Russia’s growing economic and military cooperation with China, North Korea and Iran is threatening Europe, the Indo-Pacific and North America, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Tuesday.
The outgoing Biden administration’s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, heads to Brussels on Tuesday for talks with European allies concerned that President-elect Donald Trump could abandon Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Russia has deployed up to 200 military instructors to Equatorial Guinea in recent weeks to protect the presidency, sources told Reuters, showing Moscow is expanding its footprint in West Africa despite a recent defeat in Mali.
Nato chief warns of threat from Russian ties with China, Iran, North Korea
Russia’s growing economic and military cooperation with China, North Korea and Iran is threatening Europe, the Indo-Pacific and North America, said Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Tuesday.
Rutte, in what appeared to be a message to the next US administration as president-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, underlined the importance of transatlantic unity and continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Speaking before talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, Rutte outlined what he saw as the dangers posed by North Korean and Iranian military assistance for Russia.
“At the same time, China backs Russia’s economy, enables its defence industry and amplifies its narrative all over the world stage,” said Rutte.
“Russia working together with North Korea, Iran and China is not only threatening Europe, it’s threatening peace and security, yes, here in Europe, but also in the Indo-Pacific and in North America.”
Trump has criticised the scale of Western aid to Kyiv and has said he will end the conflict in Ukraine swiftly, without saying how. His victory in the US presidential election has caused concern in Kyiv and other European capitals about the degree of future US commitment to helping Ukraine.
Russia is advancing at its fastest rate since 2022 despite taking heavy losses, and Ukraine said last week it had clashed with some of an estimated 11,000 North Korean troops deployed to Russia’s Kursk region.
Kyiv is now battling to put itself in the strongest position for any negotiations, including by securing more arms and holding out on the battlefield. A senior Ukrainian official has told Reuters the next four to five months will be pivotal.
“We must recommit to stay the course of the war and we must do more than just keep Ukraine in the fight,” said Rutte.
“We need to raise the cost for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and his enabling authoritarian threats by providing Ukraine with the support it needs to change the trajectory of the conflict.”
Macron said he would continue to push for aid to be sent to Ukraine for as long as necessary.
“It is the only way towards negotiations and I want to be clear: when the time comes, nothing should be decided on Ukraine without the Ukrainians and on Europe without the Europeans,” he said.
Blinken heads to Europe for Ukraine talks before Trump’s new presidency
The outgoing Biden administration’s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, heads to Brussels on Tuesday for talks with European allies concerned that Trump could abandon Ukraine in its war with Russia.
In his first overseas trip since Trump’s November election victory, Secretary of State Blinken will stop in Brussels ahead of scheduled visits to Peru and Brazil later this week, according to an announcement.
In meetings with Nato and European Union officials, Blinken will “discuss support for Ukraine in its defence against Russia’s aggression”, said the State Department announcement, without elaborating on what message he will deliver.
As well as providing billions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine, President Joe Biden worked to expand Nato and rallied countries around the world to isolate Russia in the wake of Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
Biden officials have said they will push to deploy aid already appropriated for Ukraine before Trump takes office on 20 January, in hopes of helping Kyiv’s forces push back Russian troops, who have been gaining territory.
“We are working hard to leave Ukraine in as strong a position as possible, both by surging assistance between now and the end of the administration and coordinating with partners around the world to ensure they are ready to step into any breach,” said a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Russian power creeps across West Africa
Russia has deployed up to 200 military instructors to Equatorial Guinea in recent weeks to protect the presidency, sources told Reuters, showing Moscow is expanding its footprint in West Africa despite a recent defeat in Mali.
The sources said the Russians were training elite guards in the two main cities of the tiny oil-exporting country of 1.7 million people, where US energy firms invested billions of dollars in the first decade of the century before scaling down.
The deployment fits into a wider pattern of waning Western influence and increasing Russian interventions in West and Central Africa, where Moscow has sent thousands of mercenaries to protect military regimes and help them fight insurgents.
For Russia, the assignments are a way to make money from government fees and economic opportunities in mining or energy, while defying the West as part of a global geopolitical confrontation playing out most dramatically in Ukraine.
In Equatorial Guinea, where 82-year-old President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled since seizing power in a coup in 1979 and is grooming his favourite son to succeed him, Russian security could ward off any threat to the ruling dynasty.
On a visit to Moscow in September, Obiang thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for sending “instructors” to strengthen Equatorial Guinea’s defences, reported the state news agency Tass.
Reuters’ sources said a key aim for the Russians was to protect Obiang’s high-living son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin, the multi-millionaire vice-president and presumed successor.
He has been the subject of investigations, criminal charges, sanctions and asset seizures in the US, France and Britain over embezzlement and money laundering.
Pentagon leaker Teixeira faces sentencing
Prosecutors will urge a US judge on Tuesday to sentence Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to nearly 17 years in prison for leaking online highly classified military documents, including records related to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Teixeira (22) will appear before a federal judge in Boston for sentencing after pleading guilty to perpetrating what U.S. prosecutors called “one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history”.
Teixeira, who has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2023, pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information relating to national defence over a leak last year of a trove of classified records to a group of gamers on the messaging app Discord.
Teixeira is slated to face a court-martial in March on separate military charges brought by the Air Force that he obstructed justice and failed to obey a lawful order. His military lawyers are negotiating a resolution of the case, according to his defence team.
Before his arrest, Teixeira had been an airman 1st class at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he worked as a cyber defence operations journeyman, or information technology support specialist.
Despite being a low-level airman, Teixeira held a top-secret security clearance, and starting in January 2022 began accessing hundreds of classified documents related to topics including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Teixeira shared classified information on the chatting app Discord in private servers while bragging that he had access to “stuff for Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China”, according to prosecutors.
He did so even though his superiors admonished him twice in 2022 about his handling of classified information and warned him against conducting deep dives into intelligence information, prosecutors say.
His leaks included information concerning the provision of equipment to Ukraine and how it would be used, following Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Teixeira’s lawyers in court papers said he “sincerely regrets the decisions that he made and the harm it has caused”, and they urged US District Judge Indira Talwani to only impose an 11-year term.
They said the autistic, isolated young man’s intent was never to harm the US but to educate friends he made online about world events, including the Ukraine war.
Ukraine to set up three new joint ventures with European arms makers
Ukraine is close to setting up three new joint ventures with European weapons producers in its effort to boost arms output during the war with Russia, the first deputy prime minister said.
Yulia Svyrydenko, who is also the economy minister, said five joint ventures with Western weapon producers had already been set up, including with German and Lithuanian companies. Several arms producers have opened offices in Ukraine.
“We have three more agreements with European companies in the final stages to set up joint ventures,” Svyrydenko told Reuters in an interview in the government headquarters in central Kyiv. She gave no details about the planned new ventures or the scale of the investments.
Ukraine’s military-industrial production has exploded in size with state and private companies rapidly increasing their production and innovating, as the government has scrambled to respond to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The authorities are still tight-lipped about details of the defence industry, but President Volodymyr Zelensky said in October that Ukraine could produce four million drones annually and was ramping up its military production, including missiles, a “drone missile” and transport vehicles.
To maintain momentum, the government has lured foreign funds and technology to transform domestic weapon production, boosting ammunition and equipment supplies to the battlefield against a better-equipped and larger enemy.
Germany’s weapons giant Rheinmetall has already launched its first defence factory in Ukraine, specializing in the maintenance of combat vehicles, with plans to start manufacturing Lynx infantry fighting vehicles by the year’s end.
Britain-based BAE Systems, Franco-German KDNS, the Babcock defence and aerospace company and MyDefence, which specialises in counter-drone technology, have teamed up with Ukrainian producers and set up local offices.
German weapons producer Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft is building a service centre in Ukraine jointly with a private Ukrainian weapons producer, said Svyrydenko.
Russian doctor jailed for 5½ years after being publicly denounced
A Russian court sentenced a Moscow paediatrician to 5½ years in a penal colony on Tuesday, said Russian media, after the mother of one of her patients publicly denounced her over comments about Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Prosecutors had last week asked for a six-year sentence for Nadezhda Buyanova for spreading “fakes” about the Russian army after the mother recorded a video in which she denounced the 68-year-old doctor over remarks that Buyanova has denied making.
More than 1,000 people have been criminally prosecuted in Russia for speaking out against the war, according to the rights project OVD-Info, and more than 20,000 have been detained for protesting.
Buyanova’s case is part of a trend in which more people in Russia are denouncing others for alleged political crimes. OVD-Info has recorded 21 such criminal prosecutions since the conflict in Ukraine began in February 2022.
Eva Levenberg, a lawyer for the rights group, told Reuters a further 175 people had faced lower-level administrative cases for “discrediting” the Russian army as a consequence of people informing on them, and 79 of these had been fined.
“I can’t get my head around it,” Buyanova, her grey hair closely cropped, told reporters before the verdict.
As Judge Olga Fedina pronounced her guilty, the courtroom erupted in protest. Several cried “Shame!”, said Russian media.
“The sentence is monstrously cruel,” Buyanova’s lawyer, Oscar Cherdzhiev, was quoted as saying by news outlet Mediazona.
The case against Buyanova was launched in February by the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes.
It was prompted by a complaint by Anastasia Akinshina, who had taken her seven-year-old son to see Buyanova at her clinic. The boy’s father, from whom Akinshina was divorced, had been killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Akinshina recorded a video in which she said Buyanova had referred to her child’s father as a “legitimate target of Ukraine”.
The video was posted by Mash, a Telegram channel with more than three million subscribers that is close to Russian security services.
Buyanova, who denied making the statement, was placed in pre-trial detention in April.
Medvedev says Europe is trying to escalate Ukraine conflict
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev accused European leaders on Tuesday of seeking to dangerously escalate the Ukraine conflict following the re-election of Trump.
Medvedev, a senior security official, wrote on Telegram that European politicians were aiming to “push the conflict with Russia into an irreversible phase” while they could and warned against allowing Kyiv to use Western long-range missiles to fire at targets inside Russia.
Medvedev dismissed what he called “ultimatums” issued by German opposition leader and possible next chancellor Friedrich Merz about Ukraine’s use of such weapons as “electioneering in nature”.
“It is clear that these missiles are not capable of changing anything significantly in the course of military operations,” he said.
French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer reaffirmed their support for Kyiv during talks in Paris on Monday, while France’s foreign minister urged Ukraine’s allies not to prejudge how Trump will handle the conflict.
“Generally speaking, it is surprising to what extent the current generation of European politicians wants to drag the war into their territory,” said Medvedev.
Russia bans ‘child-free propaganda’ to try to boost birth rate
Russia’s lower house of parliament voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban what authorities cast as pernicious propaganda for a child-free way of life, hoping to boost a faltering birth rate.
Official data released in September put the birth rate at its lowest in a quarter of a century while mortality rates are up as Moscow’s war in Ukraine rages on. The Kremlin called the figures “catastrophic for the future of the nation”.
Putin, who has cast Russia as a bastion of “traditional values” locked in an existential struggle with a decadent West, has encouraged women to have at least three children, saying that will help secure the future of Russians. There are already financial and other incentives.
The law, expected to be swiftly approved by the upper house of parliament and Putin, joins other restrictions on free expression including a ban on content deemed to promote “non-traditional lifestyles” such as same-sex relationships or gender fluidity, as well as on dissenting accounts of the conflict in Ukraine.
Authors of "child-free propaganda" will be subject to fines of up to 400,000 roubles ($4,100) for individuals, twice that amount for officials, and up to five million roubles ($51,000) for legal entities.
Some 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, which is 16,000 fewer than in the first half of 2023 and the lowest since 1999. The number of deaths jumped by 49,000. However, immigration jumped by 20%. DM