World

The US and Russian spy chiefs held a rare face-to-face meeting in Ankara Monday on Moscow’s nuclear threats in Ukraine and Americans held prisoner by the Kremlin, the White House said.

In what appeared to be the highest-level direct talks between officials of the two countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns met with Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman confirmed the meeting, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said it came as “an initiative of the American side,” according to Russian media.

Peskov declined to provide details on the contents.

But the White House said Burns, formerly Washington’s ambassador in Moscow, was delivering a warning against Russia’s threat to make use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war.

The CIA chief’s message was “on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, and the risks of escalation to strategic stability,” according to a White House statement.

The United States has warned for months over Russian threats to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine if its own territorial integrity was threatened.

On September 21, Putin said Western nations were seeking to “destroy” his country, and made what was widely taken as a threat to employ nuclear weapons.

“When the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff,” Putin said.

– ‘Unjustly’ detained Americans –

The White House National Security Council statement Monday stressed that Burns was not in Ankara to discuss ways to end the war in Ukraine, where Russian forces have been beaten back in nine months of grinding conflict but still occupy large swathes of territory.

“He is not conducting negotiations of any kind. He is not discussing settlement of the war in Ukraine,” the statement said.

“We firmly stick to our fundamental principle: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” it said.

The statement said the two officials were also discussing the issue of US citizens detained “unjustly” in Russia.

Russia has imprisoned US basketball star Brittney Griner, arrested last year in Moscow on drug charges, as well as Paul Whelan, an auto supply company official who was convicted of spying after his arrest in 2018. 

Washington has reportedly offered a prisoner swap, with speculation that it is willing to exchange jailed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for the Americans.

Last week US President Joe Biden voiced hope that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would negotiate “more seriously” to free Griner, who was sent to a penal colony on a nine-year sentence after her appeal in Russian courts failed.

“My hope is that now that the election is over that Mr. Putin will be able to discuss with us and be willing to talk more seriously about prisoner exchange,” Biden said.

According to Turkey’s Anadolu news agency, the two spy chiefs met as guests of Turkish National Intelligence.

Erdogan has made his country an important broker for talks between the two sides, especially on the issue of allowing essential grain exports from Ukraine, which were blocked by the Russian navy early in the war.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Monday criticized a mass protest against his proposed electoral reforms as an attempt by his opponents to return to corrupt old ways.

“Those who demonstrated… did so in favor of corruption, racism, classism and discrimination — that’s the bottom line,” Lopez Obrador told reporters a day after tens of thousands marched in Mexico City.

The president, who regularly accuses his predecessors of corruption, insisted that his plan sought to “strengthen democracy.”

Protesters demanded a halt to the proposed reform that they say will undermine the National Electoral Institute, the independent body which organizes the country’s elections.

Some carried banners that read, “I am not corrupt, class-conscious, racist or hypocritical,” referring to adjectives the president used earlier to describe those who planned to take part.

Lopez Obrador alleges that the INE endorsed fraud when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2006 and 2012, before winning in 2018.

Under his proposal, the INE would be replaced by a new body with members chosen by voters instead of lawmakers and with a smaller budget.

Political parties would also have less money for campaigning.

The proposed reform, which involves amending the constitution, requires support from at least two-thirds of lawmakers in Congress, and Lopez Obrador’s political opponents have vowed to oppose the changes.

Lopez Obrador criticized the participation of opposition politicians such as former president Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party in Sunday’s protest.

The president’s plan would also reduce the number of seats in the lower house of congress from 500 to 300, and those in the Senate from 128 to 96.

The next presidential election is scheduled for 2024, and the constitution limits presidents to a single six-year term.

Former president Donald Trump’s inflammatory words before and during last year’s US Capitol insurrection endangered Americans including his own deputy Mike Pence, the former vice president said in a television interview set to air Monday.

“The president’s words that day at the rally (before the riot) endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol,” Pence told ABC News.

Pence reportedly is laying the groundwork for a presidential run in 2024. It would pit him against his former boss, who has convened the media to his palatial Florida home on Tuesday night reportedly to announce his own White House bid.

Pence’s interview to be broadcast on ABC’s “World News Tonight” coincides with the release Tuesday of his memoir, “So Help Me God.”

The veteran Republican told the network that Trump, speaking on January 6, 2021 at a park near the White House, incited the crowd before it marched toward the Capitol: “The president’s words were reckless. It was clear he decided to be part of the problem.”

Pence said he was “angered” when he read a Trump tweet that day asserting that the vice president “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” to keep Trump in office by blocking Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

“I turned to my daughter, who was standing nearby, and I said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law,'” Pence told the network.

The vice president was on Capitol Hill at the time, and US Secret Service officers evacuated him from the US Senate chamber where he narrowly avoided an encounter with rioters who had stormed into the complex.

Pence has largely kept mum about his interactions with Trump in the run-up to the January 6 mob attack — until this month.

In an excerpt from his memoir, published last week by the Wall Street Journal, Pence said he spoke with Trump by phone on New Year’s Day 2021 and conveyed his refusal to take part in a plan to keep Trump in power.

“‘You’re too honest,'” Pence said Trump told him. “Hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts…. People are gonna think you’re stupid.'”

The United States said Monday it was increasing its reward for information about key leaders of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab to $10 million apiece, a move that follows a spate of deadly attacks by the jihadist group.

The US State Department also said it was for the first time offering a reward of up to $10 million for information “leading to the disruption of the financial mechanisms” of the Al-Qaeda affiliate.

Al-Shabaab fighters have stepped up attacks in the Somali capital Mogadishu and other parts of the country in the face of a widescale offensive against the group by the new government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.

The US said it was offering up to $10 million each for information leading to the identification of Al-Shabaab “emir” Ahmed Diriye, second-in-command Mahad Karate and Jehad Mostafa, a US citizen who it said had various roles in the group.

“These key leaders of Al-Shabaab are responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in Somalia, Kenya and neighbouring countries that have killed thousands of people,” said a poster issued by the US with pictures of the three men.

UN human rights chief Volker Turk said earlier Monday that more than 600 civilians had been killed this year in attacks largely attributed to the group.

At least 613 civilians have been killed and 948 injured so far in 2022, according to the latest United Nations figures — the highest since 2017 and a more-than 30-percent rise from last year.

In the deadliest attack in five years, twin bombings on October 29 claimed by Al-Shabaab killed at least 121 people and injured 333 others in Mogadishu, the UN said, citing Somali figures.

– ‘All-out war’ –

The group, which was designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the State Department in March 2008, has been seeking to overthrow the fragile foreign-backed government in Mogadishu for about 15 years.

Its fighters were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 by an African Union force, but the group still controls swathes of countryside and continues to wage deadly strikes on civilian, political and military targets.

In August, following a 30-hour siege on a Mogadishu hotel that killed at least 21 people, Mohamud declared “all-out war” on the jihadists, who espouse a strict version of sharia or Islamic law.  

The US statement said Diriye, who has been leader since September 2014 after the killing of Ahmed Abdi Godane in a US strike, was designated by the US as a “specially designated global terrorist” in April 2015, and slapped with UN sanctions the same year.

Karate, who was also designated a terrorist in April 2015 and also faces UN sanctions, continues to lead some Al-Shabaab operations, the US said.

He also “maintains some command responsibility over Amniyat, the group’s intelligence and security wing, which oversees suicide attacks and assassinations in Somalia, Kenya, and other countries in the region, and provides logistics and support for al-Shabaab’s terrorist activities”.

Mostafa, a US citizen who once lived in California, has been a military instructor at Al-Shabaab training camps, as well as a leader of foreign fighters, a leader in the group’s media wing, an intermediary with other “terrorist organisations,” and a leader in the use of explosives in attacks, the US said. 

In December 2019, he was indicted in a US court on various charges linked to Al-Shabaab.

“The FBI assesses Mostafa to be the highest-ranking terrorist with US citizenship fighting overseas.”

In May, US President Joe Biden decided to restore a military presence in Somalia, approving a request from the Pentagon, which deemed his predecessor Donald Trump’s rotation system too risky and ineffective.

Britain announced Monday that it would cut short its troop deployment with the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Mali after relations with the country’s Russian-backed junta soured.

“I can announce that the UK contingent will… now be leaving the MINUSMA mission earlier than planned,” Defence Minister James Heappey told parliament, referring to the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali.

“Two coups in three years have undermined international efforts to advance peace,” he said.

“This government cannot deploy our nation’s military to provide security when the host country’s government is not willing to work with us to deliver lasting stability and security.”

Heappey accused Mali of working with the Russian mercenary group Wagner, and actively seeking to “interfere” with the UN mission and French-led operations there.

“The Malian government’s partnership with Wagner group is counterproductive to lasting stability and security in their region,” he said.

Bamako has previously denied turning to Wagner’s paramilitaries, acknowledging only the support of Russian military “instructors.”

Britain dispatched 300 troops to Mali in December 2020 to join MINUSMA, a force drawn from dozens of countries aiming to bolster the troubled Sahel nation.

It was originally planned that they would remain there for three years, but they will now pull out within the next six months, under the ministry’s plans.

Alongside faltering relations with Mali’s military leaders, an Islamist insurgency that first erupted in the country’s north in 2012 has now spilled over into neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso.

The epicentre of the conflict — which has killed thousands of people and displaced millions — now appears to be in Burkina Faso, according to Britain’s defence ministry.

France pulled its troops out of Mali earlier this year amid growing friction with the junta in Bamako, while Sweden announced in March it would be leaving the MINUSMA mission.

Heappey insisted the UK troop drawdown did not mean Britain would abandon security commitments to the region.

“We’ve been working closely with our allies to consider options for rebalancing our deployment alongside France, the EU and other like-minded allies,” he told MPs.

Interested parties will meet next week in Ghana in the first major gathering in support of the so-called Accra Initiative, he noted.

The West African-led plans aim to prevent further contagion of the insurgency into Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Niger, and tackling the growing levels of violence in Burkina Faso.

“The UK will continue its commitment to Mali and the Sahel through our humanitarian, stabilisation and development assistance, working in close coordination with partners,” Heappey added.

Police on Monday arrested a former US college football player suspected of shooting dead three ex-teammates at the University of Virginia, a few hours south of the US capital.

The latest outburst of campus gun violence came as four people were found dead in a separate incident near the University of Idaho.

Police chief Timothy Longo told a news conference that a 22-year-old student at the University of Virginia, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr, had been taken into custody on suspicion of carrying out the shooting Sunday night.

“I don’t have information with respect to how he was apprehended,” Longo said.

The shooting took place on a bus while students were returning from a field trip, according to UVA president Jim Ryan, who said all three victims were members of the college football team.

Two other students were wounded, Ryan said, and one of them was in critical condition.

The campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Washington, had been locked down while helicopters and police searched for Jones.

The shelter-in-place order was lifted hours later but “a large police presence will remain,” the UVA Office of Emergency Management tweeted.

“This is a traumatic incident for everyone in our community, and we have cancelled classes for today,” Ryan said in a statement.

Jones is a former UVA football player listed on the Cavaliers’ 2018 roster as a first-year running back.

The three victims were identified as Cavaliers wide receivers Lavel Davis Jr and Devin Chandler and linebacker D’Sean Perry.

In 2007, Virginia Tech became the scene of the worst school shooting on record in the United States when a 23-year-old student killed 32 students and faculty members before committing suicide.

After Sunday’s UVA shooting, US Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said he was “heartbroken to hear of another Virginia community devastated by gun violence.”

– Idaho college homicide –

More than 2,000 miles to the west in the Rocky Mountain state of Idaho, police were investigating a separate incident in which four students were found dead Sunday in a home near the University of Idaho campus, believed to be the “victims of homicide.”

Officers responded to a call in the town of Moscow, near the University of Idaho, about an unconscious individual.

“Upon arrival, officers discovered four individuals who were deceased,” police said in a statement.

Authorities did not release other details including the cause of death.

“It is with deep sadness that I share with you that the university was notified today of the death of four University of Idaho students living off-campus believed to be victims of homicide,” University of Idaho president Scott Green said in a statement.

Meanwhile near Michigan’s largest city Detroit, police were scouring Oakland University early Monday “to pursue two armed suspects on campus,” the school said in a Twitter statement as they urged students and faculty to stay away.

The school later gave an “all clear.”

The Detroit Free Press reported that the incident began when suspects driving stolen vehicles crashed on an interstate and ran onto the Oakland campus to evade capture.

School shootings are alarmingly common as part of a broader wave of gun violence in the United States, where the proliferation of firearms has skyrocketed in recent years.

In May an 18-year-old gunman burst into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, with a semi-automatic rifle and killed 19 students and two teachers, in an attack that shocked the nation and renewed calls for gun reform.