The Baltic states and Poland want to make it easier to sanction the family members and entourage of Russia’s richest men and women but are facing resistance from Hungary, several EU diplomats told POLITICO.
Under its current rules, the EU can freeze the assets and impose visa bans on “leading businesspersons operating in Russia.” Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland now want to expand this definition, according to their proposal seen by POLITICO, to include “their immediate family members, or other natural persons, benefitting from them.”
The EU has sanctioned more than 1,400 people in relation to Russia’s activities in Ukraine, many of who are Russian oligarchs. An additional 96 people could be added to the EU’s next sanctions package, draft documents seen by POLITICO indicate. Including oligarchs’ family members and other associates of oligarchs would make it possible to sanctions thousands more people without having to prove that they are directly involved in the war in Ukraine or acting in the economic interest of the Russian state.
This could, for example, apply to the ex-wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, whose daughters have been sanctioned but has not been herself, and other members of the oligarchs’ entourage.
While some countries had doubts, legal experts are on board, said one of the diplomats.
Yet, in a meeting on Tuesday, at which EU ambassadors discussed the bloc’s next round of sanctions, Hungary resisted such plans, the diplomats said. Budapest argued that this is not part of the 10th sanctions package, said one of the diplomats. Hungary has long been skeptical of including too many names on the list.
Hungary also pushed to strike four people out the already existing sanctions list, two of the diplomats said.
It was not immediately possible to learn the identity of the four individuals.
That request is igniting tensions, and will be likely subject to another heated debate during a meeting of EU ambassadors on Wednesday. During that meeting, they will not only discuss the new package of sanctions against Russia, but also the so-called rollover of the 1,400-plus names already on the list to keep them sanctioned.
That’s because the regime is subject to a six-month review, which has hitherto been more or less a formality. Now, Hungary is using this extension review as leverage by insisting that four specific people have to be struck from the EU’s existing sanctions list before it will agree to the rollover. If Hungary blocks the rollover and refuses to compromise, all 1,400 people would be de-listed, the two diplomats warned.
One of the diplomats didn’t hide his frustration: “It shows Hungary’s disregard for unity and European values that they are willing to risk this in the week where we commemorate one year since the Russian invasion,” he said.
And those aren’t the only measure that Hungary takes issue with. It also is chiefly against sanctioning personnel working in the nuclear sector.
But a Hungarian official poured water on this last point, saying that “the only open issue for Hungary is with the length of the rollover and not with the listings.”
On the oligarchs issue and the proposal of the Baltics and Poland, the same Hungarian official said that this is not part of the 10th package.
As all EU countries have to agree to the proposal, any country could veto the move even if all other 26 EU countries were in favor. Time is running out, with the EU wanting to adopt the 10th sanctions package before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday.
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
“I am wicked and scary with claws and teeth,” Vladimir Putin reportedly warned David Cameron when the then-British prime minister pressed him about the use of chemical weapons by Russia’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and discussed how far Russia was prepared to go.
According to Cameron’s top foreign policy adviser John Casson — cited in a BBC documentary — Putin went on to explain that to succeed in Syria, one would have to use barbaric methods, as the U.S. did in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. “I am an ex-KGB man,” he expounded.
The remarks were meant, apparently, half in jest but, as ever with Russia’s leader, the menace was clear.
And certainly, Putin has proven he is ready to deploy fear as a weapon in his attempt to subjugate a defiant Ukraine. His troops have targeted civilians and have resorted to torture and rape. But victory has eluded him.
In the next few weeks, he looks set to try to reverse his military failures with a late-winter offensive: very possibly by being even scarier, and fighting tooth and claw, to save Russia — and himself — from further humiliation.
Can the ex-KGB man succeed, however? Can Russia still win the war of Putin’s choice against Ukraine in the face of heroic and united resistance from the Ukrainians?
Catalog of errors
From the start, the war was marked by misjudgments and erroneous calculations. Putin and his generals underestimated Ukrainian resistance, overrated the abilities of their own forces, and failed to foresee the scale of military and economic support Ukraine would receive from the United States and European nations.
Kyiv didn’t fall in a matter of days — as planned by the Kremlin — and Putin’s forces in the summer and autumn were pushed back, with Ukraine reclaiming by November more than half the territory the Russians captured in the first few weeks of the invasion. Russia has now been forced into a costly and protracted conventional war, one that’s sparked rare dissent within the country’s political-military establishment and led Kremlin infighting to spill into the open.
The only victory Russian forces have recorded in months came in January when the Ukrainians withdrew from the salt-mining town of Soledar in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. And the signs are that the Russians are on the brink of another win with Bakhmut, just six miles southwest of Soledar, which is likely to fall into their hands shortly.
But neither of these blood-drenched victories amounts to much more than a symbolic success despite the high casualties likely suffered by both sides. Tactically neither win is significant — and some Western officials privately say Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may have been better advised to have withdrawn earlier from Soledar and from Bakhmut now, in much the same way the Russians in November beat a retreat from their militarily hopeless position at Kherson.
For a real reversal of Russia’s military fortunes Putin will be banking in the coming weeks on his forces, replenished by mobilized reservists and conscripts, pulling off a major new offensive. Ukrainian officials expect the offensive to come in earnest sooner than spring. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov warned in press conferences in the past few days that Russia may well have as many as 500,000 troops amassed in occupied Ukraine and along the borders in reserve ready for an attack. He says it may start in earnest around this month’s first anniversary of the war on February 24.
Other Ukrainian officials think the offensive, when it comes, will be in March — but at least before the arrival of Leopard 2 and other Western main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Zelenskyy warned Ukrainians Saturday that the country is entering a “time when the occupier throws more and more of its forces to break our defenses.”
All eyes on Donbas
The likely focus of the Russians will be on the Donbas region of the East. Andriy Chernyak, an official in Ukraine’s military intelligence, told the Kyiv Post that Putin had ordered his armed forces to capture all of Donetsk and Luhansk by the end of March. “We’ve observed that the Russian occupation forces are redeploying additional assault groups, units, weapons and military equipment to the east,” Chernyak said. “According to the military intelligence of Ukraine, Putin gave the order to seize all of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”
Other Ukrainian officials and western military analysts suspect Russia might throw some wildcards to distract and confuse. They have their eyes on a feint coming from Belarus mimicking the northern thrust last February on Kyiv and west of the capital toward Vinnytsia. But Ukrainian defense officials estimate there are only 12,000 Russian soldiers in Belarus currently, ostensibly holding joint training exercises with the Belarusian military, hardly enough to mount a diversion.
“A repeat assault on Kyiv makes little sense,” Michael Kofman, an American expert on the Russian Armed Forces and a fellow of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. “An operation to sever supply lines in the west, or to seize the nuclear powerplant by Rivne, may be more feasible, but this would require a much larger force than what Russia currently has deployed in Belarus,” he said in an analysis.
But exactly where Russia’s main thrusts will come along the 600-kilometer-long front line in Ukraine’s Donbas region is still unclear. Western military analysts don’t expect Russia to mount a push along the whole snaking front — more likely launching a two or three-pronged assault focusing on some key villages and towns in southern Donetsk, on Kreminna and Lyman in Luhansk, and in the south in Zaporizhzhia, where there have been reports of increased buildup of troops and equipment across the border in Russia.
In the Luhansk region, Russian forces have been removing residents near the Russian-held parts of the front line. And the region’s governor, Serhiy Haidai, believes the expulsions are aimed at clearing out possible Ukrainian spies and locals spotting for the Ukrainian artillery. “There is an active transfer of (Russian troops) to the region and they are definitely preparing for something on the eastern front,” Haidai told reporters.
Reznikov has said he expects the Russian offensive will come from the east and the south simultaneously — from Zaporizhzhia in the south and in Donetsk and Luhansk. In the run-up to the main offensives, Russian forces have been testing five points along the front, according to Ukraine’s General Staff in a press briefing Tuesday. They said Russian troops have been regrouping on different parts of the front line and conducting attacks near Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Novopavlivka in eastern Donetsk.
Combined arms warfare
Breakthroughs, however, will likely elude the Russians if they can’t correct two major failings that have dogged their military operations so far — poor logistics and a failure to coordinate infantry, armor, artillery and air support to achieve mutually complementary effects, otherwise known as combined arms warfare.
When announcing the appointment in January of General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff — as the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, Russia’s defense ministry highlighted “the need to organize closer interaction between the types and arms of the troops,” in other words to improve combined arms warfare.
Kofman assesses that Russia’s logistics problems may have largely been overcome. “There’s been a fair amount of reorganization in Russian logistics, and adaptation. I think the conversation on Russian logistical problems in general suffers from too much anecdotalism and received wisdom,” he said.
Failing that, much will depend for Russia on how much Gerasimov has managed to train his replenished forces in combined arms warfare and on that there are huge doubts he had enough time. Kofman believes Ukrainian forces “would be better served absorbing the Russian attack and exhausting the Russian offensive potential, then taking the initiative later this spring. Having expended ammunition, better troops, and equipment it could leave Russian defense overall weaker.” He suspects the offensive “may prove underwhelming.”
Pro-war Russian military bloggers agree. They have been clamoring for another mobilization, saying it will be necessary to power the breakouts needed to reverse Russia’s military fortunes. Former Russian intelligence officer and paramilitary commander Igor Girkin, who played a key role in Crimea’s annexation and later in the Donbas, has argued waves of call-ups will be needed to overcome Ukraine’s defenses by sheer numbers.
And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest necessary for an attacking force to succeed.
Ukrainian officials think Russia’s offensive will be in March, before the arrival of Leopard 2 and other Western tanks | Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images
But others fear that Russia has sufficient forces, if they are concentrated, to make some “shock gains.” Richard Kemp, a former British army infantry commander, is predicting “significant Russian gains in the coming weeks. We need to be realistic about how bad things could be — otherwise the shock risks dislodging Western resolve,” he wrote. The fear being that if the Russians can make significant territorial gains in the Donbas, then it is more likely pressure from some Western allies will grow for negotiations.
But Gerasimov’s manpower deficiencies have prompted other analysts to say that if Western resolve holds, Putin’s own caution will hamper Russia’s chances to win the war.
“Putin’s hesitant wartime decision-making demonstrates his desire to avoid risky decisions that could threaten his rule or international escalation — despite the fact his maximalist and unrealistic objective, the full conquest of Ukraine, likely requires the assumption of further risk to have any hope of success,” said the Institute for the Study of War in an analysis this week.
Wicked and scary Putin may be but, as far as ISW sees it, he “has remained reluctant to order the difficult changes to the Russian military and society that are likely necessary to salvage his war.”
LONDON — “Back to her old self again” was how one erstwhile colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the U.K.’s front pages at the weekend.
That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak and his allies were afraid of.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in No. 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectful period of 13 weeks’ silence, the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister exploded back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that her radical economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance.”
In her first interview since stepping down, broadcast Monday evening, she expanded on this, saying she encountered “system resistance” to her plans as PM and did not get “the level of political support required” to change prevailing attitudes.
While the reception for Truss’s relaunch has not been exactly rapturous — with much of the grumbling coming from within her own party — it still presents a genuine headache for her successor, Sunak, who must now deal with not one but two unruly former prime ministers jostling from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job, but is never far from the headlines. Recent engagements with the U.S. media and high-profile excursions to Kyiv have ensured his strident views on the situation in Ukraine remain well-aired, even as he racks up hundreds of thousands in fees from private speaking engagements around the world.
Wasting no time
Truss and Johnson have, typically, both opted for swifter and more vocal returns to frontline politics than many of their forerunners in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They have tended to follow the lead of [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 promised: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.’”
Such an approach has never been universal. Ted Heath, PM from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “behaved appallingly” — in Bale’s words — to John Major, who replaced her in Downing Street in 1990 after she was forced from office.
But more recent Tory PMs have kept a respectful distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the EU referendum in 2016, and waited three years before publishing a memoir — reportedly in order to avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions in the House of Commons on subjects close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and rail services in her hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect to see former prime ministers be a tad more circumspect in the way they re-enter the political debate,” says Paul Harrison, former press secretary to May. “But then she [Truss] wasn’t a conventional prime minister in any sense of the word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done something very unconventional.”
Truss’s rapid refresh has not met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes that “rather than concede, move on, and focus on the future, she denies, digs in and reimagines the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’ time in office “was a period that [people] would rather not really remember too clearly.”
One long-serving Conservative MP said “she only had herself to blame for her demise, and we are still clearing up some of the mess.” Another appraised her latest intervention simply with an exploding-head emoji.
Trussites forever
But despite Tory appeals for calm, the refusal of Truss and Johnson to lie low remains a serious worry for the man eventually chosen to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought better of trying to stage a comeback.
Between them, the two ex-PMs have the ability to highlight two of Sunak’s big weaknesses.
While Truss may never live down the disastrous “mini-budget” of last September which sent the U.K. economy off the rails, her wider policy agenda still has a hold over a number of Conservative MPs who believe they have no hope of winning the election without it.
This was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a caucus of MPs who will carry the torch for the low-tax, deregulatory approach to government favored by Truss and who continue to complain Sunak has little imagination when it comes to supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Truss, insisted “she has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and “posed important questions” about how the U.K. models economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives have been advocating a reappraisal of the actions of the Bank of England in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that Truss was unfairly blamed for a collapse in the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she may be the best advocate for the causes she represents. “There’s a question about whether it actually best serves her interests in pushing back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened so soon after leaving office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — continues to symbolize the star quality and ballot box appeal which they fear Sunak lacks.
One government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, “was all about hard work.”
These apparent deficiencies feed into a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too tentatively and, as one ally put it recently, needs to rip off the “cashmere jumper.”
It’s been posited that British prime ministers swing back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds” — and nothing is more likely to underline Sunak’s nerdiness than a pair of recently-deposed jocks refusing to shut up.
Trouble ahead
Unluckily for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket items coming up which will provide ample ground on which his nemeses can cause trouble.
One is the forthcoming budget — the government’s annual public spending plan, due March 15. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to get personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a nuisance of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to offer the paucity of answers on growth they already fear.
Before that, Truss is expected to make her first public appearance outside the U.K. with a speech on Taiwan which could turn up the heat on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
One person close to her confirmed China would be “a big thing” for her, and is expected to be a theme of her future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of the Northern Ireland protocol, the thorniest unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortured negotiations appear to be reaching an endgame.
Sunak has been sitting with a draft version of a technical deal since last week, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, and is now girding his loins for the unenviable task of trying to get a compromise agreement past both his own party and hardline Northern Irish unionists.
A Whitehall official working on the protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and that “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to assemble the former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind him on a matter of such huge national and international significance. But as things stand such a get-together is difficult to picture.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’ actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departures.
They appear fated to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it — “not caring how much trouble they cause Sunak, because in their view, he should never have taken over from them in the first place.”
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has a tight two-year timetable for securing EU membership that is bound to dominate discussions at this week’s historic EU-Ukraine summit, the first to take place on Ukrainian soil.
The problem? No one within the EU thinks this is realistic.
When EU commissioners travel to Kyiv later this week ahead of Friday’s summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the heads of the European Commission and Council, their main task is likely to involve managing expectations.
Shmyhal himself is imposing a tough deadline. “We have a very ambitious plan to join the European Union within the next two years,” he told POLITICO. “So we expect that this year, in 2023, we can already have this pre-entry stage of negotiations,” he said.
This throws down a gauntlet to the EU establishment, which is trying to keep Ukrainian membership as a far more remote concept.
French President Emmanuel Macron said last year it could be “decades” before Ukraine joins. Even EU leaders, who backed granting Ukraine candidate status at their summit last June, privately admit that the prospect of the country actually joining is quite some years away (and may be one reason they backed the idea in the first place.) After all, candidate countries like Serbia, Turkey and Montenegro have been waiting for many years, since 1999 in Ankara’s case.
Ukraine is a conundrum for the EU. Many argue that Brussels has a particular responsibility to Kyiv. It was, after all, Ukrainians’ fury at the decision of President Viktor Yanukovych to pull out of a political and economic association agreement with the EU at Russia’s behest that triggered the Maidan uprising of 2014 and set the stage for war. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it: Ukraine is “the only country where people got shot because they wrapped themselves in a European flag.”
Ukraine’s close allies in the EU such as Poland and the Baltic countries strongly support Kyiv’s membership push, seeing it as a democracy resisting an aggressor. Many of the EU old guard are far more wary, however, as Ukraine — a global agricultural superpower — could dilute their own powers and perks. Ukraine and Poland — with a combined population of 80 million — could team up to rival Germany as a political force in the European Council and some argue Kyiv would be an excessive drain on the EU budget.
Short-term deliverables
Friday’s summit in Kyiv — the first EU meeting of its kind to take place in an active war zone — will be about striking the right balance.
Though EU national leaders will not be in attendance, European Council officials have been busy liaising with EU member states about the final communiqué.
Some countries are insisting the statement should not stray far from the language used at the June European Council — emphasizing that while the future of Ukraine lies within the European Union, aspirant countries need to meet specific criteria. “Expectation is quite high in Kyiv, but there is a need to fulfill all the conditions that the Commission has set out. It’s a merit-based process,” said one senior EU official.
Ukraine is a conundrum for the EU. Many argue that Brussels has a particular responsibility to Kyiv | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
Still, progress is expected when Zelenskyy meets with von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel.
Shmyhal told POLITICO he hopes Ukraine can achieve a “substantial leap forward” on Friday, particularly in specific areas — an agreement on a visa-free regime for industrial goods; the suspension of customs duties on Ukrainian exports for another year; and “active progress” on joining the SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) payments scheme and the inclusion of Ukraine into the EU’s mobile roaming area.
“We expect progress and acceleration on our path towards signing these agreements,” he said.
Anti-corruption campaign
The hot topic — and one of the central question marks over Ukraine’s EU accession — will be Ukraine’s struggle against corruption. The deputy infrastructure minister was fired and deputy foreign minister stepped down this month over scandals related to war profiteering in public contracts.
“We need a reformed Ukraine,” said one senior EU official centrally involved in preparations for the summit. “We cannot have the same Ukraine as before the war.”
Shmyhal insisted that the Zelenskyy government is taking corruption seriously. “We have a zero-tolerance approach to corruption,” he said, pointing to the “lightning speed” with which officials were removed this month. “Unfortunately, corruption was not born yesterday, but we are certain that we will uproot corruption,” he said, openly saying that it’s key to the country’s EU accession path.
He also said the government was poised to revise its recent legislation on the country’s Constitutional Court to meet the demands of both the European Commission and the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe. Changes could come as early as this week, ahead of the summit, Shmyhal said.
Though Ukraine has announced a reform of the Constitutional Court, particularly on how judges are appointed, the Venice Commission still has concerns about the powers and composition of the advisory group of experts, the body which selects candidates for the court. The goal is to avoid political interference.
Shmyhal said these questions will be addressed. “We are holding consultations with the European Commission to see that all issued conclusions may be incorporated into the text,” he told POLITICO.
Nonetheless, the symbolic power of this week’s summit is expected to send a strong message to Moscow about Ukraine’s European aspirations.
European Council President Michel used his surprise visit to Kyiv this month to reassure Ukraine that EU membership will be a reality for Ukraine, telling the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) that he dreams that one day a Ukrainian will hold his job as president of the European Council.
“Ukraine is the EU and the EU is Ukraine,” he said. “We must spare no effort to turn this promise into reality as fast as we can.”
The key question for Ukrainians after Friday’s meeting will be how fast the rhetoric and promises can become a reality.
President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that Congress pass a clean debt-ceiling increase, with no conditions attached.
Biden’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans now is rooted in the Obama administration’s experiences in 2011–15 of trying to navigate increases in the debt ceiling through the same political configuration present today: a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. While Biden says he won’t negotiate a budget deal tied to a debt-ceiling increase, then-President Obama did just that in 2011. Those negotiations not only failed but proved so disruptive to financial markets, and so personally scarring, that Obama and his team emerged from the ordeal determined never to repeat it. And when House Republicans came back in 2013 asking for more concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again, Obama declined to negotiate with them; eventually the GOP raised the debt ceiling without conditions.
To understand the choices Obama made about debt-ceiling negotiations, and how they are shaping Biden’s approach today, I spoke with multiple officials from the Obama era: several Cabinet secretaries, as well as top aides from the White House, executive-branch departments, and Capitol Hill. Most chose to speak without attribution to candidly discuss Obama’s deliberations. What’s clear from these conversations is that almost none of the conditions that led Obama to negotiate in 2011 are present today. This helps explain why Biden is rejecting Republican demands, but also why the risk of a cataclysmic default is even greater now than it was then.
When Congress raises the debt ceiling it does not authorize any new spending; it permits the Treasury to pay the debts the U.S. has incurred from earlier fiscal-policy decisions. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to the federal government defaulting, something that has never happened, and which could crater the stock market, spike interest rates, and disrupt payments to the millions of Americans who rely on federal checks.
In some ways, Biden’s staunch refusal to link fiscal negotiations to a debt-ceiling increase is out of character for a politician who spent nearly four decades in the Senate and has prided himself on his ability to reach agreements across party lines. Even now, administration officials make clear that Biden is not precluding negotiations with House Republicans over fiscal policy. What Biden is saying is that he won’t allow Republicans to link fiscal negotiations to the threat of not raising the debt ceiling. That resolve flows directly from the Obama administration’s experiences.
The dynamics that prompted Obama to negotiate with Republicans in 2011 had started coalescing before the GOP won control of the House in the 2010 midterm election. After taking office in 2009, Obama’s first major legislative victory was the passage of a roughly $800 billion stimulus plan to help the economy recover from the 2008 financial collapse. Obama devoted the rest of 2009 to steering the landmark Affordable Care Act through Congress.
After Congress approved those expensive initiatives, Obama faced pressure from not only congressional Republicans but also a core of centrist Senate Democrats (including Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad of North Dakota) to develop some plan for reducing the federal deficit. Under prodding from Conrad, in February 2010 Obama appointed the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission to recommend a deficit-reduction plan. Throughout that year, “there was an awful lot of ‘grand bargain, let’s have a historic compromise’ in the air” in Washington, Jason Furman, the then– deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told me.
Before the House changed hands in December 2010, Obama agreed with congressional Republicans on a major package to extend the tax cuts that had been passed under George W. Bush and to also temporarily reduce payroll taxes. Then, in April 2011, the Obama administration and Representative John Boehner, the new Republican House speaker, settled on a plan to fund the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year.
So when Boehner and other Republicans put forward their demands to tie any debt-ceiling increase to cuts in federal spending, the Obama administration did not initially view the prospect of negotiations with horror, multiple former officials told me. Obama shared the belief that a “grand bargain” to control the long-term debt was a worthwhile goal. Furman said the former president considered it an “exciting opportunity.”
Jack Lew, who served as Obama’s director of the Office of Management of Budget (OMB) during the 2011 confrontation and as Treasury secretary in 2013, told me about another factor that contributed to the Obama administration’s willingness to engage: Negotiations that previous presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had had with Congress about the debt ceiling had not proved that disruptive. Debt-ceiling negotiations “up until 2011 had a different character than after 2011,” said Lew, who served as House Democratic aide in the 1980s and in the OMB for Clinton in the 1990s.
Armed with these convictions, the Obama team didn’t blanch, even when the new speaker went to New York in May 2011 to lay down what became known as the “Boehner Rule”: Republicans would demand one dollar in spending cuts for each dollar increase in the debt limit that they authorized. The two sides launched fiscal negotiations in talks led by Biden for the administration and Representative Eric Cantor for the House GOP.
As these negotiations unfolded, Boehner framed the talks as the Republicans and Obama equally benefiting from the stipulations. But the White House, including Biden, never saw things that way. The White House didn’t view the debt-ceiling increase primarily as a bargaining chip—they viewed it as the eventual legislative vehicle for moving through Congress whatever agreement the fiscal negotiation produced.
Even with that difference, the talks were serious and, for a while, productive. Biden praised Cantor and Cantor reciprocated. But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did.
Over the next few weeks, the speaker and the president, joined by only a few aides, then met for a series of secret negotiations to pursue a “grand bargain” on the deficit. The two men came close to an agreement. But their negotiations ultimately foundered when Obama and Boehner could not agree on the balance between tax increases and spending cuts. Like the Biden-Cantor talks earlier, the Obama-Boehner talks crashed in late July.
Only days before August 2, when the nation would face an unprecedented default, Obama, Biden and the congressional leaders in both parties gathered in the White House for a frantic final weekend of negotiations. The two sides were trying to avoid calamity in an environment of “pure acrimony,” Furman told me. “I think if you look at the photographs that [the White House photographer] Pete Souza took over the course of that weekend, you can look at our faces and you don’t need to hear any words,” Lew said. “If you ask President Obama about the two or three most gut-wrenching moments as president I have no doubt this would be on the list.”
Pete Souza / The White House
Even though the “grand bargain” evaporated, the two sides (with Biden and Mitch McConnell at the center of the negotiations) reached a complex deal over that weekend. In the first stage, Obama got an $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling coupled with $900 billion in spending cuts. The deal linked up to another $1.5 trillion increase in debt to the creation of a congressional “super committee” that would be guaranteed a floor vote on a plan to cut the deficit an equivalent amount. If the committee deadlocked, automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending—what became known as sequestration—would be triggered. Though default was averted, months of these talks had led to a nearly universal recoil among the Obama team. There was no single meeting or moment when the president and his top advisers said, “Never again.” Instead, participants told me that that conclusion emerged organically. “I think the team around Obama really had a bad taste in their mouth after the 2011 episode and they really wanted to change the terms and dynamics of the debate, and that’s why they all embraced the idea that we can’t do this anymore,” Mark Patterson, the chief of staff at the time for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, told me.
The White House frustration deepened in November 2011. The deficit reduction “super committee” was created in July but deadlocked on the same issue that had stymied previous bipartisan negotiation: the unwillingness of enough Republicans to accept tax increases that Democrats considered sufficient to justify big cuts in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That stalemate triggered the severe sequestration reductions in discretionary spending—a squeeze that left Democrats fuming over the domestic cuts and Republicans incensed about the defense reductions.
All of that was the backdrop when House Republicans returned in 2013 with a new set of demands for raising the debt ceiling, which included unraveling Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. This time Obama declined to talk with Republicans. “In 2013, it was a very fresh memory that we got closer than anyone had ever come to defaulting,” Lew, who had by then become Treasury secretary, told me. From Obama on down, he said, there was a very strong sense that “we can’t ever be in [that] position again.”
House Republicans eventually conceded, passing an increase in the debt ceiling without any conditions in October 2013 and again the following year. In October 2015, Boehner, as his final act after announcing his intent to resign from Congress and vacate the speakership, engineered another extension that raised the debt ceiling through the remainder of Obama’s presidency while also loosening the sequestration cuts on both defense and domestic spending. Those three votes represented a sweeping victory for Obama’s new no-conditions approach to the debt ceiling.
Though Biden was among the most enthusiastic proponents of negotiations during Obama’s first term, no former officials recall him dissenting from the general rejection of that approach in Obama’s second. Notably, then–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (who died in 2021) took no chances: As the 2013 debt-ceiling fight approached, he personally told Obama to sideline Biden from any talks, because he considered the vice president too willing to make concessions to his frequent negotiating partner, McConnell.
On every front, most experts consider the environment even less hospitable today than it was during Obama’s presidency for the kind of budget deal that House Republicans are now demanding in order to raise the debt ceiling. Although Obama’s team and many congressional Democrats genuinely believed that a big long-term deficit-reduction plan was both good politics and good economics, Biden, as well as most congressional Democrats today, are much more skeptical of that proposition. And though Republicans could at least formulate specific spending-cut demands back then, they are far less likely to reach consensus today on a meaningful deficit-reduction plan. That’s largely because more of them have come to recognize that their political base, centered on older white voters, is just fine with government spending targeted toward them—particularly Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid and the ACA, which Republicans in the Obama era considered the bull’s-eye for their deficit-reduction plans. Moreover, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has less control over his fractious conference than Boehner did, and McCarthy is even less willing than his predecessor to cross his most conservative membersBut though these factors argue against a big deficit deal, especially one linked to a debt-ceiling increase, Biden must find some way to authorize more debt. He’s already facing calls from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to establish another special deficit-reduction committee.
For now, the White House, while indicating that Biden is open to talking with Republicans about the budget on other tracks, is digging in against linking anything to the debt ceiling. A former Obama official familiar with the Biden team’s strategy told me the White House believes that approach “is a matter of principle.”
Biden and his team have taken from the Obama years the lesson that if they don’t negotiate against the debt limit, a sufficient number of Republicans will eventually back down because the economic consequences of default would be so catastrophic. Biden may expect, for instance, that enough House Republicans will join House Democrats in advancing a “discharge petition” that would allow an increase to pass the House without support from the GOP leadership. Biden may be right in that calculation. But Obama’s no-negotiating posture on the debt ceiling worked mostly because enough congressional Republicans back then were unwilling to plunge over the cliff into default. The White House and financial markets around the world are certain to face many white-knuckled moments before they learn whether that is still true today.
A group of U.S. lawmakers wants the Biden administration to ask the United Arab Emirates to remove the oil company chief the country chose to lead the next U.N. climate talks — or at a minimum “seek assurances” that the UAE will promote an ambitious COP28 summit.
In a letter to Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry, 27 members of the House and Senate called for him to “urge” the UAE to withdraw the appointment of UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to lead the COP28 discussions, which start November 30 in Dubai. The company is one of the world’s largest oil producers.
“The appointment of an oil company executive to head COP 28 poses a risk to the negotiation process as well as the whole conference itself,” said the note, which was shared exclusively with POLITICO.
“To help ensure that COP 28 is a serious and productive climate summit, we believe the United States should urge the United Arab Emirates to name a different lead for COP 28 or, at a minimum, seek assurances that it will promote an ambitious COP 28 aligned with the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit,” the lawmakers added.
Kerry — along with other climate diplomats, including the EU’s Frans Timmermans — has repeatedly defended Al Jaber’s appointment in recent weeks, calling him a “terrific choice” in an interview with the Associated Press. Kerry also said ADNOC understood the need to shift its business away from fossil fuels. Kerry’s office was not immediately available to comment on the letter.
A COP28 spokesperson, who had not seen the letter, defended Al Jaber’s record “as a diplomat, minister, and business leader across the energy and renewables industry.” They highlighted his role as founder of renewables company Masdar, calling it “one of the world’s largest renewable energy company with clean energy investments in over 40 countries.”
“His experience uniquely positions him to be able to convene both the public and private sector to bring about pragmatic solutions to achieve the goals and aspirations of the Paris Climate Agreement,” the spokesperson said.
But the U.S. lawmakers noted the long history of fossil fuel industry interference in climate talks.
“Having a fossil fuel champion in charge of the world’s most important climate negotiations would be like having the CEO of a cigarette conglomerate in charge of global tobacco policy. It risks undermining the very essence of what is trying to be accomplished,” they wrote.
The “Qatargate” corruption scandal rocking the European Parliament is “dramatic and damaging for the credibility of the European Union” and makes it harder for Brussels to deal with multiple competing crises, European Council President Charles Michel told POLITICO in an exclusive interview.
Speaking in his offices in the Europa building in Brussels, Michel said he was very concerned over the charges of criminal enterprise, money laundering and corruption brought by the Belgian police against current and former members of the European Parliament in recent days.
“We first need to learn lessons from this and come up with a package of measures to avoid such things — to prevent corruption in the future,” said Michel, a former Belgian prime minister who is now in his second term as president of the European Council, the body that convenes the leaders of the EU’s 27 member countries.
But the scandal is “making it even more difficult for us to focus on the economic and energy crises that impact the lives of European citizens right now,” he said.
Belgian police have arrested multiple people, including Greek MEP Eva Kaili and her Italian partner, Francesco Giorgi, as well as Italian former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and Niccolo Figa-Talamanca, secretary-general of a rule-of-law campaign group.
The police have also sealed multiple offices in the Parliament and seized at least €1.5 million in cash following what they say was a year-long, Europe-wide investigation into alleged corruption and money laundering.
Coming just as the football World Cup reached its crescendo in Qatar, the affair has confirmed the image of the petro-kingdom as a malign meddling power and the EU as a murky playground for corrupt, entitled, sanctimonious Eurocrats.
“The EU has only made global headlines a handful of times in the last year — for example when we banned the internal combustion engine and now with this corruption scandal,” Valérie Hayer, a French MEP from President Emmanuel Macron’s party, lamented to POLITICO.
Michel acknowledged that the average European was unlikely to differentiate between the three big branches of the EU — the European Parliament, the European Council he leads and the European Commission, which serves as the executive branch and proposes legislation.
The taint of scandal will make his job far harder as he seeks to “renew the wedding vows of the EU” in the new year and tries to tackle a series of issues he described as “existential for the European project.”
Those include negotiations with the United States over the Inflation Reduction Act subsidy program that has panicked European leaders who worry about their relative economic competitiveness.
If Europe cannot come up with an adequate answer in the coming weeks, then it risks the “fragmentation of the single market,” Michel said. He said the other big problem facing Europe was “overdependency on China and the pressure being applied on us by China.”
PARIS — When French President Emmanuel Macron’s party lost its absolute majority in parliament six months ago, many wondered what the setback would mean for an ambitious, here-to-disrupt-the-status-quo leader whose first term was defined by a top-down style of management.
It turns out Macron 2.0 is a man about globe, pitching “strategic intimacy” to world leaders, as he leaves domestic politics to his chief lieutenant and concentrates on his preferred sphere: international diplomacy.
The Frenchman’s past “intimate” moves have been well-documented: affectionate hugging with Angela Merkel, knuckle-crunching handshakes with Donald Trump, and serial bromancing with the likes ofJustin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak. Now in his second term, the French president appears to be making a move on — quite literally — the world.
Since his reelection, Macron has been hopping from one official visit to another: in Algeria one day to restore relations with a former colony, in Bangkok another to woo Asian nations, and in Washington most recently to shore up the relationship with Washington. The globetrotting head of state has drawn criticism in the French press that he is deserting the home front.
“He is everywhere, follows everything, but he’s mostly elsewhere,” quipped a French minister speaking anonymously.
“[But] he’s been on the job for five years now, does he really need to follow the minutiae of every project? And the international pressure is very strong. Nothing is going well in the world,” the minister added.
Before COVID-19 struck, Macron’s first term was marked by a brisk schedule of reforms, including a liberalization of the job market aimed at making France more competitive. The French president was hoping to continue in the same pragmatic vein during his second term, focusing on industrial policy and reforming France’s pensions system. While he hasn’t abandoned these goals, the failure to win a parliamentary majority in June has forced him to slow down on the domestic agenda.
Foreign policy in France has always been the guarded remit of the president, but Macron is trying to flip political necessity into opportunity, delegating the tedium and messiness of French parliamentary politics to his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
There are few areas of global diplomacy where the president hasn’t pitched a French initiative in recent months — whether it’s food security in Africa, multilateralism in Asia or boosting civilian resilience in Ukraine. Despite some foreign policy missteps in his first term including the backing of strongman Khalifa Haftar in the Libyan civil war, Macron is now a veteran statesman, eagerly taking advantage of Europe’s leaderless landscape to hog the international stage.
The French president’s full pivot to global diplomacy in his weakened second term at home is reminiscent of past leaders confronting turmoil on the domestic front.
“The Jupiterian period is over. He’s got no majority,” said Cyrille Bret, researcher for the Jacques Delors Institute. “So now he is suffering from the Clinton-second-mandate-syndrome, who after the impeachment attempts over the Lewinsky [inquiry], turned to the international scene, trying to resolve issues in the Balkans, the Middle East and in China.”
But even as Macron embraces the wide world, the pitfalls ahead are numerous. Photo ops with world leaders haven’t done much to slow the erosion of his approval ratings at home. With a recession looming in Europe and discontent over inflation and energy woes, Macron’s margins of maneuver are limited, and trouble at home might ultimately need his attention.
Man about globe
The French president first used the words “strategic intimacy” in October, when he told European leaders gathered in Prague they needed to work on “a strategic conversation” to overcome divisions and start new projects.
If the thought of 44 European leaders cozying up wasn’t bewildering enough, Macron double-downed this month and called for “more strategic intimacy” with the U.S.
It’s not entirely clear what kind of transatlantic liaison he was gunning for, but it certainly included a good dose of tough love. Arriving in Washington, Macron called an American multi-billion package of green subsidies “super aggressive.” (He nonetheless received red carpet treatment at the White House, with Joe Biden calling him “his friend” and even “his closer” — the man who helps him bring deals over the finish line — even if he didn’t actually obtain any concessions from the U.S. president.)
Some of Macron’s success in taking center stage is, of course, due to France’s historical assets: a permanent seat on theU.N. Security Council, a nuclear capacity, a history of military interventions and global diplomacy.
But for the Americans, Macron is also the last dancing partner left in a fast-emptying ballroom across the pond. The U.K. is still embroiled in its own internal affairs and has lost some influence after Brexit, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hasn’t filled the space left by Merkel’s departure.
While Macron’s abstract and at times convoluted speeches may not be to everyone’s liking, at least he has got something to say.
“[The Americans] are looking for someone to engage with and there’s a lack of alternatives,” said Sophia Besch, European affairs expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Macron is the last one standing. There’s his enthusiasm, and at the same time he is disruptive for a leader and not always an easy partner.”
“He can count on some reluctant admirers in Washington for his energy,” she said.
The French touch
In his diplomatic endeavors, Macron likes a good surprise.
“Emmanuel Macron doesn’t like working bottom-up, where the political link is lost,” said one French diplomat. “He enjoys surprising people and marking political coups.”
“The [French bureaucracy] doesn’t really like that,” the diplomat added. “We prefer things that are all neat and tidy.”
Conjuring up new ideas — such as the European Political Community — that haven’t quite filtered through the layers of bureaucracy is one of Macron’s ways of pushing the envelope. The newly christened group’s first summit was ultimately hailed as a success, having marked the return of the U.K. to a European forum and displaying the Continent’s unity in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
It’s a technique that forces the hand of other participants but sometimes undermines the credibility of his initiatives, and raises questions about what has really been confirmed. Launching the European Political Community may have been a success; announcing a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. president a couple of days before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine less so. (The summit, obviously, never took place.)
Macron’s diplomatic frenzy has also raised speculation that he is already gunning for a top international job for when he leaves the Elysée palace. Macron cannot run for a third term, and speculation is already running high in France on what the hyperactive president will do next.
The question at the heart of Macron’s second term is whether his attempts to be everything and everywhere — combined with his stubborn dedication to controversial ideas — is what will ultimately trip him up.
Even as Macron’s U.S. visit was hailed a success, with him saying France and the US were “fully aligned” on Russia, he sparked controversy on his return when he told a French TV channel that Russia should be offered “security guarantees” in the event of negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.
“That comment fell out of the line in relation to the coordinated message from Macron and Biden, which was that nothing should be done about Ukraine without Ukraine’s [approval],” said Besch.
Macron says he wants France to be an “exemplary” NATO member, but he still wants France to act as a “balancing power” that does not completely close the door on Russia. It’s a stance that may help France build partnerships with more neutral states across the world, but it does nothing to mend the rift with eastern EU member states.
For the man about globe who presents himself as the champion of European interests, that’s an uncomfortable place to be in.
When it comes to “strategic intimacy,” it’s possible to have too many partners.
Elisa Bertholomey and Eddy Wax contributed to reporting.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
The transatlantic reset between Brussels and Washington is on life support.
After four years of discord and disruption under Donald Trump, hopes were high that Joe Biden’s presidency would usher in a new era of cooperation between Europe and the U.S. after he declared: “America is back.”
But when senior officials from both sides meet in Washington on Monday for a twice-yearly summit on technology and trade, the mood will be gloomier than at any time since Trump left office.
The European Union is up in arms over Biden’s plans for hefty subsidies for made-in-America electric cars, claiming these payments, which partly kick in from January 1, are nothing more than outright trade protectionism.
At the same time, the U.S. is increasingly frustrated the 27-country bloc won’t be more aggressive in pushing back against China, accusing some European governments of caving in to Beijing’s economic might.
Those frictions are expected to overshadow the so-called EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) summit this week. At a time when the Western alliance is seeking to maintain a show of unity and strength in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese authoritarianism, the geopolitical stakes are high.
Biden may have helped matters last Thursday, during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, by saying he believed the two sides can still resolve some of the concerns the EU has raised.
“We’re going to continue to create manufacturing jobs in America but not at the expense of Europe,” Biden said. “We can work out some of the differences that exist, I’m confident.”
But, as ever, the details will be crucial.
It is unclear what Biden can do to stop his Buy American subsidies from hurting European car-markers, for example, many of which come from powerful member countries like France and Germany. The TTC summit offers a crucial early opportunity for the two sides to begin to rebuild trust and start to deliver on Biden’s warm rhetoric.
Judging by the TTC’s record so far, those attending, who will include U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, will have their work cut out.
More than 20 officials, policymakers and industry and society groups involved in the summit told POLITICO that the lofty expectations for the TTC have yet to deliver concrete results. Almost all of the individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be attending the TTC | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Some officials privately accused their counterparts of broken promises, particularly on trade. Others are frustrated at a lack of progress in 10 working groups on topics like helping small businesses to digitize and tackling climate change.
“With these kinds of allies, who needs enemies?” said one EU trade diplomat when asked about tensions around upcoming U.S. electric car subsidies. A senior U.S. official working on the summit hit back: “We need the Europeans to play ball on China. So far, we haven’t had much luck.”
Much of the EU-U.S. friction is down to three letters: IRA.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provides subsidies to “Buy American” when it comes to purchasing electric vehicles, has infuriated officials in Brussels who see it as undermining the multilateral trading system and a direct threat to the bloc’s rival car industry.
“The expectation the TTC was established to provide a forum for precisely these advanced exchanges with a view to preventing trade frictions before they arise appears to have been severely frustrated,” said David Kleimann, a trade expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.
Biden’s room for flexibility is limited. The context for the subsidies and tax breaks is his desire to make good on his promise to create more manufacturing jobs ahead of an expected re-election run in 2024. The U.S. itself is hovering on the edge of a possible recession.
In addition, the U.S. trade deficit with the EU hit a record $218 billion in 2021, second only to the U.S. trade deficit with China. The U.S. also ran an auto trade deficit of about $22 billion with European countries, with Germany accounting for the largest share of that.
Washington has few, if any, meaningful policy levers at its disposal to calm European anger. During a recent visit to the EU, Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, urged European countries to pass their own subsidies to jumpstart Europe’s electric car production, according to three officials with knowledge of those discussions.
“It risks being the elephant in the room,” said Emily Benson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, when asked about the electric car dispute.
After a push from Brussels, there were increasing signs on Friday that the TTC could still play a role. In the latest version of the TTC’s draft declaration, obtained by POLITICO, both sides commit to addressing the European concerns over Biden’s subsidies, including via the Trade and Tech Council. Again, though, there was no detail on how Washington could resolve the issue.
Politicians across Europe are already drawing up plans to fight back against Biden’s subsidies. That may include taking the matter to the World Trade Organization, hitting the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs or passing a “Buy European Act” that would nudge EU consumers and businesses to buy locally made goods and components.
Officials and business leaders pose for a photo during the TTC in September 2021 | Pool photo by Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images
Privately, Washington has not been in the mood to give ground. Speaking to POLITICO before Biden met Macron, five U.S. policymakers said the IRA was not aimed at alienating allies, stressing that the green subsidies fit the very climate change goals that Europe has long called on America to adopt.
“There’s just a huge amount to be done and more frankly to be done than the market would provide for on its own,” said a senior White House official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “We think the Inflation Reduction Act is reflective of that type of step, but we also think there is a space here for Europe and others, frankly, to take similar steps.”
China tensions
Senior politicians attending the summit are expected to play down tensions this week when they announce a series of joint EU-U.S. projects.
These include funds for two telecommunications projects in Jamaica and Kenya and the announcement of new rules for how the emerging technology of so-called trustworthy artificial intelligence can develop. There’s also expected to be a plan for more coordination to highlight potential blockages in semiconductor supply chains, according to the draft summit statement obtained by POLITICO.
Yet even on an issue like microchips — where both Washington and Brussels have earmarked tens of billions of euros to subsidize local production — geopolitics intervenes.
For months, U.S. officials have pushed hard for their European counterparts to agree to export controls to stop high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment being sent to China, according to four officials with knowledge of those discussions.
Washington already passed legislation to stop Chinese companies from using such American-made hardware. The White House had been eager for the European Commission to back similar export controls, particularly as the Dutch firm ASML produced equipment crucial for high-end chipmaking worldwide.
Yet EU officials preparing for the TTC meeting said such requests had never been made formally to Brussels. The draft summit communiqué makes just a passing reference to China and threats from so-called non-market economies.
Unlike the U.S., the EU remains divided on how to approach Beijing as some countries like Germany have long-standing economic ties with Chinese businesses that they are reluctant to give up. Without a consensus among EU governments, Brussels has little to offer Washington to help its anti-China push.
“In theory, the TTC is not about China, but in practice, every discussion with the U.S. is,” said one senior EU official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If we talk with Katherine Tai about Burger King, it has an anti-China effect.”
Gavin Bade, Clea Caulcutt, Samuel Stolton and Camille Gijs contributed reporting.
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — European Union ministers threatened to walk out of global climate talks here Saturday, with officials blaming China and Saudi Arabia for weakening the deal.
“All ministers, as they have told me — like myself — are prepared to walk away if we do not have a result that does justice to what the world is waiting for,” EU climate envoy Frans Timmermans told reporters, escalating tense talks that have already run into overtime.
Flanked by the 13 EU ministers still present at the talks, Timmermans told a pack of reporters on Saturday that the EU is “worried about some of the things we have seen and heard” in recent hours, which he said jeopardizes the global goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“A good decision means that we remain on track to keep 1.5 alive,” he said. “We do not want 1.5 Celsius to die here.”
Ireland Environment Minister Eamon Ryan said the stakes of the talks crystallized Saturday morning when ministers read an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that said an additional 420 million people would face extreme heat and 270 million would endure water scarcity if the world warmed 2 degrees Celsius instead of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We’re on a very tight timeline. And we have to be faster now. But not fast towards a bad result,” Ryan said, as venue staff packed up the conference around the media scrum. “Not fast in terms of accepting something that we then spend years regretting — that every year afterwards we say ‘If only we had held the line in Sharm El-Sheikh.’ ”
In the early hours of Saturday morning, EU negotiators were invited to review a draft of the final COP27 deal by the Egyptians leading the talks.
Timmermans said the deal, as proposed, “stepped back” from earlier agreements.
Dutch Climate Minister Rob Jetten said that across the board their suggestions for bolstering efforts to cut dangerous greenhouse gas emissions had been rejected.
One phrase, read out to reporters by an EU official, would, if accepted, block a program meant for driving emissions cuts from ever resulting in pressure for higher national climate targets, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).
“The most crucial thing is that all countries commit themselves to updating NDCs, making sure that you actually showcase that your NDC is also helping us to keep one and a half degrees alive,” Jetten told POLITICO.
Egyptian COP27 President Sameh Shoukry defended the text in a Saturday press conference, saying it has “minor” amendments and is an attempt to accommodate various parties. He said the text keeps the 1.5 degree Celsius goal within reach.
EU climate envoy Frans Timmermans speaks to reporters in Sharm El-Sheikh | Karl Mathiesen/POLITICO
One European official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, accused the Egyptian presidency of working on behalf of a coalition of developing countries that included China and Saudi Arabia. Two others confirmed China and Saudi Arabia were blocking.
Timmermans said that the EU has done more compromising than any nation at the two-week-long negotiations. The EU offered a vision this week for steering money to vulnerable countries suffering from irreversible effects of a warming planet, breaking with past resistance to the idea.
Now it’s time for others to move, Timmermans said.
“Remember where we were only a couple of months ago — nobody even wanted this on the agenda,” Timmermans said. “Now we are talking about … establishing a fund. And that is a movement that came from us. And I think that should be reciprocated by the other side.”
The fight over those payments, known as loss and damage, has taken center stage at the talks in Egypt.
The EU’s broadsides amounted to a veiled shot at China and a group of developing countries it negotiates with. Those nations have backed a separate concept that would send payments to all developing countries, while the EU proposal focuses on the most vulnerable. It also would expand who pays into the fund, meaning countries that have grown wealthier in recent decades may be expected to contribute.
Rich economies like the EU have garnered little goodwill. An Egyptian official argued this week that the EU and other rich countries bore responsibility for the lack of will among poorer countries because they had failed to match their own financial pledges from last year.
Ryan told reporters that the goal of the EU’s proposal was not to divide. “The definition of vulnerability is not just limited to any one category or group of countries,” he said. “There are medium- and high-income countries who will on occasion be in need of that fund.”
The U.S., another longtime holdout on paying countries for climate damage, has warmed to the idea, according to a draft text of a proposal that has not yet been formally submitted to the U.N.’s Egyptian presidency.
Timmermans said the U.S. has played a “constructive role,” adding, “I have to say, I have no complaints.”
BALI, Indonesia — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday called on G20 leaders not to offer his country any peace deal that would compromise its independence from Russia, amid recently renewed contact between Washington and Moscow over the future of the war.
Zelenskyy appeared at the Bali summit via videolink at the invitation of the Indonesian hosts, just days after Ukraine liberated Kherson from invading Russian forces — a feat he compared to the D-Day landing of allied troops in Normandy, a key turning point of World War II.
“For Ukraine, this liberation operation of our defense forces is reminiscent of many battles of the past, which became turning points in the wars of the past,” Zelenskyy said in his speech to world leaders, among them U.S. President Joe Biden — and, according to a Western diplomat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “It is like, for example, D-Day — the landing of the allies in Normandy.”
Pointedly addressing his comments to the “dear G19” — the leaders of the Group of 20, with a snub to Russia — Zelenskyy warned against making Ukraine weaker than it was before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February.
“I want this aggressive Russian war to end justly and on the basis of the U.N. Charter and international law,” Zelenskyy said in his speech, the content of which was leaked to POLITICO. “Ukraine should not be offered to conclude compromises with its conscience, sovereignty, territory and independence. We respect the rules and we are people of our word.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to the summit in Bali but last week decided not to attend, sending Lavrov instead.
In his speech on Tuesday, Zelenskyy rejected any negotiations like those Kyiv held with Moscow in previous years, after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, before seizing, via proxies, territory in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
“Apparently, one cannot trust Russia’s words, and there will be no Minsk 3, which Russia would violate immediately after signing,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements, signed in 2014 and 2015 and mediated by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format, which were intended to bring an end to the war at that time.
Zelenskyy’s speech to the G20 came on the same day Chinese President Xi Jinping asked his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to work toward negotiated peace for Ukraine.
According to the Chinese state media Xinhua, Xi “emphasized that China’s position on the Ukrainian crisis is clear and consistent, advocating ceasefire, cessation of war and peace talks. The international community should create conditions for this, and China will continue to play a constructive role in its own way.”
Nevertheless, Zelenskyy thanked countries including China for rejecting Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons.
Slamming the “crazy threats of nuclear weapons,” the Ukrainian president added: “There are and cannot be any excuses for nuclear blackmail. And I thank you, dear G19, for making this clear.”
Bill Burns, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, met his Russian counterpart Sergei Naryshkin in Turkey on Monday and warned Moscow against using nuclear weapons, according to the White House.
BALI, Indonesia — Senior Indonesian politicians are calling on Western leaders to make concessions on how far to go in criticizing Russia over the war in Ukraine in a last-ditch effort to avoid leaving the G20 summit later this week without a joint declaration, three diplomats with knowledge of the ongoing negotiations told POLITICO.
According to these diplomats, U.S., European, Australian, Canadian and Japanese officials are among those under pressure from Indonesian counterparts, all the way up to President Joko Widodo, to show “flexibility” and consider using less tough rhetoric in order for Moscow — represented at the Bali summit by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — to say yes to a communiqué at the end of the gathering.
Widodo “considers it a personal success” if a G20 declaration could be reached, one of the officials said, adding that the Indonesian leader has lamented repeatedly that he is chairing the “most difficult” G20 summit ever.
He is also seeking to avoid kicking Russia out and making it the G19, which the G8 did in the wake of Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.
One possibility would be to focus squarely on the aspect of “upholding international law.” If adopted, that would be much more coded wording than what’s been used by the G7, which has repeatedly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
The latest G7 statement, following this month’s meeting of foreign ministers from the group, criticized Moscow for “its war of aggression against Ukraine” and called for Russia to withdraw. “We condemn Russia’s recent escalation, including its attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure,” it said. The G7 countries also blasted “Russia’s irresponsible nuclear rhetoric,” according to the Nov. 4 statement.
“Obviously we can’t be as tough as we do it in G7 when you need the Russians, Chinese and Saudis to agree,” a Western diplomat said, referring to the larger G20 grouping. “The question is how much we need to delete.”
China, Saudi Arabia, India and Brazil, four of the fellow G20 countries, are described as “sitting on the fence” over the issue.
Beijing, in particular, would find it impossible to accept any direct criticism of Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who will be attending the G20 summit personally, has so far only made an effort to show disapproval of any threats of using nuclear weapons, without attributing such threats to Moscow.
Another issue for Widodo is the likely lack of a family photo for the two-day summit that starts on Tuesday. According to convention, all the G20 leaders would line up and take a group picture to show solidarity. This time, however, Western leaders have hesitation about being in the same frame as Lavrov, a key aide to Putin, whom U.S. President Joe Biden has called a “killer.”
Widodo is described as “interested” in assessing fellow leaders’ opinions on having such a family photo.
Much of his lobbying has taken place in Cambodia, where he’s attending the East Asia Summit. Also in Cambodia were Biden, European Council President Charles Michel, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. Russia’s Lavrov and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang were also in Phnom Penh.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has urged Western countries for more “flexibility” | Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP via Getty Images
Speaking in Cambodia, Albanese confirmed to reporters that officials are still negotiating over the wording a G20 final communiqué.
“You know the way that these conferences work. We’ve just got through an East Asia Summit, an ASEAN meeting and a range of other summits. So we’re waiting to see what happens, but I go into the G20 with a great deal of confidence,” Albanese said.
Lavrov criticized Washington for stirring up confrontation in Asia. “There is a clear trend on militarization of the region through coordination of efforts of local U.S. allies such Australia, New Zealand, Japan with NATO enlargement,” he said.
PRAGUE — U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai traveled more than 4,000 miles to prevent a transatlantic trade war over electric vehicles, but her EU counterparts signaled on Monday that they would be a tough crowd to win round.
The growing spat hinges on U.S. legislation that encourages consumers via tax credits to “Buy American” when it comes to choosing an electric car.
At a time when the U.S. and Europe want to present a united front against Russia, this protectionist measure has triggered outrage in many EU countries, including France and Germany, two leading European carmaking nations. Beyond the EU, China, Japan and South Korea have also voiced concern.
After speaking with Tai at a meeting of EU ministers in Prague, the bloc’s trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis predicted it would be difficult to resolve the dispute.
“It will not be easy to fix it — but fix it we must,” he said.
Among the 27 EU countries, anxiety about the U.S. measure is growing. Sweden’s new trade minister, Johan Forssell, whose country takes over the presidency of the Council of the EU in January, told POLITICO on Sunday that aspects of the U.S. legislation were “worrying” and “not in accordance with [World Trade Organization] rules.”
Another senior official stressed: “It’s not only one or two member states, which are concerned … It’s also the small ones; they will have no access at all” to the U.S. market.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz agreed over lunch last week that the EU should retaliate if Washington pushed ahead with the controversial bill. Macron floated the idea of a “Buy European Act” to strike back.
The new tax credits for electric vehicles are part of a huge U.S. tax, climate and health care package, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the U.S. Congress in August.
The idea is that a U.S. consumer can claim back $7,500 of the value of an electric car from their tax bill. To qualify for that credit, however, the car needs to be assembled in North America and contain a battery with a certain percentage of the metals mined or recycled in the U.S., Canada or Mexico.
Czech Trade Minister Jozef Síkela, whose country currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU, said that European carmakers wanted to qualify for the scheme, just as the North Americans do.
In its current form, the bill is “unacceptable,” and “is extremely protective against exports from Europe,” said Síkela as he walked into Monday’s meeting. “We simply expect that we will get the same status as Canada and Mexico.”
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
“But we need to be realistic,” Síkela told reporters later. “This is our starting point in the negotiations and we’ll see what we’ll manage to negotiate at the end.”
In a bid to soothe tensions, a joint task force was set up last week by the European Commission and the U.S. The task force is supposed to meet at the end of this week, although the exact date isn’t yet fixed, according to thesenior official.
Asked whether Brussels would retaliate should no agreement be struck with Washington, Dombrovskis took a cautious approach: “Setting up this task force is already … a response of us, raising those concerns … At this stage, we are focusing on a negotiated solution before considering what other options there may be.”
The midterm elections in the U.S., where President Joe Biden’s Democrats look likely to lose ground, compound the difficulties.
It doesn’t seem like the tensions will be eased by the next Trade and Technology Council, which takes place between U.S. and European negotiators in early December.
Dismay over the U.S. subsidies has overshadowed the preparatory work for the next TTC meeting, for which the EU and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic want to see rapid concrete results to avoid the perception that the format is simply a talking shop.
Tai herself had no immediate comment in Prague, but later released a statement on her meeting with Síkela that gave no hint of a breakthrough.
“Ambassador Tai and Minister Síkela discussed the ongoing work of the Trade and Technology Council, and the importance of achieving meaningful results for the December TTC Ministerial and beyond. They also discussed the newly-created U.S.-EU Task Force on the Inflation Reduction Act,” the statement said.
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