ON BOARD A TRAIN FROM SUMY TO KYIV, Ukraine: A team of journalists from the AP spent two days traveling by train with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he visited the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, which still faces regular shelling from Russian forces, and northern towns in the Sumy region that were liberated shortly after the war began a year ago.
The AP is the first news organization to travel extensively with Zelensky since the war began. Here are some takeaways from an interview with Zelensky as he returned to Kyiv late Tuesday.
WESTERN WEAPONS
Throughout much of the war, Ukraine’s military has been bolstered by billions of dollars of ammunition and weaponry from Western nations. Zelensky welcomed the help but said some of the promised weapons had not yet been delivered.
“We have great decisions about Patriots, but we don’t have them for real,” he said, referring to the US-made air defense system.
Ukrainian soldiers have received training in the US since January on how to use the Patriot system, but it hasn’t yet been deployed in Ukraine.
Ukraine needs 20 Patriot batteries to protect against Russian missiles, and even that may not be enough “as no country in the world was attacked with so many ballistic rockets,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky added that a European nation sent another air defense system to Ukraine, but it didn’t work and they “had to change it again and again.” He did not name the country.
Zelensky also reiterated his longstanding request for fighter jets, saying “we still don’t have anything when it comes to modern warplanes.” Poland and Slovakia have decided to give Soviet-era fighter jets to Ukraine, but no Western country so far has agreed to provide modern warplanes amid concern that it could escalate the conflict and draw them in deeper.
PUTIN’S ISOLATION
Zelensky was unsparing in his assessment of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, calling him an “informationally isolated person” who had “lost everything” over the last year of war.
“He doesn’t have allies,” Zelenskky said, adding that it was clear that even China — an economic powerhouse long favorable toward Moscow — was no longer willing to back Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently visited Putin i n Russia but left without publicly announcing any overt support for Moscow’s campaign against Ukraine.
Zelensky suggested that Putin’s announcement shortly after Xi’s visit that he would move tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, closer to NATO territory, was meant to deflect from the fact that the Chinese leader’s visit did not go well. Putin said the move was a counter to Britain’s decision to provide more depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine.
Despite Putin’s nuclear provocations, Zelenskky said he does not believe the Russian leader is prepared to use the bomb.
“If a person wants to save himself, he really ... will use these,” he said. “I’m not sure he’s ready to do it.”
AVOIDING A NUCLEAR DISASTER
On Zelensky’s itinerary this week was a meeting with Rafael Mariano Grossi, the visiting head of the UN’s atomic energy agency. Grossi was in the region to take stock of the situation at the nearby Zaporizhizhia Nuclear Power Plant, which Russia took control of last year.
Fierce fighting around the plant, Europe’s largest, has put the facility and the broader region at significant risk. During his meeting with Zelensky on Monday, Grossi said the situation was not improving.
Grossi has called for a “protection zone” around the plant but has failed to come up with terms that would satisfy both Ukraine and Russia. Grossi told the AP on Tuesday he believed a deal was “close.” However, Zelensky, who opposes any plan that would legitimize Russia’s control over the facility, said he was less optimistic a deal was near. “I don’t feel it today,” he said.
THE FIGHT FOR BAKHMUT
The longest battle of the war is raging in the eastern city of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in a grinding conflict for seven months.
Some Western military analysts have questioned why Ukraine is willing to suffer so many losses to defend the territory, arguing that the city is not of strategic significance. Zelensky argued otherwise, saying any loss in the war will give Russia an opening. He predicted that if Russia defeats Ukraine in Bakhmut, Putin would set out to “sell” a victory to the international community.
“If he will feel some blood, smell that we are weak, he will push, push, push,” Zelensky said, adding that the pressure would come not only from the international community but also from within his own country.
“Our society will feel tired,” he said. “Our society will push me to have compromise with them.”
Zelensky recently made traveled near Bakhmut for a morale-boosting visit with troops fighting in the hard-hit city.
CALLS FOR TOUGHER SANCTIONS
Western sanctions against Russia don’t go far enough, according to Zelensky, who called for more far-reaching measures against people in Putin’s inner circle.
More than 30 countries, representing more than half the world’s economy, have imposed sanctions on Russia, including price caps on Russian oil and restrictions on access to global financial transactions. The West has also directly sanctioned about 2,000 Russian firms, government officials, oligarchs and their families. More than $58 billion worth of sanctioned Russians’ assets have been blocked or frozen worldwide, according to a recent report from the US Treasury Department.
Zelensky said more should be done to target Putin’s enablers, who “have to know that they will lose all their money … all their real estate in Europe or in the world, their yachts everywhere.”
RIDING THE RAILS
Most of Zelensky’s travel in Ukraine is done by rail. There are few other options: Commercial air travel has been grounded and Ukraine’s expanse, as well as the unpredictability of life in a war-torn country, make road travel arduous.
The state railway system, however, has remained remarkably stable throughout the war and largely untouched by the constant barrage of Russian missiles. One notable exception: the April 2022 bombing of the crowded Kramatorsk train station that killed dozens of people.
Though Zelensky rides on a train set aside for him and his delegation, it is largely indistinguishable on the outside from the blue-and-yellow trains ferrying other people and goods across the country. Most Ukrainians barely looked up to acknowledge Zelensky’s train as it zipped through towns across the countryside, passing picturesque fields and the occasional bombed-out building or bridge.
Volodymyr Zelensky: Russia’s Vladimir Putin has ‘lost everything’ over the last year of war with Ukraine
https://arab.news/neqt5
Volodymyr Zelensky: Russia’s Vladimir Putin has ‘lost everything’ over the last year of war with Ukraine
- Ukraine’s military has been bolstered by billions of dollars of ammunition and weaponry from Western nations
- Volodymyr Zelensky on Vladimir Putin: He is an ‘informationally isolated person’
Man jailed for knife attack aimed at French magazine Charlie Hebdo
PARIS: A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in jail for attempting to murder two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2020 with a meat cleaver.
When he carried out the attack, 29-year-old Zaheer Mahmood wrongly believed the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which was targeted by Islamists a decade ago for publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.
In fact, Charlie Hebdo had moved in the wake of the storming of its offices by two Al-Qaeda-linked masked gunmen, who killed 12 people including eight of the paper’s editorial staff.
The killings in January 2015 shocked France and triggered a fierce debate about freedom of expression and religion, fueling an outpouring of sympathy in France expressed in a wave of “Je Suis Charlie” (“I Am Charlie“) solidarity.
Originally from rural Pakistan, Mahmood arrived in France illegally in the summer of 2019.
The court had earlier heard how Mahmood was influenced by radical Pakistani preacher Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who had called for the beheading of blasphemers.
Mahmood was convicted of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy and he will be banned from France when his sentence is served.
The 2015 bloodshed, which included a separate but linked hostage-taking that claimed another four lives at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris, marked the start of a dark period for France.
In the years that followed extremists inspired by Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group repeatedly mounted attacks, setting the country on edge and inflaming religious tensions.
To mark the opening of the trial into the 2015 massacre, Charlie Hebdo republished its cartoons of Mohammed on September 2, 2020.
Later that month, urged by the extremist preacher to “avenge the Prophet,” Mahmood arrived in front of Charlie Hebdo’s former address.
Armed with a butcher’s cleaver, he gravely wounded two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency.
Throughout the trial, his defense argued that his actions were the result of a profound disconnect he felt from France, given his upbringing in the fervently Muslim Pakistan countryside.
“In his head he had never left Pakistan,” Mahmood’s defense lawyer Alberic de Gayardon said on Wednesday, conceding that “each of his blows aimed to kill.”
“He does not speak French, he lives with Pakistanis, he works for Pakistanis,” Gayardon added.
Charlie Hebdo’s decision in 2020 to republish the Mohammed lampoons triggered a wave of angry demonstrations in Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death.
Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time, were on trial alongside Mahmood on terrorist conspiracy charges for having supported and encouraged his actions.
The French capital’s special court for minors handed Mahmood’s co-defendants sentences of between three and 12 years.
None of the six in the dock reacted to the verdict.
Both victims were present at the sentencing, but did not wish to comment on the trial’s outcome.
Earlier in the trial one of the two, alias Paul, told the court of the long rehabilitation he undertook after his near-death experience.
“It broke something within me,” the 37-year-old said.
Neither he nor the other victim, named only as Helene, 32, have accepted Mahmood’s pleas for forgiveness.
Mahmood’s lawyers have yet to indicate whether their client will appeal the verdict.
Trump declassifies JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr assassination files
- The National Archives has released tens of thousands of records in recent years related to the November 22, 1963 assassination of president Kennedy
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday declassifying files on the 1960s assassinations of president John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
“A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades,” Trump told reporters as he signed the order in the Oval Office of the White House. “Everything will be revealed.”
After signing the order, Trump passed the pen he used to an aide, saying “Give that to RFK Jr,” the president’s nominee to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The National Archives has released tens of thousands of records in recent years related to the November 22, 1963 assassination of president Kennedy but held thousands back, citing national security concerns.
It said at the time of the latest release, in December 2022, that 97 percent of the Kennedy records — which total approximately five million pages — had now been made public.
The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of the charismatic 46-year-old president determined that it was carried out by a former Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.
That formal conclusion has done little, however, to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files has added fuel to various conspiracy theories.
President Joe Biden said at the time of the December 2022 release that a “limited” number of documents would continue to be held back at the request of unspecified “agencies.”
Previous requests to withhold documents have come from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thousands of Kennedy assassination-related documents from the National Archives were released during Trump’s first term in office, but he also held some back on national security grounds.
Kennedy scholars have said the documents still held by the archives are unlikely to contain any bombshell revelations or put to rest the rampant conspiracy theories about the assassination of the 35th US president.
Oswald was shot to death two days after killing Kennedy by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, as he was being transferred from the city jail.
Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK” have fueled the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson.
President Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert, a former attorney general, was assassinated in June 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-born Jordanian, was convicted of his murder and is serving a life sentence in a prison in California.
Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder and died in prison in 1998 but King’s children have expressed doubts in the past that Ray was the assassin.
dk-cl/bgs
Croatia issues Serbia travel warning after saying nationals expelled
- The Croatian foreign ministry alleged “inappropriate and unfounded actions of Serbian authorities toward Croatian nationals“
- Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman on Wednesday said he would send a protest note to Serbia
ZAGREB: Croatia on Thursday recommended its nationals postpone non-essential travel to Serbia, alleging Belgrade had expelled five Croatian women citing security reasons.
The Croatian foreign ministry alleged “inappropriate and unfounded actions of Serbian authorities toward Croatian nationals,” in a statement.
Other Croatians had previously been accused of taking part in a recent wave of protests against Serbia’s nationalist government in an separate case.
Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman on Wednesday said he would send a protest note to Serbia over the “detention of five Croatian women” there who all returned home safely.
He said the five attended a workshop involving NGOs organized by Austria’s Erste Bank foundation and were “detained without any explanation.”
He said Zagreb will inform the European Union delegation in Belgrade about Serbian authorities’ actions, “which put Croatian citizens in a humiliating position.”
Serbia’s foreign ministry said it was “inappropriate” for a Croatian official to “accuse Serbia of endangering the freedom of movement and speech of several Croatian nationals.”
The latter were “treated in Belgrade by the competent state bodies in line with legal procedures and usual international practice,” it said in a statement without elaborating.
Serbia’s interior ministry did not reply to AFP’s request for comment.
Ana Kovacic, an art historian from Zagreb who took part in the two-day workshop, told the newspaper Jutarnji list that it was attended by around 15 people from Bosnia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia.
After it ended, the participants were taken from their hotel to a police station where they were interrogated, she said.
They were given a document to sign saying that they were “threatening the security of the Republic of Serbia,” should leave the country within 24 hours and were banned from entering it for a year.
Croatian and Serbian human rights groups condemned the actions of the Serbian police, who they said “arrested and deported several persons” from those countries, describing those arrested as “activists.”
Two workshop participants from Albania also told local media in their country that they suffered the same treatment.
The Albanian foreign ministry said on Thursday it had summoned the Serbian ambassador over the case.
It “expressed regret and serious concerns regarding the detention” of the two, describing them as “representatives of civil society who participated in a seminar in Belgrade.”
Serbia has been rocked by regular protests since a deadly disaster at a train station in November ignited longstanding anger over corruption.
High-ranking Serbian government officials, without providing evidence, have claimed in their statements that the student blockades and protests are “influenced by Western intelligence agencies” with the aim of “overthrowing President Aleksandar Vucic.”
At the end of December, tabloid media close to the Serbian authorities accused a group of Croatian students of participating in the protests.
Ties between two former Yugoslav republics remain frosty since Croatia’s 1990s war of independence against Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs.
A federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship
- US District Judge John Coughenour repeatedly interrupted a Justice Department lawyer during arguments to ask how he could consider the order constitutional
- The case is one of five lawsuits being brought by 22 states and a number of immigrants rights groups across the country
SEATTLE: A federal judge in Seattle on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional” during the first hearing in a multi-state effort challenging the order.
US District Judge John Coughenour repeatedly interrupted a Justice Department lawyer during arguments to ask how he could consider the order constitutional. When the attorney, Brett Shumate, said he’d like a chance to explain it in a full briefing, Coughenour told him the hearing was his chance.
The temporary restraining order sought by Arizona, Illinois, Oregon and Washington was the first to get a hearing before a judge and applies nationally.
The case is one of five lawsuits being brought by 22 states and a number of immigrants rights groups across the country. The suits include personal testimonies from attorneys general who are US citizens by birthright, and names pregnant women who are afraid their children won’t become US citizens.
Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, began the hearing by grilling the administration’s attorneys, saying the order “boggles the mind.”
“This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour told Shumate. Coughenour said he’s been on the bench for more than four decades, and he couldn’t remember seeing another case where the action challenged was so clearly unconstitutional.
Shumate said he respectfully disagreed and asked the judge for an opportunity to have a full briefing on the merits of the case, rather than have a 14-day restraining order issued blocking its implementation.
Trump’s executive order, which he signed on Inauguration Day, is slated to take effect on Feb. 19. It could impact hundreds of thousands of people born in the country, according to one of the lawsuits. In 2022, there were about 255,000 births of citizen children to mothers living in the country illegally and about 153,000 births to two such parents, according to the four-state suit filed in Seattle.
The Trump administration argued in papers filed Wednesday that the states don’t have grounds to bring a suit against the order and that no damage has yet been done, so temporary relief isn’t called for. The administration’s attorneys also clarified that the executive order only applies to people born after Feb. 19, when it’s set to take effect.
The US is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.
The lawsuits argue that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees citizenship for people born and naturalized in the US, and states have been interpreting the amendment that way for a century.
Ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, the amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump’s order asserts that the children of noncitizens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and orders federal agencies to not recognize citizenship for children who don’t have at least one parent who is a citizen .
A key case involving birthright citizenship unfolded in 1898. The Supreme Court held that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants, was a US citizen because he was born in the country. After a trip abroad, he faced being denied reentry by the federal government on the grounds that he wasn’t a citizen under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
But some advocates of immigration restrictions have argued that case clearly applied to children born to parents who were both legal immigrants. They say it’s less clear whether it applies to children born to parents living in the country illegally.
Trump’s order prompted attorneys general to share their personal connections to birthright citizenship. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, for instance, a US citizen by birthright and the nation’s first Chinese American elected attorney general, said the lawsuit was personal for him.
“There is no legitimate legal debate on this question. But the fact that Trump is dead wrong will not prevent him from inflicting serious harm right now on American families like my own,” Tong said this week.
One of the lawsuits aimed at blocking the executive order includes the case of a pregnant woman, identified as “Carmen,” who is not a citizen but has lived in the United States for more than 15 years and has a pending visa application that could lead to permanent residency status.
“Stripping children of the ‘priceless treasure’ of citizenship is a grave injury,” the suit says. “It denies them the full membership in US society to which they are entitled.”
Spain says over 550 migrants reached its Canary Islands in 2 days
- The Spanish archipelago off northwest Africa is continuing to experience large numbers of migrant arrivals as more people mainly from West Africa
- In the first half of January, 3,409 migrants reached Spain by sea
MADRID: More than 550 migrants have arrived in Spain’s Canary Islands in boats over the past two days, Spain’s maritime rescue service said Thursday. At least one body was found in one of the boats.
The Spanish archipelago off northwest Africa is continuing to experience large numbers of migrant arrivals as more people mainly from West Africa attempt the dangerous Atlantic crossing in ramshackle boats.
In the first half of January, 3,409 migrants reached Spain by sea, the vast majority to the Canaries, Interior Ministry figures showed. About as many migrants came illegally during the same period last year.
In 2024, Spain received a record number of migrants who crossed illegally via sea, with more than 61,000 people having arrived on boats. Nearly 47,000 of those landed in the Canary Islands. They included several thousand unaccompanied minors.
The islands are roughly 65 miles (105 kilometers) from the closest point in Africa, but to avoid security forces, many migrants attempt longer journeys that can take days or weeks. The majority last year departed from Mauritania, which is at least 473 miles (762 kilometers) from the closest Canary Island, El Hierro.
Earlier this month, the Spanish migration rights group Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) said that 50 people had died in the capsizing of a boat on its way to the Canary Islands. It reported that 44 of them were from Pakistan.
The European Union’s border agency, Frontex, said irregular crossings into the bloc in 2024 fell 38 percent overall but rose by 18 percent on the Atlantic route between West Africa and the Canary Islands. It attributed the rise in part to more migrants leaving from Mauritania, which has become a primary point of departure for people attempting to reach Europe.
The International Organization for Migration recorded at least 5,000 migrants who died or went missing on the migratory route since it began keeping records in 2014. But Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) says the real death toll is significantly higher, and that over 10,000 people died or went missing while attempting the route last year alone.
Caminando Fronteras says it compiles its own figures from families of migrants and rescue statistics.
