BERLIN — German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has resigned on Monday, after a series of mistakes made her position in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government untenable.
“I have today asked the chancellor to dismiss me from the office of the Federal Minister of Defense”, Lambrecht said in a written statement on Monday. “The media focus on my person for months hardly allows for objective reporting and discussion about the servicemen and women, the Bundeswehr and security policy decisions in the interest of the citizens of Germany,” she added.
Scholz has accepted Lambrecht’s resignation, a spokeswoman for Scholz’s cabinet said in a press conference.
The minister’s repeated blunders put increasing strain on Scholz and his German defense policy shift announced during in his Zeitenwende speech last year. On Friday, various media outlets had reported unanimously on the planned resignation.
Lambrecht failed to implement an increase in military spending pledged by Scholz after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She had also faced strong criticism for celebrating an early delivery of 5,000 helmets to Ukraine at the beginning of last year as “a clear signal” of support, then by taking her son on a helicopter flight as part of a personal holiday. An awkward New Year’s Eve video, where her well wishes were muffled by the sound of exploding fireworks, contributed to eroding her stature as a defense minister.
The news of Lambrecht’s resignation throws the Scholz government into uncertainty, less than a week before a crucial meeting of Western defense ministers in Ramstein. Her successor will be announced soon, but “probably” not on Monday, the government spokeswoman said.
Several names are circulating on German media shortlists: Chancellor’s Office head Wolfgang Schmidt, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces Eva Högl, Social Affairs Minister Hubertus Heil, Lambrecht’s Parliamentary State Secretary Siemtje Möller and SPD leader Lars Klingbeil.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Monday on the sidelines of a visit to a weapons manufacturer in Ulm that he has a clear idea of Lambrecht’s successor. His idea will become known to everyone “very quickly,” he added. “I know how it should proceed from my point of view, and we will announce that in time,” Scholz said.
DAVOS, Switzerland—As snow pounds the Swiss mountain town of Davos, American lawmakers are huddled in warm, quiet rooms trying to assuage European concerns that the United States hasn’t just turned into a protectionist power.
The passage of Washington’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $369 billion behemoth legislation stuffed with clean-energy incentives, has upended EU-U.S. relations, prompting European accusations that the U.S. is unfairly boosting its own companies to encourage local investment.
In response, the EU is looking to counter with state-provided aid of its own. As the World Economic Forum hosts its annual event in Davos this week, a U.S. delegation — featuring some of the most high-profile members of Congress — was planning to meet European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen Monday night to discuss the issue before she gives a much-anticipated speech here Tuesday morning. That meeting was canceled due to travel issues for von der Leyen, however, though U.S. lawmakers are still hoping to reschedule.
The mix of U.S. senators and House members say Europe has it all wrong. The U.S., they told POLITICO in multiple exclusive interviews on the sidelines of the elite gathering, is simply investing in its own energy and economic security. And a stronger America means a stronger ally, they argued.
Europe and Germany “became too reliant on Russian energy,” said Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware who’s leading the delegation, adding “my hope is that we can together find a path forward.” American and European leaders need to “have that conversation about the alignment of values and priorities.”
But Europe doesn’t see alignments right now — only breaks.
After something of a golden era of EU-U.S. cooperation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the two sides worked constructively together to devise complex sanctions packages against Moscow — Europe was caught off guard by America’s subsidy-heavy legislation. In particular, a provision granting tax credits for electric vehicles manufactured in North America incensed the Europeans — including big car producers like France and Germany.
American lawmakers understand the criticism but believe it’s misguided. Senator Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat from West Virginia who was instrumental in passing the IRA, said Europe is being “hyper hypocritical” after decades of European protectionism.
Manchin continued that, on a separate occasion, he told French President Emmanuel Macron the IRA couldn’t possibly hurt Europe, despite the concerns.
That’s the same message he’s delivering in the winter wonderland.
“That bill was designed to basically strengthen the United States so that we can help our allies and friends, which need it right now,” Manchin said. “And if anybody needs it, the EU needs it. And without that, we’re not going to be and maintain the superpower status of the world if we’re not energy independent.”
Representative Gregory Meeks from New York, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, said Europeans still seem nervous despite the bipartisan message from Democrats and Republicans. They’re asking if lawmakers can still amend the legislation to assuage fears of withering European investments. Meeks has been retorting that “there’s no perfect bill,” and that it’s “extremely important” to secure America’s supply chain for critical semiconductors and to combat climate change.
Yet how the U.S. tackles climate change is still a point of contention within Congress, as Manchin — who retains immense sway with a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate — says fossil fuels remain vital to the American economy.
“I told them, I said, the most important thing is basically you cannot eliminate your way to clean your climate,” Manchin said outside the Hilton Garden Inn, where lawmakers are staying. “You can innovate it, and that’s what we’re doing in the U.S.”
Von der Leyen is expected to touch on the subsidy spat during her keynote speech Tuesday at the World Economic Forum.
She previewed last week that EU officials are focusing their attention on trying to secure changes that would allow them to also benefit from the U.S. tax incentives, which currently extend to Mexico and Canada. Privately, however, EU officials concede there is minimal room for maneuver, given the IRA has already passed Congress.
This week in Davos could be an opportunity for two of the world’s biggest trading blocs — the EU and the United States — to try and iron out their differences. But with little room for compromise, the Atlantic Ocean between the two seems as wide as ever.
This article was updated after a meeting Monday between Ursula von der Leyen and U.S. lawmakers was canceled due to travel issues.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was removed Sunday by police along with other protesters as they demonstrated against the razing of the German village of Lützerath for the expansion of a coal mine.
Thunberg did not comply with a police request to leave the area, prompting officers to physically escort her away, German media outlet Bild reported. Thunberg was among a group of activists still at the site on Sunday, the newspaper said.
Climate activists have been squatting in the village in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia for more than two years to protest its demolition to accommodate an extension of the Garzweiler coal mine.
Thunberg joined them on Saturday, telling a large rally in the fields outside Lützerath that the German government’s compromise deal with the owner of the coal mine was “shameful.”
According to the police, nine activists were taken to the hospital, Bild reported. More than 70 police officers have been injured in the operation to clear demonstrators from the site, the newspaper said.
JUST IN – Police remove Greta Thunberg from the anti-coal protest in Luetzerath, Germany.
Thierry Breton is winning the war of ideas in Brussels.
The ex-CEO is a political whirlwind with a gigantic portfolio as internal market chief, the backing of French President Emmanuel Macron and lots of proposals. He’s been touring European Union capitals to win support for plans to shield Europe’s industry from crippling energy prices, American subsidies and “naive” EU free traders.
France’s decades-long push for more state intervention is finally findingsome echo in Berlin and the 13th floor of the Berlaymont building, occupied by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who largely owes her job to Macron.
Omnipresent and ebullient, Breton is playing a key role in marshaling industry and political support for sweeping but so far vague plans to boost clean tech, secure key raw materials and overhaul EU checks on government support that he blasts as too slow to help companies.
“Of course there is resistance; my job is precisely to manage and align everyone,” he told French TV this week of his January meetings with Spanish, Polish and Belgian leaders to flog a forthcoming industrial policy push that could be a turning point in how far European governments will finance companies.
Time is short. Von der Leyen wants to line up proposals for a February summit. European industry is complaining that it can’t swallow far higher energy prices and tighter regulation for much longer, with at least one announcing a European shutdown and an Asian expansion.
Breton said governments don’t need convincing on the need for rapid action. But he’s running up against one of Europe’s sacred cows — EU state aid rules run by Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager that curb government support with lengthy checks to make sure companies don’t get unfair help. She’s also under intense pressure to preserve a “level playing field” as smaller countries worry about German and French financial firepower.
The French internal market commissioner’s bullish style often sees him act as if he’s got a role in subsidies. In the fall, he sent a letter to EU countries asking them to send views on emergency state aid rules to the internal market department, which is under his supervision, two EU officials recalled.
In a meeting with European diplomats, a Commission representative had to correct it, the EU officials said, asking capitals to make sure the input goes instead to the competition department overseen by Vestager.
Europe First
While Breton doesn’t like to be called a protectionist, his latest mission has been to protect Europe from its transatlantic friend.
As early as September, one Commission official said, the Frenchman was mandated by Europe’s industry to speak out against U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provides tax credits for U.S.-made electric cars and support to American battery supply chains.
U.S President Joe Biden gives remarks during an event celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on September 13, 2022 | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
His Paris-backed campaign charged ahead while EU officials and diplomats tiptoed around the subject. Some within the Commission headquarters found his bad cop routine helpful in keeping pressure on the U.S.
“He’s been constructive, though clearly disruptive,” said Tyson Barker, head of the technology and global affairs program at the German Council of Foreign Relations.
The Frenchmanhas even pitched himself as the bloc’s “sheriff” against Silicon Valleygiants, warning billionaire Elon Musk that an overhaul of the Twitter social network can only go so far since “in Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.”
“Big Tech companies only understand balances of power,” said Cédric O, a former French digital minister who worked with Breton during the French EU Council presidency. “When [Breton and Musk] see each other, it necessarily remains cordial, but Breton shows his teeth and rightly so. It’s his job.”
Breton can even surprise his own services, according to two EU officials. In May, the Commission’s department responsible for digital policy — DG CONNECT — was caught off guard when Breton announced in the press that he would unveil plans by year-end to make sure that technology giants forked out for telecoms networks.
In so doing, Breton — who was CEO of France Télécom in the early 2000s — resurrected a long-dormant and fractious policy debate that had been put to rest almost a decade ago, when erstwhile Digital Commissioner Neelie Kroes ordered Europe’s telecoms operators to “adapt or die” rather than seek money from content providers.
After Breton’s commitments, the Commission’s services were soon scrambling to develop some sort of a coherent policy program to deliver on the Frenchman’s comments. A consultation is scheduled for early this year.
Carte blanche
Breton is a rare creature in the halls of the Berlaymont, where policy is hatched slowly after extensive consultation. To a former CEO with a broad remit — his portfolio runs from the expanse of space to the tiniest of microchips — rapid reaction matters more than treading on toes or singing from the hymn sheet. This often sees him floating ideas and then pulling back.
Last year he alarmed environmentalists by raising the prospect of a U-turn on the EU’s polluting car ban. He wagged his finger at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for a solo trip to China. He called for nuclear energy to be considered green. He has pushed out grand projects — such as industrial alliances on batteries and cloud, or a cyber shield — that he doesn’t always follow up on.
He’s even pushed forward a multibillion-euro EU communication satellite program dubbed Iris², a favorite of French aerospace companies, that will see the bloc build a rival to Musk’s space-based Starlink broadband constellation.
“It’s clear that he’s been given more free rein than others,” said one EU official. “He has von der Leyen’s ear,” the official added, noting that Breton enjoys “privileged access” to the Commission president — who may be mindful that she’ll need French support for a second term.
According to an official, Breton “has von der Leyen’s ear” and enjoys “privileged access” to the Commission president | Valeria Mongeli/AFP via Getty Images
Indeed, Breton’s massive role was partly designed as a counterweight to a German president.
“There is a criticism of von der Leyen for being too German,” explained Sébastien Maillard, director of the Jacques Delors Institute think tank. “There may inevitably be a division of roles between them — [where Breton is] a counterbalance.”
He’s been called an “unguided missile,” but more often than not, the Frenchman has Paris’ backing when going off script. His October op-ed with Italian colleague Paolo Gentiloni, which called for greater European financial solidarity, was part of France’s agenda, according to one high-ranking Commission official.
“When he went out in the press with Gentiloni against Scholz’s €200 billion, he was clearly doing the job for Macron,” the official said.
His November call for a rethink on the 2035 car engine ban came just after a week after critical green legislation had been finalized by Commission Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans and jarred with the EU’s own position at the COP 27 climate summit in Indonesia. But it aped the position of French auto industry captains, such as Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares and Renault’s Luca de Meo, who wanted Brussels to slam the brakes on the climate drive.
Breton had not coordinated his car comments with colleagues in advance, according to two Commission officials.
Less than 10 days later, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne echoed caution about the “extremely ambitious” engine ban and warned that pivoting to electric car manufacturing was daunting.
Going A-list
Breton acknowledged himself that he wasn’t Macron’s first choice for the critical EU post, telling POLITICO at a live event that he was a “plan B commissioner.”
Asked if he was targeting an A-list job for the new Commission mandate in 2024, he said he “may be able to consider a new plan B assignment — if it is a plan B.”
“He is thinking about the future,” said one EU official. “Look at his LinkedIn posts. He is thinking past the next European elections. He definitely wants to convince Macron to get an expanded portfolio.”
Grabbing the Commission’s top job may be tricky, relying on how EU leaders will line up, according to multiple EU and French officials.
There are other jobs, including overturning the unwritten law that no French or German candidate can hold the economically powerful competition portfolio. Another option could be becoming Europe’s official digital czar, combining the enforcement powers of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act into a supranational digital enforcement agency, one EU official said.
Breton has shrugged off speculation on his long-term plans.
“All my life, I have been informed of my next potential job 15 minutes before,” he said last month.
Jakob Hanke Vela, Stuart Lau, Barbara Moens, Camille Gijs and Mark Scott contributed reporting.
Tatjana Patitz, one of an elite group of famed supermodels who graced magazine covers in the 1980s and ’90s and appeared in George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” music video, has died at age 56.
Patitz’s death in the Santa Barbara, California, area was confirmed by her New York agent, Corinne Nicolas, at the Model CoOp agency. In a statement to CBS News, Nicolas said, “Tatiana passed away in California. The cause of death was breast cancer. She is survived by her son, her sister, and her parents.”
Patitz, who was born in Germany, raised in Sweden and later made her life in California, was known as part of an elite handful of “original” supermodels, appearing in the Michael video along with Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford.
She was a favorite of fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, who highlighted her natural beauty in his famous 1988 photo, “White Shirts: Six Supermodels, Malibu,” and for British Vogue’s 1990 cover — leading Michael to cast the group in his lip-syncing video, according to Vogue.
Tatjana Patitz in 1992 in Paris.
Pool ARNAL/GARCIA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
The magazine quoted its global editorial director, Anna Wintour, as saying Patitz was “always the European symbol of chic, like Romy Schneider-meets-Monica Vitti. She was far less visible than her peers — more mysterious, more grown-up, more unattainable — and that had its own appeal.”
In a 2006 interview, Patitz opined that the golden age of supermodels was over.
“There was a real era, and the reason that happened was because glamour was brought into it,” she was quoted as saying in Prestige Hong Kong magazine. “Now the celebrities and actresses have taken over, and the models are in the backseat completely.”
She also noted that models from her era had healthier physiques.
“Women were healthy, not these scrawny little models that nobody knows their names anymore,” Patitz said.
Berlin — German police said their methodical operation to clear hundreds of climate change activists from a tiny town that’s been sold to an energy company to dig up for coal was going according to plan on Wednesday. As Sweden’s high-profile climate campaigner Greta Thunberg said she would join the demonstrators squatting in the otherwise abandoned village, Day Two of the police’s effort got off to a rocky start.
There were more violent clashes and even some Molotov cocktails hurled at police early Wednesday, repeating scenes that played out the previous day, but the Aachen police force said its clearance of the hamlet of Luetzerath was moving forward, and they described the scene there as predominantly peaceful.
Despite the clashes early Wednesday, which first kicked off when hundreds of police started pushing into the occupied village on Tuesday morning, the police reported no arrests or injures. They have briefly detained people to record personal information, but there was no indication that anyone was facing charges as of late on Wednesday afternoon.
Police cart away an environmental activist from the settlement of Luetzerath, next to the Garzweiler II open cast coal mine, January 11, 2023 near Erkelenz, Germany.
Andreas Rentz/Getty
The energy company RWE, which wants to excavate the lignite (brown coal) reserves under the village, has started erecting a roughly one-mile fence around Luetzerath. RWE plans to demolish the village’s homes and streets once it’s cleared of climate protesters.
When the eviction operation began, police gave the activist-squatters a chance to leave the area without facing legal ramifications, and the force said many took advantage.
A spokesman said Aachen’s police “welcome the fact that a large number of activists have decided to leave the area here peacefully and without resistance.”
Some activists, however, climbed onto high platforms that were strung together deliberately to give protesters a place to try to avoid being dragged away from the site. Around noon on Wednesday, officers started using trucks with lift platforms to get the squatters off the structures.
A demonstrator is lifted from a wire scaffold by police with the help of a lifting platform during the clearing of the village of Luetzerath, Germany, January 11, 2023.
Federico Gambarini/picture alliance/Getty
Some of the activists offered a soundtrack to the scene, playing guitars and pianos.
Officials had cleared some of the first buildings in the village Wednesday, with police bringing activists out of a former agricultural hall that was reportedly being used as a communal kitchen by the demonstrators.
Police had not yet entered Luetzerath’s occupied homes, however.
As more barricades and fencing goes up around the site, it was expected to complicate and delay the eviction process, which police expect to take about a month.
Police officers carry a demonstrator to clear a road at the village of Luetzerath, near Erkelenz, Germany, January 10, 2023.
Michael Probst/AP
Roughly 300 to 400 activists were estimated to be in the village, with some small children among them.
“Due to widespread dangers in the area of operation, the Aachen police appeal to guardians to leave the area immediately with their children,” the local police department wrote on Twitter.
A demonstration was announced for Saturday, and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said she would be in Luetzerath to attend.
This Saturday 14/1 I will join activists in Lützerath to defend the village and stop the coalmine. Join us at 12.00 to protect life, and put people over profit!
Protests against the evictions, and Luetzerath being dug up as a coal mine, have also been announced in other German cities, including Munich and Hamburg.
They’re dazzlingly rich, and they expect to be in charge for a long, long time.
The monarchs leading Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia might seem from the outside like a trio of like-minded Persian Gulf autocrats. Yet their regional rivalry is intense, and Western capitals have become a key venue in a reputational battle royale.
“All of these governments … really want to have the largest mindspace among Western governments,” said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
As the Gulf states seek to wean themselves off the oil that made them rich, they know they’ll need friends to help transform their economies (and modernize their societies).
“They think it’s important not to be tarred as mere hydrocarbon producers who are ruining the planet,” Alterman added.
The Qatari government categorically denies any unlawful behavior, saying it “works through institution-to-institution engagement and operates in full compliance with international laws and regulations.”
Against the background of regional rivalries, that engagement has become increasingly robust. While tensions with Riyadh have eased over the past few years, Qatar’s mutual antagonism with the United Arab Emirates has been particularly severe.
Qatar’s survival strategy
Regional rivalries burst beyond the Middle East in 2017 in a standoff that would reshape regional dynamics.
Until then, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been essentially frenemies. As members of the Gulf Coordination Council, they’d been working toward building a common market and currency in the region — not so different from the European Union.
But different responses to the Arab Spring frayed relations to a breaking point.
The Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network gave a platform to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist party that rode a wave of unrest into power in Egypt and challenged governments throughout the Arab world. And Doha didn’t just offer a bullhorn — it gave the Muslim Brotherhood direct financial backing.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, considered the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist group.
Along with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE severed diplomatic ties with Doha in June 2017, barring Qatar’s access to airspace and sea routes; Saudi Arabia closed its border, blocking Qatar’s only land crossing.
Among the demands: close Al Jazeera, end military coordination with Turkey and step away from Iran. Qatar refused — even though it was crunch time for building infrastructure ahead of the 2022 World Cup and 40 percent of Qatar’s food supplies came through Saudi Arabia.
Fighting what it called an illegal “blockade” became an existential mission for Doha.
“The only thing Qatar could do was make sure everyone knew Qatar exists and is a nice place,” said MEP Hannah Neumann, chair of the Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Arab Peninsula (DARP).
“They really stepped up the diplomatic efforts all around the world to also show, ‘We are the good ones,’” said Neumann, of the German Greens.
Qatar needed Brussels because it had already lost an even bigger ally: Washington. Not only did then-President Donald Trump take the side of Qatar’s rivals in the fight; he also appeared to take credit for the idea of isolating Qatar — even though the U.S.’s largest military base in the region is just southwest of Doha.
Elsewhere, Qatar had already been working with the London-headquartered consultancy Portland Communications since at least 2014 — as its World Cup hosting coup was becoming a PR nightmare, with stories emerging over bribed FIFA officials and exploited migrant workers.
Exploding onto the EU scene
In Brussels, Doha leaned on the head of its EU Mission, Abdulrahman Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, who had moved to Belgium in 2017 from Germany, to step up European relations.
Within days of the fissure, Al-Khulaifi appeared in meetings at NATO, and within months opened a think tank called the Middle East Dialogue Center to hone Doha’s image as an open promoter of debate (in contrast,it contended, to its neighbors) and pressure the EU to intervene in the Mideast.
By the next year, he was speaking on panels about combating violent extremism — alongside Dutch and Belgian federal police. By late 2019, Al-Khulaifi hosted the first meeting of embassy’s Qatar-EU friendship group with a “working dinner.”
“The situation following the blockade has pushed Qatar to establish closer relations outside the context of the regional crisis with, for example, the European Union,” Pier Antonio Panzeri, then chair of the Parliament’s human rights subcommittee, told Euractiv in 2018.
The following year, Panzeri would attend the Qatari-hosted “International Conference on National, Regional and International Mechanisms to Combat Impunity and Ensure Accountability under International Law,” and heap praise on the country’s human rights record.
Panzeri is now in a Belgian prison, facing corruption charges; his NGO, Fight Impunity, is under intense scrutiny for being a possible front.
Neumann said that Qatar’s survival strategy has paid off. “Absolutely, it worked,” she said. “I think it’s fair enough, if they didn’t do it with illegal means.”
Directly or indirectly, Qatar clocked several big victories during this period, including multiple resolutions in Parliament on human rights in Saudi Arabia and a call to end arms exports to Riyadh in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Doha also inked a cooperation arrangement with the EU in March 2018, setting the stage for closer ties.
Frenemies once again
Since Saudi Arabia and Qatar signed a deal to end the crisis two years ago, Riyadh-Doha relations have generally thawed. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, traveled to Qatar in November for the World Cup and embraced Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 42, while wearing a scarf in the host’s colors.
However, relations between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, 61 — remain chilly.
As the Gulf transforms, the United Arab Emirates “has come to see that role as being a status quo power,” said Alterman. On the part of its neighbor, “Qatar has come to see that role as aligning with forces of change in the region, and that’s created a certain amount of mutual resentment.”
Qatar’s smaller scale contributes to Doha’s sense of internal security, fueling its openness to engaging with groups that others see as an existential threat.
Qataris see themselves as “champions of the Davids against the Goliath,” said Andreas Krieg, an assistant professor at King’s College London who has worked in the past as a consultant for the Qatari armed forces. Civil society organizations founded by “a range of different opposition figures, Saudi opposition figures in the West, have been supported financially by Qatar as well,” Krieg added. (Khashoggi, one of the era’s most prominent Saudi opposition figures, had connections to the state-backed Qatar Foundation.) “Hence why Qatar was always seen as sort of a thorn in the side of its neighbors.”
And while the €1.5 million cash haul confiscated by Belgian federal police looks like an eye-popping sum, it certainly pales in comparison to the amount the Gulf states spend on legal lobbying in Brussels. And that sum, in turn, pales in comparison to what those countries spend in Washington.
“Brussels isn’t that important,” Krieg said. “If you look at the money that these Gulf countries spend in Washington, these are tens of millions of dollars every year on think tanks, academics … creating their own media outlets, investing strategically into Fox News, investing into massive PR operations.”
Nonetheless, the EU remains a key target. Abu Dhabi is strengthening its “long-standing partnership” with Brussels on economic and regional security matters “through deep, strategic cooperation with EU institutions and Member States,” said a UAE official, in a statement.
“Brussels was always a hub to create a narrative,” said Krieg.
And right now, each of the region’s power players is deeply motivated to change that narrative.
Alterman invoked a broad impression of the Gulf countries as “people who have more money than God who want to take the world back to the 7th Century.”
But that’s wrong, he said. “This is all about shaping the future with remarkably high stakes, profound discomfort about how the world will relate to them over the next 30 to 50 years — and frankly, a series of rulers who see themselves being in power for the next 30 to 50 years.”
KYIV — When the Russians first came to the school where Larysa taught history in southeastern Ukraine, they asked for all the history and Ukrainian language textbooks.
The director refused to hand them over.
The school closed — but then reopened virtually on September 1, with up to 80 percent of its 700 pupils attending online. More than half of them remain in occupied Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia region, said Larysa, who left in April for the Odesa region.
“Some go to Russian school and do homework with us,” she said. “We do all we can to make it incognito. We deleted all electronic lists, never put up any photos or screenshots or write names.”
Larysa did not give her surname or name the school for security reasons. Half of her colleagues are still on occupied territory and teaching online, risking imprisonment or worse from occupying forces — two were already detained and later released in September.
“They’re holding lessons in extreme conditions,” Larysa said. “Some were saved just because someone was on lookout. The wife was teaching a lesson and her husband was watching from the window so that she had time to hide everything before they came.”
After reopening in autumn 2021, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, Ukrainian schools have moved mostly back online following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. But from bombs to blackouts to displacement to occupation, millions of Ukrainian children and young adults face an education interrupted, with educators struggling to work under desperate conditions.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Ministry of Education. School buildings are at risk of shelling or lack heating after massive damage to the country’s energy infrastructure, while blackouts and interrupted internet connections hamper learning from home.
Meanwhile, thousands of students and teachers living under occupation face pressure to switch to Russian schooling.
Education, with its propaganda potential to influence young hearts and minds, has become a front line in the war.
Ideological battle
Crimea, under Russian control for more than eight years, is an example of how Russian education in occupied territories aims — with eventual success — to erase Ukrainian identity and militarize children.
History lessons there claim that Ukraine was always part of Russia. Army cadet courses and classes sponsored by law enforcement agencies start for children as young as six, says Maria Sulyanina from the Crimean Human Rights Group.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed | Genya Savilov AFP via Getty images
“We see that these children who were small kids when the occupation started, after eight years they have been turned into Russians,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has steadily been moving its educational system away from that inherited from the Soviet Union. It has relegated Russian to foreign language teaching; moved Russian literature to part of the study of world literature; and revised history courses to include events like the Holodomor, the Soviet-caused famine in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians and is still largely denied in Russia.
Yet despite Russia’s carrot-and-stick approach — from September, parents in recently occupied territories are paid a one-off of 10,000 rubles (€145) to send their children to Russian school, plus 4,000 per month that they stay — many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it.
But the war has made Ukrainian education extremely tenuous.
When Russia invaded and occupied Kupiansk, a town in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, the vocational school where Viktoria Scherbakova taught was pressured to switch to the Russian system, and later damaged and looted.
Now, her classroom — and office — is the kitchen table at a small rented flat she shares with her two children and elderly parents in Kyiv, after she and her children fled the Russian occupation. The flat is also her daughter’s Kharkiv university virtual lecture hall and her son’s Kyiv ninth-grade classroom on days when air raid sirens sound and he can’t attend school.
The motor transport vocational college in Kupiansk where Scherbakova taught, which offered practical training for mechanics and drivers along with courses in transport logistics to some 300 pupils aged 14 to 18, exists as a displaced, virtual entity, with no home of its own. Although she is offering lessons online, Scherbakova doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to teach there again in person.
“We’re not in Kyiv, not in Kharkiv, not in Kupiansk,” she said. “We’re not anywhere.”
The education front line
As of October, about 1,300 schools were on Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia. Teachers have been targeted for collaboration and detained, threatened and mistreated. Staff have been sent to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea for retraining in the Russian education system or told they would be replaced by teachers from Russia if they refused to work.
In Kupiansk, after the then-mayor surrendered to the Russians on February 27, educational establishments stayed open. However, many parents kept their children out of school — including Scherbakova, whose 14-year-old son stayed at home although she herself continued to work at the college.
Apart from hoisting a Russian flag outside, the occupiers left them alone — until June. But by the end of term, it became clear that staff would be forced to decide: leave, or start the next school year under the Russian system.
“And if you didn’t work for them, it wasn’t clear what the consequences would be,” said Scherbakova. “If you openly said you didn’t support them, you would end up in their prisons or cellars.”
Many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
One school director in Kupiansk, who refused to open her school after occupation, spent almost a month detained in the basement of the police station.
Of nearly 50 teaching and administrative staff in the vocational college, only seven refused to work with the Russian occupying authorities, according to Scherbakova.
“I’m ashamed of my college,” she said.
Spurred by the apparent ultimatum, Scherbakova and her children managed to leave Kupiansk for free Ukrainian territory in early June. The college was moved to operate virtually in Ukrainian-controlled territory, with her role shifting to acting director. With a colleague, they printed diplomas for those graduates who were reachable — 35 out of 53 — and developed a program to start the new teaching year.
But when she and a colleague started calling students, they found out that the teenagers had been enrolled to start the year in the college in Kupiansk — under the Russian system.
The physical and the virtual college started teaching parallel courses on September 1. Eight days later, Ukrainian forces took back Kupiansk.
When Scherbakova went back to Kupiansk after liberation, she found that though the college had been completely looted of its equipment and training vehicles, the library was full of untouched new Russian textbooks.
Some of the college staff who had remained in Kupiansk fled to Russia. Others got in touch with Scherbakova asking if they could work with her.
“At first I didn’t have an answer. I’m not the SBU [Ukrainian security services], I can’t judge them,” she said.
Some are under suspicion of collaboration. Later, the Ministry of Education clarified that teachers who had collaborated or brought in the Russian education system were banned from teaching. According to Ukrainian legislation on collaboration adopted in early September, teachers who engage in Russian propaganda in schools can be sentenced to prison terms. By mid-September, 19 proceedings had been opened against teachers in Ukraine.
Back in Kyiv,Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine.
Her students, scattered around the country by war, face power outages too. Others, displaced abroad, are fitting lessons around schooling in Germany or England. And some remain in Kupiansk, recently liberated from occupation, where there is no internet, and the town comes under Russian shelling morning and night.
Viktoria Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty images
“Those ones, all I can do is call and ask: ‘Are you alive? How did the night go? This is your exam question, just tell me something, whatever comes into your head,’” said Scherbakova.
“Of course, I can’t give them good marks. But I can’t abandon them.”
Lost generation
The physical challenges of war and the ideological battle as Russia seeks to impose its education system threaten the very basis of education in Ukraine: participation.
Scherbakova says her students, many of whom come from low-income families, are dropping out of online courses. “They need to survive. They dropped everything to find work,” she said. “Many of them had to leave their homes, and they need to live on something.”
Teachers are leaving the profession too — due to migration, retirement, low salaries, and war-related stresses and bans. The Kharkiv region has lost nearly 3,000 of 21,500 teachers since February, according to its education department.
In Kupiansk, as in many liberated towns and villages, the will to learn is not matched by the necessary infrastructure of electricity, internet and teachers. Children can only get an education if they move.
“We don’t want to leave. This is our land, and we want to live here,” said Iryna Protsenko, who was recently collecting humanitarian aid in Kupiansk with her daughter Zlata, 6. The family ran a small dairy business in the town before the war and stayed throughout occupation. “But now I’m afraid we will have to leave, because of school.”
Zlata, smiling shyly next to her mother, wants to learn, said Protsenko. She should start school this year. For the moment they read books together at home — easier now that electricity has been restored. “But she’s lonely.”
Ukrainian children were already starved of live interaction due to pandemic restrictions. Now, with only online teaching, plus the interrupted routines and safety restrictions of war, they are becoming increasingly stressed and withdrawn.
“It’s not so much the quality of education as the communication. They are losing socialization,” said Larysa, the teacher from Berdiansk.
Some parents compare the situation to that of their grandparents, who missed years of education during World War II. When the war was over, they had to study together with much younger children, earning themselves the name ‘pererostki,’ or ‘overgrown.’
“I think it will be like my grandma,” said Maria Varenikova, a journalist living in Kyiv with her son Nazar, 11. “Something will have to be figured out in Ukraine, given that for years children don’t have an education because of COVID, and now war.”
“They try hard and worry so much. They are lost children” said teacher Viktoria Scherbakova | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
Nazar’s school opened in person this September, keeping going with generators, bottled water and a basement bomb shelter. But Nazar is repeating the largely lost previous school year.
Scherbakova’s son, on top of the trauma of fleeing his home, had to cram in most of the last school year in extra classes over the summer in order to progress to the next grade in Kyiv.
“They try hard and worry so much,” said Scherbakova. “They are lost children.”
In the United States, TikTok is a favorite punching ball for lawmakers who’ve compared the Chinese-owned app to “digital fentanyl” and say it should be banned.
Now that hostility is spreading to Europe, where fears about children’s safety and reports that TikTok spied on journalists using their IP locations are fueling a backlash against the video-sharing app used by more than 250 million Europeans.
As TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew heads to Brussels on Tuesday to meet with top digital policymaker Margrethe Vestager amid a wider reappraisal of EU ties with China, his company faces a slew of legal, regulatory and security challenges in the bloc — as well as a rising din of public criticism.
One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users, as well as a source of Russian disinformation. Such comments have gone hand-in-hand with aggressive media coverage in France, including Le Parisien daily’s December 29 front page calling TikTok “A real danger for the brains of our children.”
New restrictions may be in order. During a trip to the United States in November, Macron told a group of American investors and French tech CEOs that he wanted to regulate TikTok, according to two people in the room. TikTok denies it is harmful and says it has measures to protect kids on the app.
While it wasn’t clear what rules Macron was referring to — his office declined to comment — the remarks added to a darkening tableau for TikTok. In addition to two EU-wide privacy probes that are set to wrap up in coming months, TikTok has to contend with extensive new requirements on content moderation under the bloc’s new digital rulebook, the DSA, from mid-2023 — as well as the possibility of being caught up in the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook, the Digital Markets Act.
In answers to emailed questions, France’s digital minister Jean-Noel Barrot said that France would rely on the DSA and DMA to regulate TikTok at an EU level, though he “remained vigilant on these ever-evolving models” of ad-supported social media. Barrot added that he “never failed to maintain a level of pressure appropriate to the stakes of the DSA” in meetings with TikTok executives.
Ahead of Chew’s visit to Brussels, Thierry Breton, the bloc’s internal market commissioner, warned him about the need to “respect the integrality of our rules,” according to comments the commissioner made in Spain, reported by Reuters. A spokesperson for Vestager said she aimed to “review how the company was preparing for complying with its (possible) obligations under our regulation.”
That said, the probes TikTok is facing deal with suspected violations that have already taken place. If Ireland’s data regulator, which leads investigations on behalf of other EU states, finds that TikTok has broken the bloc’s privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation, fines could amount to up to 4 percent of the firm’s global turnover. Penalties can be even higher under the DSA, which starts applying to big platforms in mid-2023.
Spying fears
And yet, having to fork over a few million euros could be the least of TikTok’s troubles in Europe, as some lawmakers here are following their U.S. peers to call for much tougher restrictions on the app amid fears that data from TikTok will be used for spying.
TikTok is under investigation for sending data on EU users to China — one of two probes being led by Ireland. Reports that TikTok employees in China used TikTok data to track the movements of two Western journalists only intensified spying fears, especially in privacy-conscious Germany. (TikTok acknowledged the incident and fired four employees over what they said was unauthorized access to user data.)
One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users | Pool photo by Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Citing a “lack of data security and data protection” as well as data transfers to China, the digital policy spokesman for Germany’s Social Democratic Party group in the Bundestag said that the U.S. ban on TikTok for federal employees’ phones was “understandable.”
“I think it makes sense to also critically examine applications such as TikTok and, if necessary, to take measures. I would therefore advise civil servants, but also every citizen, not to install untrustworthy services and apps on their smartphones,” Jens Zimmermann added.
Maximilian Funke-Kaiser, digital policy spokesman for the liberal FDP group in German parliament, went even further raising the prospect of a full ban on use of TikTok on government phones. “In view of the privacy and security risks posed by the app and the app’s far-reaching access rights, I consider the ban on TikTok on the work phones of U.S. government officials to be appropriate. Corresponding steps should also be examined in Germany.”
For Moritz Körner, a centrist lawmaker in European Parliament, the potential risks linked to TikTok are far greater than with Twitter due to the former’s larger user base — at least five times as many users as Twitter in Europe — and the fact that up to a third of its users are aged 13-19.
“The China-app TikTok should be under the special surveillance of the European authorities,” he wrote in an email. “The fight between autocratic and democratic systems will also be fought via digital platforms. Europe has to wake up.”
In Switzerland, lawmakers called earlier this month for a ban on officials’ phones.
Call for a ban
So far, though, no European government or public body has followed the U.S. in banning TikTok usage on officials’ phones. In response to questions from POLITICO, a spokesperson for the European Commission — which previously advised its employees against using Meta’s WhatsApp — wrote that any restriction on TikTok usage for EU civil servants would “require a political decision and will be based on the careful assessment of data protection cybersecurity concerns, and others.”
The spokesperson also pointed out that “there are no official Commission accounts” on TikTok.
A spokesperson for the European Parliament said its services “continuously monitor” for cybersecurity issues, but that “due to the nature of security matters, we don’t comment further on specific platforms.”
POLITICO reached out to cybersecurity agencies for the EU, the U.K. and Germany to ask if they had or were planning any restrictions or recommendations having to do with TikTok. None flagged any specific restrictions, which doesn’t mean there aren’t any. In Germany, for example, officials who use iPhones can’t use or download TikTok in the section of their phone where confidential data can be accessed.
The European Commission has previously advised its employees against using Meta’s WhatsApp | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
For Hamburg’s data protection agency, one of 16 in Germany’s federal system, restricting TikTok on official phones would be a good idea.
“Based on what we know from the available sources, we share, among other things,the concerns of the U.S. government that you mentioned and would therefore welcome it appropriate for government agencies in the EU to refrain from using TikTok,” a spokesperson said.
This suggests that the most immediate public threat for TikTok in Europe is privacy-related. Of the two probes being conducted by Ireland’s privacy regulator, the one looking into child safety on the app is the closest to wrapping up, according to a spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission.
Depending on the outcome of discussions between EU privacy regulators — the child safety probe is likely to trigger a dispute resolution mechanism — TikTok could face new requirements to verify age in the EU. The other probe, looking into TikTok’s transfers of data to China, is likely to wrap up around mid-year or toward the end of 2023 if a dispute is triggered, the spokesperson said.
Antoaneta Roussi contributed reporting.
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Nicholas Vinocur, Clothilde Goujard, Océane Herrero and Louis Westendarp
BERLIN (AP) — Daniel Barenboim on Friday announced his resignation as the general music director of Berlin’s Staatsoper, a job that he has held for over three decades, saying that his health has become too poor to carry on.
The renowned conductor and pianist, who turned 80 in November, has been in the post since 1992. In a statement issued by the Staatsoper, he said he will step down on Jan. 31.
“Unfortunately, my health has deteriorated significantly in the past year,” he said. “I can no longer deliver the performance that is rightly demanded of a general music director.”
Barenboim said that his years at the opera house on Berlin’s Unter den Linden boulevard “inspired us in every respect in musical and human terms.” And he said he was particularly “happy and proud” that the Staatskapelle orchestra, based at the Staatsoper, made him its chief conductor for life.
“We became a musical family over the years and will continue to be one,” Barenboim added. He said that he is still ready to conduct in the future.
In October, Barenboim announced that he was “taking a step back” from some of his performing activities for a period of months after being diagnosed with a “serious neurological condition.”
He returned on Saturday, conducting a New Year performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sitting down, to loud applause from the audience.
Barenboim in 2019 was granted a five-year contract extension that would have kept him at the opera house until 2027.
Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, said that Barenboim’s time at the head of the Staatsoper “was a godsend for Berlin and Germany, because he led the opera house and the Staatskapelle to world renown after the fall of the Wall.” The opera is located in what was communist East Berlin until 1990.
“I very much regret his resignation, wish him a good recovery and look forward to hopefully many further concerts and opera performances with him,” Roth said in a statement.
Germany has rebuffed the latest push by Poland’s nationalist government for vast reparations over World War II, saying in response to a diplomatic note that the issue was closed, the foreign ministry in Warsaw said on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the German foreign ministry said it had responded to a letter sent by Poland on the subject in October and did not comment on the contents of diplomatic correspondence.
Poland estimates its World War II losses caused by Germany at $1.4 trillion and has demanded reparations, but Berlin has repeatedly said all financial claims related to the war have been settled.
“This answer, to sum it up, shows an absolutely disrespectful attitude towards Poland and Poles,” Arkadiusz Mularczyk, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, said in an interview with the Polish Press Agency.
“Germany does not pursue a friendly policy towards Poland, they want to build their sphere of influence here and treat Poland as a vassal state.”
When asked about further dialog with Germany regarding compensation, Mularczyk said it would continue “through international organizations.”
Some six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed during the war and Warsaw was razed to the ground following a 1944 uprising in which about 200,000 civilians died.
In 1953, Poland’s then-communist rulers relinquished all claims to war reparations under pressure from the Soviet Union, which wanted to free East Germany, also a Soviet satellite, from any liabilities.
Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party says that agreement is invalid because Poland was unable to negotiate fair compensation. It has revived calls for compensation since it took power in 2015 and has made the promotion of Poland’s wartime victimhood a central plank of its appeal to nationalism.
The combative stance toward Germany, often used by PiS to mobilize its constituency, has strained relations with Berlin.
In a joint press conference with Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau last October, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the pain caused by Germany during World War II was “passed on through generations” in Poland but that the issue of reparations was closed.
BERLIN (AP) — The first regular shipment of liquefied natural gas from the United States arrived in Germany on Tuesday, part of a wide-reaching effort to help the country replace energy supplies it previously received from Russia.
The tanker vessel Maria Energy arrived at the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven, where its shipment of LNG will be converted back into gas at a special floating terminal that was inaugurated last month by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Germany has also temporarily reactivated old oil- and coal-fired power stations and extended the life of its last three nuclear power plants until mid-April.
Environmental campaigners said they planned to protest the arrival of the Maria Energy, arguing Germany shouldn’t be importing fossil fuels, particularly gas obtained through fracking.
BERLIN — Germany’s biggest police union called Tuesday for concerted action to prevent a repeat of the violent excesses seen in Berlin and other cities during the New Year’s celebrations, in which officers, firefighters and medical personnel were attacked with fireworks.
Police in the capital recorded dozens of attacks and said 41 officers were injured. Online videos showing people firing rockets and throwing firecrackers at police cars and rescue vehicles drew widespread condemnation from German authorities.
The head of the GdP union, Jochen Kopelke, said there should be an “immediate debate” about the causes and consequences of such attacks, adding that they “must not be repeated at the next turn of the year.”
Kopelke said it was important to discuss the facts of what had happened and avoid blanket accusations against particular social groups.
Some conservative and far-right politicians have noted that some of the attacks took place in areas of Berlin with large immigrant communities.
Christoph de Vries, a lawmaker with the center-right Christian Democrats, wrote on Twitter that to tackle the issue of violence toward police officers and firefighters it was necessary to “talk about the role of people (with the) phenotype: West Asiatic, darker skin type.”
His comments drew accusations of racism, but De Vries said he was “ironically” referring to recent guidance by Berlin police on how to describe suspects’ ethnicity and this should not distract from “the necessary discussion about migration policy and glaring deficits when it comes to integration.”
Berlin police have so far said only that out of 103 suspects released from detention, 98 were male.
The German government’s top integration official, Reem Alabali-Radovan, condemned the New Year’s attacks and called for those responsible to swiftly be punished “with the full force of our laws.”
In an interview with the Funke media group, she also called for the perpetrators to be judged “according to their deeds, not according to their presumed origins, as some are doing now,” warning that this could cause further divisions in society rather than address the social causes of the problem.
The attacks have also reignited a debate in Germany about the use of fireworks around New Year. The tradition suffered a blow during the pandemic, when the government banned their sale in an effort to ease the pressure on hospitals and discourage large public gatherings.
Experts say the absence of such a ban may have contributed to the scale of violence and large number of fireworks injuries — including at least one death — seen this year.
The GdP union’s regional head in Berlin, Stephan Weh, suggested it was time to consider a nationwide ban on pyrotechnics, saying the attacks in the capital had shown how they can be used “as weapons against people.”
FILE – A man wearing a face mask to protect against coronavirus travels on a metro in Berlin, Germany, March 22, 2022. A German doctor has been sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for illegally issuing more than 4,000 people with exemptions from wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File)
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Lise Nørgaard, a screenwriter who penned the popular epic television drama “Matador” about the lives of ordinary Danish families in a fictitious provincial town during the recession of the 1930s and the hard times of World War II, has died. She was 105.
Nørgaard died Sunday after a brief illness, her family said Monday. She is also known for having written her 1992 Memoirs “Kun en pige,” recounting her struggle to become a female reporter.
She worked at major Danish newspapers, including Politiken and Berlingske. She started her career at local newspaper Roskilde Dagblad in her hometown of Roskilde, located 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Copenhagen.
“We say goodbye to a national treasure,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Instagram. “A strong and people-loving woman who was never afraid to take the lead. She gave us Matador. A piece of Danish history.”
Danish lawmakers tweeted Monday in honor of Nørgaard, who was little known outside Scandinavia and Germany.
Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said that “culture has lost a piece of life. And Denmark an important witness and contributor to its contemporaries.”
German Ambassador Pascal Hector tweeted that her television show “Matador,” which he called a “masterpiece” was “my first encounter with the Danish language and the country’s history.”
The setting for 24-episode “Matador,” which was first broadcast in 1978 and shown as repeats over the years, was a fictitious Danish town named Korsbaek. Several Danish actors got their breakthroughs in the four-season show, which ended in 1982, and part of the make-believe town was recreated in a Danish amusement park.
Nørgaard retired as a writer and a lecturer in 2018. Funeral arrangements weren’t immediately announced.
BERLIN — The German government said Friday it is formally suspending export credit and investment guarantees for business in Iran in the wake of authorities’ crackdown on protests.
The Economy Ministry said it also has suspended other “economic formats,” including a dialogue on energy issues, in view of “the very serious situation in Iran.”
Export credit guarantees protect German companies from losses when exports aren’t paid for. Investment guarantees are granted to protect direct investments by German companies from political risk in the countries where they are made.
The ministry said that use of those instruments for projects in Iran was suspended for decades until there was a “short phase of opening” from 2016 as a result of Iran’s agreement with world powers, including Germany, on its nuclear program. It said that guarantees were granted or extended for a few projects in that period, but there have been no new ones since 2019.
The German government has now decided to “suspend completely” the guarantees, it added, and exemptions can only be granted if there are solid humanitarian reasons. German-Iranian trade totaled 1.76 billion euros (nearly $1.9 billion) in 2021 and 1.49 billion euros in the first nine months of this year, the ministry said.
Nationwide protests erupted in September after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, detained by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women. They have since transformed into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s ruling clerics. Authorities have sought to stamp out the demonstrations and ramp up pressure on critics.
Since the protests started, the United States and European Union imposed additional sanctions on Iran for its brutal treatment of demonstrators and its decision to send hundreds of drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Germany pushed for a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council last month that voted to condemn the crackdown and create an independent fact-finding mission.
BERLIN — The German government said Friday it is formally suspending export credit and investment guarantees for business in Iran in the wake of authorities’ crackdown on protests.
The Economy Ministry said it also has suspended other “economic formats,” including a dialogue on energy issues, in view of “the very serious situation in Iran.”
Export credit guarantees protect German companies from losses when exports aren’t paid for. Investment guarantees are granted to protect direct investments by German companies from political risk in the countries where they are made.
The ministry said that use of those instruments for projects in Iran was suspended for decades until there was a “short phase of opening” from 2016 as a result of Iran’s agreement with world powers, including Germany, on its nuclear program. It said that guarantees were granted or extended for a few projects in that period, but there have been no new ones since 2019.
The German government has now decided to “suspend completely” the guarantees, it added, and exemptions can only be granted if there are solid humanitarian reasons. German-Iranian trade totaled 1.76 billion euros (nearly $1.9 billion) in 2021 and 1.49 billion euros in the first nine months of this year, the ministry said.
Nationwide protests erupted in September after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, detained by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women. They have since transformed into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s ruling clerics. Authorities have sought to stamp out the demonstrations and ramp up pressure on critics.
Since the protests started, the United States and European Union imposed additional sanctions on Iran for its brutal treatment of demonstrators and its decision to send hundreds of drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Germany pushed for a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council last month that voted to condemn the crackdown and create an independent fact-finding mission.
BERLIN — Tennis great Boris Becker tearfully recounted the moment the door of his single-occupancy cell at Britain’s notorious Wandsworth prison closed for the first time, speaking publicly after serving eight months for bankruptcy offenses.
“It was the loneliest moment I’ve ever had in life,” Becker said in an interview with German broadcaster SAT.1 that aired Tuesday, recalling how hours earlier he had been unable to say farewell to his loved ones before being led downstairs to the courtroom jail.
The three-time Wimbledon champion was sentenced to 30 months in prison in April for illicitly transferring large amounts of money and hiding assets after he was declared bankrupt. Becker would normally have had to serve half of his sentence before being eligible for release, but was released early under a fast-track deportation program for foreign nationals.
Becker, who was deported to his native Germany on Dec. 15, said he prayed daily in the three weeks between his conviction and sentencing, conscious that there was a chance he might not get away with a suspended sentence.
Arriving in Wandsworth, the 55-year-old Becker said he feared attacks by other inmates.
“The many films I saw beforehand didn’t help,” he said.
Becker said prison authorities appeared to have tried to ensure his safety, allocating him a single cell and getting three experienced inmates — or “listeners” — to guide him in his new life behind bars.
That included coping with the lack of food, Becker said, as prison fare was largely restricted to rice, potatoes and sauce. “Sunday roasts” consisted of a chicken drumstick, he said.
“I felt hunger for the first time in my life,” said Becker, who won the first of many millions of dollars as a player at the age of 17.
Violence was a problem, he said, recounting instances at Wandsworth and later at HMP Huntercombe where inmates threatened to harm him until others stepped in.
In November, fellow prisoners organized several cakes for his birthday, Becker said.
“I’ve never experienced such solidarity in the free world,” he said, adding that he planned to stay in touch with some of the people he’d met in prison.
For Becker, who rose to stardom in 1985 at age 17 when he became the first unseeded player to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, the prison sentence was a heavy blow.
Asked about the judge’s statement that Becker had shown “no humility,” he acknowledged in the interview that “maybe I should have (been) even more clear, more emotional.”
Becker also admitted fault.
“Of course I was guilty,” he said of the four out of 29 counts he was convicted on.
Still, Becker said he “it could have been much worse.”
After retiring from professional tennis in 1999, the six-time Grand Slam champion worked as a coach and television pundit while also engaging in a wide range of investments and celebrity poker games.
Now he hopes to turn a new page and avoid the mistakes he made in the past — many of which he blamed on laziness and bad financial advice received from others.
“For years I made mistakes, I had false friends,” he said. “I think this time in prison brought me back.”
Becker’s time outside the limelight likely won’t last long. Organizers of the annual Berlinale said Tuesday that next year’s film festival will feature the premiere of an as-yet untitled documentary about Becker by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney.
The UN chief, speaking to reporters during his annual end-of-year press conference in New York on Monday, said the case in Germany was just one example of the threat posed by the extreme right-wing to democratic societies around the world.
“It has been demonstrated that the biggest threat of terrorism today in Western countries comes from the extreme right, neo-Nazis and white supremacy,” Guterres said.
“And I think we must be very clear and very firm in condemning every form of neo-Nazism, white supremacists, any form of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred,” he said.
“This is clearly a threat, and we must fight that threat with enormous determination,” he added.
Germany’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office arrested 25 suspects earlier this month when thousands of police conducted raids on 130 sites across 11 German federal states that targeted adherents of the so-called Reich Citizens (Reichsbuerger) movement.
Prosecutors said members of the movement were suspected of “having made concrete preparations to violently force their way into the German parliament with a small armed group”.
They added that the 22 arrested individuals were German citizens and were detained on suspicion of “membership in a terrorist organisation”, while three others allegedly supported the organisation, including a Russian citizen.
According to reports, the conspirators sought to form “homeland security companies” that would carry out arrests and executions after an overthrow of the German state.
“My recommendation to whoever owns any platform is to make sure that the freedom of expression, especially of journalists, is respected and that hate speech, neo‑Nazism, white supremacism, the other forms of extremism, do not find their way through those social platforms,” he said.
“I have no personal feelings in relation to who manages a platform. I’m very interested in about how the platform is managed.”
PARIS — France will deliver “light” battle tanks to Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron’s office announced Wednesday, adding that France would be the first country to send such Western-designed armored fighting vehicles to the war.
The Elysée said after a phone call between Macron and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy that France will send AMX-10 RC armored fighting vehicles, which Paris has been gradually replacing with new Jaguar battle tanks.
Several countries have already sent Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine. Both France and Germany have been under pressure to supply tanks to Ukraine, but had refused Kyiv’s requests, until now.
An adviser to France’s Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Wednesday’s decision was made to help Ukraine prepare for “a possible Russian offensive” in the spring.
“Ukraine is at a tipping point now at the frontline … Russia is trying to terrorize the population with its drone attacks that sometimes reach as far as Kyiv, but Ukraine could also start a counter-offensive,” he said.
Zelenskyy thanked Macron on Twitter, saying the two leaders had “a long and detailed conversation” and that the French president’s “leadership brings our victory closer.”
However, Ukraine’s requests for more arms from allies have still not been fully satisfied: In December, Kyiv formally asked for another model of tank, the Leclerc — France’s main battle tank — rather than AMX-10 vehicles, which are being phased out. The AMX-10 is lighter, less protected and has a shorter range than the Leclerc.
However the delivery of French armoured vehicles, though not fully-fledged battle tanks, might encourage others to follow suit, argued retired French colonel and military consultant Michel Goya.
“We’ve made a gesture … we can now boast that we were the first to send tanks, even though they are not the same class as the battle tanks used in Ukraine. But the move can also have an incitement effect on others,” said Goya.
On Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz faced renewed calls to send Leopard-2 tanks to Ukraine.
“The argument constantly advanced by the chancellery that Germany must not go it alone is absolutely out of date,” said Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who heads Germany’s parliamentary defence committee in an interview with AFP.
“France is once again taking on the role that was expected of Germany, and is going ahead alone,” she said.
Macron’s government did not specify how many vehicles it will send. The French and Ukrainian defense ministries are expected to discuss the details of the equipment delivery soon.
For retired general Jérôme Pellistrandi, director of National Defense magazine, the rate of replacement of the AMX-10s by new generation vehicles within the French army gives an indication of the potential scale of the supplies.
“The land forces have received 38 Jaguar vehicles, that means that the same number of AMX-10s have been removed from service, so thirty thereabouts should be available to be transferred to Ukraine,” Pellistrandi said.
Built for Soviet times
The AMX-10 is a light, highly mobile, armoured vehicle equipped with a 105mm cannon. It has been used in reconnaissance missions for the French army and was deployed as recently as the Barkhane mission in Africa, which formally ended in November.
“It’s a vehicle that was designed in the 70s and 80s to track the advance of Soviet armed land forces. The paradox is that it will be used today for the purpose it was built for … because the Russians have shown their doctrine hasn’t shifted much since the Soviet times,” Pellistrandi said.
The light tanks are useful in operations and can be deployed ahead of Ukrainian battle tanks in the event of a renewed Russian offensive in the spring, according to Pellistrandi.
However, Goya argued that the delivery of several dozen French AMX-10s to the warzone is unlikely to change the dynamic on the Ukrainian battlefield.
“It can help, but in terms of numbers it’s not much given that there are hundreds of thousands of armoured vehicles in Ukraine. The Ukrainians will use them well, but they don’t fire as far as Russian tanks,” he said.
It’s likely that the Ukrainians will keep up the pressure on France and Germany to send battle tanks, alongside other high tech military equipment. But according to a French Armed Forces ministry adviser, the upkeep of France’s defense capacities has remained “a red line” for Macron, which limits the scope for deliveries.
