Month: October 2024

Brussels — The new head of NATO vowed on Tuesday to help shore up Western support for war-ravaged Ukraine and expressed confidence that he can work with whoever is elected president of the United States, the alliance’s most powerful member, in November. “There can be no lasting security in Europe without a strong, independent Ukraine,” new NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in his first speech on taking office, and he affirmed a commitment made by the organization’s leaders in 2008 that “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces are making advances in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine’s army has …

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Berlin — A Chinese woman has been arrested in the German city of Leipzig on suspicion of foreign agent activities and passing on information regarding arms deliveries, the prosecutor general said in a statement on Tuesday.  The suspect, named only as Yaqi X, is accused of passing on information obtained while working for a logistics company at Leipzig/Halle airport to a member of the Chinese secret service, who is being prosecuted separately, the statement said.  The second Chinese national, named as Jian G, was working as an aide to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament for the far-right Alternative …

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moscow — A Russian court Monday gave a life sentence to a man convicted in a car bombing that seriously wounded nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin. Prosecutors said the May 2023 bombing in the Nizhny Novogorod region was conducted at the direction of Ukraine’s security services. Prilepin was seriously injured, and his driver died in the bombing. The convicted defendant, Alexander Permyakov, is from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and once fought with the Russian-backed separatists there, news reports said.  Prilepin was known for his vehement defense of both the Russia-backed eastern Ukraine rebels who rose up in 2014, and of Russia’s fighting …

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Washington — On a quiet May morning, two months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the homepage of Kremlin-owned news website Lenta.ru was flooded with anti-war and anti-government articles. The articles disappeared from the webpage within the hour, but because of the effort of internet archivists, they can still be viewed separately today.  This is one of many examples of the Russian government’s attacks on free media, one that activists and archivists hope to counter. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, almost all independent media has been banned or blocked, and journalists are frequently …

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