KYIV — Mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group are back fighting on the front line in Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian military official told POLITICO on Wednesday.
Several hundred fighters from the group once ruled by now-dead warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin were spotted fighting in the ranks of different Russian military units on the eastern front, said Colonel Serhiy Cherevatyi.
After Wagner was thrown into disarray following an aborted insurrection against the Kremlin in June led by Prigozhin — who subsequently died in a fiery plane crash in August — many of its troops were either welcomed to Belarus by its ruler Alexander Lukashenko or deployed to African countries where Russia has interests.
“Wagnerites were not hiding. Maybe they thought it would scare our soldiers. In fact, that showed Russia needs new meat for the grinder,” said Cherevatyi, deputy commander of Ukraine’s eastern group of troops for strategic communications. “Wagner as an organization was finished in Bakhmut. Now their more fortunate soldiers are sent to Africa, where there’s more money. The less fortunate ones are back to Ukraine.”
He added that Ukrainian wiretapping and reconnaissance had been used to confirm that former Wagner forces were back on the Donbas battlefield, but warned, “We know everything about them.”
Ukraine’s National Resistance Center previously reported that fewer than 1,000 Wagner mercenaries remained in Belarus as of September.
“Currently, 200 of them remain instructors in the special units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense of Belarus. The rest are those who do not want to be recruited either to the new PMCs or to the Russian defense ministry,” the resistance center said, citing its sources on the ground.
Earlier, CNN reported that Wagner fighters are back in Ukraine, citing Ukrainian soldiers fighting around Bakhmut. Wagner’s Telegram channels have been quiet on Ukraine, currently posting news from Belarus, Niger, and Mali.
“I see nothing special in their return. Wagner is no longer a powerful force. Those who returned are far from being in a good fighting mood, as they know what to expect here,” Cherevatyi said. “Furthermore, they are now under the control of the Defense Ministry.
“They used to call themselves soldiers of fortune but now they are more like misfortune soldiers.”
North Korea has decided “to expel” US Army Private Travis King, who crossed into the North from South Korea during a tour of the joint security area in July, state media KCNA reported on Wednesday.
“The relevant organ of the DPRK decided to expel Travis King, a soldier of the U.S. Army who illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK, under the law of the Republic,” KCNA said. The report said the investigation into King “has been finished.”
It is unclear from KCNA’s report where, when and how King would be expelled.
King crossed the military demarcation line from South Korea into North Korea in July during a tour of the Joint Security Area inside the demilitarized zone (DMZ). King, a junior enlisted soldier assigned to US Forces Korea, had faced assault charges in South Korea and was due to return to Fort Bliss, Texas, and be removed from the military just one day before he crossed into North Korea, CNN previously reported.
North Korea claimed on Wednesday that King has “confessed that he illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. army and was disillusioned about the unequal U.S. society.”
CNN cannot verify whether these are King’s own words.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last month that it “would not be out of character” for North Korea to use US soldier Travis King as a propaganda tool or bargaining chip.
“They certainly could. … We haven’t seen any indication that that’s exactly what’s afoot here, but certainly would not be out of character for them,” Kirby told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.” “What we’re focused on is trying to make sure we can get information about him.”
Kirby added at that time that King’s location was unclear, as well as “the conditions he’s being held” and information about his health.
Here is the situation on Wednesday, September 27, 2023.
Fighting
Russia released a video reportedly showing Viktor Sokolov, commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, at a meeting with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and other military top brass a day after Ukrainian special forces claimed he was among dozens of officers killed in an attack on the fleet’s Sevastopol naval base. Ukraine said it was clarifying information regarding Sokolov.
The United Kingdom’s defence ministry said “a dynamic, deep strike battle” was under way in the Black Sea after the Russian Black Sea Fleet suffered a series of major attacks.
Kyiv said its air defences destroyed 26 of 38 Russian drones fired overnight but that some of the drones hit the Danube River port of Izmail, damaging more than 30 vehicles and injuring two drivers during a two-hour attack. The drone barrage also prompted the temporary suspension of ferry services to Romania.
Russia, meanwhile, said it repelled several Ukrainian drone attacks over its Belgorod and Kursk regions.
Russian shelling killed at least two people in a village in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and injured two others in the southern Kherson region, according to local authorities.
Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev said he visited troops at a firing range near the front line in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region on the orders of President Vladimir Putin. Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of the Kremlin’s Security Council, said troops showed “excellent combat qualities of will, firmness and a general attitude to victory”.
Diplomacy and politics
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said sanctions on Russia were not sufficient to halt its “aggression” and promised new Ukrainian action against the “terrorist state”.
Anthony Rota, the speaker of Canada’s Parliament resigned, days after he honoured a man who fought in a Nazi unit during World War II as Zelenskyy visited the House of Commons.
Alexey Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, lost his appeal against a 19-year prison term for a raft of charges including alleged “extremist activities” that were added to his existing sentence last month. Proceedings were closed to the media.
Five Bulgarians living in the United Kingdom charged with spying for Russia appeared in court via videolink for an initial hearing. The three men and two women were arrested in February and are accused of “conspiring to collect information intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy”, namely Russia, between August 2020 and February this year. They spoke only to confirm their names.
Weapons
Washington imposed new sanctions on five Russian and 11 Chinese companies for their role in supplying drone technology components for use in the war.
Estonia joined Germany in a joint procurement programme for ammunition for Ukraine increasing production capacity. Ammunition “is and will remain a crucial factor for Ukraine’s resilience”, said German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius.
Zelenskyy said more than 160 companies from 26 countries in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia would attend the country’s first defence industries forum later this year.
Ukraine’s military has said it is “clarifying” information received about the alleged assassination of Russian commander Viktor Sokolov, after Moscow released a video that appears to show him alive and well.
Kyiv claimed on Monday it killed Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, in an attack on the fleet’s headquarters in occupied Crimea last Friday.
But the Russian Ministry of Defense published a video on Tuesday that appears to show Sokolov participating in a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other Russian military leaders.
In the footage, a man resembling Sokolov appears to join the meeting via video conference. The nametape on his uniform reads Sokolov V. N. and his screen shows the Cyrillic letters “ЧФ,” the abbreviation for the Black Sea Fleet. CNN cannot confirm this is Sokolov, when the meeting took place or where his video appearance was filmed.
“Since the Russians were urgently forced to publish a response with Sokolov allegedly alive, our units are clarifying the information,” Ukraine Special Operations Forces said on Telegram Tuesday.
“Available sources claim that the Black Sea Fleet Commander is among the dead. Many have not yet been identified due to the fragmentation of body fragments,” the statement added.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier on Tuesday refused to comment on the Ukrainian claim that Sokolov had been killed.
The Ukrainian Special Operations Forces had earlier said Friday’s attack – the latest in a string of bold strikes on the occupied peninsula of Crimea – killed 34 people, including Sokolov.
Ukrainian Defense Intelligence spokesperson Andrii Yusov said Russia was using Crimea as a “logistics hub” and that “the ultimate goal, of course, is the de-occupation of Ukrainian Crimea.”
Ukraine has increasingly been hitting strategic Russian targets in Crimea, the Black Sea region of southern Ukraine that has been occupied by Moscow since 2014.
Before Friday’s attack, Ukrainians had already carried out a series of strikes on Crimea. They hit a Russian military airfield at Saky, degraded Russian air defenses on the northwest coast, and carried out a missile attack on the main dry-dock and ship-repair facility in Sevastopol, crippling an attack submarine and a landing ship.
Russia appointed Sokolov as its new commander for its Crimea-based Black Sea fleet in August 2022, according to reports from state media outlet TASS at the time.
Sokolov had been serving as the Naval Academy chief since 2020. He served as the Northern Fleet deputy commander from 2013 until 2020. The change of command came amid heavy losses and a string of explosions at Russian military facilities in Crimea.
The Houthis have not yet acknowledged carrying out drone attack, while the Saudi Arabian-led coalition said it reserves right to respond.
Bahrain’s military command has accused Yemen’s Houthi fighters of killing two Bahraini soldiers in a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s southern border with Yemen.
A number of Bahraini soldiers were also wounded in the attack, Bahrain’s military said in a statement, which was carried by the official Bahrain News Agency on Monday. The exact number of soldiers wounded was not released.
“This terrorist attack was carried out by the Houthis, who sent aircraft targeting the position of the Bahraini guards on the southern border of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia despite the halt of military operations between the warring sides in Yemen,” the Bahraini military statement said.
The island nation of Bahrain is a close ally of Saudi Arabia, which has been at war with Iran-aligned Houthi fighters in Yemen for several years.
The Houthis did not immediately acknowledge carrying out the attack. There was also no mention of an attack on the media and social media operations run by the Houthis, whose negotiators earlier this month held talks with Saudi Arabian officials on a potential agreement paving the way to an end to the conflict in Yemen.
It was unclear if the drone attack and killing of the Bahraini soldiers would derail the peace talks.
The Saudi Arabian-led coalition warned Houthi fighters that “such repeated hostile and provocative actions are not consistent with the positive efforts being made… to end the crisis and reach a comprehensive political solution”.
The coalition said it “reserves the right to respond at the appropriate time and place”.
Nabeel Khoury, a former chief of the United States mission to Yemen, told Al Jazeera that the attack appeared to be the result of “normal tensions” on a front line.
“I would think, unless there is somebody trying to provoke something, that it is an incident which will pass and not have too many consequences,” Khoury said.
Yemen’s internationally-recognised government condemned the drone attack on Monday.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Bin Mubarak said he spoke by phone with Bahrain’s chief diplomat, Abdullatif al-Zayani, offering his condolences and solidarity with Bahrain.
The Houthis have been fighting against a Saudi Arabian-led military alliance since 2015 in a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and left 80 percent of Yemen’s population dependent on humanitarian aid.
Yemen’s war began in 2014, when the Houthis swept down from their northern stronghold and seized the capital, Sanaa, along with much of the country’s north. In response, a Saudi Arabian-led coalition intervened in 2015 to try to restore the internationally-recognised government to power.
The fighting soon devolved into a stalemated proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, causing widespread hunger and misery in Yemen, which even before the conflict had been the Arab world’s poorest country.
Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations earlier this year in a deal brokered by China, further raising hopes for an end to Yemen’s conflict. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia welcomed a Houthi delegation for peace talks, saying the negotiations had “positive results”.
A UN-brokered ceasefire had already largely halted the violence and Yemen has seen only sporadic clashes since the truce expired nearly a year ago. But diplomats have warned that the situation remains volatile.
3M has agreed to pay almost $10 million to settle apparent violations of Iranian sanctions, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control said last week.
The agency said 3M had 54 apparent violations of OFAC sanctions on Iran. It said between 2016 and 2018, a 3M subsidiary in Switzerland allegedly knowingly sold reflective license plate sheeting through a German reseller to Bonyad Taavon Naja, an entity which is under Iranian law enforcement control.
It’s the latest of a stream of high-publicity and high-dollar settlementsthat 3M — which makes Post-It notes, Scotch Tape, N95 masks and other industrial products — has made this year.
3M has not replied to a request for comment regarding last week’s settlement announcement.
One US person employed by 3M Gulf, a subsidiary in Dubai, was “closely involved” in the sale, OFAC said.
The alleged sales occurred after an outside due diligence report, which flagged connections to Iran’s Law Enforcement Forces.
OFAC notes Iranian law enforcement stands accused of human rights violations both in Iran and Syria.
The Switzerland subsidiary, known as 3M East, sent 43 shipments to the German reseller even though it knew the products would be resold to the Iranian entity, according to the OFAC.
OFAC said senior managers at 3M Gulf “willfully violated” sanctions laws and that other employees were “reckless in their handling” of the sales.
“These employees had reason to know that these sales would violate U.S. sanctions, but ignored ample evidence that would have alerted them to this fact,” OFAC wrote.
3M voluntarily self-disclosed the apparent violations after discovering the sale hadn’t been authorized, according to OFAC. It said it fired or reprimanded “culpable” employees involved, hired new trade compliance counsel, revamped sanctions trainings and stopped doing business with the German reseller.
3M has faced thousands of lawsuits through the last two decades over its manufacturing of products containing polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which have been found in hundreds of household products.
3M said thatthe multi-billion-dollar settlementover PFASis not an admission of liability.
Rumors of Admiral Viktor Sokolov’s death may have been greatly exaggerated.
Ukraine on Monday claimed to have killed Sokolov — the commander of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet — in an attack on the port of Sevastopol last week. But on Tuesday, Sokolov appeared, apparently alive and well, in video footage of a Kremlin defense meeting, published by Russian state-owned newswire RIA Novosti.
In an initial statement after last Friday’s attack, the Russian defense ministry said it had shot down five incoming missiles and only one serviceman was killed, though the fleet’s headquarters were damaged.
But reports about Sokolov’s death circulated online and Ukraine jumped Monday at the chance to announce his killing and say that it had inflicted huge casualties on the Russians in occupied Crimea. POLITICO could not independently verify the Ukrainian claims.
LONDON — It was the gleaming smiles and mutual backslapping of two 40-something banker bros which signalled a new era of U.K.-EU relations.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron looked like natural bedfellows as they riffed off one another at a friendly Paris press conference in March, announcing a sizeable £478 million package to deter migrant crossings through the English Channel.
The contrast with the petty name-calling of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss eras was clear to see.
Sunak’s warm and productive summit with Europe’s most high-profile leader confirmed a more collaborative relationship with the EU and its national capitals after the turmoil of the Brexit era. Less than two weeks earlier, the British PM’s landmark Windsor Framework agreement with Brussels had finally resolved post-Brexit trading issues in Northern Ireland.
“My hope is that [theagreement] opens up other areas of constructive engagement and dialogue and cooperation with the EU,” Sunak told POLITICO en route to the Paris summit.
Six months on, his words have been borne out.
In addition to the Windsor Framework and English Channel agreements, Britain has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Brussels on regulatory cooperation in financial services, and this month rejoined the EU’s massive €96 billion Horizon and Copernicus science research programs — a major result for the U.K.’s research and university sectors after two years of uncertainty.
Next on the agenda is a cooperation deal between the British government and the EU’s border protection agency Frontex — another move that brings Britain closer to the EU in a small but meaningful way.
The deal, confirmed by the Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Tuesday, is expected to be similar to other deals Frontex has with non-EU countries, like Albania, which allow the sharing of data on migration flows.
“We have seen concrete steps created by a new climate of good faith,” said a London-based European diplomat, granted anonymity — like others in this article — to speak candidly about diplomatic relations.
“We missed that before, and so that’s the Sunak effect. I wouldn’t say he’s done an amazing job, but he’s changed the state of mind — and therefore he has changed everything.”
A new hope
In addition to a renewed focus on relations with fellow leaders, Sunak has impressed EU diplomats with his willingness to face down the vocal Brexiteer wing of his own party, which has long seemed — to European eyes — to hold outsized influence over successive Tory prime ministers.
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaimed a “new chapter” in post-Brexit relations with the European Union after securing a breakthrough deal to regulate trade in Northern Ireland | Pool photo by Dan Kitwood/AFP via Getty Images
Earlier this year Sunak enraged Tory right-wingers by abandoning a controversial pledge to scrap or rewrite thousands of EU-era regulatory laws which remain on the British statute book by the end of this year, to the delight of EU capitals.
“The improving relationship is built on the fact there’s now a willingness to find solutions and engage in a way that wasn’t there in the previous administrations,” a second London-based European diplomat said.
Negotiations continue between Sunak’s government and Brussels over other outstanding areas of dispute — chief among them tough new tariffs due to be imposed in January on electric vehicles (EVs) being shipped in and out of the U.K. which do not conform to strict sourcing requirements for electric batteries.
On Wednesday the U.K.-EU Trade Specialised Committee will meet to discuss the issue, with British ministers increasingly hopeful Brussels will agree to scrap the end-of-year deadline after heavy lobbying from German automakers and its own European Commissioner for trade, Valdis Dombrovskis.
Catherine Barnard, a European law professor at Cambridge University, said overall Sunak had overseen a “much more positive relationship” with Europe, albeit one conducted on a “pay-as-you-go basis.”
“This is looking much more positive and it’s putting some meaning on dealing with our European neighbors as friends, rather than as foes,” she said.
“But equally, we’re not talking about a comprehensive and thorough renegotiation — quite the contrary.”
No. 10 Downing Street agrees the shift is less profound than some media observers — or grumbling Tory MPs — would like to think.
A No. 10 aide said Sunak sees his diplomatic efforts as “normal government,” noting that “we’ve just forgotten what it looks like” after the turmoil of the post-Brexit era.
“I know it’s following Brexit and all that nonsense we’ve seen over the last few years, and it’s nice to see any small win or small argument to bridge that divide, but this is just normal government relations,” the aide said.
But his opponent, U.K. Labour leader Keir Starmer, has made clear he too wants closer cooperation with Europe should he seize power.
A senior moderate Tory MP said that despite the attacks on Starmer, Sunak is “not overly ideological when it comes to the EU” | Kiran Ridley/Getty Images
Starmer said this month a future Labour government would use the upcoming review of the post-Brexit trade deal, expected in 2025 or 2026, as a chance to reduce border checks through the signing of a veterinary agreement and to increase U.K.-EU mobility for some sectors of the economy.
And he told a conference in Montreal last weekend that that “we don’t want to diverge from the EU” in areas such as working conditions or environmental standards.
These comments were seized upon by Tory ministers as evidence that Starmer would bring the U.K. even further into the EU’s orbit than he has publicly admitted — something the Labour leader denies. Tory campaigners hope to use such comments in campaign attacks painting Starmer as an anti-Brexit europhile.
But some observers suggest such political attacks are ironic, given Sunak’s own direction of travel. Barnard, quoted above, says that “what Keir Starmer was saying in Canada last week is pretty much a description of where we’re at at the moment.”
A senior moderate Tory MP said that despite the attacks on Starmer, Sunak is “not overly ideological when it comes to the EU.”
“There’s always been a belief in Brussels that we would inevitably come crawling back to them, and we’re seeing that a bit now,” they said.
Nevertheless, it is unclear how much closer Britain and the EU can get without a fundamental renegotiation of the terms of Brexit — something all sides insist is off the table.
One area for agreement is the need for enhanced security and defence links, with next year’s European Political Community Summit in Britain providing a potential opportunity for further announcements.
Some in Westminster speculate that this could come in the form of Britain joining individual projects of the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation — a body which coordinates the bloc’s security and defence policy. The European Council invited Britain to join its “military mobility project” alongside Canada, Norway and the U.S. in November 2022.
Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank , said he’s “not convinced” of the potential benefits for Britain, considering the U.K.’s existing position in NATO and other organizations.
He believes the British government will run out of road in finding mutually beneficial areas of cooperation with Brussels.
“The EU is relatively happy with the status quo,” Menon said. “It’s only in the U.K. where people say we need to move closer … There are so many bigger fish to fry for the EU.”
Ukraine said Saturday its bold strike on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in the Crimean city of Sevastopol had left dozens dead and wounded “including senior leadership.”
The attack on Friday is perhaps the most dramatic example yet of the confidence with which Ukraine is going after Russian facilities in occupied Crimea – and shows the vulnerability of critically important infrastructure on the peninsula.
In a statement on Telegram, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said a special op dubbed “Crab Trap” was timed to strike while senior members of Russia’s Navy were meeting, and that the attack left dozens of dead and wounded “including the senior leadership of the fleet.” No names have been given and CNN has not independently verified the claim.
Sevastopol is the largest city in Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Ukraine has not given up hope of reclaiming it.
“The daring and painstaking work of the Special Operations Forces enabled them to hit the Black Sea Fleet headquarters ‘on time and with precision’ while the Russian Navy’s senior staff was meeting in the temporarily occupied city of Sevastopol,” it said in the statement.
“The data was transmitted to the Air Force for strike. The details of the attack will be revealed once it is possible. The result is dozens of dead and wounded occupiers, including the senior leadership of the fleet,” the statement read.
It added, “We are moving further!”
Attacks have strategic and symbolic importance
No further details or any evidence as to specific casualties among Russia’s Black Sea Fleet have so far been provided by Ukraine.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense has to date only said that a Russian soldier was missing after Friday’s missile attack, which local authorities said left the naval HQ damaged scattered debris hundreds of meters away.
The incident was the latest in a string of attacks targeting Russian facilities in Crimea.
The Ukrainians have hit a Russian military airfield at Saky, degraded Russian air defenses on the north-west coast, and carried out a missile attack on the main dry-dock and ship-repair facility in Sevastopol, crippling an attack submarine and a landing ship.
The attack on Saky caused unspecified but “serious damage” at the airfield, according to sources in Ukraine’s Security Services (SBU).
In the wake of Friday’s attack, Ukraine’s Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksii Danilov warned that the Russian Black Sea Fleet could be “sliced up like a salami” in potential future strikes.
There are plenty of reasons for Ukraine to target Crimea. It’s politically a sign that despite the slow progress on the front lines in its counteroffensive, Ukraine can still inflict serious damage on the Russian military. Targets such as the Crimea bridge have considerable symbolic value as well as strategic purpose.
It’s also part of a broader effort – in Crimea, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk – to hit Russian logistics, fuel, maintenance and command centers, in order to disrupt their ability to supply the front lines.
Poland’s prime minister has told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to never “insult” Poles again, returning to harsh rhetoric towards Kyiv after the Polish president had sought to defuse a simmering dispute between the two countries over the issue of Ukrainian grain imports.
Zelenskyy angered his neighbours in Warsaw – a key military ally against Russia – when he told the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week that Kyiv was working to preserve land routes for its grain exports amid a Russian blockade of the Black Sea, but that “political theatre” around grain imports was helping Moscow’s cause.
“I … want to tell President Zelenskyy never to insult Poles again, as he did recently during his speech at the UN,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told an election rally on Friday, according to the State-run news agency PAP.
Earlier on Friday, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said the dispute between Poland and Ukraine over grain imports would not significantly affect good bilateral relations, in an apparent move to ease tensions.
“I have no doubt that the dispute over the supply of grain from Ukraine to the Polish market is an absolute fragment of the entire Polish-Ukrainian relations,” Duda told a business conference. “I don’t believe that it can have a significant impact on them, so we need to solve this matter between us.”
Duda’s comment followed after Prime Minister Morawiecki was reported as saying that Poland would no longer send weapons to Ukraine amid the grain dispute.
“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” Morawiecki said on Wednesday, according to a local media report.
Poland is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections on October 15, and Morawiecki’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party has come in for criticism from the far right for what it says is the government’s subservient attitude to Kyiv.
Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau said in an article by Politico that Poland wanted to see “a strong Ukrainian state emerge from this war with a vibrant economy”, and that Warsaw “will continue to back Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO and the EU”.
However, speaking to reporters in New York, Rau said that while Poland had not changed its policy towards Ukraine, there had been a “radical change in Polish public opinion’s perception” of the countries’ relationship.
Asked by the PAP news agency what it would take to improve this perception, Rau said repairing the atmosphere would require a “titanic” diplomatic effort.
Slovakia, Poland and Hungary imposed national restrictions on Ukrainian grain imports after the EU executive decided not to extend its ban on imports into those countries as well as fellow EU members Bulgaria and Romania.
The countries have argued that cheap Ukrainian agricultural goods – meant mainly to transit further west and to ports – get sold locally, harming their own farmers.
Speaking in Canada on Friday, Zelenskyy did not mention the tension with Poland but said that when Ukraine lacked support, Russia was strengthened.
“You help either Ukraine or Russia. There will be no mediators in this war. By weakening assistance to Ukraine, you will strengthen Russia,” Zelenskyy told reporters after a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“And a powerful Russia and what to expect from it… I think history in books and witnesses has long since answered this question. If someone wants to take a risk, fine, weaken assistance to Ukrainians,” he said, according to a statement posted on the Ukrainian president’s website.
“To be frank and honest, freedom, democracy and human rights must be fought for,” he added.
The Kremlin said on Friday that it was watching the situation between Kyiv and Warsaw closely, adding that tensions would inevitably grow between Kyiv and its European allies as the dispute over grain escalates.
“We predict that these frictions between Warsaw and Kyiv will increase. Friction between Kyiv and other European capitals will also grow over time. This is inevitable,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“We are, of course, watching this closely,” Peskov said, calling Kyiv and Warsaw “the main” centres of Russophobia.
WASHINGTON — With House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest funding plan in ruins and lawmakers leaving town for the weekend, there’s no endgame in sight as hard-right Republicans push closer to a federal government shutdown.
The White House will tell federal agencies on Friday to prepare for a shutdown, according to an official with the Office of Management and Budget who insisted on anonymity to discuss the upcoming instructions.
That’s a standard seven days out from a federal disruption.
“ ‘This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down.’ ”
— Kevin McCarthy on his intraparty Republican critics
In a crushing defeat for McCarthy on Thursday, a handful of Republican hardliners blocked a typically popular defense bill from advancing — the second time this week it was set back, an unheard-of loss for a House speaker.
Even a stopgap bill to keep government funding past the Sept. 30 deadline, called a continuing resolution, or CR, is a nonstarter for some on the right flank who have essentially seized control of the House.
“This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down,” McCarthy said after Thursday’s vote, acknowledging he was frustrated. “It doesn’t work.”
The open revolt was further evidence that McCarthy’s strategy of repeatedly giving in to the conservatives — in evidence as early as January when McCarthy is believed to have made undisclosed concessions to secure holdout GOP votes for his long-desired speakership — is seemingly only emboldening them, allowing them to run roughshod over their own House majority. Their far-right bills have almost no chances in the Senate.
Trump urged the hardliners to hold the line against the higher funding levels McCarthy had agreed to with President Joe Biden earlier this year and to end the federal criminal indictments against him.
“This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots,” Trump wrote on social media.
“They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!” the former president wrote.
The White House and Democrats, along with some Republicans, warn that a shutdown would be devastating for people who rely on their government for everyday services and would undermine America’s standing in the world.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, observed Friday on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” that investigations into, and prosecutions of, Trump are funded by continuing, indefinite appropriations and thus would be unaffected by a federal government shutdown.
“We need the extreme MAGA Republicans to get their act together,” said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
“End the civil war,” Jeffries urged the Republicans. “Get your act together.”
But one of Trump’s top allies, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, who is leading the hard-right flank in the current skirmish, said the House Republicans now have almost no choices left but to spend the time it takes to pass each of the 12 spending bills needed to fund the government — typically a laborious process — even if it means going into a shutdown.
Or they can join with Democrats to pass a CR, putting McCarthy at risk.
What Gaetz said he, and several others, would not do is vote for a continuing resolution that fails to slash spending. “I’m giving a eulogy for the CR right now,” Gaetz told reporters after a late afternoon meeting Thursday at the Capitol.
“I represent Florida’s First Congressional District, where, during the shutdown, tens of thousands of people will go without a paycheck, and so I know the impact of a shutdown,” Gaetz said. “So it may get worse before it gets better, and I have little to offer but blood, sweat, toil and tears, but that may be what it takes.”
A government closure is increasingly likely as time runs out for Congress to act.
McCarthy’s bid to move ahead with a traditionally popular defense funding bill as a first step toward keeping the government running was shattered, on a vote of 216-212. Five Republicans refused to vote with the increasingly endangered speaker. A sixth Republican voted no on procedural grounds so the bill could be reconsidered.
Moving forward with the defense bill was supposed to be a way for McCarthy to build goodwill among the GOP House majority as he tries to pass a temporary measure just to keep government running for another month. It, too, had catered to other hard-right priorities, such as slashing spending by 8% from many services and earmarking further funds for security at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Many on the right flank opposed the deal McCarthy struck with Biden this year over the spending levels and are trying to dismantle it now. They want to see progress on the individual appropriations bills that would fund the various federal departments at the lower levels these lawmakers are demanding.
The morning test vote on Thursday shattered a McCarthy strategy that had emerged just the night before. Republicans had appeared on track, in a tight roll call, to advancing the measure. Then the Democrats who had not yet voted began rushing into the chamber.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fellow Democrats yelled out to hold open the vote. She was a “no.” A few others came in behind her and tipped the tally toward defeat.
The Democrats oppose the military bill on many fronts, including Republican provisions that would gut diversity programs at the Pentagon.
As passage appeared doomed, attention turned to the five Republican holdouts to switch their votes.
GOP leaders spent more than an hour on the floor trying to recruit one of them, Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, to vote “yes.”
“Every time there’s the slightest relief of the pressure, the movement goes away from completing the work,” Bishop said.
When asked what it would take to gain his vote, Bishop said, “I think a schedule of appropriations bills over Kevin McCarthy signature would be meaningful to you, to me.”
Others were dug in, including some who had supported advancing the defense bill just two days ago when it first failed.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and a clamorous opponent of more aid for Ukraine in its defense against the unprovoked Russian invasion, said she voted against the defense bill this time because her party’s leadership refused to separate out war money.
McCarthy had pledged to keep House lawmakers in session this weekend for as long as it took to finish their work. But they were sent home and told they could be called back on ample notice.
Many Republicans were starting to speak up more forcefully against their hard-right colleagues.
Mike Lawler, who represents a swing district in New York carried handily by Joe Biden in 2020, said he would not “be party to a shutdown.”
“There needs to be a realization that you’re not going to get everything you want,” he said. “Just throwing a temper tantrum and stomping your feet — frankly, not only is it wrong — it’s just pathetic.”
Lawler had said in an interview with CNN earlier in the week that barreling toward a shutdown was not Republican conservatism but “stupidity.”
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said Thursday that an ongoing GOP blockade of hundreds of President Joe Biden’s military nominees may actually be a good thing for America since Biden has been trying to bring more diversity into the nation’s military.
In an interview with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt, Scott, who is running for president, was asked if he supports Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in blocking more than 300 military nominations in protest of the Pentagon’s policy on providing abortion-related travel. Tuberville has been leaning on Senate procedural rules since February to derail their confirmations.
Scott replied that it may actually be a good thing that Tuberville is singlehandedly preventing hundreds of U.S. military posts from being filled.
“Under President Biden, holding up promotions is not necessarily a bad thing,” said the South Carolina Republican.
“What we’ve seen in the top brass in today’s military is too much focus on … [diversity, equity and inclusion] and gender issues, vaccine mandates, as opposed to war fighting, lethality, and making sure that the resources and the equipment and the training that we need,” he said. ”We may have been a little bit better off slowing down the promotions and slowing down a greater social experimentation within the ranks of our military.”
Scott used that vague, coded language again in the interview, saying, “We need to purge the social experimentation out of the military.” Presumably, what he is actually saying is that military leaders shouldn’t allow transgender people to serve openly in the military and to receive medically necessary gender-affirming care.
A Scott campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the Republican senator thinks it would be good for the U.S. military at all to leave hundreds of military posts unfilled and why Biden’s efforts to bring more diversity and equity into the U.S. military is a reason to do so.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Scott, who has been out on the presidential campaign trail for months and yet is polling in the low single-digits, missed all of this week’s Senate votes to confirm a handful of top military leaders that Tuberville didn’t object to.
BRUSSELS — Russian President Vladimir Putin has made little secret of his plan to keep up the pressure on Ukraine until Western resolve breaks. More than 500 days into his war of aggression, he now has reason to believe things are working out the way he hoped, even if events are not playing out how he might have imagined.
Governments in Poland, Estonia, Slovakia and others in Central and Eastern Europe have been among Kyiv’s staunchest allies since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Beyond sending weapons and welcoming millions of Ukrainian refugees, they have been Ukraine’s loudest advocates in the West, pushing for a tough line against Moscow in the face of reluctance from countries like France and Germany.
But as the leaders of some of these ride-or-die allies face reelection battles or other domestic challenges, and governments get nervous about the impact of Ukraine one day joining the European Union, that support is starting to waver.
The most striking example is Poland, whose Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced on Wednesday that he would stop delivering new weapons to Ukraine. The statement marked a stunning escalation in a dispute between Kyiv and its closest EU neighbor over grain shipments Warsaw claims are undercutting production from Polish farmers ahead of a parliamentary election on October 15.
“Ukraine realizes that in the last months, they’re not bordering Poland, they’re bordering Polish elections,” said Ivan Krastev, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. So for now, “the votes of a hundred thousand Polish farmers are more important for the government than what is going to be the cost for Ukraine. And we’re going to see this happening in many places,” he added.
Morawiecki is facing a tough challenge from Donald Tusk, a former prime minister who has also served as president of the European Council. As part of his electoral strategy, the prime minister is courting supporters of the far-right Confederation Party, which opposes aid for Ukraine.
“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” Morawiecki said in an appearance on Polish television channel Polsat.
While it’s tempting to write off the tensions as electoral fireworks, there are reasons to believe they could persist beyond the campaign. As a Western diplomat who asked not to be named pointed out, the grain dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv reveals deeper misgivings about Ukraine joining the EU. “For 18 months, Poland has badgered any member state that would utter the slightest hesitation towards Ukraine,” the diplomat said. “Now they’re showing their true colors.”
The problem for Kyiv is that it’s not just Poland where support seems to be slipping. Since the start of the war, the Baltic states have led the pro-Ukraine charge in Brussels and Washington, perhaps nobody as loudly or effectively as Estonia’s liberal prime minister, Kaja Kallas.
As the daughter of a former prime minister and European commissioner, Kallas was widely seen as the emblem of a newly emboldened Eastern Europe that would ride the Ukraine crisis to positions of greater power in Brussels. But Kallas’ credibility took a hit over a scandal involving her husband, who was revealed to own a stake in a company that kept doing business in Russia after the February 2022 invasion, even as his wife was advocating for ending all trade with Moscow.
Asked about Kallas’ troubles, Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said that no amount of political upheaval would change the country’s course: “We constantly have elections, and we constantly have domestic issues, but it doesn’t change our policy,” Tsahkna said. “One thing Estonia has had in all these 32 years is the same continuous foreign policy.”
That said, Kallas has been a lot less vocal since the scandal broke in late August, depriving Kyiv of one of its strongest advocates in Western capitals.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki announced on Wednesday that he would stop delivering new weapons to Ukraine | Omar Marques/Getty Images
Then there’s Slovakia. The Central European country has been among Europe’s biggest backers of Ukraine, but elections on September 30 could turn it into a skeptic overnight.
“If you have a society where only 40 percent support arms delivery to Ukraine and your government offers support almost at the level of the Baltics, that creates a backlash,” said Milan Nič, a fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Robert Fico, the country’s populist former prime minister, is campaigning on a pro-Russian, anti-American platform that opposes sanctions against Russian individuals and further arms deliveries to Kyiv. He’s on course to win the election, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
A victory for Fico would give Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — one of Kyiv’s biggest European skeptics — an ally on the EU stage. If his party gets enough support to be part of the government, Fico told the Associated Press earlier this month, “we won’t send any arms or ammunition to Ukraine anymore.”
To be sure, Ukraine still has plenty of strong backers in Europe. Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Sweden, Finland and others remain strongly committed, and French President Emmanuel Macron has recently swung strongly behind Kyiv. Some analysts also downplay the importance of Poland and Slovakia’s role at the moment, pointing out that there aren’t many weapons left to deliver in the countries’ armories.
Kyiv, for now, seems relaxed. Speaking at a press conference after an event in Brussels last Friday, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Olha Stefanishyna downplayed the static between Kyiv and some of its erstwhile friends: “We have a strong commitment and a political confirmation that none of the political processes will affect the ongoing support,” she said.
It’s hard to imagine, however, that somewhere Putin isn’t rubbing his hands, and watching.
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.”
A Ukrainian missile attack on the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet headquarters on Friday killed and injured “dozens” of Russian troops, including a number of senior officials, Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday.
The claim, which couldn’t be verified, came as another rocket attack was launched on the Crimean city of Sevastopol, where the fleet is based, on Saturday. The Russia-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram that debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier during the latest assault.
Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on Telegram that more details of Friday’s missile attack would be communicated “when possible.”
Ukraine’s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told U.S. broadcaster Voice of America that at least nine people were killed and another 16 were injured in Friday’s attack.
According to Budanov, Russian Colonel-General Alexander Romanchuk was in “very serious condition,” while chief of staff Lieutenant General Oleg Tsekov was unconscious, Voice of America reported. Budanov didn’t, however, confirm reports that the Black Sea Admiral Viktor Sokolov had been killed in the attack, the broadcaster said. The claims could not be verified.
Crimea, which extends into the Black Sea, was occupied illegally by Russia in 2014.
The Sevastopol governor confirmed that the fleet’s headquarters had been attacked, according to a message on Telegram Friday.
Russia’s defense ministry initially said one servicemember was killed in the assault on Friday but then changed his status to missing, the Associated Press reported.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday that French troops would be withdrawn from Niger in the next couple of months, in the wake of a coup d’état in the Western African country this summer.
The military withdrawal from Niger comes after French troops were ousted from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, amid growing anti-French sentiment across the continent and military failures in containing jihadist terrorism in the Sahel region.
Macron also said France would imminently withdraw its ambassador, who had been living under effective house arrest in the French embassy in the capital Niamey, according to French authorities.
“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours, our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron said during an interview with French TV channels.
Macron also said the military cooperation between France and Niger was “over” and that French troops would return before the end of the year. “In the weeks and months to come, we will consult with the putschists, because we want this to be done peacefully,” he added.
The military junta, which came to power in July, had set France an ultimatum to withdraw its troops that were involved in anti-terrorist operations in North Africa. France at the time pledged not to withdraw troops unless requested by the deposed Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum.
1,500 French troops are stationed in several bases across Niger.
In the weeks after the coup, France also said it would consider supporting a possible military intervention launched by the African regional body ECOWAS against the putschists in Niamey. With the decision to withdraw, that prospect appears more and more unlikely.
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.”
A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
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—
The military losing a fighter jet near Charleston, South Carolina, and asking the public to help find it is a plotline in which “Top Gun” (fighter jets) meets “The Hunt for Red October” (country can’t find its weapons system).
But the larger story of the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter is like tax dollars meet “The Blob” (unstoppable force consumes everything in its path).
“How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” wondered Rep. Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, in a post on social media that speaks for everyone who read the headline about the state-of-the-art military plane that went missing Sunday after its pilot ejected and parachuted to safety.
“How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?” she continued.
A more general and important question could be asked of the F-35 program writ large: How in the heck can you spend so much money on a plane that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to?
The exact amount of money for a single aircraft like the one that went missing is somewhere around $100 million.
The entire F-35 program is on track to cost $1.7 trillion over the lifetime of the plane. Trillion. With a “t.”
CNN’s Oren Liebermann reported the facts of what we know about the missing aircraft on CNN on Monday:
The pilot ejected safely and was taken to a hospital.
Joint Base Charleston posted a social media plea for information from anyone who might have seen the jet or its remains.
The search is focused northwest of Charleston near Lakes Marion and Moultrie.
But we’re left with so many questions, he told CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
“Was the transponder working? If not, why wasn’t it working? Why, maybe, had it been switched off? What was the mission it was on? All of this is either under investigation or a question we haven’t gotten an answer to yet.”
When I asked Liebermann by email how to generally explain the F-35 program, he noted it is the most expensive weapons program in US history.
For a country that spends a good portion of its income on its military and is known to have the most advanced fighting force on Earth, that’s saying something.
The F-35 is what’s known as a “stealth” fighter, which means it is supposed to be able to avoid detection by enemies. Maybe a little too stealth.
But if you watch the glossy Lockheed Martin video at F35.com, the jet is also supposed to be able to communicate with rest of the military, “sharing its operational picture with the ground, sea and air assets.” The video shows the jet beaming information to the ground and satellites.
The New York Times’ editorial board used the word “boondoggle” to describe the F-35 program in 2021. But it added that the US is essentially stuck with the program.
Many US allies – Canada, Germany, Japan and others – also buy F-35s from Lockheed.
The F-35, as developed by Lockheed at the request of the US military, was supposed to be the jack-of-all-jets, with versions to do different jobs for the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines.
The version that went missing over South Carolina – the F-35B – is used by the US Marine Corps and meant to be able to “land vertically like a helicopter and take-off in very short distances,” according to a fact sheet from Lockheed. Another F-35B crashed in 2018, also in South Carolina.
The Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has written extensively on the F-35 and its cost overruns. I asked Dan Grazier, an F-35 expert for POGO, what has gone wrong.
It all boils down to “failure at the conceptual level,” he told me in an email.
“The architects of the program attempted to build a single aircraft to meet multiple mission requirements for not just three separate services but also those of multiple countries,” Grazier said, noting the difference between a small and nimble fighter jet and a long-range jet.
“When someone attempts to design a single aircraft to perform all of these roles, they have to make numerous design tradeoffs that generally results in an aircraft that can sort of do it all, but doesn’t do anything particularly well.”
The jet has never reached its full operational capability and already needs updates and tweaks, including a new engine. “Every F-35 built until now is nothing more than a very expensive prototype,” Grazier told me.
“All of them will have to go through an expensive retrograde process in the future when the design is complete to bring them up to something approaching full combat standards.”
I asked a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin if the company is confident the jets perform as they should considering the taxpayer investment.
They provided this statement:
The global F-35 fleet has surpassed more than 721,000 cumulative flight hours and spans 17 nations and three U.S. military services. Since F-35s began flying 17 years ago, there has been one pilot fatality and less than 10 confirmed destroyed aircraft. More than 965 F-35s have been delivered and more than 430,000 sorties completed.
Diana Maurer is director of defense capabilities and management at the Government Accountability Office, the government’s own watchdog that earlier this year described the F-35 program as “more than a decade behind schedule and $183 billion over original cost estimates.”
She said pilots frequently report being impressed by the plane’s capabilities. But they also report not being able to fly it often enough.
Problems getting spare parts, issues with repairs and a reliance on contractors all contribute to the F-35 having a substandard readiness and frequent groundings of the fleet.
“There’s a variety of reasons why they can’t get these aircraft up in the air as often as they would like,” Maurer said. “And that’s really frustrating from a taxpayer perspective for something that already costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year; cost many, many multiple billions already; and will cost nearly $2 trillion over the life cycle of the program.”
Grazier said officials at the Pentagon have acknowledged problems with the F-35 that can be applied to the design process in the future. But this is a program that evolved over successive presidencies and with a rotating cast of characters in charge both in Congress and at the Pentagon.
The system is supposed to have safeguards against extreme cost overruns, but when those warnings were triggered in previous decades, the F-35 program was allowed to barrel forward. And here we are.
KYIV — Ukraine on Tuesday pushed back against a New York Times investigation, which said evidence suggested that Kyiv accidentally bombed a local market in its own town of Kostiantynivka killing 15 people.
According to the New York Times‘ report published Monday, a combination of witnesses, findings in Kostyantynivka and open-source investigation of video footage and local anonymous Telegram channels indicated the September 6 attack was actually a tragic accident, caused by a Ukrainian BUK missile system firing toward Russian forces from the Ukrainian-controlled nearby town of Druzhkivka.
Ukrainian law enforcement, however, says the evidence they have about the strike points at another Russian war crime.
“The enemy hit this civilian object from the S-300 complex. This is evidenced, in particular, by the identified fragments of the rocket recovered at the scene of the tragedy,” Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) spokesman Artem Dehtiarenko told POLITICO.
“The investigators are also studying a number of other materials that indicate the involvement of the enemy in this shelling,” he added.
Ukrainian Army Strategic Communications Center said: “Currently, an official investigation is underway, until the completion of which it is worth refraining from speculation and conjecture. Because this is actively used by Russian propaganda.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, agreed.
“No doubt, the appearance of publications in foreign media with doubts about Russia’s involvement in the attack on Kostiantynivka entails the growth of conspiracy theories, and therefore requires examination and legal assessment by the investigative authorities,” Podolyak said.
He said Ukrainian society will receive answers about what exactly happened in Kostiantynivka — a front-line town in the Donetsk region — after Ukrainian investigators finish their job.
“We must not forget: It was Russia that launched the invasion of Ukraine and it is Russia that is responsible for bringing war to our country. Ukraine, on the other hand, conducts exclusively defense actions, defending itself and its territories,” Podolyak said.
In a statement, Nicole Taylor, managing director for external communications at the New York Times, said: “We stand by this report. Evidence analyzed by The New York Times and independent bomb-disposal experts suggests the strike on the market was caused by an errant Ukranian missile and appears to have been a tragic mishap. Ukrainian authorities said they are investigating the incident.”
Fierce firefights and heavy shelling echo once again around the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, an isolated region at the very edge of Europe that has seen several major wars since the fall of the Soviet Union.
On Tuesday, the South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan announced its armed forces launched “local anti-terrorist activities” in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is inside Azerbaijan’s borders but is controlled as a breakaway state by its ethnic Armenian population.
Now, with fighting raging and allegations of an impending “genocide” reaching fever pitch, all eyes are on the decades-old conflict that threatens to draw in some of the world’s leading military powers.
What is happening?
For weeks, Armenia and international observers have warned that Azerbaijan was massing its armed forces along the heavily fortified line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh, preparing to stage an offensive against local ethnic Armenian troops. Clips shared online showed Azerbaijani vehicles daubed with an upside-down ‘A’-symbol, reminiscent of the ‘Z’ sign painted onto Russian vehicles ahead of the invasion of Ukraine last year.
In the early hours of Tuesday, Karabakh Armenian officials reported a major offensive by Azerbaijan was underway, with air raid sirens sounding in Stepankert, the de facto capital. The region’s estimated 100,000 residents have been told by Azerbaijan to “evacuate” via “humanitarian corridors” leading to Armenia. However, Azerbaijani forces control all of the entry and exit points and many locals fear they will not be allowed to pass safely.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign policy advisor, Hikmet Hajiyev, insisted to POLITICO the “goal is to neutralize military infrastructure” and denied civilians were being targeted. However, unverified photographs posted online appear to show damaged apartment buildings, and the Karabakh Armenian human rights ombudsman, Gegham Stepanyan, reported several children have been injured in the attacks.
Concern is growing over the fate of the civilians effectively trapped in the crossfire, as well as the risk of yet another full-blown war in the former Soviet Union.
How did we get here?
During the Soviet era, Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region inside the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, home to both ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis, but the absence of internal borders made its status largely unimportant. That all changed when Moscow lost control of its peripheral republics, and Nagorno-Karabakh was formally left inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory.
Amid the collapse of the USSR from 1988 to 1994, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces fought a grueling series of battles over the region, with the Armenians taking control of swathes of land and forcing the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azerbaijanis, razing several cities to the ground. Since then, citing a 1991 referendum — boycotted by Azerbaijanis — the Karabakh-Armenians have unilaterally declared independence and maintained a de facto independent state.
For nearly three decades that situation remained stable, with the two sides locked in a stalemate that was maintained by a line of bunkers, landmines and anti-tank defenses, frequently given as an example of one of the world’s few “frozen conflicts.”
However, that all changed in 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a 44-day war to regain territory, conquering hundreds of square kilometers around all sides of Nagorno-Karabakh. That left the ethnic Armenian exclave connected to Armenia proper by a single road, the Lachin Corridor — supposedly under the protection of Russian peacekeepers as part of a Moscow-brokered ceasefire agreement.
What is the blockade?
With Russia’s ability to maintain the status quo rapidly dwindling in the face of its increasingly catastrophic war in Ukraine, Azerbaijan has moved to take control of all access to the region. In December, as part of a dispute supposedly over illegal gold mining, self-declared “eco-activists” — operating with the support of the country’s authoritarian government — staged a sit-in on the road, stopping civilian traffic and forcing the local population to rely on Russian peacekeepers and the Red Cross for supplies.
That situation has worsened in the past two months, with an Azerbaijani checkpoint newly erected on the Lachin Corridor refusing to allow the passage of any humanitarian aid, save for the occasional one-off delivery. In August, amid warnings of empty shelves, malnourishment and a worsening humanitarian crisis, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, published a report calling the situation “an ongoing genocide.”
Azerbaijan denies it is blockading Nagorno-Karabakh, with Hajiyev telling POLITICO the country was prepared to reopen the Lachin Corridor if the Karabakh-Armenians accepted transport routes from inside Azerbaijani-held territory. Aliyev has repeatedly called on Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh to stand down, local politicians to resign and those living there to accept being ruled as part of Azerbaijan.
Why have things escalated now?
Over the past few months, the U.S., EU and Russia have urged Azerbaijan to keep faith during diplomatic talks designed to end the conflict once and for all, rather than seeking a military solution to assert control over the entire region.
As part of the talks in Washington, Brussels and Moscow, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made a series of unprecedented concessions, going as far as recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory. However, his government maintains it cannot sign a peace deal that does not include internationally guaranteed rights and securities for the Karabakh-Armenians.
The situation has worsened in the past two months, with an Azerbaijani checkpoint newly erected on the Lachin Corridor refusing to allow the passage of any humanitarian aid | Tofik babayev/AFP via Getty Images
Aliyev has rejected any such arrangement outright, insisting there should be no foreign presence on Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory. He insists that as citizens of Azerbaijan, those living there will have the same rights as any other citizen — but has continued fierce anti-Armenian rhetoric including describing the separatists as “dogs,” while the government issued a postage stamp following the 2020 war featuring a worker in a hazmat suit “decontaminating” Nagorno-Karabakh.
Unwilling to accept the compromise, Azerbaijan has accused Armenia of stalling the peace process. According to former Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov, a military escalation is needed to force an agreement. “It can be a short-term clash, or it can be a war,” he added.
Facing growing domestic pressure amid dwindling supplies, former Karabakh-Armenian President Arayik Harutyunyan stood down and called elections, lambasted as a provocation by Azerbaijan and condemned by the EU, Ukraine and others.
Azerbaijan also alleged Armenian saboteurs were behind landmine blasts it says killed six military personnel in the region, while presenting no evidence to support the claim.
What’s Russia doing?
Armenia is formally an ally of Russia, and a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) military bloc. However, Russian peacekeepers deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh have proven entirely unwilling or unable to keep Azerbaijani advances in check, while Moscow declined to offer Pashinyan the support he demanded after strategic high ground inside Armenia’s borders were captured in an Azerbaijani offensive last September.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko previously said Azerbaijan has better relations with the CSTO than Armenia, despite not being a member, and described Aliyev as “our guy.”
Since then, Armenia — the most democratic country in the region — has sought to distance itself from the Kremlin, inviting in an EU civilian observer mission to the border. That strategy has picked up pace in recent days, with Pashinyan telling POLITICO in an interview that the country can no longer rely on Russia for its security. Instead, the South Caucasus nation has dispatched humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Pashinyan’s wife visited Kyiv to show her support, while hosting U.S. troops for exercises.
Moscow, which has a close economic and political relationship with Azerbaijan, reacted furiously, summoning the Armenian ambassador.
In a message posted on Telegram on Tuesday, Dmitry Medvedev, former president of Russia and secretary of its security council, said Pashinyan “decided to blame Russia for his botched defeat. He gave up part of his country’s territory. He decided to flirt with NATO, and his wife took biscuits to our enemies. Guess what fate awaits him…”
Who supports whom?
The South Caucasus is a tangled web of shifting alliances.
Russia aside, Armenia has built close relations with neighboring Iran, which has vowed to protect it, as well as India and France. French President Emmanuel Macron has previously joined negotiations in support of Pashinyan and the country is home to a large and historic Armenian diaspora.
Azerbaijan, meanwhile, operates on a “one nation, two states” basis with Turkey, with which it has deep cultural, linguistic and historical ties. It also receives large shipments of weaponry and military hardware from Israel, while providing the Middle Eastern nation with gas.
The EU has turned to Azerbaijan to help replace Russia as a provider of energy. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made an official visit to the capital, Baku, last summer in a bid to secure increased exports of natural gas, describing the country as a “reliable, trustworthy partner.”
