World Politics

The German chancellor has called for the European Union to swiftly conclusion access talks with the western Balkans countries and welcome them as members.Speaking on Monday Olaf Scholz, who took over from Angela Merkel last year, said North Macedonia and Albania should be allowed to join.“Every further delay makes Western Balkans more vulnerable to third party influence,” Mr Scholz, a social democrat, said at a joint press conference following a meeting with the Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson.“It is clear for both Germany and Sweden that the EU must push ahead with institutional reforms to make itself capable of enlargement.”His comments come as EU enlargement shoots up the agenda thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – which wants to join the bloc.Albania and North Macedonia have been candidate countries for joining the EU since 2020, but they have made little progress in the labyrinthine process.EU authorities have concerns that the Western Balkan states do not meet standards for corruption, politicisation of the judiciary, and rule of law.The 27 EU presidents and prime ministers did not focus on EU accession at last week European Council summit in Brussels – instead spending time on the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis.Last week Mr Scholz also said the Western Balkans should be admitted EU membership to secure peace.But other countries such as France are more sceptical of enlarging the union, at least in its current state. French president Emmanuel Macron has previously said the enlargement process is not fit for purpose and briefed vetoed any enlargement. More

The United States has agreed to step up gas exports to the European Union in a bid to reduce reliance eon Russian suppliesUnder a deal announce on Friday Joe Biden promised the US would deliver at least 15 billion cubic metres (bcm) more liquid natural gas to Europe than under previous plans.The accord was struck by Mr Biden and EU leaders at a summit in Brussels on Friday, which the US president is attending.The arrangement also sees the US commit to increase gas supplies in 2023.“We aim to reduce this dependency on Russian fossil fuels and get rid of it. This can only be achieved through… additional gas supplies, including LNG deliveries”, Ms von der Leyen said at a joint press conference with Mr Biden on Friday in the Belgian capital.“We as Europeans want to diversify away from Russia towards suppliers that we trust, that are our friends, that are reliable.“Therefore, the US commitment to provide the European Union with additional at least 15 billion cubic metres of LNG this year is a big step in this direction because this will replace the LNG supply we currently receive from Russia.”The US president told the same group of journalists: “We’re coming together to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russia’s energy. We should not subsidise Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine.”Gas prices have surged to record levels in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and some countries like Germany and Italy are heavily reliant on Russian supply.Germany’s government has already pulled the plug on a planned gas pipeline called Nordstream 2 which critics said would increase reliance on supply controlled by Vladimir Putin’s regime. But Russia currently supplies 40 per cent of the EU’s gas needs and 25 per cent of its oil, albeit with significant differences between countries. Boris Johnson conceded on Thursday at a Nato summit that it was easier for some countries to quit Russian hydrocarbons than others.EU leaders are on Friday discussing whether to impose phased-in restrictions on the purchase of Russian fossil fuels such as oil and coal – but gas is not expected to be on the table.Alexander de Croo, the Belgian prime minister, told reporters on the doorstep of the summit: “Measures on energy right now would have a huge impact on our economies.“The basic rule is that sanctions must have a much greater impact on the Russian side than on the European side. We don’t wage war on ourselves.”Meanwhile Mark Rutte, the Dutch leader said: “Everybody wants it but it’s nothing that you can do in the short term.”US liquid natural gas plants are thought to be producing at full capacity and the exports will likely come from supply previously destined for other parts of the world.Analysts at Goldman Sachs said “near-term measures” to support European LNG imports would “rely on the reallocation of existing supply”.They added that “such a relocation to Europe is already happening” because EU gas prices have in recent months generally been the highest in the world.More follows… More

European Union leaders have warned against trying to “circumvent” EUsanctions against Russia and say they will close any “loopholes” that are found.At a top-level summit in Brussels the 27 presidents and prime ministers said any attempts to get around restrictions imposed by the block “must be stopped”.The blunt warning came in the early hours of the morning on Friday after a discussion of the situation in Ukraine dragged late into the night.Leaders are meeting again on Friday where they will consider more sanctions, with a possible phased-in ban on Russian oil and coal an option on the table.But the 27 countries are not expected to approve the biggest sanction: a ban on Russian gas, which some EU countries like Germany and Italy are heavily dependent on.Alexander de Croo, the Belgian prime minister, told reporters on the doorstep of the summit: “Measures on energy right now would have a huge impact on our economies.“The basic rule is that sanctions must have a much greater impact on the Russian side than on the European side. We don’t wage war on ourselves.”Meanwhile Mark Rutte, the Dutch leader said: “Everybody wants it but it’s nothing that you can do in the short term.”The cautious approach is expected despite signals from the US that it will ramp up natural gas shipments to Europe – a promise relayed by Joe Biden while he visits the EU capital.It comes after Russia demanded to be paid for its gas in Roubles instead of Euros – which the European Commission considers an attempt to work around sanctions. “This would be a unilateral decision and a clear breach of contract,” Von der Leyen said of Russia’s demand.“It would be an attempt to circumvent the sanctions. We will not allow our sanctions to be circumvented. The time when energy could be used to blackmail us is over.”The Council summit comes after a Nato meeting to decide a common defence approach to help Ukraine and shore-up militaries in Eastern Europe.Boris Johnson attended the Nato summit for the UK but Britain is not invited to the European Council meeting, and it no longer has an automatic seat due to Brexit. Mr Biden was hosted by EU leaders as a special guest given the situation in Ukraine. More

New Zealand has temporarily halved fares on public transport as part of a package of measures to reduce the cost of living.The move comes in response to soaring fuel costs sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has seen a global surge in prices.Announcing the measure, Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern described the situation as “a wicked perfect storm”.“We cannot control the war in Ukraine nor the continued volatility of fuel prices but we can take steps to reduce the impact on New Zealand families,” she said.”We hope this ensures that where the option of shifting how we travel is available, this makes it more affordable to take that public transport option up.”The three-month subsidy needed to cut fares will cost between $25m and $40m NZ (£12.9 to £20.7m), according to local media.The country’s government is also set to cut fuel excise duty by 25 cents (13p) a litre for three months to ease pressure on people who cannot switch to public transport.The change to transport fares means a one-zone rail fare with a smartcard in Aukland will be cut from £1.14 ($2.20 NZ) to 57p. ($1.10 NZ).New Zealand’s approach differs from that of the UK, where rail fares were this month hiked by the fastest rate in nine years, 3.8 per cent.Instead of reducing fares because of rising inflation, the UK government increases fares in line with inflation every year, meaning a rising cost of living leads to steeper fare rises.Experts have told MPs in the UK that the cost of a litre of petrol could hit £2.50, with diesel topping out at £3.00. More

Warnings have been raised over a potential surge in Russian cyber attacks against British organisations as the crisis in Ukraine escalates.Analysts and officials are expecting retaliation from Kremlin-linked cyber groups after sanctions were imposed by Boris Johnson and the government announced plans to send extra military support to Ukraine.The National Cyber Security Centre has already urged British organisations to “bolster their online defences” amid a deterioration in relations between Russia and the West.This follows several high-profile cyber operations that have been launched against Ukraine by suspected Russian forces since the beginning of 2022. On Wednesday, multiple Ukrainian government and banking websites were knocked offline in the latest wave of attacks linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency.It’s now feared the same tactics, in which Ukrainian websites have been defaced or breached by destructive malware, could also be deployed against UK servers if the current crisis further deepens in the weeks to come.Stefano De Blasi, an analyst at Digital Shadows, which specialises in digital risk protection, said it was “realistically possible that Russia will eventually retaliate against the sanctions recently imposed on them with targeted cyber operations”.He said distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – an attempt to hinder the running of a server or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic – could be launched against Western organisations, alongside the dissemination of destructive malware.Digital Shadows, along with other cyber surveillance and protection companies, have detected a rise in attacks against Ukrainian targets in recent weeks.This include defacement attacks, espionage campaigns, wiper malware deployments, disinformation campaigns, and DDoS operations, Mr De Blasi said.“Although some of these attacks haven’t been attributed to the Russian Federation, overlapping motivations and goals likely indicate a common origin,” he said.“These attacks showcase the breadth of offensive operations that the Russian Federation maintains in its toolkit, and it suggests the potential for future attacks targeting Ukraine and its allies if the situation was to escalate.”On Tuesday, first minister Nicola Sturgeon also warned that the international community must be “vigilant” to retaliatory cyber attacks engineered by the Kremlin and its allies.“I think that is something that we have to be very vigilant about,” she said. “The discussions I’ve mentioned already about domestic impacts, cyber security is one of those.“We know, even before the current situation in Ukraine, that Russia was very active around cyber activity.”Russian state-associated threat groups have consistently used destructive cyber-attacks during military conflicts in the past, Digital Shadows said.This hybrid warfare approach has become a staple of Russian military doctrine and has been observed during its 2008 conflict with Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and against Ukraine since 2014.In an attempt to combat the spread of Russian disinformation and propaganda, the culture secretary has told Ofcom to review the operation of the Kremlin-backed Russia Today (RT) news channel in the UK.Writing to the regulator, Nadine Dorries said RT was “demonstrably part of Russia’s global disinformation campaign”.Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said RT was president Vladimir Putin’s “personal propaganda tool” and argued there is “no reason why it should be allowed to continue to broadcast in this country.”Currently, the NCSC said it was not aware of any specific cyber threats to UK organisations in relation to events in and around Ukraine, while Digital Shadows said “given the tense situation in Ukraine, Moscow is likely to focus on the conflict and on establishing financial and political frameworks to lessen the impact of Western sanctions,” rather than pursuing cyber operations.However, John Hultquist, a vice-president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, a cyber security consultancy, said there was likely to be an increase in “more aggressive information operations and disruptive cyber attacks within and outside of Ukraine” as the crisis continues.“Russia’s military intelligence service is the most aggressive of its peers when it comes to cyberattacks and other activity in the sphere,” he added. “We have seen them carry out DDoS attacks on several occasions which they use to harass and undermine institutions.“It’s also important not to misjudge the purpose of these attacks – the disruption they cause is designed to intimidate and undermine and is not an end in itself. Furthermore, they may be timed or accompanied by other elements to magnify their psychological impact.” More

More countries are adopting policies that coerce women into having more children, a report has found.Around three in ten nations across the globe now have pronatalist policies that encourage citizens to have more children, according to charity Population Matters.Researchers, who examined data from the United Nations, noted a substantial rise from the ten per cent of nations that enacted such policies in 1976.The paper highlighted examples of pronatalism being pursued in countries such as Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Iran and China.However, it also warned politicians in the US and Germany are beginning to champion parallel policies.Monica Scigliano, the report’s author, said: “When people think of coercive population policy, their minds often go to examples like China and India, in which leaders wanted to limit population growth by forcing women to have fewer children.“Now, however, with birth rates declining and in some cases emigration reversing population trends, that has changed.“As people continue to choose smaller families, more governments across the world are resorting to coercive tactics, depriving people of their reproductive rights in order to increase their populations.”Ms Scigliano, a policy adviser, said nationalism can spawn a “toxic brand of pronatalism” which signifies an “almost inevitable threat to sexual and reproductive health and rights”.Researchers warned nationalist governments are infringing on women’s reproductive and sexual freedom rights – suggesting “right-wing, populist and nationalist administrations are stigmatising women who choose to have smaller families as unpatriotic”.The proponents of pronatalist policies sometimes believe in the deeply racist and xenophobic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory which maintains Christian and European populations and their culture will be eradicated due to immigrants from Muslim countries relocating overseas to escape human rights abuses.The report noted Viktor Orban, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, has proposed “a comprehensive agreement with Hungarian women” to bear more children. The leader promotes debt-free education for women but only if they have at least three children.He has also pledged that women who give birth to four or more children need not ever pay income tax again.“We want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender,” Mr Orban has previously said.Researchers also drew attention to pronatalist policies in Poland where a near-total abortion ban was enacted last October – further tightening the nation’s already highly restrictive abortion laws and triggering the largest protests in the country since the collapse of communism.Under the new laws, it is now illegal to have an abortion in cases where there are foetal defects. Before that, although terminating a pregnancy has long been illegal in Poland, foetal abnormalities were one of the exceptions where an abortion was permitted, along with cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s life is at risk.Before the stringent new abortion rules were rolled out, some 98 per cent of the tiny number of legal abortions which occurred in the predominantly Catholic nation were cases of foetal defects.Campaigners have blamed the new for the recent death of a 30-year-old pregnant woman, named only as Izabela, who died after she was blocked from having an emergency operation as doctors said they had to wait until they could stop hearing her baby’s heartbeat.Antonina Lewandowska, an abortion rights campaigner who is one of the report’s authors, said anti-abortion campaigners in Poland forced doctors into “such a state of fear” that they preferred to let Izabela “go into septic shock” than provide her with an abortion earlier on and therefore “save her life”.She said: “They are terrified of prosecution and stigma, as the pro-natalist anti-choice movements would probably eat them alive. On the other hand, there is a group of medical professionals that are rather comfortable with the current situation.“As it lets them argue that medical negligence happens due to that ‘freezing effect’ of an abhorrent law rather than their own incompetence, mistake or deliberate choice to not provide their patients with necessary medical care – an abortion – due to their personal beliefs.“In both cases, it is clear – aggressive, fundamentalist pronatalism paved the way for violating human rights in Poland.”The report is titled Welcome to Gilead, a reference to The Handmaid’s Tale – a 1985 dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, which is set in a fervently patriarchal, totalitarian state where women are forced to bear children for a governing class of men.Robin Maynard, director of Population Matters, said: “Coercive pronatalism is not simply a manifestation of patriarchy or misogyny but can be a product of political and economic forces entirely indifferent to women, for whom they exist simply as productive or non-productive wombs.“These regimes are instrumentalising women’s bodies to serve nationalistic, economic and patriarchal interests. Violating sexual and reproductive health and rights is never justified. It is imperative we all defend them, wherever they are threatened, and for whatever reason.”The report warned world leaders are anxious women deciding to have fewer children will impede their “economic and political goals”.“Pronatalism is often linked to a restrictive, patriarchal ‘pro-family’ agenda and the promotion of ethnic nationalism, based frequently on religious orthodoxy and hostility to multiculturalism and immigration,” researchers added. More

Former president Barack Obama slightly squinted and bit his lip in characteristic fashion as he said: “Now she is all alone,” to his adviser. He had spent three hours alone with Angela Merkel in Hotel Adelon in Berlin. It was late November 2016. Donald Trump had just been elected the 45th president of the US and Obama was worried as he prepared to leave office. Only one individual, he thought, could keep the liberal world order alive while America was taking leave of its geopolitical senses. And that person was the German chancellor.But Merkel had decided not to seek another term after the German federal elections in September 2017. Obama was in the German capital to make her change her mind. He succeeded. Merkel was persuaded that it was her duty to carry on the baton of liberal internationalism, free trade and democracy. At least for the next four years.“I noticed a tear in her eye as we left,” Obama’s speechwriter Ben Rhodes later noted when he recounted the rendezvous between the two leaders. At least, that is the story as told in a fly-on-the-wall account by the editor of newspaper Die Welt. In the next four years, it was Merkel who sought to salvage the Paris climate accord and it was she who maintained the geopolitical pressure on Vladimir Putin when Trump did the opposite.If anything is Merkel’s legacy, it is her custodianship of the liberal world order. Angela Dorothea Merkel (nee Kastler) is, above all, a pragmatic foreign politician. Whereas her immediate predecessors – her mentor, the Christian democrat Helmut Kohl (1982-98) and the social democrat Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005) are primarily remembered for domestic policies, Merkel was a foreign-policy politician. Kohl presided over German unification and Schroeder reformed the welfare state. Merkel’s legacy, now that she really is standing down, has been international.Evidence, deliberation, expertsMerkel used state intervention on a massive scale to rescue the world economy after the 2008 financial crash. She embraced anti-austerity policies to save the euro. She was always pragmatic. As she told me in 2008: “I want as much market economics as possible, with as much state intervention as necessary.” When reminded that this was reminiscent of socialist politics from the 1960s, she just smiled and shrugged, “Yes, and, so what if it works?” More