Month: March 2022

In a sign that sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine may be starting to bite, Russian tanker ships carrying oil and petroleum products have been observed turning off systems that broadcast their identity and location, a practice known as “going dark” and which is often associated with efforts to evade sanctions. 

In the days and weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and a broad coalition of other countries imposed sweeping sanctions on Russian goods, including petroleum products. Experts say that by going dark, ships may be able to discharge cargo, often via ship-to-ship transfers at sea, without attracting the attention of law enforcement authorities. 

According to data gathered by Windward Ltd., an Israeli firm that uses artificial intelligence to assess maritime risk, the number of incidents of Russia-affiliated ships going dark on a daily basis has increased dramatically since the introduction of sanctions. 

This is especially true with regard to tankers carrying Russian crude oil. Prior to the invasion, Windward tracked two or three incidents per day of tankers loaded with Russian crude disabling their identification systems. It is now documenting about 20 a day. 

“We’re seeing a synchronized effort across Russian shipping and trading to systemically hide where their cargoes are going,” Ami Daniel, Windward CEO, told VOA. 

That is not to say the practice of “going dark” is being dictated by the Kremlin. The ships involved are almost all privately owned and not technically answerable to the government in Moscow. Neither the Russian government nor the various companies who own the ships in question have issued public statements about the practice. 

Automatic Identification System 

A treaty, known as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, requires large ships to have an Automatic Identification System (AIS) in operation at all times, with some specific exceptions. The AIS provides other ships and coastal authorities with the vessel’s name, heading, speed and other information.

“AIS should not be turned off, as a general matter,” Attorney Neil Quartaro, a partner in the trade and transportation group at the law firm Cozen O’Connor, told VOA. 

Quartaro said that the few exceptions include areas where broadcasting details about a ship’s speed and heading could create a security risk.  

“The primary area where it is acceptable to turn off your AIS is in something called the ‘high risk area,’ which is essentially the area off the coast of Somalia,” Quartaro said. Pirate activity is prevalent in that region, as well as a few other spots around the world, where cargo ships have been boarded and the crews held for ransom. 

Ship-to-ship transfers 

Quartaro said that it is not uncommon for ships attempting to evade sanctions to turn off their AIS equipment while, for instance, performing a ship-to-ship transfer of crude oil that originated in a sanctioned country.  

“If you’re operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and you’re anywhere close to Trinidad and Tobago or Aruba, and you turn off your AIS, anybody looking at that is going to suspect that you’re engaging in an illegal transfer of oil product out of Venezuela, which happens all the time,” Quartaro said. 

Similarly, he said, it is common for empty tankers to leave a port in the Middle East, turn off their AIS equipment, and then reappear a few days later with a load of crude oil bound for Pakistan. In such cases, he said, the oil probably originated in Iran, which is under heavy sanctions. 

Deceptive shipping practices 

In 2020, the U.S. departments of State and Treasury, as well as the Coast Guard, issued an advisory that included seven different shipping practices that were characterized as “deceptive” and associated with illicit shipping and the evasion of sanctions.  

No. 1 on the list is disabling or manipulating AIS equipment.  

“Although safety issues may at times prompt legitimate disablement of AIS transmission, and poor transmission may otherwise occur, vessels engaged in illicit activities may also intentionally disable their AIS transponders or manipulate the data transmitted in order to mask their movement,” the advisory warned. 

Others deceptive practices include falsifying registrations and cargo manifests, creating intentionally complex ownership structures, and making unscheduled stops and detours. 

Sign of desperation 

The potential downside of engaging in deceptive shipping practices is significant, which suggests that willingness to engage in it could be a sign of desperation. 

Large companies that have significant business interests in the United States, for example, do not want to get caught up in an investigation of sanction evasion. For that reason, they pay companies like Windward to identify vessels that have engaged in suspicious activity, in order to avoid doing business with them in the future. 

However, the importance of oil exports to the Russian economy may make some shippers more willing to take risks. 

Russia’s exports of petroleum products are a large contributor to the economy. In 2021, according to figures released by the Russian central bank, the country took in $490 billion from petroleum sales. Crude oil accounted for $110 billion of the total, and other oil products made up an additional $69 billion. 

Daniel, of Windward, said his company expects to see Russian shippers resorting to additional methods of bypassing sanctions in the near future. 

“We expect Russia to adopt many of these deceptive shipping practices, and not just in the tanker segments. Across all the segments, because of the huge pressure they’re under,” he said. 

 
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Indigenous leaders from Canada and survivors of the country’s notorious residential schools met with Pope Francis on Monday and told him of the abuses they suffered at the hands of Catholic priests and school workers. They came hoping to secure a papal apology and a commitment by the church to repair the harm done.

“While the time for acknowledgement, apology and atonement is long overdue, it is never too late to do the right thing,” Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, told reporters in St. Peter’s Square after the audience.

This week’s meetings, postponed from December because of the pandemic, are part of the Canadian church and government’s efforts to respond to Indigenous demands for justice, reconciliation and reparations — long-standing demands that gained traction last year after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves outside some of the schools.

More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture and Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior.

Francis set aside several hours this week to meet privately with the delegations from the Metis and Inuit on Monday, and First Nations on Thursday, with a mental health counselor in the room for each session. The delegates then gather Friday as a group for a more formal audience, with Francis delivering an address.

Symbolic gestures

The encounters Monday included prayers in the Metis and Inuit languages and other gestures of deep symbolic significance. The Inuit delegation brought a traditional oil lamp, or qulliq, that is lit whenever Inuit gather, and it stayed lit in the pope’s library throughout the meeting. The Inuit delegates presented Francis with a sealskin stole and a sealskin rosary case.

The Metis offered Francis a pair of red beaded moccasins, “a sign of the willingness of the Metis people to forgive if there is meaningful action from the church,” the group explained. The red dye “represents that even though Pope Francis does not wear the traditional red papal shoes, he walks with the legacy of those who came before him, the good, the great and the terrible.”

In a statement, the Vatican said each meeting lasted about an hour “and was characterized by desire on the part of the pope to listen and make space for the painful stories brought by the survivors.”

The Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse was rampant at the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages. The legacy of that abuse and isolation from family has been cited by Indigenous leaders as a root cause of the epidemic rates of alcohol and drug addiction on Canadian reservations.

Nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools were run by Catholic missionary congregations.

Last May, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 gravesites near Kamloops, British Columbia, that were found using ground-penetrating radar. It was Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school, and the discovery of the graves was the first of several similar grim discoveries across the country.

Caron said Francis listened intently Monday as three of the many Metis survivors told him their personal stories of abuse at residential schools. The pope showed sorrow but offered no immediate apology. Speaking in English, he repeated the words Caron said she had emphasized in her remarks: “truth,” “justice” and “healing.”

“I take that as a personal commitment,” Caron said, surrounded by Metis fiddlers who accompanied her into the square.

What needs to follow, she said, is an apology that acknowledges the harm done, the return of Indigenous artifacts, a commitment to facilitating prosecutions of abusive priests and access to church-held records of residential schools.

Canadian Bishop Raymond Poisson, who heads the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, insisted the Vatican holds no such records and said they more likely were held by individual religious orders in Canada or at their headquarters in Rome.

Demands for ‘specific actions’ 

Even before the gravesites were discovered, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission specifically had called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil for the church’s role in the abuses. Francis has committed to traveling to Canada, though no date for such a visit has been announced.

“Primarily, the reconciliation requires action. And we still are in need of very specific actions from the Catholic Church,” said Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, who led the Inuit delegation.

He cited the reparations the Canadian church has been ordered to pay, access to records to understand the scope of the unmarked graves, and Francis’ own help to find justice for victims of a Catholic Oblate priest, the Rev. Johannes Rivoire, who has been accused of multiple cases of sexual abuse and is living in France.

“We often as Inuit have felt powerless over time to sometimes correct the wrongs that have been done to us,” Obed said. “We are incredibly resilient, and we are great at forgiving. … But we are still in search of lasting respect and the right to self-determination and the acknowledgement of that right by the institutions that harmed us.”

As part of a settlement of a lawsuit involving the government, churches and the approximately 90,000 surviving students, Canada paid reparations that amounted to billions of dollars being transferred to Indigenous communities.

The Catholic Church, for its part, has paid over $50 million and now intends to add $30 million more over the next five years.

The Metis delegation made clear to Francis that the church-run residential school system, and the forced removal of children from their homes, facilitated the ability of Canada authorities to take Indigenous lands while also teaching Metis children “that they were not to love who they are as Metis people,” Caron said.

“Our children came home hating who they were, hating their language, hating their culture, hating their tradition,” Caron said. “They had no love. But our survivors are so resilient. They are learning to love.”

The Argentine pope is no stranger to offering apologies for his own errors and what he himself has termed the “crimes” of the institutional church.

During a 2015 visit to Bolivia, he apologized for the sins, crimes and offenses committed by the church against Indigenous peoples during the colonial-era conquest of the Americas. In Dublin, Ireland, in 2018, he offered a sweeping apology to those sexually and physically abused over generations.

That same year, he met privately with three Chilean sex abuse survivors whom he had discredited by backing a bishop they had accused of covering up their abuse. In a series of meetings that echo those now being held for the Canadian delegates, Francis listened and apologized. 
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Delegation members attending peace talks between Ukraine and Russia suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.  

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team, including Crimean Tatar lawmaker Rustem Umerov, were affected, according to the paper, which cited people familiar with the matter. 

It said the delegation members showed symptoms that included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands. Those affected have since improved their health, and their lives are not in danger, according to the report. 

Investigators for the open-source collective Bellingcat were also involved in sourcing the Journal’s report. 

Bellingcat said its sources have confirmed the events, and cited experts who investigated the matter and concluded that “poisoning with an undefined chemical weapon” was the most likely cause. 

The experts said the choice of toxin and dose indicates it “most likely was intended to scare the victims, as opposed to cause permanent damage.” 

The Wall Street Journal said it was not clear who was behind the suspected poisoning but said those targeted blamed hard-liners in Moscow seeking to disrupt the negotiations. 

Asked Monday about the report, Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said, “There is a lot of speculation, various conspiracy theories,” according to Reuters. 

Reuters reported that Umerov, who was cited as one of the targets of the suspected poisoning in the Journal report, urged people not to trust “unverified information.” 

The Kremlin has not commented on the report. 

Abramovich is a billionaire Russian businessman with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and is one of numerous oligarchs under sanctions from Western countries. 

Last week, the Journal reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked U.S. President Joe Biden not to include Abramovich in Western sanctions, arguing that the Russian could help to negotiate a peace deal. 

Some information in this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 

 
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Russian troops have stopped ground advances toward the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv as they appear refocused on regions in eastern Ukraine, according to a senior U.S. Defense official. 

“They clearly are not moving on Kyiv anymore,” said the official, who spoke to reporters Monday on condition of anonymity. “What we are seeing is this continued reprioritization on the Donbas.” 

Moscow’s latest military shift appears to be an effort to cut off Ukrainian forces in the eastern region, according to the official, adding that the move “could be an attempt by the Russians to gain negotiating leverage” in peace talks with Ukrainian representatives trying to end the war. 

Russia has been backing separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine since 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.  

Ukrainian forces have stopped Russian troops from taking most major cities.  

Nearly 5,000 people, including more than 200 children, have been killed in the southern city of Mariupol, which has been pounded by Russia with heavy bombardment since the Russian invasion started last month, according to the mayor’s office. 

Mariupol’s mayor on Monday called for evacuation of the remaining 160,000 residents. However, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said no humanitarian corridors would open due to intelligence reports of potential Russian assaults on the routes. 

“We’ve seen the Russians announce humanitarian corridors and then promptly shell them, or mortar them, or strike them,” the senior U.S. Defense official said Monday in response to a question from VOA, without speaking to Ukraine’s recent assertions. 

Near Kyiv, the large suburb of Irpin has been liberated from Russian forces, according to Mayor Alexander Markushin. 

“We understand that our city will be attacked more. We will protect it,” he said. 

Last week, the deputy chief of the Russian armed forces’ General Staff said Russia’s “main tasks” of the invasion of Ukraine were complete. 

“The combat capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces have been substantially reduced, which allows us to concentrate our main efforts on achieving the main goal – the liberation of Donbas,” Sergei Rudskoi said.  

However, last week a senior U.S. Defense official said Ukrainians still have more than 90% of their combat power, in part because the U.S. and other allies have replenished them “in real time.” 

Peace talks 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” are a priority as Ukraine and Russia head into a new round of peace talks.  

“We are looking for peace, really, without delay,” Zelenskyy said in a video address late Sunday. “There is an opportunity and a need for a face-to-face meeting in Turkey. This is not bad. Let’s see the outcome.”  

Earlier Sunday, in call with Russian journalists, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to adopting neutral status as part of a peace deal, if it came with third-party guarantees and was put to a referendum.  

Turkey is set to host the latest talks. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by phone Sunday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Erdogan’s office saying he stressed the need for a cease-fire and more humanitarian aid in the region.  

The United Nations says the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed 10 million people to leave their homes, with more than 3.8 million fleeing the country.  

In response to the invasion, the NATO alliance has increased defenses on its eastern flank, announcing four new battlegroups to Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia last week. Individual NATO members have also unilaterally sent troops and equipment to allied countries including Poland and the Baltic states, which neighbor Russia and have hosted NATO battlegroups since 2017. 

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby announced that six U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler aircraft and about 250 air crew would arrive in Germany on Monday to bolster NATO’s defenses. 

“These Growlers … specialize in conducting electronic warfare missions, using a suite of jamming sensors to confuse enemy radars,” Kirby told reporters. 

“They are there to reinforce deterrence capabilities of the alliance on the eastern flank. They’re not there to engage Russian assets. That is not the goal,” a senior U.S. Defense official added. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.  

 
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Jeff Horenstein has seen his fair share of injury and death as an emergency room physician in Massachusetts — and ironically far more than working as a medical volunteer on the Polish side of the border across from the western Ukraine town of Lviv at a refugee reception camp run by NGOs at Medyka in south-east Poland.

“Most people we see here are dehydrated or their elderly and want us to check them out and need reassurance; they are worried they are running low on their medications,” he says. “Serious cases bypass us. We get kids complaining of belly-ache,” he adds. He’s also treated a couple of foreign fighters, who sustained shrapnel wounds in shelling in eastern Ukraine. “They decided not to go back in,” he says.

What takes the physician aback aren’t the injuries or ailments he gets to see working with the NGO Sauveteurs Sans Frontières, or Rescuers Without Borders, but the stories Ukrainian refugees tell him.

The physician from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston shakes his head as he tells me about an 81-year-old woman from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city which has been besieged since Russia invaded on February 24 and has been pummeled daily with shelling and missiles.

“She decided to get out because she figured she would die, if she stayed,” he said. “And she went up to a Russian soldier and told him she wanted to go to Poland and could give him $20,000 in cash, her life savings. She said she had no idea whether he would shoot her or not. He took the money, and after a while came back and handed her back $2000, took her to the next checkpoint, hugged her and she was passed on checkpoint by checkpoint until she reached Ukrainian-controlled territory,” he added. “She told me that she felt bad that she didn’t take the neighbors’ kids but hadn’t wanted to get them killed, if things had gone wrong,” he says.

Hope

As Jeff tells me this, one of his colleagues interrupts saying, “You don’t see that every day,” as he took a quick snap of a man walking by pulling a 12-foot wooden cross aided by a small wheel attached to the bottom with the top of the crucifix resting on his shoulder. Oklahoma-native Keith Wheeler has been carrying his cross across the world for 37 years passing through 185 countries and more than 40 war zones.

“Here’s the thing,” the disarmingly charming 61-year-old Wheeler tells me. “People need food, people need water, people need medicine. But more than anything people need hope. And you can’t put a price tag on hope,” he adds. In recent years the self-styled pilgrim cross-bearer has trudged through lands that are, as he puts it, traditionally hostile toward Christians, including Libya and Syria, where some jihadists considered abducting him, but thought better of it. He shows me a picture of them. He has been beaten in some countries, including the United States. He often ends up roughing it, sleeping under bridges. But strangers are often hospitable and invite him into their homes, including once in a royal palace in the Gulf, where he was befriended by a prince.

“I should be dead,” he says. “Peace starts with forgiveness,” he says as a parting gift to me.

Wars attract all sorts and every sort, from the charitable and kindly to criminals and opportunists; oddballs to philanthropists; pacifists to war junkies. And they can all be encountered in the bedraggled, improvised camp just across from Ukraine that sometimes seems a cross between a chaotic local craft fair and the kind of circus that springs up around rock music festivals. The difference is no one is selling anything but giving things away — from freshly cooked food to steaming cups of tea and coffee, from blankets and clothing to toys and candy for the kids.

“Hold on,” shouts a frustrated British volunteer to his companions after they have trouble persuading kids to take proffered candy. “Wait till I have looked up how to say For Free in Ukrainian.” Already dazed refugees emerge from Ukraine into a winding path of tents and small marquees, and they run a gauntlet of charity and hospitality, which at first adds to their disorientation, but as they relax it prompts smiles. They are offered, too, counsel on how to reach where they want to go.

There is a cacophony of languages. The volunteers and charities come from the four corners of the earth — from across Europe, the United States, Australia, Latin America, Israel; there are Sikhs from India and diaspora Chinese opponents of China’s communist government. The camp is semi-organized anarchy, and some volunteers acknowledge its shortcomings and impracticality, and they say more systemization is needed at every level of the humanitarian effort, but its point, they say, is to show Ukrainians they aren’t alone.

And who are these volunteers? They are from all walks of life and all ages. Some are idealistic; others highly realistic. Most are a mixture of both. Some have reached crossroads in their own lives. One European woman told me she was going through a midlife crisis. “I could brood on a beach somewhere, or come here and be useful,” she said. Some volunteers have connections with Ukraine; many have none at all. All are moved by the plight of those caught up in the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

There’s John, a firefighter from New Jersey, who collected $70,000 from relatives, co-workers and neighbors and joined a friend who set up a feeding station for refugees. He can fix most mechanical problems. “Sometimes I just slip a little money in the bags of the elderly when they aren’t looking,” he says.

And there’s Texan mother-of-four Katie Stadler, a 38-year-old, who once tried but was unable to adopt a Ukrainian teenager who subsequently died. “I was already involved with Ukraine— it has a big orphan crisis. And so, I had already fallen in love with the country and the people. I couldn’t watch what was happening and not do something to help,” she says.

Even before flying to Poland from her home town of Fort Worth, Katie was funneling money to a pastor in the Odessa region, who bought a van and drove food kits around to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave and took other people who did want to leave to the borders. After two weeks she was “laying in bed one night and I said to my husband Matt, ‘I’m going to go over there’ and he said, ‘I was waiting for you to say that.'”

In Warsaw one ex-Special Forces humanitarian worker questioned why Katie, who had no experience as an aid worker, had come. He growled: “Why are you here?” But Katie has earned plaudits for her energy and enthusiasm from some experienced charity workers, including Heath Donnelly, CEO of the charitable foundation of movie producer and international restaurateur Ciro Orsini and actor Armand Assante. “She has kick started a lot of things done here,” he says.

At Warsaw’s central train station, Katie says she “made friends with the volunteers (who) are running the transportation kiosk and when people can’t pay and there’s no way for them to utilize government funds, I pay with my PayPal,” she says. With donations from friends, relatives and neighbors, she has helped 12 families being sheltered at a church in Warsaw and paid the air fares for 30 families.  On the border, she helps Heath. “These kids and these families that are coming out need to see that humanity is still good and people are still good,” she says.
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THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS — Dutch brewer Heineken announced on Monday it was pulling out of Russia, becoming the latest Western firm to exit the country in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The beer company had already halted the sale and production of its Heineken brand in Russia, as well as suspended new investments and exports to the country earlier this month. 

“We are shocked and deeply saddened to watch the war in Ukraine continue to unfold and intensify,” Heineken said in a statement. 

“Following the previously announced strategic review of our operations, we have concluded that Heineken’s ownership of the business in Russia is no longer sustainable nor viable in the current environment,” the statement said.

“As a result, we have decided to leave Russia.” 

Heineken said it would aim for an “orderly transfer” of its business to a new owner in compliance with international and local laws and would not take any profit from the transaction, which will cost the company 400 million euros ($438 million) in exceptional charges. 

The company said it would continue on reduced operations during a transition period to reduce the risk of nationalisation and “ensure the ongoing safety and wellbeing of our employees.” 

“In all circumstances we guarantee the salaries of our 1,800 employees will be paid to the end of 2022 and will do our utmost to safeguard their future employment.” 

Hundreds of Western firms have closed shops and offices in Russia since the war started, a list that includes famous names such as Ikea, Coca-Cola and MacDonald’s. 
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Turkey is hosting latest round of peace talks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
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Full developments of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine   
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