The yellow-and-blue flag of Ukraine has become a powerful symbol for millions of people across the Western world who want to express their solidarity with the victims of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Adopted officially in 1992, the year after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union, the banner represents the country’s pride in its status as Europe’s bread basket — just picture endless wheat fields under blue skies.
In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the colors were displayed on some of Europe’s most famous landmarks, from the Eiffel Tower to the Brandenburg Gate.
Over the course of the year since, the flag has spread to all corners of the Continent and beyond, in the hands of protesters, on official government buildings in London and Washington, and in the windows of private homes and cars.
Brandenburg Gate in Berlin | John Mcdougall/AFP via Getty ImagesEuropean Commission headquarters | Nicolas Maeterlinck/AFP via Getty ImagesMunich’s television tower | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty ImagesThe Eiffel Tower | Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images
The flag not only came to signify Ukraine’s brave resistance in a war that ended decades of peace in Europe — it quickly became the hallmark of European unity in the face of the biggest state-backed threat to the Continent’s security this century.
On a visit to Kyiv in January, Charles Michel, the European Council’s president, captured the point.
“With the Maidan uprising, 22 years after gaining your independence, you, Ukrainians said: We are European,” Michel said. “So today, I have come to Ukraine to tell you: We are all Ukrainian.”
Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty ImagesNancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris and Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesJulien De Rosa/AFP via Getty ImagesBulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
Beyond political symbols, Putin’s invasion triggered the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
Within weeks, European governments rushed to welcome in millions of Ukrainians, skipping administrative procedures at a speed that caused some to raise eyebrows.
Benedicte Simonart was one of the founders of a Brussels-based NGO BEforUkraine, whose logo features the Belgian and Ukrainian flags side by side. She was “struck” by the solidarity of those early days. “It was unbelievable: People kept coming to us, they were so eager to help,” she said.
“We felt very close to the Ukrainians,” she added. “Ukraine is the door to Europe, it’s almost as if it was our home.”
As the war has dragged on, European resolve has remained stable at a political level and in surveys of public opinion. The question is how long this will last if the conflict continues.
“One year ago, Europe came together very strongly and very supportively,” said Erik Jones, director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.
“I’m very interested to see what this is going to do over the longer term in the way Europeans think about themselves,” Jones added. “As we approach this one-year anniversary, I think it’s really important to ask: Do we have the same power as a community to support Ukraine through what may be a very long conflict?”
For now at least, Europe and Ukraine seem closer than ever. Ukrainians, through the voice of their President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, make no secret of their desire to join the EU — the sooner, the better.
And the powerful symbolism of the flag continues to color European towns and cities, a gesture that’s welcomed by Ukrainians who are now living in Europe.
“The flag is very important: it’s the symbol of Ukraine, and we need to keep displaying it, to talk about it, to remind people,” said Artem Datsii. “Because the war goes on.”
Datsii, 21, is a student at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where he moved before the war. He has not seen his parents, who live in Kyiv, for a year, but they speak regularly over the phone.
“At home, everyone is afraid that something will happen on the 24th,” Datsii said, referring to the invasion’s one-year marker. “The Russians love anniversaries.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
The EU has failed to sign off on a much-anticipated round of sanctions against Russia, leaving the bloc struggling to finalize a deal in time to mark the first anniversary on Friday of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Talks will now run into Ukraine’s official commemorations of its first year at war, casting into doubt European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent promise to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv to deliver a 10th round of sanctions by then.
Diplomats said agreement had been reached on nearly all of the package, but Poland was objecting to proposed restrictions on imports of synthetic rubber that it claims aren’t strong enough.
While acknowledging holding up the package, Warsaw denied being the problem. “We are not blocking sanctions,” a Polish official said on condition of anonymity. “We just want to have sanctions that make sense.”
All other points have been agreed on, four EU diplomats said.
The Commission was continuing talks with some EU countries on Thursday evening in search of a compromise, according to two of the diplomats. Another meeting of ambassadors from the 27 EU member countries will be held on Friday morning, four diplomats said, to try and secure a deal.
Poland’s objection related to proposed restrictions on imports of synthetic rubber from Russia. Sanctions hawks had called for a complete ban, but in an effort to appease other countries that rely on those imports the Commission suggested setting a quota limit at 560,000 metric tons, an EU diplomat said.
That’s even higher than current imports, thePolish official said. While several EU diplomats said Poland had been the most outspoken opponent of this quota, others have also expressed their discontent over derogations for certain companies. One EU diplomat said that the proposed quota “makes the sanction meaningless.”
Trade data show that imports from Russia haven’t exceeded that quota in the last decade.
The current package already excludes other controversial points, like a ban on Russian diamond imports, making it easier to sanction the family members and the entourages of oligarchs, or sanctioning certain employees of state nuclear company Rosatom.
Patience was running out, with another EU diplomat calling Poland’s move “unsustainable.”
Victor Jack contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cautiously welcomed Beijing’s efforts toward ending the war in Ukraine and said he would like to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss China’s proposals.
Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv Friday to mark the first anniversary of Moscow’s invasion, Zelenskyy said he was open to considering some aspects of the 12-point “position paper” published by the Chinese foreign ministry. Both NATO and the EU have criticized the initiative, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying that “China has taken sides” in the Ukraine conflict.
Beijing claims to have a neutral stance in the war but also has said it has a “no limits” relationship with Moscow and has refused to criticize President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said a meeting with Xi could be “useful” to both countries and for global security. “As far as I know, China respects historical integrity,” he told reporters in Kyiv.
“I believe that the fact that China started talking about Ukraine is not bad,” Zelenskyy said, according to the Associated Press. “But the question is what follows the words. The question is in the steps and where they will lead to.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak called the Chinese proposals “unrealistic” in a tweet on Saturday.
Zelenskyy also warned Beijing against providing Russia with weapons, something of increasing concern to Western governments. China is considering providing drones and ammunition to help Moscow’s war efforts in Ukraine, a person familiar with the matter told POLITICO on Friday.
“I very much want to believe that China will not deliver weapons to Russia, and for me this is very important,” Zelenskyy said, according to Reuters.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday said the alliance is closely monitoring China’s activities, adding that Beijing sending lethal aid to Moscow would be a “very big mistake.”
French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday welcomed Beijing’s initiative on the conflict in Ukraine and said he will visit China in early April and seek Chinese help in ending the war. “The fact that China is engaging in peace efforts is a good thing,” Macron said, according to French media reports.
The French leader also asked Beijing “not to supply any arms to Russia.” And he sought Beijing’s aid to “exert pressure on Russia to ensure it never uses chemical or nuclear weapons and it stops this aggression prior to negotiations,” according to the reports.
Meanwhile, Beijing announced on Saturday that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko will visit China on a state visit from February 28 to March 2. The Belarusian foreign ministry confirmed the planned visit.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, has backed Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and allowed its territory to be used in the Russian assault. Lukashenko said last week that his country was prepared to join Russia’s war against Ukraine, if attacked.
Zelenskyy also said that any proposal to end the war would be acceptable only if it led to Putin pulling his troops out of all occupied Ukrainian territory.
Amid growing concerns in the West about Ukraine’s ability to recover all its territory, NATO’s biggest European members — Germany, France and the U.K. — are putting forward a defense pact with Ukraine as a way to encourage Kyiv toward peace talks with Moscow, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing officials from the three governments.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Zelensky at a meeting earlier this month in Paris that Kyiv needed to start considering peace talks with Moscow, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the conversation.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
KYIV — As the distant howl of air raid sirens echoes around them, a dozen Ukrainian soldiers clamber out of camouflaged tents perched on a hill off a road just outside Kyiv, hidden from view by a thick clump of trees. The soldiers, pupils of a drone academy, gather around a white Starlink antenna, puffing at cigarettes and doomscrolling on their phones — taking a break between classes, much like students around the world do.
But this isn’t your average university.
The soldiers have come here to study air reconnaissance techniques and to learn how to use drones — most of them commercial ones — in a war zone. Their training, as well as the supply chains that facilitate the delivery of drones to Ukraine, are kept on the down low. The Ukrainians need to keep their methods secret not only from the Russian invaders, but also from the tech firms that manufacture the drones and provide the high-speed satellite internet they rely on, who have chafed at their machines being used for lethal purposes.
Drones are essential for the Ukrainians: The flying machines piloted from afar can spot the invaders approaching, reduce the need for soldiers to get behind enemy lines to gather intelligence, and allow for more precise strikes, keeping civilian casualties down. In places like Bakhmut, a key Donetsk battleground, the two sides engage in aerial skirmishes; flocks of drones buzz ominously overhead, spying, tracking, directing artillery.
So, to keep their flying machines in the air, the Ukrainians have adapted, adjusting their software, diversifying their supply chains, utilizing the more readily available commercial drones on the battlefield and learning to work around the limitations and bans foreign corporations have imposed or threatened to impose.
Enter: The Dronarium Academy.
Private drone schools and nongovernmental organizations around Ukraine are training thousands of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) pilots for the army. Dronarium, which before Russia’s invasion last year used to shoot glossy commercial drone footage and gonzo political protests, now provides five-day training sessions to soldiers in the Kyiv Oblast. In the past year, around 4,500 pilots, most of them now in the Ukrainian armed forces, have taken Dronarium’s course.
What’s on the curriculum
On the hill outside Kyiv, behind the thicket of trees, break time’s over and school’s back in session. After the air raid siren stops,some soldiers grab their flying machines and head to a nearby field; others return to their tents to study theory.
A key lesson: How to make civilian drones go the distance on the battlefield.
“In the five days we spend teaching them how to fly drones, one and a half days are spent on training for the flight itself,” a Dronarium instructor who declined to give his name over security concerns but uses the call sign “Prometheus” told POLITICO. “Everything else is movement tactics, camouflage, preparatory process, studying maps.”
Drone reconnaissance teams work in pairs, like snipers, Prometheus said. One soldier flies a drone using a keypad; their colleague looks at the map, comparing it with the video stream from the drone and calculating coordinates. The drone teams “work directly with artillery,” Prometheus continued. “We transfer the picture from the battlefield to the servers and to the General Staff. Thanks to us, they see what they are doing and it helps them hit the target.”
Private drone schools and nongovernmental organizations around Ukraine are training thousands of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) pilots for the army | John Moore/Getty Images
Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of these drone school students were civilians. One, who used to be a blogger and videogame streamer but is now an intelligence pilot in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas, goes by the call sign “Public.” When he’s on the front line, he must fly his commercial drones in any weather — it’s the only way to spot enemy tanks moving toward his unit’s position.
“Without them,” Public said, “it is almost impossible to notice the equipment, firing positions and personnel in advance. Without them, it becomes very difficult to coordinate during attack or defense. One drone can sometimes save dozens of lives in one flight.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher: “If you don’t fly, these tanks will kill your comrades. So, you fly. The drone freezes, falls and you pick up the next one. Because the lives of those targeted by a tank are more expensive than any drone.”
Army of drones
The war has made the Bayraktar military drone a household name, immortalized in song by the Ukrainians. Kyiv’s UAV pilots also use Shark, RQ-35 Heidrun, FLIRT Cetus and other military-grade machines.
“It is difficult to have an advantage over Russia in the number of manpower and weapons. Russia uses its soldiers as meat,” Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said earlier this month. But every Ukrainian life, he continued, “is important to us. Therefore, the only way is to create a technological advantage over the enemy.”
Until recently, the Ukrainian army didn’t officially recognize the position of drone operator. It was only in January that Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhnyi ordered the army to create 60 companies made up of UAV pilots, indicating also that Kyiv planned to scale up its own production of drones. Currently, Ukrainian firms make only 10 percent of the drones the country needs for the war, according to military volunteer and founder of the Air Intelligence Support Center Maria Berlinska.
In the meantime, many of Ukraine’s drone pilots prefer civilian drones made by Chinese manufacturer DJI — Mavics and Matrices — which are small, relatively cheap at around €2,500 a pop, with decent zoom lenses and user-friendly operations.
Choosing between a military drone and a civilian one “depends on the goal of the pilot,” said Prometheus, the Dronarium instructor. “Larger drones with wings fly farther and can do reconnaissance far behind enemy lines. But at some point, you lose the connection with it and just have to wait until it comes back. Mavics have great zoom and can hang in the air for a long time, collecting data without much risk for the drone.”
But civilian machines, made for hobbyists not soldiers, last two, maybe three weeks in a war zone. And DJI last year said it would halt sales to both Kyiv and Moscow, making it difficult to replace the machines that are lost on the battlefield.
In response, Kyiv has loosened export controls for commercial drones, and is buying up as many as it can, often using funds donated by NGOs such as United24 “Army of Drones” initiative. Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry said that in the three months since the initiative launched, it has purchased 1,400 military and commercial drones and facilitated training for pilots, often via volunteers. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Serhiy Prytula Charitable Foundation said it has purchased more than 4,100 drones since Russia’s full-scale invasion began last year — most were DJI’s Mavic 3s, along with the company’s Martice 30s and Matrice 300s.
But should Ukraine be concerned about the fact many of its favorite drones are manufactured by a Chinese company, given Beijing’s “no limits” partnership with Moscow?
Choosing between a military drone and a civilian one “depends on the goal of the pilot,” said Prometheus, the Dronarium instructor | Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images
DJI, the largest drone-maker in the world, has publicly claimed it can’t obtain user data and flight information unless the user submits it to the company. But its alleged ties to the Chinese state, as well as the fact the U.S. has blacklisted its technology (over claims it was used to surveil ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang), have raised eyebrows. DJI has denied both allegations.
Asked if DJI’s China links worried him, Prometheus seemed unperturbed.
“We understand who we are dealing with — we use their technology in our interests,” he said. “Indeed, potentially our footage can be stored somewhere on Chinese servers. However, they store terabytes of footage from all over the world every day, so I doubt anyone could trace ours.”
Dealing with Elon
Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced it had moved to restrict the Ukrainian military’s use of its Starlink satellite internet service because it was using it to control drones. The U.S. space company has been providing internet to Ukraine since last February — losing access would be a big problem.
“It is not that our army goes blind if Starlink is off,” said Prometheus, the drone instructor. “However, we do need to have high-speed internet to correct artillery fire in real-time. Without it, we will have to waste more shells in times of ongoing shell shortages.”
But while the SpaceX announcement sparked outcry from some of Kyiv’s backers, as yet, Ukraine’s operations haven’t been affected by the move, Digital Transformation Minister Fedorov told POLITICO.
Prometheus had a theory as to why: “I think Starlink will stay with us. It is impossible to switch it off only for drones. If Musk completely turns it off, he will also have to turn it off for hospitals that use the same internet to order equipment and even perform online consultations during surgeries at the war front. Will he switch them off too?”
And if Starlink does go down, the Ukrainians will manage, Prometheus said with a wry smile: “We have our tools to fix things.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Europe is on track to kick its addiction to Russian fossil fuels, but can’t seem to replicate that success with nuclear energy a year into the Ukraine war.
The EU’s economic sanctions on Russian coal and oil permanently reshaped trade and left Moscow in a “much diminished position,” according to the International Energy Agency. Coal imports have dropped to zero, and it is illegal for Russian crude to be imported by ship; only four countries still receive it by pipeline.
That’s compared to the bloc getting 54 percent of its hard coal imports and one-quarter of its oil from Russia in 2020.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to turn off the gas taps while the EU turned increasingly to liquefied natural gas deliveries from elsewhere caused the reliance on Moscow to tumble from 40 percent of the bloc’s gas supply before the war to less than 10 percent now.
But nuclear energy has proved a trickier knot for EU countries to untie — for both historical and practical reasons.
As competition in the global nuclear sector atrophied following the Cold War, Soviet-built reactors in the EU remained locked into tailor-made fuel from Russia, leaving Moscow to play an outsized role.
In 2021, Russia’s state-owned atomic giant Rosatom supplied the bloc’s reactors with 20 percent of their natural uranium, handled a quarter of their conversion services and provided a third of their enrichment services, according to the EU’s Euratom Supply Agency (ESA).
That same year, EU countries paid Russia €210 million for raw uranium exports, compared to the €88 billion the bloc paid Moscow for oil.
The value of imports of Russia-related nuclear technology and fuel worldwide rose to more than $1 billion (€940 billion) last year, according to research from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). In the EU, the value of Russia’s nuclear exports fell in some countries like Bulgaria and the Czech Republic but rose in others, including Slovakia, Hungary and Finland, RUSI data shared with POLITICO showed.
“While it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions from what is ultimately a time-limited and incomplete dataset, it does clearly show that there are still dependencies on, and a market for, Russian nuclear fuel,” said Darya Dolzikova, a research fellow at RUSI.
Although uranium from Russia could be replaced by imports from elsewhere within a year — and most nuclear plants have at least one-year extra reserves, according to ESA head Agnieszka Kaźmierczak — countries with Russian-built VVER reactors rely onfuel made by Moscow.
“There are 18 Russian-designed nuclear power plants in [the EU] and all of them would be affected by sanctions,” said Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow at Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. “This remains a deeply divided issue in the European Union.”
That’s why the bloc has struggled over the past year to target Russia’s nuclear industry — despite repeated calls from Ukraine and some EU countries to hit Rosatom for its role in overseeing the occupied Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and possibly supplying equipment to the Russian arms industry.
“The whole question of sanctioning the nuclear sector … was basically killed before there was ever a meaningful discussion,” said a diplomat from one EU country who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The most vocal opponent has been Hungary, one of five countries — along with Slovakia, Bulgaria, Finland and the Czech Republic — to have Russian-built reactors for which there is no alternative fuel so far.
Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have signed contractswith U.S. firm Westinghouse to replace the Russian fuel, according to ESA chief Kaźmierczak, but the process could take “three years” as national regulators also need to analyze and license the new fuel.
The “bigger problem” across the board is enrichment and conversion, she added, due to chronic under-capacity worldwide. It could take “seven to 10 years” to replace Rosatom — and that timeline is conditional on significant investments in the sector.
While Finland last year scrapped a deal to build a Russian-made nuclear plant on the country’s west coast — prompting a lawsuit from Rosatom — others aren’t changing tack.
Slovakia’s new Mochovce-3 Soviet VVER-design reactor came online earlier this month, which Russia will supply with fuel until at least 2026.
Russia’s nuclear energy was not initially included in EU sanctions over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine | Eric Piermont/AFP via Getty Images
Hungary, meanwhile, deepened ties with Moscow by giving the go-ahead to the construction of two more reactors at its Paks plant last summer, underwritten by a €10 billion Russian loan.
“Even if [they] were to come into existence, nuclear sanctions would be filled with exemptions because we are dependent on Russian nuclear fuel,” said a diplomat from a second EU country.
This article has been updated with charts depicting Russia’s nuclear exports.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
BERLIN — In an earlier life as a reporter in Moscow, I once knocked on the door of an apartment listed as the home address of the boss of company that, our year-long investigation showed, was involved in an elaborate scheme to siphon billions of dollars out of Russia’s state railways through rigged tenders.
To my surprise, the man who opened the door wore only his underwear. He confirmed that his identity had been used to register the shell company. But he wasn’t a businessman; he was a chauffeur. The real owner, he told us, was his boss, one of the bankers we suspected of masterminding the scam. “Mr. Underpants,” as we called him, was amazed that it had taken so long for anyone to take an interest.
Mr. Underpants leapt immediately to mind when, nearly a decade on, I learned that a sulfurous academic dispute had erupted over whether foreign companies really are bailing out of Russia in response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent international sanctions.
Attempting to verify corporate activity in Russia — a land that would give the murkiest offshore haven a run for its money — struck me as a fool’s errand. Company operations are habitually hidden in clouds of lies, false paperwork and bureaucratic errors. What a company says it does in Russia can bear precious little resemblance to reality.
So, who are the rival university camps trying to determine whether there really is a corporate exodus from Russia?
In the green corner (under the olive banner of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland) we have economist Simon Evenett and Niccolò Pisani of the IMD business school in Lausanne. On January 13, they released a working paper which found that less than 9 percent of Western companies (only 120 firms all told) had divested from Russia. Styling themselves as cutting through the hype of corporate self-congratulation, the Swiss-based duo said their “findings challenge the narrative that there is a vast exodus of Western firms leaving the market.”
Nearly 4,000 miles away in New Haven, Connecticut, the Swiss statement triggered uproar in Yale (the blue corner). Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, from the university’s school of management, took the St. Gallen/IMD findings as an affront to his team’s efforts. After all, the headline figure from a list compiled by Yale of corporate retreat from Russia is that 1,300 multinationals have either quit or are doing so. In a series of attacks, most of which can’t be repeated here, Sonnenfeld accused Evenett and Pisani of misrepresenting and fabricating data.
Responding, the deans of IMD and St. Gallen issued a statement on January 20 saying they were “appalled” at the way Sonnenfeld had called the rigor and veracity of their colleagues’ work into question. “We reject this unfounded and slanderous allegation in the strongest possible terms,” they wrote.
Sonnenfeld doubled down, saying the Swiss team was dangerously fueling “Putin’s false narrative” that companies had never left and Russia’s economy was resilient.
That led the Swiss universities again to protest against Sonnenfeld’s criticism and deny political bias, saying that Evenett and Pisani have “had to defend themselves against unsubstantiated attacks and intimidation attempts by Jeff Sonnenfeld following the publication of their recent study.”
How the hell did it all get so acrimonious?
Let’s go back a year.
The good fight
Within weeks of the February 24 invasion, Sonnenfeld was attracting fulsome coverage in the U.S. press over a campaign he had launched to urge big business to pull out of Russia. His team at Yale had, by mid-March, compiled a list of 300 firms saying they would leave that, the Washington Post reported, had gone “viral.”
Making the case for ethical business leadership has been Sonnenfeld’s stock in trade for over 40 years. To give his full job titles, he’s the Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies & Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at the Yale School of Management, as well as founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance.
And, judging by his own comments, Sonnenfeld is convinced of the importance of his campaign in persuading international business leaders to leave Russia: “So many CEOs wanted to be seen as doing the right thing,” Sonnenfeld told the Post. “It was a rare unity of patriotic mission, personal values, genuine concern for world peace, and corporate self-interest.”
Fast forward to November, and Sonnenfeld is basking in the glow of being declared an enemy of the Russian state, having been added to a list of 25 U.S. policymakers and academics barred from the country. First Lady Jill Biden topped the list, but Sonnenfeld was named in sixth place which, as he told Bloomberg, put him “higher than [Senate minority leader] Mitch McConnell.”
Apparently less impressed, the Swiss team had by then drafted a first working paper, dated October 18, challenging Sonnenfeld’s claims of a “corporate exodus” from Russia. This paper, which was not published, was circulated by the authors for review. After receiving a copy (which was uploaded to a Yale server), Sonnenfeld went on the attack.
Apples and oranges
Before we dive in, let’s take a step back and look at what the Yale and Swiss teams are trying to do.
Sonnenfeld is working with the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which launched a collaborative effort to track whether companies are leaving Russia by monitoring open sources, such as regulatory filings and news reports, supported where possible through independent confirmation.
Kyiv keeps score on its Leave Russia site, which at the time of writing said that, of 3,096 companies reviewed, 196 had already exited and a further 1,163 had suspended operations.
Evenett and Pisani are setting a far higher bar, seeking an answer to the binary question of whether a company has actually ditched its equity. It’s not enough to announce you are suspending operations, you have to fully divest your subsidiary and assets such as factories or stores. This is, of course, tough. Can you find a buyer? Will the Russians block your sale?
The duo focuses only on companies based in the G7 or the European Union that own subsidiaries in Russia. Just doing business in Russia doesn’t count; control is necessary. To verify this, they used a business database called ORBIS, which contains records of 400 million companies worldwide.
The first thought to hold onto here, then, is that the scope and methodology of the Yale and Swiss projects are quite different — arguably they are talking about apples and oranges. Yale’s apple cart comprises foreign companies doing business in Russia, regardless of whether they have a subsidiary there. The Swiss orange tree is made up of fewer than half as many foreign companies that own Russian subsidiaries, and are themselves headquartered in countries that have imposed sanctions against the Kremlin.
So, while IKEA gets an ‘A’ grade on the Yale list for shutting its furniture stores and letting 10,000 Russian staff go, it hasn’t made the clean equity break needed to get on the St. Gallen/IMD leavers’ list. The company says “the process of scaling down the business is ongoing.” If you simply have to have those self-assembly bookshelves, they and other IKEA furnishings are available online.
The second thing to keep in mind is that ORBIS aggregates records in Russia, a country where people are willing to serve as nominee directors in return for a cash handout — even a bottle of vodka. Names are often mistranslated when local companies are established — transliteration from Russian to English is very much a matter of opinion — but this can also be a deliberate ruse to throw due diligence sleuths off the trail.
Which takes us back to the top of this story: I’ve done in-depth Russian corporate investigations and still have the indelible memory of those underpants (they were navy blue briefs) to show for it.
Stacking up the evidence
The most obvious issue with the Yale method is that it places a lot of emphasis on what foreign companies say about whether they are pulling out of Russia.
There is an important moral suasion element at play here. Yale’s list is an effective way to name and shame those companies like Unilever and Mondelez — all that Milka chocolate — that admit they are staying in Russia.
But what the supposed good kids — who say they are pulling out — are really up to is a murkier business. Even if a company is an A-grade performer on the Yale list, that does not mean that Russia’s economy is starved of those goods during wartime. There can be many reasons for this. Some companies will rush out a pledge to leave, then dawdle. Others will redirect goods to Russia through middlemen in, say, Turkey, Dubai or China. Some goods will be illegally smuggled. Some companies will have stocks that last a long time. Others might hire my old friend Mr. Underpants to create an invisible corporate structure.
A stroll through downtown Moscow reveals the challenges. Many luxury brands have conspicuously shut up shop but goods from several companies on the Yale A list and B list (companies that have suspended activities in Russia) were still easy to find on one, totally random, shopping trip. The latest Samsung laptops, TVs and phones were readily available, and the shop reported no supply problems. Swatch watches, Jägermeister liquor and Dr. Oetker foods were all also on sale in downtown Moscow, including at the historic GUM emporium across Red Square from the Kremlin.
Swatch watches, Jägermeister liquor and Dr. Oetker foods can all be bought in downtown Moscow, including at the historic GUM emporium across Red Square from the Kremlin | POLITICO
All the companies involved insisted they had ended business in Russia, but acknowledged the difficulties of continued sales. Swatch said the watches available would have to be from old stocks or “a retailer over which the company has no control.” Dr. Oetker said: “To what extent individual trading companies are still selling stocks of our products there is beyond our knowledge.” Jägermeister said: “Unfortunately we cannot prevent our products being purchased by third parties and sold on in Russia without our consent or permission.” Samsung Electronics said it had suspended Russia sales but continued “to actively monitor this complex situation to determine our next steps.”
The larger problem emerging is that sanctions are turning neighboring countries into “trading hubs” that allow key foreign goods to continue to reach the Russian market, cushioning the economic impact.
Full departure can also be ultra slow for Yale’s A-listers. Heineken announced in March 2022 it was leaving Russia but it is still running while it is “working hard to transfer our business to a viable buyer in very challenging circumstances.” It was also easy to find a Black & Decker power drill for sale online from a Russian site. The U.S. company said: “We plan to cease commerce by the end of Q2 of this year following the liquidation of our excess and obsolete inventory in Russia. We will maintain a legal entity to conduct any remaining administrative activities associated with the wind down.”
And those are just consumer goods that are easy to find! Western and Ukrainian security services are naturally more preoccupied about engineering components for Putin’s war machine still being available through tight-lipped foreign companies. Good luck trying to track their continued sales …
Who’s for real?
Faced with this gray zone, St. Gallen/IMD sought to draw up a more black-and-white methodology.
To reach their conclusions, Evenett and Pisani downloaded a list of 36,000 Russian companies from ORBIS that reported at least $1 million in sales in one of the last five years. Filtering out locally owned businesses and duplicate entries whittled down the number of owners of the Russian companies that are themselves headquartered in the G7 or EU to a master list of 1,404 entities. As of the end of November, the authors conclude, 120 companies — or 8.5 percent of the total — had left.
The Swiss team was slow, however, to release its list of 1,404 companies and, once Sonnenfeld gained access to it, he had a field day. He immediately pointed out that it was peppered with names of Russian businesses and businessmen, whom ORBIS identified as being formally domiciled in an EU or G7 country. Sonnenfeld fulminated that St. Gallen/IMD were producing a list of how few Russian companies were quitting Russia, rather than how few Western companies were doing so.
“That hundreds of Russian oligarchs and Russian companies constitute THEIR dataset of ‘1,404 western companies’ is egregious data misrepresentation,” Sonnenfeld wrote in one of several emails to POLITICO challenging the Swiss findings.
Fair criticism? Well, Sonnenfeld’s example of Yandex, the Russian Google, on the list of 1,404 is a good one. Naturally, that’s a big Russian company that isn’t going to leave Russia.
On the other hand, its presence on the list is explicable as it is based in the Netherlands, and is reported to be seeking Putin’s approval to sell its Russian units. “Of course, a large share of Yandex customers and staff are Russian or based in Russia. However, the company has offices in seven countries, including Switzerland, Israel, the U.S., China, and others. What criteria should we use to decide if it is Russian or not for the purpose of our analysis?” St. Gallen/IMD said in a statement.
Answering Sonnenfeld’s specific criticism that its list was skewed by the inclusion of Russian-owned companies, the Swiss team noted that it had modified its criteria to exclude companies based in Cyprus, a favored location for Russian entrepreneurs thanks to its status as an EU member country and its business-friendly tax and legal environment. Yet even after doing so, its conclusions remained similar.
Double knockout
Sonnenfeld, in his campaign to discredit the Swiss findings, has demanded that media, including POLITICO, retract their coverage of Evenett and Pisani’s work. He took to Fortune magazine to call their publication “a fake pro-Putin list of Western companies still doing business in Russia.”
Although he believes Evenett and Pisani’s “less than 9 percent” figure for corporates divesting equity is not credible, he bluntly declined, when asked, to provide a figure of his own.
Instead, he has concentrated on marshaling an old boys’ network — including the odd ex-ambassador — to bolster his cause. Richard Edelman, head of the eponymous public relations outfit, weighed in with an email to POLITICO: “This is pretty bad[.] Obvious Russian disinformation[.] Would you consider a retraction?” he wrote in punctuation-free English. “I know Sonnenfeld well,” he said, adding the two had been classmates in college and business school.
Who you were at school with hardly gets to the heart of what companies are doing in Russia, and what the net effect is on the Russian economy.
The greater pity is that this clash, which falls miles short of the most basic standards of civil academic discourse, does a disservice to the just cause of pressuring big business into dissociating itself from Putin’s murderous regime.
And, at the end of the day, estimates of the number of companies that have fully left Russia are in the same ballpark: The Kyiv School of Economics puts it at less than 200; the Swiss team at 120.
To a neutral outsider, it would look like Sonnenfeld and his mortal enemies are actually pulling in the same direction, trying to work out whether companies are really quitting. Yet both methodologies are problematic. What companies and databases say offers an imprecise answer to the strategic question: What foreign goods and services are available to Russians? Does a year of war mean no Samsung phones? No. Does it mean Heineken has sold out? Not yet, no.
This has now been submerged in a battle royal between Sonnenfeld and the Swiss researchers.
Appalled at his attacks on their work, St. Gallen and IMD finally sent a cease-and-desist letter to Sonnenfeld.
Yale Provost Scott Strobel is trying to calm the waters. In a letter dated February 6 and seen by POLITICO, he argued that academic freedom protected the speech of its faculty members. “The advancement of knowledge is best served when scholars engage in an open and robust dialogue as they seek accurate data and its best interpretation,” Strobel wrote. “This dialogue should be carried out in a respectful manner that is free from ad hominem attacks.”
With reporting by Sarah Anne Aarup, Nicolas Camut, Wilhelmine Preussenand Charlie Duxbury.
Douglas Busvine is Trade and Agriculture Editor at POLITICO Europe. He was posted with Reuters to Moscow from 2004-08 and from 2011-14.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
It was in the early hours of the morning, a year ago in Kyiv, that blasts could be heard coming from the direction of Boryspil International Airport, southeast of the capital.
Early commuters were already on the road and, for nearly two hours, traffic continued to build. It was as though this was just another normal workday, and the blasts were nothing more than an inconvenience — like a severe rainstorm that weather forecasters had somehow, irritatingly, failed to predict.
As I looked down from my hotel balcony and talked with my newsdesk, planning the day’s coverage, the contrast between the morning commute and the rumbling explosions in the background was jarring. This is the start of a major European war, I thought. And much as I felt 21 years ago, when planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was engulfed in smoke, everything was going to be different now.
There’s always delayed shock when a war starts. It takes time to adjust to the enormity of what’s happening; people cling to their routines.
But by around 7:30 a.m., the commute into Kyiv had thinned out, as workers began to understand that the long-feared invasion was, indeed, happening. Those who had reached their offices turned tail and headed home. Down in the hotel lobby, there was pandemonium as television crews navigated past guests, frantically trying to check out.
Portly businessmen ordered their bodyguards to muscle through the panicked crowd and pack their Louis Vuitton suitcases into waiting black Mercedes and BMW SUVs. Squabbles erupted, as other guests tried to outbid each other at the concierge for drivers to speed them 600 kilometers away to the Polish border.
As this was happening, Russian President Vladimir Putin broadcast an angry address from Moscow. He said he could no longer tolerate, what he called threats from Ukraine, and that his goal was the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine.” I glanced around but couldn’t see anyone in uniform — nor anyone identifiable as a Nazi.
Shortly after Putin spoke, the barrage on Kyiv intensified, and there were more thuds coming from the outskirts too, including from the direction of the city’s second airport at Zhuliany.
Reports of action elsewhere increased — of missile bombardments on half a dozen Ukrainian cities, and the targeting of air defense facilities and military infrastructure as far away as western Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian troops had also landed on the country’s south coast and, even more alarmingly, armored columns had crossed the border north of the capital, from Belarus.
Broadcasting from his phone, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Ukrainians he would declare martial law, and he urged them to stay home, saying: “Don’t panic. We are strong. We are ready for everything. We will defeat everyone. Because we are Ukraine.”
His words were echoed in the hotel by a spa attendant: “Everything is OK. Keep calm,” she told the jostling crowd to little avail.
People wait to board an evacuation train at Kyiv central train station on March 5, 2022 | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
By mid-morning the streets of downtown Kyiv were eerily deserted. The only people to be seen were dog-walkers and a handful of scurrying tourists, dragging their luggage and breathlessly asking for directions to the train station.
The capital’s suburban roads and the highways leading west, however, quickly gridlocked with the start of a huge, breathtaking exodus of families to Lviv and other Ukrainian towns near the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary.
As the next few days unfolded, these are the snapshots left in my mind, of what I saw of a country on the move — the most dramatic flood of refugees seen since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, although it quickly dwarfed even that mass flight within days.
I saw the young saying their goodbyes to their parents, and trying to persuade their grandparents to leave as well. But many of the elderly refused, deciding to remain in family homes either to keep them secure or because they were too infirm or simply too plain stubborn to leave.
My mind now fills with images of evacuating families who fled the crash and thump of ordnance, pulling over by the side of the road to get some rest from their hours-long, or even days-long, personal odysseys. They were trying to get to neighboring borders that seemed to only get further away with each passing kilometer, their journeys disrupted by snarled-up traffic, sudden road closures, abrupt alarms and distant blasts. Families foraged for gas and food and water where they could — in small towns and at besieged gas stations, which quickly emptied of snacks, drinks and fuel.
As we traveled around, we saw cars creaking under the weight of stacked luggage and bags spilling over. Startled family pets were held by flagging hands. And etched in my memory are the faces of exhausted, disoriented children. They’d started out on their voyages gripped by a sense of excitement, seeing it all as a great adventure. But then the anxiety of their parents started to seep in, fatigue struck them, and they slowly realized something momentous had happened and struggled to make sense of it all.
Journeys that would normally take four or five hours stretched on and on. For some, getting from Kyiv to Lviv by car that first week took up to two or three days, and for families further afield in the east, it could take four or five days — a trip further complicated by the country’s notoriously inadequate road system.
But along the way, they — and I — encountered the kindness of strangers. For me, this kindness was personified by the middle-aged, deeply devout Oksana Shuper in the western town of Ternopil. She welcomed exhausted evacuees into her cramped apartment, also occupied by an infirm father, so that they could get some sleep. She would feed them oatmeal, strong coffee and fruit, before sending them on their way again with a hug and a prayer.
And as these evacuees made their way west, sometimes taking ever more circuitous routes down pot-holed country roads to bypass gridlock, they fretted: Where will we end up? And how will we cope when we get there?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Beijing announced on Saturday that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, will travel to China on a state visit from February 28 to March 2.
The announcement of the trip comes a day after Beijing, looking to play a role in mediating a resolution to the Russian war on Ukraine, published a 12-point “position paper” aimed at ending the conflict.
“At the invitation of President Xi Jinping, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko will pay a state visit to China from February 28 to March 2,” the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
The Belarusian foreign ministry confirmed the planned visit, saying the Chinese and Belarusian foreign ministers discussed it in a telephone call on Friday.
Lukashenko has backed Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and allowed its territory to be used in the Russian assault. Lukashenko said last week that his country was prepared to join Russia’s war against Ukraine, if attacked. That prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to warn the Belarusian leader not to get directly involved in the war.
Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday said he will visit China in early April and seek Beijing’s help in ending the war in Ukraine. “The fact that China is engaging in peace efforts is a good thing,” Macron said, according to French media reports.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy also said he would like to engage with Beijing following the proposals unveiled on Friday toward resolving the conflict. Zelenskyy said he was open to considering some aspects of the Chinese “position paper” and would welcome the chance to discuss the proposals with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
A meeting with Xi could be “useful” to both countries and for global security, Zelenskyy said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
“I woke at 5 o’clock,” the Estonian prime minister recalled recently. The phone was ringing. Her Lithuanian counterpart was on the line.
“Oh my God, it’s really happening,” came the ominous words, according to Kallas. Another call came in. This time it was the Latvian prime minister.
It was February 24, 2022. War had begun on the European continent.
The night before, Kallas had told her Cabinet members to keep their phones on overnight in anticipation of just this moment: Russia was blitzing Ukraine in an attempt to decapitate the government and seize the country. For those in Estonia and its Baltic neighbors, where memories of Soviet occupation linger, the first images of war tapped into a national terror.
“I went to bed hoping that I was not right,” Kallas said.
Across Europe, similar wakeup calls were rolling in. Russian tanks were barreling into Ukraine and missiles were piercing the early morning sky. In recent weeks, POLITICO spoke with prime ministers, high-ranking EU and NATO officials, foreign ministers and diplomats — nearly 20 in total — to reflect on the war’s early days as it reaches its ruinous one-year mark on Friday. All described a similar foreboding that morning, a sense that the world had irrevocably changed.
Within a year, the Russian invasion would profoundly reshape Europe, upending traditional foreign policy presumptions, cleaving it from Russian energy and reawakening long-dormant arguments about extending the EU eastward.
But for those centrally involved in the war’s buildup, the events of February 24 are still seared in their memories.
In an interview with POLITICO, Charles Michel — head of the European Council, the EU body comprising all 27 national leaders — recalled how he received a call directly from Kyiv as the attacks began.
“I was woken up by Zelenskyy,” Michel recounted. It was around 3 a.m. The Ukrainian president told Michel: “The aggression had started and that it was a full-scale invasion.”
Michel hit the phones, speaking to prime ministers across the EU throughout the night.
Ursula von der Leyen and Josep Borrell speak to the press on February 24, 2022 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
By 5 a.m., EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was in his office. Three hours later, he was standing next to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as the duo made the EU’s first major public statement about the dawning war. Von der Leyen then convened the 27 commissioners overseeing EU policy for an emergency meeting.
Elsewhere in Brussels, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg was on the phone with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who were six hours behind in Washington, D.C. He then raced over to NATO headquarters, where he urgently gathered the military alliance’s decision-making body.
The mood that morning, Stoltenberg recalled in a recent conversation with reporters, was “serious” but “measured and well-organized.”
In Ukraine, missiles had begun raining down in Kyiv, Odesa and Mariupol. Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to social media, confirming in a video that war had begun. He urged Ukrainians to stay calm.
These video updates would soon become a regular feature of Zelenskyy’s wartime leadership. But this first one was especially jarring — a message from a president whose life, whose country, was now at risk.
It would be one of the last times the Ukrainian president, dressed in a dove-gray suit jacket and crisp white shirt, appeared in civilian clothes.
Europe’s 21st-century Munich moment
February 24, 2022 is an indelible memory for those who lived through it. For many, however, it felt inevitable.
Five days before the invasion, Zelenskyy traveled to the Munich Security Conference, an annual powwow of defense and security experts frequented by senior politicians.
It was here that the Ukrainian leader made one final, desperate plea for more weapons and more sanctions, hitting out at Germany for promising helmets and chiding NATO countries for not doing enough.
“What are you waiting for?” he implored in the highly charged atmosphere in the Bayerischer Hof hotel. “We don’t need sanctions after bombardment happens, after we have no borders, no economy. Why would we need those sanctions then?”
Five days before the invasion, Zelenskyy traveled to the Munich Security Conference, where he made one final, desperate plea for more weapons and more sanctions | Pool photo by Ronald Wittek/Getty Images
The symbolism was rife — Munich, a city forever associated with appeasement following Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated attempt to swap land for peace with Adolf Hitler in 1938, was now the setting for Zelenskyy’s last appeal to the West.
Zelenskyy, never missing a moment, seized the historical analogy.
“Has our world completely forgotten the mistakes of the 20th century?” he asked. “Where does appeasement policy usually lead to?”
But his calls for more arms were ignored, even as countries began ordering their citizens to evacuate and airlines began canceling flights in and out of the country.
A few days later, Zelenskyy’s warnings were coming true. On February 22, Vladimir Putin inched closer to war, recognizing the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine. It was a decisive moment for the Russian president, paving the way for his all-out assault less than 48 hours later.
The EU responded the next day — its first major action against Moscow’s activities in Ukraine since the escalation of tensions in 2021. Officials unveiled the first in what would be nine sanction packages against Russia (and counting).
In an equally significant move, a reluctant Germany finally pulled the plug on Nord Stream 2, the yet unopened gas pipeline linking Russia to northern Germany — the decision, made after months of pressure, presaged how the Russian invasion would soon upend the way Europeans powered their lives and heated their homes.
Summit showdown
As it happened, EU leaders were already scheduled to meet in Brussels on February 24, the day the invasion began. Charles Michel had summoned the leaders earlier that week to deal with the escalating crisis, and to sign off on the sanctions.
Throughout the afternoon, Brussels was abuzz — TV cameras from around the world had descended on the European quarter. Helicopters circled above.
Suddenly, the regular European Council meeting of EU leaders, oftena forum for technical document drafting as much as political decision-making, had become hugely consequential. With war unfolding, the world was looking at the EU to respond — and lead.
European leaders gathered in Brussels following the invasion | Pool photo by Olivier Hoslet/AFP via Getty Images
The meeting was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. As leaders were gathering, news came that Russia had seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, Moldova had declared a state of emergency and thousands of people were pouring out of Ukraine. Later that night, Zelenskyy announced a general mobilization:every man between the ages of 18 and 60 was being asked to fight.
Many leaders were wearing facemasks, a reminder that another crisis, which now seemed to pale in comparison, was still ever-present.
Just before joining colleagues at the Europa building in Brussels, Emmanuel Macron phoned Putin — the French president’s latest effort to mediate with the Russian leader. Macron had visited Moscow on February 7 but left empty-handed after five hours of discussions. He later said he made the call at Zelenskyy’s request, to ask Putin to stop the war.
“It did not produce any results,” Macron said of the call. “The Russian president has chosen war.”
Arriving at the summit, Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš captured the gravity of the moment. “Europe is experiencing the biggest military invasion since the Second World War,” he said. “Our response has to be united.”
But inside the room, divisions were on full display. How far, leaders wondered, could Europe go in sanctioning Russia, given the potential economic blowback? Countries dug in along fault lines that would become familiar in the succeeding months.
The realities of war soon pierced the academic debates. Zelenskyy’s team had set up a video link as missile strikes encircled the capital city, wanting to get the president talking to his EU counterparts.
One person present in the room recalled the percolating anxiety as the video feed beamed through — the image out of focus, the camera shaky. Then the picture sharpened and Zelenskyy appeared, dressed in a khaki shirt and looking deathly pale. His surroundings were faceless, an unknown room somewhere in Kyiv.
“Everyone was silent, the atmosphere was completely tense,” said the official who requested anonymity to speak freely.
Zelenskyy, shaken and utterly focused, told leaders that they may not see him again — the Kremlin wanted him dead.
“If you, EU leaders and leaders of the free world, do not really help Ukraine today, tomorrow the war will also knock at your door,” he warned, invoking an argument he would return to again and again: that this wasn’t just Ukraine’s war — it was Europe’s war.
Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Kharkiv on February 24, 2022 | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Within hours, EU leaders had signed off on their second package of pre-prepared sanctions hitting Russia. But a fractious debate had already begun about what should come next.
The Baltic nations and Poland wanted more — more penalties, more economic punishments. Others were holding back. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi aired their reluctance about expelling Russian banks from the global SWIFT payment system. It was needed to pay for Russian gas, after all.
How quickly that would change.
Sanctions were not the only pressing matter. There was a humanitarian crisis unfolding on Europe’s doorstep. The EU had to both get aid into a war zone and prepare for a mass exodus of people fleeing it.
Janez Lenarčič, the EU’s crisis management commissioner, landed in Paris on the day of the invasion, returning from Niger. Officials started making plans to get ambulances, generators and medicine into Ukraine — ultimately comprising 85,000 tons of aid.
“The most complex, biggest and longest-ever operation” of its kind for the EU, he said.
By that weekend, there was also a plan for the refugees escaping Russian bombs. At a rare Sunday meeting, ministers agreed to welcome and distribute the escaping Ukrainians — a feat that has long eluded the EU for other migrants. Days later, they would grant Ukrainians the instant right to live and work in the EU — another first in an extraordinary time. Decisions that normally took years were now flying through in hours.
Looming over everything were Ukraine’s repeated — and increasingly dire — entreaties for more weapons. Europe’s military investments had lapsed in recent decades, and World War II still cast a dark shadow over countries like Germany, where the idea of sending arms to a warzone still felt verboten.
There were also quiet doubts (not to mention intelligence assessments). Would Ukraine even have its own government next week? Why risk war with Russia if it was days away from toppling Kyiv?
“What we didn’t know at that point was that the Ukrainian resistance would be so successful,” a senior NATO diplomat told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “We were thinking there would be a change of regime [in Kyiv], what do we do?”
That, too, was all about to change.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz addressed Germany on the night of Russia’s invasion | Pool photo by Hannibal Hanschke/Getty Images
By the weekend, Germany had sloughed off its reluctance, slowly warming to its role as a key military player. The EU, too, dipped its toe into historic waters that weekend, agreeing to help reimburse countries sending weapons to Ukraine — another startling first for a self-proclaimed peace project.
“I remember, saying, ‘OK, now we go for it,’” said Stefano Sannino, secretary-general of the EU’s diplomatic arm.
Ironically, the EU would refund countries using the so-called European Peace Facility — a little-known fund that was suddenly the EU’s main vehicle to support lethal arms going to a warzone.
Over at NATO, the alliance activated its defense plans and sent extra forces to the alliance’s eastern flank. The mission had two tracks, Stoltenberg recounted — “to support Ukraine, but also prevent escalation beyond Ukraine.”
Treading that fine line would become the defining balancing act over the coming year for the Western allies as they blew through one taboo after another.
Who knew what, when
As those dramatic, heady early days fade into history, Europeans are now grappling with what the war means — for their identity, for their sense of security and for the European Union that binds them together.
The invasion has rattled the core tenets underlying the European project, said Ivan Krastev, a prominent political scientist who has long studied Europe’s place in the world.
“For different reasons, many Europeans believed that this is a post-war Continent,” he said.
Post-World War II Europe was built on the assumption that open economic policies, trade between neighbors and mild military power would preserve peace.
“For the Europeans to accept the possibility of the war was basically to accept the limits of our own model,” Krastev argued.
Ukrainian refugees gather and rest upon their arrival at the main railway station in Berlin | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
The disbelief has bred self-reflection: Has the war permanently changed the EU? Will a generation that had confined memories of World War II and the Cold War to the past view the next conflict differently?
And, perhaps most acutely, did Europe miss the signs?
“The start of that war has changed our lives, that’s for sure,” said Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu. It wasn’t, however, unexpected, he argued. “We are very attentive to what happens in our region,” he said. “The signs were quite clear.”
Aurescu pointed back to April 2021 as the moment he knew: “It was quite clear that Russia was preparing an aggression against Ukraine.”
Not everyone in Europe shared that assessment, though — to the degree that U.S. officials became worried. They started a public and private campaign in 2021 to warn Europe of an imminent invasion as Russia massed its troops on the Ukrainian border.
In November 2021, von der Leyen made her first trip to the White House. She sat down with Joe Biden in the Oval Office, surrounded by a coterie of national security and intelligence officials. Biden had just received a briefing before the gathering on the Russia battalion buildup and wanted to sound the alarm.
“The president was very concerned,” said one European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “This was a time when no one in Europe was paying any attention, even the intelligence services.”
But others disputed the narrative that Europe was unprepared as America sounded the alarm.
“It’s a question of perspective. You can see the same information, but come to a different conclusion,” said one senior EU official involved in discussions in the runup to the war, while conceding that the U.S. and U.K. — both members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — did have better information.
Even if those sounding the alarm proved right, said Pierre Vimont, a former secretary-general of the EU’s diplomatic wing and Macron’s Russia envoy until the war broke out, it was hard to know in advance what, exactly, to plan for.
“What type of military operation would it be?” he recalled people debating. A limited operation in the east? A full occupation? A surgical strike on Kyiv?
Here’s where most landed: Russia’s onslaught was horrifying — its brutality staggering. But the signs had been there. Something was going to happen.
“We knew that the invasion is going to happen, and we had shared intelligence,” Stoltenberg stressed. “Of course, until the planes are flying and the battle tanks are rolling, and the soldiers are marching, you can always change your plans. But the more we approached the 24th of February last year, the more obvious it was.”
Then on the day, he recounted, it was a matter of dutifully enacting the plan: “We were prepared, we knew exactly what to do.”
“You may be shocked by this invasion,” he added, “but you cannot be surprised.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
