BERLIN: Britain remains a key ally even though it is leaving the EU, the German government said Wednesday, while warning of tough negotiations ahead.
Calling for swift clarity as British Prime Minister Theresa May triggered the exit process, Berlin also cautioned that uncertainty unleashed by the talks could be “poison” to both citizens and commerce.
“We must not forget that the UK is still a partner, in NATO and in Europe,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer told journalists, adding that London’s Brexit notification would offer clues on how Britain planned to handle the divorce process.
“On this basis, the 27 member states and EU institutions will define their interests and aims,” Demmer said, adding that Berlin was “well prepared” for the coming negotiations.
Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel acknowledged that the talks would “certainly not be easy for both sides.” Although the split may generate “bad feelings,” he said that should not form the basis of Britain’s future relationship with the EU’s remaining 27 members.
“The sentence often used in private divorces, ‘let’s stay friends,’ rings true in this case,” said Gabriel.
“Britain remains our neighbor, like the European Union is for Britain. We need each other. We should do everything to maintain a good and friendly relationship in the future,” he added. At the same time, a Foreign Ministry source also pointed out that “a close friend is still somewhat different from remaining part of the family of 27.”
“That is hopefully also clear to the Britons,” said the source, adding that both sides are aware that “Britain’s decision to separate from the EU at a time when the old order seems to be breaking apart ... is reckless.”
Underlining what is at stake, Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer emphasized that “uncertainty is poison for the people -- the EU citizens, Germans who live in Britain and what their future status would be, likewise for British citizens living in the European Union.”
“Perhaps it’s even more poisonous for economic trade and investment relations,” he added, questioning if London “really understood what kind of impact there could be for the British economy when all these questions have to be addressed,” and noting the “damn tight” two-year negotiation period.
“We are proud of the clear, unanimous stance of the EU 27, that they stood their ground that there would be no pre-negotiations,” he added.
“They begin now.
Next steps
Here are the key steps ahead:
• European Council President Donald Tusk will issue draft “negotiating guidelines” on Friday. He is due to give a press conference with Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat on Friday in Valletta. These are overall political red lines for the next two years and will be circulated to the capitals of the 27 remaining EU countries. Diplomats known as sherpas make further preparations and then ministers will finalize the guidelines in late April.
• EU 27 leaders will hold a special Brexit Summit in Brussels, without Britain, to rubber-stamp the negotiating guidelines.
• A day or two later, the European Commission negotiator Michel Barnier will issue an initial “Recommendation to Open Negotiations” with his suggestions for how the talks should go.
• The EU 27’s European affairs ministers — the so-called General Affairs Council — will meet in May to draw up detailed “Negotiating Directives” that will bind Barnier during the talks. The ministers already have a scheduled meeting on May 16 but could meet sooner for Brexit. The guidelines will include the three “divorce” issues the EU wants to deal with before talks on any future trade deal: Britain’s exit bill, the rights of EU citizens in Britain and vice versa, and the flashpoint border in Northern Ireland.
• EU ministers will formally give Barnier the mandate to start negotiations so that formal Britain-EU talks actually begin, nearly a year after Britain voted to leave. Informal talks however could begin earlier to work out practical issues such as what language the talks will be held in — Barnier is French — and the timetable
“There’s nothing to stop us talking about procedure before we get the mandate as long as we are not actually negotiating,” one diplomat told AFP.
• The EU says it will only discuss the leaving bill, citizens rights and Northern Ireland at first. It will only move on to a trade deal once they are sorted out.
• Barnier has set October 2018 as the latest feasible date for a draft Brexit deal to give it time to be approved by the British Parliament, by EU leaders and by the European Parliament, which will have the final say.
• The European Parliament will hold a crucial binding vote on the Brexit deal. National parliaments may also vote on it.
• Britain will formally leave the EU two years after the notification of Article 50. Whether that happens with a new trade deal included, a transitional arrangement while one is sorted out, or no trade deal remains to be seen.
• Even if Britain does manage to make a deal with the EU, the accord is likely to be partial or transitional.
A full deal for the future relationship will probably take years — up to seven years according to Tusk, or even a decade, according to reported comments by Britain’s former ambassador to the EU.
UK still partner in NATO, Europe: Berlin
UK still partner in NATO, Europe: Berlin
France returns ancient artifacts to Ethiopia
- The artifacts currently stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday
ADDIS ABABA: France on Saturday began the return of some 3,500 archeolo-gical artifacts to Ethiopia, which Paris held since the 1980s for study.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot handed over two prehistoric stone axes, bifaces, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s Tourism Minister Selamawit Kassa during a visit to the National Museum in Addis Ababa.
The tools are “samples of nearly 3,500 artifacts from the excavations carried out on the Melka Kunture site,” a cluster of prehistoric sites south of the capital excavated under the direction of a late French researcher, Barrot said.
France and Ethiopia hold a longstanding bilateral agreement to cooperate in archeology and paleontology.
The artifacts stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday.
“This is a handover, not a restitution, in that these objects have never been part of French public collections,” said Laurent Serrano, culture adviser at the French Embassy.
“These artifacts, which date back between 1 and 2 million years, were found during excavations carried out over several decades at a site near the Ethiopian capital,” he added.
Concern grows over rise in fatal migrant shipwrecks in Greece
- UNHCR representative: ‘Counting lives lost at sea cannot become a norm’
ATHENS: The UN refugee agency has voiced concern at a rise in deaths of migrants trying to reach Greece by sea in small boats from Turkiye, following two fatal shipwrecks this week.
The UNHCR said in a statement Friday that 17 people have died in such accidents this month, while the total so far this year is at least 45 deaths.
Some 56,000 people have illegally entered Greece since Jan. 1, mostly by sea. That’s a five-year high, and the number has already exceeded government estimates of some 50,000 arrivals by the year’s end in October.
The UNHCR representative in Greece, Maria Clara Martin, said the migrant deaths “highlight the urgent need for long-term responses and safer and credible alternatives” for people fleeing conflict, persecution, violence, or human rights violations.
“Counting lives lost at sea cannot become a norm — we should not get used to it,” she said.
The UN agency said that this week’s two fatal accidents off the eastern Aegean Sea island of Samos, which is close to the Turkish coast, saw a mother lose three of her children, while another survivor lost his wife and daughter.
Greek authorities have attributed this year’s rise in migrant arrivals to conflicts in the Middle East.
While there’s been a surge in people attempting the long and dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing from Libya to the southern Greek island of Crete, most migrants pay smuggling gangs to ferry them from Turkiye to the eastern Aegean islands.
On Friday, the Greek coast guard said it arrested a 17-year-old Turkish youth on suspicion of having landed 16 migrants — including three children — on the eastern island of Chios.
Tunisia and Libya have become vital departure points for migrants, often from other African countries, who risk perilous Mediterranean Sea journeys in the hopes of reaching better lives in Europe.
Each year, tens of thousands of people attempt to make the crossing. Italy, whose Lampedusa island is only 150 km from Tunisia, is often their first port of call.
In the latest incident reported on Friday, two unidentified bodies were recovered off Tunisia’s eastern coast after a migrant boat capsized, with one person still missing and 28 rescued.
The boat had set sail from Teboulba, a coastal town some 180 km south of Tunis.
In late October, the bodies of 15 people believed to be migrants were recovered by authorities in Monastir, eastern Tunisia.
And in late September, 36 would-be migrants — mainly Tunisians — were rescued off Bizerte in northern Tunisia.
Since Jan. 1, at least 103 makeshift boats have capsized, and 341 bodies have been recovered off Tunisia’s coast, according to the Interior Ministry.
Kenyan, Ugandan presidents to mediate Ethiopia-Somalia dispute
- Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite governing itself and enjoying comparative peace and stability since declaring independence in 1991
NAIROBI: Kenya’s President William Ruto said on Saturday he and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni would help mediate a dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia, threatening the region’s stability.
Landlocked Ethiopia, which has thousands of troops in Somalia to fight Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents, has fallen out with the Mogadishu government over its plans to build a port in the breakaway region of Somaliland in exchange for possible recognition of its sovereignty.
Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite governing itself and enjoying comparative peace and stability since declaring independence in 1991.
The spat has drawn Somalia closer to Egypt, which has quarreled with Ethiopia for years over Addis Ababa’s construction of a vast hydro dam on the Nile River, and Eritrea, another of Ethiopia’s foes.
Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite governing itself and enjoying comparative peace and stability since declaring independence in 1991.
“Because the security of Somalia ... contributes significantly to the stability of our region, and the environment for investors, business people, and entrepreneurs to thrive,” he told a news conference.
Several attempts to resolve the feud in Ankara, Turkiye, failed to make a breakthrough.
Ethiopia’s government and foreign affairs spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Somalia’s foreign minister could not immediately be reached by Reuters.
The government of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubbaland state said earlier it was suspending relations and cooperation with the federal government in Mogadishu following a dispute over regional elections.
Jubbaland, which borders Kenya and Ethiopia and is one of Somalia’s five semi-autonomous states, reelected regional president Ahmed Mohammed Islam Madobe for a third term in elections on Monday.
However, the national government based in Mogadishu, led by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, opposed the election, saying it was held without federal involvement.
Russian missile strike on central Ukraine kills 4: Zelensky
- More than a dozen others were wounded, including a child
- “A rescue operation is currently underway in the Dnipro region,” Zelensky said
KYIV: A Russian missile strike on a town in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region on Saturday killed at least four people, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
More than a dozen others were wounded, including a child, while a residential building and shop were damaged, according to officials.
“A rescue operation is currently underway in the Dnipro region after the missile strike. As of now, it is known that four people were killed,” Zelensky said in his evening address.
Tsarychanka is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the region’s capital Dnipro.
The town had a population of around 7,000 people before the war.
The nearly three-year conflict has seen a sharp escalation in recent days, with Moscow pummelling Ukrainian towns and cities ahead of the winter.
Russia launched more than a hundred drones at Ukraine on Friday, a day after knocking out power to more than a million people with strikes on energy infrastructure.
Zelensky says NATO offer for Ukraine-controlled territory could end ‘hot stage’ of war
- “You can’t give an invitation to just one part of a country,” the Ukrainian president said
- “So legally, by law, we have no right to recognize the occupied territory as territory of Russia”
KYIV: An offer of NATO membership to territory under Kyiv’s control would end “the hot stage of the war” in Ukraine, but any proposal to join the military alliance should be extended to all parts of the country that fall under internationally recognized borders, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a broadcast interview.
Zelensky’s remarks on Friday signaled a possible way forward to the difficult path Ukraine faces to future NATO membership. At their summit in Washington in July, the 32 members declared Ukraine on an “irreversible” path to membership. However, one obstacle to moving forward has been the view that Ukraine’s borders would need to be clearly demarcated before it could join so that there can be no mistaking where the alliance’s pact of mutual defense would come into effect.
“You can’t give an invitation to just one part of a country,” the Ukrainian president said in an excerpt of the interview with Sky News, dubbed by the UK broadcaster. “Why? Because thus you would recognize that Ukraine is only that territory of Ukraine and the other one is Russia.”
Under the Ukrainian constitution, Ukraine cannot recognize territory occupied by Russia as Russian.
“So legally, by law, we have no right to recognize the occupied territory as territory of Russia,” he said.
Since the start of the war in 2022, Russia has been expending huge amounts of weaponry and human life to make small-but-steady territorial gains to the nearly one-fifth of Ukraine it already controls in east and southern Ukraine.
“If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under the NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control. That’s what we need to do, fast. And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically,” he said.
An invitation for Ukraine to join NATO is one key point of Zelensky’s “victory plan”, which he presented to Western allies and the Ukrainian people in October. The plan is seen as a way for Ukraine to strengthen its hand in any negotiations with Moscow.
Earlier this week, NATO’s new Secretary General Mark Rutte said that the alliance “needs to go further” to support Ukraine in its fight against a Russian invasion. Military aid to Kyiv and steps toward ending the war are expected to be high on the agenda when NATO members’ foreign ministers meet in Brussels for a two-day gathering starting on December 3.
However, any decision for Ukraine to join the military alliance would require a lengthier process and the agreement of all member states.
There is also uncertainty as to the foreign policy stance of President-elect Donald Trump. While Trump vowed on the campaign trail to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a single day, he has not publicly discussed how this could happen. Trump also announced Wednesday that Keith Kellogg, an 80-year-old, highly decorated retired three-star general, would serve as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.
In April, Kellog wrote that “bringing the Russia-Ukraine war to a close will require strong, America First leadership to deliver a peace deal and immediately end the hostilities between the two warring parties.”
Meanwhile, during his only campaign debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump twice refused to directly answer a question about whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war — raising concerns that Kyiv could be forced to accept unfavorable terms in any negotiations.
Zelensky’s statement comes as Ukraine faces increasing pressure along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) frontline. In its latest report, the Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War said Saturday that Russian forces had recently advanced near Kupiansk, in Toretsk, and near Pokrovsk and Velyka Novosilka, a key logistics route for the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine’s air force announced Saturday that the country had come under attack from ten Russian drones, of which eight were shot down over the Kyiv, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kherson regions. One drone returned to Russian-occupied territory, while the final drone disappeared from radar, often a sign of the use of electronic defenses.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said that 11 Ukrainian drones had been shot down by the country’s air defense systems. Both the mayor of Sochi, Andrey Proshunin, and the head of Russia’s Dagestan region, Sergey Melikov, both in Russia’s southwest, said that drones had been destroyed in their regions overnight. No casualties were reported.
On Friday, the Ukrainian president announced a number of changes to military leadership, saying that changes in personnel management were needed to improve the situation on the battlefield.
General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who led the defense of Kharkiv during Russia’s new offensive on Ukraine’s second-largest city this year, was appointed the new head of Ukraine’s Ground Forces. Oleh Apostol was named as the new Deputy Commander-in-Chief responsible for improving military training.
Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi also announced Friday that he would bolster units in Donetsk, Pokrovsk and Kurakhove with additional reserves, ammunition, weapons and military equipment.
