World

The top diplomats of the United States and Russia spoke Friday for the first time since the Ukraine war, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken describing a “frank” exchange as he pushed to free two Americans.

Blinken initiated the call with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whom he had shunned as early as a few weeks ago, as he pressed Russia to accept an offer to free prisoners.

“We had a frank and direct conversation. I pressed the Kremlin to accept the substantial proposal that we put forth on the release of Paul Whelan and Brittney Griner,” Blinken told reporters.

President Joe Biden has faced growing public pressure to find a way home for Griner, a basketball star jailed for transport of cannabis oil, and Whelan, a former Marine jailed on espionage charges he denies.

Blinken declined to characterize Lavrov’s reaction, saying, “I can’t give you an assessment of whether I think things are any more or less likely.”

“But it was important that he heard directly from me on that,” Blinken said.

Russia’s foreign ministry, in a statement on the call, said that relations between the two nations “are in strong need of normalization.”

“As for a potential swap of Russian and American prisoners, the Russian side insisted that we return to a regime of professional dialogue, free of media speculation, in the framework of discreet diplomacy,” it said.

Lavrov also denounced the US military and NATO for their supply of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, saying it “only prolonged the agony of the Kyiv regime, extending the conflict and its victims.” the foreign ministry said.

– Warnings on annexation –

The US proposal, sent quietly to Russia several weeks earlier, reportedly includes swapping the two Americans for convicted Russian arms smuggler Viktor Bout and would follow a similar prisoner exchange in April. 

Blinken said he also pressed Lavrov on Russia honoring a Turkish-brokered proposal to ship grain out of Ukraine and on purported plans by Moscow to annex additional parts of Ukraine seized by Russian troops. 

Blinken said he told Lavrov that the world will not recognize annexation.

“It was very important that the Russians hear directly from us that that will not be accepted — and not only will it not be accepted, it will result in additional significant costs being imposed upon Russia if it follows through,” Blinken said.

Blinken said Russia was preparing “sham referendums” to try to “falsely demonstrate that the people in these parts of Ukraine somehow seek to become part of Russia.”

The votes would be part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objective of “gobbling up as much Ukrainian territory as he can,” he added.

The telephone conversation was the first between Blinken and Lavrov since February 15, when the top US diplomat warned Russia against invading Ukraine, repeating a message he delivered in person in Geneva a month earlier.

Putin went ahead and attacked nine days later, leading the United States and its allies to impose sweeping sanctions and to seek to isolate Russia on the world stage.

Blinken refused to meet Lavrov when they both attended talks in early July in Bali of the Group of 20 major economies. They are likely to cross paths again next week at talks of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Cambodia.

For Brett Eagleson, this week’s Saudi-backed golf event at Trump National is an affront: it’s happening just miles from where hijackers murdered his father on 9/11.

“It’s extremely disrespectful, it’s hurtful, it’s painful,” Eagleson, who was 15 when his dad died in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, told AFP.

The 36-year-old heads 9/11 Justice, a group that accuses Saudi Arabia of complicity in the atrocity — allegations the Saudi government has denied.

Ex-president Donald Trump’s course in Bedminster, New Jersey, less than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Ground Zero, is hosting LIV Golf’s third event this weekend.

Eagleson was among a few dozen relatives of victims and survivors of the Al-Qaeda attacks, which killed 3,000 people, who gathered near the course Friday ahead of the three-day tournament’s start.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in the coordinated attacks on New York and Washington were Saudi nationals. An FBI memo released last year hinted at official Saudi involvement.

Trump himself claimed in 2016 while he was running for president that Saudi Arabia was responsible, without providing any evidence.

“(Now) he chooses to host the kingdom at his course in the backyard where 750 people were blown away,” said Eagleson, referencing the number of New Jersey residents killed on 9/11.

“It’s incredibly infuriating,” he said.

Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, LIV has sought to lure top golfers from the establishment PGA and DP World tours with contracts that have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Human Rights groups say the venture is a “sportswashing” exercise being used to boost Saudi Arabia’s international reputation. Organizers insist their intention is to boost golf’s popularity worldwide.

Avid golfer Trump has emerged as a vocal advocate for LIV, urging players to “take the money” and sign with the circuit.

Trump played in Thursday’s pro-am at Bedminster, alongside two of LIV’s highest-profile recruits — major winners Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson.

He brushed off criticism from 9/11 families in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week.

– ‘Money over morality’ –

But Eagleson says Trump’s involvement will hurt him politically as he mulls whether to run for the White House again in 2024.

“Some of our biggest 9/11 advocates are family members of FDNY and NYPD. And those have been some of Trump’s biggest supporters. Well, not anymore,” he said.

LIV organizers have said previously that 9/11 families “have our deepest sympathy,” but that “we believe golf is a force for good around the world.”

For Tim Frolich, who was injured on 9/11, the tournament has reopened old wounds.

“I had trouble sleeping last night, just the anger,” the 58-year-old told AFP as relatives held up photos of their late loved ones and wore T-shirts saying “never forget.”

Eagleson’s father, Bruce Eagleson, was at a meeting on the 17th floor of the South Tower when hijackers slammed United Airlines Flight 175 into the skyscraper. He was 53.

Eagleson says his father was a huge golf fan whose favorite player was Phil Mickelson, one of the first players to defect to LIV.

“I don’t know how he lives with himself,” Eagleson said of Mickelson. “He’s literally choosing to take the money over any sense of morality.”

More protests are planned for upcoming LIV events in Boston, Chicago and Miami, the latter tournament being held at another Trump course.

“We’re not going away anytime soon,” said Eagleson.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Friday urged Turkey to respect human rights during a testy visit at which she sparred openly with counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu.

The former German Green party co-leader also rejected Turkey’s territorial claims to Greek islands in the Aegean and urged Ankara not to stage a mooted military incursion into northern Syria.

Baerbock was paying her first visit to Turkey after holding talks in Greece that came with old rivalries between the two NATO defence alliance neighbours rising once again.

Turkey accuses Greece of illegally arming its web of islands — some of them visible from the Turkish shore.

Greece counters that Turkey is staging provocative military sorties over the region and threatening to go to war.

“The Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes and many others are Greek territories and nobody has the right to question them,” Baerbock said alongside Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias in Athens.

“We cannot solve the problems of the east Mediterranean by escalating tensions,” she added during a joint media appearance with Cavusoglu.

Cavusoglu retorted: “Why are you closing your eyes to Greece’s unlawful actions.”

Turkey and Germany developed a warm friendship in the era of former chancellor Angela Merkel.

Germany accepted millions of Turkish workers and pushed for broader EU assistance to Ankara aimed at rewarding it for hosting people fleeing the war in Syria and other conflicts.

But Baerbock was more critical of Turkey as leader of the leftist Green party and raised a number of what she called “difficult” issues in Istanbul.

– Missing Merkel –

Baerbock warned that Turkey’s threat to launch a new offensive against Kurdish military in northern Syria “will only cause more pain for people” and help jihadists from the Islamic State group.

She called for the release of civil society leader Osman Kavala — jailed for life this year on what most Western governments believe are trumped-up charges — and stressed that “persecuted people’s rights should be protected”.

Cavusoglu turned and looked directly at Baerbock during some of his firmest remarks.

“Why are you mentioning Kavala?” Cavusoglu demanded. “Because you used him. We know that you funded Gezi events.”

Kavala was convicted of organising and funding so-called “Gezi park” protests against then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2013.

“When Merkel was there, Germany’s position was balanced,” Cavusoglu said. “It could do mediation.”

German played a central role in helping calm another spike in tensions between Ankara and Athens in 2020.

Baerbock’s visit to Athens saw Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias call on Germany to suspend a joint venture under which Turkey is producing a modern new class of submarines.

These submarines “threaten to shift the balance of forces in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Dendias said.

“The paradigm of revisionism must not succeed.”

Berlin has previously argued that it cannot suspend a commercial agreement signed by Germany’s Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems.

The death toll from severe flooding in Kentucky hit 16 on Friday and is expected to double, the US state’s governor said, after torrential rains caused flash floods that swept away some homes while people slept.

“Tough news is 16 confirmed fatalities now, and folks that’s going to get a lot higher,” Governor Andy Beshear said at a media briefing.

“It is devastating,” Beshear told CNN earlier in the day, saying he expected the toll to “more than double.”

“Some people’s houses were completely swept away in the middle of the night while they were sleeping,” the governor said.

Hundreds of people had been rescued by boat and there had been about 50 aerial rescues using National Guard helicopters, he said.

With many roads washed out “we still can’t get to a lot of people,” the governor said.

“The current is so strong it’s not safe for some of those water rescues that we need to do.”

Eastern Kentucky has had flash flooding previously “but we’ve never seen something like this,” Beshear said.

“Folks who deal with this for a living, who have been doing it for 20 years, have never seen water this high.”

Some areas of the state’s Appalachia region reported receiving more than eight inches (20 centimeters) of rain in a 24-hour period.

The water level of the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg rose to a staggering 20 feet within hours, well above its previous record of 14.7 feet.

– Disaster declaration –

Many roads resembled rivers, mangled cars littered the landscape and muddy brown floodwaters lapped against the rooftops of low-lying houses.

Kayla Brown, 29, and Joe Salley Jr., 56, residents of Perry County, told the Lexington Herald-Leader that the fast-rising flood waters trapped them in their mobile home.

“It was like a wave coming at you out of the ocean,” Salley said.

Neighbors came to their rescue after their trailer was knocked off its foundations.

Four young children ranging in age from one and a half to eight years old were swept away from their parents in hard-hit Knott County, the Herald-Leader reported. 

Brittany Trejo, the siblings’ cousin, told the newspaper the bodies of two of the children had been found, but the other two were still missing.

Their parents were rescued after clinging to a tree for eight hours, Trejo told the Herald-Leader.

“They managed to get to a tree and… held the children a few hours before a big tide came and washed them all away,” Trejo said.

The eastern Kentucky flooding is the latest in a series of extreme weather events that scientists say are an unmistakable sign of climate change.

Nearly 60 people were killed in western Kentucky by a tornado in December 2021.

The National Weather Service warned that more heavy rain was expected on Friday.

President Joe Biden issued a disaster declaration for Kentucky, allowing federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts.

Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, arrived in Kentucky on Friday to tour flood-hit areas and report back to the president.

Moscow and Kyiv on Friday accused each other of bombing a jail holding Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russian-held territory, with Russia saying 40 prisoners and eight prison staff were killed.

Russia’s defence ministry said the Ukrainian strikes were carried out with US-supplied long-range missiles, in an “egregious provocation” designed to stop soldiers surrendering.

It said that among the dead were Ukrainian forces that had laid down their arms after repelling Moscow’s assault on the sprawling Azovstal steel works in Mariupol.

The claims came as President Volodymyr Zelensky visited a port in southern Ukraine to oversee a ship being loaded with grain for export under a UN-backed plan aimed at ending a food crisis.

Ukraine’s presidency said exports could start in the “coming days” under the plan aimed at getting millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain stranded by Russia’s naval blockade to world markets.

– ‘Petrifying war crime’ –

Following the strike on the prison, Russian state-television showed what appeared to be destroyed barracks and tangled metal beds but no casualties could be seen.

Ukraine’s military denied carrying out the attack saying its forces “did not launch missile and artillery strikes in the area of Olenivka settlement.”

It instead blamed Russia’s invading forces for “a targeted artillery shelling” on the detention facility, saying it was being used to “accuse Ukraine of committing ‘war crimes’, as well as to hide the torture of prisoners and executions”.

“Russia has committed another petrifying war crime by shelling a correctional facility in occupied” Olenivka where it held Ukrainian POWs, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter.

Ukraine’s army said in a statement that the attack was “not coordinated with the leadership” of Russia’s defence ministry and was used to conceal the “embezzlement of funds” allocated for Ukrainian POWs. 

Ukraine’s forces in May ended a weeks-long siege of Azovstal, with around 2,500 combatants surrendering after calling a halt to their first resistance. 

Moscow’s state media has reported that some officers — including those from the controversial Azov regiment — have been taken into Russia. 

Kyiv says it has captured thousands of Russian troops during the invasion and has begun putting some on trial for alleged war crimes. 

A Ukrainian court on Friday reduced the life sentence handed to a Russian soldier in May for pre-meditated murder in the country’s first war crimes trial, instead jailing the serviceman for 15 years.

– Mykolaiv strikes –

Russian strikes elsewhere in Ukraine killed five people and wounded seven more on Friday on the heavily bombed city of Mykolaiv near the country’s southern frontline, the regional governor said.

“They shot at another area near a public transport stop,” governor Vitaliy Kim said in a statement on social media.

Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, has seen roughly half of its estimated pre-war population of nearly 500,000 people leave and the city has been shelled daily for weeks.

It is the largest Ukrainian-controlled urban hub near the frontlines in the Kherson region, where Kyiv’s army has launched a counter-offensive to regain control of the economically and strategically important coastal territory.

The Ukrainian presidency said Friday that Russian strikes on the city a day earlier had struck a humanitarian aid distribution point and injured three people.

In the eastern Donetsk region, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko also said Friday that Moscow’s forces had killed eight people and wounded 19 more in attacks over the previous day.

– Grain ship loading –

The ceaseless violence on the ground comes as Ukraine looks to push ahead with restarting crucial grain exports under a plan brokered by Turkey and the United Nations to lift Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade. 

Ukraine’s presidency released footage of Zelensky standing in front of Turkish ship Polarnet in the port of Chornomorsk on a visit to inspect grain being loaded.

“The first vessel, the first ship is being loaded since the beginning of the war,” Zelensky said in a statement. 

Zelensky said Kyiv was “waiting for a signal” from Ankara and UN to start exports that it is hoped will help mitigate a global food crisis that has seen prices soar. 

According to Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry, 17 ships had been loaded with grain in the ports of Chornomorsk and neighbouring Odessa with 10 ready for departure.

The hike in food costs is just one of the shock waves that Moscow’s war in Ukraine has sent reverberating around the world.

Energy prices have also risen dramatically as Moscow has cut gas supplies to Europe and the turbulence has wracked the oil markets. 

The French presidency said that leader Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had agreed to work together to limit the impact of the war at talks in Paris. 

Macron took the meeting despite fierce criticism from rights groups in a bid to get major crude producer Saudi Arabia to up its production. 

burs-jbr-acl/har

French authorities on Friday held a fireman from the south of France accused of being behind a series of wildfires in the region which he says he started in a quest for adrenaline.

The man, a volunteer fireman from the Herault region, was arrested on Wednesday, regional prosectors said.

The case of the man dubbed in media as the “pyromaniac fireman” has sparked a keen interest in France, which was shocked by a swathe of wildfires in last week’s heatwave that forced the evacuation of thousands of people. 

Montpellier prosecutor Fabrice Belargent said in a statement that the man had admitted starting fires with a lighter on May 26, July 21 and most recently over the night of July 26-27.

“Asked about his motive, he declared that he had done this in order to provoke an intervention by the fire brigade to save him from an oppressive family environment and because of the excitement these interventions caused him,” said Belargent.

“Adrenaline he called it — these are his own words,” said the prosecutor. “He also said he had a need for social recognition.” 

Adding to the irony, the full time job of the man, who has not been identified by name but is in his 30s, was a forester with preventing fires one of his primary responsibilities.

His lawyer Marie Bar told BFM TV that under questioning the man had “expressed very strong regret and above all a strong sentiment of shame”.

She confirmed he had been remanded in custody by an investigating judge ahead of trial. 

“He apologised to the…. firemen who he works with as he calls them his big family. This is someone who is very devoted to his work,” she said.

“He finds it hard to explain. In a way he is relieved to have been arrested. He explains it as an addiction.”

If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison and a 150,000 euro ($153,000) fine.

“It’s disgusting to have within the organisation this type of individual,” former fire brigade colonel Ludovic Pinganaud told BFM, adding that out of 200,000 volunteer fireman in France there were just “some sick people” addicted to fires.