Elon Musk, the billionaire ally of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, has praised the far-right Alterative for Germany party ahead of the election due in Germany early next year. The party wants to end Western support for Ukraine in its war against Russian invaders. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Ukraine attacked a town in Russia’s Kursk region Friday, killing six people, including a child, a senior local official said.

Ten others were hospitalized in the town of Rylsk after the attack with U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets, Kursk acting Governor Alexander Khinshtein said.

The attack, Ukrainian officials said, followed an earlier Russian missile attack on Kyiv.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said an early Friday morning Russian ballistic missile attack on the capital killed at least one person, wounded 13 and damaged six foreign embassies and a university in the city’s center.

On its Telegram social media account, Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted five Iskander short-range ballistic missiles fired at the city, but falling missile debris caused damage and sparked fires in three districts. City officials reported damage to multiple residential buildings, medical facilities and schools.

Air force officials urged citizens to immediately respond to reports of ballistic attack threats because they provide very little time to find shelter.

At a briefing in Kyiv on Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Georgiy Tykhyi said the missile attack did significant damage to a building that houses the embassies of Albania, Argentina, the Palestinians, North Macedonia, Portugal and Montenegro. He shared pictures of the damage to the buildings. No injuries were reported in those attacks.

The Kyiv National Linguistics University said on its Instagram account that its building also had been hit, and it shared a picture of an area near an entrance where two large windows had been blown out.

Russia has said it launched the attack in retaliation for Kyiv’s firing U.S.-made weapons into Russia.

Russia’s attacks on Kyiv came one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s year-end press conference. Putin has been talking about negotiations to end the war “for quite some time, but the bombing has continued,” said Charles Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

President-elect Donald Trump has talked about the possibility of talks with the Russian and Ukrainian presidents to end the war. He has said he could broker a deal to end the war in 24 hours.

Kupchan said Trump is “naive” to think he could get the two countries to come to an agreement so swiftly.

Trump “cannot afford a deal that effectively subjugates Ukraine and leaves it a ward of Russia,” Kupchan said. Ukraine must be defensible, he said, and “not left in a geopolitical limbo that invites Russia to simply pick up the war where it left off six months from now … or a year later.”

Meanwhile, Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister of justice, reported Friday that Russia had launched a cyberattack on state registers, resulting in a shutdown.

Stefanishyna made the initial report from her Facebook page, where she said it was clear the attack was orchestrated by Russia to “sow panic among citizens of Ukraine and abroad.”

She held a briefing later Friday in Kyiv along with Ukraine’s acting head of the Cybersecurity Department of the security service, Volodymyr Karastelov.

She told reporters that while it appeared no data were lost or stolen, the ministry suspended the activities of all state registers to avoid further deployment of threats. The affected registries include civil acts such as marriages, wills, births and car registrations, and Stefanishyna said they were working to restore them.

The Cybersecurity Department said its main line of investigation was that a hacker group affiliated with Russian military intelligence was behind the attack. Russia has yet to comment on the attack.

VOA’s Kim Lewis contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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Igor Kirillov had overseen the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine and regularly spread disinformation about the West developing bioweapons prior to being killed on Dec. 17.
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washington — The United States has charged a Russian Israeli dual citizen over alleged involvement with the Lockbit ransomware group, the Justice Department said Friday. 

Rostislav Panev, 51, was arrested in Israel in August and is awaiting extradition to the United States, the department said. 

Panev was a developer at Lockbit from its inception in 2019 until at least February 2024, during which time the group grew into “what was, at times, the most active and destructive ransomware group in the world,” the department said.  

“The Justice Department’s work going after the world’s most dangerous ransomware schemes includes not only dismantling networks but also finding and bringing to justice the individuals responsible for building and running them,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. 

Lockbit and its malware were linked to attacks on more than 2,500 victims in at least 120 countries around the world, according to the department, including small businesses and large multinationals, hospitals, schools, critical infrastructure, government and law enforcement agencies. 

Lockbit was discovered in 2020 when its eponymous malicious software was found on Russian-language cybercrime forums. 

It operated a ransomware-as-a-service operation, in which a core group of developers and administrators worked with affiliates who carried out attacks. Extortion proceeds were split among the parties involved. 

Lockbit and its affiliates extorted at least $500 million in payments from victims, according to the Justice Department, as well as causing significant costs from lost revenue and incident response and recovery. 

The arrest followed two guilty pleas in July from a pair of Russian members of the Lockbit gang — Ruslan Astamirov and Mikhail Vasiliev — and the seizure in February of numerous Lockbit websites by Britain’s National Crime Agency, the FBI and other international law enforcement agencies. 

Lockbit reappeared online not long after the seizure, defiantly saying: “I cannot be stopped.” But law enforcement officials and experts say the bust helped damage the gang’s standing in the cybercriminal underworld. 

Government actions “have proven incredibly effective at dismantling and discrediting” Lockbit as a brand and bringing the group’s volume of attacks down precipitously, said Jeremy Kennelly, a cybersecurity analyst with Google owner Alphabet.  

Affiliates and others working with the group may have shifted to collaborating with other gangs, Kennelly said, but the crackdown has been “critical to ensuring that ransomware and extortion are seen as crimes for which there are consequences.” 
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A 7-year-old girl was stabbed to death Friday at an elementary school in Croatia by a knife-wielding teenager who also wounded three other children and a teacher, officials said.  

Video footage Friday showed children running away from the school as a medical helicopter was landing.   

The attacker is a former student of the Precko Elementary School in Zagreb where the attack took place, according to Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic. 

The teen had a history of mental health issues and after Friday’s incident “shut himself in a nearby health center where he tried to injure himself with the knife,” according to Bozinovic. Police were able to prevent him from committing suicide. 

Last year, the teen also tried to kill himself, the minister said.  

“Five persons have been hospitalized, and their lives are not in danger,” Croatian Health Minister Irena Hrstic said, including the attacker in the count. 

Leaders declare day of mourning

School attacks are rare in Croatia.   

“There are no words to describe the grief over the horrible and unthinkable tragedy that shocked us all today,” said President Zoran Milanovic. 

“We are horrified,” said Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.  

Following the assault at the school, Croatian officials declared Saturday as a day of mourning.  

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.   
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The United States last month formally opened a permanent military base in Poland, part of NATO’s missile defense system amid rising tensions with Russia. The Polish defense minister says the base is a testament to Polish-American cooperation. VOA Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Myroslava Gongadze reports from Redzikowo, Poland.
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U.S. billionaire Elon Musk, set to join President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, waded into Germany’s election campaign on Friday, calling the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the country’s savior.

The AfD is running second in opinion polls and might be able to thwart either a center-right or center-left majority, but Germany’s mainstream, more centrist parties have vowed to shun support from the AfD at national level.

Europe’s leading power is expected to vote on February 23 after a center-left coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz collapsed.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform, X.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has already expressed support for other anti-immigration parties across Europe.

The German government said it had taken note of Musk’s post but declined to give any further comment at its regular press conference.

Musk reposted a message by German right-wing influencer Naomi Seibt that criticized Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate for the conservatives, who are comfortably ahead in surveys.

Musk had already voiced support for the AfD last year, when he attacked the German government’s handling of illegal migration.

Last month, Musk called for the sacking of Italian judges who had questioned the legality of government measures to prevent irregular immigration.

And this week Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s right-wing Reform UK party and friend of Trump, posted a photo of himself and Reform’s treasurer meeting Musk at Trump’s Florida residence, and said he was in talks with Musk about financial support.

 
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Moscow — Russia on Friday sentenced a resident of east Ukraine’s Lugansk region to 16 years in prison for “high treason,” Moscow’s FSB security service said.

Moscow regularly hands heavy sentences to people it accuses of spying for Ukraine and has also consistently imprisoned Ukrainians in Russia and occupied regions.

The sentencing came as President Vladimir Putin called on security services to be “tough” in anti-terror measures and especially vigilant in military counterintelligence as the Kremlin’s Ukraine offensive drags on for almost three years.

Putin called for special services to “identify spies and traitors” and to “stop the work of foreign security services.”

The unnamed man was sentenced Friday by a military court in Russia’s southern city of Rostov-on-Don.

Prosecutors said he had handed information on the Russian armed forces to Kyiv’s security services.

The FSB, cited by Russian news agencies, said the man was found guilty of state treason, being an accomplice in terrorist acts as well as the illegal handling and transport of explosives.

The court ordered that he serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony.

The Tass news agency published a video showing the man’s arrest, in which FSB officers stopped a car, dragged a man out and threw him to the ground, before handcuffing him and taking him to the local headquarters of the security force.

The video showed a man with his face blurred — filmed by the FSB — saying he had been recruited by Ukraine’s SBU security service in 2016.

Russia regularly releases confession videos filmed by the FSB after arrests.

Russian independent media reported that an activist had killed himself Thursday in a Rostov detention center, shortly after being sentenced to 16 years in prison also in the Rostov region.

The Mediazona website said it got confirmation from prison officials that Roman Shved — a 39-year-old anarchist sentenced for an arson attack on a government building after the Kremlin announced a military mobilization in 2022 — had died in a Rostov detention center.

Several social media channels had said Shved had killed himself hours after being sentenced.

Russia has punished thousands of its citizens for opposing the Ukraine campaign.
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Leaders of 12 European countries agreed at a meeting in Tallinn to expand sanctions against Russia’s “shadow fleet” that is used by Moscow to sell oil and evade Western sanctions. Several European states imposed new policies on Russian vessels transiting through European waters to curb Russia’s ability to use profits from illicit oil sales to fund its war in Ukraine.

Click here for the full story in Russian.

 
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Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov said that a conflict between Russia and NATO is possible within the next decade. VOA Russian spoke to experts who agreed that Belousov is most likely voicing the Kremlin’s true intentions, and that the West should treat these statements seriously.

Click here for the full story in Russian.
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Washington / belgrade, serbia — An encounter with police in the Serbian city of Pirot earlier this year unnerved investigative reporter Slavisa Milanov.

A journalist for the independent media outlet FAR, Milanov was driving with a colleague in February when they were pulled over by police, who asked the pair to accompany them to a station to be tested for illegal substances.

Once there, Milanov said he was asked to leave his phone and personal belongings behind during a check.

The drug tests were negative, but when police handed Milanov his phone, he noticed the settings had been changed.

Suspecting that spyware may have been installed, he reached out to Amnesty International.

In a report published this week, the international watchdog confirmed Milanov’s suspicions, finding forensic evidence that spyware was installed on the phones of several journalists and activists, including Milanov.

In at least two cases, software provided by Cellebrite DI — an Israeli company that markets products for government and law enforcement agencies — was used to unlock the phones prior to infection, the report found. Then, Serbian spyware called NoviSpy took covert screenshots, copied contacts and uploaded them to a government-controlled server. 

“In multiple cases, activists and a journalist reported signs of suspicious activity on their mobile phones directly following interviews with Serbian police and security authorities,” Amnesty said.

‘Major consequences’ seen

Aleksa Tesic, who has reported on spyware in Serbia for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, said the Amnesty report precisely documented for the first time cases showing technology abuse for the purpose of affecting civil liberties.   

“We had various indications that this was happening before, because Serbia has been interested in advanced spy software for more than 10 years. But this could now have major consequences for democracy in Serbia,” Tesic said.  

Serbia’s Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) rejected the findings. In a statement on its website, the agency said the report contained “nonsensical statements,” and that the BIA operates within local law.  

The Serbian Interior Ministry also denounced the report as incorrect.  

Milanov said the existence of spyware on his phone could “jeopardize me, my family, colleagues and my sources.”

“If anything happens to any of us, I will hold the state responsible for it. I don’t see who else it could be,” he told VOA Serbian.

Milanov is based in Dimitrovgrad, at the border of Serbia and Bulgaria, 330 kilometers from Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. He recalled to VOA the traffic stop and police headquarters, where he believes his phone was accessed.

“There, I was told to turn off my phone and leave other personal belongings during the check. Alcohol and drug tests were, of course, negative. Yet the policeman was, as it seemed to me, messaging with someone unknown to me,” Milanov said.

The reporter asked if he was free to go but was told, “We are waiting for the boss.”

Not long afterward, two men arrived. Milanov said they did not identify themselves.

“I assumed they were police inspectors. We went to another police station, where they questioned me about my work, financing, if I have traveled to Bulgaria recently and with whom,” he said.

Milanov answered the questions before being released with his belongings.

But changes to his phone settings led to a suspicion that something was wrong.

At home, he used specialized software and found that although he had left his phone off at the police station, it had been switched back on for the duration of his police encounter.

Call for accountability

Pavol Szalai, who heads the European Union-Balkans Desk of Reporters Without Borders, told VOA that Amnesty’s report corroborates  information his organization had about journalists targeted by surveillance. 

“Spyware and surveillance used in an illegitimate way kills journalism without spilling [any] blood of a journalist. Surveillance undermines confidentiality of sources, which is a cornerstone of press freedom,” he said. “And as for Serbia on the international level, it must be held accountable by the international organizations of which it is a member.”

Serbia is a European Union candidate country. But a report this year by the European Commission said the country lacked progress, including in the rule of law, the fight against corruption, nonalignment with Russia sanctioning and media freedoms.

A European Commission spokesperson told VOA that any attempts to illegally access citizens’ data, including journalists and political opponents, if confirmed, are not acceptable. 

“The commission expects national authorities to thoroughly examine any such allegations and to restore citizens’ trust,” the spokesperson said.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that while he could not comment on a specific case, the use of spyware raises concerns.

“Speaking broadly, we have made quite clear since the outset of this administration the concerns that we have about governments that use spyware to track journalists, to track dissident groups, to track others who legitimately oppose or report on government activities,” Miller said in response to a question by VOA. 

Grant Baker, a research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, said Serbia should conduct an impartial investigation and provide remedy to those affected. 

“Authorities should also amend excessively broad laws regulating surveillance so they better align with both the European Court of Human Rights rulings and the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance,” Baker said.  

The international community should also “make clear that such disproportionate surveillance is a grave threat to democracy,” Baker said.  

“While export controls are not a panacea, they are one important and necessary step to reducing the technology’s negative impact on human rights around the world,” he said. 

Serbia has a vibrant media landscape, but reporters often face political pressure, and impunity for crimes against journalists tends to be the norm, according to press freedom groups. 

Reporters Without Borders ranks Serbia 98th out of 180 on the Press Freedom Index, where 1 reflects the best environment for media.
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump says the leaders of Ukraine and Russia should be “prepared to make a deal” to end the brutal conflict that has consumed Ukraine since 2022. He also slammed President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to strike inside Russian territory with U.S.-provided weapons – hinting that when he takes office, he may reverse that move. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Washington. Iuliia Iarmolenko, Kim Lewis and Kateryna Lisunova contributed.
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MAMOUDZOU, MAYOTTE — French President Emmanuel Macron arrived Thursday in the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte to survey Cyclone Chido’s destruction and was immediately confronted with a firsthand account of devastation across the French territory. 

“Mayotte is demolished,” Assane Haloi, a security agent, told Macron after he stepped off the plane. 

Macron had been moving along in a line of people greeting him when Haloi grasped his hand and spoke for a minute about the harrowing conditions the islands faced without bare essentials since Saturday when the strongest cyclone in nearly a century ripped through the French territory off the coast of Africa. 

“We are without water, without electricity, there is nowhere to go because everything is demolished,” she said. “We can’t even shelter, we are all wet with our children covering ourselves with whatever we have so that we can sleep.” 

Numbers of dead unknown 

At least 31 people have died and more than 1,500 people were injured, more than 200 critically, French authorities said. But it’s feared hundreds or even thousands of people have died. 

Macron arrived shortly after The Associated Press and other journalists from outside were able to reach Mayotte to provide accounts from survivors of the horror over the weekend when winds howled above 220 kph (136 mph) and peeled the roofs and walls from homes that collapsed around the people sheltering inside. 

In the shantytown Kaweni on the outskirts of the capital Mamoudzou, a swath of hillside homes was reduced to scraps of corrugated metal, plastic, piles of bedding and clothing, and pieces of timber marking the frame where homes once stood. 

“Those of us who are here are still in shock, but God let us live,” Nassirou Hamidouni said as he dug in the rubble of his former home. “We are sad. We can’t sleep because of all of the houses that have been destroyed.” 

Macron took a helicopter tour of the damage and then met with patients and staff at a hospital, who described having to work around the clock. 

A woman who works in the psychological unit became emotional as she described staff becoming exhausted and unable to care for patients. 

“Help the hospital staff, help the hospital,” pleaded the woman, whose name was not known. “Everyone from top to bottom is wiped out.” 

More help on the way 

Macron, who was wearing a traditional red, black and gold Mayotte scarf over his white dress shirt and tie, put his hand on her shoulder as she wiped away tears. 

He sought to reassure people that food, medical aid and additional rescuers arrived with him and more help was on its way in the form of water and a field hospital to be set up Friday. A navy ship brought 180 tons of aid and equipment, the French military said. 

But the visit took a testy turn when Macron was criticized for being out of touch about what was happening on the ground by a man who said they had gone six days in Ouangani without water or a visit from rescue services. 

The president said it took the military four days to clear the roads and get a plan in place to deliver aid. 

“If you want to continue shouting to get airtime,” Macron said as he was cut off, by the man saying he didn’t intend to shout. “If you are interested in my response, if not I will walk away.” 

Residents have expressed agony at not knowing if loved ones were dead or missing, partly because of the hasty burials required under Muslim practice to lay the dead to rest within 24 hours. 

“We’re dealing with open-air mass graves,” said Estelle Youssoufa, who represents Mayotte in the French parliament. “There are no rescuers, no one has come to recover the buried bodies.” 

Macron acknowledged that many who died haven’t been reported. He said phone services will be repaired “in the coming days” so that people can report their missing loved ones. 

France’s poorest territory 

Mayotte, with a population of 320,000 residents and an estimated 100,000 additional migrants, is France’s poorest territory. 

It is part of an archipelago located between mainland Africa’s east coast and northern Madagascar that had been a French colony. Mayotte voted to remain part of France in a 1974 referendum as the rest of the islands became the independent nation of Comoros. 

The cyclone devastated entire neighborhoods as many people ignored warnings, thinking the storm wouldn’t be so extreme. 

Signs of the disaster and its impact were everywhere. 

Streets remained swamped in puddles. Bright clothing was hung to dry on the wooden frames of homes and along the railings of a footbridge over a debris-strewn stream in the Kaweni slum. Throngs of motorbikes and cars lined up at a gas station still in service. 

Families sprawled out on blankets at a school where 500 people were taking shelter. Women washed clothing in buckets of water as children played with the pieces of a giant chessboard. 

Alibouna Haithouna, a displaced mother of four, was with her own mother who had been forced to leave a hospital after her son died there. 

“There was a tragedy. We lost my brother. We are here,” Haithouna said. “My brother’s body, we haven’t been able to get it from the hospital because there is a lot of paperwork to do and in addition to that you have to pay to recover the body.”
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After a French court Thursday found all 51 defendants guilty in a drugging-and-rape case, the victim, Gisele Pelicot said that the trial has been a “difficult ordeal,” but that she never regretted making the case public.

Following a four-month trial in the southeastern city of Avignon, Pelicot’s ex-husband of 50 years, 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot, received a sentence of a maximum of 20 years in prison.

He pleaded guilty in September to repeatedly drugging his wife, raping her while she was unconscious and recruiting strangers to join him over a period of 10 years.

The five-judge panel handed Pelicot’s 50 co-defendants, a group of men from 27 to 74 years old, sentences ranging from three to 20 years in prison.

In her first comments following the verdicts, Gisele Pelicot told reporters her first thoughts were with her three children and her grandchildren, “because they are the future, and it is also for them that I have fought this battle.”

She said she was also thinking of all the other families affected “by this tragedy.” Finally, she said, “I think of the unrecognized victims whose stories often remain in the shadows. I want you to know that we share the same struggle.”

Pelicot has become a symbol of courage and resilience to many, and crowds of supporters gathered outside the courthouse as the case went on.

Asked by reporters about complaints by her supporters that the sentences were too lenient, Pelicot said she respected the court and the decision. She said, “I trust, now, in our capacity to collectively seize a future in which each one of us, woman and man, may live in harmony with mutual respect and understanding.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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WASHINGTON — The Commerce Department’s efforts to curb China’s and Russia’s access to American-made advanced computer chips have been “inadequate” and will need more funding to stymie their ability to manufacture advanced weapons, according to a report published Wednesday by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The Biden administration imposed export controls to limit the ability of China and Russia to access U.S.-made chips after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago.

The agency’s Bureau of Industry and Security, according to the report, does not have the resources to enforce export controls and has been too reliant on U.S. chip makers voluntarily complying with the rules.

But the push for bolstering Commerce’s export control enforcement comes as the incoming Trump administration says it is looking to dramatically reduce the size and scope of federal government. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” to dismantle parts of the federal government.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

BIS’s budget, about $191 million, has remained essentially flat since 2010 when adjusted for inflation.

“While BIS’ budget has been stagnant for a decade, the bureau works diligently around the clock to meet its mission and safeguard U.S. national security,” Commerce Department spokesperson Charlie Andrews said in a statement in response to the report.

Andrews added that with “necessary resources from Congress” the agency would be “better equipped to address the challenges that come with our evolving national security environment.”

In a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, chair of the subcommittee, pointed to news reports of the Russian military continuing to acquire components from Texas Instruments through front companies in Hong Kong to illustrate how the export controls are failing as an effective tool.

Blumenthal in a statement called on “Commerce to take immediate action and crack down on the companies allowing U.S.-made semiconductors to power Russian weapons and Chinese ambition.”

Texas Instruments said it opposes the use of its chips in Russian military equipment and the illicit diversion of its products to Russia.

“It is our policy to comply with export control laws, and any shipments of TI chips into Russia are illicit and unauthorized,” the company said in a statement. “If we find evidence indicating product diversion, we investigate and take action.”

It’s not just Texas Instruments that’s the issue. The subcommittee in September published a report that found aggregated exports from four major U.S. advanced chip manufacturers nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022 to Armenia and Georgia.

Both of those countries are home to front companies known to assist Russia in acquiring advanced chips made in the U.S. despite export controls.

China, meanwhile, has created “vast, barely disguised smuggling networks which enable it to continue to harness U.S. technology,” the subcommittee report asserts.

Washington has been gradually expanding the number of companies affected by such export controls in China, as President Joe Biden’s administration has encouraged an expansion of investments in and manufacturing of chips in the U.S.

But Chinese companies have found ways to evade export controls in part because of a lack of China subject matter experts and Chinese speakers assigned to Commerce’s export control enforcement.

The agency’s current budget limits the number of international end-use checks, or physical verification overseas of distributors or companies receiving American-made chips that are the supposed end users of products. Currently, Commerce has only 11 export control officers spread around the globe to conduct such checks, the report said.

The committee made several recommendations in its report, including Congress allocating more money for hiring additional personnel to enforce export controls, imposing larger fines on companies that violate controls and requiring periodic reviews of advanced chip companies’ export control plans by outside entities.
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WASHINGTON — They were promised a chance to earn money, get an education abroad, and gain work experience. Instead, they found themselves assembling military drones in Russia and, in one case, subjected to a Ukrainian drone strike.

A series of investigative reports has shed light on a Russian labor recruitment program that has allegedly lured young African women to work at an industrial park in provincial Russia with false promises and coerced them into contributing to the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine.

The reported victims of the program, which attracts recruits largely through online job advertisements, includes women from Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.

Media reports from The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others have exposed the operation, entitled Alabuga Start, but VOA reporting has found that African countries have largely failed to intervene or give an official response. Some even appear to be building ties with the Russian entity behind the program.

That entity called the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, has been intensifying its outreach across the African continent, according to David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security and the researcher behind a report exposing the program that exploited the young women. “In some of the initial investigations of this, the recruiters in Africa were oblivious when they were asked where these women were going,” Albright said, adding that some are now aware and that he hopes there will be “pushback from these governments about what exactly [Alabuga is] recruiting these women to do.”

Albright said representatives from Alabuga recently visited Sierra Leone, Zambia and Madagascar, signing memorandums of cooperation with local organizations, despite the reports of misleading recruitment practices and questionable labor actions.

Albright said the young women are forced to handle toxic materials, which he says is forbidden in Russian labor law. But African and other governments have also been willing to send their citizens off to Alabuga Start. VOA discovered a series of documents online indicating the government ministries had officially promoted the program.

VOA reached out to authorities of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Nigeria but several emails and phone calls went unanswered. VOA also requested comment from Alabuga and the Russian Embassy in Washington but received no response.

Recruitment under false pretenses

Located 1,000 kilometers to the east of Moscow in Russia’s Tatarstan region, the city of Yelabuga, known as Alabuga in the local Tatar language, would hardly seem a desirable location for young people from Africa.

But the nearby Alabuga Special Economic Zone has been casting a wide net on the African continent. In promotional materials, it paints an exciting, optimistic picture of life in the Alabuga Start program.

In one recruitment video intended to appeal to potential recruits, an African woman arrives in Alabuga and begins work at a restaurant, where she waits on a young Russian man. At the end of the video, she returns to the restaurant as his pregnant wife.

Other promotional videos show participants working in construction, cleaning and warehouse operations, as well as studying and playing sports with their friends. Only one video features the women assembling drones, but no indication is given that the drones have a military purpose.

According to the Russian independent news outlet Protokol, the program has specifically targeted young women because its organizers believe young men from Africa “could be too aggressive and dangerous.”

Researchers and reporters found that some of the program’s internal documents, as reported by Albright and others, often referred to the women as mulattos using an outdated racial term that is now widely considered offensive.

Its appeal to African young people is not difficult to understand, says Maxim Matusevich, a Russia-Africa expert and a global history professor at Seton Hall University.

“A lot of these nations have very high unemployment rates,” he told VOA. Russia is “offering them attractively packaged and attractively sold job packages.”

Matusevich believes Alabuga Start aims to solve the problem of a shortfall of workers in Russia due to the heavy demand of the war in Ukraine.

Albright said that inaction has global ramifications: Alabuga Start is involving young Africans in Russian violence against Ukrainians.

“It’s been a very deceptive program in the sense that the applicants didn’t know they’d be working in essentially a U.S.- [and] European-sanctioned company making drones that are being used to devastating effect against Ukrainian civil targets, energy targets, electrical plants,” he told VOA.

“And so, in that sense, they’re complicit in a crime, an international crime, given that the war against Ukraine is illegal. They’re getting involved in making drones that are being used against civilian targets, not just military targets.”

Exploitation factory

Alabuga didn’t start out exploiting young African women. Before that, it used young Russians in drone production.

Since 2019, the special economic zone has operated a program called Alabuga Polytech, which recruits Russian high school students. Unlike workers from the African continent and other countries, the Russian students take part in a four-year work-study program, receiving accredited technical education while doing industrial work.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that program ramped up its activity. It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing. When the program pivoted to drone production, Alabuga had to lobby the Russian authorities to alter labor laws. According to a July report from the Institute for Science and International Security, that allowed Alabuga to hire children under the age of 18 to work with toxic chemicals.

Parents soon began to complain about the poor work conditions: Participants were working 12-hour factory shifts and their movements were strictly controlled, Albright recounted. He said the program has since stopped recruiting people younger than 18.

When the special economic zone launched Alabuga Start and began recruiting workers from abroad in 2022, the program was almost entirely focused on drone production.

According to estimates by Albright’s organization, only a third of Polytech students work on drone production, while over 90% of Alabuga Start participants do.

Despite that stark distinction, organizers appear to have frequently conflated the two programs, including by sometimes depicting Alabuga Start participants wearing school uniforms in promotional materials.

Multinational conveyer belt

Alabuga’s recent outreach to African nations signals a potential expansion of its recruitment efforts.

VOA found that African and other governments have at times been willing partners. Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education shared on its website a document announcing open admissions to Alabuga Start in 2023.

Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sport shared a similar announcement. In the document upload site Scribd, a digital document library, VOA found two files that appear to be official letters from the government ministries of Mali and Burkina Faso announcing that Alabuga Start had reserved spots for participants from those countries in 2023.

VOA also found a document by Bangladesh’s Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training announcing that applications were open for Alabuga Start in 2023.

The special economic zone’s many meetings with African diplomats and government officials, some of which included the signing of memoranda of understanding, appear to signal a deepening of ties.

Albright emphasizes that the special economic zone’s drone factory has been a linchpin of Russian-Iranian collaboration during the war against Ukraine.

“Alabuga is a special economic zone that basically builds and hires out or sells buildings for civilian industry,” he said. “With the war in Ukraine, their international occupants pulled out and they were desperate for money. And so, they made a contract with the Russian government and the Iranian government to build drones.”

The Alabuga factory in question primarily assembled the Shahed-136, an Iranian kamikaze drone.

In the first half of 2023, around 100 Alabuga Polytech students traveled to Tehran for two months of training in Shahed-136 airframe production, The Washington Post reported in August 2023.

Alabuga Start participants are largely used as low-skilled labor, assigned to complete the simplest tasks involved in assembling the airframes. A list of 100 Russian words that participants must know to take part in the program drives that conclusion home. It largely consists of basic vocabulary but also includes several higher-level words: “to hook,” “to unhook,” “factory,” and “task.”

The military nature of the work is largely absent from promotional materials for the program viewed by VOA. They typically show participants working in the service industry, construction, or non-military industrial production.

One brochure emphasizes that, after completing Alabuga Start, participants have the opportunity to continue working on a permanent basis, get a job at another Alabuga factory, or enroll in Polytech.

It also includes images that appear to show articles by the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal with headlines praising the factory and its salaries. In reality, the images have been edited to conceal the fact that both stories are about military drone production at the facility.

That work has placed African women in direct danger. On April 22, a Ukrainian drone crashed into the dormitory where Alabuga Start participants live.

A day later, Alabuga Start released a video featuring a Kenyan woman –– one of the program’s public-facing participants –– who said she would be going to work in a cafe. The participant notably said she had come to work and study at Alabuga Polytech — and not Start.

“Those who attacked our hostel today are real barbarians and they deserve serious condemnation,” she said. “In my opinion, they wanted to intimidate us. But I want to tell you they did not succeed. You won’t scare me, because Alabuga is a strong place and we will get through this.”

This story is a collaboration between VOA’s Africa Division and VOA’s Russian Service.
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BRUSSELS — NATO’s secretary-general said he wants to discuss ways to put Ukraine in a position of strength for any future peace talks with Russia during a meeting Wednesday with Ukraine’s president and a small number of European leaders.

But Mark Rutte appeared frustrated at growing speculation in NATO capitals about when those peace talks might start and whether European peacekeepers would be involved, saying that speaking publicly about it plays into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“High on the agenda is to make sure that the president, his team in Ukraine, are in the best possible position one day when they decide to start the peace talks,” Rutte told reporters as he welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to his residence in Brussels.

The focus, Rutte said, must be “to do everything now to make sure that when it comes to air defense, when it comes to other weapons systems, that we make sure that we provide whatever we can.”

He said that another issue up for discussion would be “how to make sure that when peace comes one day that we also think about the economy of Ukraine now, but also after a future peace deal.”

Zelenskyy posted on Telegram that he would hold talks with the leaders of the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland and U.K. representatives, who were in Brussels. He’s also due to take part in an EU summit in the Belgian capital on Thursday.

Zelenskyy said that the meeting would provide “a very good opportunity to speak about security guarantees for Ukraine, for today and for tomorrow.” Ukraine sees NATO membership as the ultimate security guarantee, but the U.S. and Germany lead a group of countries that oppose this while war continues.

After separate talks with Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country is making reinforced support for Ukraine its ″absolute priority″ and will continue giving Ukraine ″the means to defend itself and to make Russia’s war of aggression fail,″ according to Macron’s office.

Noting his recent meeting with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Zelenskyy, Macron said he will maintain a ″tight dialogue with Ukraine and its international partners to work for a return to a fair and lasting peace,″ the statement said.

At NATO headquarters earlier, Rutte had said the terms of any peace talks should be up to Ukraine, Russia and any others at the negotiating table. “If we now start to discuss amongst ourselves what a deal could look like, we make it so easy for the Russians,” he said.

“I think we would be very wise to put some lid on this and focus on the business at hand, and the business at hand is to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to prevent Putin from winning,” Rutte added.
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Washington — “Ehtisham was the darling of the family. He was very fond of cricket. His only obsession was that one day he would go to Europe and poverty would end at home.”

This is a statement from Fazlur Rehman, a close relative of 35-year-old Ehtisham Anjum, who went missing after a migrant boat he was in capsized in Greek territorial waters on Saturday. According to locals, 10 of the passengers, including Anjum, were from Helaan, a village in Pakistan’s central Punjab province.

The initial list of 47 survivors released by the Pakistani embassy in Greece does not include Anjum’s name. But the family is holding out hope that he is still alive. However, according to Pakistan embassy in Greece, the rescue operation for the missing has been called off by the Greek authorities.

According to the embassy in Athens, three boats carrying 175 illegal migrants of different nationalities including Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians and Sudanese crew members, capsized off the Greek coast.

While all the passengers on two of the boats were rescued, only 39 out of 83 have been rescued from the third. Several teens were on board and at least one 12-year-old Pakistani was among the passengers.

In a video shared with VOA, several Pakistanis give the details of their perilous journey and the poor condition of the boats ferrying them to Greece from Tobruk, Libya.

One survivor of the boat that capsized said the sea was rough, and the boat was small and not in good working condition. Despite that, he said, the smugglers put many people on board, way over the boat’s capacity.

That man and another said the boat hit a coast guard ship or cargo ship before it capsized. They said they were in the water for an hour and a half before being rescued.

Last year more than 350 Pakistanis lost their lives when an overcrowded boat carrying hundreds of illegal migrants sank en route to Greece from Tobruk, Libya.

According to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, Pakistan, “in the year 2023 alone over 6,000 Pakistanis undertook illegal journeys to reach European shores” — though some estimates put the number significantly higher. A report released by the commission in May of this year said most of the illegal migrants were motivated by economic concerns.

Human smugglers are a big part of this journey and one of the locals in Helaan village told VOA’s Urdu service that a local agent had asked for the equivalent of $14,380 each from the clients to get them to Europe. The agent went missing after the news of the accident.

Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency intensified its crackdown on human smugglers in the wake of the tragedy off Greece last year. In 2023, 189 cases were registered, leading to 854 arrests.

Fazlur Rehman, the relative of Ehtisham Anjum, says four youngsters from the same village died four years ago while trying to get to Europe illegally. He adds that people are becoming greedier and will soon forget the dangers involved.

This story originated in VOA’s Urdu Service, with Ehtisham Shami and Ishraq Nazir contributing.
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Russia has long considered the Balkans a part of its sphere of influence, but its current focus on its war in Ukraine is creating a power vacuum in the region and giving an opportunity for Turkey to expand its role. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is set to meet Wednesday with NATO chief Mark Rutte and European leaders in Brussels as Ukraine seeks to bolster its defenses against Russian forces.

Zelenskyy on Tuesday cited an urgent need to boost military aid to Ukraine, especially air defense systems.

“We must do everything possible to destroy Russia’s ability to wage war from as far away as possible,” Zelenskyy said. “For this, we need more drones, more modern artillery, and long-range missiles.”

Wednesday’s talks come a month before U.S. President Donald Trump takes office, bringing uncertainty about the level of continued U.S. support for Ukraine from the new administration.

Among those expected to meet with Zelenskyy in Brussels were German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Ahead of the talks, Russia launched another round of overnight aerial attacks.

Ihor Taburets, governor of Ukraine’s Cherkasy region, said Wednesday on Telegram that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 13 drones. He said there was no damage to infrastructure in the area.

Khmelnytskyi Governor Serhii Tiurin said Wednesday that Ukrainian forces shot down two drones.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday it destroyed two Ukrainian aerial drones over the Belgorod region, along with a drone over Bryansk and another over Kursk.

Moscow attack 

Russia said Wednesday it detained a suspect in the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the chief of the military’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces. 

Authorities described the suspect as a citizen of Uzbekistan who was recruited by Ukrainian intelligence services to carry out the Tuesday attack in Moscow. 

An official with Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, said Tuesday the agency was behind the attack and called Kirillov a “war criminal and an entirely legitimate target.” 

Several countries, including Britain and Canada, had sanctioned Kirillov, 54, for his actions in Moscow’s nearly three-year war in Ukraine

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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