Category World News

More than 1,500 homes were destroyed and hundreds of families were lost in a neighborhood in the capital of the Philippines, Manila, as a result of a massive fire that swept through the area. Before it was contained, the fire in Malabon City burned for more than eight hours.

The European Union is preparing to adopt a new round of sweeping sanctions against Russian energy exports on Thursday, a day after United States President Donald Trump imposed similar measures against Moscow amid setbacks to his efforts at diplomacy with Vladimir Putin.

These steps come as Russia and Ukraine are increasingly targeting each other’s energy infrastructure in an attempt to make it economically harder to wage war.

On the ground, Russia’s war in Ukraine remained stagnant.

Russia claimed it had taken another handful of villages during the past week – Tykhe and Pishchane in Kharkiv, Novopavlivka, Chunyshyne and Pleshcheyevka in Donetsk, Poltavka in Zaporizhia and Privillia in Dnipropetrovsk.

On the whole, however, Ukrainian front lines remained resilient and Russia scored no major breakthrough.

“I think that their army is weak now,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a visit to the White House on Friday. “They have a lot of losses in economy and people.”

He urged Trump to use that weakness to force Russia to the negotiating table, saying he was prepared to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin one-on-one.

Just before that meeting, Trump had spoken to Putin and had seemingly pulled back on previous suggestions that the US might supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles. After the call, Trump said that he hoped the US would not need to share those missiles with Kyiv.

“We need Tomahawks … you’re talking about massive numbers of very powerful weapons … Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks.”

Trump also announced that he would be meeting with Putin in Budapest over the next two weeks.

But that attempt at direct diplomacy with his Russian counterpart fell through this week, when the US president said he wouldn’t be meeting Putin any more, suggesting that it would be a waste of time.

“Every time I speak to Vladimir, I have good conversations and then they don’t go anywhere,” Trump said on Wednesday at the White House, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte seated next to him.

Russia had, a day earlier, rejected Trump’s latest proposal for a ceasefire along existing lines of control in Ukraine – a pitch that Kyiv and major European powers backed.

Indeed, despite losing slivers of territory, Ukraine feels it has certain advantages – particularly in long-range warfare against the Russian rear.

Energy attacks

Since late summer, Ukraine has stepped up a targeted campaign to take out Russian refineries, depriving Moscow of gasoline for its economy and diesel for its war machine.

Ukraine had successfully struck Russian energy infrastructure 58 times since August, compared with three times in June and July, according to a Reuters analysis. Ukraine is believed to have destroyed or damaged about a fifth of Russia’s refining ability.

Just in the past week, Ukraine has struck several facilities.

On Sunday, Russia’s gas processing complex at Orenburg, 1,200km southeast of Moscow, was forced to shut down its gas intake from Kazakhstan after being struck by Ukrainian drones. The strike caused a massive explosion and fire at the plant.

The Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery in Russia’s Volga region also stopped processing crude oil after being struck on the same day.

Russian energy facilities were struck in its Bryansk region and neighbouring Smolensk on Tuesday, said Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation. “Our forces also took out the Bryansk chemical plant,” he said.

Other strikes were thwarted. Russia said it downed at least 88 Ukrainian long-range drones over its border regions during the week.

But the cumulative effect of Ukraine’s attacks has been felt. Petrol prices in Russia have risen, and rationing has been introduced in some regions.

Satellite images captured on October 17 showed that Ukrainian drones had severely damaged at least 11 main storage tanks at the Feodosia oil terminal in Crimea, used by Russia to supply its forces in southern Ukraine. Ukraine’s General Staff believed at least 16 tanks to be damaged, and Frontelligence Insight, an open-source analyst, put the number at 19.

Through the attacks, Ukraine has also successfully struck at Russia’s ability to sell its oil for export revenue.

In an address to Ukrainians on October 15, Zelenskyy called Ukraine’s long-range capabilities “the things that truly affect Russia’s war potential and noticeably reduce it”.

“There has been an increase both in the range and in the accuracy of our long-range [capabilities] against Russia,” Zelenskyy said on Sunday.

At the White House on Friday, Zelenskyy sought to convince Trump — unsuccessfully for the moment — to allow Ukraine access to the Tomahawk cruise missiles, with a 2,500km (1,550-mile) range.

Currently, Ukraine’s most powerful missile is the Anglo-French Storm Shadow, with a range of about 500km.

Ukraine produces drones that have struck Russian refineries 2,000km away, and wants missiles to match that range to create combined strikes, Zelenskyy said at the White House.

He offered Ukrainian drone technology and production know-how in exchange for the Tomahawks.

But Russia has said it would regard the transfer of Tomahawks to Ukraine as an escalation. A top Russian diplomat told reporters on Friday that it would “elevate the risks in the security sphere – not only European, but global security as well”.

Russian strikes

Russia, meanwhile, has mirrored Ukraine’s tactics, targeting its electricity production, according to an analysis by Ukrainian Pravda. The newspaper found that during July and August, Russia had targeted Ukraine’s power stations in the east of the country, forcing massive transfers of electricity from power stations in the west. It had switched to targeting substations and power lines during July and August, to cause a blackout in the east.

Russia has also not spared coal, which Ukraine uses to generate electricity. Ukrainian coal miner DTEK said Russian drones had struck one of its mines in Dnipropetrovsk, in the country’s southeast, and had struck three more of its mines in the past two months.

Russia’s long-range capabilities are greater than Ukraine’s. Between October 16 and 22, Russia launched 859 drones and 77 missiles into the beleaguered country. Ukraine intercepted three-quarters of the drones but fewer than half the missiles, many of which were ballistic.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for more air defence systems from his allies. Despite initial reports of an acrimonious meeting with Trump on Friday, Zelenskyy described the meeting as “positive” and said Ukraine was preparing to buy 25 Patriot air defence systems.

Sanctions a route to peace?

Trump and the EU have until recently taken opposite approaches to peace, with Trump believing in a deal between superpowers and European leaders siding with Zelenskyy in calling for more pressure on Putin.

That appeared to change this week.

On Wednesday, Trump imposed sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, with the threat of risks to foreign financial institutions that do business with these firms — a warning that could make it harder for countries like India to continue to buy oil from Moscow.

Earlier in the week, Trump called for an immediate halt to the war and for current battlefield control lines to serve as the starting point for subsequent negotiations.

Ukraine and Europe quickly accepted Trump’s proposal.

“We strongly support President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” said the leaders of Europe’s five biggest economies and leading Ukraine allies in a statement on Tuesday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, however, said that an immediate ceasefire along existing contact lines was not acceptable to Moscow.

To Europe, this apparent dissonance between Trump and Putin offers an opportunity to further batter Russia’s flagging war economy.

“We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defence industry, until Putin is ready to make peace,” said the European leaders in their statement.

The EU’s upcoming 19th package of sanctions will take important steps in curtailing the oil and gas that Europe currently imports from Russia.

The Council of EU energy ministers said the bloc would phase out all Russian gas during the course of next year.

The EU never banned Russian gas as it banned Russian oil imports, and last year imported 51.7bn cubic metres of it. Greenpeace recently discovered that France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands bought 34.3 billion euros ($40bn) of Russian LNG last year, but among them gave 21.2 billion euros ($24.5bn) in various forms of support to Ukraine.

The EU’s new sanctions are also expected to use 140 billion euros ($162bn) in cash reserves belonging to Russia’s central bank but immobilised on EU soil as collateral for a loan of equal size to Ukraine. A draft of this measure, seen by Reuters, would set aside most of the money for Ukrainian purchases of European weapons, with some going to US weapons like the Patriot systems.

The EU would thus use Russian money to develop Ukraine’s defences and rebuild the European defence industry, despite Moscow railing against such a move for months.

It was perhaps this that Zelenskyy was referring to when he told Ukrainians his meeting with European leaders was leading to “a strong and, in many ways, completely new agreement on our defence capabilities”.

The cash injection is timely. Military aid to Ukraine fell by 43 percent in July and August compared with the first half of the year, according to the Kiel Institute.

Lastly, the EU’s newest package would target third parties buying Russian oil.

On Sunday, the iconic Louvre Museum in the French capital played host to a speedy heist in which eight items of precious jewellery dating from the Napoleonic era were spirited away from its second floor.

The stolen items included a tiara pertaining to the jewellery set of Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense, an emerald necklace utilised by Empress Marie-Louise, a large brooch belonging to Empress Eugenie, and other similar goodies.

International news outlets reported the theft with predictable drama, CNN, for example, blared the headline: “Historic jewels stolen in ‘ national disaster ‘ for France”. The article went on to note that one of the looted diadems “features 24 Ceylon sapphires and 1, 083 diamonds that can be detached and worn as brooches, according to the Louvre”.

The sensational hand-wringing was almost reminiscent of another contemporary “national disaster” in Paris – namely, the April 2019 fire at the Notre Dame cathedral that broke the hearts of politicians worldwide, even as they remained apparently unmoved by such objectively more tragic events as Israel’s recurrent slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

And now that we have just witnessed two years of all-out genocide in Gaza courtesy of the United States-backed Israeli military, it seems that the loss of all those sapphires and diamonds might ultimately not really be so “disastrous”, after all – at least in terms of, you know, the general state of humanity and the future of the planet.

In fact, many of us might even find ourselves rooting for the thieves, to some extent – if only as a symbolic middle finger to a world predicated on obscene inequality and misplaced priorities.

To be sure, the Louvre and like-minded elite art institutions are themselves symbolic of historical injustice, serving as they do as repositories for treasures accrued by royals who built their very wealth on the backs of the working classes – not to mention cultural artefacts and stolen relics from former colonial possessions and other imperial stamping grounds.

Talk about “looting”.

In her book Decolonize Museums, curator and scholar Shimrit Lee notes that “even the term ‘ loot ‘ derived from the Hindi ‘ lut’, meaning ‘ stolen property’, was appropriated into the English language as a result of British control of India”. Remarking on how the British Museum in London has traditionally “showcased plundered sculptures from India as well as the bronzes of Benin”, the West African kingdom in what is now Nigeria that was invaded by Britain in 1897 and subsequently subsumed into the British Empire, Lee observes that “France’s Louvre created galleries in the early 1800s specifically to house the many objects nabbed by Napoleon and his entourage in Egypt”.

Nowadays, Lee writes, it is “impossible to find a Western museum that doesn’t hold some amount of cultural material from Africa, Asia, Oceania, or Native America” – a legacy of violent and extractive colonialism whose repercussions continue to impact the lives of Indigenous and Black people across the world. And yet “the museum, with its white walls and white lights, aids in historical amnesia, tricking visitors into believing that this violence only exists in the past”.

Enter Sunday’s jewel thieves, who – against such a white-walled, white-lit backdrop – might even assume the role of semi-Robin-Hood-type heroes. Unfortunately, this sort of romanticisation falls short, as the would-be Robin Hoods most likely did not undertake their spectacular stunt as a politico-cultural statement against historical amnesia but rather in the interest of making bank by peddling the looted treasures to other rich people specialising in the art of exploitative economics.

In her recent article on the heist, Emiline Smith – a lecturer in criminology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland – emphasises that the stolen jewels are “products of a long history of colonial extraction”, the looted gemstones having been mined in Asia, Africa, and South America, regions that were “systematically exploited for their cultural and natural resources to enrich European courts and empires”.

As Smith puts it, France’s “colonial outposts and broader European networks funnelled such valuable resources to royal courts and elite collectors” – all with the help of good old slavery. Among the funnelled items is a 19th-century sculpture by enslaved court artist Akati Ekplekendo of the kingdom of Dahomey – formerly a colony of France – in the present-day Republic of Benin (not to be confused with the British-appropriated kingdom of Benin), which Smith notes “Benin has repeatedly requested back yet is still exhibited in the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions”.

Again, then, it is not difficult to see why those of us concerned with global justice might theoretically be inclined to view with favour the material loss inflicted on the Louvre on Sunday.

At the end of the day, though, the heist is not quite worthy of romanticisation. It should not be categorized as a “national disaster” or an “international disaster,” though. And it’s pretty much a disaster in itself that there are those who would portray it as such.

Off the coast of South America, the United States launched an airstrike on what it claimed was a drug-smuggling boat. The Pacific Ocean’s first attack of this nature was the eighth. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has warned that his anti-Latein American drug cartel campaign may grow.