cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18350654

Politico.com

I have been out of the loop and I wanted to read a detailed (preferably unbiased) account of what happened.

I mainly used social media to follow the news but now I am thinking of getting a RSS app and using feeds to follow news. All suggestions are appreciated :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1076816

In fealty to US foreign policy, Mexico has long refused to recognize Palestinian statehood. Last week, that finally changed, with AMLO’s government officially acknowledging Palestinian statehood and establishing a full embassy in Mexico City.

On June 2, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates announced that, as of the first of the month, it had reclassified its diplomatic mission in Mexico from special delegation to embassy. The ministry “expresses its firm conviction that this measure will contribute significantly to the . . . strengthening of relations between Mexico and the State of Palestine, on the basis of respect and mutual recognition, in benefit of our two peoples as well as international security and development,” it affirmed in a statement.

The U.N. Security Council is calling for a halt to fighting in Sudan and the protection of civilians. The brief press statement followed closed consultations Friday by the U.N.’s most powerful body. The council also is calling for the scaling up of humanitarian assistance to Sudan and neighboring countries, support for humanitarian workers, and respect for international humanitarian law. Sudan descended into conflict in mid-April after months of worsening tensions exploded into open fighting between rival generals seeking to control the African nation. The fighting has killed thousands of people and forced more than 2.5 million people to flee their homes to safer areas in Sudan and neighboring countries, according the U.N. migration agency.

A related article indicates Prigozhin claims this is not a coup; that his claims of being shelled by Russia haven't been substantiated; that he also criticized Putin a day ago.

Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed a "huge number" of his fighters had been killed in the strike.

(first post here. hope this is okay)

Turkey’s central bank sharply raised interest rates on Thursday, the clearest sign yet that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is shifting his country toward more orthodox economic policies in the hope of taming a painful cost-of-living crisis.

The spike in rates, to 15 percent from 8.5 percent, came less than a month after Mr. Erdogan, Turkey’s dominant politician for two decades, won a third presidential term despite a challenge from a newly unified opposition, high inflation that has left many Turks feeling poorer and catastrophic earthquakes in February that killed more than 50,000 people.

Members of Turkey’s opposition had feared that Mr. Erdogan would capitalize on his victory to crack down on his opponents and further consolidate power. But to date he has made no drastic moves and has largely stuck to his previous positions, including the use of Turkey’s membership in NATO to block Sweden from joining the alliance.

His largest shift has been in economic policy, an apparent effort to head off the threat of interlocking economic problems that economists say are largely of Mr. Erdogan’s making.

The official annual inflation rate rose above 80 percent last year and was at 39.5 percent last month, eroding the purchasing power of Turkish families and sending the nation’s currency, the lira, plunging to record lows. Outside groups have accused the government of manipulating the statistics, saying the actual inflation rate is twice as high.

In the run-up to last month’s election, Mr. Erdogan tapped the central bank’s foreign currency reserves to prevent the lira from falling further while unleashing billions of dollars of new spending to insulate voters from the immediate impact of high inflation. He increased the minimum wage, hiked civil servant salaries and changed regulations to allow millions of Turks to draw early government pensions.

Mr. Erdogan also insisted on repeatedly reducing interest rates, from 19 percent in 2021 to 8.5 percent this year, in defiance of orthodox economic theory and practice, which call for raising rates to control inflation.

Since his victory on May 28, Mr. Erdogan has not directly announced a change of course, but has made several moves that point to more conventional economic policies that, while aimed at taming inflation and reducing the threat of a currency crisis, could also throw the economy into a recession.

He reappointed Mehmet Simsek, a highly regarded former Merrill Lynch banker and minister in Mr. Erdogan’s government, as finance minister. To head the central bank, he named Hafize Gaye Erkan, a Princeton-educated economist and former executive at the now-defunct First Republic Bank. Ms. Erkan is the first woman in Turkey to hold the post.

In announcing the interest rate hike, the bank said that further increases would follow “in a timely and gradual manner until a significant improvement in the inflation outlook is achieved.”

Given the new appointments, many analysts had expected an even bolder rate hike, and the value of the lira continued to slide after the new rate was announced.

Mr. Erdogan has long promoted the unorthodox idea that lower rates lead to lower inflation, a theory that did not work out but that did deliver continuous economic growth.

It remains unclear whether Mr. Erdogan will continue to allow interest rates to rise if Turkey’s economy starts to slow.

Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief. He has spent more than a dozen years in the Arab world, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen. He is the author of “MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman.”

Biden welcomes India’s prime minister despite concerns over human rights.

President Biden emphasized common ground with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on Thursday during a lavish state visit meant to bolster ties with the world’s most populous nation, while largely skirting points of friction over human rights and Russia’s war in Ukraine, at least in public.

After a pomp-filled, red-carpet arrival ceremony, Mr. Biden and Mr. Modi announced a range of initiatives to advance cooperation in technology, energy and military hardware but revealed no movement toward each other on the areas of disagreement that have strained the relationship in recent months, most especially Ukraine.

In its early phases, Ukraine’s counteroffensive is having less success and Russian forces are showing more competence than western assessments expected, two western officials and a senior US military official tell CNN.

Report accuses Israel of ‘silencing civil society’ by outlawing human rights groups

"Hundreds of Israeli settlers on Wednesday stormed into a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank, setting fire to dozens of cars and homes to avenge the deaths of four Israelis killed by Palestinian gunmen the previous day, residents said. The settler attack came as the Israeli military deployed additional forces across the occupied West Bank, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to build 1,000 new settler homes in response to the deadly shooting."

The proposed agreement has evoked considerable interest in India and beyond, with experts terming it a significant step for bilateral defence and high-tech cooperation amid China’s growing influence and global technological dominance.

Read without paywall

The history of elections under Sheikh Hasina shows that the next one, scheduled for January 2024, is unlikely to be free or fair. Both realpolitik and ideals make the case for India taking a strong stance on restoring democracy in Bangladesh.

Translation by DeepL

Article by Justas Stasevskij

Activists in exile from Russia believe that Russia will fall apart as a result of the war in Ukraine.

The break-up of Russia is now being pursued by a group of activists in different parts of the country, and they are closing ranks.

The League of Free Peoples of Russia, among others, is calling for the break-up. It has brought together Russian opposition forces and those calling for independence or at least greater autonomy for their own regions. On the map drawn by the League, today's Russia is divided into dozens of independent parts.

One of the parts to be chopped up, according to the League, would be Dagestan, which is the subject of the video above. The video, shot last autumn, shows Dagestanis protesting against Russian mobilisation.

Some activists within the union have organised internet debates in their own regions on whether or not their region should secede from Russia. There have been polls in five regions, all of which have voted yes to secession. Yle has not been able to verify the reliability of the votes.

In the map below, you can see the League of Free Peoples' outline of a possible break-up of Russia. Russia is divided into two parts on the map.

The break-up of Russia is possible

According to a growing number of experts, the break-up of Russia as a result of war is indeed a possible scenario, although not the most likely.

• A year ago, I would have been sceptical about such an idea. But now the question of what is possible and what is not is moving towards increasingly absurd scenarios, says Margarita Zavadskaya.

Zavadskaya is a senior researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute and an expert on Russian domestic politics.

The longer the war goes on, the more unpredictable the consequences for Russia could be, according to Zavadskaya. One of the main messages of Putin's propaganda is that "the West wants Russia to fall apart" and that "Russia's existence is in danger". Russians dreaming of independence fit this narrative perfectly.

But Putin's constant talk of the West's intentions to break up Russia could turn against his ambitions and become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Zavadskaya says.

In a report published early this year, the Atlantic Council, a US think-tank, estimated that Russia will not survive the next ten years. Another US think tank, Stratfor, published a forecast back in 2015 that predicted Russia would break up in the first half of the 2020s. It predicted that Karelia would eventually join Finland.

Paul Goble, an American researcher on Russia, believes that Russia could break up as a result of war in the near future.

• Putin is not restoring the Soviet Union, he is restoring the conditions that made the Soviet Union's demise possible," Mr Goble said in an interview with Lithuanian broadcaster Lithuanian Radio last June.

Russia has kept its war machine running by sending its ethnic minorities to the front line.

The fact that Russia has kept its war machine running by sending its ethnic minorities to the front line is also a factor in its dreams of independence.

• People are angry that they are there and their nations are suffering disproportionately," Goble said. Could East Karelia become independent?

One of the parts drawn on maps by activists that is breaking away from Russia is right on Finland's eastern border, East Karelia. That's the dream of Dmitry Kuznetsov. He comes from East Karelia and has lived in Finland since last February.

Kuznetsov, 48, fled Russia in the early part of the last decade and was granted asylum in Spain in 2016. Yle has seen Kuznetsov's asylum decision.

• Russia has always tried to make Karelia Russian. Everything has been done to destroy Karelian culture, historical facts and events. Even the names have been changed," Kuznetsov says.

Kuznetsov wants to organise a meeting in Finland, a congress of Karelians, to discuss whether Karelians have the right to their own state. He wants people with ties to Karelia to attend.

There was supposed to be a congress already, but the money is missing. Kuznetsov has a handful of people in Finland and Estonia involved in his project.

The researchers point to two major reasons why Kuznetsov's dream cannot be realised. First, the Republic of Karelia has a population of just over half a million people, of whom no more than one in ten is ethnically Karelian or speaks Karelian.

So there are probably only a few tens of thousands of people with an East Karelian identity.

• Unfortunately, the Soviet Union was very successful in weakening the Karelian language," says Zavatskaya of the Institute of Foreign Policy.

According to Kuznetsov, this would not be an insurmountable problem. In his view, people are not so much in favour of Russia as of authority in general.

• When power changes, they want to become Karelians, Vepsians and so on. This is how everything works in Russia, because people are used to supporting those in power," he says.

Secondly, East Karelia is crossed by a land link between Moscow and the main base of the Russian Northern Fleet. The base is located in the Murmansk region. The Northern Fleet is one of Russia's two ocean fleets equipped with strategic nuclear weapons mounted on submarines.

So sparsely populated Eastern Karelia would hardly be the first place to be pinched by Russia, says Marko Eklund.

Mr Eklund is a former deputy defence attaché at the Finnish embassy in Moscow and works as a background journalist for Yle.

• The North Sea region has been a key focus of Russian geopolitics in recent years," says Eklund.

According to Eklund, the idea of isolating this important region from the rest of Russia would certainly not appeal to Moscow.

As for Kuznetsov, one has to wonder whether he could be part of Russia's information influence. Could Russia be using him to show that there is a desire in Finland to move the border?

Kuznetsov vehemently denies this. He insists that he is not seeking to put pressure on Finland in the debate on the Karelian Isthmus, i.e. whether Finland should demand the return of the territory it lost to the Soviet Union in the last war. East Karelia is more than a isthmus, Kuznetsov stresses.

According to the Finnish Security Police, Finland "is not currently subject to information interference that would endanger national security". Supo does not comment on individual persons such as Kuznetsov.

Researcher highlights the troubled North Caucasus and Tatarstan

Foreign Policy Institute researcher Zavadskaya would draw attention to the North Caucasus region. Its population is a patchwork of ethnic groups. People there have a strong sense of their national identity, she says.

Zavadskaya also highlights Tatarstan, which is rich in natural resources. Most of the four million Tatars in Tatarstan are of Turkic origin.

Tatarstan voted for the sovereignty of the region in 1992, with more than 60% of the vote. A large proportion of Tatars then interpreted the vote as a declaration of independence. However, Russia did not welcome the region's independence.

Today, independent Tatarstan is led by the exiled Rafis Kashapov. He fled to Ukraine after serving a three-year prison sentence in Russia. He had criticised the invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Kashapov tells Yle in an email that his movement is already preparing for Tatarstan's independence.

• Our soldiers who served in the Soviet Union and Russia are already training in Turkey and Kazakhstan," Kashapov writes.

In Kashapov's view, the West pays too much attention to opposition politicians like Navalny, Kasparov and Khodorskovsky.

• They are imperialists. When Russia sent troops to Georgia, Syria and Ukraine, none of them condemned the military invasion. That means that if they come to power, they will continue Putin's policies," Kashapov argues.

Kashapov and Kuznetsov, who are planning new states for Russia, say that the goal of independence will only succeed if all indigenous peoples pull together.

• Until the criminal empire collapses, we will not be able to create our own independent state," Kashapov said in an email.

Zavadskaya of the Foreign Policy Institute is of the same opinion.

• Most activists live in exile abroad and have little ability to influence Russia's development.

Zavadskaya points out that the break-up of Russia would be an unpredictable process.

• It is worth being careful what you wish for. No empire has broken up peacefully.