The guardians of Champagne will let no one take the name of the bubbly beverage in vain, not even a U.S. beer behemoth.

For years, Miller High Life has used the “Champagne of Beers” slogan. This week, that appropriation became impossible to swallow.

At the request of the trade body defending the interests of houses and growers of the northeastern French sparkling wine, Belgian customs crushed more than 2,000 cans of Miller High Life advertised as such.

The Comité Champagne asked for the destruction of a shipment of 2,352 cans on the grounds that the century-old motto used by the American brewery infringes the protected designation of origin “Champagne.”

The consignment was intercepted in the Belgian port of Antwerp in early February, a spokesperson at the Belgian Customs Administration said on Friday, and was destined for Germany. Belgian customs declined to say who had ordered the beers.

The buyer in Germany “was informed and did not contest the decision,” the trade organization said in a statement.

Frederick Miller, a German immigrant to the US, founded the Miller Brewing Company in the 1850s. Miller High Life, its oldest brand, was launched as its flagship in 1903.

According to the Milwaukee-based brand’s website, the company started to use the “Champagne of Bottle Beers” nickname three years later. It was shortened to “The Champagne of Beers” in 1969. The beer has also been available in champagne-style 750-milliliter bottles during festive seasons.

No matter how popular the slogan is in the United States, it is incompatible with European Union rules which make clear that goods infringing a protected designation of origin can be treated as counterfeit.

The 27-nation bloc has a system of protected geographical designations created to guarantee the true origin and quality of artisanal food, wine and spirits, and protect them from imitation. That market is worth nearly 75 billion euros ($87 billion) annually — half of it in wines, according to a 2020 study by the EU’s executive arm.

Charles Goemaere, the managing director of the Comité Champagne, said the destruction of the beers “confirms the importance that the European Union attaches to designations of origin and rewards the determination of the Champagne producers to protect their designation.”

Molson Coors Beverage Co., which which owns the Miller High Life brand, said in a statement to The Associated Press that it “respects local restrictions” around the word Champagne.

“But we remain proud of Miller High Life, its nickname and its Milwaukee, Wisconsin provenance,” the company said. “We invite our friends in Europe to the U.S. any time to toast the High Life together.”

Molson Coors Beverage Co. added that it does not currently export Miller High Life to the EU and “we frankly don’t quite know how or why it got there, or why it was headed for Germany.”

Belgian customs said the destruction of the cans was paid for by the Comité Champagne. According to their joint statement, it was carried out “with the utmost respect for environmental concerns by ensuring that the entire batch, both contents and container, was recycled in an environmentally responsible manner.”
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The European Union is reportedly preparing emergency curbs on Ukrainian food products after several member states bordering Ukraine imposed their own import bans in recent days, complaining that a glut of cheap produce is hitting their own farmers.

Following a virtual meeting with EU officials on Wednesday, Romanian Minister of Agriculture Petre Daea outlined the bloc’s plans.

“The [European] Commission is making available to the five countries [Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia] 100 million euros [$109.32 million] from its crisis reserve. … It provides for the activation of exceptional safeguarding mechanisms, which means stopping imports until June 5 for the following products: wheat, corn, sunflower seeds and rapeseed,” Daea told reporters.

He added that the deal would be made available only when member states had withdrawn their own unilateral import bans.

The EU has yet to confirm details of the planned support package.

Ukraine grain

Ukraine, the world’s fifth-biggest grain exporter, has struggled to ship agricultural produce from its Black Sea ports to world markets following Russia’s invasion last year.

The European Union ended quotas and tariffs on Ukrainian goods after the outbreak of the war to shore up the Ukrainian economy. Eastern European states claim this has led to cheap grain imports being dumped on their domestic markets.

In the past week, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria have banned the import of Ukrainian grain and other products, in an apparent breach of EU trade law. Bulgarian Prime Minister Galab Donev said Wednesday that the measures were necessary.

“A significant amount of [Ukrainian] food has remained in the country and disrupted the main production and trade chains,” Donev told reporters. “If this trend persists and even increases, it is possible to reach extremely serious consequences for the Bulgarian business.”

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki outlined a $2.4 billion support package for farmers and said the European Union response had been inadequate.

“What the EU is offering us is offered with a delay; it is too little, a drop in the ocean of needs,” Morawiecki told a news conference Friday in Warsaw.

Protests

Farmers have staged protests in several countries bordering Ukraine, including Romania.

“Our fear is that this unfair competition coming from our colleagues in Ukraine cannot be borne by the Romanian farmers. We will witness a chain of bankruptcies of Romanian farmers,” warned Liliana Piron of the League of Romanian Agriculture Producers Associations at a protest in Bucharest earlier this month.

Brussels warned this week that the import bans violated EU law.

“Unilateral action is not possible under EU trade policy,” European Commission spokesperson Miriam Garcia Ferrer said Wednesday. Nevertheless, it appears the EU is preparing to approve emergency curbs on Ukrainian imports for certain countries.

Domestic politics

The dispute has taken many by surprise, said Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform, an analyst group.

“In the case of Poland, what’s so strange is that this is so much at odds with the assistance that Poland has given Ukraine in other ways,” Bond told VOA.

“So, this is entirely driven by domestic political considerations to do with protests by Polish farmers, and the risk that government obviously feels that the farmers might defect and vote for some other party in the next elections,” Bond said.

Ukraine reaction

For Ukrainian farmers, the import bans add to the troubles caused by Russia’s invasion. Volodymyr Bondaruk, executive director of the Pearl of Podillia, a mixed dairy and arable farm near Ternopil in western Ukraine, said, “I would like farmers and the agricultural lobby in the Eastern [European] countries to understand that we face similar problems. We don’t ask for subsidies; we don’t want anything like that. Just help us to sell our goods,” Bondaruk told Reuters.

“We have leftovers from the 2022 harvest. In the previous years, we exported a lot of corn, wheat and other grains to the Middle East countries, African countries. But today because of the war, ports do not accept large amounts of goods,” he added.

Black Sea

The glut of Ukrainian grain in Europe is the result of reduced exports through the Black Sea since Russia’s invasion. A deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to reopen the shipping route, known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative, came into force last August. However, Russia is threatening to end the deal when it’s up for renewal next month.

The ban on imports of Ukrainian grain by some countries in Europe could play into Moscow’s hands, analyst Bond said.

“It seems to me that this increases the chances that Russia will see this as a pressure point and will try to use it as a way of saying, ‘Well, we’re not going to renew the grain deal unless you agree to completely unacceptable conditions.’”

While its domestic import ban remains in place, Poland resumed the transit of Ukrainian products across its territory on Friday.

The European Union said it planned to organize alternative transport, including convoys of trucks, trains and barges, to take grain from Ukraine’s land borders to ports where it could be shipped to the world market.
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The European Union is reportedly preparing emergency curbs on Ukrainian food products. Some Eastern European states have imposed their own import bans in recent days, complaining that a glut of cheap Ukrainian produce is hitting their own farmers. Ukraine’s struggles to export grain following Russia’s February 2022 invasion have raised fears of a global shortage, as Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Ukrainian women from all walks of life have joined the armed forces to fight for their homes and country. Anna Kosstutschenko met with some near Bakhmut. Video: Pavel Suhodolskiy
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New developments:

Kyiv acknowledges Russian advances in Bakhmut.
U.S. will be training Ukrainian soldiers on Abrams tanks, while Germany will build a tank repair hub in Poland.
Britain sanctions a Russian judge and four others linked to the arrest and alleged poisoning of Kremlin critic and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years for alleged treason and other offenses.

Four European Union member states have banned Ukraine’s food exports to protect their own markets. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria say that an influx of Ukrainian food imports is harming their own farmers, who can’t compete with Ukraine’s low prices. The Polish government approved $2.4 billion in aid for its agricultural sector, criticizing the European Commission on Friday for not doing enough to help resolve the problem.

“What the EU is offered with a delay, it is too little, a drop in the ocean of needs,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference.

The European Commission has offered $110 million of aid for central European farmers, in addition to an earlier $61.5 million package. It has also said it will take emergency preventive measures for other products — like wheat, corn and sunflower seeds — but the central European states want this list to be broadened to include honey and some meats, Reuters reported.

Ukraine’s economy is heavily dependent upon agriculture, and the European ban will put a significant dent in its sales, Bloomberg reported, citing UkrAgroConsult.

Romania has for now decided not to participate in the ban, while allowing transit of Ukraine exports through its Black Sea port of Constanta.

Several central European countries became the gateway to a glut of Ukraine’s food exports after Ukrainian grain was stranded in Black Sea ports blockaded by Russia. The Black Sea Initiative brokered by the United Nations and Turkey has allowed safe transit of grain shipments through that corridor, though Russia is threatening not to renew after the deal expires on May 18.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday that the renewal of the deal depended on whether the West would lift restrictions affecting Russia’s agricultural exports. The Kremlin said Friday that it was monitoring reports of a possible ban on Russian exports and that new Western sanctions would damage the global economy.

“We are aware that both the U.S. and the EU are actively considering new sanctions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “We believe that both the current sanctions against the Russian Federation and the new additional steps that the U.S. and the EU may be thinking about now will, of course, also hit the global economy.”

Bakhmut fighting

Fighting in Bakhmut is raging and Kyiv said Friday that while Russian forces had made some advances in the eastern city, the situation was still in play. “The situation is tense, but under control,” Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Malyar made the comments after Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a briefing Friday that assault troops were fighting in western parts of Bakhmut, the last part of the embattled Ukrainian city still held by Kyiv’s forces.

US tank training

The U.S. hosted a meeting Friday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany focused on air defense and ammunition in Ukraine. The United States said it would soon start training Ukrainian troops on driving Abrams tanks, while Germany announced that it was building a tank repair hub in Poland for tanks deployed in Ukraine.

During the meeting, allies also reassured Kyiv of their unconditional support and supported Ukraine’s bid to join NATO in the future.

Ukraine pressed its allies for long-range weapons, jets and ammunition ahead of a counteroffensive against Russian troops that is expected in the coming weeks or months.

NATO members Denmark and the Netherlands announced Thursday that they were partnering to buy and refurbish 14 Leopard 2-A4 tanks to send to Ukraine.

The Dutch and Danish defense ministries said the tanks would be ready for delivery to Ukrainian forces early next year. Denmark and the Netherlands will share the $180 million cost.

Belgorod blast

Late Thursday, Russian authorities reported an explosion in Belgorod, close to the border with Ukraine, saying it had left a crater 20 meters wide in the city center.

Neither the region’s governor nor the city’s mayor said what caused the explosion. A report from the Russian state news outlet Tass, however, cited Russia’s defense ministry as saying a Russian warplane was to blame.

“As a Sukhoi Su-34 air force plane was flying over the city of Belgorod, there was an accidental discharge of aviation ammunition,” Tass cited the Defense Ministry as saying.

The Belgorod region, including the city of the same name, has been frequently hit by shelling since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Russia’s military acknowledged that a bomb accidentally dropped by one of its warplanes caused a powerful blast in a Russian city not far from Ukraine’s border, injuring two and scaring local residents.

Belgorod, a city of 340,000 located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the Russia-Ukraine border, has faced regular drone attacks during Russia’s current military operation in Ukraine. Russian authorities blamed the earlier strikes on the Ukrainian military, which refrained from directly claiming responsibility for the attacks.

The explosion late Thursday was far more powerful than anything Belgorod residents had experienced before. Witnesses reported a low hissing sound followed by a blast that made nearby apartment buildings tremble and shattered their windows.

It left a 20-meter (66-foot) -wide crater in the middle of a tree-lined avenue flanked by apartment blocks, damaged several cars and threw one vehicle onto a store roof. Two people were injured, and a third person was later hospitalized with hypertension, authorities said.

Immediately after the explosion, Russian commentators and military bloggers were abuzz with theories about what weapon Ukraine had used for the attack. Many of them called for strong retribution.

But about an hour later, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that a weapon accidentally released by one of its own Su-34 bombers caused the blast. The ministry did not provide any further details, but military experts said the weapon likely was a powerful 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) bomb.

Military experts charged that the weapon appeared to have been set to explode with a small delay after impact that would allow it to hit underground facilities.

Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said local authorities decided to temporarily resettle residents of a nine-story apartment building while it was inspected to make sure it hadn’t suffered structural damage that rendered it unsafe to live in.

In an editorial gaffe, an anchor on Russian state television followed the news about the local authorities dealing with the explosion’s aftermath by declaring that “modern weapons allow Russian units to eliminate extremists in the area of the special military operation from a minimal distance.” The anchor looked visibly puzzled by the text that he had just read.

Russian commentators questioned why the warplane flew over Belgorod and urged the military to avoid such risky overflights in the future.

Some alleged that the bomb that was accidentally dropped on Belgorod could be one of a batch of modified munitions equipped with wings and GPS-guided targeting system that allows them to glide to targets dozens of kilometers (miles) away. The Russian air force has started using such gliding bombs only recently, and some experts say that they could be prone to glitches.

In October, a Russian warplane crashed next to a residential building in the port city of Yeysk on the Sea of Azov, killing 15 people. Yeysk hosts a big Russian air base with warplanes that fly missions over Ukraine.

Military experts have noted that as the number of Russian military flights have increased sharply during the fighting, so have crashes and misfires.

In another deadly incident in the Belgorod region, two volunteer soldiers fired at Russian troops at a military firing range, killing 11 and wounding 15 others before being shot dead.
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Germany’s train system came to a standstill Friday when railway workers went on strike for eight hours. 

EVG, the union representing the state-owned Deutsche Bahn workers, says its members need a raise to counter inflation.  

Long distance and regional trains were affected by the strike, which lasted from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m.  

The railway strike coincided with a walkout at four major German airports, affecting hundreds of flights. Reuters news agency reports 700 flights were canceled.
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U.S.-made M1A1 Abrams tanks will arrive in Germany in May, and Ukrainians will start training on them soon after, according to senior military officials.

Thirty-one Abrams tanks will arrive at a base in Grafenwöhr, Germany, next month so that Ukrainians can start a 10-week course on how to operate the tanks. Additional force-on-force training and maintenance courses will be held at either Grafenwöhr or another base in Hohenfels, Germany, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.

The U.S.-led training will involve about 250 Ukrainians, and officials say 31 Abrams tanks will be delivered to Ukraine by the fall, which is much earlier than initially expected. 

The training tanks will not be the ones that will go to Ukraine as it fights against Russia’s invasion. Those are being refurbished in the United States and will go to the frontlines when they are ready, according to officials.

The news comes as U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is hosting another meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Friday, where military leaders from more than 50 nations are focusing on the Ukrainian military’s armor, air defense and ammunition needs.

Austin is expected to announce that the Abrams will arrive in Germany in the coming weeks during a Friday press conference.

Speaking at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where he first convened the group last April, Austin said the groups’ members had provided more than $55 billion in security assistance for Ukraine.

“More than a year later, Ukraine is still standing strong. Our support has not wavered, and I’m proud of the progress that we have made together,” he said.

In the past few months, members of the group have provided enough equipment and training to support nine additional armored brigades, according to Austin.

Abrams tanks, in particular, have been a long-awaited addition to the fight. The tank’s thick armor and 1,500-horsepower turbine engine make it much more advanced than the Soviet-era tanks Ukraine has been using since the war’s beginning.

The Biden administration announced in January that it would send a newer version of the Abrams tanks, known as M1A2, to Ukraine after they were procured and built, a process that could potentially take years.

In March, the administration pivoted to provide M1A1 Abrams tanks instead, in order to get the tanks “into the hands of the Ukrainians sooner rather than later,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said at the time.

The U.K. was the first to promise Western-style tanks for Ukraine, sending its Challenger 2 tanks to aid in the fight. After the U.S. Abrams announcement in January, Germany announced it would provide Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and allow other allies with German tanks, such as Poland, to do the same.

Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov spoke to members of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group Friday in order to update leaders on the state of the battlefield and Ukraine’s most urgent military needs. Moscow began a renewed offensive in Ukraine earlier this year that has stalled, and Kyiv is preparing for a massive counteroffensive that is expected to begin in the coming days or weeks.

The U.S. has now provided more than $35 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, which Austin called “an unprovoked and indefensible war of aggression.”

Some countries, including Estonia and Latvia, have donated more than 1% of their GDP to Ukraine’s defense.

Ahead of the meeting, Austin addressed the massive Pentagon leak of classified documents detailing sensitive intelligence on the war in Ukraine, Russian intelligence and intelligence gleaned from spying on allies.

Austin said he took the issue very seriously and would continue to work with “our deeply valued allies and partners.”

“I’ve been struck by your solidarity and your commitment to reject efforts to divide us. And we will not let anything fracture our unity,” he said.

The Ukraine Defense Contact Group has worked better than predicted in terms of maintaining supplies for Ukraine, showing Western resolve to face down Russian aggression and having “Ukraine’s back even without having forces on the battlefield,” according to Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The U.S. and allies have vowed to support Ukraine in defending its sovereign territory for “as long as it takes,” which O’Hanlon says may extend through all of 2024.

“I’m afraid that’s a distinct possibility,” he said.
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British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab has resigned from office, following an investigation that he bullied his colleagues. Several formal complaints were lodged against him. 

In a resignation letter posted on Twitter Friday, Raab said, “I called for the inquiry and undertook to resign, if it made any finding of bullying whatsoever.  I believe it is important to keep my word.” 

Raab said in the letter that he felt “duty bound to accept the outcome of the inquiry, it dismissed all but two of the claims levelled against me. I also believe that its two adverse findings are flawed and set a dangerous precedent for the conduct of good government.”

“In setting the threshold for bullying so low,” Rabb wrote, “this inquiry has set a dangerous precedent. It will encourage spurious complaints against ministers and have a chilling effect on those driving change on behalf of your government – and ultimately the British people.” 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a letter he had accepted Rabb’s resignation “with great sadness” and thanked him for his support during Sunak’s bid to become prime minister. He also said the resignation “should not make us forget” Rabb’s achievements as a government official.
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The outcome of Turkey’s presidential elections next month is growing more uncertain, with a populist outsider entering the race and threatening to split the opposition vote — something that would help longtime incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
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They are called mercenaries or contractors or volunteers, and they fight on both sides in the war in Ukraine. But whether they are regarded as villains or heroes, their presence is having an unquestionable impact on the battlefield.

The dark side of the irregular fighting forces assisting and resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion was driven home this week when two ex-convicts told a human rights group they had deliberately killed Ukrainian children and civilians while serving as commanders in Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group last year.

In videos posted online by Russia’s Gulagu.net, Azamat Uldarov and Alexey Savichev described their brutality in graphic detail.

“I wasn’t allowed to let anyone out alive, because my command was to kill anything in my way,” said Uldarov, describing how he fatally shot a 5- or 6-year-old girl.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private military company whose convict-bolstered ranks have been instrumental in the months-long battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, has denied those allegations and threatened retribution.

But Sean McFate, a former American officer and private military contractor who is now a professor at the National Defense University, said no one should be surprised to see atrocities committed by a military force staffed largely with convicts.

“When you are … opening 11 time zones of jails and dumping into Ukraine … you’re creating a labor pool of psychotic armed men who are running around Ukraine and that region and that doesn’t end well,” he said in an interview with VOA Ukrainian.

McFate added that the use of mercenaries often goes hand in hand with the arms trade and other illicit practices including human trafficking and narcotics.

Robert Young Pelton, a veteran war journalist who has covered more that four dozen conflicts around the world, argued in an interview that the Wagner Group has become an embarrassment not only to Russia’s regular forces but to their country as a whole.

“Russia has professional soldiers that have some of the finest spetsnaz, special operations people,” Pelton told VOA Ukrainian. But by unleashing the Wagner Group in Ukraine, Russia has created an especially dangerous precedent as they legally are “not answerable to anyone.”

“There’s no one going to investigate Wagner and judge them for being good or bad because they’re technically not a part of a state apparatus [or] any state-sanctioned organization,” said Pelton, whose reporting has taken him to Afghanistan, Chechnya and Liberia and brought him into contact with the Taliban and Blackwater security contractors in Iraq.

“We now have Russians murdering people inside Ukraine … and are not really held accountable, and yet they’ll integrate back into society inside Russia.”

On the other side of the paramilitary ledger, Ukraine is supported in its defense of its homeland by several outside groups, some playing a direct role in the fighting.

Among these are the American veteran-led donor-funded organization Project Dynamo that saves civilians from war zones in Ukraine and Afghanistan, and a now-disbanded international Mozart Group that was evacuating civilians and training Ukrainian soldiers.

Some of its former members reorganized under a new name, Sonata, and continue to operate in Ukraine more discreetly, coordinating both with Ukraine’s high-level military officers and battlefront units to understand operational issues and provide technical solutions.

Kyiv does not reveal the numbers but based on media estimates, roughly from 1,000 to 3,000 foreign volunteers are defending Ukraine now, most of them serving in three battalions of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, or the Ukrainian Foreign Legion.

The legion was formed shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for the help of “every friend of Ukraine who wants to join Ukraine in defending the country.”

In a written statement to VOA Ukrainian, the legion said that multiple foreigners in the regiment fought bravely and earned high praise from their comrades and commanders, as well as state honors. Some foreign nationals who as part of other battalions served in the weekslong siege at the Azovstal steel plant and in Mariupol also received state honors.

But not all of the foreigners who have flocked to Kyiv’s defense have served so honorably.

The New York Times has reported that some foreign volunteers ended up undermining the war effort, wasting money or even defecting to Russia. The Kyiv Independent has also reported on misconduct within the International Legion leadership that included physical abuse, threats and sending soldiers on reckless “suicidal” missions.

“The problem is, during the war you get what we call ‘the ash and trash,’ people who don’t know what else to do in their life,” McFate said.

“The good ones tend to leave because they don’t want to get killed with the bad ones. And what you are left with are a refuse from the other wars in Iraq, Afghanistan. And not all of them are bad, but this is a common problem of private warfare,” he said.

When asked how the Ukrainian Foreign Legion screens its volunteers, VOA Ukrainian was told that all the soldiers undergo an examination by recruiters, background checks by the government and training before being deployed to the battlefield.

But Pelton said that private contractors “always muddy the water” when brought into a war. “Within that very narrow segment of foreigners fighting in Ukraine, they’re more of a problem than a help because they bring international condemnation, confusion, and sort of a moral question to why these foreigners are here.”

Despite the moral and legal uncertainties, some experienced American warriors say they are still willing to fight for the right cause.

One of these is Dan Hampton, one of America’s most decorated combat pilots with 151 missions in F-16s. He is also the author of several books and the CEO of MVI International, a private military company based in the western U.S. state of Colorado.

“This is the pivotal issue of the Ukraine’s fight against Russia, this is a black and white conflict. … I’ll go myself, I’m – one, you can count me in,” Hampton said in an interview with VOA Ukrainian on March 9.

Hampton, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who received four Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor and a Purple Heart, suggested that American contractors could help Ukraine with one of its most vexing problems — its need for an enhanced air combat capability.

Ukraine has for months appealed for the United States and its allies to provide the country with F-16 fighters, but the U.S. has so far refused, arguing that the planes are so complex that it would take months if not years for Ukrainian pilots to become proficient in them.

Hampton suggested that if F-16s were provided, experienced foreign pilots could fly them while Ukrainian pilots train or continue to fly their existing aircraft.

This article originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service.
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European Union countries have agreed to extend a proposal to reduce the amount of natural gas they use by 15% until spring of 2024. The goal is to continue to reduce their reliance on Russian gas. Valentina Vasileva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Yuriy Zakrevskiy 
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Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili — imprisoned in Tbilisi for more than a year — is in critical condition and, according to his family, his health is deteriorating. Poland, Ukraine and other European countries are calling for his release. His supporters say Russia is behind his captivity. From Warsaw, Myroslava Gongadze has this report. Camera: Daniil Batushchak.
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By day, Jessica Wade spends her time in a laboratory at Imperial College London surrounded by spectrometers, oscilloscopes — and men.

At night, she writes biographies on Wikipedia about women researchers like her who don’t have an online presence.

“We can’t just do the shouting about how we need more women in science. We have to do the point of honoring and celebrating the women scientists that we have,” she told AFP.

“And I think writing their stories, making sure the world recognizes what they’ve done is a really important way to do that.”

Wade, 34, has worked at Imperial’s imposing campus in west London since 2016.

As a physicist, she is involved in developing new generations of carbon-based semi-conductors to make optical and electronic devices such as televisions and solar panels more energy efficient.

She leads a team of five people in a wider team of about 15. Of them, only one other scientist is a woman.

Science “is very male dominated,” Wade said, lamenting the lack of interest in it among girls whose parents are not scientists.

“As soon as I walked into a physics department that had a majority of men and a majority of people from white privileged backgrounds, I suddenly realized that not everyone’s getting the opportunity to study physics, not everyone’s getting excited about it,” she added.

“That lack of diversity impacts the science we do, the questions we ask, the directions we go in, the way we translate our innovations into society, where those kinds of devices are actually used in the world and who they benefit.”

Visibility

Wade now seeks to “take science to more people” but came across “knowledge gaps” in the internet’s free, multilingual, collaborative encyclopedia.

“Wikipedia is an amazing platform because it’s used by everyone in society,” she said.

“It’s used by 15 billion access points a month. Parents, teachers, policymakers, journalists, scientists, Amazon, Alexa, Google Home, they all use Wikipedia when they’re looking for information.”

But there is one big problem, she added: “About 90% of Wikipedia contributors and editors are men, and about 19% of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women.”

Wade set out to redress the imbalance in 2018 and has since written almost 2,000 pages by herself at the rate of one a night, at home, after dinner.

“They take more than one hour each, so that’s already too many hours of my life,” she laughed.

But she is undeterred by the daunting task.

“I don’t see it stopping anytime soon,” she said.

In fact, the research itself creates more work, as she often discovers more women scientists when writing another biography.

Wades’ first Wikipedia biography entry was the American climatologist Kim Cobb.

She saw her at a conference but after looking her up on Wikipedia found there was nothing on her oceanographic research.

Acknowledgement

Wade, who is now part of a network of women editors and leads workshops on how to write for Wikipedia, says a person’s presence and their work on the internet means they are discoverable.

“Little girls who are googling something, let’s say about sea urchins, will click through and then land on a Wikipedia page about an awesome woman scientist who had contributed to that,” she said.

“If you’re trying to nominate someone for an award or to become a fellow or to invite someone to give a lecture, you always google them and if they’ve got a biography nicely summarized on somewhere like Wikipedia, it’s so much easier to write someone’s citation or reference.”

That happened for Gladys West, a 92-year-old black American mathematician, whose profile was one of Wade’s first.

Starting in 1956, when racial segregation was still imposed in the United States, she worked for 42 years on navy navigation systems. Her calculations eventually led to the development of GPS.

“I researched Gladys to write her page and there was so little about her online, she was almost 90 and no one had celebrated her,” she said.

“I put her Wikipedia page online in February 2018 and in May 2018 she was in the BBC top 100 women in the world.

“And then she was inducted to the US Air Force Hall of Fame, and she won the Royal Academy of Engineering Prince Philip medal, which had never before gone to a woman.”
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his Swedish counterpart outside Stockholm Wednesday, a rare visit intended to show Washington’s support for Sweden’s bid to join NATO. VOA’s Pentagon correspondent, Carla Babb, is traveling with the secretary and has this report from a Swedish naval base.
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Russia’s invading forces are deliberately using rape, torture and kidnapping to try to sow terror among civilians in Ukraine, the top prosecutor in Ukraine told U.S. lawmakers in graphic testimony Wednesday.

Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said nearly 80,000 cases of war crimes have been registered in Ukraine since the war began in February 2022.

Focusing on just one area of the country that has felt the brunt of the war, Kostin described some of the discoveries made when the Ukrainian military liberated Kherson last November. He said about 20 torture chambers were found and more than 1,000 survivors have reported an array of abuses, including the use of electric shocks, waterboarding, being forced to strip naked and threats of mutilation and death.

Kostin said more than 60 cases of rape were documented in the Kherson region alone. In areas still controlled by Russian forces, residents, including children, are being forcefully relocated to other occupied territories or to Russia.

“Such evil cannot let be,” Kostin said.

He was asked about the motivations behind Russia’s tactics, but said he struggles to understand the brutality of the Russian forces in targeting civilians.

“The only possible explanation is that they just want to erase Ukraine and Ukrainians from the land,” Kostin said. “Maybe because they want to really kill all of us.”

Russian officials have consistently denied committing war crimes in what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine.

The United States House Foreign Affairs Committee invited Kostin to testify. The chairman, Republican Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, believes that spotlighting the brutality of Russia’s actions will show lawmakers and voters why the U.S. is in the right in supporting Ukraine.

“This is happening right now. They are monsters and they need to be brought to justice,” McCaul said. “These are more than war crimes. These are more than crimes against humanity. What we are witnessing in Ukraine is genocide.”

McCaul also issued a challenge to fellow lawmakers, saying “history will judge us by what we do here and now.”

“No country can remain neutral in the face of such evil,” McCaul said.

US leader pushes to provide F-16 jets

Congress approved about $113 billion in economic, humanitarian and military spending in 2022 to assist Ukraine. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said the United States will help Ukraine “as long as it takes” to repel the Russian invasion, though support for that aid has softened, polling shows.

Congressional leaders anticipate that Ukraine will need billions of dollars in additional assistance in the months ahead.

Ukraine is preparing to launch a counteroffensive in an attempt to regain territory lost to Russian troops. McCaul said he would like to see the U.S. back Ukraine’s efforts to retake Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized in 2014, so it could negotiate for a cease-fire from a stronger position. He is pushing for the U.S. and its allies to provide Ukraine with long-distance artillery and F-16 fighter jets for the counteroffensive.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted that he spoke by telephone with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, and thanked him for bipartisan support from Congress. Zelenskyy also outlined the “situation at the front” and Ukraine’s “urgent defense needs in armored vehicles, artillery, air defense & aircraft.”

The House committee also heard from a war crimes survivor, a 57-year-old woman, who said she was taken to a torture chamber for five days, beaten, forced to strip and endured threats of rape and murder. At one point, she was forced to dig her own grave. She said her house was looted. She has escaped, but other Ukrainians still experience such treatment in Russian-controlled territories, she said.

“These terrible crimes need to be stopped,” she told lawmakers. Her identity was not revealed out of concerns about retribution.

Prosecutor calls for reparations

Kostin said exposing atrocities is not enough.

“Only with discovering and determining truth, bringing perpetrators to responsibility and providing adequate reparations to victims and survivors, we can say justice has been done,” Kostin said.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant last month for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes, accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine. But the practical implications are limited as the chances of Putin facing trial at the court are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.

McCaul told The Associated Press he will press for the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI agents to assist prosecutors in Ukraine, even as he doubts there will ever be a full reckoning for the war crimes.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, how this is going to end,” McCaul said. “But at least there’ll be historical documentation about what they did, for generations to read about the atrocities.”
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The U.S. Justice Department is asking Congress for additional authority to funnel seized Russian assets to Ukraine.

In December, Congress authorized the Justice Department to transfer the proceeds of forfeited Russian assets to the State Department for Ukrainian reconstruction.

But the power applies only to assets seized in connection with violating U.S. sanctions under certain presidential executive orders. 

As a result, millions of dollars’ worth of Russian assets seized and forfeited in violation of U.S. export controls and other economic countermeasures cannot be transferred.

Now, the Justice Department is urging Congress to expand the range of seized assets that it can transfer for Ukrainian rebuilding. 

“We’re leaving money on the table if we don’t expand our ability to use the forfeited assets that we gain from enforcement of our export control violations and expanding the sanctions regimes that that transfer authority is applicable to,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday. “So I urge the Congress to give us the additional authority so we can make the oligarchs pay for rebuilding Ukraine as well.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, has cracked down on Russian oligarchs and investigated war crimes.

The law enforcement agency set up a task force shortly after the invasion to enforce sweeping U.S. sanctions and export controls. 

Task Force Kleptocapture has since seized more than $500 million in assets owned by Russian oligarchs and others who support Moscow and dodge U.S. sanctions, Monaco said.

The seized assets include a $300 million super yacht owned by Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, and a $90 million yacht belonging to Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch. 

The Justice Department is believed to have used its congressionally granted authority to transfer seized Russian funds only once. 

In February, Garland authorized the transfer of $5.4 million seized from a Denver-based bank account of sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev.

In the more than one year since Russia’s assault on Ukraine, the Justice Department has charged more than 30 individuals with sanctions evasion, export control violations, money laundering and other crimes, and arrested defendants in more than a half-dozen countries, Monaco said. 
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The Baltic countries have remained an important source of support for Ukraine as Russia’s assault drags on. In Latvia, people have kept up efforts to assist the Ukrainian military, while accepting Ukrainian refugees and making them feel welcome in an exile that for many, seems to have no end. Marcus Harton narrates this report by Ricardo Marquina in the Latvian capital, Riga.
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New developments:

Black Sea grain deal inspections resume in Turkey
Hungary adds honey, wine, bread, sugar to temporary ban on imports from Ukraine
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says like-minded countries should oppose “illegal unilateral pressure of the West”

Ukraine’s defense minister said Wednesday that Patriot air defense systems had arrived in the country.

Ukrainian officials long lobbied allies to provide the advanced weapons that are capable of shooting down enemy missiles and Ukrainian forces spent several months training in the United States and Europe to use the systems.

“Today, our beautiful Ukrainian sky becomes more secure because Patriot air defense systems have arrived in Ukraine,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted.  “Our air defenders have mastered them as fast as they could.  And our partners have kept their word.”

Earlier Wednesday, Ukrainian officials reported overnight drone attacks by Russian forces in the Odesa region of southern Ukraine.

Yuri Kruk, the head of Ukraine’s military command in the Odesa region, said the drones caused a fire at an infrastructure facility, but that there were no casualties.

Russia has made widespread use of drones to carry out attacks in Ukraine, including against infrastructure targets.

Sweden NATO

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin voiced support Wednesday for Sweden’s bid to join the NATO alliance.

Speaking during a visit to Sweden’s Musko Naval Base, Austin said the United States looks forward to “continuing to advocate for your swift admission to NATO and we’ll work hard to get that done before the summit.”

Austin said Swedish forces will “add a lot of value to NATO, our overall effort, you have a very, a highly professional military and you’ve invested a lot in modernization over the last several years.”

Sweden applied for NATO membership along with Finland in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

Finland formally joined the military alliance in early April. Sweden’s bid has been held up by objections from Hungary and Turkey, which says Sweden has not done enough to crack down on groups that Turkey considers terror organizations.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Polish and Ukrainian officials say convoys of Ukrainian grain transiting Poland for export abroad will be sealed, guarded and monitored to ensure the produce stops flooding the Polish market and playing havoc with prices.

Tuesday’s announcement came after two days of intensive talks following protests by Polish farmers, who said much of the Ukrainian grain was staying in Poland and creating a glut that caused them huge losses.

The deal will also end a temporary prohibition issued by Poland on Saturday to address the protests on the entry of grain from Ukraine. Hungary and Slovakia, which are also affected by the transit of Ukrainian farm produce, later took similar measures. These moves drew the anger of the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, which manages trade for the 27 member countries.

Polish Agriculture Minister Robert Telus told a press conference on Tuesday that Warsaw and Kyiv “have worked out mechanisms that mean that not a single ton of (Ukraine) grain will remain in Poland, that it will all be passing in transit.”

He said that for an unspecified length of time, all Ukrainian produce in transit will be sealed, with traceable devices attached, and ferried in special, guarded convoys to Polish ports and border crossings, on its way to other countries.

The transit is to ease the accumulation of grain and other produce intended for export to needy countries that’s blocked in Ukraine by Russia’s invasion.

Telus said the weekend’s temporary ban was partly intended to draw the EU’s attention to the acute problem. He alleged that the EU, while supporting the idea of the transit, has done nothing to facilitate it and prevent the glut.

The issue led to the talks between Poland and Ukraine’s agriculture ministers, with the participation of Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko. The transit measures will be introduced Friday, when the temporary ban on grain — mainly wheat — will be lifted.

“We pay attention to the problems of our Polish colleagues with the same attention as Poland treats our problems. Therefore, we have to respond promptly and constructively to this crisis situation,” Svyrydenko said in Warsaw.

It was not clear when a ban on the entry of other Ukraine goods such as sugar, eggs, meat, milk and other dairy products and fruits and vegetables would be lifted.

Farmers in Poland and neighboring countries say that Ukrainian grain and farm produce, apart from flooding their markets, has filled their own storage areas, leaving no room for their own crops from this year.

After Russia blocked traditional export sea passages amid the war in Ukraine, the European Union lifted duties on Ukrainian grain to facilitate its transport to Africa and the Middle East and offered to pay some compensation, which the farmers said was insufficient.

Much of the grain ends up staying in transit countries, and some Polish unions and opposition politicians accuse government-linked companies of causing the problem by buying up cheap, low-quality Ukrainian grain, and then selling it to bread and pasta plants as high-quality Polish produce.

Poland’s main ruling party, Law and Justice, is seeking to ease the discontent of farmers — the party’s voter base — ahead of fall parliamentary elections.

In Romania, another country affected by Ukraine produce overflow, the ruling Social Democrat Party said Tuesday that it will ask its governing coalition partners to urgently look to issue a temporary suspension of imports of food products from Ukraine.

“Such a measure is necessary to protect Romanian farmers, in the context in which compensation received from the European Commission cannot cover the total value of the damage,” the party said in a statement.
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