GENEVA — U.S. President Donald Trump will take part virtually in the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos just days after his inauguration, the forum president said Tuesday. 

Borge Brende, a former Norwegian foreign minister who heads the Geneva-based organization, noted that Trump had twice attended the elite gathering of business, government and other leaders in person during his first term. 

“On Thursday afternoon, he will join us digitally, online, live in a dialogue with our participants,” Brende told reporters Tuesday as he presented the five-day program that will start Monday — the day of Trump’s inauguration. 

“We think that will be a very special moment,” he added, notably to help learn the administration’s “policy priorities.” 

Brende said he didn’t know whether Elon Musk, the multibillionaire who is poised to co-lead Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, would attend, but said the forum expects “additional, high-level representation” from the administration once confirmation processes for Trump’s nominees get underway in the U.S. Senate as early as Monday. 

Forum organizers say a record of around 900 business leaders, including from important emerging markets, will take part in the annual meeting this year, which is expected to draw nearly 3,000 participants from over 130 countries. 

With climate change, war, global tensions, economic uncertainty and other issues in mind, Brende acknowledged that the 55th annual meeting of the forum will take place “against the most complicated geopolitical backdrop in generations.” 

“But still in that fragmented and partly polarized world, there are still areas where we can collaborate and … we have big opportunities and responsibilities to find those areas where there is a possibility to improve the state of the world,” he said. The theme of this year’s edition is “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age” — a nod to the growing importance of technology in the world. 

The WEF has long been derided as a gathering of world elites who plot the future at a cushy, snow-bound powwow in the Swiss Alps. Critics often argue the developing world gets less attention than global powers and big business in the West or Gulf states. 

Forum managing director Mirek Dusek insisted that the number of businesses from developing countries in the “Global South” was growing, and the attendance of their leaders was “on parity” with the participation of leaders in the developed world. 

Ursula Von Der Leyen, president of the European Union’s executive commission, plans to attend the opening day of meetings on Tuesday, after an introductory gala the night before. Other top envoys include President Javier Milei of Argentina, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, and Chinese Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang. 

The vast array of topics will include the future of Syria — its new foreign minister is expected to attend — after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month; the fight against climate change; the threats and promise of artificial intelligence; global trade and economic growth; and wars in places like Ukraine, Sudan and beyond. 

“We are ready to roll up our sleeves to make the best out of a situation where we are faced with many, many challenges,” Brende said.
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LONDON — Britain’s antitrust regulator said on Tuesday it would investigate Google’s search services using its new powers to see how they impact consumers and businesses, including advertisers, news publishers and rival search engines.

The Competition and Markets Authority, which has gained new powers to examine big tech, said search was vital for economic growth and it was critical that competition was working well.

“Millions of people and businesses relied on Google’s search and advertising services – with 90% of searches happening on their platform and more than 200,000 UK businesses advertising there,” CMA boss Sarah Cardell said in a statement.

“It’s our job to ensure people get the full benefit of choice and innovation in search services and get a fair deal.”

The CMA’s move comes after U.S. prosecutors in November argued to a judge that Google must sell its Chrome browser, share data, and search results with rivals, and take a range of other measures to end its monopoly on online search.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.
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HELSINKI — European nations must be prepared to face further incidents in the Baltic Sea following the recent damage to undersea infrastructure, leaders of NATO countries in the region said on Tuesday ahead of a security meeting in Helsinki.

Baltic Sea nations are on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and are discussing an increased NATO presence.

Some 2,000 ships are crossing the Baltic Sea every day, making it difficult to monitor it all, Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said.

“Let’s face it, we can’t ensure 100% protection but if we are sending a bold signal then I think that such incidents are going to decrease or even to stop,” Rinkevics told reporters.

Finnish police last month seized a tanker carrying Russian oil and said they suspected the vessel had damaged the Finnish-Estonian Estlink 2 power line and four telecoms cables by dragging its anchor across the seabed.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday that this and other recent incidents in the Baltic Sea must be assumed to be part of a hybrid strategy that is threatening European countries.

“It is important that we come together here now and talk about how we can work together to ensure greater security in the Baltic Sea region,” Scholz said.
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CHISINAU, MOLDOVA — The prime minister of Moldova’s separatist Transniestria region said Monday that the abrupt curtailment of Russian gas supplies that plunged the region into an energy crisis has also shattered both its exports and imports.

The cutoff, prompted by Ukraine’s refusal to renew an agreement allowing Russian gas to transit through Ukraine, has led to daily blackouts in the pro-Russian region of some 350,000 people and disruptions in heating and water supplies.

Prime Minister Alexander Rozenberg told local media that the New Year cutoff had triggered a 43% decline in imports and a 60% plunge in exports in the region, which split from Moldova in the final days of Soviet rule.

“The steepest drop in the volume of export operations … has been registered in the metals sector, in manufacture of machines and in the chemical industry,” he said. “Exports of cement have been completely stopped.”

Transniestria depends heavily on assistance from Moscow and its leaders acknowledge that the Russian gas it has long received was provided free of charge as “humanitarian assistance.”

The gas cutoff affects operations at a thermal plant that provides electricity both for Transniestria and much of the area controlled by the central Moldovan government. Its operations have been switched to coal, and Ukraine, Moldova’s eastern neighbor, has offered to provide supplies.

Moldovan President Maia Sandu, who has spearheaded the country’s drive to join the EU, called a meeting of Moldova’s Supreme Security Council on Tuesday to discuss energy. Both Moldova and Transniestria have proclaimed states of emergency.

Much of Transniestria’s industry has been forced to close or obliged to operate at night, when there is less strain on the power grid.

Among the factories closed are a cement plant and a steel mill in the town of Rybnita, with the latter accounting for 35% of the region’s budget revenue.

The region’s separatist authorities last week said energy savings had enabled them to reduce rolling blackouts from eight hours a day to three by the weekend. But a blackout of five hours had been announced for Monday.

Moldova, which denounces Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says Moscow fomented the crisis and has suggested shipping gas on a route through Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania.

Russian gas giant Gazprom said it will provide no supplies until Moldova settles arrears it estimates at $709 million, a figure disputed by Moldovan authorities.

Transniestria’s leaders say Moldova has done nothing to ease the crisis and reject any notion that Moldova’s government has offered to help purchase power from Western Europe.

More than 30 years after Transniestria waged a brief war against the newly independent Moldovan state, the region continues to exist alongside Moldova with little turmoil. But 1,500 Russian “peacekeepers” remain in the territory and efforts to resolve the separatist dispute have made little headway.
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Pro-Kremlin Russian media lost millions of readers and viewers in 2024, with some state propaganda outlets having their audiences slashed by up to a third. The main propaganda TV channel, Channel One, has lost a quarter of its viewers since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Experts who spoke to VOA Russian note this has become a steady trend that the Kremlin has so far been unable to reverse, even with larger injections of cash into state-owned media outlets. 

Click here for the full story in Russian. 
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KYIV, UKRAINE — Russian forces are bypassing a key stronghold in eastern Ukraine that they have fought for months to capture and are focusing instead on cutting supply lines to it, a Ukrainian official said Monday.

Russian troops are going around the vital logistics hub of Pokrovsk, where a steadfast Ukrainian defense has kept them at bay, and are taking aim at a highway that leads from there to the central Ukraine city of Dnipro, Major Viktor Trehubov, a local Ukrainian army spokesperson, told The Associated Press.

That route is crucial for supplies feeding Ukrainian forces in the entire region. Cutting the highway traffic would also severely weaken Pokrovsk.

“So far, they have not achieved their goal and [Ukrainian forces] are working to ensure that they do not achieve it in the future — just as they have not been successful in other attempts to bypass the city,” Trehubov said in a WhatsApp message.

Ukraine’s army is under severe strain along parts of the approximately 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, especially in the eastern Donetsk region where Pokrovsk is located.

After almost three years of war, Ukrainian units are depleted and are outnumbered by Russian forces. Though its battlefield progress has been slow and costly, momentum in the war is in Russia’s favor and its onslaught has gradually swallowed up towns and villages, especially in Donetsk. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Monday its forces had seized the village of Pishchane.

In his daily video address to the nation late Sunday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said fighting around Pokrovsk was “the most intense” in recent days.

In separate comments to local media, Trehubov, the army spokesperson, speculated that Russia’s heavy losses of troops and armor in the Donetsk operation had prompted it to alter its strategy.

“Now they are acting more cautiously,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pressing his advantage ahead of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House next week. Trump says he wants to bring a swift end to the war, though he hasn’t publicized details of his plans.

In 2022, Moscow illegally annexed the Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk regions, which make up the economically important Donbas industrial area, together with the southeastern provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. But Russian forces don’t fully control any of them.
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Washington — Outgoing President Joe Biden sought to burnish his foreign policy record Monday and said U.S. adversaries are weaker than when he took office four years ago despite global crises that remain unresolved. 

A week before handing over to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden in a rare State Department speech touted his administration’s backing for Ukraine against Russia’s 2022 invasion and for Israel’s wars in the Middle East. 

Biden said the United States was “winning the worldwide competition” and would not be surpassed economically by China as had been predicted, while Russia and Iran have been weakened by wars without direct U.S. involvement. 

“Compared to four years ago, America is stronger, our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker,” Biden said. “We have not gone to war to make these things happen.” 

While wars continue to rage in Ukraine and the Middle East, officials hope a deal between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas can be reached before Biden departs the White House on Jan. 20. 

Biden said negotiators were close to reaching a deal that would free hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip and halt the fighting in the Palestinian enclave to allow a surge of humanitarian aid. 

“So many innocent people have been killed, so many communities have been destroyed. Palestinian people deserve peace,” he said. 

Biden has faced criticism for providing Israel with weapons and diplomatic support during its assault on Gaza after Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. 

Since then, more than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials, with much of the enclave laid to waste and most of its population displaced. 

Protesters shouting “war criminal” greeted Biden outside the State Department on Monday, some with signs and some throwing red liquid intended to look like blood. 

Biden said he had helped Israel defeat adversaries like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both backed by Iran. The U.S. president also hailed Washington’s support for Israel during two Iranian attacks in 2024. 

“All told, Iran is weaker than it’s been in decades,” he added, noting the collapse of the Syrian Assad government. “There’s no question that our actions contributed significantly.” 
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BERLIN — Germany, Poland, Britain, France and Italy will implement as swiftly as possible new NATO targets for weapons and troop numbers which the alliance is about to agree upon, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius pledged on Monday.

The chief of NATO’s Military Committee, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, told Reuters earlier that the alliance aims to bring forward the decision on new targets for weapons and troop numbers to this summer.

The Western military and political alliance has been under pressure not only in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine but also internally, with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump calling on its members to spend much more on defense.

A NATO summit in The Hague at the end of June will also discuss hiking NATO’s existing military spending target of 2% of national GDP, with 3% being floated by some experts as one potential new target. Trump, who returns to the White House on Jan. 20, recently urged a 5% goal.

Speaking after a meeting with his four counterparts in the Polish village of Nowa Wies, Pistorius welcomed NATO’s decision to fix the alliance’s new capability targets in June instead of October as originally planned, a move he said was triggered by a German request.

“This buys us a lot of time and we can much earlier kick off the implementation,” Pistorius told reporters.

At the same time, he rejected Trump’s push to have members raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, arguing this would equal more than 40% of Germany’s total budget.

“The crucial question for me is: How fast do we … every single ally, manage to meet NATO’s new capability targets? … How quickly are we fully capable of defending ourselves when we need to be?” Pistorius said.

France’s defense minister, Sebastien Lecornu, said military budgets would continue to increase but did not specify a figure for a new NATO target.

“The situation is worse than it was during the Cold War. … We can be defeated without being invaded,” he said, referring to cyberattacks.

Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said the next meeting of the Group of Five in Paris would discuss how to finance the organization and the development of the arms industry in Europe.

“We will coordinate all defense-related activities between our countries. This is a priority. Europe must show its strength. Europe can again be a beacon for the whole world, it just needs to say clearly: Security is number one,” he said.
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Around 300 North Korean soldiers have been killed and 2,700 others injured in Russia’s war in Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers in a closed briefing Monday.

The National Intelligence Service said it had participated in the interrogation of several North Korean troops who were captured by Ukrainian forces.

The briefing came days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the capture of two North Korean soldiers during fighting in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces launched a surprise offensive in August.

Zelenskyy said late Sunday he would send captured North Koreans back to their country if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un organizes a swap for Ukrainian soldiers being held in Russia.

The Ukrainian leader said it is “only a matter of time” before Ukraine captures more North Korean soldiers, and that Russia’s military “is dependent on military assistance from North Korea.”

Drone attacks

Ukraine’s military said Monday it destroyed 78 of the 110 drones that Russian forces launched in overnight attacks targeting regions across the country.

The intercepts took place over the Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Poltava, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia and Zhytomyr regions, the Ukrainian air force said.

Mykolaiv Governor Vitaliy Kim said on Telegram that falling drone fragments damaged several houses, but did not hurt anyone. Russian shelling in his region injured one person, Kim said Monday.

In Sumy, officials said Russian attacks caused a fire at a residential building and injured one person.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Monday it destroyed six Ukrainian drones over the Voronezh region, as well as one drone over Belgorod and another drone over Bryansk.

The ministry also said Monday that a Ukrainian drone attack Saturday targeted the TurkStream gas pipeline that is used to send Russian gas to Turkey and Europe.

Russian air defenses shot down all of the drones involved in the attack, and there were no casualties, the ministry said.

Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters
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