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  • The end of Boris Johnson

    The end of Boris Johnson

    Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

    Boris Johnson’s political career ended on Wednesday, with stuttering and fake politesse.

    Seated before a U.K. House of Commons committee poised to rule on whether he lied to parliament about Partygate, Johnson was far from his element. Beneath the ghost of his famous bonhomie and the half-conceived rhetoric, I saw anger segueing to bafflement: A man who has been forgiven all his life, now unforgiven. He should rewatch the original “House of Cards”: nothing lasts forever.

    If Johnson once coasted on the times, now he is cursed by them. Britain has a new seriousness and a new PM: In politics, a bookie is followed by a bishop, to borrow the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous phrase. (I’m not including Liz Truss, who is owed a special category of her own.)

    Johnson may be suspended from parliament if the committee finds against him, and he may then lose his seat. The classicist in him will understand: He is most in danger from his friends. The committee’s Tory questioners were more savage, but they have been more deeply betrayed. He is an embarrassment now. They will throw him overboard for a percentage point. When the committee paused for a vote, he led a rebellion against the government on the Windsor Framework, Rishi Sunak’s solution to Johnson’s own Brexit deal. Only 22 out of 354 Tory MPs followed him. This is how he departs.

    The hearing took place in a dull room with expensive furniture that looked cheap and a mad mural of leaves in his eye line. Johnson isn’t in politics for dull rooms: He’s in it to ride his motorbike around Chequers.

    Harriet Harman, the Labour MP and Mother of the House, was in the chair wearing black, as precise as Johnson is chaotic, with a necklace that looked like a chain. Was it metaphor? Harman has spent her career supporting female parliamentarians. Then a man who said voting Tory would give wives bigger breasts won an 80-seat majority in 2019. But that was a whole pandemic ago.

    Johnson was there to defend himself against the charge that he repeatedly lied to parliament when he said guidance was followed in No. 10. His strategy was distraction: obscuration, and repetition, and sentences that tripped along ring roads, going nowhere.

    He has never been so boring: No one listening ever wants to hear the word “guidance” again. If the ability to inflict boredom was his defense, it was also his destruction. Johnson is supposed to be a seducer with a fascinating narrative arc ― one of his campaign videos aped the film “Love Actually” ― not a bore. But needs must. The fascination was thrown overboard.

    He swore to tell the truth on a fawn-colored Bible, but he did not look at it. He rocked on his heels. He has had a haircut: As ever, his hair emotes for him. The mop, so redolent of Samson ― he would muss it before big speeches, to disguise that he cared ― is a sullen bowl now. He looked haunted. Lord Pannick, his lawyer, smiled behind him. His resting face is a smile, and he needed it.

    Johnson told Harman there would soon be a Commons vote, as if she, Mother of the House, didn’t know. She said she would suspend proceedings for the vote, and he talked over her with a flurry of thanks. He thanked her four times. He didn’t mean it.

    He read a statement: “I’m here to say to you, hand on heart, that I did not lie to the House.” He made a fist, and placed his hand on his chest where his heart isn’t: on the right-hand side. He said there was a near-universal belief in No. 10 that the guidance was followed, and that is why he said so to the House.

    He shuffled his papers, as handsome Bernard Jenkin, a Tory, began the questioning with exaggerated gravity, to indicate that the Tories are through with levity. He reminded Johnson that he had regularly said “hands, face, space” while standing behind podiums that said also said, “hands, face, space,” which indicated he understand the guidance.

    People sit in the Red Lion pub in London as former Prime Minister Boris Johnson giving evidence on Partygate is shown on the TV | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

    They discussed the leaving party of Lee Cain, Johnson’s former director of communications. There were 15-20 people there, Jenkin reminded him, you gave a speech. Johnson said guidance was followed, at least while he was there. Jenkin pressed him. “I don’t accept that people weren’t making an effort to distance themselves socially from each other,” Johnson said, while we gazed at a photograph of people standing next to each other. And this was how it was for 300 minutes: We were invited to ignore the evidence of our own eyes, even as they chilled with boredom.

    Johnson insisted: “It was necessary because two senior members of staff were about to leave the building in pretty acrimonious circumstances. It was important for me to be there and to give reassurance.” This fits the Johnson myth. He was there for morale, while others governed, because that’s boring. I am not sure that the leaving party of a press aide is a matter of state, but Johnson always lived for headlines. Even so, he pleaded: We had sanitizers, we kept windows open, we had Zoom meetings, we had Perspex screens between desks, we had regular testing ― way beyond what the guidance advised!

    “If you had said all that at the time to the House of Commons, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here,” said Jenkin mildly, even sympathetically, and that’s when I knew it was over. Tories are awfully like characters from “The Godfather” sometimes: murderers come with smiles. “But you didn’t.”

    Jenkin read the guidance to him: “You must maintain social distancing in the workplace wherever possible.” “The business of the government had to be carried on!” Johnson cried. “That is what I had to do!” No one replied: “It was Lee Cain’s leaving do, you maniac.”

    On it went, trench warfare. Johnson didn’t seem to understand that he wasn’t describing an absence of law-breaking, but a culture of it. In his wine-filled wood, he couldn’t see a tree. Committee members suggested he breached the guidance. He said he didn’t ― and if it should have been obvious to him that he was breaching it, it should have been obvious to Rishi Sunak too. They asked him why he didn’t take proper advice when talking to the House. (Because he trusted the press office. His people. Lawyers aren’t his people.)

    Bernard Jenkin said: “I put it to you, Mr. Johnson, that you did not take proper advice.” Johnson’s thumb stroked his other thumb. He exploded with tangents, and eventually half-shouted: “This is nonsense, I mean complete nonsense!” Lord Pannick’s smile slid down his face. He blinked.

    I would like to say this is the last gasp for Johnson’s faux-aristocratic style, with its entitlement and its pseudo-intellectualism, but his danger was ever in his precedent. It is always pleasing when a narcissist is exposed, and by himself, but there will be another one along soon enough. I wonder if its hair will have its own cuttings file.

    Amid his word salad, Johnson told Harman she had said things that were “plainly and wrongly prejudicial, or prejudge the very issue you are adjudicating.” She told him the assurances he used to inform parliament had been “flimsy.” Finally, he said he’d much enjoyed the day. (He lied.) The question, as ever with Johnson, is ― does he believe it himself? Truthfully, it doesn’t matter now.

    POLITICO Staff

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  • Free tea and sausages in the snow: How Putin persuades Russians to cheer the war

    Free tea and sausages in the snow: How Putin persuades Russians to cheer the war

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    MOSCOW — Among the perks offered to those stamping their feet to stay warm outside Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium there were hot drinks, payouts, free food or a day off from class. Others had simply been told by their employers to attend, independent media reported.

    “We’re from the Russian Post,” a young man with dark hair said glumly, burying his face into his coat. Minutes earlier, a woman in a white wooly hat had called out his name from a list and handed him a paper invite in the colors of the Russian tricolor. 

    “Invite to the festive program ‘Glory to the Defenders of the Fatherland,’” it read. 

    The mass event at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on Wednesday could hardly be called spontaneous. But it was certainly a crowd-puller. 

    Тens of thousands were reported to have poured through the metal detectors installed on the grounds of Luzhniki, once the gem of the World Cup Russia hosted in 2018 and a symbol of its international appeal. Now it is a favorite location for staged patriotic rallies. 

    This event was timed for Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 23, a traditional holiday in Russia which this year acts as an upbeat to the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a day later. 

    The lineup included a number of pop stars who are regular faces at patriotic events, such as singers Grigory Leps and Oleg Gazmanov, both of whom are on the EU’s sanctions list. 

    Тhe singer Shaman belted out his ballad “We’ll rise,” dressed in a T-shirt reading: “I am Russian.” 

    But the real star was President Vladimir Putin who looked visibly pleased after walking on stage to chants of: “Russia! Russia!”

    “Right now there is a battle going on our historic lands, for our people … we are proud of them,” he told the crowd. “Today, in defending our interests, our people, our culture, language, territory, all of it, our entire people is the defender of the fatherland.”

    Earlier, a group of young children described as being from Mariupol were brought on stage with footage of a destroyed city playing in the background. “I want to thank Uncle Yurya for saving me and hundreds of thousands of others,” one of the girls said before being encouraged to hug а military commander said to have “saved” more than 350 children. 

    Generally, public messaging has tended to avoid putting too much focus on Ukraine and the war — a term which in Russia is still a criminal offense — and more on a broader and less contentious narrative of patriotism and support for the country’s armed forces.

    Тens of thousands were reported to have poured through the metal detectors installed on the grounds of Luzhniki, once the gem of the World Cup Russia hosted in 2018 | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

    At the stadium, some law enforcement officers, but few visitors, brandished Zs, the letter that has become a symbol of the war. Similarly, across the city, billboards featured veterans and modern-day soldiers and slogans such as “We stand together!” but rarely did they explicitly mention Ukraine. 

    Access to the concert was strictly controlled. There were no tickets for purchase and only a handful of media were allowed in. Attendants had to sign up beforehand via youth organizations, state companies and educational institutions. 

    “I was signed up by my university,” a young man dressed in a light gray hooded sweater said. Asked whether it had been mandatory, he nodded and looked away. 

    He declined to give his name and, fearing reprisals, others were similarly wary to talk. “We don’t speak Russian,” a woman of Central Asian appearance said, after being asked what had brought her there. 

    “It’s very cold today, and we’re just having a snack, thank you, goodbye,” said another woman in a fur coat, who stood outside with a group eating sausage sandwiches and pickles in the snow. 

    A similar rally in Luzhniki was held in March last year, when Russia marked the eight-year anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. And another in October on Red Square after a ceremony annexing four more Ukrainian regions, despite them not being fully under Russian control.

    In fact, since 2014 the rallies have become a fixed feature of Putin’s leadership.

    “After Crimea’s annexation, Putin went from aspiring to the legitimacy of an elected president to that of being an almighty Leader. And if you’re a Leader, you need a crowd to gather around you,” analyst Nikolai Petrov, a consultant at Chatham House think tank, told POLITICO. 

    But even the most fervent Kremlin supporter would struggle to portray the rallies as spontaneous. In fact, the traditional scenes of rows of similar buses transporting similar-looking people who then wave similar-sized Russian flags are more like North Korea than Woodstock. 

    However, said Petrov, the Kremlin is unlikely to consider this a weakness. “The Kremlin doesn’t need people to mobilize themselves, even in its support,” he said. “The whole idea of such events is to demonstrate loyalty, not some kind of fanatical love.” 

    Though the Luzhniki concert was the big showstopper, other festivities are expected across the country in the coming days. 

    According to the business outlet RBC, the presidential administration has sent out guidelines to regional authorities on suitable activities. Suggestions reportedly included painting military-themed murals, staging flash mobs with people lining up in the form of a star-shaped war medal, and arts and crafts workshops to produce, among other things, knitted socks that could later be sent to soldiers fighting in Ukraine. 

    The real star of the show was President Vladimir Putin who looked visibly pleased after walking on stage to chants | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

    Russians who have family or friends involved in the “special military operation” have also been encouraged to record personal video messages and share them online under the hashtag #ourheroes. 

    In one such video posted on Instagram — a platform that has been banned in Russia as extremist but is still widely used via VPN — a teary-eyed woman from the town of Prokhladny in Kabardino-Balkaria dressed in uniform tells her husband: “You’re our rock, our defender. I wish for you to come back victorious, healthy, unharmed. I love you very much.” 

    Back at Luzhniki, ahead of the rally, loudspeakers promised attendants free hot tea, porridge and sausages.

    Meanwhile, coordinators continued to call out names from their clipboards to groups of middle-aged women in mittens and fur coats and men in dark jackets and hats. “Smirnova, Oxana Pavlovna!” one such organizer yelled. Answering to that name, a woman walked forwards and accepted her entry ticket with little emotion. 

    After getting their names ticked, a trickle of people headed straight back to the metro, away from the grounds before the celebrations had even started, some of them with the Russian tricolor flags they had been given still in hand.

    With another anniversary, the annexation of Crimea, around the corner in March, they are likely to be back soon. 

    POLITICO Staff

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  • EU to Steve Bannon: You don’t scare us … anymore

    EU to Steve Bannon: You don’t scare us … anymore

    BRUSSELS — The EU was “scared” of Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon during the European parliamentary election in 2019 — but those fears are gone ahead of the 2024 ballot, European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said.

    Referring to Bannon’s attempts to form a “club” to support far-right populists such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen in the run-up to the last EU-wide election, Jourová said Brussels was genuinely concerned his ideas would take off.

    “We were scared by Steve Bannon organizing the pan-European campaign comprising Mr. Wilders, Madame Le Pen, and all the rest — finding everywhere useful partners and willing collaborators,” Jourová told journalists at a gathering on Thursday night.

    “It was a combination still of the effect of the migration crisis, of terrorism, and Trump,” Jourová said. “It was also the Cambridge Analytica case” — revelations that the infamous British data analytics firm had illegally accessed people’s social media data to target them in a number of elections and was linked to Trump’s successful 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. “It was also the time of rising disinformation, targeted disinformation campaigns — these were things which were relatively new for us.”

    Bannon, “with his simplified vision of Europe, could easily trigger something, which the others who know Europe could use as a platform. This was my fear,” Jourová said. But, “it didn’t happen. And I believe that now it will be a similar thing.”

    Jourová, who is the European commissioner for values and transparency, said she believed Russia’s war on Ukraine would see Europeans make safe bets in the 2024 election, during which citizens in the EU’s 27 member countries will vote to elect the members of the European Parliament.

    “I don’t think there will be a rise of extremist parties — far right or left,” Jourová said. “Because the people now see, especially in the time of crisis, it’s not the time for experiments.”

    Asked whether the revelations of corruption and influence-buying by countries such as Qatar and Morocco in the European Parliament would drive extremist sentiment in the ballot, Jourová said it was “hard to say,” as the election was still a year away.

    But, she added, “if I take a broader picture, when people see the politicians in jail, there are two kinds of instincts: ‘They are all rotten, they are all bad, we knew it.’ But then when the people see the system works, and when cases of corruption are closed and people are punished, I think that paradoxically, such scandal can even increase the trust of people in democratic institutions.”

    Zoya Sheftalovich

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  • Can Putin win?

    Can Putin win?

    “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.”

    Jamie Dettmer

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  • Luke Skywalker to sell signed Star Wars posters for Ukraine: May the funds be with you!

    Luke Skywalker to sell signed Star Wars posters for Ukraine: May the funds be with you!

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    Love Star Wars? Hate Vladimir Putin? Then there’s good news as Luke Skywalker is to start selling signed posters to raise cash for maintaining the Ukrainian army’s drone supply.

    “We decided to sign Star Wars posters, a limited amount,” Mark Hamill, the actor who played Skywalker in the iconic movies, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. “For real hardcore collectors — especially those that have disposable income — you can get way more money … than you would imagine.”

    Exactly how the posters will be put up for sale is yet to be finalized, but the idea of “having hundreds and thousands of people enter [a competition or auction], that’s smart,” Hamill said.

    The poster sale is expected to start next week and comes ahead of the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine on February 24, with Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov saying Russia is planning a major offensive.

    This really is the return of the Jedi — Hamill revealed he hasn’t sold autographed items since 2017, when “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” came out. “It’s just not something I do,” he said, adding that he is happy to do it to support Ukraine, whose ongoing fight against Russia is “nothing short of inspirational.”

    Hamill said that something he learned from the world(s) of Star Wars is doing the “right thing for the good of everyone, rather than being all about self-interest,” adding that comparing the two worlds shouldn’t trivialize “the true horrors of what Ukrainians face.”

    “One is really a fairy tale for children, originally that’s what Star Wars was. And the reality, the stark reality of what’s going on in Ukraine, is harrowing.”

    Ukrainian servicemen fly a drone on the outskirts of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine | Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images

    The money raised from the sale of the posters will go to the Ukrainian fundraising platform United24. Hamill became an ambassador for the platform’s “Army of Drones” project in September after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally asked him to join the fight against “the empire of evil,” as he labeled Russia — a reference to the Galactic Empire, the brutal dictatorship led by evil Palpatine in the Star Wars saga.

    The actor says he is “thrilled” that the fundraising project has evolved to this “massive, worldwide event,” saying that “anything I can do, however small it is, is something I feel obligated to do.”

    The “Army of Drones” involves drone procurement, maintenance and training, as the drones are used to monitor the frontline, according to the project’s website. “Drones are so vital in this conflict. They are the eyes in the sky. They protect the border, they monitor,” Hamill said.

    The project is a joint venture between the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and United24. The latter was set up by Zelenskyy and has so far raised more than €252 million.

    Other celebrities — including the band Imagine Dragons and the singer and actress Barbra Streisand — have also been named ambassadors for the platform.

    “The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this,” Zelenskyy told Hamill during a video call last year, thanking him for supporting the Ukrainian people.

    CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the amount of money raised by United24.

    Wilhelmine Preussen

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  • Manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive

    Manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive

    Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

    It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks and make up for the battlefield failings of its command.

    This week, Norway’s army chief said Russia has already suffered staggering losses, estimating 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February — a figure much higher than American estimates, as General Mark Milley, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, had suggested in November that the toll was around 100,000.

    But whatever the exact tally, few military analysts doubt Russian forces are suffering catastrophic casualties. In a video posted this week, Russian human rights activist Olga Romanova, who heads the Russia Behind Bars charity, said that of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from jails by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, 40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted.

    In some ways, the high Wagner toll isn’t surprising, with increasing reports from both sides of the front lines that Prigozhin has been using his recruits with little regard for their longevity. One American volunteer, who asked to remain unnamed, recently told POLITICO that he was amazed how Wagner commanders were just hurling their men at Ukrainian positions, only to have them gunned down for little gain.

    Andrey Medvedev, a Wagner defector who recently fled to Norway, has also told reporters that in the months-long Russian offensive against the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, former prisoners were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, as meat. “In my platoon, only three out of 30 men survived. We were then given more prisoners, and many of those died too,” he said.

    Of course, Wagner is at the extreme end when it comes to carelessness with lives — but as Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day missile strike demonstrated, regular Russian armed forces are also knee-deep in blood. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed at Makiivka — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the invasion began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll was nearer 400.

    Many of those killed there came from Samara, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and Samara rivers, where Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had an underground complex built for Russian leaders in case of a possible evacuation from Moscow. The bunker was built in just as much secrecy as the funerals that have been taking place over the past few weeks for the conscripts killed at Makiivka. “Lists [of the dead] will not be published,” Samara’s military commissar announced earlier this month.

    To make up for these losses, Russia’s military bloggers, who have grown increasingly critical, have been urging a bigger partial mobilization, this time of 500,000 reservists to add to the 300,000 already called up in September. President Vladimir Putin has denied this, and Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also dismissed the possibility, saying that the “topic is constantly artificially activated both from abroad and from within the country.”

    Yet, last month, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called for Russia’s army to be boosted from its current 1.1 million to 1.5 million, and he announced new commands in regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia, on the border with Finland.

    Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence that another draft will be called is also accumulating — though whether it will be done openly or by stealth is unclear.

    Along these lines, both the Kremlin and Russia’s political-military establishment have been redoubling propaganda efforts, attempting to shape a narrative that this war isn’t one of choice but of necessity, and that it amounts to an existential clash for the country.

    General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” | Ruslan Braun/Creative commons via Flickr

    In a recent interview, General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” and that course corrections are needed when it comes to mobilization. He talked about threats arising from Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

    Similarly, in his Epiphany address this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church said, “the desire to defeat Russia today has taken very dangerous forms. We pray to the Lord that he will bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” And the increasingly unhinged Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has warned that the war in Ukraine isn’t going as planned, so it might be necessary to use nuclear weapons to avoid failure.

    As Russia’s leaders strive to sell their war as an existential crisis, they are mining ever deeper for tropes to heighten nationalist fervor too, citing the Great Patriotic War at every turn. At the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, which commemorates the breaking of the German siege of the city in 1944, a new exhibition dedicated to “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned” is due to be unveiled, and it is set to feature captured Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. “It’s only logical that a museum dedicated to the struggle against Nazism would support the special operation directed against neo-Nazism in Ukraine,” a press release helpfully suggests.

    In line with Putin’s insistence that the war is being waged to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists have also been endeavoring to popularize the slogan, “We can do it again.”

    At the same time, there are signs that local recruitment centers are gearing up for another surge of draftees as well.

    Rumors of a fresh partial mobilization have prompted some dual-citizen Central Asian workers — those holding Russian passports and who would be eligible to be drafted — to leave the country, and some say they’ve been prevented from exiting. A Kyrgyz man told Radio Free Europe he was stopped by Russian border guards when he tried to cross into Kazakhstan en route to Kyrgyzstan. “Russian border guards explained to me quite politely that ‘you are included in a mobilization list, this is the law, and you have no right to go,’” he said.  

    In order to prevent another surge of refuseniks, Moscow also seems determined to put up further restrictions on crossing Russia’s borders, including possibly making it obligatory for Russians to book a specific time and place in advance, so that they can exit. Amendments to a transport law introduced in the Duma on Monday would require “vehicles belonging to Russian transport companies, foreign transport companies, citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons and other road users” to reserve a date and time “in order to cross the state border of the Russian Federation.”

    Transport officials say this would only affect haulers and would help ease congestion near border checkpoints. But if so, then why are “citizens of the Russian Federation” included in the language?

    All in all, manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive in the coming months. And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers on the battlefield. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest are necessary for an attacking force.

    Jamie Dettmer

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  • Reporting corruption in a time of war: The Ukrainian journalists’ dilemma

    Reporting corruption in a time of war: The Ukrainian journalists’ dilemma

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    When a major corruption scandal broke in Ukraine last weekend, reporters faced an excruciating dilemma between professional duty and patriotism. The first thought that came to my mind was: “Should I write about this for foreigners? Will it make them stop supporting us?”

    There was no doubting the severity of the cases that were erupting into the public sphere. They cut to the heart of the war economy. In one instance, investigators were examining whether the deputy infrastructure minister had profited from a deal to supply electrical generators at an inflated price, while the defense ministry was being probed over an overpriced contract to supply food and catering services to the troops.

    Huge stories, but in a sign of our life-or-death times in Ukraine, even my colleague Yuriy Nikolov, who got the scoop on the inflated military contract, admitted he had done everything he could not to publish his investigation. He took his findings to public officials hoping that they might be able to resolve the matter, before he finally felt compelled to run it on the ZN.UA website.

    Getting a scoop that shocks your country, forces your government to start investigations and reform military procurement, and triggers the resignation of top officials is ordinarily something that makes other journalists jealous. But I fully understand how Nikolov feels about wanting to hold back when your nation is at war. Russia (and Ukraine’s other critics abroad) are, after all, looking to leap upon any opportunity to undermine trust in our authorities.

    A journalist is meant to stay a little distant from the situation he or she covers. It helps to stay impartial and to stick to the facts, not emotions. But what if staying impartial is impossible as you have to cover the invasion of your own country? Naturally, you have to keep holding your government to account, but you are also painfully aware that the enemy is out there looking to exploit any opportunity to erode faith in the leadership and undermine national security.

    That is exactly what Ukrainian journalists have to deal with every day. In the first six months of the invasion, Ukrainian journalists and watchdogs decided to put their public criticism of the Ukrainian government on pause and focus on documenting Russian war crimes. 

    But that has backfired.  

    “This pause led to a rapid loss of accountability for many Ukrainian officials,” Mykhailo Tkach, one of Ukraine’s top investigative journalists, wrote in a column for Ukrainska Pravda.

    His investigations about Ukrainian officials leaving the country during the war for lavish vacations in Europe led to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy imposing a ban on officials traveling abroad during the war for non-work-related issues. It also sparked the dismissal of the powerful deputy prosecutor general.

    The Ukrainian government was forced to react to corruption and make a major reshuffle almost immediately. Would that happen if Ukrainian journalists decided to sit on their findings until victory? I doubt it.

    President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended up imposing a ban on officials traveling abroad during the war for non-work-related issues | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

    Is it still painful when you have to write about your own government’s officials’ flops when overwhelming enemy forces are trying to erase your nation from the planet, using every opportunity they can get to shake your international partners’ faith? Of course it is.

    But in this case, there was definite room for optimism. Things are changing in Ukraine. The government had to react very quickly, under intense pressure from civil society and the independent press. Memes and social media posts immediately appeared, mocking the government’s pledge to buy eggs at massively inflated prices. Ultimately, the deputy infrastructure minister was fired and the deputy defense minister resigned.

    This speedy response was praised by the European Commission and showed how far we really are from Russia, where authorities hunt down not the officials accused of corruption, but the journalists who report it.

    As Tkach said, many believe that the war with the internal enemy will begin immediately after the victory over the external one.

    However, we can’t really wait that long. It is important to understand that the sooner we win the battle with the internal enemy — high-profile corruption — the sooner we win the war against Russia.

     “Destruction of corruption means getting additional funds for the defense capability of the country. And it means more military and civilian lives saved,” Tkach said.

    Veronika Melkozerova

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  • How Gulf tensions drove Qatar to seek friends in Brussels

    How Gulf tensions drove Qatar to seek friends in Brussels

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    They’re dazzlingly rich, and they expect to be in charge for a long, long time.

    The monarchs leading Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia might seem from the outside like a trio of like-minded Persian Gulf autocrats. Yet their regional rivalry is intense, and Western capitals have become a key venue in a reputational battle royale.

    “All of these governments … really want to have the largest mindspace among Western governments,” said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    As the Gulf states seek to wean themselves off the oil that made them rich, they know they’ll need friends to help transform their economies (and modernize their societies).

    “They think it’s important not to be tarred as mere hydrocarbon producers who are ruining the planet,” Alterman added.

    With an erstwhile vice president of the European Parliament in jail and Belgian prosecutors asking to revoke immunity from more MEPs, allegations of cash kickbacks and undue influence by Qatari interests look likely to ensnare more Brussels power players.

    The Qatari government categorically denies any unlawful behavior, saying it “works through institution-to-institution engagement and operates in full compliance with international laws and regulations.”

    Against the background of regional rivalries, that engagement has become increasingly robust. While tensions with Riyadh have eased over the past few years, Qatar’s mutual antagonism with the United Arab Emirates has been particularly severe.

    Qatar’s survival strategy

    Regional rivalries burst beyond the Middle East in 2017 in a standoff that would reshape regional dynamics.

    Until then, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been essentially frenemies. As members of the Gulf Coordination Council, they’d been working toward building a common market and currency in the region — not so different from the European Union.

    But different responses to the Arab Spring frayed relations to a breaking point.

    The Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network gave a platform to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist party that rode a wave of unrest into power in Egypt and challenged governments throughout the Arab world. And Doha didn’t just offer a bullhorn — it gave the Muslim Brotherhood direct financial backing.

    Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, considered the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist group.

    Along with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE severed diplomatic ties with Doha in June 2017, barring Qatar’s access to airspace and sea routes; Saudi Arabia closed its border, blocking Qatar’s only land crossing.

    Among the demands: close Al Jazeera, end military coordination with Turkey and step away from Iran. Qatar refused — even though it was crunch time for building infrastructure ahead of the 2022 World Cup and 40 percent of Qatar’s food supplies came through Saudi Arabia.

    Fighting what it called an illegal “blockade” became an existential mission for Doha.

    “The only thing Qatar could do was make sure everyone knew Qatar exists and is a nice place,” said MEP Hannah Neumann, chair of the Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Arab Peninsula (DARP).

    “They really stepped up the diplomatic efforts all around the world to also show, ‘We are the good ones,’” said Neumann, of the German Greens.

    Qatar needed Brussels because it had already lost an even bigger ally: Washington. Not only did then-President Donald Trump take the side of Qatar’s rivals in the fight; he also appeared to take credit for the idea of isolating Qatar — even though the U.S.’s largest military base in the region is just southwest of Doha.

    Elsewhere, Qatar had already been working with the London-headquartered consultancy Portland Communications since at least 2014 — as its World Cup hosting coup was becoming a PR nightmare, with stories emerging over bribed FIFA officials and exploited migrant workers.

    Exploding onto the EU scene

    In Brussels, Doha leaned on the head of its EU Mission, Abdulrahman Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, who had moved to Belgium in 2017 from Germany, to step up European relations.

    Within days of the fissure, Al-Khulaifi appeared in meetings at NATO, and within months opened a think tank called the Middle East Dialogue Center to hone Doha’s image as an open promoter of debate (in contrast, it contended, to its neighbors) and pressure the EU to intervene in the Mideast.

    By the next year, he was speaking on panels about combating violent extremism — alongside Dutch and Belgian federal police. By late 2019, Al-Khulaifi hosted the first meeting of embassy’s Qatar-EU friendship group with a “working dinner.”

    “The situation following the blockade has pushed Qatar to establish closer relations outside the context of the regional crisis with, for example, the European Union,” Pier Antonio Panzeri, then chair of the Parliament’s human rights subcommittee, told Euractiv in 2018.

    The following year, Panzeri would attend the Qatari-hosted “International Conference on National, Regional and International Mechanisms to Combat Impunity and Ensure Accountability under International Law,” and heap praise on the country’s human rights record.

    Panzeri is now in a Belgian prison, facing corruption charges; his NGO, Fight Impunity, is under intense scrutiny for being a possible front.

    Neumann said that Qatar’s survival strategy has paid off. “Absolutely, it worked,” she said. “I think it’s fair enough, if they didn’t do it with illegal means.”

    Directly or indirectly, Qatar clocked several big victories during this period, including multiple resolutions in Parliament on human rights in Saudi Arabia and a call to end arms exports to Riyadh in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Doha also inked a cooperation arrangement with the EU in March 2018, setting the stage for closer ties.

    Frenemies once again

    Since Saudi Arabia and Qatar signed a deal to end the crisis two years ago, Riyadh-Doha relations have generally thawed. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, traveled to Qatar in November for the World Cup and embraced Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 42, while wearing a scarf in the host’s colors.

    However, relations between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, 61 — remain chilly.  

    As the Gulf transforms, the United Arab Emirates “has come to see that role as being a status quo power,” said Alterman. On the part of its neighbor, “Qatar has come to see that role as aligning with forces of change in the region, and that’s created a certain amount of mutual resentment.”

    Qatar’s smaller scale contributes to Doha’s sense of internal security, fueling its openness to engaging with groups that others see as an existential threat.

    Qataris see themselves as “champions of the Davids against the Goliath,” said Andreas Krieg, an assistant professor at King’s College London who has worked in the past as a consultant for the Qatari armed forces. Civil society organizations founded by “a range of different opposition figures, Saudi opposition figures in the West, have been supported financially by Qatar as well,” Krieg added. (Khashoggi, one of the era’s most prominent Saudi opposition figures, had connections to the state-backed Qatar Foundation.) “Hence why Qatar was always seen as sort of a thorn in the side of its neighbors.”

    And while the €1.5 million cash haul confiscated by Belgian federal police looks like an eye-popping sum, it certainly pales in comparison to the amount the Gulf states spend on legal lobbying in Brussels. And that sum, in turn, pales in comparison to what those countries spend in Washington.

    “Brussels isn’t that important,” Krieg said. “If you look at the money that these Gulf countries spend in Washington, these are tens of millions of dollars every year on think tanks, academics … creating their own media outlets, investing strategically into Fox News, investing into massive PR operations.”

    Nonetheless, the EU remains a key target. Abu Dhabi is strengthening its “long-standing partnership” with Brussels on economic and regional security matters “through deep, strategic cooperation with EU institutions and Member States,” said a UAE official, in a statement. 

    “Brussels was always a hub to create a narrative,” said Krieg.

    And right now, each of the region’s power players is deeply motivated to change that narrative.

    Alterman invoked a broad impression of the Gulf countries as “people who have more money than God who want to take the world back to the 7th Century.”

    But that’s wrong, he said. “This is all about shaping the future with remarkably high stakes, profound discomfort about how the world will relate to them over the next 30 to 50 years — and frankly, a series of rulers who see themselves being in power for the next 30 to 50 years.”

    Sarah Wheaton

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  • Christmas comes early: Ukrainian church allows December 25 celebrations for first time

    Christmas comes early: Ukrainian church allows December 25 celebrations for first time

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    KYIV — Ukraine’s Orthodox worshippers have always celebrated Christmas on January 7 — but that will change for many this year, with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) for the first time allowing its congregations to celebrate on December 25.

    This move creates a dividing line with Russia, which celebrates on January 7, and is likely to widen a rift between Ukraine’s two feuding churches.

    In 2018, the OCU split from the similarly named Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is seen as politically linked to Moscow and is facing public demands for its closure amid accusations that it is a hotbed of fifth columnists — that is, people who support and secretly help the enemies of the country they live in.

    Indeed, the OCU’s decision to allow a shift of Christmas observance to December 25 (for those who want to) has already infuriated the Russian-oriented UOC.

    “We are giving people the option to celebrate on a different day,” said Archbishop Yevstratiy Zoria of the OCU in Kyiv.

    Yevstratiy told POLITICO there had been a groundswell for a change since 2017, when December 25 became a public holiday in Ukraine. Many of the church’s adherents had lobbied for a move away from the Julian calendar, which is observed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

    The calls for the switch have only grown louder since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prompting the OCU to allow its 7,000 parishes to hold full religious services on December 25, if desired.

    According to Yevstratiy, already before the invasion, more than a third of Ukrainians wanted to change to the Gregorian calendar. “The numbers are probably higher now, and we are having an experiment to try to understand what worshippers really want,” he said.

    “We are not moving the day of Christmas,” he added. “This will be an additional day of worship,” with celebrations held in accordance with the official Julian church calendar.

    In the meantime, the church will “consider what to do in the future, and we will observe closely how many congregations take up the opportunity to celebrate on December 25,” Yevstratiy continued.

    Despite opposition from the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church, in 2019 the OCU was granted ecclesiastical independence by Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople — considered the spiritual leader of Orthodox believers worldwide. His decision revoked a centuries-old agreement that granted the patriarch in Moscow authority over the church in Ukraine.

    Political differences underpin the the split between the churches of the predominantly Orthodox nation: Western-oriented OCU churches offered support to the Maidan protesters of 2014, which toppled Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow’s viceroy in Ukraine. Over recent years, the church been a strong advocate of Ukrainian statehood and sovereignty.

    The Russian-tied UOC claimed in May to have ended its subordination to Moscow’s Metropolitan Kirill, a vociferous supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin — although few believe the split is sincere. The church’s spokesperson, Metropolitan Klyment, dismissed as a political stunt the OCU’s decision to allow its congregants to celebrate on December 25, claiming it as evidence of how the rival church is not a religious institution but a political organization eager to do the government’s bidding.

    “Families historically are used to celebrating on [January 7],” he told POLITICO. “The people who go to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are not requesting any change,” he said. “It has been four years since the government announced December 25 as an official holiday, and since then, you have not seen people celebrating it as Christmas Day,” he added.

    The Kyiv-headquartered UOC dismisses the charge that its decision to allow congregations to celebrate Christmas on December 25 has anything to do with politics. Instead, it is merely responding to “numerous requests and taking into account the discussion that has been going on for many years in the church and in society.”

    The OCU response to the new Christmas option, says Archbishop Yevstratiy, is par for the course. “They have always treated us as a political group. They don’t accept us as a religious organization or as a church,” he said.

    “It is very similar to how Russia treats Ukraine in general,” he continued. “From our side, we have often offered to start a dialogue without any preconditions, but they generally don’t respond — and when they do, they insist we acknowledge that we are not a church, have no canonical rights and that our clergy are not clergy.”

    More than 1,600 parishes have defected from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church since it was recognized by the Patriarchate of Constantinople — about 1,000 of them since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582; the Julian calendar, established by Julius Caesar, harks back to 46 B.C.

    Jamie Dettmer

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  • A very special Christmas mass for Orthodox Church of Ukraine

    A very special Christmas mass for Orthodox Church of Ukraine

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    KYIV — On a frosty Saturday morning, several altar boys posed for group selfies next to the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra Monastery complex in the Ukrainian capital. 

    “It is for history! Moskals used to occupy this place, and now we are here,” said one of the boys, using a Ukrainian slur for Russians.

    “No time for photos, boys! We have work to do,” a priest admonished the youngsters as the first-ever Christmas service of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was about to start in Lavra — an 11th-century monastery that is the most important religious center for Ukrainian Orthodox believers.

    “God has graced us with a great gift during difficult trials: For the first time, the Ukrainian prayer of the local autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine is heard in the main cathedral church of the Assumption of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. Christ was born! Let’s praise Him!” Church Metropolitan Epifaniy said during the Christmas service.

    Just as Ukraine is fighting against Russia to maintain its sovereignty, Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine is battling against Russian-backed priests for control over the Lavra Monastery complex, which is also known as the Monastery of the Caves. Rising numbers of Ukrainians have been moving away from the Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is also known as the Ukrainian Church of Moscow Patriarchate, and have been switching allegiance to the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, especially since February when Russia invaded Ukraine.

    After Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian-backed church started to be seen as a weapon of Moscow’s influence in Ukraine as many priests have allegedly collaborated with the Kremlin’s invading forces, according to the Ukrainian government.

    ‘Moral victory’

    “We have already achieved a moral victory because all people of goodwill condemn the acts of genocide, terror, and numerous war crimes committed by the evil Russian empire on our land,” Metropolitan Epifaniy said in the Christmas service.

    Hundreds of parishioners came to Lavra for the first Christmas service in the Ukrainian language inside these walls. The Dormition Church was soon full of soldiers, priests and other believers, and people kept coming. Some had to stay outside and watch the service on TV screens even though the temperature was minus 8 degrees Celsius. Many people cried with joy.

    “This is a historical event. A turning point. Even though it is still unclear whether the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will get the long-time rent from the state, we saw the government’s position. And it is clear. There will be no Moscow Church here anymore, thank God,” one believer, 19-year-old Hanna from Kyiv, told POLITICO. “Of course, we want them to go peacefully. We want to celebrate the birthday of Christ in peace.”

    Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine is battling against Russian-backed priests for control over the Lavra Monastery complex | Ethan Swope/Getty Images

    Previously, parishioners and priests of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine were not allowed to pray here, as the Dormition Cathedral, the main church of the Kyiv Pechersk Monastery, used to be the main headquarters of the Russia-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate Church. So far it is unclear whether the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine will be allowed to stay in churches for more than one Christmas day, because the previous tenants, Moscow-backed priests, won’t agree to go in peace.

    Although the Lavra priests deny they still have ties to Moscow, many of them are currently under investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine for alleged collaboration with Russian security forces and invading soldiers after Russian passports and Russian propaganda material were found during searches of monasteries. The priests refute the accusations.

    While the entire Lavra complex is state-owned, Russian-affiliated orthodox priests had rented the Dormition Cathedral and nearby Trapezna Church from the state since the 1990s. In December, their lease expired and the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the primary manager of Lavra, refused to prolong it, returning both temples to the state on January 5. 

    Cathedral clash

    Russian-affiliated priests refused to acknowledge the decision, claiming despite the expiration of the lease that they have the right to stay in the Lavra churches until the war ends. Russian-affiliated priests also assert that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has no right to serve in the Dormition Cathedral.

    “The events announced on the territory of the Lavra are an attempt to forcibly seize the cathedral by means of blackmail and misleading society,” the Russian-affiliated church said in a statement on Thursday.

    The priests claimed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine announced the service before it received official permission and pressured the government in Kyiv to grant it.

    The Lavra priests consider themselves the only genuine local Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Many times, Moscow-backed priests have called the Orthodox Church of Ukraine schismatic even though in 2019 Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, officially recognized the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and granted it self-governorship.

    “The Ukrainian shrine should serve the entire Ukrainian people, and we will adhere to this principle in the future,” Ukrainian Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko said in a statement on Telegram on Thursday.

    Some 3,000 police officers were guarding the Lavra premises during the Christmas service Saturday morning.

    Veronika Melkozerova

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  • UK takes fresh stab at internet rules as EU framework surges ahead

    UK takes fresh stab at internet rules as EU framework surges ahead

    LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first. 

    Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill. 

    On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain. 

    The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.

    “Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.

    Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends. 

    Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.

    In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.

    The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused. 

    Long and winding road

    Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.

    The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.

    Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.

    The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.

    The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.” 

    That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.

    Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda. 

    When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations. 

    Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content. 

    Not just free speech

    In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.

    That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.

    Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU.  Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.

    “This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”

    Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.

    Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott

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  • Brexit Britain trapped in the middle as US and EU go to war on trade

    Brexit Britain trapped in the middle as US and EU go to war on trade

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    LONDON — Three years after leaving the EU to chart its own course, Britain finds itself caught between two economic behemoths in a brewing transatlantic trade war.

    In one corner sits the United States, whose Congress in August passed the Biden administration’s much-vaunted $369 billion program of green subsidies, part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

    In the opposing corner is the European Union, which fears Washington’s subsidy splurge will pull investment — particularly in electric vehicles — away from Europe, hitting carmakers hard.

    The EU is preparing its own retaliatory package of subsidies; Washington shows little sign of changing course. Fears of a trade war are growing fast.

    Now sitting squarely outside the ring, the U.K. can only look on with horror, and quietly ask Washington to soften the blow. But there are few signs the softly-softly approach is bearing fruit. Britain now risks being clobbered by both sides.

    “It’s not in the U.K.’s interest for the U.S. and EU to go down this route,” said Sam Lowe, a partner at Flint Global and expert in U.K. and EU trade policy. “Given the U.K.’s current economic position, it can’t really afford to engage in a subsidy war with both.” The British government has just unleashed a round of fiscal belt-tightening after a market rout, following months of political turmoil.

    For iconic British motor brands, the row over the Biden administration’s IRA comes with real costs.

    The U.S. is the second-largest destination for British-made vehicles after the EU, and the automotive sector is one of Britain’s top goods exporters.

    Manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover have warned publicly about the “very serious challenges” posed by the new U.S. law and its plan for electric vehicle tax credits aimed at boosting American industry.

    Kemi on the case

    U.K. Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch has for months been privately urging top U.S. officials to soften the impact of the electric vehicle subsidies on Britain by carving out exemptions, U.K. officials said.

    When Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited London in early October, Badenoch pushed her to rethink the strategy. The U.K. trade chief brought that same message to Washington in a series of private meetings earlier this month, including at a sit-down with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo.

    Badenoch has “raised this issue on many levels,” an official from the U.K.’s Department for International Trade said, citing conversations with U.S. Ambassador to Britain Jane Hartley, with Secretary Raimondo, “and with members of the Biden administration and senior representatives of both parties.”

    The Cabinet minister has also spoken out in public, telling the pro-free market Cato Institute in Washington earlier this month that “the substantial new tax credits for electric cars not only bar vehicles made in the U.K. from the U.S. market, but also affect vehicles made in the U.S. by U.K. manufacturers.”

    U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

    Badenoch’s comments echo concerns raised by both British automotive lobby group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), and by Jaguar Land Rover, in comments filed with the U.S. Treasury Department.

    The SMMT warned that Biden’s green vehicle package has several “elements of concern that risk creating an uneven competitive environment, with U.K.-based manufacturers and suppliers potentially penalised.” The lobby group is taking aim at the credit scheme’s requirement for green vehicles to be built in North America, with significant subsidies available only if critical minerals are sourced from the U.S. or a U.S. ally.

    In response to Washington’s plans, the EU is preparing what could amount to billions in subsidies for its own industries hit by the U.S. law, which also offers tax breaks to boost American green businesses such as solar panel manufacturers. Britain faces being squeezed in both markets, while lacking any say in whatever response Brussels decides.

    Protectionism that impacts like-minded allies “isn’t the answer to the geopolitical challenges we face,” the British trade department official warned, adding “there is a serious risk” the law disrupts “vital” global supply chains of batteries and electric vehicles.

    The conversations Badenoch had this month in Washington were “reassuring,” the official added. “But it’s for them to address and find solutions.”

    ‘Ton of work to do’

    Yet others believe Badenoch will have a hard time getting her colleagues in the U.S. — now cooling on a much-touted bilateral trade deal — to take action. “The U.S. is minimally focused on how any of their policies are going to impact the U.K.,” admitted a U.S.-based representative of a major business group.

    While Britain and the U.S. are “very close allies”, they added, those in Washington “just don’t really view the U.K. as an interesting trade partner and market right now.” The U.S. is more focused, they noted, on pushing back against China, meaning Badenoch has “a ton of work to do” getting the administration to soften the IRA.

    Nevertheless the U.S. is still working out how its law will actually be implemented, the business figure said, and is assembling a working group on how the IRA impacts trade allies. This has the potential, they added, to “alleviate a lot of the concerns coming out of the U.K.”

    Late Tuesday evening, the SMMT called on the British government to provide greater domestic support for the sector as it prepares to ramp up its own electric vehicle production. The group wants an extension past April on domestic support for firms’ energy costs; a boost to government investment in green energy sources; and a speedier national rollout of charging infrastructure and staff training.

    In the meantime, Britain’s options appear limited.

    Newly manufactured Land Rover and Range Rover vehicles parked and waiting to be loaded for export | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images

    The U.K. “could consider legal action” and haul the U.S. before the World Trade Organization or challenge the EU through provisions in the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement, said Lowe of consultancy Flint. “But — to be blunt — neither of them care what we have to say.”

    Anna Jerzewska, a trade advisor and associate fellow at the UK Trade Policy Observatory, suggested pressing ahead “with your own domestic policy and efforts to support strategic industries is perhaps more important” than complaining about foreign subsidy schemes. But she noted that after a “chaotic” political period, Britain is “likely to take longer to respond to external changes and challenges.”

    And in truth, Britain “can’t afford to out-subsidize the U.S. and EU,” said David Henig, a trade expert with the European Centre For International Political Economy think tank.

    Outside the EU, Britain could work to rally allies such as Japan and South Korea who are also unhappy with the Biden administration’s protectionist measures, he noted. “But I don’t think we’re in that position,” Henig said, as it would take a concerted diplomatic effort, and the U.K.’s automotive sector would “have to be well positioned” in the first place, not struggling as it is. He predicted London’s lobbying in Washington and Brussels is “not going to get anywhere.”

    Graham Lanktree

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  • World population at 8 billion — by the numbers

    World population at 8 billion — by the numbers

    It’s getting crowded in here.

    Last month, the global population reached 8 billion for the first time, according to the United Nations. While the number of humans on the planet is expected to keep growing — peaking at around 10.4 billion by the end of the century — its demographic profile is changing. Fertility rates are gradually decreasing and several countries — most of them in Europe and Southeast Asia — will experience population declines in the next 30 years.

    Thanks to better health care and improving economic conditions, people across the planet now live longer and healthier lives, though significant regional inequalities still exist.

    Greater life expectancy, combined with lower fertility rates, also means that the world’s population is aging. The old-age dependency ratio — the number of people over 65 as a share of the working-age population — is projected to double in the next 30 years. This means the working-age population will need to sustain a growing number of retired people — a big challenge for social security, pension and health care systems.

    Giovanna Coi

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  • Bitter friends: Inside the summit aiming to heal EU-US trade rift

    Bitter friends: Inside the summit aiming to heal EU-US trade rift

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    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.

    Mark Scott, Barbara Moens and Doug Palmer

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  • As Xi reemerges, Europe again falls prey to China’s divide-and-rule tactics

    As Xi reemerges, Europe again falls prey to China’s divide-and-rule tactics

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    BALI, Indonesia — Every European leader at this week’s G20 summit in Bali wanted a one-on-one meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

    Not everyone got one.

    The Europeans’ desire to meet Xi was driven by the fact that this week was the first opportunity to meet the Chinese leader at a major diplomatic jamboree since the lockdowns of early 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic started in China and spread to the world.

    The Europeans always had to accept that they were going to be fighting for the crumbs in terms of the timetable. U.S. President Joe Biden spent three and a half hours with Xi, while France’s President Emmanuel Macron had to be content with (a still perfectly respectable) 43 minutes.

    China conspicuously revived its long-established tactic of courting specific EU countries and their national interests, something it has often used to destabilize Brussels. (When Brussels threatened an all-out trade war in 2013 over China undercutting the EU market in solar panels and telecoms equipment, China expertly shattered EU unity by threatening retaliatory action against French and Spanish wine, playing Paris and Madrid against EU trade officials.)

    Once again in Bali, China took the canny nation-to-nation approach, meeting Macron, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte, while avoiding European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel. A meeting with Michel, at least, had been widely expected in diplomatic circles.

    China bristles at the EU designation that it is a “systemic rival” to Brussels, and instead decided to leverage its influence with individual European countries.

    Take the meeting with Rutte. The Chinese leader’s main interest was that the Netherlands, home to chipmaker ASML, a company that makes key equipment for microchip manufacturing, should not join any EU-U.S. trade coalition seeking to box China out of new technologies.

    “It is hoped that the Netherlands would enhance Europe’s commitment to openness and cooperation,” Xi noted in a readout of the Dutch meeting. Translation: Don’t make trade trouble over microchips.

    With Sánchez, Xi played up the importance of China as a motor for tourism in Spain, a sector where Madrid is particularly interested in high-rolling visitors from Asia. “The two sides need to make good preparations for the China-Spain Year of Culture and Tourism to build greater popular support for China-Spain friendship,” Xi said. 

    Similarly, the Xinhua state news agency quoted Macron saying he wanted more cooperation on business, specifically in the aviation and civil nuclear energy sectors. The Chinese account of the Xi-Meloni meeting was that Beijing would import more “high-quality” goods — presumably of the luxury and gourmet variety — and would cooperate in manufacturing, energy and aerospace.

    Macron cozies up to Xi

    In a sign that Xi’s diplomatic strategy was paying dividends, Macron took a non-confrontational approach to Xi, even massaging the Chinese leader’s ego.

    The Chinese embassy to Paris promoted a video by TikTok’s domestic Chinese equivalent Douyin, in which Macron passed his best wishes to China after Xi secured a norm-breaking new mandate. (Xi was appointed for a third term as Communist Party general secretary in a highly choreographed party congress.)

    Macron also hailed Xi as a “sincere” figure who should “play the role of a mediator over the next few months” in stopping further Russian aggression against Ukraine — even though Beijing has shown no sign of being a good fit for such a role since the war broke out in February.

    Ignoring China’s deadly Himalayan tensions with India, escalating tension with Taiwan or military adventurism in the South China Sea, Macron declared: “China calls for peace … [There is] a deep and I know sincere attachment to … the U.N. charter.”

    Macron also told reporters he planned to visit China early next year. That looks like a riposte to the visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who visited China earlier this month. Scholz reportedly rejected Paris’ suggestion for a joint Macron-Scholz visit and decided to go alone with a delegation of big businesses.

    “Macron needed this air-time with Xi enormously as he couldn’t be seen to be left out by China when the Americans and the Germans have dominated the headlines,” a Western diplomat said.

    While Macron claimed that Xi agreed with him on a “call for respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” China’s own readout made no such mention, saying only: “China stands for a ceasefire, cessation of the conflict and peace talks.”

    Brussels boxed out

    In stark contrast to the French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian leaders, the Brussels-based EU chiefs didn’t get a look-in.

    In a show of Beijing’s continually negative view of the European Union, Xi decided not to go ahead with what POLITICO understood to be a near-certain plan for Michel, the one representing all 27 countries, to meet Xi.

    That event, had it been allowed to take place, would have been significant in showcasing the possibility for the bloc’s smaller economies to also make their voice heard, since Xi would otherwise be busy dealing with the bigger players.

    Xi’s change of heart over a meeting with Michel came shortly after the EU Council president’s prerecorded speech at a Shanghai trade expo was dropped. According to Reuters, he tried to call out Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in the speech, a message that was deemed too sensitive to Chinese ears.

    Commission President von der Leyen, meanwhile, busied herself not with plans to line up a meeting with Xi, but on a joint show with Biden to focus on infrastructure financing for developing countries in order to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

    In a thinly veiled criticism of China’s approach to the new Silk Road, von der Leyen said: “The [West’s] Partnership Global for Infrastructure and Investment is an important geostrategic initiative in era of strategic competition.

    “Together with leading democracies we offer values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnerships for low- and middle-income countries,” she said.

    Her tone, though, proved to be a minority among European leaders during the G20 engagement with China.

    “There’s no common message from the EU on China,” according to another EU diplomat in Bali. “But then there never was one.”

    To the relief of European diplomats, at least Xi did not handle their bosses in the same way he treated Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

    “Everything we discuss has been leaked to the paper; that’s not appropriate,” Xi told Trudeau through an interpreter in a clip recorded by Canadian media.

    “That’s not … the way the conversation was conducted. If there is sincerity on your part …” Xi said, before Trudeau interrupted him, defending his country’s interest in working “constructively” with Beijing.

    Xi took his turn to interrupt. “Let’s create the conditions first,” Xi said.

    Go and stand in the corner, Justin.

    Stuart Lau

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  • Orbán’s new public enemy: A Twitter-savvy US ambassador calling out conspiracies

    Orbán’s new public enemy: A Twitter-savvy US ambassador calling out conspiracies

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    BUDAPEST — On an early morning drive from his residence to the U.S. Embassy, David Pressman kept a close eye on his surroundings. 

    Look, the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary said, pointing out the government-funded billboards dotting Budapest’s streets. 

    “The Brussels sanctions are ruining us!” they declared, the word “sanctions” emblazoned across a flying bomb.

    One by one, the posters whizzed by, blaring the same ominous warning.

    These types of signs have been a feature of the Budapest landscape for years, spinning up a conspiratorial gallery of foreign enemies Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used to instill fear and anger in the Hungarian population as he vies to keep his grip on power. 

    But historically, the U.S. — like many of its Western partners — has stayed relatively quiet in public about these targeted messaging campaigns and the rise of anti-Western government rhetoric, which often reflected the country’s democratic backsliding and the local influence of Russian propaganda. 

    With Pressman, that has changed. Pressman’s presence alone is an implicit rebuke of Orbán’s strongman, culture wars agenda. Pressman is a human rights lawyer, has a male partner and has worked closely with George Clooney, a totem of the Fox News-caricatured “Hollywood liberal elite.”

    And in just two months on the job, the new American ambassador has become a household name in Budapest for his willingness to call out — and even troll — the Orbán government’s overtly propagandistic and conspiratorial bombast.

    There is, Pressman said in his first interview since taking his post, a “need to be both respectful and more candid about what we’re seeing.”

    Recently, the U.S. embassy posted a once-unthinkable video quiz challenging people to guess whether quotes came from Hungarian public figures or Russian President Vladimir Putin. The answer, of course, was never Putin.

    “I’m concerned when I see missiles flying from Moscow into children’s playgrounds in Kyiv — and see the foreign minister of Hungary flying into Moscow to do Facebook Live conferences from Gazprom headquarters,” the ambassador told POLITICO.  

    For this approach, Pressman has become the latest foreign enemy in Budapest.

    In a country that recently banned the portrayal of LGBTQ+ content to minors, Pressman has put his personal life on display | Janka Szitas/U.S. Embassy Budapest

    The newspapers cover him regularly — “Clown diplomacy,” one declared. State-owned and Orbán-friendly TV channels are similarly obsessed, portraying the American ambassador as a secretive colonial overlord sent to meddle in Hungary’s internal affairs.

    And in a country that recently banned the portrayal of LGBTQ+ content to minors, Pressman has put his personal life on display, posting photos of his partner and their two kids as they arrived to present his diplomatic credentials. 

    “I think it speaks for itself,” Pressman said. “Sometimes the power of example,” he added, “is the most powerful way we can communicate about shared values and concerns.” 

    In many ways, Pressman’s story is emblematic of the evolution of the broader relationship between the U.S. and Hungary. For years, an ambassador posting in Budapest was primarily considered a symbolic role, reserved for wealthy political donors with no foreign policy expertise. 

    Hungary, the thinking went, was a reliable European Union and NATO member that required little extra attention in Washington. But the erosion of democratic norms — combined with Moscow’s influence in Budapest and Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine — has changed the calculus. 

    “The stakes right now are huge,” the ambassador said. “The politicization and partisanization of the relationship,” he added, “is not sustainable.”

    A pragmatic idealist 

    Pressman, unlike many of his predecessors, is no novice to U.S. foreign policy. 

    As a young lawyer, he teamed up with Clooney on a campaign to get those in power to pay attention to atrocities in Darfur — later earning the nickname “Cuz” from Clooney. He also made stops as an aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as a Homeland Security Department official and a White House staffer during the Obama years. In 2014, he landed in New York as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs. 

    Those experiences — and his resulting relationships across government — have given Pressman the backing to make significant changes to how the U.S. approaches Orbán’s government. 

    Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author-turned-diplomat, was the one who brought the then-32-year-old Pressman to the White House before working closely together in New York when she became U.N. ambassador. Pressman, she said, was her go-to person for tough assignments. 

    Once, she recalled, her staff needed to convince China to join sanctions against North Korea after a nuclear test.

    “David,” she told POLITICO, “is a person that I entrusted in the day-to-day to work with the Chinese ambassador to extract as robust a set of sanctions as possible.” 

    “When we see insane Kremlin stories being re-propagated in the Hungarian media, we’re gonna call that out, because we have to”, David Pressman said | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty images

    Pressman, Power recounted, was so well-prepared that it was as if he “got a PhD in iron ore trafficking.” His prep work also paid off. “No one had invested more in advance of the nuclear tests in a relationship with his Chinese counterpart that he could then call upon when it mattered for the United States,” she added. 

    Now, Hungary matters for the United States. In the last 12 years, Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party has taken control of much of the media landscape, placed allies at the helm of independent state institutions, channeled government resources into political campaigning and nurtured ties to Moscow and Beijing. The development has strained the bedrock of the global democratic order.

    On a recent fall day, the ambassador invited POLITICO to visit his home at 7:30 in the morning, as his sons were getting ready to leave for school. He then spent the day racing between meetings with anti-corruption experts, a founding member of Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, Hungarian students and a fellow ambassador. 

    At the discussion with anti-corruption campaigners, Pressman placed a large notebook on the table and began scribbling as he tossed out a flurry of questions: Who is involved? How does this work? How do you know that? 

    Later, Pressman popped into a graffiti-decorated pub and took his seat among a cluster of high school and university students. Again, the questions came quickly: How do your peers see the U.S.? Is there anyone in the government you trust? What comes to mind on Russia? 

    Pressman is known as an idealist. As the White House National Security Council’s director for war crimes and atrocities, he decorated his office — no bigger than two large filing cabinets — with photos of indicted war criminals the U.S. was trying to apprehend, Power recalled.

    But he still professes a pragmatic approach. His goal, he insists, is to build relationships with the Hungarian government — even as he needles it over anti-democratic behavior. The two sides can work together, he noted.

    “When we see insane Kremlin stories being re-propagated in the Hungarian media, we’re gonna call that out, because we have to,” he said. 

    But, Pressman added, “all of that is with the intent to pull us closer together — not to push us apart.”

    A troubled relationship 

    Even before the ambassador’s arrival, anti-American rhetoric had been on the rise in Hungary. 

    In the government-controlled press, the U.S. is both the boogeyman behind the invasion of Ukraine and the puppet master of Hungary’s opposition parties. Fidesz-linked outlets even spread paranoid conspiracy theories about a U.S. diplomat who died in a traffic accident.  

    But in recent weeks, the vitriol — and the personal attacks on Pressman — has reached a fever pitch. 

    As Orbán’s allies have tightened their judicial system vice grip, the EU and others have made strengthening the council a priority | John Thys/AFP via Getty images

    One sharp escalation occurred after Pressman posted a photo of himself meeting with two judges from the National Judicial Council. 

    The group’s bureaucratic name belies its heated symbolic and political importance in Hungary. 

    The council is meant to help oversee Hungary’s judiciary. So as Orbán’s allies have tightened their judicial system vice grip, the EU and others have made strengthening the council a priority.

    Pressman’s decision, just weeks into his job, to sit down with the council’s representatives sparked dozens of articles attacking him and breathless TV coverage.

    “Unprecedented serious interference in the judiciary,” blared a headline in the government-linked Origo news portal. “Today what comes to mind is that if we have such friends, then we don’t need enemies,” the Orbán-adjacent Magyar Nemzet newspaper pronounced.

    Even in private, Hungarian officials stewed. “His meeting with two infamous judges,” said one senior Hungarian official, ”was a pretty unfortunate beginning.” A spokesperson for the Hungarian government did not respond to questions about Pressman.

    Judge Csaba Vasvári — the council’s spokesperson and one of the figures who met with the ambassador — told POLITICO the public pillorying is fueling a “strong chilling effect” within the judiciary. 

    Instead of letting it pass, Pressman pushed back — in his own style. 

    The U.S. embassy posted a host of photos of politicians and senior diplomats meeting with judges — including, cheekily, a smiling younger Orbán standing beside former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. 

    “What is inconsistent with normal diplomatic practice between allies,” the embassy said in a public statement, “is the recent coordinated media attack on the spokesperson and international liaison of the National Judicial Council in what appears to be an effort to instill fear in those who wish to engage with representatives of the United States.” 

    A politicized alliance 

    Orbán and his government have made no secret of their disdain for Democrats.

    Democrats, they say, want to impose their liberal ideology on Hungary. They are the ones who ruined the relationship with Hungary. They lack family values. They are not a Christian government. 

    “Always great to hear from our good friend @realDonaldTrump. Let’s make US-HU relations great again!” Orbán tweeted recently at the Twitter-banished ex-president | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty images

    Republicans are the exact opposite, in the government’s narrative. Orbán himself has personally courted MAGA-ites at their own super bowl — CPAC. He hosted Tucker Carlson in Budapest. He pines on Twitter for Donald Trump’s return. 

    “Always great to hear from our good friend @realDonaldTrump. Let’s make US-HU relations great again!” Orbán tweeted recently at the Twitter-banished ex-president.

    It’s these types of tossed-off comments that no longer pass without a response. 

    “With Hungary facing economic challenges and Vladimir Putin’s war on its doorstep, the time for a great US-HU relationship? Right now,” Pressman quipped back. 

    It wasn’t the pair’s first sarcastic Twitter repartee, either. When the Hungarian leader first joined the platform in October and rhetorically asked where Trump was, Pressman also jumped in. 

    “While you look around for your friend, perhaps another friend to follow: the President of the United States,” he shot back, before offering a sly nod to his critics: “But as the Hungarian media might say: no pressure.” 

    Such cutting Twitter missives are not to everyone’s liking. Some even insist they are having a boomerang effect, cheapening diplomacy and further deteriorating the U.S.-Hungarian relationship.

    Two former Trump-era intelligence officials recently blasted Pressman’s approach in the Wall Street Journal, calling the playful video quiz a “cringe-worthy example of the State Department’s woke virtue signaling.” 

    “When the U.S. has issues with foreign leaders, it should deal with them through adult diplomacy,” they added. “Instead, our diplomatic efforts under President Biden, a self-styled foreign-policy expert, could be summed up as ‘anyone I don’t like is Putin.’” 

    The Biden administration batted away any concerns.  

    When POLITICO asked for comment on the ambassador’s work, the State Department was quick to both express the administration’s “full confidence” in Pressman and to pass along a bipartisan endorsement from Cindy McCain, the widow of Republican stalwart and foreign policy maven John McCain. 

    McCain, now in Rome as a U.S. diplomat, talked of knowing Pressman for “nearly two decades,” and said he had “earned the deep respect of national security and foreign policy leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties.”

    If there is any overarching goal, it is to call out Russian propaganda, while still paying attention to how Hungary’s government treats minorities at home | Yuri Kadobnov/AFP via Getty images

    For his part, Pressman insisted the embassy has no partisan goals and simply wants a better relationship with the Hungarian authorities. 

    “Our work is not about liberal policies. It’s not about conservative policies,” he said. “But it’s fundamentally about shared core values that are premised upon small ‘d’ democracy, and ensuring that we are able to collaborate together.” 

    If there is any overarching goal, it is to call out Russian propaganda — while still paying attention to how Hungary’s government treats minorities at home.

    “The United States will always engage on behalf of communities that are vulnerable or marginalized, and that are under pressure — and here in Hungary, there are a few of those,” the ambassador said, noting that groups have Washington’s support as “they seek to engage in their own democratic process.”

    Principled stances aside, the situation is undeniably strange: A diplomat from an allied country becoming public enemy No. 1 — and the top news story. On a recent Sunday evening, the Fidesz-linked HírTV station spent nearly half an hour on Pressman.

    Pressman insisted he doesn’t take it personally. But “do we take it seriously? Absolutely,” he said. 

    “I’m the representative of the United States of America,” he added. “It’s unusual to find yourself,” he observed with understatement, in “an environment quite like this.” 

    Lili Bayer

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