WASHINGTON: NATO allies announced Wednesday they had started the long-promised transfer of F-16 jets to Ukraine as leaders meet for a summit in Washington clouded by political uncertainties in the United States.
With the pomp of the three-day gathering in the US capital, President Joe Biden is aiming to rally the West and also reassure US voters amid intense pre-election scrutiny on whether at 81 — six years older than the alliance — he remains fit for the job.
Kicking off events for the 32-nation alliance with a celebration Tuesday evening, Biden committed a new air defense system for Kyiv and urged unity against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched the Ukraine invasion in 2022.
“Make no mistake. Ukraine can — and will — stop Putin,” Biden said in a forceful speech.
The White House followed up Wednesday by saying that Denmark and the Netherlands had begun sending F-16 jets to Ukraine.
Biden last year approved the key request by Ukraine, which wants advanced Western aircraft as it struggles to gain parity in the skies with Russia.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the F-16 transfer “concentrates Vladimir Putin’s mind on the fact that he will not outlast Ukraine, he will not outlast us and, if he persists, the damage that will continue to be done to Russia and its interests will only deepen.”
“The quickest way to get to peace is through a strong Ukraine,” Blinken said.
But Donald Trump, who is edging out Biden in recent polls, has mused about bringing a quick peace settlement by forcing Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia.
The Republican mogul has repeatedly questioned the utility of NATO — formed in 1949 as collective defense against Moscow — which he sees as an unfair burden on the United States.
On the eve of the summit, Russia fired a barrage of missiles on Ukraine, killing dozens, including in Kyiv where a children’s hospital was reduced to debris.
Biden invited to the summit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who voiced gratitude for the F-16s which he said would better protect his country from such “brutal Russian attacks.”
The new aircraft will “bring just and lasting peace closer, demonstrating that terror must fail everywhere and at any time,” Zelensky wrote on social media.
The summit will look for ways to “Trump-proof” the alliance including by having NATO itself take over coordination of arms delivery from the United States.
Outgoing NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has also sought a pledge to keep supplying arms at the same rate — some 40 billion euros ($43 billion) annually — that NATO members have been since Russia invaded.
“I expect that regardless of the outcome of the US elections, the US will remain a strong and staunch NATO ally,” Stoltenberg said as leaders gathered for the summit.
Biden has also invited four key Pacific partners — Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand — as he seeks to increase NATO’s role in managing a rising China.
Ukraine wants firm assurances that it will one day join NATO, which considers an attack on any member an attack on all.
A NATO diplomat said negotiations had settled on wording of a statement that will voice support for Ukraine’s “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.”
Kyiv’s membership enjoys wide backing from Baltic and Eastern European nations still haunted by decades under the Soviet yoke.
But Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have led opposition, concerned that the alliance would effectively be entering war with nuclear-armed Russia as it occupies swathes of Ukraine.
Zelensky, who has achieved hero status in much of the West for his media-savvy defiance of Russia, voiced open annoyance at the last NATO summit in Lithuania at the failure to provide a clearer path to membership.
Other leaders attending the summit include Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of Putin’s closest partners in the West, who ahead of Washington went to Ukraine, Russia and China on a self-described peace mission criticized by Brussels and Washington.
Biden, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will later welcome their counterparts for gala dinners around the Washington area, which is in the throes of a searing heat wave.
One new NATO leader is British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is visiting days after taking office in a landslide victory by his Labour Party.
He will meet both Biden and Zelensky and is expected to confirm Britain’s strong support for Ukraine.
NATO begins sending F-16 jets to Ukraine as Biden leads summit
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NATO begins sending F-16 jets to Ukraine as Biden leads summit
- Biden committed a new air defense system for Kyiv and urged unity against Russian President Vladimir Putin
- The White House followed up Wednesday by saying that Denmark and the Netherlands had begun sending F-16 jets to Ukraine
Clashes erupt at Albania anti-government protest
TIRANA: Clashes broke out late Monday in Tirana between police and opposition protesters seeking that longtime leftist Prime Minister Edi Rama resigns, leaving 10 officers injured police said.
A few thousand people gathered in the Albanian capital at demonstrations organized by the country’s right-wing opposition, according to an AFP reporter.
Scuffles first broke out in front of the government building when demonstrators tried to break through a police cordon and some of them threw Molotov cocktails.
The crowd then moved toward the headquarters of Rama’s Socialist Party where more Molotov cocktails were thrown, setting on fire the entrance door and a banner with the prime minister’s image, the AFP journalist reported.
The protesters, who want Rama to step down and a caretaker government to take over until next year’s parliamentary elections, also targeted the interior ministry headquarters and the city hall with Molotov cocktails. A bus station and several garbage containers were set on fire.
Police, deployed in large numbers, used teargas in a bid to disperse the crowd moving toward the parliament.
“So far 10 police officers have been injured in the attacks with Molotov cocktails, pyrotechnics and solid objects,” a police statement said.
Meanwhile, according to the AFP reporter at least three demonstrators were mildly injured by Molotov cocktails during the nearly four-hour protest.
Police urged the demonstrators to stop attacking them and state institutions, warning that measures were being taken to identify those involved in the attacks.
“This is the first step toward civil disobedience,” Flamur Noka, an official of the main opposition Democratic Party, told reporters in front of the party’s headquarter.
“We will continue our battle of civil disobedience until Rama resigns and a caretaker government is formed,” he said.
The protest was held a week after opposition lawmakers threw their chairs out of parliament and set them on fire in protest at a prison sentence handed to one of their peers.
Ervin Salianji, an official of the Democratic Party, in September was found guilty of “giving false testimony” in a drug trafficking case that targeted the brother of a lawmaker of the ruling Socialist Party.
The opposition described the MP’s arrest and conviction as a “blind act of revenge and political terror against the Democratic Party,” accusing Rama of being behind it.
Democratic Party leader and former prime minister Sali Berisha said earlier that Monday’s protests would be the “battle of our lives.”
Berisha has been under house arrest since December last year on charges of “passive corruption.”
He has rejected the accusations against him as politically motivated.
US says Russia denying access to citizen jailed for fighting in Ukraine
- Stephen Hubbard, 72, was arrested more than two years ago and sentenced on Monday by a Moscow court for fighting for Kyiv
WASHINGTON: The United States on Monday criticized Russia for withholding consular access for a detained American, accused of being a “mercenary” for Ukraine and sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.
Stephen Hubbard, 72, was arrested more than two years ago and sentenced on Monday by a Moscow court for fighting for Kyiv.
“We have limited information available about this case because Russia has refused to grant consular access,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
Calling on Moscow to grant American diplomats access to Hubbard, as “they have an obligation” to do, Miller added the US government was “considering our next steps.”
Hubbard has been in custody since April 2022, though his case only became public on September 27, when his trial — largely held behind closed doors — began in Moscow.
He was sentenced to six years and ten months in prison, convicted of “participating as a mercenary in the armed conflict.”
Russia has not said where he had been detained.
The United States says he was detained in Ukraine.
Russia has recently detained and tried a number of US citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has since been released in a prisoner swap.
Washington accuses Moscow of arbitrarily detaining Americans in order to use them for prisoner exchanges.
Trump says migrants who have committed murder have introduced ‘a lot of bad genes in our country’
- The Biden administration has stiffened asylum restrictions for migrants, and Harris, seeking to address a vulnerability as she campaigns, has worked to project a tougher stance on immigration
NEW YORK: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday suggested that migrants who are in the US and have committed murder did so because “it’s in their genes.” There are, he added, “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It’s the latest example of Trump alleging that immigrants are changing the hereditary makeup of the US Last year, he evoked language once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump made the comments Monday in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. He was criticizing his Democratic opponent for the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, when he pivoted to immigration, citing statistics that the Department of Homeland Security says include cases from his administration.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person,” Trump said. “And they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer — I believe this: it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. Then you had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals.”
Trump’s campaign said his comments regarding genes were about murderers.
“He was clearly referring to murderers, not migrants. It’s pretty disgusting the media is always so quick to defend murderers, rapists, and illegal criminals if it means writing a bad headline about President Trump,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement released immigration enforcement data to Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales last month about the people under its supervision, including those not in ICE custody. That included 13,099 people who were found guilty of homicide and 425,431 people who are convicted criminals.
But those numbers span decades, including during Trump’s administration. And those who are not in ICE custody may be detained by state or local law enforcement agencies, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
The Harris campaign declined to comment.
Asked during her briefing with reporters on Monday about Trump’s “bad genes” comment, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “That type of language, it’s hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate, it has no place in our country.”
The Biden administration has stiffened asylum restrictions for migrants, and Harris, seeking to address a vulnerability as she campaigns, has worked to project a tougher stance on immigration.
The former president and Republican nominee has made illegal immigration a central part of his 2024 campaign, vowing to stage the largest deportation operation in US history if elected. He has a long history of comments maligning immigrants, including referring to them as “animals” and “killers,” and saying that they spread diseases.
Last month, during his debate with Harris, Trump falsely claimed Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating pets.
As president, he questioned why the US was accepting immigrants from Haiti and Africa rather than Norway and told four congresswomen, all people of color and three of whom were born in the US, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Escapee from Portuguese prison caught in Morocco, four still at large
- On Sept. 7, the five convicts escaped from Vale de Judeus prison during visiting hours, when the guards were busy, with the help of a long ladder provided by an accomplice on the outside
LISBON: One of five inmates who staged a spectacular escape from a high-security prison near Lisbon a month ago has been recaptured in Morocco, Portuguese police said on Monday, while the other four, including foreign nationals, remain at large.
Moroccan authorities arrested Fabio Loureiro, 33, late on Sunday in Tangier.
He will appear before a judge in Morocco before his extradition to Portugal to serve the rest of a 25-year prison sentence for armed robbery, drug trafficking, extortion and other crimes, police said.
On Sept. 7, the five convicts escaped from Vale de Judeus prison during visiting hours, when the guards were busy, with the help of a long ladder provided by an accomplice on the outside.
The prison guards’ union has long been flagging what it sees as inadequate staffing and security at the prison with a capacity for 560 inmates, especially since the watchtowers were torn down and replaced with video surveillance.
India offers financial support to Maldives after talks to repair ties
NEW DELHI: India stepped up its development assistance to the Maldives after the two leaders held talks in New Delhi on Monday in a bid to repair strained ties that saw the president of the Indian Ocean archipelago forging closer relations with China.
After the talks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India will offer financial support to the cash-strapped Maldives in form of a $100-million treasury bills rollover. The countries also signed a $400-million currency swap agreement.
The two leaders virtually inaugurated a new international airport in the Maldives, and Modi announced that work will be accelerated on the India-assisted Greater Male Connectivity Project, which aims to link key islands of the Maldives through modern transport networks.
“India is Maldives’ nearest neighbor and a close friend,” Modi said during a joint news conference. He said the Maldives held an important position in India’s “neighborhood first policy.”
Tensions between India and the Maldives have grown since President Mohamed Muizzu, who favors closer ties with China, was elected last year after defeating India-friendly incumbent Ibrahim Mohamed Solih. Leading up to the election, Muizzu had promised to expel Indian soldiers deployed in the Maldives to help with humanitarian assistance.
