🌐 👀Global Eyes, World Edition
Around the world in five minutes
⚠️ War in Europe
Russia is boycotting a UN Security Council meeting today.
Fighting continues at the steel works in Mariupol where the last Ukrainian forces are holed up with scores of civilians who couldn’t evacuate. Contact with the fighters has been lost.
Russian strategic bombers fired 18 rockets from airspace above the Caspian Sea at targets in Ukraine.
Russian attacks in the eastern Donbas sector have “ground to an effective halt,” the Kyiv Post writes, as evidence mounts that Ukraine is gaining ground in the neighboring Kharkiv sector, possibly threatening a key Russian supply line.
Ukraine retakes villages near Kharkiv, Russian shelling slows:
Ukrainian forces are ousting Russian troops from a string of villages that were used to strike the country’s second most-populous city, Kharkiv, regaining strategic terrain that could blunt Russia’s attempt to conquer the eastern Donbas region. The recent Ukrainian gains, to the north and northeast of Kharkiv, build on previous successes in forcing Russia’s military from the immediate outskirts of the city, a major industrial and transportation hub with a prewar population of 1.4 million.
Russia says it has struck the supply lines bringing in Western military equipment:
[Russia’s defense] ministry said it used air- and sea-based missiles to hit electric power facilities located at five railway stations across Ukraine. Russian troops also struck Ukrainian defensive strongholds as well as fuel and ammunition depots. The strikes targeted areas near the western city of Lviv, the city of Odessa in the south, as well as Dnipropetrovsk in the southeast.
In the east of Ukraine, 21 civilians have been killed and another 28 wounded in the Donetsk region. Ten were killed in the shelling of the Avdiivka coke plan. The daily death toll was the highest since the Russian strike on a train station in Kramatorsk last month.
Russian forces in Mariupol are preparing to hold a parade:
“The occupiers continue to dismantle the debris in the city center, including the Drama Theater, in preparation for the parade,” said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor. … Mariupol residents are being forced to work to clear blockages so they can eat, Andryushchenko said. “Work in exchange for food: This is the best illustration of the occupiers’ ‘victory.’”
Putin told Emmanuel Macron the West must stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. He accused Kyiv of not taking talks to end the conflict seriously.
The Elysée readout of the call: (In French)
The President of the Republic reiterated the extreme seriousness of the consequences of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
He expressed his deep concern about Mariupol and the situation in Donbass, and called on Russia to allow the continuation of the evacuations from the Azovstal plant begun in recent days, in coordination with humanitarian actors and leaving the choice to evacuees from their destination, in accordance with international humanitarian law.
He also expressed his willingness to work with relevant international organizations to help lift the Russian blockade of Ukrainian food exports by the Black Sea with regard to its consequences on global food security.
The President of the Republic called on Russia to live up to its responsibilities as a permanent member of the Security Council by putting an end to this devastating aggression.
He expressed his continued willingness to work on the terms of a negotiated solution to allow peace and full respect for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The President of the Republic has finally renewed his ceasefire demand.
Counting the dead: More than two months into Russia’s invasion, no one really knows how many Ukrainian civilians have died.
AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol theater airstrike. Six hundred people, in a building marked visibly from the air as a shelter for women and children. A horrific, intentional massacre.
🎧 Andrew Neil talks Fiona Hill about Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump.
🎥 War in Ukraine, Unfiltered. “Everyone needs to see this video,” writes Robert Zubrin. “Radio Free Europe at its best. Journalists died to make it. Share it everywhere.”
☦️ Fed up with Kirill:
The European Commission has proposed sanctioning the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Patriarch Kirill must be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, says Human Rights Without Frontiers, an NGO based in Brussels.
HRWF appeals to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A. A. Khan QC, to hold personally accountable and prosecute Vladimir Mikhaïlovitch Goundiaïev, known as Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, for inspiring, inciting, justifying, aiding and abetting war crimes (Art. 8 of the Rome Statute) and crimes against humanity (Art. 7) perpetrated and being perpetrated by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine. …
.. the Patriarch castigated those who fight against the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine, targeting them as the “evil forces.” Kirill has portrayed the military actions as a war against evil, saying in his sermon on March 6 that “we have entered into a struggle that has not a physical but a metaphysical significance,” a fight for “human salvation.” … All in all, Patriarch Kirill has backed Putin’s purifying “operation” in Ukraine by equating it to a spiritual purification of Ukraine, a religious cleansing operation and religious crusade.
The Pope told Patriarch Kirill not to be “Putin’s altar boy.”
“I spoke to Kirill forty minutes via Zoom. The first twenty, with a card in his hand, he read me all the justifications for the war. I listened and told him: I don't understand anything about this. Brother, we are not clerics of state, we cannot use the language of politics, but that of Jesus. We are pastors of the same holy people of God. For this reason we must seek ways of peace, to put an end to gun fire. The Patriarch cannot turn into Putin’s altar boy.” (In Italian.)
The Russian Orthodox Church called these comments “regrettable.”
Kirill denied that Russia had invaded Ukraine at all: “We don’t want to fight with anyone, Russia has never attacked anyone. It’s amazing when a great and powerful country didn’t attack anyone, it only defended its borders.”
🪆 Coup rumors: Moscow is alive with rumors that former generals and KGB officials are preparing to oust Putin to end the war in Ukraine:
The top of Putin’s former employer—the Russian security service FSB—is said to be so frustrated about the lack of military progress in Ukraine that it has reached out to a number of generals and former army officials …
🧵 A thread about the torture and murder of prisoners in Penal Colony No. 6 in Vladimir Oblast, where Putin has ordered Alexei Navalny to be transferred. “Abuse and torture are used against inmates in many Russian prisons, but IK-6 in Melekhovo is a monstrous place even by such insane standards.”
Time to threaten Russia with obliteration. “NATO has stood on the sidelines as Ukraine was invaded and is being destroyed … Unfortunately, the same pattern emerges concerning a Russian nuclear threat.”
NATO’s three nuclear powers—the US, France, and Britain-must heighten their rhetoric and shift away from shaming Russia as “irresponsible for talking about nuclear escalation” or from Biden’s opaque, nuanced and polite veiled threat that “we are prepared for whatever they do.” Their message should be, in private, “Mr. Putin if you drop a nuke on Ukraine or NATO soil, we will respond in kind,” or better yet a blunt Russian-style threat—If you drop a nuke on Ukraine we will vaporize your Black Sea and Arctic fleets in 15 minutes.”
Perhaps that has happened, but anxiety remains, and the failure to do so publicly represents another “deterrence and assurance gap” that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley has referred to.
🌍 🇪🇺 Europe 💶
Diplomatic Dustup:
Chancellor Olaf Scholz says there is a “problem” in Germany’s relations with Ukraine and that Ukraine should help resolve the dispute.
Last month, Ukraine refused to allow German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to visit Kyiv because of his close ties to Russia. Scholz took umbrage:
You can’t do that. It can’t work that from a country that provides so much military assistance, so much financial assistance that is needed when it comes to the security guarantees that are important for Ukraine’s time in the future, that you then say, but the president can’t come.
The Ukrainian ambassador, Andriy Melnyk, used an idiom that loses something translation, “It doesn’t sound very statesmanlike to behave like a beleidigte Leberwurst.” (Literally, “an offended liverwurst.”) “This is about the most brutal war of extermination since the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, it’s not kindergarten.”
Friedrich Merz, who leads the conservative CDU, spotted the opportunity to upstage the chancellor and traveled to Ukraine to meet Zelensky.
Scholz, who has been more tepid than other Western leaders in backing Ukraine, is facing growing pressure to take a firmer line, including from members of his own coalition.
French left-wing parties, who have long been at odds, have come to a deal with the far-left Mélenchon to launch a joint bid in the upcoming legislative elections.
European Council President Charles Michel pledged to increase EU military aid to Moldova.
Will Putin’s war alienate his admirers on Europe’s far right? (Claire—I doubt it.)
Sweden’s soldiers are getting ready for Russian attack.
What the war in Ukraine means for Europe:
No matter what happens next in Ukraine, there can be no return to the status quo before February 24. A dangerous new era has dawned, confronting Europeans with the urgent task of building their own defensive, technological, and nuclear deterrence capabilities. …
…. The nuclear question alone demonstrates the epochal scale of Europe’s current challenge. Since Putin launched his war of aggression, strengthening Europe’s defensive and deterrence capabilities has become a top priority. Moreover, while this process must be carried out in the context of NATO, Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States made clear that Europeans also must be prepared to go it alone.
🛢 The EU plans to ban Russian oil imports by the end of the year. The proposal must be approved by all the member states.
The oil plan is the centerpiece of the EU’s sixth round of sanctions, a package that also would remove Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and two others from the SWIFT system for international transactions. Additionally, von der Leyen said, the EU would ban three Russian state-owned broadcasters from the bloc’s airwaves. The package takes aim at high-ranking military officers and “other individuals who committed war crimes in Bucha” … It also targets those “who are responsible for the inhuman siege of the city of Mariupol.”
Africa
“Russian-speaking men in uniform” have been implicated in a massacre in the Central African town of Bossangoa on June 2021:
The uniformed men allegedly stopped a group of civilians who tried to pass through the road on motorbikes. The civilians were told to hand over their phones and money. According to witnesses, the armed group then surrounded the civilians and started beating them, before two of the uniformed men pulled the civilians to the side one by one, forced them to kneel and shot them in the head.
The Guardian contacted Yevgeny Prigozhin—Putin’s chef—seeking his reaction to evidence implicating Wagner fighters in massacres in Mali:
“You are a dying-out western civilization that considers Russians, Malians, Central Africans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and many other peoples and countries to be third world scum,” the businessman added. “Remember, this is not true …. You are a pathetic endangered bunch of perverts, and there are many of us, billions of us. And victory will be ours!” … “There is a proverb: ‘Don’t try to piss against the wind, you will get drowned in the splash.’ These atrocities are committed in your inflamed brain, infected with the disease called ‘Nazism’.”
Food inflation in Nigeria rose 15 percent from April 2021 to March 2022, adding pressure on the cost of living for workers whose incomes have not risen for close to three years.
How Chad’s involvement in peace missions held back democracy back home:
…. Déby used participation in international interventions for his own purposes, namely to stay in power. He lacked domestic legitimacy and presided over a little-institutionalized state between 1990 until his death in 2021. Through his participation in international interventions, Déby made himself an indispensable ally of France (and to a lesser extent of the US) and helped them further their interests in the wider Sahel.
East Africa’s worst drought in forty years is threatening livestock, livelihoods and tradition:
For the people of Manyatta South, a small village of Laisamis town in Kenya’s far north, nightfall is the only reprieve from the desiccating heat and relentless sun, which have bleached the sandy fields pale. The landscape is nearly gentle now in the glow of the setting sun. Walking through the sandy base of a bone-dry riverbed, just one of many snaking throughout the sparse village that is home to 3,000 people, 33-year-old Benjamin Galwaha says that just in his lifetime, the change has been overwhelming. “This used to all be forested, with lots of wild animals and fruits,” he says. “But the population has exploded since my childhood.” …
Former South African president predicts the end of the ruling ANC.
🌏 Asia
US officials say they haven’t detected overt Chinese military and economic support for Russia, a welcome relief:
As well as steering clear of directly backing Russia's war effort, China has avoided entering new contracts between its state oil refiners and Russia, despite steep discounts. In March its state-run Sinopec Group suspended talks about a major petrochemical investment and a gas marketing venture in Russia.
North Korea fired a ballistic missile eastward into the Sea of Japan as South Korea prepared to inaugurate its first conservative government in five years.
Pyongyang speeds up weapons tests. North Korea has carried out 14 missile tests this year, including a suspected intercontinental missile launch in late March. Last week the North vowed to develop its nuclear forces “at the fastest possible speed” and said it would use the weapons preemptively.
Russia has banned the entry of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and many high-ranking officials:
Widely seen as a retaliation for the Japanese government’s series of punitive measures against Russia since it started attacking Ukraine in late February, the ministry accused Tokyo of launching an “unprecedented anti-Russian campaign with unacceptable rhetoric” and hurting its economy and international prestige. Executives of Japanese media organizations and university professors were also included in the list.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has been on an eight-day tour of five countries in Southeast Asia and Europe. He and Pope Francis agreed to aim for a world free of nuclear weapons.
Japan asked Kazakhstan to join the international community in sanctioning Russia. Tokyo has been trying to enhance economic relations with Central Asia to counter the influence of China.
Japan asked Mongolia to join the pressure on Russia, too:
Mongolia, a landlocked country in East Asia sandwiched by China and Russia, has long been highly dependent on the two big powers in terms of energy supplies, trade and even electricity especially in the western part … In early March, Mongolia abstained from voting on a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.
Japan’s population of children fell for the 41st straight year. The number of children aged 14 or younger, including foreigners, was 14.65 million, down about 250,000 from a year earlier and the lowest figure since 1950, when data became available.
Rifts have emerged at the top of the Taliban hierarchy as it tries to reconcile classic Islamic governance with “the twin challenges posed by modernity and running a country that has undergone immense social, cultural and political change in the past 20 years.”
Pakistani Airstrikes Escalate Conflict on Afghan Border. The airstrikes killed at least 45 people, stoking fears of a violent resurgence of the conflict in eastern Afghanistan, which has become a base for Pakistani militants.
Khan charged with blasphemy: Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and and his delegation were heckled by Pakistani pilgrims during a recent official visit to Saudi Arabia. Sharif’s supporters, claiming the hecklers were connected to Khan, charged Khan with blasphemy.
🔎 Read the background to this story in the magazine: The Meltdown in Pakistan.
Security forces were deployed across the Sri Lankan capital on Friday after protesters tried to storm the president’s home in anger at the nation’s worst economic crisis since independence.
The war in Ukraine has driven up the demand for palm oil, since the conflict has reduced the amount of sunflower oil on the market. Sunflower oil is the main replacement for palm oil in supply chains. Indonesia and Malaysia are the world’s largest producers of palm oil—and its production is a leading driver of deforestation.
The relationship between palm oil and deforestation.
Deforestation is the primary threat to orangutans:
The non-profit Orangutan Conservancy estimates that 54,000 Bornean orangutans and only 6,600 Sumatran orangutans remain in the wild. … forest degradation, fragmentation and outright clearing—sometimes by intentionally set fires—are the main drivers of the species’ population decline. The result has been the loss of some 80 percent of the orangutans’ habitat in just the last two decades.
Middle East
Leaked videos show in “chilling and unprecedented detail Syrian military personnel committing a massacre in 2013 of 288 civilians, including seven women and 12 children.”
A Swedish-Iranian national sentenced to death in Iran on charges of spying for Israeli intelligence is to be executed this month. The disaster medicine doctor and researcher was arrested in 2016 on an academic visit to Iran.
The Commander of the Quds Brigade in the Iran Revolutionary Guards claims that Iran carried out a successful drone mission in Israel.
Some of the most vulnerable peoples ISIS targeted, such as Yazidis and Christian Assyrians, remain under existential threat:
The need for direct support in order for Yazidis and Assyrians to survive has never been greater, yet the prospect has never seemed more remote. Biden-era policy has not only renewed US commitment to the long-established and repeatedly catastrophic status quo but has moved toward formalizing its most destructive aspects.
🌎 Americas
Iranian oil minister meets Venezuela’s Maduro in Caracas. They’re discussing cooperation in energy and sanctions-busting.
Venezuelan migrants say it’s “time to go home.”
Back to bolivar? Venezuela makes bid to revive local currency.
Venezuela’s Cocaine Revolution:
In 2013, Nicolás Maduro became president of Venezuela following the death of his charismatic predecessor Hugo Chávez. Since then, the country’s cocaine trade has undergone revolutionary changes. Today, Venezuela is at risk of becoming the world’s fourth cocaine-producing country. And the Maduro regime has positioned itself as the gatekeeper to the country’s drug trade, controlling access to cocaine’s riches not only for drug traffickers but also for corrupt politicians and the military-embedded trafficking network known as the “Cartel of the Suns.”
In Mexico, one cartel is cleared, but others storm in. “In the state of Michoacán, small drug cartels compete with larger ones for territory, leaving the residents caught in the middle of a brutal turf war.”
South American countries perform poorly in the World Press Freedom Index.
A cybercrime group that threatened to release troves of stolen data from the Costa Rican government has now hit Peru’s intelligence agency, showing how governments in the region continue to be easy pickings for ransomware attacks.
The Latin American and Caribbean Parliament, or Parlatino, is urging its 23 member countries to curb the soaring food prices. Prices are reaching unprecedented highs.
The United States is preoccupied by the leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe v. Wade.
Escalating rivalry between former FARC groups for control of cocaine production has ended a brief period of tranquillity in Colombia’s southern department of Putumayo.
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva and his economic team say they would push for a unified regional currency like the Euro to end South America’s dependence on the US dollar:
The proposed name for the new South American digital currency would be Sur and it “would be issued by a South American Central Bank, with an initial capitalization made by member countries, proportional to their respective shares in regional trade” … The capitalization of Sur “would be made with the countries’ international reserves and/or with a tax on exports from countries outside the region,” they proposed. “The new currency could be used for trade and financial flows between countries in the region.”
Prisoners in Bolivia can now get out of jail early by reading.
Cuba has thanked the Russian government for a donation of 19,526 tons of wheat, which reached the island a month late due to Western sanctions.
In Tijuana, some 500 Ukrainian refugees are arriving daily. A refugee camp for them has been established by federal and local authorities.
For the past two years, the federal government has turned away migrants at the US-Mexico border, including those who are seeking asylum, using a public emergency health order known as Title 42. The US has announced the lifting of Title 42 by May 23. This will probably result in a sharp increase in border crossings. Estimates calculate the current pace will triple, with scenarios ranging from 12,000 to 18,000 arrivals per day, putting high pressure on infrastructure and processing capacity at the Mexican border. Implementation of the decision has for the moment been suspended by a Federal Judge in Mississippi.
🌖 Global
Not even Elon Musk is wealthy enough to bring free speech to Twitter:
… The coming showdowns will therefore not be between dictatorial censorship in the one corner and free speech absolutism in the other. They will be between business and governments. And as Elon Musk will soon be aware if he is not already, plenty of governments seem up for the fight.
The West should stay focused on geoeconomic rivalry with China:
… if the West still wishes to recouple with China on a fairer and more secure basis—rather than decouple entirely, which would have severe economic consequences—it will need to pursue a concerted effort of economic statecraft that combines inducements, deterrence and enforcement toward Beijing to achieve that goal. The priority should be not on eliminating dependencies entirely, but on creating new tools and, in the longer term, new rules that counter the way that China’s economic behavior—for example, its subsidies to state-owned enterprises—distorts the global economy.
The WHO has reported an outbreak of acute hepatitis of unknown origin among young children. It’s not yet clear if there’s truly been a rise in such cases or an rise in awareness of such cases.
🎧 Ukraine invasion threatens international collaboration in space.
For almost 2,000 years, the Behistun Inscription lay unread. Carved into the cliffs of western Iran and written in cuneiform, the inscription had “baffled for centuries the most learned men in Europe” until Henry Rawlinson, a British former army officer, set about solving it. The riddle of Behistun is a story about how knowledge is created. It changed how Westerners think about the past forever.
The Sun is angrier than expected, but we don’t know why. Sunspot counts are far above official expectations.
Such an early surge could mean an unexpectedly strong activity cycle. Or it could just be one of those seasons that gets off to an early start. “We’re about as good at predicting the Sun as my being able to tell you what the Tattslotto numbers will be tomorrow.”
🔎 Read the background to this story in the magazine: Beware the space Apocalypse.
The Great Starvation is coming, and the world must prepare for it.
✍️ By the Cosmopolitan Globalists
“Ukraine’s moral example has changed the course of history,” writes Robert Zubrin in the Kyiv Post. “Ukraine, the hero country … by taking an unexpected stand against monstrous evil, has awakened us as to who we need to be.”
“In Ukraine, the West cannot allow itself to sleepwalk into another Syrian catastrophe,” writes Nicolas Tenzer:
… Moreover, we continue to be told that “the solution to the crisis can only be political”— albeit in a less explicit fashion than before. Besides the fact that this is not a crisis, but a war, we know where this language led to in Syria. There was no political solution because there simply could not be one so long as Assad remained in power. The leaders locked themselves into unworkable UN resolutions and the fiction of a constitutional committee that predictably achieved nothing. This has only strengthened Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies. To think that it could be in the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine is a similar denial of responsibility.
Map of the day
