London — The British government said Monday it is suspending exports of some weapons to Israel because they could be used to break international law.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said there is a “clear risk” some items could be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

He told lawmakers the decision related to about 30 of 350 export licenses for equipment “that we assess is for use in the current conflict in Gaza,” including parts for military aircraft and drones and items used for ground targeting.

Lammy said it was “not a determination of innocence or guilt” about whether Israel had broken international law, and was not an arms embargo.

Britain is among several of Israel’s longstanding allies whose governments are under growing pressure to halt weapons exports because of the toll of the 11-month-old war in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

British firms sell a relatively small number of weapons and components to Israel. Earlier this year the government said military exports to Israel amounted to 42 million pounds ($53 million) in 2022.

The U.K.’s center-left Labour government, elected in July, has faced pressure from some of its own members and lawmakers to apply more pressure on Israel to stop the violence. In the election the party lost several seats it had had been expected to win to pro-Palestinian independents after leader Keir Starmer initially refused to call for a cease-fire shortly after Israel retaliated for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants that killed about 1,200 people.

In a departure from the stance of its Conservative predecessor, Starmer’s government said in July that the U.K. will not intervene in the International Criminal Court’s request for an arrest warrant against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Starmer also restored funding for the United Nations’ Palestine relief agency UNRWA, which had been suspended by his Conservative predecessor Rishi Sunak’s government in January.

Lammy, who has visited Israel twice in the past two months as part of Western efforts to push for a cease-fire, said he was a “friend of Israel,” but called the violence in Gaza “horrifying.”

“Israel’s actions in Gaza continue to lead to immense loss of civilian life, widespread destruction to civilian infrastructure, and immense suffering,” he said.
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Warsaw, Poland — Decades after they were killed, Poland held a state burial on Monday of the remains of more than 700 victims of Nazi Germany’s World War II mass executions that were recently uncovered in the so-called Valley of Death in the country’s north.

The observances in the town of Chojnice began with a funeral Mass at the basilica, leading to an interment with military honors at a local cemetery of the victims of the Nazi crimes. The remains were contained in 188 small wooden coffins with ribbons in national white and red colors across them.

Relatives of the victims, an aide to President Andrzej Duda, local authorities and top officials of the state National Remembrance Institute, which carried out and documented the exhumations, took part in the events.

“We want to give back memory, we want to give back dignity to the victims of the crimes in Chojnice,” presiding Bishop Ryszard Kasyna said.

Duda sent a message saying that the deaths weren’t in vain and will always be held in the national memory, because the only reason they were killed by the Nazis was the fact that they were Polish.

The remains of Polish civilians, including 218 asylum patients, were exhumed in 2021-2024 from a number of separate mass graves on the outskirts of Chojnice.

Personal belongings and documents helped identify around 120 of the victims of an execution in early 1945. Among them were teachers, priests, police officers, forestry and postal workers, and landowners.

Historians have established that the Nazis, shortly after invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, executed some of the civilians, in a drive to subdue the nation. The remains of another 500 victims are from the January 1945 execution, when the Germans were fleeing the area. Bullets and shells from handguns used by German forces were found in the graves.

Experts will continue to comb the area for more mass graves of the so-called Pomerania Crime.

Poland lost 6 million citizens, or a sixth of its population, of which 3 million were Jewish, in the war. The country also suffered huge losses to its infrastructure, industry and agriculture.
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Oslo — Electric car sales in Norway took a 94% share of the market in August — a new world record — statistics showed Monday, as sales in the rest of Europe stagnate.  

Boosted by the Tesla Model Y, which accounted for 18.8% of sales, and to a lesser extent Hyundai’s Kona and Nissan’s Leaf, electric vehicles made up 94.3% of new car registrations, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.  

Norwegians bought 10,480 new EVs in August, bringing the total to 68,435 since the start of the year.  

Elsewhere in Europe high prices and insufficient infrastructure have hampered sales of EVs, whereas sales of hybrid models, which combine fossil fuel engines with electric batteries, have increased.  

The Scandinavian country, a major oil and gas producer, has set a target to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2025, 10 years ahead of the EU goal.  

The country offers generous tax benefits which make electric models competitively priced.  

“No country in the world comes close to Norway in the electric car race,” OFV director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen said in a statement.  

“If this trend continues, we will soon be on our way to achieving our goal of 100% zero-emission cars by 2025,” he said.  

By comparison, electric cars represented 12.1% of new car sales in the EU in July, behind petrol cars at 33.4%, full hybrids at 32% and diesel cars at 12.6%, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association. 
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Vatican City — If any evidence were needed to underscore that Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to Asia and Oceania is the longest and most challenging of his pontificate, it’s that he’s bringing along his secretaries to help him navigate the four-country program while keeping up with work back home.

Francis will clock 32,814 kilometers by air during his Sept. 2-13 visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, far surpassing any of his previous 44 foreign trips and notching one of the longest papal trips ever, both in terms of days on the road and distances traveled.

That’s no small feat for a pope who turns 88 in December, uses a wheelchair, lost part of a lung to a respiratory infection as a young man and had to cancel his last foreign trip (to Dubai in November) on doctors’ orders.

But Francis is pushing ahead with this trip, originally planned for 2020 but postponed because of COVID-19. He’s bringing along his medical team of a doctor and two nurses and taking the usual health precautions on the ground. But in a novelty, he’s adding his personal secretaries into the traditional Vatican delegation of cardinals, bishops and security.

The long trip recalls the globetrotting travels of St. John Paul II, who visited all four destinations during his quarter-century pontificate, though East Timor was an occupied part of Indonesia at the time of his landmark 1989 trip.

By retracing John Paul’s steps, Francis is reinforcing the importance that Asia has for the Catholic Church, since it’s one of the few places where the church is growing in terms of baptized faithful and religious vocations. 

Here is a look at the trip and some of the issues that are likely to come up, with the Vatican’s relations with China ever-present in the background in a region where Beijing wields enormous influence.

Indonesia

Francis loves gestures of interfaith fraternity and harmony, and there could be no better symbol of religious tolerance at the start of his trip than the underground “Tunnel of Friendship” linking Indonesia’s main Istiqlal mosque to the country’s Catholic cathedral.

Francis will visit the underpass in central Jakarta with the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, before both partake in an interfaith gathering and sign a joint declaration.

Francis has made improving Christian-Muslim relations a priority, and has often used his foreign travels to promote his agenda of committing religious leaders to work for peace and tolerance, and renounce violence in God’s name.

Papua New Guinea

Francis was elected pope in 2013 largely on the strength of an extemporaneous speech he delivered to his fellow cardinals in which he said the Catholic Church needed to go to the “peripheries” to reach those who need God’s comfort the most. When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will be fulfilling one of the marching orders he set out for the future pope on the eve of his own election.

Few places are as remote and poverty wracked as Vanimo, a northern coastal town on the main island of New Guinea. There Francis will meet with missionaries from his native Argentina who are working to bring Christianity to a largely tribal people who still practice pagan traditions alongside the Catholic faith.

East Timor

When John Paul visited East Timor in 1989, he sought to console its overwhelmingly Catholic population who had suffered under Indonesia’s brutal and bloody occupation for 15 years.

“For many years now, you have experienced destruction and death as a result of conflict; You have known what it means to be the victims of hatred and struggle,” John Paul told the faithful during a seaside Mass.

East Timor emerged as an independent country in 2002, but still bears the trauma and scars of an occupation that left as many as 200,000 people dead — nearly a quarter of the population.

Francis will literally walk in John Paul’s footsteps when he celebrates Mass in Tasi-Toli, near Dili, the same seaside esplanade as that 1989 liturgy, which some see as a key date in the Timorese independence movement.

Another legacy that will confront Francis is that of the clergy sexual abuse scandal: Revered independence hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo was secretly sanctioned by the Vatican in 2020 for sexually abusing young boys.

There is no word on whether Francis will refer to Belo, who is still revered in East Timor but has been barred by the Vatican from ever returning.

Singapore

Francis has used several of his foreign trips to send messages to China, be they direct telegrams of greetings when he flies through Chinese airspace or more indirect gestures of esteem, friendship and fraternity to the Chinese people when nearby.

Francis’ visit to Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is ethnically Chinese and Mandarin is an official language, will give him yet another opportunity to reach out to Beijing as the Vatican seeks improved ties for the sake of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics.

“It’s a faithful people, who lived through a lot and remained faithful,” Francis told the Chinese province of his Jesuit order in a recent interview.

The trip comes a month before the Vatican is set to renew a landmark 2018 agreement governing bishop nominations.

Just last week, the Vatican reported its “satisfaction” that China had officially recognized Tianjin Bishop Melchior Shi Hongzhen, who as far as the Vatican is concerned had taken over as bishop in 2019. The Holy See said China’s official recognition of him under civil law now was “a positive fruit of the dialogue established over the years between the Holy See and the Chinese government.”

But by arriving in Singapore, a regional economic powerhouse which maintains good relations with both China and the United States, Francis is also stepping into a protracted maritime dispute as China has grown increasingly assertive with its presence in the South China Sea.
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A Russian missile strike injures dozens in Ukraine. The news comes as Moscow claims to have intercepted 158 Ukraine-launched drones overnight. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Rome — Crew members on Mike Lynch’s yacht have spoken of the moments when a storm sank the vessel off Sicily and their efforts to help save passengers, after a disaster that killed the British tech tycoon and six other people.

Matthew Griffiths, who was on watch duty on the night of the disaster two weeks ago, told investigators that the crew members did everything they could to save those on board the Bayesian, according to comments reported by Italian news agency Ansa on Saturday.

Griffiths, the boat’s captain James Cutfield, and ship engineer Tim Parker Eaton have been placed under investigation by the Italian authorities for potential manslaughter and shipwreck. Being investigated does not imply guilt and does not mean formal charges will follow.

“I woke up the captain when the wind was at 20 knots (23 mph/37 kph). He gave orders to wake everyone else,” Ansa quoted Griffiths as saying.

“The ship tilted and we were thrown into the water. Then we managed to get back up and tried to rescue those we could,” he added, describing the events of the early hours of Aug. 19, when the Bayesian had been anchored off the Sicilian port of Porticello.

“We were walking on the walls (of the boat). We saved who we could, Cutfield also saved the little girl and her mother,” he said, referring to passenger Charlotte Golunski and her one-year-old daughter. In all there were 15 survivors of the wreck.

Cutfield exercised his right to remain silent when questioned by prosecutors on Tuesday, his lawyers said, saying he was “worn out” and that they needed more time to build a defense case.

Before this, Cutfield gave a similar description to Griffiths’ to investigators, according to comments reported on Sunday by Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera.

Cutfield said the boat tilted by 45 degrees and stayed in that position for some time, then it suddenly fell completely to the right, the newspaper reported.

Parker Eaton had not previously commented on the investigation. On Sunday, Il Corriere quoted him as saying that all doors and hatches were closed when the storm hit the boat, except one giving access to the engine room.

That door was located on the side opposite to the tilting and so could not be a factor causing the sinking, he said.

Prosecutor Raffaele Cammarano said last week that the vessel was most likely hit by a “downburst,” a very strong downward wind.

The sinking has puzzled naval marine experts, who said a vessel like the Bayesian, built by Italian high-end yacht manufacturer Perini, should have withstood the storm and, in any case, should not have sunk as quickly as it did.

Prosecutors in the town of Termini Imerese, near Palermo, have said their investigation will take time, with the wreck yet to be salvaged from the sea.
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Koumac, France — An alliance of parties seeking independence for New Caledonia has nominated as chief a prominent opposition leader currently jailed in France over a wave of deadly rioting in the French Pacific territory.

Christian Tein, who considers himself a “political prisoner,” was one of seven pro-independence activists transferred to mainland France in June — a move that sparked renewed violence that has roiled the archipelago and left 11 people dead.

His appointment on Saturday to lead the Socialist Kanak National Liberation Front (FLNKS) risks complicating efforts to end the crisis, sparked in May by a Paris plan for voting reforms that indigenous Kanaks fear will thwart their ambitions for independence by leaving them a permanent minority.

Laurie Humuni of the RDO party, one of four in the FLNKS alliance, said Saturday that Tein’s nomination was a recognition of his CCAT party’s leading role in mobilizing the independence movement.

It was not clear if the two other alliance members, the UPM and Palika, supported the move — they had refused to participate in the latest FLNKS meeting and indicated they would not support any of its proposals.

The alliance also said it was willing to renew talks to end the protests, but only if local anti-independence parties are excluded.

“We will have to remove some blockades to allow the population access to essential services, but that does not mean we are abandoning our struggle,” Humuni told AFP.

On Thursday, France said it had agreed to terms with Pacific leaders seeking a fact-finding mission to New Caledonia in a bid to resolve the dispute, though a date for the mission has not yet been set.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government has sent thousands of troops and police to restore order in the archipelago, almost 17,000 kilometers (10,600 miles) from Paris, and the electoral reforms were suspended in June.
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Warsaw — Poland on Sunday marked 85 years since the outbreak of World War II during annual commemoration ceremony held at dawn to remember Nazi Germany’s first attacks that triggered the deadly conflict.

Nearly six million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall, including the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.

The remembrance ceremony on Sunday was traditionally held in Westerplatte, on Poland’s Baltic coast, where a Nazi German battleship had opened fire on a Polish fort 85 years ago to the day.

Speaking at Westerplatte, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the lessons of World War II were “not an abstraction” and drew parallels with the war in neighboring Ukraine.

“This war is coming again from the east,” he said.

He urged NATO member states to be “fully devoted to defense… against the aggression that we are witnessing today on the battlefields of Ukraine.”

Adolf Hitler’s attacks on Poland led Britain and France to declare war on Nazi Germany. On September 17, the Soviet Union in turn invaded Poland.

After the Nazis tore up their pact with Moscow, two alliances battled it out: the Axis powers led by Germany, Italy and Japan and the victorious Allied forces led by Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Polish President Andrzej Duda took part in commemorations in the western Polish city of Wielun where Germany’s first bombs fell 85 years ago.

Duda said “sorry” from Germany was not enough and called for reparations, adding: “This issue is not settled.”

Although it has been 85 years since the war started, there are still unresolved matters according to Poland.

Poland’s current pro-EU government led by Tusk has urged Germany to provide financial compensation over losses the country sustained at the hands of Nazi troops.

It echoed an earlier similar push by the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party that lost power in October election.

During his visit to commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a doomed revolt against occupying forces, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke of plans to establish a memorial to the Polish victims of the Nazis.

“Many other efforts are underway, including for the remaining survivors of the German occupation. Our two governments are liaising closely on this,” he said.

Steinmeier did not, however, provide any further details on the possible compensation measures.

According to Polish media, discussions between Warsaw and Berlin on financial compensation to the living victims of the Nazi Germany are underway, with Poland estimating up to 70,000 people would be eligible.
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PATERZELL, Germany — How do you teach a bird how, and where, to fly?

The distinctive northern bald ibis, hunted essentially to extinction by the 17th century, was revived by breeding and rewilding efforts over the last two decades. But the birds — known for their distinctive black-and-iridescent green plumage, bald red head and long curved beak — don’t instinctively know which direction to fly to migrate without the guidance of wild-born elders. So a team of scientists and conservationists stepped in as foster parents and flight instructors.

“We have to teach them the migration route,” said biologist Johannes Fritz.

The northern bald ibis once soared over North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and much of Europe, including southern Germany’s Bavaria. The migratory birds were also considered a delicacy, and the bird, known as the Waldrapp in German, disappeared from Europe, though a few colonies elsewhere survived.

The efforts of Fritz and the Waldrappteam, a conservation and research group based in Austria, brought the Central European population from zero to almost 300 since the start of their project in 2002.

The feat moved the species from a “critically endangered” classification to “endangered” and, Fritz says, is the first attempt to reintroduce a continentally extinct migratory bird species.

But while northern bald ibises still display the natural urge to migrate, they don’t know which direction to fly without the guidance of wild-born elders. The Waldrappteam’s early reintroduction attempts were largely unsuccessful because, without teaching the birds the migration route, most disappeared soon after release. Instead of returning to suitable wintering grounds such as Tuscany, Italy, they flew in different directions and ultimately died.

So the Waldrappteam stepped in as foster parents and flight instructors for the Central European population, which was made up of descendants from multiple zoo colonies and released into the wild in the hopes of creating a migratory group. This year marks the 17th journey with human-led migration guides, and the second time they’ve been forced to pilot a new route to Spain due to climate change.

To prepare them for travel, the chicks are removed from their breeding colonies when they are just a few days old. They are taken to an aviary that’s overseen by the foster parents in the hopes of “imprinting” — when the birds will bond with those humans to ultimately trust them along the migration route.

Barbara Steininger, a Waldrapp team foster mother, said she acts like “their bird mom.”

“We feed them, we clean them, we clean their nests. We take good care of them and see that they are healthy birds,” she said. “But also we interact with them.”

Steininger and the other foster parents sit on the back of a microlight aircraft, waving and shouting encouragement through a bullhorn as it flies through the air.

It’s a bizarre scene: The aircraft looks like a flying go-kart with a giant fan on the back and a yellow parachute keeping it aloft. Still, three dozen birds follow the contraption, piloted by Fritz, as it sails over alpine meadows and foothills.

Fritz was inspired by “Father Goose” Bill Lishman, a naturalist who taught Canadian geese to fly alongside his ultra-light plane beginning in 1988. He later guided endangered whooping cranes through safe routes and founded the nonprofit “Operation Migration.” Lishman’s work prompted the 1996 movie “Fly Away Home” but features a young girl as the geese’s “mother.”

Like Lishman, Fritz and his team’s efforts have worked. The first bird independently migrated back to Bavaria in 2011 from Tuscany. More have flown the route that’s upward of 550 kilometers (342 miles) each year, and the team hopes the Central European population will be more than 350 birds by 2028 and become self-sustaining.

But the effects of climate change mean the Waldrapp are migrating later in the season now, which forces them to cross the Alps in colder, more dangerous weather — without the aid of warm currents of air, known as thermals, that rise upward and help the birds soar without expending extra energy.

In response, the Waldrappteam piloted a new route in 2023, from Bavaria to Andalusia in southern Spain.

This year, the route is roughly 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) — some 300 kilometers (186 miles) longer than last year’s path. Earlier this month from an airfield in Paterzell, in upper Bavaria, the team guided 36 birds along one stage through bright blue skies and a tailwind that increased their speed.

The entire journey to Spain could take up to 50 days and end in early October. But Fritz says the effort is bigger than just the northern bald ibises: It’s about paving the way for other threatened migratory species to fly.
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Moscow, Russia — A helicopter with 22 people aboard, most of them tourists, has gone missing in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula in the far east, regional authorities said Saturday.

“Today at about 1615 (0415 GMT) communication was lost with a Mi-8 helicopter … which had 22 people on board, 19 passengers and three crew members,” Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said in a video posted on Telegram.

Rescue teams in helicopters have been searching into the night for the missing aircraft, focusing on a river valley that the helicopter was due to fly along, Russian authorities said.

The Mi-8 is a Soviet-designed military helicopter that is widely used for transport in Russia.

The missing helicopter had picked up passengers near the Vachkazhets ancient volcano in a scenic area of the peninsula known for its wild landscapes, pristine rivers, geysers and active volcanoes.

Kamchatka, which is nine hours ahead of Moscow, is a popular tourist destination.

A source in the emergency services told TASS news agency that the helicopter disappeared from radar almost immediately after taking off and the crew did not report any problems.

The local weather service said there was poor visibility in the airport area.

Accidents involving planes and helicopters are frequent in Russia’s far eastern region, which is sparsely populated and where there is often harsh weather.

The emergencies ministry said the search and rescue operation was being hampered by thick fog in the area.

In August 2021, a Mi-8 helicopter with 16 people on board, including 13 tourists, crashed into a lake in Kamchatka due to poor visibility, killing eight.

In July the same year, a plane crashed as it tried to land on the peninsula, with 22 passengers and 6 crew aboard, all of whom were killed.
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Madrid/Washington — They are known as “illegals” — spies who operate under the guise of normal jobs.

Since Russia lost many of its valuable spy assets when dozens of diplomats were expelled from Western countries after the invasion of Ukraine, these civilian agents have become essential.

Experts in Russian intelligence told VOA that this was the “renaissance of illegals,” with 90% of operations now carried out by these shadowy figures.

The August 1 hostage swap, in which American journalists and Russian rights activists were exchanged for an assassin and spies, exposed how some of these “illegals” operate.

Many manage to avoid detection by working in innocuous jobs that allow them access to events and people of interest to Moscow. The prisoner swap included supposed art dealers and a freelance journalist.

President Vladimir Putin welcomed back Russian couple Artem and Anna Dultsev, who posed as Argentinians and ran a tech start-up and gallery in Slovenia, and Spanish-Russian freelance reporter Pablo Gonzalez, also known as Pavel Rubtsov.

On the surface, Gonzalez worked as a reporter for media outlets that included DW and VOA, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. But in reality, according to the head of the British MI6 secret service, he was gathering information on Russian opposition groups and trying to destabilize Ukraine in the run up to Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Polish authorities detained Gonzalez in February 2022. Until August 1, he was held in a high-security jail on charges of spying for Russia — allegations he had denied.

Media watchdogs condemned the conditions in which Poland held Gonzalez, but footage of him being welcomed by Putin after the swap appeared to confirm his primary role was spy craft, not journalism.

Gonzalez himself gave VOA a cryptic answer to a request for an interview. Referring to an earlier VOA article about his release, Gonzalez said through his Spanish wife, Oihana Goiriena, “If there are no more speculations, then I don’t know what you want to talk about.”

 

Russian roots

Speaking perfect Russian and Spanish, Gonzalez forged a career in journalism after studying Slavic studies at the University of Barcelona. But despite his new life in the West, he retained much sympathy for his country of birth.

A source with knowledge of the Russian intelligence sector who did not want to be named told VOA that Gonzalez grew up in Spain’s Basque country, where sympathies for a regional independence movement are common — and, in left-wing circles, support for Putin is not unusual.

This meant many who met him did not question his pro-Russian leanings; far fewer suspected he secretly worked for Russian intelligence.

“This is a renaissance for illegals,” Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an expert in subversive Russian and Soviet special services, told VOA from Kyiv.

“Historically, it was so difficult to travel abroad. [These spies] can travel, they can live, they can join governments, businesses,” said Danylyuk, who is an associate fellow of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, a defense think-tank.

“Some people are still not convinced that illegals are important, but it is 90% of all the [Russian intelligence] activity.”

Danylyuk said part of their value is that millions of Russians — and foreign-national Kremlin sympathizers — can travel freely without suspicion.

“They can travel to Silicon Valley and steal secrets, and they can recruit Westerners. Why would you need to use diplomats?” he said. “For some specific tasks, yes, but in fact for other operations you would use illegals, and you would have spymasters.”

Danylyuk said one purpose of illegals is to exert influence on the Western world by infiltrating radical protest groups or opposition organizations.

In 2016, Gonzalez engaged with leaders of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom — named after the Russian opposition politician assassinated in 2015 — where he became close with key members of the group.

Nemtsov’s daughter and co-founder of the foundation, Zhanna Nemtsova, said she was a target of Gonzalez’s espionage.

“I was the first to tell Agentstvo about Pablo Gonzalez/Pavel Rubtsov in May 2023 after I had access to the case materials,” she wrote on social media X on August 27. Agentstvo is an independent Russian media outlet.

Gonzalez collected detailed reports on his contacts with Nemtsova and the foundation, Agentstvo said.

Spy operations

Marc Marginedas, a correspondent for Spanish newspaper El Periodico, said despite the expulsions of Russian diplomats after the Ukraine invasion, the Russian intelligence service is like a small army.

“Tens of thousands of people work for the different branches of the intelligence services in Russia. Some sources elevate this to hundreds of thousands if it includes those working not on a regular basis,” said Marginedas, who specializes in the former Soviet states and Middle East.

Staff in Russian embassies and state-run media organizations, he added, are probably forced to work in some kind of intelligence capacity.

Marginedas agreed that “illegals” are now a mainstay of Moscow’s spying operation.

“Russia has invested heavily in ‘illegal’ agents who do not enjoy diplomatic protection,” he said.

“They provide them with a personal alibi that is very difficult to track down. Latin American countries, with not very tight controls and regulations when providing citizenship to foreigners, are very useful for this purpose.”

Marginedas said that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine resulted in large numbers of suspected Russian spies being expelled from embassies around the world. So, when Putin appeared at the airport in Moscow to welcome the agents in the prisoner swap in August, it sent a specific message.

“Following the war in Ukraine and the mass expulsions of Russian diplomats from Western countries, its capacities were seriously undermined,” Marginedas said.

“Putin, by receiving those people with pomp at [Moscow’s] airport and promising them jobs and medals, was sending out the message to the future spies that the Russian state will not abandon its spies.”

A journalist who knew Gonzalez said his real identity came as a shock.

Xavier Colas, who works for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, has known Gonzalez since 2014 when they met in Ukraine.

“He was not a person who pretended to be a journalist. He really was one. He did reports and traveled and knew what he was talking about,” Colas said. “He styled himself as an expert in Ukraine and other [post-Soviet] republics. He knew his stuff.”

Colas, whom Russia expelled earlier this year, also said Gonzalez espoused “pro-Russian” arguments that attacked Ukraine and the European Union and claimed Alexei Navalny, the late opposition leader imprisoned by Russia, was being treated well by the Russian government.

Navalny died in a penal colony in the Arctic in February.

“Gonzalez’s opinions were very pro-Russian. But he was not some stupid young radical journalist. He knew what he was talking about, but his arguments did not make sense,” Colas remembers.

He said that Gonzalez worked for mostly regional newspapers such as the pro-separatist Basque Gara newspaper, but he never seemed short of funds to travel to all parts of Ukraine and Syria.

Gonzalez worked for Spanish outlets Publico, La Sexta and Gara. He also worked as a freelancer for Voice of America in 2020 and 2021 and the public broadcasters Deutsche Welle and EFE.

VOA hired Gonzalez via a third-party freelance media platform. After learning of his arrest in Poland, the broadcaster removed his content.

Deutsche Welle did not reply to a request for comment. But Miguel Angel Oliver, president of EFE, told VOA: “We have not made any comment. Gonzalez worked for EFE over two years ago. It was a brief collaboration principally about photographs at the start of the Ukraine war.”

Colas said he thought Gonzalez came from “a wealthy Basque country family.” It was a shock, he said, when Gonzalez emerged from a plane with a Russian hitman and other spies.

“I knew for a while that the Spanish secret services believed he was a spy. But this was still a shock for me,” he said.

Intelligence services

Three different intelligence services had no doubt about where Gonzalez’s real loyalties lay — even if his colleagues and many peers were in the dark.

Spanish secret services, who spoke on background to a VOA reporter, said they believed he was a Russian spy. And Polish security services said Gonzalez was included in the prisoner swap because of “common security issues” with the United States.

In a statement, they said: “Pavel Rubtsov, a GRU officer arrested in Poland in 2022, [had been] carrying out intelligence tasks in Europe.”

Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, said at the Aspen Security Forum in 2022 that Gonzalez was an “illegal” arrested in Poland after “masquerading as a Spanish journalist.”

“He was going into Ukraine to be part of their destabilizing efforts there,” Moore said.

Gonzalez has always denied spying for Russia.

His lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, noted the case of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter Russia detained on false espionage charges who was freed in the prisoner swap and welcomed by U.S. President Joe Biden.

“Nobody in the USA has questioned that Gershkovich was simply a journalist. We think that neither Gershkovich nor Pablo Gonzalez are spies, but journalists are trapped in a new kind of cold war, where truth matters little,” he told VOA.

Boye also acted as a lawyer for Edward Snowden and Carles Puigdemont, a fugitive former Catalan independence leader wanted in Spain on charges of embezzlement and misuse of public funds. (Boye himself has faced legal action, convicted in a 1996 trial involving Basque separatists.)

Gonzalez is now living in Russia, but his wife, Goiriena, still lives with the couple’s three children in Spain’s Basque country. She told VOA that she remains in touch with her husband daily by social media or telephone.

“So far there is no news of him coming back from Russia,” she said. “I think he has to recover from everything he has been through.”

While living in Warsaw in the run-up to Russia’s invasion, Gonzalez had a girlfriend, named in local media as Magdalena Chodownik. She has since been charged by Polish authorities with assisting espionage but denies the charge.

Chodownik, who has worked for several European outlets, declined to comment to VOA when asked about Gonzalez.

Spain’s Foreign Ministry did not reply when asked by VOA if Gonzalez will be allowed to return to Spain to see his family while Poland has accused him of spying.
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KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian air defenses shot down 24 out of 52 drones launched by Russia during overnight attacks on eight regions across Ukraine, the air force said Saturday.

It said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that 25 Shahed drones had fallen on their own and three others had flown toward Russia and Belarus. There were no reports of anybody being hurt in the attacks or of any major damage being caused.

Ukraine uses electronic warfare as well as mobile hunting groups and aircraft defenses to repel frequent Russian drone and missile strikes.

Air alerts sounded several times during the overnight drone attacks, with many people rushing to shelters in the middle of the night.

In the capital, Kyiv, where alerts lasted for about four hours, it was the fourth drone attack this week, officials said.

All drones targeting the city were downed and no major damage was reported, Kyiv city officials said.

Ukrainian air defenses also shot down Russian drones in the Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyrovohrad and Dnipropetrovsk regions in central Ukraine, in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions in the north and the Mykolayiv region in the south.

Regional officials in the Cherkasy region said the drones’ debris had damaged several private houses.

The Russian forces also launched five missiles during the attack, the Ukrainian air force said, but gave no other details.

Meanwhile, five people were killed and 46 injured in a Ukrainian attack on the southwestern Russian city of Belgorod late Friday, the local governor said. Vyacheslav Gladkov said that 37 of the injured, including seven children, were hospitalized.

Video from a car dashboard, posted on social media and purporting to demonstrate the attack, showed another car being blown up while moving on the road. Seconds later an explosion is seen on the other side of the road. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video.

Russia’s Investigation Committee said on its Telegram channel that it had initiated a criminal case into the Belgorod attack.

Authorities also reported that a woman was injured Saturday during Ukrainian shelling of the border town of Shebekino in the Belgorod region.

Ukraine has staged frequent attacks on Belgorod and other Russian border regions in recent months. The city has been the focal point of the attacks.

Ukraine and Russia say they do not deliberately target civilians in the war that began when Russia sent thousands of troops into its smaller neighbor in February 2022. Moscow has called the invasion a “special military operation.”
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BERLIN — Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is legitimate and covered by Kyiv’s right to self-defense, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told German weekly Welt am Sonntag in his first reaction to the advance into Russian territory.

“Ukraine has a right to defend itself. And according to international law, this right does not stop at the border,” Stoltenberg told the paper, adding that NATO had not been informed about Ukraine’s plans beforehand and did not play a role in them.

The NATO chief said Ukraine was running a risk with the advance onto Russian territory but that it was up to Kyiv how to conduct its military campaign.

“(Ukrainian) President (Volodymyr) Zelenskiy has made clear that the operation aims to create a buffer zone to prevent further Russian attacks from across the border,” he said.

“Like all military operations, this comes with risks. But it is Ukraine’s decision how to defend itself.”

Kyiv launched a major cross-border incursion into the Kursk region on August 6, while Moscow’s troops keep pressing towards the strategic hub of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine.

The incursion was also discussed at a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine-Council on Wednesday that was requested by Kyiv amid Moscow’s biggest wave of air attacks on its neighbor.

The council, grouping members of the Western military alliance and Ukraine, was established last year to enable closer coordination between the alliance and Kyiv.

Russia has called the Kursk operation a “major provocation” and said it would retaliate. 
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KYIV, Ukraine — When the air raid siren bellows in the dead of night, the women in arms rush to duty.

Barely two months since joining the mobile air-defense unit, 27-year-old Angelina has perfected the drill to a tee: Combat gear fitted, anti-aircraft machine gun in place, she cruised behind the wheel of a pickup, singing along to a Ukrainian song about rebellion.

The rest unfolded in seconds: Under a tree-lined position near Kyiv’s Bucha suburb, she and her five-woman unit mounted the gun, checked the salvo and waited. The chirp of crickets filled the silence until the Russian-launched Shahed drone was shot down — on this August night, by a nearby unit — another menace to near daily life in Ukraine eliminated.

To shoot down a drone brings her joy. “It’s just a rush of adrenaline,” said Angelina, who like other women in the unit spoke to The Associated Press on condition only their first names or call signs be used, in keeping with military policy.

Women are increasingly joining volunteer mobile units responsible for shooting down Russian drones that terrorize Ukrainian civilians and energy infrastructure as more men are sent east to the front line.

While women make up only a tiny fraction of the country’s armed forces, their service is vital. With tens of thousands of men reportedly recruited every month, women have stepped up as crucial operations from coal mines to territorial defense forces accept them to fulfill traditionally male roles.

At least 70 women have been recruited into the Bucha defense forces in recent months for anti-drone operations, said the area’s territorial defense commander, Col. Andrii Velarty. It’s part of a nationwide drive to attract part-time female volunteers to fill the ranks of local defense units.

The women come from all walks of life — stay-at-home moms to doctors like Angelina — and call themselves the “Witches of Bucha,” a nod to their role of keeping watch over the night skies for Russian drones.

Some were motivated to volunteer by the Russian massacre of hundreds of Bucha residents during the monthlong occupation of the Kyiv suburb by Russian troops soon after the February 2022 invasion. Bodies of men, women and children were left on the streets, in homes and in mass graves.

“We were here, saw these horrors,” said Angelina, who treated wounded residents, including children, during the Russian occupation.

So when she spotted a sign calling for female recruits on a highway while driving in June with her friend, Olena, also a doctor, “we didn’t hesitate,” she said.

“We called and were immediately told ‘Yes, come tomorrow,’” she said. “There is work that we can do here.”

A grueling training

At a training session deep inside Bucha’s forest this month, female recruits ranging in age from 27 to 51 were being tested on how quickly they could assemble and disassemble rifles. “I have eighth graders who can do this better,” their instructor shouted.

The recruits were taught about a variety of weapons and mines, tactics and how to detect Russian infiltrators — their skills adapted to a war in which their enemy’s methods are always changing.

“We train no less than men,” said Lidiia, who joined a month ago.

A 34-year-old sales clerk with four children, Lidiia said her main motivation was to do her part to protect her family. Her children have looked at her differently since she began wearing army fatigues, she said.

“My younger son always asks, ‘Mom, do you carry a gun?’ I say, ’Yes.’ He asks, ‘Do you shoot?’ I say, ‘Of course I do.’”

“I’ve always been the best for them, but now I’m the best in a slightly different way,” she said.

On July 31, she was on duty when Russia launched 89 Shahed drones, all of which were destroyed. Lidiia was an assistant machine-gunner that night.

“We got ready, we went to the call, we found that there were a lot of targets all over Ukraine,” she said. “We had night-vision devices so it was easy to spot the target.”

What did she feel as her unit shot down three of the drones? “Joy and some foul language,” Olena said.

After shooting down drones, the day job begins

When the sun rose, Angelina and Olena removed their heavy combat gear and went home to slip on surgical scrubs. Another shift, this time at the intensive care unit at the hospital where they work, was about to start.

By midnight, they would be back near the tree line, waiting for incoming Russian drones. “Today I slept for two hours and forty minutes,” Olena said.

There is no escape from the war for both women.

Their boyfriends are soldiers, and Angelina, an anesthesiologist, met hers at the hospital where he was recovering from a combat wound to his foot.

Seeing the numbers of wounded Ukrainian soldiers was one reason she decided to volunteer.

“To bring our victory closer. If we can do something to help, why not?” she said.

Angelina’s boyfriend worries every time she is on duty and the air raid alarm sounds. He texts her, “be careful” and when it ends, “write to me” — despite it being much scarier on the front lines, she said.

‘We are no longer women, we are soldiers’

The Russian drone attacks are typically more intense at night, but daytime attacks are just as deadly. The drone unit spends entire nights driving back and forth from their base in the forest to the position. Sometimes they stand there for hours waiting to shoot.

“There is nothing easy about it. In order to shoot it down, you have to train constantly,” Angelina said. “I have to train all the time, including on simulators.”

Their platoon commander, a confident woman with long braided hair who goes by the call sign Calypso, leads training in shooting, assault skills and combat medicine every Sunday.

There’s no difference between the male and female volunteers, she said.

“From the moment we come to serve, sign a contract, we are no longer women, we are soldiers,” she said. “We have to do our job, and men also understand this. We don’t come here to sit around and cook borscht or anything.”

“I have a feeling the girls and I would shoot down these Shaheds with our bare hands, with a stick, if we had to — anything to stop them from landing on our children, friends and family.”

The women in the mobile-fire units are on duty every two or three days. They work in groups of five, with a machine gunner, assistant, fire support, a driver and commander.

“Of course, war is war, but no one has canceled femininity,” Calypso said. “It doesn’t matter whether you hit a Shahed with painted eyes or not, the work is still going on. And not everyone has a manicure.”

As more women are trained to join the ranks of the territorial defense forces, the safer Ukraine’s skies will be, Angelina said.

“This means that I can make at least some small contribution to the fact that my mother sleeps peacefully, that my brothers and sisters go to school peacefully and they can meet their friends peacefully,” she said.

“So that my godsons can also grow under a relatively peaceful sky.”
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london — Russia has accused the European Union of “theft” after the bloc transferred the first tranche of profits from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine to boost its military capabilities in the face of Moscow’s invasion. The G7 group of leading industrialized nations plans a similar scheme.

However, there are concerns that the asset schemes could prompt some countries to cut their own bilateral funding to Ukraine, after Germany indicated it could end bilateral military aid for Kyiv after 2025.

The European Union said Friday that it had so far provided around $48 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. The bloc has begun providing military and civilian aid to Ukraine using profits from $300 billion worth of confiscated Russian assets, following an EU agreement struck in May.

“We have mobilized the first tranche of windfall profits from Russian frozen assets. It’s 1.4 billion [euros, or $1.55 billion]. Part of it is going directly to Ukraine in order to boost the Ukrainian defense industry. By March, we will have the second tranche of the windfall profits,” EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told reporters Friday.

Russian anger

Moscow described the transfer of profits from its frozen assets as “theft.”

“These are illegal actions. They will definitely have legal consequences. This is nothing but illegal expropriation — in Russian, theft — of our money, our assets,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a phone call Thursday.

The G7 also agreed in June to use frozen Russian assets to finance a $50 billion loan to provide military aid for Ukraine, although that scheme has yet to be finalized.

Germany indicated this month that it intends to end bilateral military aid for Ukraine from 2026 as it seeks to close a $13 billion budget deficit. Berlin said the G7 asset mechanism could help pay for the shortfall.

Germany is currently Ukraine’s second-biggest bilateral donor, after the United States. The move to end that support has come under widespread criticism, said analyst Liana Fix of the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations.

“The political signal that it sends is devastating: that the biggest donor in absolute terms in Europe, Germany, suddenly stops its support for Ukraine, especially as it is unclear when and how exactly this G7 mechanism on the Russian frozen assets will work,” Fix said.

“The idea of the G7 instrument was to communicate to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin that it doesn’t make sense for him to outwait the West, right? That he cannot hope that at some point the West will stop support. And so this is a contradicting sign now — that the moment another financial source has been tapped, suddenly Ukraine funding is cut out of the budget,” Fix told VOA.

Political pressure

Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently insisted Germany would continue to support Kyiv.

“We will support Ukraine as long as it will be necessary and we will be the biggest national supporter of Ukraine in Europe,” Scholz told reporters during a visit to Moldova on August 21.

Amid enduring economic pressures at home, Scholz is facing domestic political difficulties, said Fix.

“Although the foreign policy has not changed, it shows changing priorities. Because before, for the governing coalition, Ukraine support was sacred. Nothing could be changed about that. And it shows how desperate the governing coalition in Berlin is for their political survival, ahead of elections in the autumn in eastern Germany.”

Long-range missiles

Meanwhile, the European Union on Thursday urged member states and Western allies to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to target sites inside Russia.

“The military platform for Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure should not stay off limits for elimination, should not be a sanctuary for Russia attacking Ukraine,” Borrell told reporters.

“To facilitate Ukraine to respond to the Russian aggression inside Russian territory is in accordance with international law. And I don’t see why someone says it is going to war against Moscow. No, we are not going to war with Moscow. We are delivering arms to Ukraine, that’s all,” he added.
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Russia on Thursday accused the European Union of “theft” after the bloc transferred the first tranche of profits from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine to boost Kyiv’s military capabilities. But some fear Western states could cut their own aid, as Henry Ridgwell reports. Camera: Henry Ridgwell.
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islamabad — A group of 28 asylum-seekers were repatriated to Afghanistan from Germany on Friday after being deported for criminal convictions.

The deportees, on board a chartered flight, arrived in the capital of Kabul, where Taliban authorities promptly detained them for investigation and blocked journalists’ access to the airport, according to witnesses.

The Taliban did not immediately issue a statement regarding the fate of the Afghan returnees or whether the repatriation resulted from mutual understanding between Kabul and Berlin.

Earlier, a German government spokesperson said in a statement on its website that the Afghan nationals had been “convicted for criminal offenses,” carried “no legal residency,” and “were subject to return orders.”

Steffen Hebestreit, a spokesperson for the government, noted that this was the first time Germany had repatriated Afghan nationals since August 2021, when the Taliban regained control of the country.

“The federal government will continue with such returns,” Hebestreit said. “The security interests of Germany clearly outweigh the claim for protection of criminals and individuals endangering national security.”

The Taliban takeover had prompted Germany to halt deportations to Afghanistan and shut down its embassy in the country amid fears of reprisals against returnees.

Hebestreit did not respond to reports from German media that Friday’s deportation flight resulted from two months of secret negotiations between Berlin and Taliban authorities, with Qatar serving as the intermediary.

He said in a statement that Germany had sought the support of “key regional partners to help facilitate the return” and was “very grateful for this support” without elaborating.

Violent offenders and sex offenders were reportedly among the Afghans sent back Friday, including a man who took part in the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl.

Friday’s resumption of Afghan deportations came a week after a deadly knife attack at a street festival in the city of Solingen that shocked Germany. The Islamic State extremist group claimed responsibility for the attack that killed three people. A 26-year-old Syrian man allegedly carried it out.

Last May, a 25-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker was accused of killing a German police officer in a knife attack on a market square in the city of Mannheim. That incident occurred amid a reported increase in criminal activities involving Afghan nationals in Germany. It revived debate about deporting serious criminals even if they come from countries deemed unsafe, like Afghanistan or Syria.

The Taliban have implemented their strict interpretation of Islamic law in Afghanistan, placing restrictions on personal conduct and freedom of the population. They have barred Afghan girls from receiving an education beyond the sixth grade and women from most jobs in public and private sectors.

The curbs, particularly those on women and girls, have outraged the global community and deterred foreign governments from officially recognizing the de facto Kabul government.
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