US Business

Russia has resorted to a “campaign of terror” targeting Ukraine’s civilian population after failing to achieve the strategic, operational and tactical objectives of its invasion, the top US general said Wednesday.

It is however unlikely that Ukraine can militarily force Russia out of all of the territory it occupies, but a winter slowdown in fighting could create an opening for a political solution, General Mark Milley told a news conference.

Russia is “imposing a campaign of terror, a campaign of maximum suffering on the Ukrainian civilian population in order to defeat Ukrainian morale,” he said.

Many of the recent Russian strikes — including a barrage of dozens of missiles across Ukraine on Tuesday that Milley said may have been the heaviest of the war — have targeted the country’s energy infrastructure.

“The deliberate targeting of the civilian power grid, causing excessive collateral damage and unnecessary suffering on the civilian population, is a war crime,” Milley said.

Moscow’s attacks on infrastructure, which Milley said are likely to make for a tougher winter in Ukraine, came after a string of Russian failures to achieve its military objectives in the country.

“The Ukrainians have achieved success after success after success. And the Russians have failed every single time. They’ve lost strategically, they’ve lost operationally, and I repeat, they lost tactically,” the general said.

Russia failed in its objective to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government, as well as more limited goals such as seizing the Donbass region, Milley said.

“The strategic reframing of their objectives, of the illegal invasion, have all failed — every single one of them,” he said.

– Opening for talks? –

At the same time, Moscow controls some 20 percent of Ukraine, and it is unlikely that Kyiv’s troops will force the Russians to quit the country soon.

“The probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine… the probability of that happening anytime soon is not high,” Milley said.

But there is a tendency for fighting to slow down in the winter months, and this could present an opening for talks.

“If there’s a slowdown in the actual tactical fighting, if that happens, then that may become a window… for a political solution, or at least the beginnings of talks to initiate a political solution,” Milley said.

“The Russian military is really hurting bad. So you want to negotiate at a time when you’re at your strength, and your opponent is at weakness,” he added.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking alongside Milley, said assistance provided by Ukraine’s allies will likely give Kyiv’s troops an edge in the coming winter.

“We pushed… enormous amounts of winter gear into Ukraine, thanks to countries like Canada and others who have really been very, very generous,” Austin said.

Russia is meanwhile fighting in a foreign country and is facing attacks on its supply lines, meaning it will be difficult for it to bring in gear needed by its troops.

“I think the Ukrainians will have the upper hand in this fight, as they have right now” and “that they’ll continue to maintain that upper hand going into the winter,” Austin said.

When Taylor Swift announced her first tour in five years, Jacob Landry couldn’t wait to jump in line to see his favorite artist take the stage.

But after diligently registering for and receiving a presale code, the 20-year-old jazzed for his first concert ever was confronted with a massive queue, site glitches and soaring costs.

Landry’s experience was far from unique: thousands of social media users reported similar experiences, including 19-year-old Kathryn Berry, who told AFP the process that ultimately left her with nosebleed seats in Nashville turned into a “thirteen-hour ordeal.”

Berry said she’s “happy I got tickets, but definitely holding a grudge against Ticketmaster for a while.”

For many music fans that grudge is longstanding.

The American ticketing industry, which the company Ticketmaster overwhelmingly dominates, has for years left concertgoers frustrated by hidden fees, soaring costs, rampant scalpers and limited tickets due to presales.

Swifties flooding ticketing sites linked to by Ticketmaster described crashes, outages, and other snafus, and many who were granted presale codes ultimately couldn’t nab tickets.

Cody Rhodes said his cousin received a code granting access to buy seats for Swift’s May show in Philadelphia, but after waiting five hours they were booted out of the queue. 

By the time they got back through the line, there were no tickets left.

“I was FLOORED,” the 23-year-old told AFP. “It was kind of funny at first like wow haha Taylor is so popular everyone wants to see her! Queen!”

“But every passing hour I was realizing the seriousness of it.”

Rhodes said he’ll try again when the general sale opens on Friday, saying his loose budget is $400 per ticket.

“That is a lot of money for us really, but we are huge fans and have waited so long,” Rhodes said, but added he’s already seeing resale tickets in the $2,000 to $9,000 range for the kinds of seats they were hoping for.

“Ticketmaster is a money-hungry service with little to no regard to real fans. I think they will allow price gauging since it allows them to take advantage of situations like this,” he said.

– ‘Unchecked monopoly’ –

Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to an AFP interview request, but in a statement Tuesday the company said waiting fans should “please hang tight,” citing “historically unprecedented demand” from millions.

The company also delayed one of the presales a full day.

The havoc spurred comment from a number of lawmakers, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Richard Blumenthal, who urged an investigation into the “state of competition in the ticketing industry.”

In 2010, Ticketmaster and the event promotion company behemoth Live Nation merged, which Congressman David Cicilline on Tuesday dubbed “an unchecked monopoly.”

He and other legislators in 2021 called for a Justice Department probe into “Live Nation’s efforts to jack up prices and strangle competition.”

Swift fans have an enormous online presence and a zeal that leaves them well-positioned to call attention to their plight, but Krista Brown — an analyst at the  American Economic Liberties Project, which has urged unwinding the merger — said the chaos “is just the latest example.”

“This isn’t about one artist’s concert or one website crashing,” Brown told AFP.

“Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment have a monopoly over the industry that lets it regularly abuse its power, leaving customers, artists and venues at its mercy.”

Live Nation recently has reported soaring demand after several pent-up pandemic years, saying ticket sales are up 37 percent compared to 2019.

But while fans have complained of skyrocketing costs — Bruce Springsteen show prices in the thousands of dollars triggered uproar earlier this year — Ticketmaster responded to a recent query from Representative Bill Pascrell by blaming the resale ticketing market, and saying that “promoters and artist representatives set pricing strategy and price range parameters.”

“As the resale ticketing market has grown to more than a $10 billion industry over the past few years, artists and teams have lost that revenue to resellers,” Ticketmaster said, saying event organizers were trying to “recapture that lost revenue” via “market-based pricing.”

Landry said he was originally willing to pay around $300 to see Swift, but with fees the final price landed at a $569.

He dipped into his savings to afford a spot.

Landry said he’s feeling “relieved” now and that while the “process was ridiculous,” it was worth it to see Swift’s Arlington, Texas show: “I literally adore her.”

And as Rhodes anxiously awaits the general sale’s opening, he’s hoping for a “crackdown” on Ticketmaster.

“Using another ticketing service is hardly an option,” he said.

Tesla tycoon Elon Musk on Wednesday defended his $50 billion pay package as CEO of the electric vehicle giant, arguing that the pioneering company was on the verge of collapse when the deal was agreed.

Musk is being sued, along with Tesla and some board members, by a shareholder who accuses them of improperly signing off on “the largest compensation package ever awarded to an executive.”

Around 2018, when the pay deal was approved, investors “thought we would fail and go bankrupt,” Musk told a courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware.

“We were in quite a tough position at the time. We were losing a lot of money… The probability of survival was extremely low,” he said.

Musk testified in the same Delaware court where he faced a lawsuit by Twitter to ensure he went through with his buyout of the social platform.

The $44 billion purchase of Twitter has put the South African billionaire under intense scrutiny after he conducted massive layoffs, provoked concern among advertisers, and struggled to control a surge of fake accounts.

Musk arrived discreetly at the hearing in a black Tesla, which parked at the back of the courthouse in a tent set up for the occasion.

A few minutes later, wearing a black suit and tie, he passed through security to enter the building.

– ‘Unjustified enrichment’? –

The Tesla case is based on a complaint by shareholder Richard Tornetta, who accused the defendants of failing in their duties when they authorized the pay plan.

Tornetta alleges that Musk dictated his terms to directors, who were not sufficiently independent from their star CEO to object to a package worth around $51 billion at recent share prices.

He also accuses Musk of “unjustified enrichment” and has asked for the annulment of a pay program that helped make the entrepreneur the richest man in the world.

The lawsuit says that Musk wasn’t even working full time for Tesla, as he is also the head of the space company SpaceX and the start-ups Neuralink and The Boring Company.

Musk countered that investors in Tesla were some of the “most sophisticated in the world” and able to keep tabs on his management.

He said Tesla had been the laughing stock of the auto industry, and it was only the massive success of the company’s Model 3 that proved electric cars were the future.

“They thought electric vehicles were a joke. When the Model 3 started taking market share, they changed their plans,” he said, defending his vision for the company.

According to a legal filing, Musk earned the equivalent of $52.4 billion in Tesla stock options over four and a half years after virtually all of the company’s targets were met.

Musk insisted that he played no role in coming up with the package nor discussed his deal with the board members, some of them close friends, who ultimately signed off on it.

The non-jury trial began Monday with testimony from Ira Ehrenpreis, head of the compensation committee on Tesla’s board of directors, who said the targets set were “extraordinarily ambitious and difficult.”

Ehrenpreis argued that the board wanted to spur Musk to focus on Tesla at a time when the company was fighting to gain traction.

The trial, which will run through Friday, was presided over by Judge Kathaleen McCormick, the same judge who was to preside over the dropped Twitter case.

There is no deadline for her decision which could take months.

She largely let questioning by lawyers for Musk and the plaintiff proceed uninterrupted, but jumped in when she found the tycoon’s answers rambling.

“We can all listen to this all day because it’s very interesting, but I don’t think it was responsive to the question, which I’ve now forgotten,” she said.

Western leaders played down fears Wednesday that a deadly missile blast in eastern Poland could herald a dangerous escalation in the war Russia launched against Ukraine, blaming stray anti-aircraft fire.

The United States said it backed an assessment by Warsaw that the missile that landed inside Poland was fired by Ukrainian forces.

“We have seen nothing that contradicts President (Andrzej) Duda’s preliminary assessment that this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defense missile,” the White House said in a statement.

Warsaw and NATO have said the explosion was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile launched to intercept a Russian barrage, but that Moscow was ultimately to blame for starting the conflict.

Two people were killed on Tuesday when at least one missile hit a village in NATO member Poland near the Ukrainian border, during a mass Russian bombardment aimed at civilian infrastructure inside Western-backed Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky contradicted the assessment, saying on Wednesday that the missile that hit Poland was Russian. 

“I have no doubt that this is not our missile,” Zelensky said in televised remarks. “I believe that this was a Russian missile, based on our military reports.”

Zelensky said Kyiv had not seen proof that the missile was Ukrainian and said it was imperative that Ukraine become part of an investigation.

In the immediate aftermath there was fear the incident would mark a new escalation in the conflict, but by Wednesday Duda announced Poland’s conclusion the projectile likely originated from Ukraine’s own air defences. That theory was then endorsed by Washington.

Duda said it was very likely that the Soviet-era missile was launched by Ukraine in what he called an “unfortunate accident” and said the blame lay with Russia because of its attacks on Ukraine.

– Russia ‘bears responsibility’ –

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg underlined this stance and EU diplomats meeting in Brussels praised Warsaw, one of Ukraine’s closest friends and Russia’s fiercest foes, for its measured response.

After crisis talks in Brussels, Stoltenberg said an ongoing investigation was expected to find “that the incident was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks”.

“But let me be clear, this is not Ukraine’s fault,” he continued. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine.”

Stoltenberg said NATO had ramped up its defences along its eastern flank in response to the war in Ukraine and denied that the alliance’s air defences had failed.

“We are prepared to handle situations like this in a firm, calm, resolute way, but also in a way that prevents further escalation,” he said.

The NATO chief said Poland had not invoked Article 4 of the Western alliance’s treaty, which would have obliged members to discuss whether “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened”.

NATO’s most powerful member, the United States, has hundreds of troops in Poland and leads the West in supplying weapons to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said American personnel would work to support the Polish investigation.

“Russia is facing setback after setback on the battlefield, and Russia is putting Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure in its gun sights,” he said.

The Russian defence ministry said: “Photographs of the wreckage… were unequivocally identified by Russian military experts as fragments of a guided anti-aircraft missile of a Ukrainian S-300 air defence system.” 

It insisted that its own strikes, a barrage of scores of missiles, “were carried out on targets only on the territory of Ukraine and at a distance of no closer than 35 kilometres (about 20 miles) from the Ukrainian-Polish border”.

Ukrainian officials had initially insisted that Russia must have fired the missile that hit Poland.

“Ukraine requests immediate access to the site of the explosion,” the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, Oleksiy Danilov, said on social media.

He said Kyiv was ready to hand over evidence of its claim that Russia was responsible, but that he was “expecting information from our partners” on reports that it was a Ukrainian missile.

The explosion rocked the village of Przewodow in eastern Poland at 1440 GMT on Tuesday.

“I’m scared. I didn’t sleep all night,” Anna Magus, a 60-year-old teacher at the local elementary school, told AFP near the scene. “I hope it was a stray missile because otherwise we’re helpless.”

–  Electricity outages –

Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 and still holds swathes of territory despite a series of recent battlefield defeats.

The conflict has caused deep unease in neighbouring Poland, which shares a 530-kilometre (329-mile) border with Ukraine and where memories of Soviet domination are still very raw.

The explosion came after a wave of Russian missiles hit cities across Ukraine on Tuesday, including Lviv, near the Polish border.

Zelensky said the strikes cut power to some 10 million people, though it was later restored to eight million of them, and also triggered automatic shutdowns at two nuclear power plants.

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High-profile US sports stars and personalities have been named in a lawsuit over deceptive practices targeting investors who became victims of the stunning collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

The celebrities helped promote the exchange, which declared bankruptcy in the United States last week in a meltdown that has reverberated across the digital currency landscape and drawn scrutiny from authorities in multiple countries.

American football star Tom Brady and his supermodel ex-wife Gisele Bundchen, basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, tennis Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka, actor/comedian Larry David, and Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary were among those named alongside FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the suit filed in Miami federal court on Tuesday.

Plaintiff Edwin Garrison filed the suit in a Miami court on behalf of other investors, seeking to recover damages from losses suffered in the FTX implosion, accusing the company of “misrepresentations and omissions.”

“FTX’s fraudulent scheme was designed to take advantage of unsophisticated investors from across the country,” the lawsuit alleges.

“Some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment have either invested in FTX or been brand ambassadors for the company” and hyped the exchange on social media, the document said.

David appeared in a television ad during this year’s American football Super Bowl championship game, a coveted and costly promotional spot.

FTX “needed celebrities … to continue funneling investors into the FTX Ponzi scheme, and to promote and substantially assist in the sale” of the accounts “which are unregistered securities,” the court documents said.

The turmoil at FTX, recently valued at $32 billion, came after Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency platform, backed out of a deal to buy the troubled company amid reports about mismanagement of client funds and potential investigations by regulators.

The House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday announced it would hold a hearing next month to investigate the company’s collapse.

“The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds,” committee Chair Maxine Waters said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year.”

The lawsuit alleges the company used money from new investors to “pay interest to the old ones and to attempt to maintain the appearance of liquidity.”

The collapse followed rising doubt over the financial stability of FTX. Attention had focused on the relationship between FTX and Alameda Research, a trading house also owned by Bankman-Fried, and reports he shifted funds out of the exchange, even as he tried to fill a $7 billion gap.

It was a spectacular reversal of fortune for the founder and one-time cryptocurrency wunderkind Bankman-Fried.

The disgraced executive apologized on Twitter and resigned, but after the company filed for bankruptcy it said it was the victim of “unauthorized transactions.”