Category World News

Kyiv, Ukraine – Tymofey’s palms and fingers are still dotted with lilac, half-healed scars left by the razor-sharp barbed wire on the walls around the military training centre he busted out from six months ago.

The lanky 36-year-old office worker in Kyiv told Al Jazeera he has done it twice after being forcibly conscripted in April.

He said he chose to desert after realising how perfunctory and ineffective his training was for real combat, and that he would inevitably become a front-line stormtrooper with no chances of survival.

“There’s zero training. They don’t care that I won’t survive the very first attack,” Tymofey said, referring to the drill sergeants who were training him in April after police rounded him up in central Kyiv.

He claimed that his trainers were mostly preoccupied with preventing desertions from the centre, which was surrounded by a 3-metre (9.8 ft) high concrete wall covered with barbed wire.

“They don’t care whether a soldier learns to shoot. They gave me a gun, I shot a round in the direction of a target, and they ticked a box next to my name,” he said.

Tymofey asked to withhold his last name and personal details because he is hiding from the authorities.

He claimed he has not been officially charged with desertion or going AWOL (absent without leave), charges that can be seen in the online and publicly-accessible registry of pretrial investigations.

His explanation is simple: “Half the country is on the run”, while military and civilian authorities do not have the capacity to track down and apprehend each deserter.

Prosecutors said in October that some 235,000 servicemen went AWOL, and almost 54,000 have deserted since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022.

Those numbers began to snowball last year. Some 176,000 AWOL cases and 25,000 desertions were registered between September 2024 and September 2025.

“Even in Russia, there aren’t that many soldiers going AWOL,” Valentyn Manko, top commander of storm troops, told the Ukrainian Pravda on Saturday.

The desertion crisis exacerbates the disastrous shortage of servicemen amid the gradual, grinding loss of Ukrainian territory to Russia.

In November, Russian forces occupied some 500 square kilometres (190 sq miles), mostly in eastern Ukraine, while the Washington-mediated peace talks stalled again.

Manko said that about 30,000 men are mobilised monthly, but the preferred number is 70,000 to “restaff” all military units.

A serviceman can be accused of deserting 24 hours after leaving his military unit, and can face between five and 12 years in jail, according to wartime regulations, while going AWOL is punishable by up to 10 years in jail.

Many prefer jail.

“The number of our deserters, servicemen gone AWOL is too high,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s General Staff of Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera. “They think that from the legal standpoint, it’s easier to go to jail than to the front line.”

Romanenko has long been advocating for the introduction of stricter wartime laws and harsher punishment for deserters and corrupt officials, who he believes should be sent to the front line instead of jail.

The legal difference between desertion and going AWOL is an “intention to leave the service for good”.

But since November 2024, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government has declared an amnesty for first-time deserters, who can return to their unit without any punishment.

Some 30,000 have, counting on the lenience of military authorities and their commanding officers.

“There’s more understanding towards them,” a psychologist at a military unit in southern Ukraine told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, because he is not authorised to talk to the media.

Desertion does not always stem from fear of death, and is often caused by inattentive commanding officers who ignore their servicemen’s issues, the psychologist said.

“Some say their commander didn’t let them go on leave, didn’t let them visit their sick relatives, didn’t let them get married,” he said.

In one case, a man in his early twenties deserted after learning he would be dispatched to the front-line town of Pokrovsk, the psychologist said.

After fleeing, the deserter worked in a factory job despite the risk of being caught, the psychologist found out later.

Meanwhile, the military police force is severely understaffed and cannot detain a serviceman without a court order unless he is drunk or threatens them with a weapon – while courts are swamped with thousands of cases that cannot be processed promptly.

So, a deserter’s nightmare is the “conscription patrols” that comprise military and police officers who comb public places asking men of fighting age to show IDs and “soldier’s tickets”, QR-coded documents about their conscription status.

But many deserters know their way around such places, or even carry enough cash to pay a bribe of up to several hundred dollars.

Deserters can also be caught while driving cars registered to them, or even connected to them via traffic fines paid for from their cards.

That is how Tymofey got caught.

For months, he had been driving his brother’s car, but in April, he used his own credit card to pay a fine for running a red light.

Days later, traffic police rounded him up, saying that a conscription notice had been sent to him months earlier.

Tymofey claimed to have never received the notice.

He was sent to a training centre in the central Zhytomyr region and escaped after finding a gap in the barbed wire and securing a ride from a friend.

To reach the car, he said he walked for five hours in the rain through a forest, stumbling and scratching his face and arms.

“The friend almost drove away without me,” Tymofey said.

Once in Kyiv, he moved to his friend’s apartment, went back to work, and even started using his old SIM card.

But two months later, he was caught again while driving his brother’s car.

His second escape was an easier, fast-forwarded version of the first one, because “the training centre was in Kyiv and the fence was lower”, he said, showing his scarred palms.

Tymofey shrugged off the opinion of his friends and relatives who condemn his “cowardice” and a “lack of patriotism”.

Some have cut ties with him altogether, he said.

Many former servicemen despise draft dodgers and deserters, thinking they should face tougher punishment and have their civil rights limited.

“There is low intensity crimes of vengeance because people know their tormentors.”

An Israeli drone company, malaria testing technology, and the proposed sale of an American billionaire’s oil and gas empire are among the many previously unknown business ventures that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak discussed with the late sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, leaked emails reveal.

Epstein served as a trusted financial adviser, fixer, concierge, sounding board, and even friend to the ex-Israeli leader during a long-running relationship that blurred professional and personal boundaries, the emails suggest.

While Barak has previously acknowledged having a business relationship with Epstein via the Israeli emergency services startup Reporty, the communications suggest that the politician coordinated with the disgraced financier on several previously unknown business proposals, relying heavily on his advice and connections.

Barak, who led Israel from 1999 to 2001 and served as the country’s defence minister from 2007 to March 2013, also sought Epstein’s input on drafts of newspaper op-eds and used an apartment in New York City arranged by the financier to write his autobiography.

The two men also exchanged holiday greetings, and Epstein sent his condolences to Barak when his mother passed away in 2013.

Like many powerful figures in Epstein’s orbit, Barak, who said he first met the late financier in 2003, continued his association with Epstein for years after he became a convicted sex offender following a controversial plea deal in 2008.

The emails, which span 2013 to 2016, were published in August by the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets after being stolen by the hacktivist group Handala, which the government of Canada has linked to Iran’s intelligence agencies.

Barak did not respond to requests for comment sent to his personal email address and those of his lawyers and publisher.

Barak’s prospective business partners in the various deals he discussed with Epstein also did not respond to requests for comment.

Just months after Barak ended his tenure as Israel’s defence chief in 2013, Epstein promised to make the politician hundreds of millions of dollars in an email flexing his skills as a financial adviser.

“We both know that with my involvement at a senior level you will be able to achieve, not so many but at least few hundred million more than without my help. To date you have not made a real proposal, and though I am happy to move forward I would need a firm serious offer to do so,” Epstein wrote to Barak in the email dated September 20, 2013.

That November, it appears that Epstein sought to renegotiate the terms of an agreement for his financial services following a delayed payment.

“I think best that after this is received we look to form a new arrangement that meets both of our needs,” Epstein wrote.

Epstein, who indicated in their correspondence that he had already been paid at least $5m, proposed that he receive a $2m annual retainer plus a percentage of profits.

It is unclear what terms, if any, the two men ultimately agreed upon.

Among the projects that Barak appears to have sought Epstein’s advice on was a proposed investment in Israeli startup Light & Strong, which in 2014 was working on solar-powered, high-altitude, long endurance (HALE) drones in an initiative dubbed “Project Sun Spark”.

Founded in Israel in 2007, Light & Strong produced military and aerospace components for the Israeli state and defence industry.

Two Israeli businessmen, Ofer Amir and Gal Erez, bought the company from a liquidator in 2014 after a previous owner went bankrupt.

Amir and Erez hoped that Light & Strong could rival Google and Facebook with solar-powered drones capable of boosting mobile phone and broadband coverage, according to a company prospectus. The drones also offered a secondary use for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, the emails show.

“They would like me to join as Chairman and to consider invest up to $1M based on $13M pre money as part of a round that will raise $3.0M ($16M post money valuation),” Barak wrote to Epstein in October 2014 after he was approached by Amir.

Epstein and his lawyer reviewed the company’s financial statements over a flurry of email exchanges with Barak over the next few weeks before Epstein issued a hard “no” on the investment.

“this is crazy. the people writing this have no financial knowledge. they write for ex that this cashflow does not include depreciation.???? of course not. deprecitation has nothing to do with cashflow  nothing. STAY AWAY,” Epstein wrote in a typically error-strewn email on November 27, 2014.

Light & Strong was later acquired by an Indian aerospace conglomerate, according to Israeli media.

Epstein’s advice took a similar tone when Barak asked about a potential deal with the late Denver, Colorado-based oil tycoon Jack Grynberg.

Barak’s emails indicate that he felt a personal affinity for Grynberg, who had shared his experience of surviving the Holocaust as a child before making a multibillion-dollar fortune in oil and gas.

A judge later found that Grynberg, who died in 2021 aged 89, “suffered from insane delusions and failed to make rational decisions” in the waning years of his life as he tried to keep his fortune out of the hands of his family.

Grynberg engaged Barak in 2014 to help broker the sale of one of his oil and gas companies, Gadeco LLC.

The oil tycoon proposed offloading a 25 percent stake in the company for $400m, or a 100 percent stake for $1.6bn.

Barak agreed to help broker the deal for a 5 percent commission – to be divided among himself and business associates – and suggested two “Chinese and Russian candidates”.

Barak’s emails show that in October 2014, he approached China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), the Israeli-Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, and Hong Kong entrepreneur Joachim Chao, who was representing a “consortium of Chinese private companies”.

The emails also suggest that Epstein helped Barak approach the staff of Leon Black, the billionaire cofounder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, about the sale.

Barak asked for Epstein’s advice in late October in a series of emails with the subject line “JG Co. Sale”.

“Hi Jeff Thx for your support. Pl share with me your impression from the JG Co. Materials once you’ve looked through them. Do not hesitate to correct or direct me along the way. I don’t have enough time to learn from my own mistakes,” Barak wrote.

‘Total waste of your time’

Epstein told him to avoid the sale at all costs a few hours later.

“This is total 100 percent BULLSHIT. I told you on the phone before sending or asking anyone about it you should do your own homework, You cannot be seen to be selling garbage ,frauds. Bad things and or trouble,” Epstein wrote.

“This is a total waste of your time. Call me when awake.”

Two days later, Barak emailed Epstein to thank him for his advice and inform him he had “softly killed the GADECO story”.

In early November, Barak informed Grynberg he could no longer help with the sale, but by the middle of the month, negotiations with Chao were back on, according to the emails.

Negotiations with Chao appeared to fizzle out by December, and the sale did not proceed.

Grynberg later lost control of his business empire in 2019 following a successful lawsuit by his family.

Epstein played a supporting role for Barak in other ways, including by offering his Manhattan home to host business meetings.

Those meetings included a September 2013 encounter between Barak and Boris Nikolic, a biotech venture capitalist and then-chief adviser for science and technology at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

At the time, Barak sat on the advisory board of the Israeli biotech startup Parasight, which was developing a platform to test blood for malaria and parasites.

Barak solicited Nikolic’s feedback on the technology, which was undergoing clinical trials in India, in the hopes that the Gates Foundation might invest in Parasight, later renamed Sight Diagnostics.

Nikolic later passed on the opportunity, telling Parasight that the Gates Foundation was avoiding “machine-based technology” due to the difficulty of deploying it in remote parts of Africa.

Epstein often steered Barak to reach out to high-profile individuals spanning politics, business, academia and entertainment, or in many cases offered to connect Barak himself.

The list included then-president of the Maldives Abdulla Yameen; former French President Nicolas Sarkozy; outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; former Harvard President Larry Summers; billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel; public intellectual Noam Chomsky; and film director Woody Allen.

It is unclear how many of these meetings took place.

One event that did go forward, however, was a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 while Barak was in Moscow.

“I think you should let Putin know you will be in Moscow. See if he wants private time,” Epstein wrote to Barak in May of that year.

Epstein and Barak both hoped to convince Putin to abandon his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and help bring an end to the Syrian civil war, according to an investigation by Drop Site News that reviewed the same trove of emails.

Acting as a backchannel for the Israeli government, Barak met with Putin in June 2013, but he failed to sway him.

Another important connection for Barak was the billionaire French banker Ariane de Rothschild, whose relationship with Epstein was also reported on by Drop Site news.

Epstein advised Barak on how to approach the banker, the emails show.

De Rothschild had previously told Epstein that Barak would need to “build a relationship” with her if he wanted “to make serious money”, according to Epstein’s account of the conversation.

“I’m ready. But I need your advise re HOW? ( ladies is your forté),” Barak wrote to Epstein on November 21, 2013, in reference to De Rothschild.

“time.  attention.  stable. recurring.,  PREDICTABLE  where  what when,” Epstein replied a few hours later.

Epstein also suggested in a June 2014 email to Barak that De Rothschild’s foundation had unspecified problems with the Israeli government that the politician should be briefed on.

Around this time, Epstein was pursuing Rothschild to fund Israeli “offensive cyber” startups, according to Drop Site News.

Barak shared similar interests, including in the Israeli cloud security startup Guardicore. He suggested in August 2014 that Epstein pass a one-page backgrounder on Guardicore to PayPal.

It is unclear whether Epstein followed his advice, and Guardicore was later acquired by cloud service provider Akamai Technology.

Barak’s correspondence with Epstein at times pointed to a deep personal friendship.

“[t]here are very few people that i enjoy spending time with,  you are unique,” Epstein wrote to Barak on September 21, 2013.

“Thx. The same. EB,” Barak wrote back.

Epstein gave Barak access to an apartment in New York, and on one occasion, arranged for the delivery of a piano to the property.

“We are in the apartment. So cute. And your team prepared it with so much attention to details. Thank you very much. It is so helpful for this task of writing a book,” Barak wrote on July 25, 2015.

Epstein also invited Barak and his wife, Nili Priel, to visit his private island, Little Saint John, in the Caribbean.

Barak shared a potential travel itinerary with Epstein to visit his island in January 2014, but that trip appears to have been cancelled.

In December of that year, Barak’s wife shared a new travel itinerary to travel to St Thomas, an island close to Little St James, with Epstein.

“we can arrive to St. Thomas Friday, December 12 from NY at 12:55 PM with AA 1275 And leave on Monday, December 15 at 2 PM to NY with AA 1275. Does this suit you?” she wrote in an email forwarded to Barak.

The following week, Barak thanked Epstein for his “hospitality” and complimented him on his “Great, impressive island”.

Barak referred to the visit again in a February 2015 email to Epstein that mentioned a bodyguard who joined the former Israeli leader in “LSJ on the second day”.

After Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2019, Barak announced that he had “cut all ties” with his former business partner.

In a 2023 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Barak adamantly denied attending any of Epstein’s “parties or activities involving girls and women”.

The leaked emails show that Barak had been approached years earlier for comment about his knowledge of Epstein’s activities.

In 2015, The Mirror newspaper contacted Barak to give him a chance to comment on whether he was aware that his business partner was “paying underage girls for sex”.

In a letter sent through his lawyers, Barak denied any knowledge of criminality by Epstein.

“As to your question about my awareness of Mr. Epstein’s activity, you are assuming allegations as fact and, even if the allegations turn out to be true, I was never aware that Mr. Epstein, to quote you, ‘was paying underage girls for sex.’”

The Mirror ultimately did not publish an article about Barak’s ties to Epstein following its correspondence with the politician.

While Barak’s relationship with Epstein opened up a world of elite connections and business opportunities, it overshadowed his aspirations for a political comeback in Israel.

At the time of Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, Barak was seeking to challenge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in upcoming elections under the banner of the newly formed Democratic Union, an alliance of left-leaning parties.

One month later, Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in what was later ruled a suicide.

Israel’s military has carried out a wave of air strikes in southern Lebanon, damaging several homes, according to Lebanese state media. Israel says it targeted around 13 Hezbollah-linked sites. The attacks are the latest Israeli violation of a ceasefire agreed last year.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the country’s largest political party, is decisively breaking its decades-long alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami, the South Asian nation’s biggest Islamist group, repositioning itself instead as a liberal, democratic force before national elections.

The shift comes 16 months after the toppling of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, following a mass uprising against her decade-and-a-half-long rule marked by widespread human rights excesses, including extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, arrests of critics and opposition leaders, and a brutal crackdown on protesters in August 2024.

Hasina’s Awami League party, historically the BNP’s principal rival, had over the decades proclaimed the mantle of a secular, liberal pillar in Bangladeshi politics, though critics disputed that assertion.

By contrast, the BNP and Jamaat were pulled together by their shared opposition to the Awami League. But their ideological differences were never hidden: The BNP subscribed to a nationalist worldview, while the Islamic identity of most Bangladeshis is the raison d’etre of the Jamaat.

Now, those differences have erupted into a full-fledged split between the parties that had ruled together in the last non-Hasina government elected in Bangladesh, between 2001 and 2006.

Addressing party supporters this week, BNP Acting Chairman Tarique Rehman invoked the blood-soaked memory of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan, saying “people saw” what happened then. He did not name the Jamaat, but the reference was clearly understood across Bangladesh: The Jamaat had opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.

He also accused the Jamaat of misusing religion to seek votes.

In similar comments last month, BNP Secretary-General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir cautioned against dividing the country “in the name of religion” and stressed that the BNP’s politics ought to rest on national unity, democratic principles, and the foundational spirit of 1971.

So what’s behind this shift?

The BNP’s recent narrative suggests that it wants to appropriate the moral vocabulary of secular nationalism that the Awami League long monopolised through its lopsided historical revisionism of the true spirit of the liberation war. Awami League founder Sheikh Mujibur Rehman led the liberation struggle, but was also responsible for an independent Bnagladesh’s early descent into authoritarianism, when he banned all other political parties to try to set up a one-party system in 1975.

Hasina carried forward that legacy when she was in power between 2009 and 2024, banning the Jamaat and arresting thousands of BNP leaders and workers – including its longtime chief and former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, who is currently in hospital in what her party and family have described as a “very critical condition”. The Hasina government’s ruthless crackdown on the political opposition and other critics turned the 2014, 2018 and 2024 elections into a sham, with the Awami League winning landslides against a landscape of repression.

To occupy the secular nationalist void left by the Awami League – which itself has now been banned, while Hasina is in exile in India – the BNP needs to sever ties with an Islamist party whose historical baggage could hinder its attempt to appeal to an audience seeking pluralistic politics.

To be sure, the BNP-Jamaat split did not appear overnight. For months, both parties have drifted apart over core questions: Whether broader reforms must precede elections, how to restructure the Constitution, and what political model should define the post-Hasina era.

The Jamaat pushed for sweeping structural changes before polls; the BNP insisted on early elections and minimal constitutional revisions. Their disagreements slowly hardened into open rifts.

But this break is not merely about strategic disagreements. It reflects an ideological recalibration driven by the new political environment.

The centre-left, liberal-secular space that the Awami League once claimed is now vacant.

The BNP sees an opportunity to occupy it, before national elections scheduled for February.

BNP’s calculation is anchored in the shifting mood of the electorate. The youth-led uprising of 2024, the collapse of one-party authoritarianism, and the civic awakening of urban middle-class voters have all produced a renewed demand for democratic governance and political moderation.

Jamaat’s religion-driven leanings, the BNP believes, could clash with that sentiment. By rebranding itself, the BNP believes it can resonate with voters who are disillusioned with both the Awami League’s authoritarianism and the Jamaat’s religious conservatism.

The reorientation also aims to reclaim the moral high ground of 1971. For decades, the Awami League weaponised the Jamaat’s wartime collaboration with Pakistan to delegitimise the BNP by association. Now the BNP is flipping that narrative.

By denouncing the Jamaat’s role in 1971, the party is challenging the ideological monopoly the Awami League exercised for half a century – trying to appeal to younger citizens who view 1971 through narratives of democracy and human rights rather than loyalty to any one party.

This attempted transformation is not without risks. The BNP must overcome scepticism about whether this rebranding is genuine or opportunistic. Elements within the BNP’s own ranks may resist the shift towards a more liberal identity.

Furthermore, the post-Hasina political space is crowded: Youth-driven groups like the National Citizen Party (NCP) and civil society networks are also vying for the liberal-centrist vote.  Vote fragmentation could dilute the BNP’s gains unless it manages to unify disparate pro-democracy constituencies.

Yet the strategic logic behind BNP’s recalibration appears compelling for now.

The party is no longer positioning itself as a centre-right force competing with the Awami League; it is attempting to transform into a broad democratic platform that absorbs former Awami League voters, urban liberals, minority communities, and politically awakened youth, all searching for a new political home.

Whether this shift succeeds will depend on how consistently the BNP maintains this new ideological line and whether the public believes that the party’s rupture with Jamaat is a principled decision rather than electoral choreography.

But what is clear already is that the BNP of 2025 is not the BNP of the past decade. Its leaders are speaking a new language – rooted in inclusiveness, anti-sectarianism, and democratic reform.

And they are speaking it loudly.