They continuously make headlines for being a gathering space for far-right and neo-Nazi groups, and for their rowdy and sometimes even violent behaviour.

Now, their focus has shifted to Ukraine — but not in support of the country.

“Bucha was the biggest Ukrainian false-flag operation until now”, said a recent post on a Telegram channel belonging to the German-language offshoot of the QAnon movement, gathering more than 13,000 users from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

They claimed Bucha was a “fake” fabricated to discredit the Russian army.

Inspired by the conspiracy theory that began as a claim that US political elites ran a secret Satanic cabal slash paedophile ring from a pizza store, QAnon has turned into a powerful political movement in the United States and inspired countless copycats across the pond.

Most of them gather supporters among people with strong anti-elite and anti-establishment leanings, and those who are sceptical of government initiatives — which is why those opposing vaccines and COVID-19 measures were the first to join.

Now, the German QAnon sings the praises of Vladimir Putin and his army and criticises the government in Kyiv – who they see as western puppets.

At recent rallies in the Austrian capital, the QAnon flag flown by the Capitol rioters on 6 January 2021 was proudly exhibited next to that of Russia. 

The letter Z, known for being painted on the sides of Russian tanks, has now also made an appearance.

Demonstrators participating in the Labour Day march in Vienna carry a letter-Z placard amongst anti-vaxx messages on 1 May, 2022Aleksandar Brezar

For journalist and author Michael Bonvalot, who regularly follows the anti-vax protests in Vienna, the fact that the Austrian far-right has openly shifted to Putin-worship does not surprise him.

“From the very first protest in Vienna in April 2020 it was very clear that well-known far-right and neo-Nazi activists were participating,” Bonvalot recalled for Euronews.

“It became even clearer in May of that year when one of the demonstrations was officially organised by the FPÖ. 

“From then you could conclude that the main organisers of the protests were far-right activists.”

Freedom Party foregoes legacy to defend Putin

FPÖ, or the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, is the country’s third-most-popular party known for its anti-immigrant and anti-establishment positions. At times, it has openly veered into open flirtations with Nazism, particularly during the leadership of the late Jörg Haider.

Haider, a far-right populist who popularised the party in the late 1980s, made a name for himself as Austria’s most scandalous son.

He engaged in public friendships with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and made statements that minimised the Holocaust and showered praise for the Nazi German government and Austrian SS troops.

However, he was staunchly anti-Kremlin. For Haider, one of the first mainstream politicians to openly call for pan-German unity after World War II, Russia was an enemy due to its communist past.

​​But FPÖ changed its direction after Haider’s departure from the party and his death in a car accident in 2008 and grew increasingly closer to Putin, such as publicly supporting Moscow’s wars including the 2008 invasion of Georgia and signing a cooperation agreement with the United Russia party in 2016.

In 2019, a scandal erupted involving a leaked video with Vice-Chancellor and FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache and his deputy Johann Gudenus, where they were revealed to have promised lucrative Austrian government tenders to Russian oligarchs while on vacation in Ibiza.

Ibizagate, as it has since been known, marks perhaps the clearest indication of the soft spot FPÖ has fostered for Russian political and financial influence.

The leaked recording led Strache to lose his government post and launched Austria into a political crisis, causing Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to drop FPÖ as his ruling coalition partner.

A man carries a Russian flag at an anti-vaxx protest in Vienna on 12 March 2022Cleared

This resulted in resentment both within FPÖ and their supporters, who lent their support to Kurz at a time when he needed right-wing bona fides.

In response, party leader Herbert Kickl and the likes of Strache mobilised their supporters and joined in on the anti-vax protests against the government and Kurz himself.

By March 2021, the movement grew to the point where police in Vienna came out in large numbers to monitor the thousands marching the streets carrying old imperial German flags in the colours of red, white and black, but also placards complaining about the “Plandemic” as well as QAnon banners.

Kickl, who was Haider’s former speechwriter and interior minister before FPÖ was kicked out, gave an impassioned speech on 6 March focused almost entirely on Kurz, labelling the lockdowns and vaccine mandates as a “crazed obsession with power”.

Police in riot gear form a line in front of the anti-vaxx protesters in Vienna in March 2022Cleared

“All the measures this government has passed are the result of an extraordinary power-trip on their end,” Kickl said, repeating that the strength of those gathered lies in “our numbers and our persistence and that is how we will take down Kurz & Co”.

“We have a strong immune system, especially against mutations that have suddenly been discovered by some people. Now we have become the immune system for our democracy,” Kickl stated.

“This immune system becomes stronger every day, and our opponents become weaker.”

‘Alternative independent channels’ and ‘magazines for patriots’

Kurz resigned in October 2021 after a corruption probe threatened to trigger a vote of no-confidence in parliament. Yet, Kickl — who has defended Putin in the past and made repeated claims that NATO is at fault for the invasion — continues to appear with the anti-vaxxers.

Their movement is now bolstered by a full-fledged media outlet, AUF1, which labels itself as an “alternative independent channel”.

Its editor-in-chief Stefan Magnet is a former activist of the Bund freier Jugend or League of Free Youth, a neo-Nazi extremist group and major proponent of the “blood-and-soil” ideology.

Magnet was arrested in 2007 under accusations that he and two other BfJ members violated the Nazi Prohibition Act but ended up being acquitted after spending six months in prison.

In 2011, he founded a media and advertising company called Medienlogistik, which produced advertising videos for the FPÖ regional leader in Oberösterreich, Manfred Haimbuchner.

Magnet also worked as an advisor to Info-Direkt, an online outlet that brands itself as a “magazine for patriots”, known for often publishing articles written by or about members of the Identitarian movement as well as the likes of the Kremlin’s favourite ideologue, Alexander Dugin.

A man introduced as “Victor from Russia” speaks while a AUF1 baloon flies in the air at anti-vax protests in Vienna in March 2022Cleared

The Identitarians, led in Austria by Martin Sellner — who promoted AUF1 when it first started — are a pan-European far-right political group claiming that Europe belongs to whites and that they are now victims of the “Great Replacement”, an Islamophobic conspiracy theory aimed at portraying immigrants as dangerous to the continent’s societies.

Identitarian symbols are also often seen at protests of vaccine sceptics in Austria.

Since the renewed invasion of Ukraine, AUF1 — which up to that point focused on COVID-19 conspiracy theories — created a separate subsection dedicated to the war in Ukraine, publishing content stating that “this is a proxy war between Russia and the USA and NATO” or that Austria and the EU should “stay out of it”.

They now regularly feature guests such as Norbert van Handel, who used to be a foreign policy advisor to Norbert Hofer, another former FPÖ leader and transport minister under Kurz.

Van Handel, a proponent of a “Central European Union” within the existing EU bloc — which, in his view, should constitute a traditionalist revival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — is known for his anti-migrant and Islamophobic views.

He was regularly critical of the 2014 sanctions against the Kremlin over the war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, stating in 2017 in an interview for the Visegrad Post that it was “silly to have sanctions against Russia, and there will be no good results in the long-term.”

According to disinformation expert Ingrid Brodnig, the shift to Ukraine was the logical continuation of what she describes as a very small, yet very loud minority in Austrian society.

“In German-speaking countries, there is a niche of these conspiracy theorists who spread and really believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories,” Brodnig told Euronews.

“For this ecosystem, the right-wing and far-right accounts are really important. Before the pandemic, these far-right accounts were already pro-Putin, so you often had articles portraying Putin as a kind of a strong leader, because Putin is the antidote to a pluralistic Europe.

Anti-vax demonstrators carry a “We love AUF1” banner at a protest in Vienna in March 2022Cleared

“Then the pandemic happened and those right-wing accounts suddenly started talking about COVID-19 and they lured new people to their channels. And when the war in Ukraine started they made the switch back to focusing on Putin and Russia,” she explained.

“It is a very good topic, in their thinking, because you can use your existing stereotypes, like being against the mainstream media, the criticism of Europe and European states, and just apply it to a new subject. It’s how they stay alive as a community.”

Russian narratives prove successful with some

Brodnig, who was appointed Digital Ambassador of Austria to the EU by the Austrian Federal Government in 2017, pointed out that the effect that Russian propaganda had over the years across Europe should not be underestimated.

“During certain crises, you can see that Russian narratives are quite successful,” she said.

Brodnig recalled the debate in 2017 around the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack near Idlib in the midst of the war in Syria.

Although the international community and human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch all established that the forces of President Bashar al-Assad were behind the toxic gas attack that killed 89 and injured almost 600, Russian state-run outlets claimed it was a false-flag operation.

“I remember that during that time I gave a lot of workshops and presentations, etc. and often I would have one person who would raise their hand in the end and ask, ‘but isn’t it the case that’ or ‘I also read that’ and then they would repeat such narratives.”

“For years, Russian media organisations have been trying to lure people who are interested in alternative media, and that works quite well.”

Austrian neutrality, a common Russian talking point

In the region of Oberösterreich, a party supporting vaccine scepticism called Menschen-Freiheit-Grundrechte, or People-Freedom-Rights, managed to enter the regional parliament, winning three seats in September 2021. According to the latest polls, the party has a shot at making it to the federal parliament on or before 2024.

But although this is still a relatively minor result, what the conspiracy theorists are really successful at is flooding public debate with their talking points and defining the talking points on a certain topic, and according to Brodnig, they are likely to become louder and more influential.

Anti-vax protest participants flash a white supremacist gesture used in memes to promote hate, in Vienna in March 2022Cleared

MPs and official institutions like the ministry of health are continuously inundated with emails and calls by people who believe in conspiracy theories, she said.

With military neutrality being one of the terms that defined the end of the Allied occupation since 1955, and with 76% of its citizens favouring neutrality according to a poll from March despite condemning Russia’s aggression on Ukraine, pro-Kremlin right-wing voices are now demanding Austria stay out of the conflict.

“I think it’s an indirect effect, but there’s always the danger that this small minority, even when it’s really small, might seem bigger than they are and might lead to a lot of questions about how strict we’re going to be about a certain law or whether we really want to have a certain debate,” Brodnig concluded.

Bonvalot, whose constant coverage of the protests led to threats on his life and safety, says that while not everyone who appears at these marches is necessarily far-right or pro-Russian — they do not mind being affiliated with them.

People have such strong opinions on the pandemic — and the alleged freedoms that they claim it hampers — even when their opinions do not align with Putin supporters, Bonvalot explains.

“People were not bothered by the fact that Austria’s most famous neo-Nazis and neo-fascists were marching alongside them in the protest — they were bothered by vaccines and compulsory vaccination,” he said.

The post From anti-vax to pro-Putin, conspiracy theorists now back Russia’s war first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

After finding her amid the rubble, she raced with the youngster in her arms to soldiers near the frontline in south-east Ukraine. 

They applied a tourniquet to her leg, but it wasn’t enough to save it. She remains in intensive care at a hospital in Kryvyi Rih, around 50 kilometres from the fighting.

Her mum is in a nearby hospital, feeling lucky to be alive after the bomb — which fell in late April — failed to detonate. She lost her toe, has damaged feet and is bruised black and blue.

“It came through our roof, and all the rubble fell all over us,” said Natalia, adding her family had not been sheltering underground as there was no siren in their village of Vysokopilla. 

“My five-year-old daughter is at another hospital here in Kryvyi Rih. She lost her leg. I just remember how everything fell on me. I am petrified today. I feel terrible. My daughter is still in urgent care. I just hope that all of this will be over.”

The pressure on the hospitals

Natalia is one of many patients at the hospital in Kryvyi Rih, which receives some of the worst cases in the region. Often wounded civilians firstly arrive at hospitals near the frontline and are then moved to bigger ones such as this if their injuries require it. 

The UN’s official civilian death toll in Ukraine is 3,381, but the actual number might be much higher, according to Matilda Bogner, head of the UN mission in Ukraine. She says 3,680 people have been injured. 

On top of this is the military casualties. Ukraine says more than 25,000 Russian soldiers have died, while last month Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last month that up to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed. Euronews is unable to independently verify either claim.

“We heard about snipers on roofs who would just shoot fairly randomly at civilians when they would cross the road, I assume as a form of trying to keep people in their houses and discourage them from going out,” said  Bogner.

Yuri PashkovCredit: Stefan Weichert

Back at the hospital in Kryvyi Rih – whose walls are worn down and windows blocked by blankets to stop the building from becoming a target, the head of the polytrauma department Yuri Pashkov makes his morning rounds. 

He tells Euronews that more and more patients are arriving every day. Much depends on the intensity of the nearby fighting, which has seen the Ukrainian army try and push back Russian troops towards Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Kyiv in 2014. 

“The situation now is more stable than it was in the first part of the war,” he said. “We have everything that we need to take care of the situation for now.”

The arrival of military doctors to the hospitals near the frontline has helped dramatically. They provide vital first aid before the patients arrive at the hospital in Kryvyi Rih, making their job easier. Fragments from artillery fire wound many patients here, he said. The small pieces of metal are penetrating the body and damaging everything.

Olexander shows his injuriesCredit: Stefan Weichert

‘He hit me with his assault rifle’

Olexander, 57, who has been in Kryvyi Rih hospital for more than a month, is eager to show Euronews his wounds. 

He claims a Russian soldier hit him on the head with a rifle after Olexander tried to stop him from stealing food.

It happened in Vysokopillia, a Russian-held village, meaning Olexander had to cross into Ukrainian-controlled territory to get treatment. 

“I was knocked out and woke up all in blood. I had to cross the border by foot,” said Olexander, who has a long scar on his scalp.

“The Russians were often getting drunk and just went into people’s houses, looking for food, vodka and valuables. 

“I just got mad, so I wanted to stop it. That might have been stupid, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

Olexander, who also suffered two broken ribs and an injured hand, says he’s on the road to recovery and hopes to be released soon. 

But, he adds: “I will never be able to forgive this.”

Injured soldier: ‘My friends are out there, I need to be with them’

There are also wounded soldiers at the hospital. 

Euronews is not allowed to take photos of their faces or use their full names but is allowed to see them being treated. 

One is a sniper wounded by an artillery fragment – it went through his right thigh and left an open hole. It is still uncertain whether he will recover without any permanent injury. 

Another soldier, Anton, agrees to speak. He says he was wounded a few weeks ago when artillery hit his position as he was relocating. 

It exploded just 15 metres from him, and a large fragment went through his back. Miraculously, he isn’t paralysed and is already able to walk with crutches. However, he has a big hole in his back and says it isn’t healing, causing significant problems.

“Everything will be Ukraine,” says the picture on a table in the hospital.Credit: Stefan Weichert

“When I am better, I will go back out and fight,” says Anton, “My friends are out there. I need to be with them. I am not afraid of going back. I know what I am getting into.”

Asked whether he thinks there will ever be peace, he says it has to come. What it will look like, he doesn’t know, but it will be hard ever to forgive Russia.

“I will never be able to forgive. But, maybe the future generations will,” he said.

The post Inside a hospital near the frontline of Russia’s war in Ukraine first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

That was the claim of Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday. 

It came before the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, announced the bloc was giving Ukraine another €500 million to buy heavy weapons to fend off Moscow’s invasion.

“We will provide a new tranche of 500 more million to support the military of Ukraine,” Borrell told reporters ahead of the G7 meeting in Weissenhaus, on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast.

The funds would be allocated for the purchase of heavy weapons and take the EU’s total financial support for Ukraine to €2 billion, he added.

Lavrov, speaking before Borrell’s announcement, said: “The EU has evolved from a constructive economic platform, as it was created, to an aggressive and belligerent player which already displays its ambitions far beyond the European continent.”

As such, Lavrov added that “Kyiv’s desire to become a member of the European Union is not insignificant”.

More broadly, he accused the Europeans of rushing “exactly on the path that NATO has already traced, thus confirming the trend towards fusion with the north Atlantic alliance and will, in fact, serve as an appendage” to NATO.

Moscow considers NATO an existential threat and has partly justified its war in Ukraine by pointing to the alliance’s expansion eastwards.

On Thursday, Finland’s leaders called for the country to join NATO “without delay”; Sweden could do the same in the coming days.

Russia is also stepping up its verbal attacks on the EU, which has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Moscow following the invasion on 24 February.

The post EU has become ‘aggressive and bellicose’ amid Ukraine war first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

Dmytro Pletenchuk, a public affairs officer for the Mykolaiv regional government, was on his way to work when the government’s headquarters was hit.

“This building is like a monument from Russia’s world,” Pletenchuk told Euronews while standing in the remains of his office.

Some 36 people were killed in the building. On the same day, Mykolaiv’s airport was also hit.

Pletenchuk says this is part of a larger strategy. “They want to rebuild the USSR,” he said.

“And without Ukraine… [it] is impossible. And they can’t live in freedom. But we can. And that’s what we want. And we fight.”

He added that he wanted all Russian soldiers out of the region: “From the Donbas, from Crimea… Crimea is Ukraine.”

But to achieve that, Ukrainian troops will have to recapture Kherson – one of Ukraine’s most important ports and the first city to be taken by Russia.

“Kherson is very important. It is the only land route to Crimea, the first one,” said Nesquik, commander of the battalion fighting for Kherson.

“Drinking water also comes from there to Crimea through the Dnieper River”.

Nesquik was born in Kherson. The 26-year-old is now in charge of 900 men currently trying to recapture his birthplace.

And news of Ukrainian troop advances in the north is a boost to morale in the region.

“I think we will recapture it by autumn,” Nesquik told Euronews.

“Russia has a very strong border with us and suffers losses everywhere; they place a great emphasis on the eastern part of Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“Kherson is not a problem to liberate. You need to remember that there are regions where it will be much more difficult [for us] to work.”

The post ‘This building is like a monument from Russia’s world’ first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

After more than a week of intense discussions, there is still no agreement in sight.

Hopes are low that a breakthrough can be achieved during the weekend or even at a meeting of foreign affairs ministers on Monday.

Talks are expected to drag on and might stretch until the extraordinary EU summit scheduled to take place on 30 and 31 May, diplomats told Euronews, where a political solution at the highest level could be found.

The main point of contention remains the timeline envisioned by the European Commission: a phase-out of all Russian crude in six months and all refined oil products by the end of the year.

The measure will apply to both seaborne and pipeline oil.

This has put a group of three landlocked countries — Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — in a bind: the trio are physically connected to the Russian-operated Druzhba pipeline and obtain the majority of supplies from the massive conduit.

Hungary and Slovakia initially pushed for a tailored extension to complete the embargo by December 2024, while the Czech Republic asked for June 2024, the date by which it expects to be connected to the Transalpine Pipeline.

Bulgaria, which has access to the sea, has joined the sceptical group and asked for a similar dispensation. The government argues the oil refinery in Burgas, which is owned by Russian energy multinational LUKOIL, would not be able to operate entirely without Russian oil.

The stakes are high for the EU to introduce the embargo, seen as one of the last resorts to curtail the Kremlin’s ability to finance the invasion of Ukraine after the previous rafts of sanctions failed to inject the necessary economic pain to force Vladimir Putin’s hand.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, flew earlier this week to Budapest and met with Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, in a bid to iron out differences and reach a deal. But von der Leyen left the meeting empty-handed, saying “further work is needed”.

Hungary has since then doubled down on its resistance. In an interview with Spanish newspaper El País, the country’s foreign affairs minister, Péter Szijjártó, said the energy transition would take over five years and require between €500 and €550 million, in addition to €200 million to boost the capacity of the Adria pipeline.

“We told the president of the European Commission that his proposal was a problem for us. We cannot vote in favour unless a solution is offered,” Szijjártó said.

“No such plan has been presented so far. The rational thing would be for the ban on Russian oil imports to apply to shipments by sea. However, deliveries by pipeline should be exempted.”

Even if most Russian oil barrels arrive into the bloc via ports, removing pipeline supplies from the embargo would open up a considerable loophole in the collective action and offer Moscow an unrestricted path to keep reaping profits from the European market. 

An official from a hardliner country told Euronews exemptions are not a “good idea,” pose a “threat to competition rules” and should be accompanied by extra taxes and a prohibition to sell Russian oil to other countries.

The Commission has said it is open to negotiating protracted timelines and “pragmatic solutions” for countries in “very specific” situations but has so far refused to remove pipeline supplies from the proposed embargo. 

EU sanctions require the unanimous approval of all 27 member states. This means the group of four could hold up the final decision for as long as they think necessary to secure their carve-outs.

Negotiations are taking place at a political and technical level, with national representatives, the French presidency of the EU Council and the Commission all involved in the talks.

President von der Leyen is yet to hold the video call with “regional partners” that she announced on Monday. The call was supposed to take place on Tuesday but has been indefinitely postponed 

“We will call that when we feel that the solutions that we find are sufficiently ripe to be discussed by the leaders,” a Commission spokesperson said on Thursday.

Diplomats fear Viktor Orbán might want to drag the talks until EU leaders meet on 30 May for an extraordinary summit where a political, rather than technical, solution could be found, diplomatic sources told Euronews.

The summit’s agenda will include “defence, energy and Ukraine,” according to European Council President Charles Michel, who convened the summit in early April, well before the oil embargo was presented.

Orbán had previously said sanctioning Russian fossil fuels was a “red line” for his country, despite having voted in favour of an EU ban on Russian coal. More recently, the prime minister compared the proposed oil embargo to “a nuclear bomb dropped on the Hungarian economy.”

Splitting the sixth package of sanctions in two parts to approve the other measures – such as expelling Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, from the SWIFT system – while waiting for the approval of the oil ban is not an option at the moment, said a EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The question of money is set to feature prominently in the ongoing discussions. 

The Commission will present on Wednesday its much-anticipated REPower EU initiative, a plan to gradually wean the bloc off Russian fossil fuels. 

The announcement is expected to include financial contributions to support the costly energy transition of member states, particularly of those who currently depend the most on Russian imports.

The ban on Russian oil is considered the most radical and consequential step taken by the EU in response to the Ukraine war.

Since the onset of the conflict on 24 February, the 27 member states have spent about €24 billion on Russian oil, according to a tracking tool set up by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), an independent research organisation.

This article has been updated to include new developments and reactions.

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It is pushing the world toward a sixth mass extinction and fuelling biodiversity loss that could cost more than 10 per cent of the world’s annual gross domestic product, according to the United Nations.

It is also the major topic of conversation at COP15, a UN-organised conference on deforestation and desertification that started on Monday in the city of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. What COP26 was for air and climate, COP15 aims to be for land, and its protection and restoration.

“The basic needs and incentives for human beings is access to food first,” organiser of the conference Abou Bamba told Euronews.

With land degradation comes reduced food production – people don’t have enough money or resources to take care of their families.

“For those young people who used to be farmers or fishermen in countries like Somalia, now they have their hopelessness, they have nothing to do and they want to cross the Mediterranean,” Bamba explains.

In COP15’s host country, Côte d’Ivoire, 92 per cent of primary forests have been lost since it gained independence in 1960. Nearly 60 per cent of the land used to grow crops is affected by soil degradation.

Many countries in Africa also relied on Russia and Ukraine for imports of crops like wheat and vegetable oil. But as supplies have been disrupted and prices rise, the food security crisis is worsening.

The impact of climate change consequences combined with food insecurity brought on by the war in Ukraine are now threatening peace and democracy across African nations.

“That’s the reason why 196 countries and more than 5,000 delegates are converging in Abidjan.”

“So that solutions can be brought to the table to fix a situation, which is kind of emerging but if we don’t deal with it properly, might escalate into something terrible.”

Can we reverse the problem of land degradation?

There is still hope to rectify the situation and prevent scores of people from having to leave their home countries. By investing in restoring Africa’s soil, the organisers and participants of the UN conference believe that millions of Africans who might otherwise leave for Europe will stay.

“The world is approaching the point of no return in land degradation, desertification and deforestation, but we can reverse it if we act now,” says Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara.

Ouattara opened COP15 by launching the “Abidjan Legacy Program”, Côte d’Ivoire’s implementation plan for COP15 resolutions at a national level.

Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara awaits the opening ceremony of COP15.SIA KAMBOU/AFP

“At COP15, Côte d’Ivoire will launch a new global cooperation framework to restore forests and land, boost food production, create jobs for young people and lift rural women out of poverty. We call on all countries to honour the pledges made at the 2015 Paris climate accords to fund this important work.”

The country is launching a massive €1.4-billion land restoration project over the next five years. It incorporates advanced technology solutions including tree-planting drones, investment in sustainable agriculture and social projects to enable gender equality.

A global issue that Africa can’t fix alone

While many in Europe are conscious of the issue of migration, Bamba believes few are aware of the joint effort needed to tackle the root of the problem.

“The climate or desertification related migration is an issue that affects the countries of departure, but also the countries of arrival. It’s a global issue that not only Africa alone can fix,” he explains.

Alongside funds from Cote d’Ivoire, the Abidjan Legacy Program aims to raise up to €950 million of international funds to support Ivorian land restoration and sustainable agriculture by 2050.

Rangers stand guard in the Banco forest, Ivory Coast.LUC GNAGO/REUTERS

“We have to work together with European countries, with people in Europe,” Bamba adds.

“I think there is work to be done in terms of raising the awareness of people in Europe, just so that you can have all the elements of the equation. It is not only for African countries to consider or to fix the problem.”

Bamba adds that if the Abidjan Legacy Program is successful, we would find ourselves in a win-win situation.

European countries reluctant to see people crossing the Mediterranean Sea and African nations worried about young people leaving their families behind would both be happy.

“I think that will bring satisfaction, you know, to African countries and European countries as well.”

The post What is COP15 and how is it addressing climate migration? first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

While US President Joe Biden said he had reliable information confirming the imminence of war, the Kremlin denied it, proclaiming the suggestion a form of political blackmail. Analysts worldwide put forward multiple possible scenarios. 

Amid this frenzy of conjectures, a colleague asked me, “Do you think Putin would do it?” I instinctively replied: “Why not?”

I had no information beyond what I was reading in the media. I had no access to intelligence reports or pundit analyses. Yet I had an innate certainty it would happen – because I am a Syrian refugee who was forced to flee to Europe fewer than two months after Russian forces entered Syria on 30 September 2015. I have not lost memory of the harrowing events. I knew Putin would invade Ukraine.

Putin’s forces invaded Georgia in 2008, and to this day his forces control South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. His forces entered my country in 2015 where he became a God of War, and since 2016 Putin has been dispatching his favourite mercenaries, Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Fighters, to Libya, Mali, Central Africa, and other countries. In 2018, Russia used nerve gas on British soil in violation of its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention. At the start of 2022, Putin’s forces entered Kazakhstan to suppress the popular uprising and return its ousted president to the capital, Astana, after he fled to Moscow. All the while Russia had been lending support to extreme right-wing parties and groups across Europe. 

These crimes had passed without accountability from the international community, so why shouldn’t Ukraine have been next?

A few days after the start of the war on Ukraine, we saw horrific scenes of systematic bombing of infrastructure, the siege of cities, and the spreading of terror among civilians forced to flee their homes. We witnessed the scorched-earth policy, the targeting of hospitals and schools, the body parts of civilians strewn across the streets, public buses carrying the displaced from combat zones, and hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing the borders into neighbouring countries.

I switch between news stations, and the images still confuse me. I’ve seen them before. 

The devastation in Bucha is the devastation in Aleppo. Listening to Dr Lisa Lisitsa of Kyiv’s Okhmadyt Hospital saying that the hospital keeps patients who cannot be evacuated due to illness or who cannot be transferred to the underground shelter was like listening to the accounts of Syrian doctor Amani Ballour from the “Cave Hospital” in Ghouta of Damascus years before.

The Syrian children of Idlib, recovered from beneath the rubble, and the Ukrainian children of Sumy, despite their distance, share the same smile. 

The Ukrainians pleading for a no-fly zone remind me of the Syrians who pleaded for the same. A Russian pilot who was captured by the Ukrainian army last month is thought to have previously bombed Syrian cities. I still recall seeing a photo of Russian pilots standing next to Bashar al-Assad and Putin hung up in Syria’s Hmeimim airport. 

I pray that Putin’s forces do not use chemical weapons in Ukraine as their Syrian government partners did in Syria.

If al-Assad and Putin had been held accountable for their notorious crimes, we may not have seen the Syrian scenario replaying in Ukraine today. 

Russia’s leadership does not brazenly commit heinous crimes in Ukraine before the eyes of the entire world because of Putin’s military superiority or economic power, but rather because of his conviction that he can attack the values of international humanitarian law, human rights, democracy, and the international system, while enjoying full impunity. 

Putin only needs to look to Assad, his trusted partner in Syria. Instead of finding a man brought to justice for his war crimes, he finds a man walking free and some countries are even calling for normalisation of relations with him out of political pragmatism.

To ensure that the tragedies of Syria and Ukraine do not spread to other countries, the international community must uphold consistent principles and standards worldwide, leveraging its political efforts towards a robust reassertion of international law and democratic values wherever they are trampled on, irrespective of the perpetrator or the victims. It must ensure that there are more resources — including enforcement mechanisms — for the International Criminal Court, national war crimes units, and more willingness to create new types of institutions to plug current gaps in international justice and end impunity for war criminals.

I hope that we can build on the present global momentum and commitment to accountability for Russia’s abuses in Ukraine to create a turning point for international justice, one that also applies to Syria and other countries.  

The international community’s response should ascribe equal importance to all victims of war worldwide. In the end, in our interconnected world, we all pay a price for every war for which perpetrators are not held to account.

Mazen Darwish is a lawyer and President of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.

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Fourteen-year-old Yura Nechyporenko from Bucha feared he would become one of them after his horrifying encounter with Russian forces who were occupying the streets he grew up in.

He also witnessed his father die, unable to do anything to save his life.

Yura and his father were on the way to visit vulnerable neighbours sheltering in basements when they came across a lone Russian serviceman. Their bikes were tied with white fabric, a sign they travelled in peace.

“We were biking right up until here. The Russian soldier came from around the corner of the building behind. First, the muzzle of his gun was pointed to the ground, but then he elevated the muzzle, so it was pointing directly at us and told us to halt in Russian.”

But before they had time to explain what they were doing, he fired two shots, killing Yura’s dad in front of his eyes.

“After that, he also shot at my raised hands, but the bullet got between my thumb and forefinger and scraped my thumb.”

Saved by his jumper

The boy lay still on the asphalt, listening to his father die. His elbow burned where a bullet had pierced him. His thumb stung from being grazed. 

Another shot hit his elbow. Then, a final shot was fired. Yura lay on the street for minutes afterwards, waiting for the soldier to walk away. 

Then Yura ran. He reached the kindergarten where his mother worked, and where some residents used the basement as a shelter. They were shocked to see the boy and gave him first aid.

He realised he needed to go home. He returned to the streets, not knowing where the next soldier might be.

When he arrived home, his family called the police. The police said they could do nothing because they didn’t control the area, according to the family. The ambulance service said the same.

The police told the family that officers didn’t know what to do with the case, according to the boy’s uncle, Andriy. 

A prosecutor’s report describes the killing and attempted killing in a few bare sentences, including the loss of a cellphone belonging to Yura’s father. He would have been of help now — he’d been a lawyer.

Yura most likely survived as his oversized grey jumper took the bullet instead of him — an item that he is now keeping as evidence.

Turning 15 without his father

Following Russia’s retreat, Yura’s family transferred his father’s body from a makeshift grave to a local cemetery. 

They brought Yura’s father home in a wheelbarrow. He was rolled in a carpet and placed on an old wooden door. 

Amidst the sounds of shelling and gunfire, they buried him in the yard behind the woodshed, in one of many makeshift graves hurriedly dug during the monthlong Russian occupation.

Yura and his family left Bucha the next day along a rare evacuation corridor. 

This year, Yura turned 15 without his father, who would usually prepare a meal on the grill for his son’s birthday. As investigations into atrocities like this continue, all Yura is wishing for is justice.

“It’s not only me who wants justice,” he said. “People in Ukraine are still possibly being tortured and killed even now.”

Yura’s story, while just one of many, comes as international justice experts arrive in Bucha to investigate possible war crimes committed by Russian forces on their retreat from Ukraine’s capital.

In Bucha alone, local authorities report that 31 children have been killed. The UN human rights office says over 200 children have been killed across Ukraine since the start of the invasion.

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Ukraine’s natural gas pipeline operator (GTSOU) said it would stop shipments through an eastern part of the country due to interference from “occupying forces”.

Russian-backed separatists who control the region in eastern Ukraine have been accused of siphoning off gas at the Sokhranovka transit point.

It is the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv has symbolically disrupted the flow of Russian energy exports to the west.

The Sokhranovka transit point usually handles around a third of Russian gas flows to Europe — mostly to Austria, Italy, Slovakia and other east European states.

The head of GTSOU said on Facebook that Moscow must bear full responsibility for any humanitarian consequences of the halt of gas to Europe.

The immediate impact of the cutoff was likely to be limited since much of the gas can be directed through another pipeline, according to analyst Zongqiang Luo at Rystad Energy.

Luo told the Associated Press that the move by Ukraine would make it harder for European countries to refill underground storage for next winter.

The interruption of supply would also “hasten Europe’s plans to move away from imports of Russian gas,” he added.

The European Commission said on Wednesday that the sudden interruption would have an impact on part of the bloc’s gas supply but that there were no “immediate security of supply concerns”.

EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson is due to speak to Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko.

Russia’s state-owned giant Gazprom has indicated some drop in supply reaching Europe but stated that it was continuing to meet its obligations.

Gazprom said on Wednesday it was sending 72 million cubic metres of gas through Ukraine, down around 25% from the previous day.

The European Union has sought to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, phasing out its use of coal and considering doing the same for oil. Gas presents a more complicated problem, given both how much Europe uses and the technical difficulties in sourcing it elsewhere.

Gazprom had already decided to cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria after the two countries refused to pay in roubles.

It was not clear if Russia would take any immediate hit since it has long-term contracts and other ways of transporting gas.

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A recent report by the Kyiv School of Economics revealed that direct and indirect losses from the war range from $564 billion to $600 billion (€568 billion), and could increase even further as the conflict drags on.

By comparison, the US-led Marshall Plan that brought Western Europe out of the devastation after World War II had an original price tag of $13 billion, equivalent to over $155 billion in current prices.

With damages mounting across the country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is asking Western countries to provide the government with at least $5 billion a month to pay for essential services and keep the economy afloat.

“This is a lot for our state. This is not possible for Ukraine. But this is possible for you,” Zelenskyy told G7 leaders in video call last week.

All eyes turn now to Brussels, where a recovery fund is in the works. But the EU cannot foot the bill alone.

Watch the video above to learn more about Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

The post The cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction will eclipse the Marshall Plan first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.