It’s not every day that a pair of sunglasses causes your downfall. But that’s what happened to Bjørnar Moxnes, a Norwegian left-wing party leader who was caught on camera stealing a pair of luxury sunglasses from Oslo airport.
“A lot of people have asked me how I could do something so stupid. I’ve asked myself that many times in recent weeks. I don’t have an adequate explanation,” Moxnes wrote on Facebook.
In honor of Moxnes’ fall from grace, POLITICO brings you some of the most embarrassing resignations in European politics (and there were a lot to choose from). From sex scandals to misused government funds to petty theft, here are 11 of the most shameful examples with a facepalm ranking from 1 (yikes, that’s embarrassing) to 5 (dear lord, what have you done?).
Tractor Porn
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UK Conservative MP Neil Parish resigned after being caught watching porn in the House of Commons chamber in 2022. Parish claimed it was a “moment of madness” and said he chanced upon the offending adult content accidentally while Googling tractors, only to later admit that he did then look at actual porn (it’s unclear if the porn involved tractors).
Parish admitted in an interview that his wife always found him “oversexed.” He added that she would tell him “I’ll get the scissors to you if you don’t behave yourself. Snippety, snip” if he got “a little too amorous.” A classic case of TMI.
Cuban cigars and a private jet
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When Haiti was hit by an earthquake in 2010, French Development Minister Alain Joyandet was ready to help. To get to an international aid conference held in Martinique, Joyandet hired a private jet worth a cool €116,500 — not a great look. He resigned after the scandal hit the headlines.
Joyandet was not the only minister found to have wasted taxpayer money under former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Junior minister Christan Blanc came under fire for buying €12,000 worth of Cuban cigars using public cash. Alas, Blanc couldn’t remember who had smoked them all. “I smoke two a day … that’s the maximum,” he said. Who consumed the remaining thousands of euros worth of cigars? he was asked. “I don’t know.”
Tax hypocrisy
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Former French Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac used to be a strong advocate against overseas tax havens. You’ll never guess what he was later found guilty of. It was tax fraud! Of course it was. Cahuzac’s illegal fiscal activities were first made public in a 2012 investigation by news site Mediapart, which reported he had failed to declare money kept in a Swiss bank account for close to 20 years. Oops! The Panama Papers confirmed that Cahuzac also owned a company in the Seychelles. He was sentenced to two years in prison for money laundering and tax fraud.
There was some good news that came out of this case, the creation of an ethics body, the Haute Autorité de la Transparence pour la Vie Publique.
The City of Light — and graphic sex messages
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The 2020 race to be mayor of Paris was riddled with internal feuds and party rivalry. And then Benjamin Griveaux — the La République En Marche candidate and one of Emmanuel Macron’s biggest supporters — made everyone forget all about it as he was hit with allegations that he sent graphic videos to an unidentified woman. Screenshots of sexually explicit messages attributed to Griveaux — married with three children — went viral, prompting the candidate to step down. “I don’t want to expose myself and my family anymore when any sort of attack is allowed, it goes too far,” Griveaux said in a statement, perhaps ill-advisedly using the word “expose.” The sexually explicit content was published on a blog registered by Russian artist and activist Piotr Pavlenski. In an added twist, one of those who spread the graphic videos widely on social media was MP Joachim Son-Forget, who in 2021 had his Twitter account suspended for impersonating Donald Trump!
From a fake Russian with love
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Austrian Deputy Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache thought he was going on a nice vacation in Ibiza, where he met a woman claiming to be a wealthy Russian citizen who said she wanted to invest in Austria. The woman offered to buy a 50 percent stake in Austria’s Kronen-Zeitung newspaper and switch its news line to push the agenda of Strache’s far-right Freedom Party. In turn, Strache said he could award her public contracts. Alas for Strache, she was not a wealthy Russian at all. He later tried to justify his actions by saying it was “a drunken night” and he was in whatever “intimate vacation mood” is!
The ensuing scandal — dubbed “Ibiza-gate” — brought down Sebastian Kurz’s government. To be fair to Strache, let those of us who haven’t tried to trade public contracts for party donations from a woman we believed to be the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch cast the first stone.
25 naked men and a whole lot of drugs
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Hungarian MEP József Szájer had one of the wildest exits from office in recent memory. A senior member of the Fidesz party, known for its conservative views and its anti-LGBTQ stance, Szájer was caught attending a lockdown-busting party in Brussels in 2020. Police found 25 naked men at the gathering, according to Belgian media reports, and a passerby reported seeing a man fleeing along the gutter, leading the police to apprehend Szájer and find narcotics in his backpack, prosecutors said. Viktor Orbán called the deed “unacceptable and indefensible” and Szájer quit the party and his post in Brussels. For some reason, there is not a statue of Szájer in Brussels.
Skin in the game
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Five years before Moxnes and the Hugo Boss sunglasses, regional head of Madrid Cristina Cifuentes made headlines when old footage circulated showing her allegedly stealing anti-aging cream. The incident was an “involuntary error,” said Cifuentes, who was released after paying for the €40 cream. But as the shoplifting scandal broke on the tail of a news site accusing her of lying about her graduate degree, Cifuentes stepped down from her role.
Grabbing a bite to eat
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In yet another shoplifting scandal, a Slovenian MP lost his job after stealing a sandwich from a shop in Ljubljana. Darij Krajcic reportedly told his colleagues he became annoyed when supermarket employees ignored him and decided to conduct what he called a “social experiment” to test the shop’s security. While the theft went unnoticed, pressure from colleagues led to his resignation — and to him paying back the cost of the sandwich.
EU mass exodus
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Of all the embarrassing resignations on this list, this is the one with the most people involved. In 1999, the entire European Commission led by Jacques Santer resigned after a scathing committee report found it guilty of “corruption, misuse of power and fraud.” The 140-page report by independent experts looked at charges of widespread fraud, nepotism, and corruption in the Commission. One of the commissioners at the center of the storm, former French Prime Minister Edith Cresson, was heavily criticized for hiring friends and relatives, including her local dentist, to well-paid positions. The dentist, René Berthelot, did not get his teeth into the adviser role he was given, and produced only a 24-page document during his 18-month stint working for the EU.
Got any snus?
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John Dalli, the EU commissioner for health, resigned in 2012 after an anti-fraud inquiry linked him to an attempt to influence tobacco legislation. A Dalli aide called Silvio Zammit was accused of trying to obtain a whopping €60 million from a tobacco company called Swedish Match to reverse an EU ban on snus, a type of smokeless tobacco that can make the user look like they are gargling bin juice. Dalli claimed he was dismissed by the Commission chief at the time, José Manuel Barroso, and took him to court. In 2019, the EU’s General Court rejected Dalli’s claim for compensation for damages he claims he suffered as a result of losing his job.
The PM, the spy services, his wife and his lover
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In 2013, Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas resigned after his chief of staff, Jana Nagyova, was charged with corruption and abuse of power. Among the crimes, Nagyova was accused of bribing former MPs, but what made headlines was her illegal use of the secret service. It turns out that Nagyova, who was having an affair with Necas at the time, allegedly used military intelligence to spy on the prime minister’s wife. Needless to say, this particular resignation was followed by a divorce. But it wasn’t long before Necas and Nagyova had a happy ending, getting married soon after.
When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni walks into the Oval Office on Thursday, her transformation will be complete.
Gone is the ghoulish caricature of an extremist monster, sympathetic to Moscow, whose party was descended from fascists, and in her place stands a pragmatic conservative willing to do business with a grateful international mainstream.
For U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukraine’s backers in the West, securing Meloni’s long-term commitment to the war effort is vital: Italy will assume the leadership of the G7 next year, at what’s likely to be a critical time in the conflict.
Initially, the signs weren’t good. Before she was elected last September, Meloni alarmed officials in Western capitals with her blunt brand of far-right populism. She banged the drum for nationalist causes, vowing to slam the brakes on immigration, stand up to the European Union’s leadership in Brussels and even opposed sanctioning Russia over Ukraine.
Yet 10 months since Meloni won power, the picture has changed dramatically. She will receive VIP treatment at the White House Thursday, with a welcome from Biden that will be as sincere as for any other G7 ally. While the Democrat and the far-right populist share almost nothing in their political outlooks, their handshake is likely to be one of mutual relief.
Meloni’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, leader of the center-right Forza Italia party, told POLITICO that the Ukraine war had bolstered Italy’s relationship with the U.S. The Meloni government’s “three polar stars” are now the EU, the U.N. and NATO, he said.
“Italy is part of the Western alliance and wants to be a protagonist in the Western alliance and in particular in its alliance with the U.S.A.,” Tajani said. “Since the crisis in Ukraine, our relationship on issues of security and shared policy with the U.S.A. has been getting stronger.”
Putin’s pals
It is a far cry from the sort of rhetoric that had, until recently, emanated from Rome.
As leader of the hard right Brothers of Italy, she supported Putin’s strongman politics while in opposition, congratulating him after his re-election by saying “the will of the people appears unequivocal.”
After Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Crimea she repeatedly opposed sanctions against Russia, citing the need to protect Italian exports. During the pandemic Meloni endorsed Russia’s Sputnik vaccines. In a TV interview in 2022 before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she highlighted how essential it was to remain on good terms with Putin and accused Biden of “using foreign policy to cover up the problems he has at home.”
If Meloni seemed like a problem to Western leaders, her coalition partners were an even worse prospect. Matteo Salvini, leader of the right wing League, who once wore a T-shirt printed with Putin’s face to the EU Parliament, attempted to arrange a peace mission to Moscow with flights paid by the Russian embassy.
And Meloni’s coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi, who led the center-right Forza Italia party until his death in June, blamed Ukraine for the war and had a personal friendship with Vladimir Putin, continuing to exchange gifts with the Russian leader even after the invasion.
When she took power, there were deep, if private, fears within the White House, according to several Biden administration officials who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, that Meloni might shatter the G7 support for Ukraine.
But Meloni surprised U.S. officials at the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May with just how eager she seemed to build a strong relationship with Biden, according to two government officials who witnessed their interactions.
At the NATO summit earlier this month in Vilnius, Meloni stood just a few feet from both Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the G7 nations announced additional security guarantees for Kyiv that were meant as something of a make-good after NATO declined to fast-track Ukraine’s membership.
At the NATO summit earlier this month in Vilnius, Meloni stood just a few feet from both Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
With Italy set to take over the presidency of the G7 in January, Meloni’s support for the cause has prompted sighs of relief from both sides of the Atlantic.
“The President and the Prime Minister have built a good, productive relationship as they have worked together closely on a variety of issues such as our support for Ukraine and our approach to China, and President Biden is looking forward to continuing that conversation,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for Biden’s national security council.
Pleasantly surprised
Biden has told those around him he has been pleasantly surprised by Meloni’s leadership in the war effort but is eager to get to know the Italian leader better, according to multiple administration officials.
For Alessandro Politi, Director of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome, Meloni “understood very quickly that when you get into government you have responsibilities and the U.S.A. is a primary ally.”
Her visit to Kyiv in February was a clear sign she was following “an orthodox path” and a moment when “she convinced the wider international community that she was in charge of the coalition and that her allies had to follow her political line.”
Meloni’s support for the Western stance does not mean the whole of Italy feels the same way.
Some populists on both the left and right of Italian politics still hold pro-Russian views, and the question of whether it’s right to send arms to Ukraine elicits fierce debate in the media. Italy’s longstanding position on Russia has always been to try to act as a bridge, facilitating good relations between East and West.
But although a majority of Italians are opposed to it, Meloni has continued to back Ukraine with military aid. Ukrainians are “defending freedom and democracy on which our civilization is based,” she told the Italian Senate in March.
While Biden and Meloni are likely to agree on Ukraine, it is not certain that they will be in harmony on all issues.
In 2019 Italy became the only G7 country to join China’s Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative. Later this year it is up for renewal, but in the new cold war climate the U.S. expects the deal to be scrapped.
While Meloni has indicated that she might not extend the agreement with Beijing, calling it “a big mistake,” this position is not yet confirmed. If she does return to the more traditional Italian line of walking a middle ground, the cracks in the Biden-Meloni relationship will open up again.
A “conversation has commenced” with North Korea over US Army Pvt. Travis King, who crossed the border between North and South Korea last week in the demilitarized zone separating the two nations, the deputy commander of the United Nations Command (UNC) said Monday.
King, believed to be the first US soldier to cross into North Korea since 1982, had a history of assault, was facing disciplinary action over his conduct and was meant to go back to the US the day before the incident.
Gen. Andrew Harrison said the case of King is still under investigation and he could not provide further detail on the private, who the US military said “willfully and without authorization” crossed into North Korea while taking a civilian tour of the Joint Security Area, a small collection of buildings inside the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that has separated North and South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
“There is a mechanism that exists under the armistice agreement, whereby lines of communication are open between the UNC and the Korean People’s Army, and that takes place in the JSA. That process has started,” Harrison told journalists at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club.
He acknowledged that the answers he could provide were “disappointing,” but “I’m constrained by what I can say.”
“You may not get the answers for what you’re desperate for,” Harrison told the journalists.
The UN Command was making King’s welfare its primary concern as the process goes forward, he said.
“Obviously, there is so much welfare at stake, and clearly we’re in a very difficult and complex situation which I don’t want to risk by speculation or going into too much detail about the communications that are existing,” he said.
The UNC is a multinational military force that includes the United States which fought on the side of South Korea during the 1950-53 Korean War.
It controls the South Korean side of the JSA, the one place where the North and South can meet for talks.
King has not been publicly seen or heard from since he crossed into North Korea last Tuesday. North Korea has also not said anything about the status or condition of the missing soldier.
His reasoning for crossing the border into one of the world’s most authoritarian places – and a country which the US does not have diplomatic relations with – has so far remained a mystery.
A US Army official told CNN the private was set to be administratively separated from the service when he returned to Fort Bliss in Texas.
But before he could board an American Airlines flight from Incheon International Airport outside of Seoul last Monday, King bolted.
“He passed through all the security points up to the boarding gate but he told the airline staff that his passport was missing,” an official at the Incheon airport told CNN. The airline staff then escorted him back outside to the departure side, the official said.
King had reservations for a Joint Security Area tour for the next day and somehow made it to the excursion, joining other tourists as they went into the DMZ and the Joint Security Area, where he then ran into North Korea.
Russian strikes on Odesa overnight damaged at least at least six residential buildings, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church and “architectural monuments,” according to Ukraine’s southern Operational Command.
“Dozens of cars were damaged, facades and roofs of many buildings in the city were damaged and windows were blown out,” it said in a statement on Telegram.
“Several craters have been formed in the city. There are power outages, which may hamper traffic and the route of public transport may be changed.”
The strikes on Saturday night killed at least one person, the statement said, and left at least 19 hurt.
“Another 19 people including four children were injured. Eleven adults and three children were hospitalized while the rest are being treated on an outpatient basis,” the statement said.
Ukraine has been struggling in the past week to repel a wave of Russian strikes against Odesa – its air defenses unable to cope with the types of missiles that Moscow has used to pummel the region.
By Friday residents endured at least four nights of bombardment.
A CNN team on the ground began hearing explosions on Thursday, with near continuous strikes lasting at least 90 minutes – followed by air raid sirens on Friday as Russian troops fired more missiles from the Black Sea.
In a statement on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned Moscow’s latest strikes on Odesa.
“Missiles against peaceful cities, against residential buildings, a cathedral… There can be no excuse for Russian evil,” Zelensky said. “As always, this evil will lose and there will definitely be a retaliation to Russian terrorists for Odesa. They will feel this retaliation,” he said, adding that those injured were being provided with medical assistance.
“I am grateful to everyone who is helping people and to everyone who is with Odesa in their thoughts and emotions. We will get through this. We will restore peace. And for this, we must defeat the Russian evil.”
His words come as local military commanders reported at least two deaths following Russian overnight strikes in the Kharkhiv region, among them a 57-year-old woman and 45-year-old man killed in the Dvorichna district by shelling.
“Over the past day, the enemy has been massively shelling settlements in Kharkiv, Chuhuiv, Kupyansk and Izium districts with artillery, mortars and aircraft,” Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv region military administration, said on Telegram.
Civilian industry buildings including at least three houses and outbuildings were also damaged as a result of the attacks on Kupyansk with rocket launchers, cannon artillery and mortars.
“Our defenders are holding their positions in the Kupyansk sector. The enemy has made no progress,” Syniehubov said.
Latest North Korean missile launches come amid warnings as US nuclear-armed submarine docks in South Korea port.
North Korea has fired several cruise missiles towards the sea to the west of the Korean Peninsula, South Korea’s military said, marking the second missile launch in apparent protest over the arrival of a nuclear-armed United States submarine at a South Korean port.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Saturday the launches were detected beginning at about 4am local time (19:00 Friday GMT).
“Our military has bolstered surveillance and vigilance while closely cooperating with the United States and maintaining a firm readiness posture,” the JCS said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
On Wednesday, North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles from an area near its capital, Pyongyang. They flew about 550km (341 miles) before landing in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
The flight distance of those missiles roughly matched the distance between Pyongyang and the South Korean port city of Busan, where the nuclear-armed submarine, the USS Kentucky, made the first visit by a US nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea since the 1980s.
The distance which the missiles fired on Saturday travelled was not immediately released by the JCS.
The missile launches come as Seoul and Washington ramp up defence cooperation in the face of growing tensions with the North, including joint US and South Korean military exercises with advanced stealth jets and new rounds of nuclear contingency planning meetings.
North Korea’s defence minister Kang Sun-nam said the Ohio-class submarine’s deployment may have fallen “under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons specified in the DPRK law on the nuclear force policy”, using an acronym for North Korea’s official name.
South Korea’s defence ministry on Friday described the deployment of the Kentucky and the nuclear contingency planning meetings between Washington and Seoul as “defensive response measures” to counter the North Korean threat.
South Korea’s defence ministry also said that any use of nuclear weapons by North Korea would prompt an “immediate and decisive response” resulting in the “end” of Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Tucked into a narrow tree line on Ukraine’s southern front, a young Ukrainian soldier wearing an American flag patch talks about how frightening it was the first time his team assaulted the densely mined Russian positions in the offensive launched a month ago.
“The first day was the most difficult,” says the 19-year-old who goes by his call sign, “Kach.” “We didn’t know what to expect, what could happen, how events would unfold.”
Nor did anyone really. After months of anticipation, Ukraine finally launched its “Spring Offensive” in early June. Everyone knew it would be tough going for the Ukrainians, having watched Russia dig in and build up formidable defenses over months. But even with no real expectation that the offensive would look like Ukraine’s lightening fast advance around Kharkiv last September, the hope among western officials was that Ukraine would be farther along and more successful than they are right now.
But the offensive has proven more challenging than many expected, even with an arsenal of new western weaponry and equipment fueling the assault.
Among the most-anticipated pieces of equipment was the American-made Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a critical addition to help infantry cross the dangerous and open terrain.
Speaking to CNN, Kach is sitting inside his own Bradley. Just a few months ago, Kach was going through an accelerated US training course in Germany, where he and other Ukrainian soldiers were taught a more American, complex and nimble way of fighting.
Kach’s brigade, the 47th Mechanized Brigade, is the only one to have received the coveted Bradleys, 200 of which have been committed by the US.
The armored fighting vehicles are so admired by Ukrainian soldiers that running around Kach’s team’s camp barking is “Bradley” – the brigade press officer’s 6-month-old rescue puppy.
The Velcro flag patch on Kach’s chest was a parting gift from his American trainer in Germany, who told him it would bring good luck. But it was the thick armor, powerful machine guns, rockets and night vision capabilities on the Bradley that gave Kach a boost of confidence when ordered to assault the Russians.
When the brigade did, the Russians were ready. Dense minefields had been laid, rows of winding trenches were dug. Russian artillery started to pick off the vehicles sent out to de-mine the area. On top of that, this southern direction of attack was perhaps the most predictable in the offensive: designed to try to punch through the Russian line, drive south and split the southern land bridge connecting Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas before finally reaching the Sea of Azov.
The 47th ran into trouble very quickly trying to pierce the Russian line in their newly acquired armor. Photos and videos showed charred armored vehicles, including Bradleys and a German Leopard tank. Oryx, a military analysis site based on open source information, reports that around three dozen Bradleys have been destroyed or damaged.
“It’s not that hard to clear a minefield but it is very hard to clear a minefield when in doing so under fire and from different types of fire,” says Rob Lee, a military analyst who is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who just visited Ukraine.
“Since the beginning of that campaign, they adapted and it’s largely become a dismounted infantry fight,” Lee says. “It’s extremely arduous, extremely tough. The burden is very heavy on individual infantry men.”
There is no disagreement from rank-and-file troops, nor from their commanders, who admit the progress has been slower than they would like.
In a southern town about 10 kilometers from the jagged line of contact – often called the “zero line,” the brigade’s 25th Separate Assault Battalion has set up a command post in a basement bunker. It’s filled with enormous floor-to-ceiling maps denoting Ukrainian and Russian battlefield positions. A large computer monitor tracks the fighting through incoming reports and dozens of drone feeds.
One soldier updating the maps showed CNN a Russian map recently taken from a trench that had been cleared, detailing the Russian defenses in the area. Outside loud booms from Ukrainian artillery cannons sweep across the heavily damaged and now largely empty town.
The drone feeds show the empty fields littered with anti-tank and -personnel mines, pockmarked with craters from artillery. The tree lines on the other side hide Russian forces camped out in trenches.
“We need to break through the mine barriers so that equipment and infantry can pass,” says Tral, the commander of a demining – or “sapping” – platoon. Moments prior he had just returned to the command post from yet another treacherous mission on foot to destroy or de-fuse the mines blocking their way.
They work slowly, Tral says, “everything is done gradually. Where we have already [cleared] passages, our troops are already entering there. We do not allow [the Russians] to enter where we have already demined the territory.”
Tral shares a video from his phone showing a large explosion shooting dirt and shrapnel into the sky after a Russian mine was detonated. (Ukrainian soldiers often ask to go by just one name or their “call sign.”)
“It’s hard,” he says, “very hard.”
Another soldier in the basement, Stanislav, keeps his eyes fixed on the big monitor, pulling up different drone feeds from his sector. As he watches Ukrainian artillery shells landing near Russian positions, he will help coordinate between the artillery teams and other forces closer to where the shells land to direct the fire.
“In this war artillery is the most valuable asset,” Stanislav says flatly, eying the feed. “There are a lot of Russians. In here and overall. They have more guns, they have more shells and they have more people so we must counter that with our … professionalism.”
These days, that means the slow grind of the exposed troops fighting from trench to trench, assaulting tree line to tree line under heavy fire.
“There are [soldiers] in trenches,” Stanislav says. “We can’t liberate land with artillery. There are people that are working there.”
That work requires resilience and patience. The soldier with the Russian map points to a tree line, spreading his index and middle finger to represent the distance, roughly 300 meters, he says “this section took us one and a half months.”
Under a desk is Bradley, the press officer’s puppy. When it’s time to go, he strains his leash refusing to go back outside because of the artillery firing.
Ukrainian troops have started firing the cluster munitions provided by the US as part of their counteroffensive against Russia, according to two US officials and another person briefed on the matter.
The US is still waiting for updates from Ukrainian forces about how effective the munitions have been on the battlefield, one of the officials said.
National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby confirmed later on Thursday that Ukrainians forces have begun using the munitions.
“They are using them appropriately. They’re using them effectively and they are actually having an impact on Russia’s defensive formations and Russia’s defensive maneuvering. I think I can leave it at that,” Kirby told reporters.
The US announced on July 8 that it would be sending the controversial munitions, and they were delivered to Ukrainian forces about a week later, as CNN first reported.
Brig. Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavsky told CNN at an interview in central Ukraine last week that the munitions “can radically change (the battlefield).”
“The enemy also understands that with getting this ammunition, we will have an advantage,” Tarnavsky said.
Cluster munitions scatter “bomblets” across large areas, which would allow Ukrainian forces to target larger concentrations of Russian forces and equipment with fewer rounds of ammunition.
But the bomblets can also fail to explode on impact, and can pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines. The UK, France, Germany and other key US allies have outlawed the munitions under the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the US and Ukraine are not signatories to the ban.
The US sent the M864 and M483A1 models of cluster munitions, CNN has reported, which the administration said were tested in recent years to ensure they had a lower than 2.35% dud rate. The dud rate refers to the percentage of bomblets that fail to explode and pose a risk to civilians.
The US decided to send the cluster munitions primarily to help alleviate a potential shortage of ammunition on the frontlines. It is not clear whether the heavy amount of artillery ammunition Ukrainians forces have been expending day-to-day would have been sustainable long-term without the cluster munitions, officials and military analysts said.
CNN reported earlier this week that the US and Europe are struggling to provide Ukraine with the large amount of ammunition it will need for a prolonged counteroffensive against Russia, and western countries are racing to ramp up production to avoid shortages on the battlefield that could hinder Ukraine’s progress.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last week that the Ukrainians pledged in writing to only use the cluster munitions in “appropriate places” and not in populated areas.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this week that Russia has a stockpile of cluster munitions and will consider using them against Ukraine “if they are used against us.” But Russia has already used the munitions several times in Ukraine, CNN has previously reported, including in densely populated areas.
In March, the United Nations said it had compiled credible reports that Russian forces had used cluster munitions in populated areas at least 24 times. A CNN investigation last year found that the Kremlin fired 11 cluster rockets at Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, during the war’s opening days.
KYIV – Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Vadym Prystaiko as Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, after the envoy criticized the Ukrainian president in public.
Speaking to reporters at the NATO summit in Vilnius earlier this month, Wallace said that the U.S. is heading for a presidential election next year, and lawmakers from countries making big military donations to Kyiv could face a political problem if they are met with Ukrainian anger. There is concern across much of Europe that NATO-skeptic Donald Trump could return as U.S. president.
Zelenskyy responded with an ironic remark during the press briefing in Vilnius, saying he does not understand how much more he should express his thanks, in response to Wallace’s comment. “He can write to me about how he wants to be thanked, so we can fully express our gratitude. We can make a point to wake up (every) morning and thank him,” Zelenskyy said.
During the interview with Sky News Prystaiko was asked if that remark had a hint of sarcasm. He agreed. “I don’t believe that this sarcasm is healthy. We don’t have to show Russians that we have something between us. They have to know we are working together,” Prystaiko said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Poland that any attack on Belarus will be considered an attack on Russia, in a direct threat to the NATO country televised on Friday.
“Aggression against Belarus will mean aggression against the Russian Federation,” Putin told a televised Security Council meeting on Friday, shown by Reuters. “We will respond to it with all means at our disposal,” he said.
Putin appeared to be responding to Warsaw’s decision this week to re-station military units to the east of the country, closer to the Belarusian border, following the Russian ally’s hosting of Wagner mercenary fighters.
Putin said that Poland appears to have interests in retaking eastern territories it lost to former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin, including “a good chunk of Ukraine … to take back the historic lands.” He added that “it’s well known that they dream of Belarusian lands as well.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki hit back later on Friday, tweeting that “Stalin was a war criminal, guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles.” He said that the ambassador of the Russian Federation will be summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Morawiecki’s defense minister defended the relocation of troops on Friday, pointing to reports that the Wagner mercenaries were carrying out training exercises with the Belarusian army.
“Training or joint exercises of the Belarusian army and the Wagner group are undoubtedly a provocation,” said Zbigniew Hoffmann, secretary of the government’s National Security Committee, according to a report by Polish state-run news agency PAP.
Belarus has been Russia’s ally throughout Putin’s war on Ukraine. In addition to hosting the Wagner Group following an insurrection on Moscow led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has allowed Putin to station tactical nuclear weapons on its territory.
Germany said Berlin and NATO were prepared to support Poland in defending the eastern border, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Friday, according to Reuters.
Bulgaria, meanwhile, has agreed to provide Ukraine with some 100 armored personnel carriers, marking a U-turn in the NATO member’s policy on sending military equipment to Kyiv following the appointment of a new, pro-Western government. The parliament in Sofia late Friday approved the administration’s proposal to make the first shipment of heavy military equipment to Ukraine since the beginning of the war, the AP reported.
Separately, a drone attack on an ammunition depot in Crimea prompted an evacuation and brief suspension of road traffic on the bridge linking the peninsula to Russia, Reuters reported. Sergei Aksyonov, the Moscow-installed regional governor, said on Saturday that there was an explosion at the depot in Krasnohvardiiske in central Crimea but reported no damage or casualties, according to the report.
The brief halting of traffic on the Crimean Bridge came five days after blasts there killed two people and damaged a section of the roadway — the second major attack on the bridge since the start of the war.
Four days after re-opening the strategic Crimea bridge that links Russia to the occupied Ukrainian peninsula, Moscow was forced to close it again due to another attack.
A drone assault on an ammunition depot in the Krasnogvardeysky district has caused residents within a 5 kilometer radius of the area to be evacuated, and for rail traffic to be suspended on the Kerch bridge into Crimea. Social media reports suggested that an oil depot had been struck in Oktyabr’skiy, south of the town of Krasnogvardeysky and close to an airfield.
The attack was more than 200 kilometers from the bridge, but Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of occupied Crimea, said on Telegram that train traffic will be suspended “to minimize risk.” The main rail line from the bridge travels through Crimea and eventually branches around to Krasnogvardeysky, a small town roughly in the center of the Russian occupied territory.
Earlier, Aksyonov reported on an attempted drone raid on infrastructure in the same district, Russian state-owned media TASS reported. POLITICO has been unable to verify these reports.
The Kerch bridge, completed in 2018, four years after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal occupation of Crimea, is a critical land route into the peninsula, re-supplying Moscow’s forces fighting in southern Ukraine with troops, weapons and fuel.
Its closure on Saturday is the second in a week, after the bridge was struck by two drones on Monday, killing two civilians and collapsing part of the roadway structure. One lane was re-opened and the rail line continued to operate.
The bridge was also the target of an attack during Ukraine’s counteroffensive last October.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Aspen security conference in the U.S. on Friday that the Kerch bridge was a military target, according to a Reuters report. “This is the route used to feed the war with ammunition and this is being done on a daily basis. And it militarizes the Crimean peninsula,” Zelenskyy said.
“For us, this is understandably an enemy facility built outside international laws and all applicable norms. So, understandably, this is a target for us. And a target that is bringing war, not peace, has to be neutralized,” the Ukrainian leader said, in comments relayed through an interpreter.
No one has yet come forward to take responsibility for this week’s attacks.
KYIV — Russia unleashed a missile barrage early Sunday on Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa, leaving one person dead and heavily damaging the cathedral in the historic city center.
Moscow has been bombarding Odesa and its surroundings with different types of missiles for nearly a week after Russia withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the U.N.-brokered deal to export Ukrainian grain.
The attack on Odesa Sunday came hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko in St. Petersburg.
Russian forces attacked the Odesa region with 19 missiles, including cruise, anti-ship and ballistic missiles, in Sunday’s barrage. Ukrainian air defense managed to shoot down nine of them, the country’s air force said in a statement.
More than 19 people were wounded and one person was killed in the attack. Odesa’s historical city center, a UNESCO world heritage site, was badly damaged by the attack. Six residential buildings were destroyed. City’s oldest and biggest Transfiguration Orthodox Cathedral was heavily damaged by a Russian missile, local authorities said.
“Missiles against peaceful cities, against residential buildings, a cathedral … There can be no excuse for Russian evil,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement. “As always, this evil will lose. And there will definitely be a retaliation to Russian terrorists for Odesa. They will feel this retaliation,” he added.
Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP via Getty Images
Ukraine can’t shoot down the Oniks anti-ship missiles that Russia is firing at Odesa, partly because those weapons fly at a high speed of more than 4,000 kilometers an hour, Yuriy Ignat, spokesman of Ukraine’s air force, told Radio Liberty.
“Russians launch them from the coastal complex “Bastion” from the territory of the occupied Crimea,” Ignat said. “Initially, they fly at a speed of more than 3,000 km/h, and during the approach to the target, they descend to 10-15 meters. That way, it’s hard to shoot down something that flies very low. It is even difficult to detect those missiles,” Ignat added.
According to Ignat, only Patriot air defense systems could shoot down those types of missiles. Ukraine currently has only two of that type of U.S.-made air defense system.
The meeting between Putin and Lukashenko on Sunday came on the heels of Russian leader’s warning that an attack on Belarus would be an attack on Russia. That warning on Friday appeared to be in response to a Polish decision to shift military units to the east of the country, closer to the Belarusian border, following the Russian ally’s hosting of Wagner mercenary fighters.
In their meeting, Putin told Lukashenko that Ukraine’s counteroffensive “has failed,” according to a Reuters report.
A record 16 Chinese warships were spotted in waters around Taiwan in a 24-hour period late last week, the island’s Defense Ministry reported, in what analysts said was the latest sign of an intimidation campaign against Taipei by China’s ruling Communist Party.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) activity in the 24 hours ending at 6 a.m. local time Saturday followed exercises earlier last week that saw dozens of Chinese warplanes fly past the median line of the Taiwan Strait and into the key regions of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ).
Over 72 hours in the middle of last week, 73 PLA aircraft either crossed the Taiwan Strait’s median line – an informal demarcation point that Beijing does not recognize but until recently largely respected – or entered the southeastern or southwestern parts of the island’s ADIZ.
During that same period, nine PLA vessels were reported in waters around Taiwan in three consecutive days.
The 16 Chinese ships around Taiwan on Friday into Saturday was the most since the island’s Defense Ministry began providing daily updates of PLA activity around the island in August 2022.
“It is a growing military effort,” Carl Schuster, a Hawaii-based analyst and former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, told CNN on Monday.
The military operations indicate Beijing’s efforts are twofold, he said.
One, constant PLA activities around the island present its defenders with a range of possible attack routes to design defenses for, and two, to “practice, rehearse and train for the ‘moment’ should it come,” Schuster said.
That moment would be a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
China’s ruling Communist Party claims the self-governing democracy as its territory despite never having controlled it, and has spent decades trying to isolate it diplomatically. Beijing has not ruled out using force to take control of the island.
Chinese state media on Sunday touted the naval activity, noting the PLAN “breaking the record for the number of vessels deployed in its drills in the region,” in a story in Global Times.
“Analysts said Sunday that the recent intensive exercises demonstrate the PLA’s capabilities in encircling the island,” the Global Times story said.
Neither Taiwan’s Defense Ministry nor the Global Times article gave details on what PLA warships were in the waters around Taiwan.
But Chinese state-run media said the PLA exercises “likely featured amphibious landing training” and the story was topped with a picture of a PLAN amphibious assault ship it said was taken “during a maritime real-combat training exercise recently.”
Schuster said he expects the PLA to keep increasing the pressure on Taiwan.
“We will see more such exercises and next year’s will more complex and larger in terms of units involved and extent of their activities,” he said.
US defence official said Washington is considering options amid growing aggression by Russian planes in skies over Syria.
The United States is deploying additional fighter jets around the strategic Strait of Hormuz to protect ships from Iranian seizures, a senior US defence official said, according to a news report.
Speaking to Pentagon reporters on Friday, the official said the US will send F-16 fighter jets to the Gulf region this weekend to augment the A-10 attack aircraft that have been patrolling there for more than a week.
Washington’s increase in military assets in the region comes after Iran tried to seize two oil tankers near the strait last week, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reported.
The defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details of US military operations in the region, said the F-16s will give air cover to the ships moving through the waterway and increase the US military’s visibility in the area, as a deterrent to Iran, AP reported.
The US Navy said that in two recent instances, Iranian naval vessels backed off when the USS McFaul, a guided-missile destroyer, arrived on the scene.
Russian military activity in Syria, which has increased in frequency and aggression towards US forces since March, stems from growing cooperation and coordination between Moscow, Tehran and the Syrian government to try to pressure the US to leave Syria, the official said.
The most recent incident was on Friday morning when a Russian aircraft flew repeatedly over the al-Tanf garrison in eastern Syria, where US forces are training Syrian allies and monitoring ISIL activity.
The official said the Russian An-30 aircraft was collecting intelligence on the base. The US did not have fighter aircraft in the area and took no direct action against the Russian flight, the official said.
There are about 900 US forces in the country, and others move in and out to conduct missions targeting ISIL.
In this image from a video released by the US Air Force, a Russian SU-35 flies near a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone on July 5, 2023, over Syria. The US says Russian fighter jets have flown dangerously close to several of their drone aircraft over Syria, setting off flares and forcing the MQ-9 Reapers to take evasive action [File: US Air Force via AP]
US says commitment to security of South Korea and Japan is backed by ‘full range of capabilities, including nuclear’.
The United States, South Korea and Japan have jointly condemned the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by North Korea, pledging to work with the international community to tighten sanctions against Pyongyang.
In a joint statement on Friday, the three allies said they would push to block North Korea’s “illicit revenue generation through overseas workers and malicious cyber activities” that they said the country uses to fund its weapons programmes.
“The United States reiterated that its commitments to defend the ROK [South Korea] and Japan are ironclad and backed by the full range of capabilities, including nuclear,” the statement said, referring to South Korea by its official name.
Earlier on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met his Japanese and South Korean counterparts on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Indonesia.
North Korea – formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) – fired the ICBM on Wednesday, and it landed in waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
It was the first such launch in three months, following heightened tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.
Two days earlier, North Korea slammed a US plan to deploy nuclear submarines near the Korean Peninsula, warning that the move could “incite the worst crisis of nuclear conflict in practice”.
On Thursday, North Korea’s United Nations ambassador, Kim Song, told the UN Security Council that the ICBM launch aimed “to deter dangerous military moves of hostile forces and safeguard the security” of the country.
In Friday’s statement, the US, South Korea and Japan denounced the North Korean launch as dangerous.
“This constitutes a clear, flagrant violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions and poses a grave threat to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and beyond,” the three countries said.
“The DPRK’s launch of this ICBM threatened the safety of civil aviation and maritime traffic in the region.”
North Korea has been escalating its missile testing over the past two years.
Former US President Donald Trump engaged in direct talks with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Un during his tenure, but high-level meetings between the two countries came to a halt under the current US president, Joe Biden.
After the first meeting between Trump and Kim in 2018, the nations said in a joint statement that North Korea was committed to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”.
But the pledge was never followed by efforts to end the country’s nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea carried out its first nuclear weapon test in 2006 in violation of an international ban on such testing. Since then, the UN Security Council has unanimously passed numerous resolutions that imposed sanctions on the country over its nuclear programme.
Last year, Russia and China vetoed a Security Council proposal to impose more penalties on North Korea, arguing that sanctions have not been effective in curbing the country’s nuclear and missile programmes.
On the 55th anniversary of the Prague Spring, the head of Britain’s secret intelligence service sat down with POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy — a journalist with deep experience reporting from behind the Iron Curtain — to talk about Russia, Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, China and AI in spycraft.
In the rare exclusive interview, Richard Moore issued a thinly-veiled recruitment call to Russians who’ve become disillusioned with their leadership while assessing that President Vladimir Putin was “under pressure” internally after a mutiny by mercenaries exposed his weakness.
“Join hands with us — our door is always open,” Moore — known as “C” inside the agency — said in a speech at a POLITICO event hosted by the British embassy in Prague.
The MI6 chief, who rose to lead the agency in 2020 after a career in diplomacy, repeatedly referred to Prague’s history as a center of resistance against Russian dominance as a parallel to current times. While the city’s students led an uprising against Soviet occupiers that was brutally repressed by Russian tanks, the Czech Republic — long known as a playground for spies — is now a member of NATO and the EU, as well as a robust supporter of Ukraine.
“When we were thinking about me coming here, it seemed a very good place to speak about Ukraine in particular. The parallels are so strong, aren’t they?” he said. “This is the last European country to see Russian tanks rolling across its border and that is where Ukraine finds itself.”
Moore offered an upbeat assessment of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, noting that Kyiv’s forces had taken back more ground in the past month than the Russians had done in a year. And he issued a warning to African leaders who are relying on Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner PMC mercenary army, to keep them in power.
“If Russian mercenaries can betray Putin, who else might they betray?” he said in the speech, the only public one he plans to give this year.
Moore’s remarks come as MI6 is increasing its public outreach efforts. Founded under another name before World War I, MI6 — Britain’s equivalent to the U.S.’s CIA, whereas MI5 is more like the FBI — operated for many years completely out of public view. The British government only officially acknowledged its existence in 1994.
During those years in the shadows, a rich lore developed around the spy agency and its cadre of secret agents — thanks in large part to authors such as Graham Greene and John Le Carré, and the iconic James Bond 007 character invented by Ian Fleming.
MI6 has modernized its image and now operates out of a gleaming headquarters on the banks of the Thames in London. But Moore said he embraces the mythology surrounding his office — including by writing in green ink, in keeping with a century-old tradition.
Between comments about the global spy game, Moore flashed his playful cufflinks — which were in the shape of Marmite jars and bore the words “love” and “hate” on either wrist. Ever the diplomat, Moore explained to the international audience that Marmite was a condiment made from yeast extract that has a “very strong taste” and is either adored or detested, even in Britain. Take that, James Bond!
Here are seven takeaways from Moore’s POLITICO interview in Prague.
1. Ukraine’s ‘hard grind’
With Russia’s invasion almost 18 months old, Kyiv’s Western allies are paying close attention to the progress of a counteroffensive that started earlier this summer. Ukrainian commanders have underscored challenges on the battlefield, as deeply-entrenched Russian troops have strewn the front with many thousands of mines that are slowing Ukraine’s advance.
Kyiv’s progress, which is taking place without strong air support, has led to criticism that Ukraine is advancing too slowly. But Moore struck a positive note.
“Well it’s a hard grind and, you know, Ukrainian officials and military don’t shy away from that. And the Russians have had a chance to put in defense[s] which are very tough to overcome,” he said.
“But I do return to the point that Ukrainian commanders in rather stark contrast to their Russian counterparts want to preserve the lives of their troops and therefore move with due caution. They have still recovered more territory in a month than the Russians managed to achieve in a year.”
2. Don’t ‘humiliate’ Putin
Since the start of the war, some Western leaders — most notably French President Emmanuel Macron — have voiced concern about the risk of “humiliating” Putin. Moore seemed to agree, saying the West’s aim was not to embarrass Russia or Putin himself.
“No one wants to humiliate Putin, still less does anyone want to humiliate the great nation of Russia,” he said. “But the route for them is very clear: Pull all your troops out.”
He added: “Most conflicts end in some kind of negotiation. It is for Ukraine to define the terms of peace, not us. Our job is to try and put them in the strongest possible position to negotiate from, from a position of strength, and that’s what we’re intent on doing.”
3. Russian leader ‘under pressure’
Nearly 1.5 years into Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine and a month after Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny, Moore said it was impossible to determine what was going through Putin’s mind. But he did offer a severe assessment of his position inside the Russian power structure.
“He is clearly under pressure. You don’t have a group of mercenaries advance up the motorway toward Rostov and get to within 125 kilometers of Moscow unless you have not quite predicted that was going to happen,” he said.
“I think he probably feels under some pressure. Prigozhin was his creature, utterly created by Putin, and yet he turned on him,” Moore added. “He really didn’t fight back against Prigozhin. He cut a deal to save his skin using the good offices of the leader of Belarus.”
4. Calling all Russian defectors
Moore issued an open invitation to Russians who feel disillusioned by their leader and the bloodshed in Ukraine, urging them to get in touch with British security services.
“I invite them to do what others have already done in the past 18 months and join hands with us,” he said in his prepared remarks. During his interview, he added: “The truth is that people continue to come to us, Anne, and of course in doing so they take risk. But we look after the people who come and work with us, and of course, our successes are never known.”
5. China’s ‘huge’ capabilities
Despite the intense focus on Russia, the spy chief underscored that Britain’s chief concern on the world stage today is China, which he described as unavoidable.
“We now devote more resources to China than any other mission.” This reflects “China’s importance in the world” and the “crucial need” to understand the capabilities of the Chinese government, he said.
On China’s intelligence operations in the West, Moore said: “Like everything else with China you have to look at its scale.” China’s capabilities are “huge and they deploy overseas in large numbers,” he added.
6. Spying in the age of AI
With the rise of artificial intelligence, some critics have argued that AI will make human agents irrelevant. Moore pushed back strongly against that point, arguing that human intelligence remained crucial to do what “machines cannot do,” while underscoring that MI6 was “experimenting like mad” with AI.
“If AI is taken in a direction which is beyond international coordination and developed for evil intent, that is highly dangerous. As we can tell already with the possibilities of generative AI, this will have to be handled with real care,” he said.
7. Turmoil in Iran over drones
Moore dropped a tantalizing clue about discord inside Iran’s secretive regime. While Iran has been a key supporter of Putin’s invasion, providing drones that have terrorized Ukrainian troops and cities, the MI6 boss said that the provision of drones was prompting arguments among Iran’s leaders.
“Iran’s decision to supply Russia with the suicide drones that mete out random destruction to Ukraine’s cities has provoked internal quarrels at the highest level of the regime in Tehran,” he said in prepared remarks. “Iran has chosen presumably to earn cash as well as probably to receive some military know-how in return for their support for the Russians.”
Troops from Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group, who are relocating to Belarus following last month’s aborted mutiny, will not go back to fight in Ukraine and will stay in Belarus to train local troops, their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said Wednesday.
“We did a lot for Russia. What is happening at the front now is a disgrace. We want no part of it,” Prigozhin said in his first appearance since his troops marched on Moscow in a failed uprising last month.
In a shaky mobile phone video shot at dusk, Prigozhin can be seen in silhouette wearing a baseball cap. He speaks to a crowd of men who appear to be Wagner fighters and break repeatedly into applause and cheers.
“Therefore we have taken the decision to be in Belarus for a while. In this time, we will turn the Belarusian army into the second most powerful in the world and, if needed, we will take its place,” Prigozhin pursued, in a jab at Russia, which currently has the second largest army in the world.
He then hinted his troops could later go to Africa, where Wagner has been active in Mali and the Central African Republic.
Prigozhin’s deputy, Dmitry Utkin, whose nom de guerre gave the mercenary army its name, speaks: “This is not the end. This is the beginning. The biggest task in the world will begin very soon,” he said before switching to English: “Welcome to hell.”
After months of tension with Russia’s military leadership, Prigozhin turned his troops against the Russian authorities last month. He led his men deep into Russian territory, taking the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don and only stopping a few dozen kilometers from Moscow.
The mutinous warlord then went off the grid after he struck a deal with the Kremlin and Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko under which Wagner fighters would be spared prosecution in Russia, while he and his men would go in exile in Belarus.
He resurfaced a few days later, posting a voice message on social media to thank the supporters of the aborted uprising while signalling that Minsk had offered options for his troops to continue operating from Belarus.
Since then, there have been contradicting reports about Prigozhin’s whereabouts. Lukashenko initially confirmed Prigozhin had popped up in Belarus three days after the rebellion, on June 27, before later saying that he wasn’t actually there — and could even be in Russia.
Last week, the Kremlin said the Wagner boss was in Moscow on June 29, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin together with other Wagner commanders.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
“When Putin, and his craven lust for land and power, unleashed his brutal war on Ukraine, he was betting NATO would break apart … But he thought wrong,” Biden said at the end of the two-day summit in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius.
“NATO is stronger, more energised and yes, more united than ever in its history. Indeed, more vital to our shared future,” he said.
The Russian foreign ministry said in a statement late on Wednesday that the outcome of the NATO meeting would be “carefully analysed” for the threats posed to Russia’s security.
“Taking into account the challenges and threats to Russia’s security and interests that have been identified, we will respond in a timely and appropriate manner, using all means and methods at our disposal,” the ministry said in the statement.
Western powers were determined to divide “the world into democracies and autocracies”, the ministry said, adding that “the crosshairs of this policy of searching for enemies is aimed at Russia”.
“Taking the course of escalation, they issued a new batch of promises to supply the Kyiv regime with more and more modern and long-range weapons in order to prolong the conflict as long as possible – to exhaustion,” the ministry said.
Russia would respond by strengthening “the country’s military organisation and defence system”.
The NATO summit, which opened with news that Turkey would approve Sweden’s membership of the military alliance after months of objections, ended on Wednesday with the US and its allies giving Ukraine new security assurances for its defence against Russia.
NATO’s courting of Ukraine will likely further anger Putin who has partly portrayed his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO’s eastward expansion and to prevent the possibility of Ukraine joining the Western military alliance and the stationing of NATO forces at Russia’s borders.
Washington, DC-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, (ISW) said on Wednesday that the NATO summit “demonstrated the degree to which the 2022 Russian invasion has set back the goals for which the Kremlin claims it launched the war” on Ukraine.
“The aim of preventing NATO expansion and, indeed, rolling back earlier rounds of NATO expansion and pushing NATO back from Russia’s borders was one of the Kremlin’s stated demands before the invasion. The Kremlin has repeated this aim continually throughout the war,” the ISW said.
The Group of Seven (G7) Coalition and #NATO signed agreements to offer #Ukraine long-term security commitments during the second day of the #NATOSummit on July 12. Ukraine also secured additional bilateral security and defense agreements on July 12. https://t.co/7FIdErkAFOpic.twitter.com/PUFfPQZ47u
The summit represents a “defeat” for “Russia’s pre-war aims”, it added.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov became on Wednesday the second senior Russian figure in as many days to warn of a military escalation owing to Western support for Ukraine. Lavrov said that the West was creating a nuclear threat to Russia by planning to supply Ukraine with US-made F-16 fighter jets.
“The USA and its NATO satellites are creating the risk of a direct military confrontation with Russia and this can have catastrophic consequences,” Lavrov said in an interview with the Russian internet portal Lenta.ru.
F-16 fighter jets can potentially carry nuclear weapons, Lavrov said.
“The very fact of the appearance of such systems in the Ukrainian armed forces we will consider as a nuclear threat from the West,” he said.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, warned on Tuesday that assistance for Ukraine from NATO members brought the threat of a third global conflict closer.
The training of Ukrainian pilots in the operation of F-16 fighter jets is to begin in Romania in August, officials said on the sidelines of the NATO summit. Kyiv’s military allies have yet to agree on the actual provision of the advanced warplanes to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s defence minister says he hopes training lasts no longer than 6 months so fighter planes can be in combat against Russia soon.
The training of Ukrainian pilots on United States-made F-16 fighter jets is to begin in Romania in August, officials have said on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Lithuania.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov announced the Romania training programme on Tuesday alongside Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren and Denmark’s acting Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen.
“Hopefully, we will be able to see results in the beginning of next year,” Poulsen told reporters.
Resnikov said he hoped the training would last no longer than six months and that by that point, Ukraine will be using the combat aircraft in its fight against Russia’s invasion of his country.
[Al Jazeera]
The Netherlands and Denmark are leading an 11-nation coalition to train Ukrainian pilots on the US fighter jets, which Ukraine argues will help turn the tide of the war in its favour.
Training Ukrainian pilots in the use of advanced fighter planes was previously seen as controversial but received the green light in May at the G7 summit in Japan.
Russia later warned that providing Kyiv with F-16 would be a “colossal risk” as it threatens spreading the war to other parts of Europe.
Though Ukraine’s allies have committed to providing training and other support, the opening of the fighter pilot school does not mean F-16s will actually be delivered to Kyiv. Ukraine’s military supporters have yet to commit to sending warplanes.
Romania announced last week that it intended to set up an F-16 training centre for military pilots from NATO partner states and Ukraine.
Romania, which shares a long border with Ukraine and has been a NATO member since 2004 and a European Union member since 2007, has increased defence spending in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
After Moscow’s forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, NATO increased its presence on Europe’s eastern flank by sending additional multinational battlegroups to alliance members Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia.
The fighter pilot training facility will aim to position Romania as “a regional leader in the field of F-16 pilot training” and contribute to “improving cohesion, demonstrating unity and strengthening the deterrence and defence posture Euro-Atlantic”, the Romanian government said in a statement.
Romania has played an increasingly prominent role in the alliance throughout Russia’s war in Ukraine, including hosting a NATO meeting of foreign ministers in November. The government has also approved the acquisition of an unspecified number of “latest generation” US-made F-35 fighter jets as part of Romania’s push to modernise its air force.
The New Democrat Coalition, which says it has a 98-House member bloc, is ramping up pressure on Speaker Kevin McCarthy to reject hardliners in his party and instead work with Republicans and Democrats to pass its annual defense legislation in a timely manner.
“Speaker McCarthy must choose between caving to the most extreme elements of his party that seek to compromise our national defense or working with sensible lawmakers to support all of our troops,” New Democrat Coalition Chairs jointly announced Tuesday.
The urge to pursue a bipartisan path comes as leadership must navigate right-wing lawmakers pushing for a slew of hot button amendments that could put moderate Republicans in a complicated position and threaten Democratic support for the must-pass bill.
The House Rules Committee is meeting Tuesday to decide which of the over 1,500 amendments that have been submitted will actually be made in order, with the GOP leaders hoping to pass the final bill on the floor by the end of this week.
The National Defense Authorization Act, which outlines the policy agenda for the Department of Defense and the US military and authorizes spending in line with the Pentagon’s priorities, passed out of the House Armed Services committee with overwhelming bipartisan support, even though some controversial GOP amendments – including a ban on drag shows on military bases and the reinstatement of troops who refused to comply with the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate – were adopted.
While drama isn’t new in fights over the NDAA, which has been passed by Congress every year for the last six decades, this level of acrimony is notable. After receiving heat for the debt ceiling deal struck earlier this year, McCarthy is under increasing pressure to cater to his right flank, ratcheting up concerns about the ability for lawmakers to reach a compromise that both chambers can agree on.
Republicans can only afford to lose two votes on the committee on a party-line vote, and McCarthy placed three far-right members on the panel in exchange for becoming speaker. At least one of the conservative lawmakers on the panel, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, told CNN he plans to oppose the rule.
This story has been updated with additional updates.
