World

The first shipment of Ukrainian grain to leave Odessa since Russia’s invasion reached Turkish waters on Tuesday under a landmark deal to lift Moscow’s naval blockade in the Black Sea.

The Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni arrived at the edge of the Bosphorus Strait shortly after Kyiv announced the start of mandatory evacuations from the war-scarred Donetsk region now bearing the brunt of Russia’s five-month assault.

In Moscow, Russia’s supreme court labelled Ukraine’s Azov regiment a “terrorist” organisation — a decision that could pave the way for fighters captured by the Kremlin to face lengthy jail terms.

The Razoni set sail under a deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations aimed at getting millions of tonnes of trapped produce to world markets and curbing a global food crisis.

It is due to be inspected Wednesday near Istanbul by a team that includes Russian and Ukrainian officials before delivering its cargo of 26,000 tonnes of maize to Tripoli, Lebanon.

The UN secretary-general’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said he hoped for “more outbound movement” on Wednesday. 

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he wished for “regularity”. 

“When one ship leaves a port, others should be waiting for their turn, being loaded or reaching a port,” he said.

The halt of deliveries from Ukraine — one of the world’s biggest grain exporters — has contributed to soaring food prices, hitting the world’s poorest nations especially hard.

Kyiv says at least 16 more grain ships are waiting to depart.

But it also accuses Russia of stealing Ukrainian grain in territories seized by Kremlin forces and then shipping it to allied countries in Africa and the Middle East, such as Syria.

Russia attacked the Odessa port from which the Razoni set off on Monday less than 24 hours after the grain deal was signed in Istanbul last month, putting the safety of future deliveries in doubt.

– Donetsk evacuations –

Russia has continued to pound cities and towns across Ukraine’s sprawling front line.

Kyiv said it had started mandatory evacuations from the eastern region of Donetsk bearing the brunt of the Russian offensive, after Zelensky urged the estimated 200,000 remaining residents to leave.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said a train carrying “women, children, elderly people, many people with reduced mobility” arrived in the central city of Kropyvnytskyi on Tuesday morning.

More than 130 people were evacuated from the Donetsk region, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.

Officials have said they want to get residents out of the battered region before the start of winter as gas pipes for heating have been severed.

In the south of the country, the head of Ukraine’s Kryviy Rig military administration said Russian shelling had killed two civilians in a minibus trying to leave the Moscow-controlled Kherson region.

Ukrainian forces have in recent days been pressing a counter-offensive to drive out the Russians from the region.

Dmytro Butriy, the head of the Ukrainian authorities in Kherson, said Tuesday they had so far taken 53 settlements back under their control.

The mayor of the nearby city of Mykolaiv said Russian strikes had damaged a university dormitory. He said 403 people had been killed in his region since the invasion, but hoped that the counter-offensive would “result in a decrease of shelling”.

– More Western arms –

Ukraine was bolstered by more supplies of Western arms — particularly long-range artillery — ahead of the planned push to retake Kherson city.

The United States announced a new tranche of weapons worth $550 million for Ukraine’s forces, including ammunition for increasingly important rocket launchers and artillery pieces.

“Our artillerymen are ready to turn night into day to expel the Russian invaders,” Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said.

In Moscow meanwhile, Russia paved the way for captured members of Ukraine’s Azov regiment to face stiff prison sentences. 

Fighters from Azov were among 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered in May after weeks of fierce resistance at the Azovstal steel plant in devastated Mariupol. 

The regiment — which was incorporated into Ukraine’s national guard in 2014 — is demonised by Moscow for alleged far-right links. 

Its members were among 50 Ukrainian servicemen killed last week in an attack on a jail holding prisoners of war in Russian-occupied territory. 

Ukraine has accused Moscow of deliberately executing the detainees, while Russia says Ukrainian forces hit the facility with missiles. 

Azov, in response to the Russian court ruling, called on the United States and other countries to recognise Russia as a “terrorist state”. 

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan late Tuesday, defying a string of increasingly stark warnings and threats from China that have sent tensions between the world’s two superpowers soaring.

Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, is the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years and Beijing has made clear that it regards her presence as a major provocation, setting the region on edge.

Live broadcasts showed the 82-year-old lawmaker, who flew on a US military aircraft, being greeted at Taipei’s Songshan Airport by foreign minister Joseph Wu.

“Our delegation’s visit to Taiwan honors America’s unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan’s vibrant democracy,” she said in a statement upon her arrival, adding that her visit “in no way contradicts” US policy towards Taipei and Beijing. 

Taiwan said the trip displayed “rock solid” support from Washington. 

Pelosi is currently on a tour of Asia and while neither she nor her office confirmed the Taipei visit in advance, multiple US and Taiwanese media outlets reported it was on the cards — triggering days of mounting anger from Beijing. 

China’s military said it was on “high alert” and would “launch a series of targeted military actions in response” to the visit.

It promptly announced plans for a series of military exercises in waters around the island to begin on Wednesday, including “long-range live ammunition shooting” in the Taiwan Strait.

“Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Beijing’s foreign ministry added. 

Taiwan’s defence ministry said more than 21 Chinese military aircraft had flown on Tuesday into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone — an area wider than its territorial airspace that overlaps with part of China’s own air defence zone. 

– No need for ‘crisis’ –

China considers self-ruled, democratic Taiwan as its territory and has vowed to one day seize the island, by force if necessary. 

It tries to keep Taiwan isolated on the world stage and opposes countries having official exchanges with Taipei.

In a call with US President Joe Biden last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Washington against “playing with fire” on Taiwan.

While the Biden administration is understood to be opposed to Pelosi’s Taiwan stop, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said she was entitled to go where she pleased. 

“There is no reason for this to erupt into conflict. There’s no change to our policy,” he told CNN shortly after Pelosi’s arrival.

The last speaker of the US House of Representatives to visit Taiwan was Newt Gingrich in 1997.

Kirby reiterated that US policy was unchanged toward Taiwan.

This means support for its self-ruling government, while diplomatically recognising Beijing over Taipei and opposing a formal independence declaration by Taiwan or a forceful takeover by China.

Russia’s foreign ministry called Pelosi’s visit a “clear provocation,” and said Beijing “has the right to take necessary measures to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity over the Taiwan issue.”

China has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been accused of providing diplomatic cover for the Kremlin by blasting Western sanctions and arms sales to Kyiv.

– All eyes on Taiwan –

Pelosi left Kuala Lumpur Tuesday after meeting Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri and Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah.

So many people were tracking the US military plane ferrying her on FlightRadar that the website said some users experienced outages.

The plane took a circuitous route that avoided the South China Sea — which Beijing claims — before heading up the east coast of the Philippines. 

Press access around Pelosi has been tightly restricted and limited to a handful or short statements confirming meetings with officials.

Her itinerary includes stops in South Korea and Japan — but the prospect of a Taiwan trip dominated attention.

Taipei’s government had stayed silent on whether she would visit but news kept leaking out.

The capital’s famous Taipei 101 skyscraper was illuminated with the words “Speaker Pelosi… Thank You” on Tuesday night an hour before Pelosi’s plane arrived. 

– ‘Seek to punish Taiwan’ –

Taiwan’s 23 million people have long lived with the possibility of an invasion, but that threat has intensified under Xi, China’s most assertive ruler in a generation.

“Beijing shouldn’t get to decide who can visit Taiwan or how the US should interact with Taiwan,” Wang Ting-yu, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, told AFP ahead of the visit. 

“I think China’s open intimidation is counter-effective.”

Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia programme at the US-based German Marshall Fund think tank, said the probability of Beijing choosing war was “low”. 

“But the probability that… (China) will take a series of military, economic, and diplomatic actions to show strength & resolve is not insignificant,” she wrote on Twitter.

Taipei’s Council of Agriculture on Tuesday said China had suspended the import of some Taiwanese goods, including some fishery products, tea and honey. The council said China cited regulatory breaches.

Pelosi’s potential visit has been preceded by a flurry of military activity across the region that highlights how combustible the issue of Taiwan is.

Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to a flight tracking website Tuesday anxious to find out whether US official Nancy Pelosi was in fact going to Taiwan, in defiance of China’s angry protests.

Trouble was, there were so many of them — a site record of over 708,000 — that Flightradar24 said it had to limit non-subscribers’ access in order to keep the service online.

“Unfortunately, due to the volume of users, it was necessary to deploy our waiting room functionality, which meters access,” the company said in a statement, referring to “unprecedented” interest.

The sudden fixation on the plane carrying Pelosi, dubbed SPAR19, was driven in large part by uncertainty over whether the US House Speaker would go through with the trip she had refused to confirm.

It’s significant because Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, is the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years and Beijing has made clear that it regards her presence as a major provocation. 

Once the plane landed safely on the Taipei tarmac — speculation had grown that China might take action against the jet — the mystery was no more and the curious crowd dispersed.

“Shortly after SPAR19 landed, normal access for all users was restored quickly,” Flightradar24 said.

China considers self-ruled, democratic Taiwan as its territory and has vowed to one day seize the island, by force if necessary. 

It tries to keep Taiwan isolated on the world stage and opposes countries having official exchanges with Taipei.

A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced an activist for police labour rights to five years in prison for extortion and distribution of pornography.

Arrested in May 2020, former policeman Vladimir Vorontsov has been in detention for nearly three years.

Vorontsov, who quit the Moscow police force in 2017 after 13 years, has denied any wrongdoing.

Moscow’s Lyublinsky district court on Tuesday found him guilty of extortion, distribution of pornography and insulting a representative of the authorities, said OVD-Info, a human rights monitor tracking political persecution.

He was also stripped of his police rank of major and banned from administering blogs for 10 years.

Supporters say the real reason for Vorontsov’s punishment was his Police Ombudsman project, a series of social media accounts dedicated to protecting police officers’ rights and exposing abuse by their superiors. 

He set up his project in 2017 while still in the police, driven by a desire to highlight allegations of injustice and violations. 

He later established close contacts with opposition activists and following his arrest, chief Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s team urged police officers to keep up the pressure.

Vorontsov’s case at the time sparked a rare public outcry among police, a key pillar of President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

Vorontsov was detained in a spectacular fashion.

During an early-morning raid, two commando teams stormed the former policeman’s top-floor apartment in southeast Moscow, one abseiling down the high-rise while the other broke down the door.

During a five-hour search, investigators even combed through their four-year-old’s toys, socks and underwear, Vorontsov’s wife Aleksandra told AFP in 2020.

With no genuinely independent police trade unions in Russia, Vorontsov’s initiative was popular, attracting more than half a million followers.

It has exposed allegations of corruption within law enforcement and denounced pressure on officers to fulfil quotas for fines and arrests.

It has also drawn attention to long working hours and suicides in the police force.

Vorontsov has criticised excessive use of force by police and supported claimants’ successful legal court cases.

Members of Russia’s 750,000-strong police force openly challenged the authorities over Vorontsov’s treatment but also on the functioning and methods of the police.

Dozens of serving and former police staff in Russia at the time took to social media to call for Vorontsov’s release.

Some posted photos of themselves, others released anonymous pictures of their police hats and protest signs.

Conditions for police in Russia are so hard that dozens of police commit suicide every year, Kremlin critics say.

Supporters believe that Vorontsov has made enemies in the upper echelons of the police force and several senior officers have lost their jobs due to his activism.

Voters headed to the polls in the Midwestern US state of Kansas Tuesday to weigh in on the first major ballot on abortion since the Supreme Court ended the national right to the procedure in June.

The vote is heavy with consequences for Kansans, who will decide whether to remove the right to terminate a pregnancy from the traditionally conservative state’s constitution.

But it is also seen as a test case for abortion rights nationwide, as Republican-dominated legislatures rush to impose strict bans on the procedure following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Turnout was high after polls opened at 7:00 am (1200 GMT), according to poll worker Marsha Barrett, who said some 250 voters had come to the station in Olathe by noon — the same number it might see all day in a presidential election. 

“This election is crazy,” Barrett told AFP. “People are determined to vote.”

Other states including California and Kentucky are set to vote on the hot-button issue in November, at the same time as Congressional midterm elections in which both Republicans and Democrats hope to use it to mobilize their supporters nationwide.

In Kansas, the ballot centers on a 2019 ruling by the state’s supreme court that guarantees access to abortion — currently up to the 22-week stage of pregnancy. 

In response, the Republican-dominated state legislature introduced an amendment known as “Value Them Both” that would scrap the constitutional right — with the stated aim of handing regulation of the procedure back to lawmakers.

In the opposing camp, activists see the campaign as a barely masked bid to clear the way for an outright ban — one state legislator has already introduced a bill that would ban abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s life. 

For Ashley All, spokeswoman for pro-abortion rights campaign Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, the amendment would deal a blow to “personal autonomy.”

Activists also complain that the phrasing of the ballot question is counterintuitive, and potentially confusing: voting “Yes” to the amendment means abortion rights being curbed, while people who wish to keep those rights intact must vote “No.” 

First-time voter Morgan Spoor knew she wanted to vote “no” to support “the right to choose.”

“I really want my word out there, especially as a female,” the 19-year-old told AFP. “I don’t think anyone can say what a woman can do with their body.”

– All eyes on Kansas –

Abortion rights advocates in Kansas are looking nervously to neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri, which are among at least eight states to have passed near-total bans — the latter making no exceptions for rape or incest — while Midwestern Indiana adopted its own rigid ban on Saturday.

Kara Miller Karns, a voter in Leawood, said she planned to vote for the status quo on Tuesday, saying it was “not acceptable” for her daughters to grow up with fewer rights than she did. 

But in the same Kansas neighborhood, 43-year-old Christine Vasquez said she planned to back the constitutional amendment — in hope it would clear the way for a future vote on an abortion ban.

“I believe that life starts at conception,” she told AFP ahead of the ballot.

The outcome in Kansas could mean a boost or a blow to either side of the highly charged abortion debate.

Kansas leans heavily toward the Republican Party, which favors stricter abortion regulations, but a 2021 survey from Fort Hays State University found that fewer than 20 percent of Kansas respondents agreed that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape or incest.