A new developer stream for Star Wars: The Old Republic showed a surprising feature on the way in Game Update 7.5. Players will be able to earn their own farmstead on the planet of Dantooine after completing a quest chain. The cozy feature will come with a Spring Abundance festival, which includes the surprisingly comfortable activities of “seed collecting, dancing, pie-baking, animal rehabilitation, and a galactic egg hunt,” according to a press release.
Broadsword is taking the game in an intriguing direction. Patch 7.4.1 included Date Night companion missions, which are exactly what you’d expect from the name. These missions become available if the companion has been romanced, and is available in a player’s story — some circumstances can cause your partner of choice to leave the party. Date Night missions will be released in batches, and they grant a unique title and decoration.
Update 7.5 also includes a new main story chapter where players wrangle with a Hutt, and new single-player Ventures that are meant to provide a challenging experience. Players train up their very own Basilisk Prototype B3-S1 (or Bessie) and prepare them for combat. Eventually, Bessie joins your team as a permanent companion. The release date for Update 7.5 will be announced soon.
Helldivers 2 was compared to Starship Troopers when it was first released, but since then, the squad-based third-person shooter has become closer to the post-Judgment Day future in Terminator. While the first mission order, to retake territory from bugs called Terminids, was a success, things went downhill once the game introduced the Automatons, the much harder-to-kill robots that attack Super Earth planets.
Just this week, players lost the planet Malevelon Creek to the Automatons while just barely liberating Mort after around 10 million Helldiver deaths, according to a post in the official Helldivers 2 Discord (via Gamesradar). Despite some gains, the Automatons have pushed back Super Earth’s forces for now. Starting Thursday, players will see a message stating the major order to liberate planets under Automaton control has been a failure, and players should change course:
Despite the valorous efforts of the Helldivers, Automaton marauders have invaded Super Earth territory. Patriotic citizens mourn as their sufficiently-sized homes burn to the ground. Super Earth citizens demand justice, and they will receive it. But for now, the Terminid Control System is ready for activation.
While players can still fight on Automaton worlds, most will likely shift their priorities to Terminid territory, starting with Veld, which features a hive that “eluded detection and has been gestating un-Democratic vermin for weeks.”
Helldivers 2 launched with the Terminids, and while they proved to be a challenge, players banded together and were able to complete the first major order and reap the rewards. That was not the case with the Automatons, which proved to be way tougher than their organic bug brethren. Besides the fact that even the smallest units are covered in tough-to-pierce armor, the game introduced missions that required way more strategy and teamwork than previous ones. Along with some surprise real-time work from Arrowhead Game Studios devs, the failure was inevitable.
Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
The mission type that specifically threw players for a loop was escort missions, which required Helldivers to help researchers and other citizens trapped on planets being invaded by Automaton fleets escape into an extraction point. Sounds easy enough on its face: Follow some unarmed civilians as they run from one side of a relatively small area to another. It was a common objective with the Terminids as well. However, anybody who’s played one of these Automaton missions through will tell you that after the first 10 or so get rescued, you’ll get bombarded with Automatons of all kinds. And because these missions take place in one small space with a lot of chokepoints, and the NPCs aren’t the best at self-preservation, it’s easy for players and civilians to die over and over… and over.
Players on the Helldivers subreddit have been trying to plan out strategies for this specific mission type since the campaign started. The consensus has been to have a full four-person team, with three people luring enemies into the outskirts of the mission area and one person focusing on stealth tactics to escort civilians (that means using smoke stratagems or specialty scouting armor sets). However, this only works if people are willing to constantly communicate in voice chat. Depending on your difficulty level, you still might run into some extremely heavy spawn rates that will decimate your team regardless of how coordinated you are. And with its 40-minute clock, there is a lot of time for things to go horribly wrong. Plus, players have reported bugs, like NPCs standing in front of the extraction point without entering.
I spoke with a player who identified himself to Polygon as Alessio, aka Zarrusso on Reddit, who posted a clear, comprehensive visual guide on how to tackle these missions this week, basically putting all the disparate Reddit threads and YouTube videos on the topic together. The guide suggests landing as far away from the objective as possible, along with a set of stratagems to equip.
Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment
“On difficulty 6 [Extreme] and all of the above, the difficulty spikes greatly and we couldn’t kill the enemies fast enough and the civilians kept dying after taking one step outside,” he wrote. “So after getting some advice from YouTube and Reddit and just playing the missions, I put together that little strategy. And now I play those missions on difficulty 7, 8, and 9, and I have completed like 90 percent of my escort missions.”
These escort missions require way more strategy than others. Some Automaton objectives are nearly identical to Terminid ones (kill a certain number of enemies; launch an ICBM), so they didn’t have a large barrier to entry and therefore didn’t need nearly as much coordination between players, especially on lower difficulties. “The other missions don’t require this much strategy. On lower difficulties, you can pretty much do them without thinking but still need to bring the right weapons,” Zarrusso explained.
The Automaton escort missions, though, have been a completely different challenge for players, despite being similar to previous ones. This led to many people spamming easier 15-minute objectives instead. With this many failures on the board, it’s no wonder the community didn’t succeed in their collective fight.
But also, failure might’ve been the point all along. In a pre-release video, deputy game director Sagar Beroshi revealed Helldivers 2 would have a game master who would introduce twists and story moments, watching players as they complete missions and responding in real time. Players still have a degree of control over how mission orders go, but like in a tabletop RPG, the GM will move players in a specific direction, sometimes with a little improv. This might include something small like giving players an extra stratagem mid-round, or something much more globally impactful.
“The enemies have goals, right? They will look at what you’ve done, respond to the ways in which you have — you as the community, that is — has behaved, and react in a way that changes the face of the galaxy thereafter,” Beroshi said.
A recent PC Gamer article features a quick interview with CEO Johan Pilestedt, who explained this dev’s name is Joel and he apparently “takes his job very seriously.”
“Joel, in his infinite wisdom decided, ‘What happens when a faction wins a portion of a war? Well, they mine everything.’ That’s where the incendiary mine segment came from,” Pilestedt gave as an example, referring to the period where players got access to the incendiary mine stratagem for free.
Helldivers 2 will continue to surprise players with these tactics. “We have a lot of systems built into the game where the Game Master has a lot of control over the play experience. It’s something that we’re continuously evolving based on what’s happening in the game,” Pilestedt said. “And as part of the roadmap, there are things that we want to keep secret because we want to surprise and delight.” This will likely be with mechs, which have been teased and have been the subject of leaks, along with other new enemies and stories. It’s all a good reminder that your best efforts might be in vain, but you can turn the tides of war, and that makes for a more complex play experience.
TEL AVIV — As he tries to cling to power, Benjamin Netanyahu is being buffeted by contradictory demands over the direction of the war in Gaza. His war cabinet is increasingly urging a cease-fire deal to be struck with Hamas — to secure the return of Israeli hostages — while lawmakers in his own Likud party are pushing in the opposite direction and pressing for military operations to remain unrelenting.
Unable to square the circle, the Israeli leader appears to have chosen to postpone decisions about the direction of the war, but it is doubtful they can be delayed for much longer. A public groundswell is starting to build for military operations to be put on hold and for a cease-fire to be reached with Hamas for the release of more than a hundred Israelis still being held in Gaza.
There’s rising alarm about the captives’ treatment and the conditions they are enduring. Thousands of Israelis took to the streets over the weekend calling for the hostages to be prioritized over the military campaign. And in a television interview Thursday, a war cabinet minister, Gadi Eisenkot, a former and highly popular chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), warned the only way to save hostages in the near term is through a deal even if that comes at a high price.
Eisenkot, whose 25-year-old son and 19-year-old nephew died fighting in Gaza in December, also appeared to criticize Netanyahu’s management of the war with Hamas, suggesting the Israeli leadership is not telling the Israeli public the truth about the conflict and that talk of destroying Hamas is over-blown. A complete victory over the militant group is unrealistic, he said.
“Whoever speaks of the absolute defeat [of Hamas in Gaza] and of it no longer having the will or the capability [to harm Israel], is not speaking the truth. That is why we should not tell tall tales,” Eisenkot said.
Eisenkot also said elections should be held soon to restore public trust in the Israeli government following the devastating October 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas. Eisenkot is seen by some as a future prime minister candidate, favored by some even over Benny Gantz, a former defense minister. The two are leaders of the centrist National Unity Party and agreed to join Netanyahu’s war cabinet after October 7 as a demonstration of national solidarity.
The Eisenkot interview, broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12 News, was especially damaging as it was broadcast hours after Netanyahu rejected in a press conference the idea of holding elections in the middle of a war. Netanyahu said he could continue in power well into 2025. He vowed to “bring about a complete victory” over Hamas.
Netanyahu’s indecision is also infuriating his own lawmakers — they worry there is a lack of defined goals beyond the slogan of “destroying Hamas,” and fear the prime minister will cave to pressure for a cease-fire. And they complain about a throttling back of military operations, which has seen the IDF move away from large-scale ground operations and air strikes to conduct more targeted missions.
Tactical transition
Senior Israeli military officials first confirmed on January 8 the tactical transition, with military spokesman Daniel Hagari saying the IDF would reduce troop numbers in the Palestinian enclave and conduct “one-off raids there instead of maintaining wide-scale maneuvers.”
Described as Phase 3 in the military campaign, officials in briefings cast the transition as necessary to give reservists some rest for the long haul in a war they say will take months, and to return others to their jobs to help the country’s ailing economy. The officials also said some troops needed to be redeployed to Israel’s tense northern border, where Hezbollah attacks have prompted Israel to threaten a ground campaign in Lebanon.
But the reasons given for the adjustment are disputed by some Likud lawmakers, including by Danny Danon, a former U.S. envoy to the U.N. He and others view the shift more than anything as an effort to placate the Biden administration and European governments anxious about the civilian death toll in Gaza. And there’s mounting talk of a possible future party leadership challenge to Netanyahu.
“We hear a lot of declarations both from the prime minister and [Defense Minister] Yoav Gallant almost every day about how we’re going to eradicate and destroy Hamas. But when you look at what’s happening now, I’m not sure it’s going in that direction,” Danon told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. “If he will not win the war, then I’m sure there will be another leader from the right that will step in because that will be the time,” he added.
Danon has twice challenged Netanyahu for the party leadership, in 2007 and 2014, but waves off a question about whether he will again seek the party’s leadership, saying merely that Likud is growing uneasy. “I speak with a lot of people and I hear them. They demand victory,” he said. “He’s being tested. Netanyahu has done a lot for Israel over the years, but he will be remembered by the way he finishes the war.”
Danon said the only acceptable conclusion to the war is “either Hamas surrenders or it is destroyed.” Military pressure is what led to the release of some hostages in December, he said. “What has happened now is that we have changed the way we are conducting the operation because of the pressure coming from the U.S.,” he added.
With opinion polls suggesting Likud has lost a third of its electoral support since October 7, Danon suggested victory could restore the party’s fortunes as well as being necessary for the security of Israel. “We need to hit Hamas so hard they will not be able to come against us anymore,” he said, adding that prime ministers, including Netanyahu have too often pulled up short before and announced Israel has been made safe and its enemies have now been deterred only for attacks to resume. “You cannot play that game anymore,” he said.
Party unease
With Likud members becoming increasingly restless, Netanyahu is more and more focusing on trying to tamp down internal party dissent. “It is all about Likud at the moment,” said a senior Israeli official, who was granted anonymity to talk about a sensitive issue. The official acknowledged that talk of a party rebellion might be premature and that Likud critics would have to calculate that an attempt to oust Netanyahu could ultimately trigger early elections that would see Likud lose badly. Nonetheless, the Israeli leader is agitated about the unease within the ranks of a party that he molded over the years in his own image, stacking it with loyalists and promoting those who share his views.
Likud disapproval partly explains Netanyahu’s strong push back last week on Washington’s readout of a phone conversation between the Israeli leader and U.S. President Joe Biden — their first since December. Israeli officials on Saturday took issue with Biden’s remarks after the call in which he said a two-state solution may still be possible even while Netanyahu is in power. Biden told reporters some “types” of two-state solution may be acceptable to the Israeli premier, even though Netanyahu has frequently ruled out the notion of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Netanyahu’s office reiterated his rigid opposition in a statement sent to POLITICO following Biden’s take. “In his conversation with President Biden, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated his policy that after Hamas is destroyed Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty,” his office said.
A two-state solution is anathema for the right-wing of the Likud party.
On October 7, Hamas fighters launched a bloody attack against Israel, using paragliders, speedboats and underground tunnels to carry out an offensive that killed almost 1,200 people and saw hundreds more taken back to the Gaza Strip as prisoners.
Almost three months on, Israel’s massive military retaliation is reverberating around the region, with explosions in Lebanon and rebels from Yemen attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Western countries are pumping military aid into Israel while deploying fleets to protect commercial shipping — risking confrontation with the Iranian navy.
That’s in line with a grim prediction made last year by Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, who said that Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza meant an “expansion of the scope of the war has become inevitable,” and that further escalation across the Middle East should be expected.
What’s happening?
The Israel Defense Forces are still fighting fierce battles for control of the Gaza Strip in what officials say is a mission to destroy Hamas. Troops have already occupied much of the north of the 365-square-kilometer territory, home to around 2.3 million Palestinians, and are now stepping up their assault in the south.
Entire neighborhoods of densely-populated Gaza City have been levelled by intense Israeli shelling, rocket attacks and air strikes, rendering them uninhabitable. Although independent observers have been largely shut out, the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry claims more than 22,300 people have been killed, while the U.N. says 1.9 million people have been displaced.
On a visit to the front lines, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that his country is in the fight for the long haul. “The feeling that we will stop soon is incorrect. Without a clear victory, we will not be able to live in the Middle East,” he said.
As the Gaza ground war intensifies, Hamas and its allies are increasingly looking to take the conflict to a far broader arena in order to put pressure on Israel.
According to Seth Frantzman, a regional analyst with the Jerusalem Post and adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Iran is certainly making a play here in terms of trying to isolate Israel [and] the U.S. and weaken U.S. influence, also showing that Israel doesn’t have the deterrence capabilities that it may have had in the past or at least thought it had.”
Northern front
On Tuesday a blast ripped through an office in Dahieh, a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut — 130 kilometers from the border with Israel. Hamas confirmed that one of its most senior leaders, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in the strike.
Government officials in Jerusalem have refused to confirm Israeli forces were behind the killing, while simultaneously presenting it as a “surgical strike against the Hamas leadership” and insisting it was not an attack against Lebanon itself, despite a warning from Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati that the incident risked dragging his country into a wider regional war.
Tensions between Israel and Lebanon have spiked in recent weeks, with fighters loyal to Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist militant group that controls the south of the country, firing hundreds of rockets across the frontier. Along with Hamas, Hezbollah is part of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” that aims to destroy the state of Israel.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Iran’s foreign ministry said the death of al-Arouri, the most senior Hamas official confirmed to have died since October 7, will only embolden resistance against Israel, not only in the Palestinian territories but also in the wider Middle East.
The Israel Defense Forces are still fighting fierce battles for control of the Gaza Strip in what officials say is a mission to destroy Hamas | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
“We’re talking about the death of a senior Hamas leader, not from Hezbollah or the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards. Is it Iran who’s going to respond? Hezbollah? Hamas with rockets? Or will there be no response, with the various players waiting for the next assassination?” asked Héloïse Fayet, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations.
In a much-anticipated speech on Wednesday evening, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah condemned the killing but did not announce a military response.
Red Sea boils over
For months now, sailors navigating the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb Strait that links Europe to Asia have faced a growing threat of drone strikes, missile attacks and even hijackings by Iran-backed Houthi militants operating off the coast of Yemen.
The Houthi movement, a Shia militant group supported by Iran in the Yemeni civil war against Saudi Arabia and its local allies, insists it is only targeting shipping with links to Israel in a bid to pressure it to end the war in Gaza. However, the busy trade route from the Suez Canal through the Red Sea has seen dozens of commercial vessels targeted or delayed, forcing Western nations to intervene.
Over the weekend, the U.S. Navy said it had intercepted two anti-ship missiles and sunk three boats carrying Houthi fighters in what it said was a hijacking attempt against the Maersk Hangzhou, a container ship. Danish shipping giant Maersk said Tuesday that it would “pause all transits through the Red Sea until further notice,” following a number of other cargo liners; energy giant BP is also suspending travel through the region.
On Wednesday the Houthis targeted a CMA CGM Tage container ship bound for Israel, according to the group’s military spokesperson Yahya Sarea. “Any U.S. attack will not pass without a response or punishment,” he added.
“The sensible decision is one that the vast majority of shippers I think are now coming to, [which] is to transit through round the Cape of Good Hope,” said Marco Forgione, director general at the Institute of Export & International Trade. “But that in itself is not without heavy impact, it’s up to two weeks additional sailing time, adds over £1 million to the journey, and there are risks, particularly in West Africa, of piracy as well.”
However, John Stawpert, a senior manager at the International Chamber of Shipping, noted that while “there has been disruption” and an “understandable nervousness about transiting these routes … trade is continuing to flow.”
“A major contributory factor to that has been the presence of military assets committed to defending shipping from these attacks,” he said.
The impacts of the disruption, especially price hikes hitting consumers, will be seen “in the next couple of weeks,” according to Forgione. Oil and gas markets also risk taking a hit — the price of benchmark Brent crude rose by 3 percent to $78.22 a barrel on Wednesday. Almost 10 percent of the world’s oil and 7 percent of its gas flows through the Red Sea.
Western response
On Wednesday evening, the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom issued an ultimatum calling the Houthi attacks “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing,” but with only vague threats of action.
“We call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks and release of unlawfully detained vessels and crews. The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways,” the statement said.
The Houthi movement insists it is only targeting shipping with links to Israel in a bid to pressure it to end the war in Gaza | Houthi Movement via Getty Images
Despite the tepid language, the U.S. has already struck back at militants from Iranian-backed groups such as Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria after they carried out drone attacks that injured U.S. personnel.
The assumption in London is that airstrikes against the Houthis — if it came to that — would be U.S.-led with the U.K. as a partner. Other nations might also chip in.
Two French officials said Paris is not considering air strikes. The country’s position is to stick to self-defense, and that hasn’t changed, one of them said. French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu confirmed that assessment, saying on Tuesday that “we’re continuing to act in self-defense.”
“Would France, which is so proud of its third way and its position as a balancing power, be prepared to join an American-British coalition?” asked Fayet, the think tank researcher.
Iran looms large
Iran’s efforts to leverage its proxies in a below-the-radar battle against both Israel and the West appear to be well underway, and the conflict has already scuppered a long-awaited security deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“Since 1979, Iran has been conducting asymmetrical proxy terrorism where they try to advance their foreign policy objectives while displacing the consequences, the counterpunches, onto someone else — usually Arabs,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of Washington’s Center on Military and Political Power. “An increasingly effective regional security architecture, of the kind the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are trying to build, is a nightmare for Iran which, like a bully on the playground, wants to keep all the other kids divided and distracted.”
Despite Iran’s fiery rhetoric, it has stopped short of declaring all-out war on its enemies or inflicting massive casualties on Western forces in the region — which experts say reflects the fact it would be outgunned in a conventional conflict.
“Neither Iran nor the U.S. nor Israel is ready for that big war,” said Alex Vatanka, director of the Middle East Institute’s Iran program. “Israel is a nuclear state, Iran is a nuclear threshold state — and the U.S. speaks for itself on this front.”
Israel might be betting on a long fight in Gaza, but Iran is trying to make the conflict a global one, he added. “Nobody wants a war, so both sides have been gambling on the long term, hoping to kill the other guy through a thousand cuts.”
Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.
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Gabriel Gavin, Antonia Zimmermann and Laura Kayali
An American destroyer intercepted four drones fired by Houthi militants into the busy shipping lanes of the Red Sea, as the escalating crisis saw two commercial tankers hit in one chaotic day.
In a statement issued Sunday, U.S. Central Command said its navy had “shot down four unmanned aerial drones originating from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen that were inbound to the USS Laboon” the day before. The American destroyer had been patrolling the area as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian, the Washington-led mission to prevent violence spilling over into the strategic waterway.
On Saturday, the Pentagon announced that a Japanese-owned, Liberian-flagged chemical tanker, the Chem Pluto, had been struck by a drone in the Indian Ocean, stating that the attack was launched from Iran.
According to data from analytics platform Kpler, seen by POLITICO, the Chem Pluto had been carrying almost 43,000 barrels of highly-flammable benzene en route to the port of Mangaluru at the time, but no casualties have been reported. The attack was well outside the usual area of operation for Houthi drones, around 300 nautical miles from the coast of India and it is believed to be the first time the U.S. has accused Iran directly of targeting commercial shipping since the crisis began.
Washington has previously said intelligence revealed Iran was “deeply involved” in planning attacks on vessels, working closely with Yemen’s Houthi rebels to cause a crisis that experts fear is already threatening the world economy. Houthi forces say they are targeting vessels with links to Israel in retaliation for its war in Gaza.
On Saturday evening, two civilian ships in the Red Sea area sounded the alarm that they were under attack. The Blaamanen, a Norwegian-flagged vessel carrying a quarter of a million tons of sunflower oil, reported it had narrowly avoided an attack drone, while Indian-flagged crude oil tanker Saibaba confirmed it had taken a direct hit.
Close to the Suez Canal which links Europe to Asia, more than 10 percent of global trade passes through the Red Sea, with around 17,000 ships a year crossing between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea.
In his first interview since being appointed as U.K. foreign secretary, former British prime minister David Cameron, told The Telegraph on Friday that the West must send “an incredibly clear message that this escalation will not be tolerated” to Tehran. Along with France, Italy and Spain, the U.K. is one of a handful of countries joining forces with the U.S. as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian.
Germany has floated that the United Nations could take control in Gaza once the Israel-Hamas war is over, according to a document seen by POLITICO.
However, both the Palestinians and some EU diplomats have serious doubts about the feasibility of the idea, with a senior Palestinian figure in Europe calling it “unacceptable.”
Israel has been striking the densely populated Gaza Strip in reaction to an attack by Hamas on October 7, during which the militant group killed around 1,200 Israelis. According to data from the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli strikes have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians.
Discussions are ongoing about how to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza and how to stop the fighting. But there are also increasing discussions on scenarios for after the war.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority” should ultimately govern Gaza but offered no indications on how to make it “effective” or overcome Israeli opposition. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had stated earlier that his country would take “overall security responsibility” for Gaza “for an indefinite period.”
That is a no-go for the EU and the United States.
The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, on Monday stressed that Israel cannot stay in Gaza after the war, when he presented his vision for what happens post conflict ahead of a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Healsosaid, “we believe that a Palestinian authority must return to Gaza,” stressing he meant “one Palestinian authority, not the Palestinian Authority.”
Blinken has also warned that Israel cannot reoccupy Gaza after its war with Hamas ends.
The German proposal — a two-page, nonofficial document (or non-paper in EU-speak) — is dated October 21, so before Israel’s decision to launch the second phase of its military operation against Gaza at the end of October.
Berlin, one of Israel’s staunchest allies within the EU, writes that “Israel’s goal is a goal we share: never again should Hamas be in a position to terrorize Israel and its citizens.” Yet at the same time, “it is clear that these goals are hard to achieve with military means only … Its radical ideology and agenda cannot be fought by military means.”
It floats five different scenarios about the future of the Gaza Strip, including Israeli re-occupation of Gaza, and either the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Egypt taking control.
The U.N scenario is also on the list. In Berlin’s words, the scenario means an “internationalization of Gaza under the umbrella of the United Nations (and regional partners)” with “a carefully organized transition” toward Palestinian self-administration, “ideally” through elections “and in combination with an international coalition that provides necessary security.”
The document described this scenario as one that “could offer a political perspective since neither the PA nor Egypt are willing or able to take over and a return to the status quo ante or an Israeli re-occupation are politically not desirable.”
But Berlin also warned that “this scenario would require significant investment of political capital and financing as well as an international coalition to engage on security issues alongside the U.N.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority” should ultimately govern Gaza but offered no indications on how to make it “effective” or overcome Israeli opposition | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The document says that “the EU should take over a pro-active role in shaping this [the post-war] discussion” and it ends by emphasizing that the situation in the Gaza Strip “can only be sustainably stabilized through a relaunch of the Middle East Peace Process.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the U.N.idea in her speech last week to EU ambassadors, saying that after the conflict the world has to ensure Gaza is no longer a safe haven for terrorists. To ensure that, von der Leyen said “different ideas are being discussed on how this can be ensured, including an international peace force under U.N. mandate.”
But several diplomats — granted, like others in this article, anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject — said that theGerman suggestion didn’t go far enough. It came in the very early stages of the conflict, it was not circulated among all member countries and was not intended to be discussed by foreign ministers.
When German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated Berlin’s line more recently, she said that “Gaza must not be occupied, but ideally be placed under international protection” without explicitly mentioning a U.N. role.
One EU diplomat described the document as “stillborn.”
Palestinian no-go
The German suggestion has angered Palestinian officials, already unhappy at EU statements that don’t mention a cease-fire in Gaza.
When German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated Berlin’s line more recently, she said that “Gaza must not be occupied, but ideally be placed under international protection” without explicitly mentioning a U.N. role | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
That feeling extends across Muslim countries. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — which has 57 Muslim countries as members — held a press conference in Brussels on Monday morning, at the same time as EU foreign ministers were meeting, to argue that they don’t want to talk about the future of the Gaza Strip as long as there’s no cease-fire.
The 27 EU member countries have agreed on a call for “humanitarian corridors and pauses” but there’s no unanimity on a cease-fire, which is being pushed by Spain but objected to by the likes of Germany and Austria for several reasons, including that it could put Israel and Hamas on the same level, as the former is a country and the latter classed as a terrorist organization by the bloc.
For Abdalrahim Alfarra, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the EU, Belgium and Luxembourg, the U.N taking control of Gaza would be “unacceptable.”
He told POLITICO that a U.N role in providing international protection at the borders — like the blue helmets in the south of Lebanon — to protect the frontier between two future countries, Israel and Palestine, is “what we need.”
The problem with the German document is that it doesn’t talk about U.N protection at the borders but rather about U.N “control of Gaza,” he said.
Alfarra said that the Palestinian Authority has not been consulted about the document and also criticized it for not mentioning any form of cease-fire before addressing the future of the region.
“They didn’t talk about how we’re going to protect the men and women now. Right away: the future of Gaza,” he said.
The World Health Organization described Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital as a “death zone,” after a U.N. team visited the largest medical complex in the Palestinian enclave on Saturday.
“The team saw a hospital no longer able to function: no water, no food, no electricity, no fuel, medical supplies depleted,” WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote on social media.
He announced WHO was trying to set up an urgent evacuation plan from the current situation, which was described as “unbearable and unjustifiable,” and called for a cease-fire.
Some 290 patients, including 32 babies in extremely critical condition, were left at al-Shifa, according to the U.N.-led mission, which accessed the facility briefly. The team also saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital, it said.
Meanwhile, the White House said the U.S. was working “hard” to get a deal between Israel and Hamas that would see the release of hostages seized by the militant group in exchange for a five-day pause in the fighting, after the Washington Post reported that the two sides are close to agreement on a U.S.-brokered deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. officials said no deal had been reached yet.
More than 11,500 Palestinians have been killed, while another 2,700 have been reported missing, according to Hamas-run health authorities in the Gaza Strip, following the group’s attack into southern Israel six weeks ago, which triggered the war. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Around 1,200 people have been killed on the Israeli side, mainly civilians from Hamas’ attack, in which the group also took 240 hostages back into Gaza.
Israel has repeatedly said the al-Shifa hospital houses a Hamas command center and announced it would soon release photos of the military’s findings of the hospital which include a tunnel shaft, Israel’s spokesman Daniel Hagari said during a news conference Saturday evening.
KYIV — Sergeant Yegor Firsov, deputy commander of a Ukrainian army strike drone unit, sounds exhausted in a voice message he sent to POLITICO from Avdiivka, an industrial city at the center of intense fighting on the eastern front.
Russian troops have been storming Avdiivka relentlessly for more than two weeks in an all-out effort to encircle the Ukrainian forces there.
“The situation is very difficult. We are fighting for the heights around the city,” Firsov said. “If the enemy controls these heights, then all logistics and roads leading to the city will be under its control. This will make it much harder to resupply our forces.”
Facing an enemy with superior numbers of troops and armor, the Ukrainian defenders are holding on with the help of tiny drones flown by operators like Firsov that, for a few hundred dollars, can deliver an explosive charge capable of destroying a Russian tank worth more than $2 million.
The FPV — or “first-person view” — drones used in such strikes are equipped with an onboard camera that enables skilled operators like Firsov to direct them to their target with pinpoint accuracy. Before the war, a teenager might hope to get one for a New Year present. Now they are being used as agile weapons that can transform battlefield outcomes. Others are watching, and learning, from a technology that is giving early adopters an asymmetric advantage against established methods of warfare.
“It’s hard to handle the emotion when a drone pilot hits a tank. The whole group and the whole platoon are happy like babies. Infantry units are rejoicing nearby. Everyone is screaming, and hugging. Although they do not know the guy who gave them this happiness,” Firsov wrote in a Facebook post.
A typical FPV weighs up to one kilogram, has four small engines, a battery, a frame and a camera connected wirelessly to goggles worn by a pilot operating it remotely. It can carry up to 2.5 kilograms of explosives and strike a target at a speed of up to 150 kilometers per hour, explains Pavlo Tsybenko, acting director of the Dronarium military academy outside Kyiv.
“This drone costs up to $400 and can be made anywhere. We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress. We made the carbon frame ourselves. And, yeah, the batteries are from Tesla. One car has like 1,100 batteries that can be used to power these little guys,” Tsybenko told POLITICO on a recent visit, showing the custom-made FPV drones used by the academy to train future drone pilots.
“It is almost impossible to shoot it down,” he said. “Only a net can help. And I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.”
Contagious technology
Commercial drones were first weaponized in Azerbaijan’s — ultimately successful — campaign to retake the Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway region from Armenian separatists. Their use has expanded rapidly in the 20-month-old Russian war in Ukraine.
And, earlier this month, Hamas militants flew drones to knock out Israeli border defenses during a surprise attack in which they massacred more than 1,400 people and took around 200 hostages. For Ukrainians, the video clip of a Hamas drone destroying an Israeli main battle tank by dropping a grenade was a film they had seen before.
Ukrainian drone experts and intelligence officials are convinced that Russian specialists have trained Hamas in the art of drone warfare — although Moscow denies this.
Some experts worry that militants across the world will soon learn how to use FPV drones to sow terror | Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images
“Only we and the Russians know how to do this — and we definitely did not teach them,” Andriy Cherniak, a representative of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate, told POLITICO.
Ruslan Belyaiev, head of the Dronarium military academy, shares that view. He warns that other militants will soon learn how to use FPV drones to sow terror.
“No one is immune from such attacks,” said Belyaiev. “In theory, a specialist with my level of expertise could plan and execute an operation to liquidate the first persons of any European state … Pandora’s box is open.”
Secret training
While NATO militaries hesitate to use commercial drones that are mostly made in China, or made from Chinese components, some Western democracies have already shown interest in learning from Ukraine’s experience of drone warfare.
Several figures in Ukraine’s drone community, granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, told POLITICO that special forces and anti-terrorist units of two NATO countries bordering Russia have taken courses from Ukrainian drone operators over the past six months.
Their focus is on countering small kamikaze drones and commercial drones that can be successfully used for reconnaissance, correcting artillery fire and video signal transmission, one person with direct knowledge said.
Basic training for a drone pilot takes five days. Learning how to pilot a kamikaze drone takes more than 20 days, Tsybenko said.
Battlefield experience has led the Ukrainian government to shift its preference away from conventional military drones, which are miniature fixed-wing aircraft with a long enough range to strike targets inside Russian territory. The effectiveness of FPV drones at closer quarters has led Defense Minister Rustam Umerov to simplify approvals for new models to be deployed.
“FPV drones are effective tools for destroying the enemy and protecting our country. The Ministry of Defense is doing everything possible to increase number of drones,” Umerov said in a statement on Wednesday.
Team players
Every FPV drone pilot works in tandem with aerial reconnaissance units, who fly a DJI Mavic or other type of drone with video and audio transmitters to observe their mission. “An FPV loses its video signal close to the target. So, the other drone helps the pilot and supporting units to understand the target was indeed hit,” Tsybenko said.
Firsov confirmed that in a Facebook post from the front. What looks simple on video in fact requires close coordination between dozens of people.
“Everything seems so simple, put on glasses — and “Bam!” you destroyed a tank,” said Firsov. “In fact, aerial scouts spend hours looking for targets. A decryptor looks at video and finds targets that the enemy has carefully hidden. A navigator who is nearby helps the pilot to fly along the route. An engineer attaching explosives, a sapper, who twists standard ammunition for drones and many, many others.”
Russian forces use FPV drones to target single soldiers | John Moore/Getty Images
Most FPV drones are kamikaze, Tsybenko said. And their effectiveness has changed the stakes. The Russians, who at first lagged behind Ukraine in mastering drone warfare, have learned from their mistakes. And now they are scaling up Ukraine’s methods of drone warfare.
Russian forces now have “countless” FPV drones that they now use to target single soldiers.
Russia has also launched its own production lines and is devising new tactics to deploy drones in swarms. “One manager and all the others will repeat the movement. This controlled pack is a very big threat on the battlefield,” Tsybenko warned.
China factor
However, neither Ukraine nor Russia are able to produce drones for warfare by themselves. They still source crucial parts from China — the leading maker of commercial drones. Earlier this year the Chinese Ministry of Commerce imposed restrictions on drone exports to both Ukraine and Russia out of “fear it would be used for military purposes.”
Still, it’s possible to obtain components and drones via third countries. “Yes, China can either stop or stall the export of parts if it sees ‘Ukraine’ in export data. But it can’t control what we buy in Europe. Russia has fewer problems and a common border with China, and that makes drone imports way easier.”
“Every lock has its key. Indeed, the commercial drones we buy in stores are synchronizing their data with a server. But we learned how to create user logins that are completely anonymized. Even the drone might think it is flying somewhere in Canada — and not in Donbas,” Tsybenko said.
“When we talked to Europeans, they were amazed at how easy it is to hack and anonymize Chinese drones. It is safe to use them, we tried to persuade our partners,” Tsybenko said, adding that Ukraine did not have the luxury of time to independently develop and certify its own drones.
“If we waited, the war would be over when they finally arrived.”
NATO said on Friday it is increasing its peacekeeping presence in northern Kosovo as a result of escalating tensions with neighboring Serbia, as the U.S. called on Serbia to withdraw a military buildup on the border with Kosovo.
The heightening of tensions comes after about 30 heavily armed Serbs stormed the northern Kosovo village of Banjska last Sunday. A Kosovo policeman and three of the attackers were killed in gun battles.
“We need NATO because the border with Serbia is very long and the Serbian army has been recently strengthening its capacities,” Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti told the Associated Press. “They have a lot of military equipment from both the Russian Federation and China,” he said.
“These people want to turn back time,” Kurti said. “They are in search of a time machine. They want to turn the clock back by 30 years. But that is not going to happen,” he said.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008, but Belgrade and Moscow have refused to recognize it.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby confirmed a “large military deployment” of Serbian tanks and artillery was on the border. He described the buildup as “a very destabilizing development” and called on Serbia to withdraw these forces.
The White House also “underscored the readiness of the United States to work with our allies to ensure KFOR [NATO’s Kosovo Force] remained appropriately resourced to fulfill its mission,” according to a readout of a call between the U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Kurti.
Kirby added that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had called Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to urge “immediate de-escalation” and a return to dialogue.
The U.K. also said it was sending troops to support NATO’s peacekeepers on the ground.
Milan Radoicic, the vice president of Serb List, the main Kosovo-Serb political party, resigned on Friday after admitting to setting up the armed group responsible for the attack.
The U.S. ambassador to Kosovo earlier said Washington had concluded that the weekend attack was intended to destabilize the region and warned of potential further escalation. “We know it was coordinated and sophisticated,” Ambassador Jeffrey M. Hovenier told POLITICO, adding the gunmen appeared to have had military training. “The quantity of weapons suggests this was serious, with a plan to destabilize security in the region,” he said.
The EU and the U.S. have pushed for years to broker a lasting peace between Kosovo and Serbia, but a deal has remained elusive amid continued divisions over the status of northern Kosovo, where a majority of the population is Serbian.
The first Russian lunar mission in nearly half a century ended with a bang.
The Luna-25, which left earth on August 10, crash-landed on the moon nine days later after an incident involving the pre-landing maneuvers malfunctioned, Russian space agency Roscosmos said late Saturday on its Telegram channel.
According to Roscosmos, the last communication with the spacecraft was at 2:57 p.m. Moscow time (13:57 CEST) on Saturday. Efforts after that to get back in contact with the craft did not produce any results, the agency said.
A specially formed commission will now look at why the Luna craft malfunctioned, Roscosmos said.
Russia’s Luna-25 mission was sent to scope out the lunar south pole, where scientists believe there is a plentiful supply of water locked in ice in the perpetual shade of mountain ridges. Firming up water reserves is a critical requirement for supporting life on the moon with breathable oxygen, drinking water and even rocket fuel, which would then help space-faring nations further explore the cosmos from any lunar outpost in the future.
Other countries are also eyeing the moon’s southern region. The U.S. plans to send a mission to the south pole later this decade as part of its Artemis program supported by Canada and European countries.
More immediately, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission is scheduled to land on the lunar surface on August 23 to explore the south pole. An earlier Indian mission crashed in 2019.
TBILISI — Georgia’s annual LGBT+ Pride event was evacuated by the police on Saturday after hundreds of counter-protesters stormed the site.
In a statement, organisers of the festival in the capital of Tbilisi announced that they had been forced to shut down the annual festivities after the authorities failed to maintain the perimeter.
“Today’s developments indicate that today’s planned events were pre-coordinated and agreed upon between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the violent group Alt-Info,” Tbilisi Pride said.
The interim deputy minister of internal affairs, Aleksandre Darakhvelidze, said that “the pride festival was to take place in an open territory” and therefore authorities were “unable to provide protection.”
Smoke rose above the site, a field just outside the city, as LGBT+ rainbow flags were burned and right-wing activists danced to traditional Georgian folk music. Attendees had been told to board buses for safety moments before.
Reacting to the attacks, the British Ambassador to Georgia, Mark Clayton, said he was “shocked and saddened to see that despite the planning and preventive measures, Tbilisi Pride festival was cancelled due to safety risks for participants.”
Shocked and saddened to see that despite the planning & preventive measures, @Tbilisipride festival was cancelled due to safety risks for participants. I call on authorities to ensure that all who broke law & aggressively disrupted a peaceful gathering will be brought to justice. pic.twitter.com/6rOsPQqm8n
He called on the Georgian government to “ensure that all who broke law and aggressively disrupted a peaceful gathering will be brought to justice.”
Despite the condemnations, Shalva Papuashvili, chairman of Georgia’s parliament, insisted “the police had an appropriate response” and “properly ensured the safety of both participants and journalists.”
Rémy Bony, executive director of LGBT+ NGO Forbidden Colours, said that EU countries should give refuge to the organisers at their embassies because “their lives are in danger. Thousands of anti-LGBTIQ hooligans are hunting them down.”
🏳️🌈🇬🇪The Embassies of the EU member states in Georgia must open their doors for the organisers of Tbilisi Pride immediately.
Their lives are in danger. Thousands of anti-LGBTIQ hooligans are hunting them down. Georgian authorities are not able to provide safety. pic.twitter.com/8cYtIoRP6N
Alt-Info, a far-right group with close ties to the Georgian Orthodox Church, has repeatedly organized counter-protests against the annual festivities. In 2021, dozens of journalists were injured at the annual event and a cameraman later died.
In the wake of the violence that year, the EU mission to the country issued a strongly-worded letter to the government in which they decried “direct attacks on Georgia’s democratic and pro-European aspirations” and criticized the burning of an EU flag outside the parliament.
Speaking to POLITICO from the crowd on Saturday, Levan Chachua, the leader of the nationalist, religious Georgian Idea political group, said: “I would refuse to … join the EU if that will prevent us from entering the heavenly kingdom.”
Georgia has a stated intention to join the EU. But Brussels has warned that its government, which has sought closer ties with Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine, has presided over a significant backsliding in human rights and civil liberties.
Europe cannot ignore Taiwan’s desire for “better relations” if EU countries such as Germany are keen to acquire advanced microchip-making technologies from the island, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said.
Speaking to POLITICO and other media on his trip to Europe, Wu questioned the enticements Europe is offering TSMC when asked why the world-leading chipmaking giant based in Taiwan has still not come to a decision to build a new plant in Germany.
“If Europe has provided very positive incentive, and also speak with the TSMC in a way that will make the TSMC feel comfortable, that their investment in Europe is going to produce very positive results … their investment in Europe is certainly not going to be stopped by the government,” Wu said.
“Even though we are not selfish in stopping the TSMC, for making investment in other countries, we certainly hope that other countries who want to attract TSMC to make investment can also think about the situation Taiwan is in, or TSMC’s position in Taiwan, and the position Taiwan is seeing in this geo-strategical landscape,” he said.
In contrast, Wu called Japan and the U.S. — where TSMC plants will be completed next year — a “like-minded partner” and “a very good partner of Taiwan,” respectively.
“I think this is some philosophical thinking, rather than government policy of putting conditions on TSMC making investment in other [countries],” Wu said. “That philosophical issue is that when a country is in shortage of computer chips, they will ask Taiwan, ‘you should do this, and you should do that’ — but they don’t seem to be thinking about a broader picture of better relations with Taiwan, economic or otherwise.”
Wu’s comments are a pointed though veiled criticism aimed at Germany.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2021, then-German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier asked his Taiwanese counterpart, Wang Mei-hua, to intervene regarding TSMC’s reduced supply to the German auto industry, according to a letter reported by Reuters. “I would be pleased if you could take on this matter and underline the importance of additional semiconductor capacities for the German automotive industry to TSMC,” said the letter written by Altmaier, who was a key member of Angela Merkel’s government which put a priority on trade with China.
Deterring China
One of Wu’s main missions in Europe — in a trip that took him to Prague, Brussels and Milan — was to shore up diplomatic support for Taiwan among European leaders.
He welcomed the EU’s repeated calls on Beijing to maintain the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. “China might also sense that it might come down with some economic price for their possible aggression against Taiwan, so sanction or other types of economic means against China, and I think the European countries have been discussing about that as well,” he said.
Even if the EU has taken a more critical view of China as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which began in China, as well as Beijing’s stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, Taiwan still faces challenges while engaging with Europe.
On trade, the European Commission has been reluctant to begin negotiations for a bilateral investment agreement (BIA) with Taiwan, apparently out of concern about retaliation from Beijing.
Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu traveled to Europe to shore up diplomatic support from European leaders | Vladimir Simicek/AFP via Getty Images
“We are very concerned that the BIA between Taiwan and EU seems to be called as a hostage to the stalling CAI negotiations,” Wu said, referring to the comprehensive agreement on investment between the EU and China. “But if you look at the linkage — close linkage — between Taiwan and the EU, in economic sense, I think EU needs to find an alternative to strengthen the bilateral economic or trade relations, rather than get bogged down by the CAI which is not going anywhere,” he said.
“We hope we can persuade the EU leadership to think about this in a positive way,” Wu added.
Due to diplomatic protocol under which all EU member countries recognize the “one China” policy, the Taiwanese officials requested that POLITICO and the other media not disclose the location where the interview was conducted. Nor could Wu say which EU officials he met with, or whether he planned to have meetings at NATO, also based in Brussels. (One of the few EU figures confirming Wu’s presence in Brussels was European Parliament Vice President Nicola Beer, who tweeted about their meeting and called Taiwan a “firm member of the democratic family.”)
Despite the EU’s lack of public acknowledgment of his visit — as well as the European public’s preference of “staying neutral” in the event of a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan — Wu still has high hopes that the bloc’s attitude would change.
“I don’t think morally, any sensible country, any sensible leader can stay neutral and say, ‘No, we’re not going to pay any attention to [the] atrocity,'” he said, referring to potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
“And I think the same can apply to the situation between the U.S. and China. If China initiated any aggression against other countries, in killing innocent people, violating international laws, causing atrocities and destructions, and killing innocent people, and all that, and the United States is trying to help, I don’t think the European countries can say that it’s a matter … between the U.S. and China,” Wu said.
“When the international community discuss about the major international principles,” he said, “I think it’s going to be very hard for Europe to say that ‘I don’t care’.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday appeared to confirm that his country’s much-anticipated counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion has begun, but he said Ukraine would refrain from giving details about the operation.
“Counteroffensive and defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine; at which stage I will not talk in detail,” Zelenskyy said at a joint press conference in Kyiv on Saturday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was on an unannounced visit to Ukraine.
“I am in touch with our commanders,” the Ukrainian leader was quoted as saying. “Everyone is positive.”
Zelenskyy’s comments came after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Kyiv’s long-expected counteroffensive was already failing. Reports earlier this week said the counteroffensive was under way, with Ukraine battling to retake territory occupied by Moscow’s forces.
In his nightly address late Saturday, Zelenskyy thanked Ukrainian troops on the front lines but gave few details about the state of combat. “Thanks go to our soldiers. To everyone who is on the front line, in positions, at combat posts, and on combat missions,” he said.
“I thank everyone who is taking a stand and who is moving forward,” the Ukrainian president said.
The British Defense Ministry said on Saturday that Ukraine had conducted “significant” operations in several eastern and southern areas of the country in the last 48 hours. “In some areas, Ukrainian forces have likely made good progress and penetrated the first line of Russian defenses,” the ministry said in a tweet. “In others, Ukrainian progress has been slower,” it said.
“Russian performance has been mixed,” the ministry added.
Fighting has escalated in recent days in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, with Ukraine forces reported to be trying to regain access to the Sea of Azov, the BBC reported. Ukraine’s efforts to advance in the area could be hindered by flooding in the south of the country after the Nova Khakovka dam was destroyed.
Canada’s Trudeau reaffirmed his country’s political and financial support for Ukraine in battling the Russian aggression, committing about $375 million in new military aid.
Trudeau was more circumspect in backing Kyiv’s ascension to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “Canada supports Ukraine to become a NATO member as soon as conditions allow for it,” according to a statement released during the visit.
Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, now in its 16th month, will be at the top of the agenda at a June 15-16 meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. The gathering will be a prelude to next month’s NATO leaders’ summit in Lithuania, where the alliance will again have to confront the issue of Ukraine’s membership bid.
BELFAST — He fought for peace in Northern Ireland — and now George Mitchell is fighting for his life.
The former U.S. Senate majority leader from Maine, who became a diplomatic superhero in Northern Ireland after leading years of painstaking talks to produce the Good Friday Agreement, may be visiting his adopted homeland for the final time.
He hopes not. But, as Mitchell reflected in an interview with POLITICO, he simply cannot know.
Welcomed by well-wishers young and old this week as he returned to Belfast and to Queen’s University, where he served as chancellor for a decade following his peacemaking triumph in 1998, Mitchell opened a conference marking the accord’s 25th anniversary.
For nearly 45 minutes, Mitchell argued passionately for the power of compromise, his message leavened with well-timed jokes poking fun at the entrenched attitudes — and tough-to-decipher vowels — that tested him in Northern Ireland.
You’d never have known that Mitchell, 89, was making his first public speech in three years — nor that he had only recently ended years of chemotherapy in a battle with leukemia that came close to killing him.
“This is a gift by the grace of God to be able to come back here. I’ve had a rough couple of years,” he said.
“I retired from my law firm at the end of 2019, planning with my wife a life of travel and doing a lot of things that we hadn’t done. Then COVID hit and I was almost immediately diagnosed with acute leukemia. So I’ve been pretty sick. I haven’t been able to do very much.
“Initially I underwent intensive chemotherapy, which was very severe. I didn’t read a newspaper, I didn’t watch a minute of television. I was bedridden and very, very sick for about three months. Then I was on chemo for about two-and-a-half years,” he said. “The doctors said to me: ‘There’s a limit to how much chemotherapy you can take. We have to take you off.’ The disease may return. It may be six months, it may be two years — or who knows.”
‘Nothing in politics is impossible’
Mitchell now describes himself as pain-free and in remission.
He spoke in a Queen’s office overlooking the university’s entrance, where a bronze bust honoring him has just been unveiled by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the former British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern. In April 1998, the two premiers joined Mitchell for the intensive final days of the talks in Belfast, while Clinton cajoled Northern Ireland’s polarized politicians by phone from the White House.
Several other figures who helped deliver that breakthrough are no longer alive, including Northern Ireland’s joint Nobel Peace Prize laureates from 1998, John Hume and David Trimble, both of whom have died since the last Good Friday commemorations five years ago.
George Mitchell (C) attends a gala marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement | Pool photo by Charles McQuillan/AFP via Getty Images
In his speech, Mitchell paid equal tribute to Hume, the moderate Irish nationalist leader who opposed Irish Republican Army violence and laid the intellectual architecture for the Good Friday deal; and Trimble, the prickly legal scholar who risked splitting his Ulster Unionist Party by accepting a deal that allowed IRA prisoners to walk free and ex-IRA chiefs to join a new cross-community government without clear-cut guarantees the outlawed group would disarm.
“Without John Hume, there would not have been a peace process. Without David Trimble, there would not have been a peace agreement,” Mitchell said to thunderous applause from the crowd, among them most of today’s crop of British unionist, Irish nationalist and middle-ground leaders.
Left unsaid was that others wanted to see Mitchell himself share that same Nobel prize, given his central role in sustaining hope in the talks after what U.S. President Joe Biden last week described as “700 days of failure.”
Indeed, it has been a common refrain this week among those now seeking to revive Northern Ireland’s shuttered regional government — the centerpiece of a much broader Good Friday package that included police reform, prisoner releases and paramilitary disarmament — that they wish Mitchell was still in the market for one more Belfast mission.
Mitchell offered only raised eyebrows and a wry smile when asked if he’d like to lead one more round of talks at Stormont, the government complex overlooking Belfast.
But he expressed unreserved optimism that the Democratic Unionists — the party that physically tried to block him from taking his chair when the talks began in June 1996, and spent years condemning the peace process as a sellout to IRA terror — will find a way to return to a cross-community government with the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin.
The DUP has refused to revive the coalition government since May 2022 elections, citing its opposition to post-Brexit trade rules that treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the U.K.
Mitchell thinks Northern Ireland’s political fundamentals have evolved since he wrote, in his 1999 book “Making Peace,” that the Good Friday Agreement became possible only because the DUP had abandoned the talks the year before.
“Times and circumstances change,” he said. “Nothing in politics is impossible.
“Political parties change and evolve. Does the Republican Party in the United States today reflect the views of the Republican Party of 20 or even 10 years ago? Does the Democratic Party? The challenge of leadership is to recognize that and to deal with change, all in the broader public interest.”
He also rejected any notion that blame for the current Stormont impasse lies entirely with the DUP. “There isn’t any one villain,” he said. “Everybody’s trying to do what they think is best. The question is: What is best?”
Mitchell stressed that “100 percenters” — people who see “any compromise as weakness” — exist in pretty much every political party on earth, including his own Democrats. And he said no American politician should criticize the depth of political division in Northern Ireland given that, today, the divide in U.S. politics has grown arguably even more noxious.
Former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and George Mitchell shake hands during a photocall at the BBC studios, in Belfast in 2008 | Peter Muhly/AFP via Getty Images
Leaders in any democracy, he said, must be ready to absorb criticism from within their own ranks and keep striving for common ground.
“You can’t let the first ‘no’ be the final answer,” he said. “Or the second ‘no,’ or the seventh ‘no.’ You just have to treat everyone with respect and keep at it.”
A final goodbye
Mitchell came face to face with his own mortality during Monday’s unveiling of his bronze bust, drawing big laughs from the crowd as he observed: “When you’re looking at a statue of yourself, you know the end is near.”
But the reality of living with leukemia, which makes him more vulnerable to infections and other threats, draws his mind back to one of his great regrets from the Stormont talks.
“We were at a critical early moment in the talks in the summer of 1996. I was trying to get them going, to adopt a set of rules. It was very complicated, unnecessarily complicated,” he recalled.
With a vote on the rules due that coming Monday, he received an unexpected phone call from Maine. His brother Robbie, who had been fighting leukemia for five years, was close to death. If Mitchell hopped on to the next flight, he might make it back to his hometown of Waterville by Friday night — but he’d risk having the talks fall at their first hurdle.
Mitchell called his brother’s doctor, oncologist Richard Stone at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, to be told that although Robbie’s health was deteriorating and it was impossible to be certain, he might well survive for several weeks longer. Wanting to get the first step of the peace talks banked before negotiations broke for the summer, Mitchell chose to stay in the U.K. over the weekend.
That Saturday night, another call from Waterville confirmed that his older brother had just died.
“I came back to Belfast on Monday and we got those rules adopted. I made it home in time to speak at Robbie’s funeral. But I didn’t see him before he passed away. That’s one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made,” Mitchell said.
A quarter-century later, the same Dr. Stone is now treating the younger Mitchell brother for the same disease. Mitchell has been told that if the cancer returns, his advanced age means chemotherapy must be kept to a bare minimum.
“Medical science has advanced very rapidly in the curing of leukemia. But as the doctors explained to me, chemotherapy is poison and if you take enough of that, that will kill you,” he said. “The doctor also explained to me that, on the other hand, I might go a few years and die of something else.”
Bill Clinton shakes hands with George Mitchell in the Oval Office at the White House after naming the retiring senator to be a special advisor for economic initiatives in Ireland | Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Mitchell estimates he’s already flown back and forth to Belfast at least 100 times since 1995. He and his wife, Heather, have approached this trip as if it could be his last — that this week might represent his final goodbye to a vexatious land he’s come to love.
“I honestly don’t know if this is the last time I’ll ever be in Northern Ireland. But my wife and I accept the possibility that it is,” he said. “I told Heather on the way over, we’ve really got to enjoy this and take in the sights and sounds of this beautiful place and the people. My fervent hope is that I’ll be able to come back again.”
The Russian government is kicking several German diplomats out of the country in an alleged tit-for-tat move, its foreign ministry said on Saturday.
“The German authorities have decided on yet another mass expulsion of employees of Russian diplomatic missions in Germany. We strongly condemn these actions of Berlin, which continues to defiantly destroy the entire array of Russian-German relations,” the ministry said in a statement, arguing that Germany’s actions were “hostile.”
The foreign affairs ministry did not specify how many diplomats it would expel, although ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told state-run television Zvezda that Moscow had decided to expel “more than 20,” according to AFP.
Russia said it took the decision in response to Germany ordering a “mass expulsion” of Russian diplomats, without specifying further details. The German foreign ministry confirmed to German outlet Deutschlandfunk only that it had been in contact with Russian authorities regarding personnel questions.
Germany had been informed of the move at the beginning of the month, the Russian foreign ministry added in the statement.
Since the war in Ukraine began, tensions between Moscow and Berlin have increased. In April last year, the German government expelled some 40 Russian diplomats from the country.
KYIV — Pete Reed, an American volunteer medic and founder of the NGO Global Response Medicine, was killed while helping to evacuate civilians in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
Reed, a former U.S. Marine, died on Thursday in the besieged city in the Donetsk region of the country, GRM said late Friday.
“In January, Pete stepped away from GRM to work with Global Outreach Doctors on their Ukraine mission and was killed while rendering aid,” the NGO said. “Pete was the bedrock of GRM, serving as Board President for 4 years,” it said.
Bakhmut has been one of the major hot spots during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the ongoing attempts to seize the city, Moscow has been throwing thousands of troops at the Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut in tactics that have gained the name “meat waves.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the city in December, calling it the “hottest spot” in the war.
“Pete was just 33 years old, but lived a life in service of others, first as a decorated U.S. Marine and then in humanitarian aid,” GRM said. “We fully support Pete’s family, friends, and colleagues during this devastating time.”
Global Outreach Doctors also confirmed the death of Reed, who was the organization’s Ukraine Country director. “Pete was actively aiding in the evacuation of Ukrainian civilians when his evacuation vehicle was hit with a reported missile in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Feb. 2,” the group said in a statement.
Reed’s wife, Alex Kay Potter, wrote on Instagram that her husband apparently died saving another team member’s life, CNN reported. “He was evacuating civilians and responding to those wounded when his ambulance was shelled,” her post said, according to the CNN report.
“Pete Reed, a volunteer medic, was killed by shelling in Bakhmut, Ukraine, yesterday while trying to evacuate civilians. One of the most selfless people I’ve ever met,” documentary photographer Cengiz Yar wrote in a tweet.
The same day Reed was killed, two other foreign volunteer doctors were injured in a bombing in Bakhmut. The medics — Norwegians Sander Sørsveen Trelvik and Simon Johnsen — were working for Frontline Doctors. They were taken to a hospital in Dnipro for surgery.
They both are recovering and preparing to return to Norway on Tuesday, Grethe Sørsveen, Sander’s mother, wrote on Facebook.
Thierry Breton is winning the war of ideas in Brussels.
The ex-CEO is a political whirlwind with a gigantic portfolio as internal market chief, the backing of French President Emmanuel Macron and lots of proposals. He’s been touring European Union capitals to win support for plans to shield Europe’s industry from crippling energy prices, American subsidies and “naive” EU free traders.
France’s decades-long push for more state intervention is finally findingsome echo in Berlin and the 13th floor of the Berlaymont building, occupied by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who largely owes her job to Macron.
Omnipresent and ebullient, Breton is playing a key role in marshaling industry and political support for sweeping but so far vague plans to boost clean tech, secure key raw materials and overhaul EU checks on government support that he blasts as too slow to help companies.
“Of course there is resistance; my job is precisely to manage and align everyone,” he told French TV this week of his January meetings with Spanish, Polish and Belgian leaders to flog a forthcoming industrial policy push that could be a turning point in how far European governments will finance companies.
Time is short. Von der Leyen wants to line up proposals for a February summit. European industry is complaining that it can’t swallow far higher energy prices and tighter regulation for much longer, with at least one announcing a European shutdown and an Asian expansion.
Breton said governments don’t need convincing on the need for rapid action. But he’s running up against one of Europe’s sacred cows — EU state aid rules run by Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager that curb government support with lengthy checks to make sure companies don’t get unfair help. She’s also under intense pressure to preserve a “level playing field” as smaller countries worry about German and French financial firepower.
The French internal market commissioner’s bullish style often sees him act as if he’s got a role in subsidies. In the fall, he sent a letter to EU countries asking them to send views on emergency state aid rules to the internal market department, which is under his supervision, two EU officials recalled.
In a meeting with European diplomats, a Commission representative had to correct it, the EU officials said, asking capitals to make sure the input goes instead to the competition department overseen by Vestager.
Europe First
While Breton doesn’t like to be called a protectionist, his latest mission has been to protect Europe from its transatlantic friend.
As early as September, one Commission official said, the Frenchman was mandated by Europe’s industry to speak out against U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provides tax credits for U.S.-made electric cars and support to American battery supply chains.
U.S President Joe Biden gives remarks during an event celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on September 13, 2022 | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
His Paris-backed campaign charged ahead while EU officials and diplomats tiptoed around the subject. Some within the Commission headquarters found his bad cop routine helpful in keeping pressure on the U.S.
“He’s been constructive, though clearly disruptive,” said Tyson Barker, head of the technology and global affairs program at the German Council of Foreign Relations.
The Frenchmanhas even pitched himself as the bloc’s “sheriff” against Silicon Valleygiants, warning billionaire Elon Musk that an overhaul of the Twitter social network can only go so far since “in Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.”
“Big Tech companies only understand balances of power,” said Cédric O, a former French digital minister who worked with Breton during the French EU Council presidency. “When [Breton and Musk] see each other, it necessarily remains cordial, but Breton shows his teeth and rightly so. It’s his job.”
Breton can even surprise his own services, according to two EU officials. In May, the Commission’s department responsible for digital policy — DG CONNECT — was caught off guard when Breton announced in the press that he would unveil plans by year-end to make sure that technology giants forked out for telecoms networks.
In so doing, Breton — who was CEO of France Télécom in the early 2000s — resurrected a long-dormant and fractious policy debate that had been put to rest almost a decade ago, when erstwhile Digital Commissioner Neelie Kroes ordered Europe’s telecoms operators to “adapt or die” rather than seek money from content providers.
After Breton’s commitments, the Commission’s services were soon scrambling to develop some sort of a coherent policy program to deliver on the Frenchman’s comments. A consultation is scheduled for early this year.
Carte blanche
Breton is a rare creature in the halls of the Berlaymont, where policy is hatched slowly after extensive consultation. To a former CEO with a broad remit — his portfolio runs from the expanse of space to the tiniest of microchips — rapid reaction matters more than treading on toes or singing from the hymn sheet. This often sees him floating ideas and then pulling back.
Last year he alarmed environmentalists by raising the prospect of a U-turn on the EU’s polluting car ban. He wagged his finger at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for a solo trip to China. He called for nuclear energy to be considered green. He has pushed out grand projects — such as industrial alliances on batteries and cloud, or a cyber shield — that he doesn’t always follow up on.
He’s even pushed forward a multibillion-euro EU communication satellite program dubbed Iris², a favorite of French aerospace companies, that will see the bloc build a rival to Musk’s space-based Starlink broadband constellation.
“It’s clear that he’s been given more free rein than others,” said one EU official. “He has von der Leyen’s ear,” the official added, noting that Breton enjoys “privileged access” to the Commission president — who may be mindful that she’ll need French support for a second term.
According to an official, Breton “has von der Leyen’s ear” and enjoys “privileged access” to the Commission president | Valeria Mongeli/AFP via Getty Images
Indeed, Breton’s massive role was partly designed as a counterweight to a German president.
“There is a criticism of von der Leyen for being too German,” explained Sébastien Maillard, director of the Jacques Delors Institute think tank. “There may inevitably be a division of roles between them — [where Breton is] a counterbalance.”
He’s been called an “unguided missile,” but more often than not, the Frenchman has Paris’ backing when going off script. His October op-ed with Italian colleague Paolo Gentiloni, which called for greater European financial solidarity, was part of France’s agenda, according to one high-ranking Commission official.
“When he went out in the press with Gentiloni against Scholz’s €200 billion, he was clearly doing the job for Macron,” the official said.
His November call for a rethink on the 2035 car engine ban came just after a week after critical green legislation had been finalized by Commission Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans and jarred with the EU’s own position at the COP 27 climate summit in Indonesia. But it aped the position of French auto industry captains, such as Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares and Renault’s Luca de Meo, who wanted Brussels to slam the brakes on the climate drive.
Breton had not coordinated his car comments with colleagues in advance, according to two Commission officials.
Less than 10 days later, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne echoed caution about the “extremely ambitious” engine ban and warned that pivoting to electric car manufacturing was daunting.
Going A-list
Breton acknowledged himself that he wasn’t Macron’s first choice for the critical EU post, telling POLITICO at a live event that he was a “plan B commissioner.”
Asked if he was targeting an A-list job for the new Commission mandate in 2024, he said he “may be able to consider a new plan B assignment — if it is a plan B.”
“He is thinking about the future,” said one EU official. “Look at his LinkedIn posts. He is thinking past the next European elections. He definitely wants to convince Macron to get an expanded portfolio.”
Grabbing the Commission’s top job may be tricky, relying on how EU leaders will line up, according to multiple EU and French officials.
There are other jobs, including overturning the unwritten law that no French or German candidate can hold the economically powerful competition portfolio. Another option could be becoming Europe’s official digital czar, combining the enforcement powers of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act into a supranational digital enforcement agency, one EU official said.
Breton has shrugged off speculation on his long-term plans.
“All my life, I have been informed of my next potential job 15 minutes before,” he said last month.
Jakob Hanke Vela, Stuart Lau, Barbara Moens, Camille Gijs and Mark Scott contributed reporting.
BELFAST — A top-level British diplomatic mission designed to soothe tensions over the Northern Ireland trade protocol instead opened new divisions Wednesday when the leader of Sinn Féin was unexpectedly barred.
U.K. government officials offered conflicting explanations for blocking Mary Lou McDonald from the Northern Ireland Office meeting with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. He had traveled to Belfast to brief local party leaders on Monday’s breakthrough with the European Commission on making post-Brexit trade arrangements work better in what remains the most bitterly divided corner of the U.K.
McDonald’s exclusion triggered a boycott of the meeting by Sinn Féin, the largest party in the mothballed Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as its moderate competitor for Irish nationalist votes, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). It propelled the Belfast talks to the top of an Irish news agenda bored stiff by the long-running Brexit protocol dispute — and played straight into the hands of Sinn Féin, which lost no time in denouncing perfidious Albion.
“Apart from this being utterly bizarre, I mean beyond bizarre, it’s extremely unhelpful,” McDonald said nearby the Northern Ireland Office headquarters in central Belfast, where Cleverly hosted the talks attended by only three of the five parties from Northern Ireland’s collapsed power-sharing government.
“It’s a bad message and a bad signal if the British Tories are now behaving in this petulant fashion and saying that they would seek to exclude people from the very necessary work that needs now to be done,” McDonald said.
British government officials initially defended McDonald’s exclusion on the grounds that she is not an elected member of the Stormont assembly — a condition not cited or enforced on many similar political gatherings dating back to McDonald’s February 2018 elevation to the Sinn Féin leadership.
McDonald represents central Dublin in the Republic of Ireland parliament, reflecting Sinn Féin’s status as the only major political party contesting elections in both parts of Ireland. Since 2020 she has led the parliamentary opposition to the coalition government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin.
An explanation circulated by the Northern Ireland Office to journalists said its meeting invite had specified attendance by Michelle O’Neill, McDonald’s party deputy and the senior Sinn Féin politician north of the border.
O’Neill and McDonald had planned to attend together, as has been common. Both similarly plan to meet Varadkar and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer when they make separate visits Thursday to Belfast.
“The leader of Sinn Féin in the [Northern Ireland] Assembly was invited and remains invited. Her attendance is a matter for Sinn Féin. But she was not excluded,” the U.K. government said, referring to O’Neill.
Others quickly pointed out an evident contradiction. Leaders of two other parties — the Democratic Unionists’ Jeffrey Donaldson and the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood — had been invited, even though they, just like McDonald, have no role at Stormont.
Cleverly’s office circulated a second explanation citing a different protocol — diplomatic protocol — as the real reason not to permit McDonald through the door.
Those officials cited Ireland’s December 17 Cabinet reshuffle in which Martin replaced Simon Coveney as foreign minister. This meant, they said, Cleverly needed to hold a face-to-face meeting with Martin before he could do the same with opposition leader McDonald.
Irish nationalist and center-ground politicians dismissed both explanations. They noted that U.K. government leaders already have met dozens of times with Martin, who served as prime minister for the first half of Ireland’s planned five-year government.
In Dublin, senior officials also questioned the U.K.’s stated rationale.
“I’d like to think we wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to offer this insult up on a plate to Sinn Féin. It seems such an obvious point to make, but the parties in Northern Ireland should be free to choose who represents them at any table. This is normally never an issue. This shouldn’t be made an issue,” one official told POLITICO. “Citing the rules of diplomacy for this move boggles the mind.”
Cleverly and Chris Heaton-Harris, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland who also took part in Wednesday’s meeting, declined comment.
Donaldson — whose party is blocking the operation of the Stormont assembly and formation of a new cross-community government in protest against the trade protocol — said he wouldn’t comment on whether it had been right or wrong to exclude McDonald.
But he said Cleverly and Heaton-Harris had reassured him in the behind-closed-doors meeting that any agreement on reforming the trade protocol must meet his party’s core demands. These include an end to any EU controls on British goods arriving at local ports that are destined to remain within Northern Ireland.
“They recognize that a deal with the EU that doesn’t work for unionists just isn’t going to fly,” Donaldson said.
They’re dazzlingly rich, and they expect to be in charge for a long, long time.
The monarchs leading Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia might seem from the outside like a trio of like-minded Persian Gulf autocrats. Yet their regional rivalry is intense, and Western capitals have become a key venue in a reputational battle royale.
“All of these governments … really want to have the largest mindspace among Western governments,” said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
As the Gulf states seek to wean themselves off the oil that made them rich, they know they’ll need friends to help transform their economies (and modernize their societies).
“They think it’s important not to be tarred as mere hydrocarbon producers who are ruining the planet,” Alterman added.
The Qatari government categorically denies any unlawful behavior, saying it “works through institution-to-institution engagement and operates in full compliance with international laws and regulations.”
Against the background of regional rivalries, that engagement has become increasingly robust. While tensions with Riyadh have eased over the past few years, Qatar’s mutual antagonism with the United Arab Emirates has been particularly severe.
Qatar’s survival strategy
Regional rivalries burst beyond the Middle East in 2017 in a standoff that would reshape regional dynamics.
Until then, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been essentially frenemies. As members of the Gulf Coordination Council, they’d been working toward building a common market and currency in the region — not so different from the European Union.
But different responses to the Arab Spring frayed relations to a breaking point.
The Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network gave a platform to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist party that rode a wave of unrest into power in Egypt and challenged governments throughout the Arab world. And Doha didn’t just offer a bullhorn — it gave the Muslim Brotherhood direct financial backing.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, considered the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist group.
Along with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE severed diplomatic ties with Doha in June 2017, barring Qatar’s access to airspace and sea routes; Saudi Arabia closed its border, blocking Qatar’s only land crossing.
Among the demands: close Al Jazeera, end military coordination with Turkey and step away from Iran. Qatar refused — even though it was crunch time for building infrastructure ahead of the 2022 World Cup and 40 percent of Qatar’s food supplies came through Saudi Arabia.
Fighting what it called an illegal “blockade” became an existential mission for Doha.
“The only thing Qatar could do was make sure everyone knew Qatar exists and is a nice place,” said MEP Hannah Neumann, chair of the Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Arab Peninsula (DARP).
“They really stepped up the diplomatic efforts all around the world to also show, ‘We are the good ones,’” said Neumann, of the German Greens.
Qatar needed Brussels because it had already lost an even bigger ally: Washington. Not only did then-President Donald Trump take the side of Qatar’s rivals in the fight; he also appeared to take credit for the idea of isolating Qatar — even though the U.S.’s largest military base in the region is just southwest of Doha.
Elsewhere, Qatar had already been working with the London-headquartered consultancy Portland Communications since at least 2014 — as its World Cup hosting coup was becoming a PR nightmare, with stories emerging over bribed FIFA officials and exploited migrant workers.
Exploding onto the EU scene
In Brussels, Doha leaned on the head of its EU Mission, Abdulrahman Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, who had moved to Belgium in 2017 from Germany, to step up European relations.
Within days of the fissure, Al-Khulaifi appeared in meetings at NATO, and within months opened a think tank called the Middle East Dialogue Center to hone Doha’s image as an open promoter of debate (in contrast,it contended, to its neighbors) and pressure the EU to intervene in the Mideast.
By the next year, he was speaking on panels about combating violent extremism — alongside Dutch and Belgian federal police. By late 2019, Al-Khulaifi hosted the first meeting of embassy’s Qatar-EU friendship group with a “working dinner.”
“The situation following the blockade has pushed Qatar to establish closer relations outside the context of the regional crisis with, for example, the European Union,” Pier Antonio Panzeri, then chair of the Parliament’s human rights subcommittee, told Euractiv in 2018.
The following year, Panzeri would attend the Qatari-hosted “International Conference on National, Regional and International Mechanisms to Combat Impunity and Ensure Accountability under International Law,” and heap praise on the country’s human rights record.
Panzeri is now in a Belgian prison, facing corruption charges; his NGO, Fight Impunity, is under intense scrutiny for being a possible front.
Neumann said that Qatar’s survival strategy has paid off. “Absolutely, it worked,” she said. “I think it’s fair enough, if they didn’t do it with illegal means.”
Directly or indirectly, Qatar clocked several big victories during this period, including multiple resolutions in Parliament on human rights in Saudi Arabia and a call to end arms exports to Riyadh in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Doha also inked a cooperation arrangement with the EU in March 2018, setting the stage for closer ties.
Frenemies once again
Since Saudi Arabia and Qatar signed a deal to end the crisis two years ago, Riyadh-Doha relations have generally thawed. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, traveled to Qatar in November for the World Cup and embraced Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 42, while wearing a scarf in the host’s colors.
However, relations between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, 61 — remain chilly.
As the Gulf transforms, the United Arab Emirates “has come to see that role as being a status quo power,” said Alterman. On the part of its neighbor, “Qatar has come to see that role as aligning with forces of change in the region, and that’s created a certain amount of mutual resentment.”
Qatar’s smaller scale contributes to Doha’s sense of internal security, fueling its openness to engaging with groups that others see as an existential threat.
Qataris see themselves as “champions of the Davids against the Goliath,” said Andreas Krieg, an assistant professor at King’s College London who has worked in the past as a consultant for the Qatari armed forces. Civil society organizations founded by “a range of different opposition figures, Saudi opposition figures in the West, have been supported financially by Qatar as well,” Krieg added. (Khashoggi, one of the era’s most prominent Saudi opposition figures, had connections to the state-backed Qatar Foundation.) “Hence why Qatar was always seen as sort of a thorn in the side of its neighbors.”
And while the €1.5 million cash haul confiscated by Belgian federal police looks like an eye-popping sum, it certainly pales in comparison to the amount the Gulf states spend on legal lobbying in Brussels. And that sum, in turn, pales in comparison to what those countries spend in Washington.
“Brussels isn’t that important,” Krieg said. “If you look at the money that these Gulf countries spend in Washington, these are tens of millions of dollars every year on think tanks, academics … creating their own media outlets, investing strategically into Fox News, investing into massive PR operations.”
Nonetheless, the EU remains a key target. Abu Dhabi is strengthening its “long-standing partnership” with Brussels on economic and regional security matters “through deep, strategic cooperation with EU institutions and Member States,” said a UAE official, in a statement.
“Brussels was always a hub to create a narrative,” said Krieg.
And right now, each of the region’s power players is deeply motivated to change that narrative.
Alterman invoked a broad impression of the Gulf countries as “people who have more money than God who want to take the world back to the 7th Century.”
But that’s wrong, he said. “This is all about shaping the future with remarkably high stakes, profound discomfort about how the world will relate to them over the next 30 to 50 years — and frankly, a series of rulers who see themselves being in power for the next 30 to 50 years.”
LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first.
Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill.
On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain.
The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.
“Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.
Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends.
Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.
In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.
The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused.
Long and winding road
Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.
The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.
Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.
The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.
The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.”
That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.
Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda.
When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations.
Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content.
Not just free speech
In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.
That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.
Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU. Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.
“This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”
Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.
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Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott
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