old friends like Norway and emerging partners such as Algeria and Nigeria, to get ahead of any potential disruptions, she said.
“After the Gaza crisis unfolded, we are faced with two conflicts in the European neighborhood. The Eastern Mediterranean is an important theater for European energy security, as Europe’s energy transition is still entangled in geopolitical uncertainties,” Simson said, attributing the lack of drama in the markets to “the preparedness and crisis management that the EU put in place to respond to Russia’s energy blackmail.”
Fighting in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has had only a limited impact on oil markets. Prices initially rose on the news of the attack by Hamas militants on October 7 and Israel’s massive response, but key crude benchmark Brent dropped back by 4.2 percent this week to around $81 per barrel, around the levels seen before the start of the violence.
Markets have avoided a repeat of 1973, when the Yom Kippur War between Israel and its neighbors prompted the big Arab producers, led by Saudi Arabia, to embargo their exports to Israel’s allies. Gulf country relations with Israel have improved markedly in the past 50 years: The UAE and Bahrain recognized its sovereignty under the 2020 Abraham Accords, while Saudi Arabia is in negotiations to do the same.
Traders are therefore betting that as long as the conflict doesn’t expand, supplies of oil will remain more or less stable, said Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst at energy intelligence firm Kpler.
The risk stems more from Iran, he said. In the worst case, an expansion of the conflict could cause Iran to disrupt shipping from Gulf Arab countries through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s own crude oil, while sanctioned by the West, is exported in large quantities to China. “If Israel starts to strike the Iranian territory and Iran as a consequence needs to export less, then China doesn’t have enough crude and needs to buy from somewhere else,” sending global prices rocketing, Katona said. “It’s an entire spiral that gets triggered immediately.”
While Iran’s theocratic leadership has consistently vowed to destroy the state of Israel and publicly endorsed Hamas’ attacks last month, it denies involvement in their planning and execution. The Israel Defense Forces say they have carried out strikes on militant groups in Syria with close links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have so far stopped short of hitting targets inside Iran itself.
Lessons learned
Gas markets felt a more immediate impact from the war. Israel turned off the taps at its Tamar offshore gas field in the hours following Hamas’ surprise attack, amid reports that it was a target for rocket attacks. While Israel produces only relatively small quantities of natural gas — around 21 billion cubic meters last year, compared to Russia’s 618 billion — it is a key exporter to neighboring Egypt, and the downtime worsened regular rolling power outages there. The flow has since been resumed, albeit in smaller quantities.
Any escalation with Iran could affect gas as well as oil markets, given a third of the world’s liquefied natural gas and a sixth of its oil is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. “If things stay as they are there’s no problem, but if there’s a war where Iran was included and they [block trade through] the Hormuz strait then prices will go up for sure,” said one EU diplomat with knowledge of internal energy strategy talks, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
However, “all the big players want to avoid escalation, Iran wants to avoid this” because of threat of sanctions, the envoy insisted.
Absent that dire scenario, the impact on EU gas markets is likely to be limited, says Tom Marzec-Manser, head of gas analytics at commodities intelligence company ICIS — but more because of the last conflict than the most recent one.
“From a European gas pricing perspective, we’re still looking relatively OK and that’s been driven largely by weak demand. Many industrial consumers continue to use noticeably less gas than they did prior to the energy crisis last year, so consumption in Europe has remained low,” he said.
According to the European Commission, member states collectively shaved almost 20 percent from their natural gas use in the run-up to last winter, with industry slowing output and renewable power playing a much larger role in electricity generation. Despite that, consumption actually rose in October for the first time since the start of the war, in an early sign that businesses could be tentatively trying to restore lost productivity.
But even though the bloc’s gas reserves are more than 99 percent full ahead of schedule, prices have still remained stubbornly high across the Continent compared to other regions. That means Europeans are more at risk of short-term spikes in the cost of energy, with industry potentially having to slow down again if bills become unaffordable.
“We are in a much better situation than in 2022,” said Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at the Bruegel energy think tank. “We have more heat pumps, power plants are back in the picture that we didn’t have available last year, and we’ve built more liquified natural gas terminals.” However, he warned, if member states lose focus on reducing demand and try to give their own industries a head start with subsidies, that could spark a wasteful race “that is essentially to everyone’s detriment.”
At the same time, winter in Europe isn’t what it used to be. Record-breaking temperatures have been recorded across the globe for the past four months, according to an EU Copernicus satellite monitoring report published this week, while last winter was the second-warmest ever recorded on the Continent. While that might be good news for conflict-prone fossil fuel supplies in the short term, it’s probably bad news for just about everything else in the not-so-much-longer term.
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron travels on Wednesday to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where he hopes to secure uranium for his country’s nuclear plants.
The trip comes as geopolitical tensions grow with the EU’s current major suppliers, Niger and Russia.
Macron’s visit to the two countries aims to expand French influence in an area which has strong ties with Russia and is now also growing closer to China, an Elysée official said.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are respectively France’s largest and third-largest suppliers of uranium, which is burned to fuel nuclear plants.
Last summer a military junta took over Niger, which supplies 15 percent of France’s uranium needs, sparking questions as to whether the African country can continue to be a reliable source. Uncertainty has also surrounded imports of Russian uranium since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Niger raises questions, Russia could raise questions in the long term [if] the EU imposes sanctions on the nuclear sector. Macron’s visit to Central Asia helps to anticipate those concerns,” said Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, an energy expert at the Jacques Delors Institute think tank in Paris.
Russia’s nuclear sector has not been targeted by EU sanctions so far, but member countries continue to turn away from Moscow. The quantity of uranium the EU imported from Russia fell by 16 percent last year from 2021, while the amount from Kazakhstan rose by over 14 percent.
Earlier this year, Yerzhan Mukanov, CEO of the country’s state-run nuclear firm Kazatomprom, told POLITICO he was seeing increasing interest from Europe, and that Kazakhstan “intends to become a significant contributor to the European nuclear market.”
French nuclear firm Orano is active in Kazakhstan, where it has been operating uranium mines since the 1990s, and more recently in Uzbekistan. Orano President Claude Imauven is accompanying Macron on his trip along with 14 other French executives, including Luc Remont, head of French energy giant EDF.
An Elysée official said that new contracts and business partnerships will be announced during the trip, including in the energy sector.
EDF has also positioned itself to become a supplier of nuclear reactors for Kazakhstan’s first nuclear plant.
The visit comes as Brussels competes with China for influence in the region via investment programs focused on infrastructure.
Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are benefitting from Chinese investment under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, with their presidents attending a high-level meeting on the subject in Beijing in October. The EU is trying to gain influence in the two countries by involvingthem in cooperation and investment projects under its “Global Gateway” initiative, the bloc’s response to Belt and Road.
Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu was suspended indefinitely after he said in an interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities,” the government announced on Sunday.
“Eliyahu’s statements are not based in reality,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement on X.
Israel and its military “are operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents,” the prime minister added.
A member of the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, Eliyahu earlier on Sunday claimed in a radio interview that since there were “no non-combatants in Gaza,” using an atomic weapon on the Palestinian enclave was “one of the possibilities.”
Eliyahu later sought to rectify his statement, saying it was “clear to all sensible people” that his reference to nuclear weapons had been “metaphorical.”
Israel, which has one of the most powerful armies in the Middle East, is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, although it has never publicly conducted nuclear tests.
Netanyahu’s government has been under fire for the failures of Israeli intelligence in preventing the surprise attacks from the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 people on Israeli soil on October 7. The government has also been criticized for a lack of support provided to survivors of the attacks.
In retaliation, Israel’s government has ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, limiting all access to food, water and fuel in the Palestinian enclave — which is controlled by the Hamas militant group and home to 2.3 million people — for the past month.
It has also launched a ground assault into Gaza and thousands of airstrikes on the enclave, killing more than 9,400 people, according to the Hamas-run heath authorities in Gaza. Israel’s offensive has also led to strikes on several non-military targets, including nearby refugee camps and an ambulance convoy which Israel says was being used by Hamas.
The Egyptian-controlled Rafah border crossing from the Gaza Strip opened on Saturday morning, letting trucks carrying humanitarian aid into the blockaded enclave, which has been under siege from the Israeli military for almost two weeks.
The first of 200 trucks loaded with about 3,000 tons of aid, which have been blocked near the Rafah crossing for days, started moving toward Gaza early Saturday, the Associated Press reported.
Earlier this week, U.S. President Joe Biden said Egypt had agreed to open the border and let 20 trucks enter the Palestinian enclave, while Israel said it would allow the delivery of food, water or medicine — but no fuel — from Egypt, provided they were limited to civilians in the southern part of Gaza and would not go to Hamas militants.
European leaders were quick to welcome the border’s opening. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on social media that the crossing’s opening was “an important first step that will alleviate the suffering of innocent people.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was “good and important that the first humanitarian aid is now coming to the people in Gaza.”
“They need water, food and medicine – we won’t leave them alone,” Scholz said.
The Gaza Strip has been besieged by Israeli forces since October 9, when Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallan moved to restrict all access to food, water and energy in the enclave in retaliation for a surprise incursion from the Hamas militant group that killed at least 1,400 people in Israel.
The U.N. has called on Israel to reverse course, with a spokesperson saying an evacuation in Gaza “could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
The news of the border crossing’s opening comes as leaders of a dozen countries — including top officials from Germany, France, Turkey and Qatar — are set to meet in Cairo on Saturday at the invitation of Egypt’s leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in an attempt to prevent the conflict from escalating into a broader regional war.
Meanwhile, Israel asked its citizens living in neighboring Jordan and Egypt to leave those countries “as soon as possible” and to “avoid staying in all the Middle East/Arab countries,” according to a joint statement from the prime minister’s office and the foreign ministry.
The ongoing blockade of Gaza has pushed the enclave’s 2.3 million people to the brink of starvation, Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, warned on Sunday.
Israel has besieged the densely populated coastal region for almost two weeks, refusing to allow in food and medical aid amid fears it could fall into the hands of the militant group Hamas. As Israel intensified airstrikes over the weekend in preparation for a ground invasion, the first 20 aid trucks entered Gaza on Saturday after being blocked near the Egyptian-controlled Rafah border crossing.
But a lot more aid needs to be delivered, McCain told POLITICO.
“Right now we’re facing a catastrophe in the area with the inability to feed people and the inability for the people to find anything to eat at all,” McCain said in an interview Sunday. “These people are going to starve to death unless we can get in.”
Her warning was echoed by the regional director of the relief organization Mercy Corps, Arnaud Quemin, who told POLITICO a ceasefire is needed if there is going to be a sustainable flow of humanitarian aid into the Gaza.
Quemin warned that a spread of the conflict to neighboring countries, like Lebanon, already wracked by recent wars and deep in an economic crisis, would present the international community with a “daunting challenge.”
A second convoy of aid trucks entered the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing on Sunday, heading toward the Gaza Strip, Reuters reported, citing Egyptian security and humanitarian sources at Rafah. The trucks were carrying medical and food supplies, according to the report.
There are already an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon and any major displacement of the Lebanese from southern Lebanon in the event of full-scale hostilities breaking out between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, would have catastrophic repercussions, Quemin said on Sunday. “It would be horrible. I hope the all the major actors in the region understand that there aren’t any buffers.”
The Gaza Strip has been besieged by Israeli forces since October 9, when Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallan moved to restrict all access to food, water and energy in the enclave in retaliation for a surprise incursion from the Hamas militant group that killed at least 1,400 people in Israel.
Israel’s retaliatory air and missile strikes have killed at least 4,385 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, and displaced more than a million people, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday.
Israel intensified its airstrikes Saturday night, killing more than 50 Palestinians, according to medical authorities in Gaza. The Israeli military warned that civilians who refused to relocate to the southern part of Gaza could be identified as sympathizers with a terrorist organization, Reuters reported.
Next stages of the war
Israeli military officials are warning that the near-constant aerial bombardment of the coastal enclave will only intensify in the coming days in preparation for a ground incursion into the Gaza.
“We will increase our strikes, minimize the risk to our troops in the next stages of the war, and we will intensify the strikes, starting from today,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said on Saturday, adding that a ground operation in Gaza would be launched when conditions are right.
All eyes are now on the next move by the IDF, which has amassed huge numbers of troops outside Gaza and pounded the densely populated area with airstrikes in its attempt to eradicate Hamas following its deadly October 7 attack on Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel on Sunday launched an airstrike on the Al-Ansar Mosque in the city of Jenin in occupied West Bank, claiming militant Palestinian groups have been using it to plan “an imminent terror attack.” Violence has flared in the West Bank with Israel stepping up operations since the Hamas attack on southern Israel two weeks ago.
And according to Syria’s state news agency, Israeli airstrikes targeted both Damascus and Aleppo airports in the early hours Sunday, putting out of action the runways and forcing air traffic to be diverted to the city of Latakia. An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson declined to comment.
Israel earlier struck both airports on October 12 amid fears that Iran might use them to transfer weaponry to Hezbollah in readiness to launch a “second front” against Israel, something Iran and the Lebanese militant group have threatened to do if Israel fails to stop bombing Gaza.
Since the Gaza war erupted earlier this month, Hezbollah and Israel have been trading fire across the southern Lebanese border with increasing intensity. Both sides have largely confined their exchanges to military targets with Hezbollah acknowledging 15 of its fighters have been killed but claiming to have knocked out two Israeli tanks.
‘The heart of the battle’
Speaking at a funeral for one of the dead fighters on Sunday, a senior Hezbollah official vowed to step up attacks on Israel. Sheikh Naim Kassem, deputy leader, said Hezbollah is “already in the heart of the battle,” adding his group is “trying to weaken the Israeli enemy and let them know we are ready.” He added: “Do you [Israel] believe that if you try to crush the Palestinian resistance, other resistance fighters in the region will not act?”
Visiting troops on Israel’s northern border on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that if Hezbollah wants war, Israel is ready. Netanyahu said Hezbollah would be making “the mistake of its life.” He added: “We will strike it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the significance for it and the state of Lebanon will be devastating.”
Hezbollah is “dragging Lebanon into a war that it will gain nothing from, but stands to lose a lot,” Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conricus said on Sunday. “Hezbollah is playing a very, very dangerous game.”
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has admitted publicly that his government has little leverage on Hezbollah. In a phone call with the Lebanese leader on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted “growing concerns over rising tensions” but underscored continued American support “for Lebanon’s army, security forces and people,” according to the U.S. State Department.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense announced Sunday that it is instructing more communities near the Lebanese border to evacuate. Twenty-eight communities were evacuated last week living within 2.8 kilometers of the border, but now the buffer zone is being expanded to 5 kilometers affecting another 14 communities. According to Mercy Corps, more than 12,000 Lebanese have been displaced by the fighting in southern Lebanon.
For humanitarian agencies, the immediate concern is Gaza and they are lobbying for all sides to allow more aid to get through to the besieged enclave.
“We can’t allow politics to begin to shape how humanitarian aid is given or sent in and so that’s what we’re pressing on people,” McCain said, noting the increased risk of diseases like cholera due to the collapse of Gaza’s water and sanitation services. “This is a humanitarian crisis. We need to be in there and we need to be in there now.”
Before the blockade, about 400 aid trucks entered the territory every day. After a visit by U.S. President Joe Biden last week, Israel said it would allow deliveries of food, water and medicine — but not fuel — from Egypt, provided they were limited to civilians in the southern part of Gaza and did not go to Hamas militants.
The 20 aid trucks that entered on Saturday “are not enough,” Samer AbdelJaber, the World Food Program’s country director for Palestine, said in a statement.
Palestinians carry their share of food aid provided to poor families at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) distribution center | Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images
Saturday’s deliveries “are a window of hope amid a catastrophic situation,” AbdelJaber said. “But they are not enough. We need continuous access. People need food, water and medicine every day, not just once.”
McCain said the WFP had systems in place to minimize the risk. “We have ways to be able to track and trace our goods,” she said. “We also have ways to make sure that our recipients are actually the people who should be getting it and not the bad guys.”
Bartosz Brzezinski reported from Brussels. Jamie Dettmer reported from Beirut.
Western efforts to undermine the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine through a price cap on Russia’s all-important oil income are falling short. Hopes that Moscow could run out of cash for weapons and soldiers’ salaries are fading, industry insiders warn, as Russia sells its oil exports well above a $60-per-barrel price cap imposed by the G7+ nations, boosted by strong Chinese and Indian demand.
Russia’s main crude blend, Urals, broke through the cap imposed by G7+ countries on the open market in June, and has since pushed above $80 per barrel last month. It is currently trading at around $75 a barrel.
That means Russian President Vladimir Putin can keep the war going for longer: Strong oil revenues allow Moscow to purchase more arms and bolster the civilian economy. Isolating Russia from global markets has been a key pillar of the U.S. and EU strategy to counter the invasion, along with supplying weapons to Ukraine. Russian spending plans reveal that it will allocate a third of its annual budget to defense next year, indicating its top brass are confident they can outlast and outspend the West.
Besides higher prices, Russia is also selling more crude by volume, with seaborne exports rising 10 percent last month to 3.37 million barrels a day — well above the pre-war average of 3.1 million, according to data from commodities giant S&P.
“The price cap has absolutely failed,” Fotios Katsoulas, lead analyst for tanker shipping at S&P, told POLITICO from London. “Across the market we expect that all of the cargoes of Russian barrels are now trading above the price cap.”
The high prices are driven by a strong global market, he said, with benchmark Brent crude flirting with $100 a barrel in recent weeks. With benchmarks so high, Russian crude offers a tempting discount even at $80 or more.
Russia has been working to actively subvert the sanctions, taking advantage of a “shadow fleet” of aging tankers willing to carry oil in violation of the sanctions — often obscuring their ownership and even hiding the true origin of their cargo.
“New companies have been established in the [United Arab] Emirates, India, China and so on, increasing the tonnage they control, buying older vessels, not operating under Western insurance providers,” said Katsoulas, arguing the move means they’re effectively immune to the consequences of violating the price cap. China and India are now the largest destinations for Russian seaborne crude, followed by Turkey.
A senior economist at one major trading firm, granted anonymity to speak frankly on sensitive regulatory issues, warned there is little Western policymakers can do to enforce the rules without overheating an already frothy market.
“The U.S. administration probably will prefer to not penalize freight and insurance companies involved in breaking the $60 limit because that would risk even higher crude oil prices,” the trader said.
You can leave your cap on
A spokesperson for the European Commission acknowledged that there had been “recent fluctuations in oil prices above the G7+ price cap level,” but insisted “this does not mean that the price cap is not working.”
“To continue the successful enforcement of the oil price caps across the international coalition, it is indeed vital to counter Russian attempts to undermine its functioning,” the official added, pointing out that the bloc has sought to target rogue ship operators in its 11th package of sanctions against Moscow in May.
Strong oil revenues allow Moscow to purchase more arms and bolster the civilian economy | Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Maria Shagina, a sanctions researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, cautioned against giving up on the price cap. Instead, “we now need to make sure the cap is watertight, that the mechanism is more robust than it is now.”
“Tighter enforcement would make a difference to the Russian budget — when there was more compliance from January through to August we saw Russian revenues drop 50 percent year on year and they struggled to cope with social spending and war-related spending,” Shagina said. “Now the cap is failing, but it hasn’t ultimately failed. If we tighten the screws we can bring it back to life.”
That could be difficult without the U.S. Last month, five diplomats from EU countries told POLITICO that despite growing awareness that the restrictions aren’t functioning properly, there is little appetite among the bloc’s governments to change it. “The Americans have said from their point of view that it’s working,” said one envoy, with another pointing out that little would change without U.S. support for tighter rules.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top economic adviser, Oleg Ustenko, used an interview with POLITICO in August to urge the West to both tighten the cap to just $30, and to close a “loophole” that allows countries like India, Turkey and China to export fuel refined from Russian crude to the global market without restrictions.
Responding to a request for comment, the U.S. State Department said that “the coalition continues to watch market conditions closely” and argued that current measures have already “rendered the Russian military-industrial complex unable to produce and maintain critical equipment for operations in Ukraine.”
The West’s united front on Ukraine is showing more cracks than ever — and Kyiv has little choice but to grin and bear it.
More than 500 days into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Republican lawmakers in Washington DC on Saturday derailed an effort to unleash a major tranche of aid for the war-torn country.
Coming just nine days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington to plead for continued support, the blockage underscored a hardening of attitudes among congressional Republicans who want to end Washington’s assistance for Kyiv.
At the same time as Republicans were voting ‘no’ on Capitol Hill, voters in Slovakia elected a pro-Russian prime minister, Robert Fico, who vows not to send a “single round” of ammunition to Ukraine, and looks set to team up with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn to oppose further European support for Kyiv. Poland, once the most dependable of Kyiv’s allies, made the shock announcement on September 20 that it would no longer send weapons.
These warning signs don’t amount to a profound policy shift in Washington or Brussels. U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to stand by Ukraine despite the budget fiasco. And most European leaders remain staunchly supportive of Ukraine, with some €50 billion in continued support for the country due to be signed off in coming months, according to two EU diplomats who were granted anonymity to talk about the non-public deliberations.
Asked to comment on the fact that the U.S. stopgap bill lacks any funding for Ukraine, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “The president has built a coalition of more than 50 countries to provide aid to support Ukraine … There is very strong international coalition behind Ukraine and if Putin thinks he can outlast us, he’s wrong.”
Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, said he was “sure” the decision to block funding would be reconsidered. “We’ll continue to be on your side,” he told reporters in Kyiv Monday when asked how the U.S. budget shortfall would affect Ukraine.
Ukrainian politicians — who’ve faced criticism from the United States and United Kingdom for appearing insufficiently “grateful” for Western aid — sounded similarly upbeat. “We’re working with both sides of the Congress to ensure it doesn’t repeat again, under any circumstances,” said Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, appearing next to Borrell.
‘Words of gratitude’
But despite these attempts to put a positive spin on the situation, open criticism of aid among senior Western politicians — coupled with Elon Musk’s online attacks against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — sends a chilling message to Kyiv.
The message that the U.S. and Europe will stick with Kyiv — no matter what — is starting to ring hollow.
Ukraine remains heavily dependent on Western support not just to fuel its battle against Russia, but also to keep its public administration ticking over. According to its projected budget for 2024, Ukraine expects to receive $42.8 billion from international donors in the coming year, a big chunk of which would come from the United States. In June, Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, told POLITICO that the U.S. should “step in and at least provide us mid-term relief.”
At the same time as Republicans were voting ‘no’ on Capitol Hill, voters in Slovakia elected a pro-Russian prime minister, Robert Fico, who vows not to send a “single round” of ammunition to Ukraine | Janos Kummer/Getty Images
Asked whether the holdup on Capitol Hill now leaves Kyiv with a budget shortfall, a spokesperson for Marchenko declined to comment.
Europe is also worried about what to expect from Washington. While most EU countries agree on supporting Ukraine, aid for Kyiv is tied to a broader review of the EU’s long-term budget on which there is no agreement. And since all EU27 countries need to back the deal, it may prove difficult to pass by year-end, which is when the EU’s current support for Ukraine runs out.
“There is not much political discussion on the financial support for Ukraine. That is not the difficult piece of the puzzle. But the puzzle overall is very hard, that no one dares to predict anything,” said an EU diplomat who asked not to be named to discuss the confidential budget talks.
Indeed, Hungary’s Orbán has already said he’s not prepared to finance Ukraine unless it reviews its treatment of Hungarian minorities living in the country. Although critics describe this stance as a tactical veto meant to unlock funds that Brussels is withholding from Budapest over a separate rule-of-law dispute, Orbán may use the election of his like-minded Slovakian peer to toughen his negotiating tactics.
“Member states remain broadly supportive of aid for Ukraine,” said a second EU diplomat. “Of course the big elephant in the room is, ‘What if this is the precursor to the U.S. just abandoning Ukraine?’ While it’s in the back of everyone’s minds, I just don’t think that’s going to happen now or anytime soon.”
Amid uncertainty about whether Ukraine will be able to finance its budget and keep its war effort going, Ukrainian officials are trying hard to put on a brave face and appear thankful. Speaking to POLITICO last week, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal insisted on his “gratitude” toward Poland, an ally that has been locked in a dispute with Kyiv over grain exports, and has now vowed not to send any more weapons.
“I would like to express the words of gratitude to the Polish nation and all Polish families for the support that they have given and have provided to Ukrainian refugees,” he said.
Gregorio Sorgi and Suzanne Lynch contributed reporting in Brussels and Eun Kim in Washington DC.
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Nicholas Vinocur, Paola Tamma and Veronika Melkozerova
Top officials from the United States and the EU met with their Russian counterparts for undisclosed emergency talks in Turkey designed to resolve the standoff over Nagorno-Karabakh, just days before Azerbaijan launched a military offensive last month to seize the breakaway territory from ethnic Armenian control.
The off-diary meeting marks a rare — if ultimately unsuccessful — contact between Moscow and the West on a major security concern, after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 upended regular diplomacy.
A senior diplomat with knowledge of the discussions told POLITICO the meeting took place on September 17 in Istanbul as part of efforts to pressure Azerbaijan to end its nine-month blockade of the enclave and allow in humanitarian aid convoys from Armenia. According to the envoy, the meeting focused on “how to get the bloody trucks moving” and ensure supplies of food and fuel could reach its estimated 100,000 residents.
The U.S. was represented by Louis Bono, Washington’s senior adviser for Caucasus negotiations, while the EU dispatched Toivo Klaar, its representative for the region. Russia, meanwhile, sent Igor Khovaev, who serves as Putin’s special envoy on relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Such high-level diplomatic interaction is rare. In March, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came face to face on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India — but Moscow insisted the exchange happened “on the move” and no negotiations were held.
In a statement provided to POLITICO, an EU official said “we believe it is important to maintain channels of communications with relevant interlocutors to avoid misunderstandings.” The official also observed Klaar had sought to keep lines open on numerous fronts over the “past years,” including in talks with Khovaev and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin.
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department declined to comment on the meeting, saying only that “we do not comment on private diplomatic discussions.”
However, a U.S. official familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters explained the discussions came out of an understanding that the Kremlin still holds sway in the region. “We need to be able to work with the Russians on this because they do have influence over the parties, especially as we’re at a precarious moment right now,” the American official said.
Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19, sending tanks and troops into the region under the cover of heavy artillery bombardment. Karabakh Armenian leaders were forced to surrender following 24 hours of fierce fighting that killed hundreds on both sides. Since then, the Armenian government says more than 100,000 people have fled their homes and crossed the border, fearing for their lives.
Azerbaijan insists it has the right to take action against “illegal armed formations” on its internationally recognized territory, and has pledged to “reintegrate” those who have stayed behind. European Council President Charles Michel described the military operation as “devastating,” while Blinken has joined calls for Azerbaijan “to refrain from further hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh and provide unhindered humanitarian access.”
KORNIDZOR, Armenia — Tons of humanitarian aid were en route on Saturday to Nagorno-Karabakh under the terms of a deal struck with the breakaway region’s Armenian leadership, Azerbaijan said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Saturday said it had dispatched its first shipment of food and fuel to reach the mountainous territory from Armenia since Azerbaijan launched its military offensive earlier this week. The convoy of four trucks drove across the Hakari Bridge, crossing the border amid warnings of a growing humanitarian crisis among the civilian population.
“We are looking at the different needs of the population,” a spokesperson for the ICRC told POLITICO. “And, underlining our role as a neutral intermediary, we are of course in dialog with all the decision-makers to be able to provide assistance that is much needed.”
The delivery marks only the second time civilian aid will reach Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia since Azerbaijan closed a checkpoint on the internationally recognized border after a firefight with Armenian troops on June 15. The ICRC has previously warned that without access, a humanitarian crisis could quickly unfold — and that situation has only been compounded by reports of mass displacements as Azerbaijani forces took territory inside the ethnic Armenian-held enclave in a 24-hour attack that began on Tuesday.
While the ICRC has been able to transfer wounded people to hospitals inside Nagorno-Karabakh, a mooted evacuation of the injured to Armenia has not yet materialized.
Azerbaijan has since said the local leadership must disband, its soldiers must lay down their weapons, and those living there will have to accept being governed as part of Azerbaijan, or else leave.
A U.S. congressional delegation visited the road leading to the Hakari Bridge moments before the ICRC convoy passed. Addressing reporters, Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said Washington was deeply concerned by the unfolding crisis and called for support for civilians “suffering as a result of the blockade for many months.”
Shortly afterwards, a long convoy of Russian peacekeepers’ vehicles raced down the road toward Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan said that it had dispatched two tanker trucks full of fuel to the de facto capital, Stepanakert. Moscow’s personnel had also been prevented from regularly using the road since June, reportedly only bringing in essentials for their own troops by helicopter.
Speaking to POLITICO, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s foreign policy adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, said the guarantee for humanitarian aid access “once again shows the good intentions and seriousness of the Azerbaijan government to meet the needs and requirements of Armenian residents and also to ensure a safe and decent reintegration process.”
A special government working group has been established, he added, to address the humanitarian, economic and social aspects of absorbing Nagorno-Karabakh and its tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians into Azerbaijan after 30 years of self-declared independence. The leadership of the unrecognized state said on Wednesday that it had been forced to accept a Moscow-brokered surrender agreement as its troops were routed. Azerbaijan says Armenian fighters have already begun surrendering their weapons under the terms of the deal.
“Karabakh was a powder keg and the most militarized zone in the world,” Hajiyev added. “But now that is in the past. Under these circumstances, there are much better chances for peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
However, concerns remain that tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the crisis-hit region could be forced to flee their homes, with local officials warning of “ethnic cleansing.”
According to Laurence Broers, an expert on the conflict at Chatham House, the question is now whether the apparent goodwill gestures solidify into something more permanent.
“We’ve got to end this stop-start humanitarian aid paradigm,” he said. “We need to have a long-term solution around access and, just as importantly, we have to have concentrated attention so that those who want to get out of Karabakh can still do so.”
What César really wanted was to get out of Cuba. A bartender struggling to make ends meet in Havana, he tried last year to reach Miami in a rickety boat but was forced to abandon the attempt when he was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard.
He’s now preparing a second escape attempt: with a direct flight to Moscow. His ticket has been paid for by a Russian recruiter but it comes with a hefty price tag nonetheless: As part of the deal, he will have to join the Russian army and fight in Ukraine.
“If this is the sacrifice I have to make for my family to get ahead, I’ll do it,” said César, who turned 19 this year and whose name has been changed to protect his identity.
“You can be a nuclear physicist and still die of hunger here,” he said. “With my current salary I can barely buy basic things like toilet paper or milk.” He said he hoped he would be allowed to work as a paramedic.
The news of Cuban fighters in Ukraine splashed across global headlines earlier this month when Havana announced it had arrested 17 people for involvement in a human trafficking ring recruiting young men to fight for Russia.
The news raised questions about the extent of cooperation between the two Cold War allies, and whether cracks were beginning to show in Havana’s support for Russia’s invasion.
Conversations with Cubans in Cuba and Russia reveal a different side of the story: of desperate young men who see enlistment in the Russian army as their best shot at a better life — even if not all of them seem to know what they were getting themselves into.
One recruit in his late 40s in the Russian city of Tula, whom we will call Pedro, said he was promised a job as a driver “for workers and construction material” but on arrival in Russia was being prepared for combat, weapon in hand.
“We signed a contract with the devil,” he said, recalling the moment he enlisted. “And the devil does not hand out sweets.”
Cold-war allies
Until recently, Havana — though formally neutral on Ukraine — made no secret of siding with Moscow in what it called its clash with the “Yankee empire.” The Castro regime is dependent on Russia for cheap fuel and other aid. But unlike, say, North Korea, it has little to offer in return other than diplomatic loyalty.
Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale assault last year, the countries have exchanged visits by top brass.
Critics have warned that, keeping with Soviet tradition, Cuba could send troops to help fight Moscow’s cause. They point to a May visit to Belarus by Cuba’s military attaché, where the “training of Cuban military personnel” was top of the agenda, and a trip to Moscow by Cuba’s defense minister several weeks later to discuss “a number of technical military projects.” But there has been no evidence of direct involvement.
Havana’s crackdown on the recruitment network followed the publication of an interview on YouTube in late August, in which two 19-year-old Cubans claimed they had been lured to Russia for lucrative construction jobs, only to be sent to the trenches in Ukraine. They said they had suffered beatings, been scammed out of their money and were being kept captive.
Cuba’s foreign ministry vowed to act “energetically” against efforts to entice Cubans to join Russia’s war effort, adding: “Cuba is not part of the conflict in Ukraine.”
The change in tone in Havana suggests that the recruitment of Cubans through informal backchannels has “hit a nerve,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House.
“Cuba and the Soviet Union fought side by side in Angola and other places, but for ideological reasons,” he said. “Now it’s boiled down to the ugliest, most mercenary terms, giving it a transactional quality that goes against decades of friendship.”
In November 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree offering fast-tracked naturalization to foreigners who signed up as contract soldiers. “We are all getting Russian citizenship,” one recruit texted this reporter. That week, he and others told POLITICO, some 15 recruits, some of whom had been in Russia for only a couple of months, had been personally handed their passports by the local governor.
With heavy losses in Ukraine, Russia “needs the cannon fodder,” said Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He added most foreign recruits come from Central Asian and African countries, Syria and Afghanistan.
It is unclear exactly how many foreign citizens have joined Russia’s ranks. But Luzin says their limited numbers mainly serve to boost Russia’s narrative that it has international support for its war.
“Without speaking the language, knowing the local terrain, or the right training for modern warfare, they’ll be swiftly killed and that’s it,” he said.
Joining the 106th
For most of the Cubans with whom POLITICO spoke, their involvement with the Russian army began in late 2022, when somebody using the name Elena Shuvalova began posting on social media pages targeting Cubans looking to go abroad or already in Russia.
One post showed a woman in a long skirt in front of a car decorated with a Cuban flag and a “Z,” Russia’s pro-war symbol. In the accompanying text, Shuvalova offered a one-year contract with the Russian army, “help” with the required language exams and medical tests, and “express legalization within two days.”
Pay consisted of a one-off handout of 195,000 rubles (about $2,000) followed by a monthly salary of 204,000 rubles ($2,100). By comparison, Cuba’s average GDP per capita in 2020 was $9,500 per year.
Of the four recruits currently in Russia who shared their stories with POLITICO, three said they had been flown in from Cuba this summer. At home, they worked in hospitality, teaching and construction. One said he had a professional military background. Two others had completed two years of standard compulsory military service.
While they knew they would be employed by Russia’s military, they were reassured that they would be working far from the front line as drivers or construction workers. “To dig fortifications or help rebuild cities,” one recruit’s exasperated wife told POLITICO.
Because they could face charges of joining a mercenary group in Cuba or of treason or espionage in Russia for talking to a reporter, POLITICO changed the names of the recruits quoted in this story.
Each of them said they were flown in from Varadero along with several dozen other men. They said their passports were not stamped on departure, and that upon entering Russia their migration cards were marked “tourism” as their purpose of stay.
On landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the recruits were met by a woman who introduced herself as Diana, who said she was a Cuban with Russian ties. They were then loaded onto a bus and brought to what one recruit described as “an empty school building” near Ryazan, a city in western Russia 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
There, they underwent a cursory medical check and were subject to a mountain of red tape, including the signing of a contract with the Russian defense ministry. One recruit said a Spanish version of the text was made available to those who specifically requested it, but others said that a translator simply summarized its content verbally.
The recruits said that some of the new arrivals remained behind at a military unit in Ryazan. But most were transferred to the 106th Guards Airborne, a division based in the city of Tula near Moscow that has been deployed into some of the fiercest fighting in Ukraine.
Kyiv claims the 106th was largely “reduced to fertilizer” in the early days of the invasion when it tried to capture Kyiv. In recent months, it has been stationed around Soledar and Bakhmut, hotspots in eastern Ukraine.
“When they handed us the uniform and told us to go train I realized this was not about construction at all,” one recruit said. By then, however, he was locked in.
A legal adviser who is well-known within Russia’s Cuban community told POLITICO he has delivered the same tough message to scores of Cuban recruits who have appealed to him for help: “Once you’ve signed the contract, defecting is tantamount to treason.”
When POLITICO spoke to Pedro in Tula, he said he felt trapped by his decision.
“I came here to give my children a better life, not to kill,” he said, breaking down into tears. “I won’t fire a single bullet.”
He added he had considered trying to escape. “But where do I go?”
On landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the recruits were met by a woman who introduced herself as Diana, who said she was a Cuban with Russian ties | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Willing participants
POLITICO could not determine whether Shuvalova or Diana were working for Russian or Cuban authorities. Neither woman responded to requests for comment — though Shuvalova told journalists at the Russian-language Moscow Times that she worked pro-bono.
While the Cuban Embassy in Moscow did not respond to multiple requests for comment, the government itself has sent mixed messages. Shortly after Cuba’s announcement that it had broken up the human trafficking ring, Havana’s ambassador to Moscow told the state-run RIA agency that “we have nothing against Cubans who just want to sign a contract and legally take part in this operation.”
Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not easy to tell just how many Cuban citizens have joined the Russian military.
In conversations with POLITICO, the recruits said roughly 140 Cubans were currently in Tula. And a caller to a Miami-based Spanish-language television channel in early September said that he had some 90 Cubans under his command in Ryazan.
A trove of 198 hacked documents, allegedly belonging to recent Cuban recruits and published online by the Ukrainian website Informnapalm, showed the ages of those who joined the Russian army ranged between 19 to 69 years old. More than 50 of the passports were issued in June and July this year.
Not all Cubans POLITICO spoke to said they had been tricked into joining the war. In photos shared online and in messenger apps, many pose proudly in military gear, some carrying weapons.
“No one put a gun to their heads,” Yoenni Vega Gonzalez, 36, a Cuban migrant in Russia, said of his acquaintances in Ukraine. “The contract makes it clear that you’re going to war, not to play ball or camping.”
He said he had been refused the opportunity to join because he does not speak Russian. “Otherwise, I would have gone [to the front] with pride and my head held high.”
During the reporting of this article, several Cubans still on the island reached out saying they wanted to enlist. All cited economic, and not political, reasons as their core motivation.
Accounts of daily life behind the fences of the training sites differed greatly.
Some recruits described their interaction with the Russians as friendly and the atmosphere as relaxed. In their free time they smoked cigarettes and sipped on Coca-Cola (officially not available in either Cuba or Russia). On the weekends they went sightseeing and reveled in the city’s bars.
But those who say they were tricked into service, seemingly a minority, complain about payment delays and said they are threatened with incarceration for resisting orders.
When asked about the moral implications of his decision, one recruit in Tula said it wasn’t his primary concern.
“This is the way we found to get out of Cuba,” he said. “No one here wants to kill anyone. But neither do we want to die ourselves.”
