World

British postal operator Royal Mail on Friday unveiled plans to axe up to 10,000 jobs, blaming the move partly on ongoing staff strikes that contributed to a first-half loss.

The announcement came one day after staff staged the first of 19 walkouts targeting the critical run-up to Christmas, joining several other UK sectors carrying out industrial action as sky-high inflation erodes the value of wages.

Royal Mail’s job cuts follow “the impact of industrial action, delays in delivering agreed productivity improvements and lower parcel volumes”, its parent group said in a results statement, sending shares tanking.

“Our operational full-time employee workforce will need to reduce by an estimated 10,000 by the end of August 2023,” International Distributions Services added alongside news it had plunged into the red.

– ‘Gross mismanagement’ –

The planned job losses comprise almost seven percent of Royal Mail’s total workforce of 150,000 people.

The restructuring includes up to 6,000 compulsory redundancies.

Dave Ward, general secretary of the CWU union that has organised Royal Mail walkouts, said the job cuts were “the result of gross mismanagement “.

He added there had been “a failed business agenda of ending daily deliveries, a wholesale levelling-down of the terms, pay and conditions of postal workers, and turning Royal Mail into a gig economy-style parcel courier”.

The group suffered an operating loss of £219 million ($245 million) in the six months to the end of September, it added Friday.

That contrasted sharply with profit of £235 million a year earlier, when it was buoyed by strong parcel demand during the pandemic.

“It now expects full-year losses to hit £350 million, which is the figure it had hoped to make in cost savings before the strikes erupted,” noted Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

The threat of further strike action beyond Christmas “means that no certainty can be given over the full year outlook for the group as a whole”, she added.

Royal Mail said full-year operating losses could increase to £450 million should “customers move volume away for longer periods” as a result of strike action.

The share price of International Distributions Services was down more than eight percent at 192.65 pence in afternoon London trading, having recovered from even sharper losses following Friday’s news.

– Royal makeover –

Set up more than 500 years ago, Royal Mail has experienced some of its most turbulent times during the past decade, particularly following its controversial privatisation in 2013.

The firm’s core letters business has been ravaged as consumers increasingly go online to communicate.

However, it enjoyed booming demand for parcel deliveries during Britain’s Covid lockdowns — and played a vital role delivering test kits and protective clothing in the pandemic.

Yet the Covid-era boom in parcels has tailed off.

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last month, all new Royal Mail postboxes will no longer feature the EIIR royal cipher.

The cipher stood for Elizabeth II Regina (“queen” in Latin).

Instead they will be imprinted with CIIIR, representing Charles III Rex (“king” in Latin). A crown will feature above both letters.

New British stamps will also feature an image of his head.

Rape and sexual assault attributed to Moscow’s forces in Ukraine are part of a Russian “military strategy” and a “deliberate tactic to dehumanise the victims”, UN envoy Pramila Patten told AFP in an interview.

“All the indications are there,” the UN special representative on sexual violence told AFP on Thursday, when asked if rape was being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine.

“When women are held for days and raped, when you start to rape little boys and men, when you see a series of genital mutilations, when you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,” she said.

“And when the victims report what was said during the rapes, it is clearly a deliberate tactic to dehumanise the victims.”

The United Nations has verified “more than a hundred cases” of rape or sexual assault since the beginning of the war, Patten said.

The first cases were reported just “three days after the invasion of Ukraine” on February 24, she added, referring to a UN report released in late September.

The report “confirmed crimes against humanity committed by the Russian forces, and according to gathered testimonies, the age of the victims of sexual violence ranges from four to 82 years old,” Patten said.

The victims are mostly women and girls, but also men and boys, she added.

“There are many cases of sexual violence against children who are raped, tortured and kept hostage,” she said.

But “reported cases are only the tip of the iceberg,” she added.

“It’s very difficult to have reliable statistics during an active conflict, and the numbers will never reflect reality, because sexual violence is a silent crime” that is largely underreported.

– ‘World is watching’ –

Patten said her fight against sexual violence was “a battle against impunity”.

“That’s why I went to Ukraine (in May): to send a strong signal to the victims, to tell them that we stand with them and to ask them to break their silence,” she said.

But it was “also to send a strong signal to the rapists. The world is watching them, and raping a woman or girl, man or boy, will not be without consequences”.

Rape as a weapon of war has been reported in conflicts worldwide, from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But the war in Ukraine has marked a turning point in international attitudes, the UN envoy said.

“There is now political will to fight impunity, and there is consensus today on the fact that rapes are used as a military tactic, a terror tactic,” Patten said.

“Is it because it is now happening in the heart of Europe? That might be it.” 

She said she hoped, however, that the focus on Ukraine would not detract from other conflicts.

“I find this attention to… sexual violence linked to conflicts to be very positive,” she said, unlike in the past when the issue was viewed as “unavoidable”, mere “collateral damage” or even a “cultural issue”.

Patten said she was also concerned about the risk of human trafficking.

“The women, girls and children who have fled Ukraine are very, very vulnerable, and for predators, what is happening in that country is not a tragedy but an opportunity,” she said.

“People trafficking is an invisible crime, but it’s a major crisis.”

More than seven million Ukrainians have fled the fighting into other European countries since the war started, the UN refugee agency says.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss won power by appealing to Conservative members as the heir to Margaret Thatcher. Barely six weeks into her tenure, her hard-right economic platform lies in ruins.

Truss succeeded Boris Johnson by telling the Tory rank-and-file that she would turbo-charge economic growth through tax cuts, via increased borrowing. 

She accused her rival Rishi Sunak of “scaremongering” when he warned that such an approach at a time of rampant inflation would drive up interest rates for millions of Britons. 

But that is exactly what has happened, leading Truss on Friday to part ways with her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, a fellow traveller on her political journey to the free-market, libertarian right.

Yet the chancellor of the exchequer was merely the public face for Truss’s own agenda when he delivered his disastrous budget announcement on September 23.

Kwarteng’s sacrifice may not prove enough. Senior Tory MPs bidding to unseat Truss are said to be plotting ways to deny the party membership another say in their choice of leader.

Truss is no stranger to screeching U-turns. She began her political journey as the Liberal Democrat-supporting daughter of progressive parents, and opposed the monarchy and Brexit.

Her youthful calls to abolish the royal family ran headlong into her new role when Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, only two days after appointing Truss. 

The new prime minister paid tribute to the late monarch, curtsied to King Charles III, and joined the queen’s successor on a tour of his new UK realms. 

But her tribute from the steps of 10 Downing Street was widely seen as stilted, betraying the leaden oratory of Truss in comparison to the verbal theatrics of Johnson.

Yet after the scandal-ridden Johnson, Truss’s unvarnished style and promises of a right-wing agenda found favour with the Tory membership.

– ‘Human hand grenade’ –

“She’s always been outspoken. She’s always been a disrupter,” said Mark Littlewood, head of the Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank and a former member of Oxford University’s Liberal Democrat club with Truss.

“You really need to understand Elizabeth Truss as a kind of free-market liberal,” he told AFP when she took power.

Truss’s rise to become the UK’s third female prime minister has inevitably led to comparisons with the first: Thatcher.

As foreign secretary for the past year, Truss had been pictured riding atop a tank and sporting a Russian fur hat in Moscow, just like the Tory icon.

Johnson’s former top aide Dominic Cummings likened her to a “human hand grenade”, and some MPs have accused her of excessive self-promotion.

Truss admits to not being the “slickest presenter”. She is still mocked online for a bizarre speech she gave as environment minister in 2014, offering impassioned support for British cheese and pork.

– Liberal to Tory –

Truss grew up first in Scotland and then an affluent suburb of Leeds, northern England. 

Her mother was a nurse, teacher and campaigner for nuclear disarmament who took her on protests, and her father was a left-wing maths professor.

During the Tory leadership campaign, Truss criticised her Leeds school for fostering “low expectations”.

That prompted a backlash from teachers, contemporaries and locals who accused her of inventing an “insulting” backstory to curry favour with the Tory right.

Despite the school’s supposed failings, she went on to Oxford, where — like Sunak — she graduated in philosophy, politics and economics.

At Oxford, she was president of the university’s Liberal Democrat branch. At the party’s national conference in 1994, she gave a speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy.

“I was a bit of a teenage controversialist,” Truss admitted during campaigning. 

By her own admission, her switch to the Conservatives shocked her parents, but she says her beliefs had evolved.

After university, Truss worked in the energy sector, including for Shell, and telecommunications before entering politics a decade later.  

She was a local councillor in southeast London for four years and became an MP in 2010, part of a new generation of women and minority candidates encouraged by then party leader David Cameron.

He faced down protests from the local party in the agricultural South West Norfolk constituency, after it emerged that Truss had been having an extra-marital affair with a fellow Tory. 

Her critics were dubbed the “Turnip Taliban”.

Truss’s marriage to an accountant survived the episode. They have two daughters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijan on Friday slammed “unacceptable” comments from French leader Emmanuel Macron’s on the decades-long conflict between arch foes Baku and Yerevan.

The Caucasus neighbours have fought two wars — in 2020 and in the 1990s — over Azerbaijan’s Armenian populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Deadly clashes in September along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border have raised the fears of a fresh all-out conflict.

In comments to French television Wednesday, Macron accused Russia of “destabilising” and “seeking to create disorder” in the Caucasus.

The French leader’s remarks “show a lack of understanding of the course of the conflict,” Putin said during a meeting of leaders of Commonwealth of Independent States members in Kazakhstan. 

He added that Macron’s accusations “sounded incorrect” and were “unacceptable”.

“There will be an opportunity” to “discuss” this with Macron, Putin said as he also invited the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to Russia for talks “at any time, in any place”.

“Russia has always sincerely sought to resolve any conflicts, including issues related to Karabakh,” he said. 

Macron also accused Azerbaijan of launching “a terrible war, with many deaths, atrocious scenes”.

More recently, “Azerbaijan has launched several offensives along the border (with Armenia). We have condemned them. We will not abandon Armenians,” he said.

The foreign ministry in Baku reacted angrily Friday, saying the remarks were “unacceptable and biased”.

“Azerbaijan is forced to reconsider France’s efforts in mediating” Armenian-Azerbaijani talks, it said.

– Future peace treaty –

On Friday Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan and Azerbaijan’s Jeyhun Bayramov met for talks in the Kazakh capital Astana.

Russian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani foreign ministries said the trio discussed joint efforts on normalising Azerbaijani-Armenian relations.

The meeting was held amid the growing Western engagement in the volatile Caucasus region, where Russia — distracted by its war in Ukraine — is visibly losing influence after decades of domination.

On Wednesday, Kremlin foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov criticised the “attempts of non-regional players — the EU and US — to wedge themselves in our work” on the region.

With Moscow increasingly isolated on the world stage following its February invasion of Ukraine, the US and the EU have taken a leading role in mediating the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace talks.

Last week, the European Union announced a “civilian EU mission” to Armenia to help delineate the borders with Azerbaijan.

Following a slew of diplomatic efforts from Brussels and Washington, Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers met on October 3 in Geneva to begin drafting the text of a future peace treaty.

In September, more than 285 people were killed in border clashes at the Caucasus neighbours’ border, before a US-brokered truce ended the worst fighting since their 2020 war. 

That six-week war in autumn 2020 claimed the lives of more than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.

Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed about 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan. The ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.

Russia indicated Friday repairs to the Crimea bridge could take months after an explosion on the key supply link that sparked a barrage of retaliatory missile strikes on Ukraine.

Nearly eight months into Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine, Kyiv’s emboldened military was celebrating Defender’s Day while a UN envoy claimed Russia’s forces were using rape as a weapon.

Those celebrations come after pro-Kremlin authorities in the southern Kherson region pleaded with Moscow for help evacuating civilians in the face of an advancing Ukrainian counter-offensive.

At the same time, Russian-backed forces in the east have announced they are inching closer to the Ukraine-held down of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the explosion on the Crimea bridge last week as a terrorist act and in retaliation battered Ukraine for two days with missiles that hit energy facilities and caused blackouts and disruption to water supplies.

Russia’s cabinet, in a decree signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, ordered the company tasked with the “design and restoration of destroyed elements of the transport and engineering infrastructure of the Crimean Bridge” to complete the work by July 1, 2023.

The date for work to be completed gives an indication of the extent of the damage caused by an explosion at the bridge last Saturday, and officials in Moscow have been circumspect about the lasting impact of the incident.

– Ukraine ‘will definitely win’ –

They did however say hours after the blast — blamed on Ukraine special forces — that both road and rail traffic had been restored.

The bridge is logistically crucial for Moscow — a vital transport link for moving military equipment to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

It is also symbolically important to Putin, who inaugurated the bridge in 2018 several years after he annexed the peninsula from Ukraine to a chorus of Western condemnation.

In Kyiv Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed that Ukrainian forces would be victorious over Russian forces during events marking the country’s first Defender’s Day celebrations.

He also laid a wreath at a memorial for soldiers killed since 2014, when Kremlin-backed separatists wrested control of two eastern regions and appealed in February for Russia to intervene.

“The world is with us, more than ever. This makes us stronger than ever in history,” he added in reference to unprecedented Western aid.

Ukrainian forces mounted a counter-offensive in the south towards the end of the summer and have been pushing closer and closer to the main city in the Kherson region, also called Kherson.

On Friday, Moscow-installed authorities of the region renewed a call for residents to temporarily leave, with reports that Ukrainian forces have been gaining ground near Kherson.

– Advance on Kherson –

“The bombardments of the Kherson region are dangerous for civilians,” Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of the pro-Russian regional administration said, calling on residents to take a trip for “rest and recreation” elsewhere.

But in the east, pro-Russian forces said they were closing in on the industrial city of Bakhmut after they reported the capture of two villages on the city’s outskirts this week.

An official of the so-called Lugansk People’s Republic, a breakaway region in east Ukraine, said “active hostilities were underway” within Bakhmut.

“Our forces are confidently marching and liberating this settlement,” the official, Andriy Marochko, was quoted as saying by Russia’s state-run TASS news agency. 

Also this week, UN envoy Pramila Patten told AFP in an interview that rapes and sexual assaults attributed to Moscow’s forces in Ukraine are part of a Russian “military strategy” and a “deliberate tactic to dehumanise the victims”. 

“When you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,” the UN special representative on sexual violence said Thursday. “It is clearly a deliberate tactic to dehumanise the victims.”

Ireland has detected a “warmer” tone from the new UK government as Britain and the EU seek compromise on a controversial post-Brexit deal for Northern Ireland, the Irish European Affairs minister told AFP.

A fresh approach by Britain under Prime Minister Liz Truss was “welcome”, given the complex task of implementing the so-called Northern Ireland protocol that aims to avoid a hard border between the British province and the Irish Republic as a result of Brexit, Thomas Byrne said in an interview during a visit to France.

“What we’ve seen in recent weeks is a real effort by the British to engage with us, in every possible way, with more frequent contact,” Byrne said. “We’re definitely on a new plane, it’s warmer, it’s more frequent, I hope it will be deeper.”

– ‘We had to be measured’ –

Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, angered the Irish government and the rest of the European Union by backtracking on the protocol, drawing accusations of violating the Brexit divorce treaty.

Describing Irish relations with the Johnson government, Byrne said: “Maybe ‘provocation’ is too strong a word, but there were times when we certainly had to be particularly measured in our responses.”

The Johnson government in June introduced legislation to rip up the Northern Ireland protocol — which is part of Britain’s exit deal with the EU — sparking fears of a trade war and worsening relations with Europe.

Dublin called the move “a particular low point in the UK’s approach to Brexit”.

Earlier this month Steve Baker, a British government minister, told Irish broadcaster RTE that he was “sorry that relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland have been soured by the Brexit process”.

– ‘Engage, engage, engage’ –

Byrne said his government was not looking for apologies. “We just want to engage, engage, engage,” he said.

But he added: “We really welcome this change of tone, we acknowledge it, we’re happy with it.”

Recent events, including the death of Queen Elizabeth, have been occasions to confirm the improved relations.

“There was a very warm response from the Irish side when the Queen died,” Byrne said.

He added that Irish President Michael D. Higgins had observed, based on conversations with the Queen, and then with King Charles III, “that the royal family in Britain is deeply committed to the peace process, and we find that very helpful”.

The president “hoped that would permeate through to the system”, he said.

Byrne said British help and sympathies had been forthcoming this month when a blast at a petrol station in northwest Ireland killed 10.

– ‘Must be complied with’ –

The Northern Ireland protocol has been contentious because it calls for checks of goods between the province and the rest of the UK, sparking opposition from unionist parties in Northern Ireland which say it undermines the integrity of the United Kingdom.

“Where we are at the moment is that the Northern Ireland protocol is in operation, it’s not being operated maybe to its fullest degree,” Byrne said.

He acknowledged that “some people in opposition to it are interested in eliminating it, essentially”, but said that would not happen.

“Our basic principle is that it’s an international agreement, and no matter the context, it must be complied with,” he said.

However, “there’s a special context here, it’s Northern Ireland”, he said.

“We need everybody working together, particularly at the higher level, the Dublin government, the London government and Brussels, working together, speaking with one voice,” he said.

The aim, he added, was to give Northern Ireland “the best of both worlds, access to the EU and access to the British market”.

Britain and Ireland both joined the EU’s predecessor, the European Communities (EC), in 1973.

“What we saw during the time of our joint membership was, first of all, increased prosperity, and less dependence on Britain, actually, for trade, but warmer relations over time, culminating in the Good Friday agreement, and really close personal connections,” Byrne said.

The Good Friday deal ended most of the sectarian violence seen in Northern Ireland since the 1960s.

Border infrastructure had been a flashpoint during the three decades of conflict, making an open border central to the peace deal.

In the interview, Byrne said there had been “absolutely extraordinary solidarity here in France and in all the member states of the EU” with Ireland.

“They want and need to engage with Britain on lots of issues, particularly Ukraine, but to do that, agreements that Britain has signed must be complied with,” he said.