Month: May 2023

As Turkey heads to the polls for its momentous elections Sunday, former U.S. ambassadors to Ankara will be monitoring from afar. While the perspectives shaped by their respective tenures in Turkey may vary, three former mission chiefs speaking to VOA share at least one view: The elections in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will face the biggest challenge to his two-decade rule will determine the course of Turkey’s future, its role as a NATO ally and its international standing. Turkey’s elections are taking place amid an economy battered by inflation and a currency that has depreciated, much of which has …

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Much of western Europe is dealing with dwindling populations, and the problem is especially severe in Spain, where the government says more than half of the country’s municipalities are in danger of total depopulation as many young people move to cities or choose not to have children. Jonathan Spier narrates this report from Alfonso Beato in the Catalonian town of Vilada, where a Honduran immigrant and her three daughters are breathing life into a community. …

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The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Poland’s decision to rename the Russian city of Kaliningrad in its official documents was a “hostile act,” as ties continue to fray over the war in Ukraine.  Kaliningrad, which sits in an exclave that is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic coast, was known by the German name of Koenigsberg until after World War II, when it was annexed by the Soviet Union and renamed to honor politician Mikhail Kalinin.  Warsaw says Kalinin’s connection to the 1940 Katyn massacre — when thousands of Polish officers were executed by Soviet forces — had …

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Repeated attempts by hackers, including some linked to Russia, to damage or take down critical infrastructure in Latvia have been answered, thanks in part to help from U.S. and Canadian cyber personnel. The three countries Wednesday announced the completion of a three-month-long operation focused on hunting down threats to Latvia’s infrastructure that also involved a series of defensive actions. The so-called “hunt forward” mission involved more than a dozen U.S. personnel from U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force, a Canadian cyber task force and Latvia’s CERT.LV, the Latvian military’s cybersecurity response division.  “Latvia has demonstrated incredible resilience for the …

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United States to provide $1.2 billion in new military aid to Ukraine, including air defenses and ammunition. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says “only a matter of time before we can restore a sustainable and just peace for our part of Europe, for Ukraine.” Agence France-Presse journalist Arman Soldin was killed by rocket fire in eastern Ukraine where journalists were with a group of Ukrainian soldiers. Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear power plant operator warned Wednesday that Russia planned to evacuate more than 3,000 workers from the town that serves the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Energoatom posted on Telegram that “there is now …

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