Displaying items by tag: Europe

Opinion polls predicted a win for opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the election. However, President Erdogan received 49.5% of the votes, making it a serious test of his twenty-year iron rule. Turkey’s economy has soaring inflation, a plummeting lira, and a cost-of-living crisis partly caused by Erdogan’s wacky economic policies. Also the shambolic response to February’s earthquake which killed 50,000 and displaced 1.5 million added to Erdogan’s many corruption and mishandling scandals. Could mild-mannered technocrat Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who is capable of uniting opposition parties of left and right, be what Turkish voters want in the run-off on 28 May? He has pledged to rule Turkey ‘with consultations and compromise’. A million Turkish expats living in the USA, Germany and Canada voted in the first round of the election: Kilicdaroglu has vowed to win the second round.

Whole towns flattened into fields of dirt, brick, and branches. People emerge from underground shelters to search for food and relief supplies. One country sent tanks. One country didn’t. Russia is winning. No, Ukraine is winning. Reports coming out of Ukraine are muddled. Different narratives spotlight different elements of the war. Yet the ones who feel forgotten are the Ukrainian families huddled in basements. The local churches are stepping up with aid to places where news cameras won’t go. The Holy Spirit is sending believers with the hope and help of Jesus Christ. Pray for more Christians to arise as messengers of His hope to the hopeless. Ask God to strengthen the Church as it becomes the hands and feet of Jesus, meeting physical and spiritual needs. Pray for increased opportunities for Ukrainians to discover and follow Christ.

Ukraine is expected to attempt to retake Moscow-held Zaporizhzhia territory. The Russian-installed governor of the partly-occupied province ordered 18 settlements near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to evacuate. The UN's nuclear watchdog is concerned about the facility’s safety. Russian passport-holders were taken to cities on the coast of the Sea of Azov. The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed deepening concern after Russia fired 30+ shells at a Ukrainian-held town near the plant. The nuclear reactors are shut down, but staff and their families remain. Ask God to comfort them in this stressful situation. Meanwhile Ukraine released a video of white fire from phosphorus munitions in the besieged city of Bakhmut, accusing Russia of using incendiary weapons. International law prohibits using any incendiary weapons, and if chemical weapons are used it is a war crime. 

The EU High Representative and the European Commission are willing to step up in the global fight against kleptocrats. A new anti-corruption sanctions regime would supplement the EU’s existing regime covering worldwide corruption, enabling it quickly and flexibly to complement country-specific anti-corruption policies for targeting dishonest individuals. The proposal would bring the EU into line with other regimes such as the Global Magnitsky Act, passed after investigations into tax fraud by Russian officials, which allows the USA to ban visas and freeze assets of corrupt individuals and human rights abusers worldwide. It is now incumbent upon EU member states to adopt the Commission’s proposal without delay.

Ukraine’s call for more weapons and ammunition to bolster the defence of Bakhmut has grown louder. A year ago they fired all forty barrels of their rocket launcher in one go. Now they can only afford to fire a few at a time at Russian targets. They haven't got enough ammunition for their weapons but are still called on to provide fire support to Ukrainian forces desperately clinging on to the edges of the town, which Russia has spent months trying to capture. Russians are getting closer to their goal, but at enormous cost. On 1 May a top Ukrainian general said that over 20,000 Russian fighters have been killed in Ukraine since December. Some of the Ukrainian Grad missile supplies are coming from the Czech Republic, Romania and Pakistan. Ukraine is frustrated that it can't provide more support to their fellow fighters being killed in Bakhmut.

Germany’s last three nuclear power plants were closed on 15 April. Its car industry has been the market leader for decades. Now production of diesel and petrol engines will end, and gas and oil heating systems will not be installed in homes. Current prosperity, welfare, and economy are being run down and replaced with higher-grade technologies for which technical and personnel replacements are not readily available. Increasing chaos on the railways illustrates the incompatibility of political demands with the current state of infrastructure and the available staffing levels. The political agenda also fuels disruptive actions by climate activists and strikes in the public sector and in state-owned companies. Germany has been entrusted with much historically: the gospel of Jesus Christ, a country of poets and philosophers, a nation with economic stability. Pray for God’s purposes for Germany, not based on history's materialism but on #its God-given identity as a nation.

There is an awful silence hanging over the steep hill on which Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school sits. On 3 May, a 13-year-old entered the school, armed with two guns, and shot dead eight fellow students and a security guard. Six other children remain in hospital. The school is at the heart of this central Belgrade community, where streams of mourners are arriving, bearing flowers and soft toys. 24 hours after the worst school shooting in Serbian history, pupils from the next-door college stand along the street to stand in silence and remember those killed. ‘I am crushed’, says final-year school student Alex Oborina, 19, beside some of the handwritten notes left on the pavement. ‘We have failed as a society because this is something that should not happen to a 13-year-old. He should not be grabbing a gun and going into his school and shooting his friends.’ Alex seems to echo the sentiment everyone here feels. ‘This is probably the worst thing that has ever happened in my life. We need to use this as a stepping stone to rebuild.’

Russians are kidnapping Ukrainian children and adopting them into Russian families where they are brainwashed. Last May, Putin simplified Russian adoption laws to enable these illegal adoptions. A majority of the children have living parents or relatives: they were illegally and forcefully separated from them when their parents were taken into 'filtration camps'. NGOs are trying to return these children to their families, and the international community calls this a war crime. The number of children who have been proven by name is 16,121, according to Orphan’s Promise. The Russian commissioner for children's rights said over 300,000 children have been taken to Russia, given Russian citizenship and adopted into Russian families - illegally. A Ukrainian human rights lawyer has said, ‘A mother and her four-year-old daughter were separated at a filtration camp. She had to give her daughter to some woman she didn't know, and we don't know what happened to her.’

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, independent Russian media have received restrictions or threats. News channels TV Rain and Meduza have had to move abroad; Novaya Gazeta remains in Moscow but has stopped publishing newspapers. The authorities have closed talk radio station Echo and others. Countless commentators are in exile, including veteran journalist Nevzorov, branded a ‘foreign agent’ and given a jail sentence in absentia for spreading ‘fake news’ against Russia’s army. People do not need an audience of millions to be targeted. Mathematics student Dmitry Ivanov ran an anti-war Telegram channel and received an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence. An anti-war picture sketched by a 13-year-old at school warranted Alexei, her father, being jailed for two years. Putin rules Russia virtually unchallenged. Critics who once spoke out have been forced into exile, jailed or killed. By the time he invaded Ukraine, two decades of stamping out dissent had all but annihilated Russian opposition.

When Russia initiated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a second, less visible battle in cyberspace got under way. The conflict has blurred the lines between those working for the military and the unofficial activist hackers. Oleksandr, one of the most prominent hackers in the vigilante group, the 200,000-strong IT Army of Ukraine, has helped to temporarily disable hundreds of Russian websites, disrupted services at dozens of banks and defaced websites. For over a year, he has devoted himself to causing as much chaos in Russia as possible. He recently joined a team of hackers called One Fist, to hijack Russian radio stations and broadcast the sound of fake air raid sirens and an alert message telling citizens to take shelter. ‘We feel ourselves like the military’, says Oleksandr. ‘When my country calls me to pick up a rifle I am ready, but hacking Russia now, I feel that I am helpful.’