Category World News

A Moscow district court has designated Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot as an extremist organisation, according to the state TASS news agency.

The exiled group’s lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, told TASS that Monday’s court ruling was made in response to claims brought by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and that the band plans to appeal. According to TASS, the case was heard in a closed session at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office.

The court said that it had upheld prosecution submissions “to recognise the punk band Pussy Riot as an extremist organisation and ban its activities on the territory of the Russian Federation”, the AFP news agency reports.

An official Pussy Riot social media account shared a statement, responding defiantly to the ruling, saying the band’s members, who have lived in exile for years, were “freer than those who try to silence us”.

“We can say what I think about putin — that he is an aging sociopath spreading his venom around the world like cancer,” the statement said.

“In today’s Russia, telling the truth is extremism. So be it – we’re proud extremists, then.”

The group’s designation will make it easier for the authorities to go after the band’s supporters in Russia or people who have worked with them in the past.

“This court order is designed to erase the very existence of Pussy Riot from the minds of Russians,” the band said. “Owning a balaclava, having our song on your computer, or liking one of our posts could lead to prison time.”

According to TASS, earlier reports said that the Prosecutor General’s Office had brought the case over Pussy Riot’s previous actions, including at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in February 2012, and the World Cup Final in Moscow in 2018.

Today Russian court designated Pussy Riot as an extremist organization.

And yet, we’re freer than those who try to silence us. We can say what I think about putin — that he is an aging sociopath spreading his venom around the world like cancer. In today’s Russia, telling the… pic.twitter.com/ymz3BbApTo

The band’s members have already served sentences for the 2012 protest at the cathedral in Moscow, where they played what they called a punk prayer, “Mother of God, Cast Putin Out!”

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, who were jailed for two years on hooliganism charges over the cathedral protest, were released as part of a 2013 amnesty, which extended to some 26,000 people facing prosecution from Russian authorities, including 30 Greenpeace crew members.

In September, a Russian court handed jail terms to five people linked with Pussy Riot – Maria Alyokhina, Taso Pletner, Olga Borisova, Diana Burkot and Alina Petrova – after finding them guilty of spreading “false information” about the Russian military, news outlet Mediazona reported. All have said the charges against them are politically motivated.

Mediazona was founded by Alyokhina alongside fellow band member Tolokonnikova.

The news outlet says that it is continuing to maintain a verified list of Russian military deaths in Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

United States President Donald Trump has personally appealed to Chinese President Xi Jinping to release imprisoned Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, saying he was deeply concerned about the 78-year-old’s health following his conviction.

On Monday, Hong Kong’s High Court found Lai guilty on three charges in his national security trial, a ruling condemned by rights groups as a decisive blow to press freedom in the Chinese financial hub.

Prosecutors accused Lai of orchestrating conspiracies to encourage foreign governments to take action against Hong Kong or China, and of publishing material that “excited disaffection” against Chinese authorities. Lai pleaded not guilty and now faces a possible life sentence following his guilty verdict.

“I spoke to President Xi about it, and I asked to consider his release,” Trump told reporters on Monday, without saying when he made the request to Xi.

“He’s an older man, and he’s not well. So I did put that request out. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said.

Trump met Xi in October in South Korea, where he is believed to have raised Lai’s case with the Chinese leader. Shortly after Trump’s comments on Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the verdict underscored Beijing’s determination to suppress dissent.

Rubio said the conviction showed China’s resolve to “silence those who seek to protect freedom of speech and other fundamental rights”.

Lai founded the now-defunct pro-democracy tabloid newspaper Apple Daily and became one of the most prominent pro-democracy figures targeted under Hong Kong’s national security law.

“Reports indicate that Mr. Lai’s health has severely deteriorated during more than 1,800 days in prison,” Rubio said in the statement. “We urge the authorities to bring this ordeal to an end as soon as possible and to release Mr. Lai on humanitarian grounds,” he said.

Jimmy Lai has spent over 1,800 days in prison. I echo President Trump’s call for Beijing to conclude this ordeal and release Mr. Lai.

The United Kingdom also criticised the conviction of Lai as a “politically motivated prosecution” and called for his immediate release.

Lai, who has been detained since late 2020, is a British citizen. His son Sebastien said that the UK needed to increase pressure on Beijing.

“It’s time to put action behind words and make my father’s release a precondition to closer relationships with China,” Lai’s son said at a news conference in London.

Lai’s daughter, Claire, said her father would abandon political activism if freed from jail.

“He just wants to reunite with his family. He wants to dedicate his life to serving our Lord, and he wants to dedicate the rest of his days to his family,” she told the Associated Press in Washington.

“My father is fundamentally not a man who operates on illegal ground,” she said.

A devout Catholic, Lai has drawn support in the US from a loose coalition of democracy advocates, press freedom groups and Christian activists, a constituency that forms a key part of Trump’s political base.

The forced closure of Lai’s Apple Daily in 2021, once known for its fiercely critical reporting, marked a turning point for Hong Kong’s media landscape. News organisations have since scaled back critical coverage of China amid fears of prosecution in Hong Kong, while the city’s global press freedom ranking has fallen sharply, dropping to 140th out of 180 countries, according to advocacy group RFA.

“Although it’s an expected verdict, when the news came out, the feeling of ‘finally it’s here’ hit us,” said Edward Li, a former editor at Apple Daily currently residing in Taiwan.

Here is where things stand on Tuesday, December 16:

Fighting

• A Russian drone attack killed a 62-year-old Ukrainian man as he was riding a bicycle in the Velyka Pysarivka community of Ukraine’s Sumy region, Governor Oleh Hryhorov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
• Russian forces launched 850 attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region in a single day, injuring 14 people and damaging houses, cars and infrastructure, Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Telegram.
• Russian forces injured five people in attacks on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, and six people in the Kherson region in the past day, local officials said, according to the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform.
• In Dnipropetrovsk, those injured included a firefighter and factory worker, hurt after Russian forces launched a second attack on a factory in the Synelnykivskyi district, as rescuers tried to respond to a fire caused by an earlier Russian attack, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine reported on its website.
• Russian attacks caused power outages in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, as well as the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, the Ukrainian energy company NPC Ukrenergo said on Facebook.
• Ukraine claimed that underwater drones had, for the first time in the war, struck a Russian submarine docked in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
• The head of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet press service, Aleksei Rulyov, denied that the underwater drone attack was successful. “Not a single ship or submarine of the Black Sea Fleet located at the base in Novorossiysk Bay was damaged,” he said. “The enemy’s attempt at sabotage through underwater drones failed to achieve its aims.”

Ceasefire talks

• US President Donald Trump said a deal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine was “closer than ever” after American, Ukrainian, European and NATO leaders met in Berlin for hours of talks on a potential settlement, hosted by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
• European leaders issued a joint statement after the talks, saying that any decisions on potential Ukrainian territorial concessions to Russia can only be made by the people of Ukraine, and once robust security guarantees are in place for Kyiv.
• They also said that US and European leaders had agreed to “work together to provide robust security guarantees”, including a European-led “multinational force” made up of nations willing to assist “in securing Ukraine’s skies, and in supporting safer seas, including through operating inside Ukraine”.
• Speaking at a news conference after the talks, Merz said that the US had offered “considerable” security guarantees, and that although there is now a “chance for a real peace process”, “territorial settlement remains a key question”.

Regional security

• Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov called “the EU’s aggressive actions the main threat in the world at the moment”, and claimed that the US is trying to put Europe “in its place”, in an interview with Iranian state television.
• Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, suffered a major email outage. Officials told UK newspaper The Financial Times that they suspect it was a cyberattack, while the Ukraine ceasefire talks were taking place in Berlin.
• Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the new head of the UK’s armed forces, has called for “national resilience” in the face of a “growing” risk from Russia. “It means more people being ready to fight for their country,” Knighton said of the threat from Moscow, while also referring to recent comments from his French counterpart, Fabien Mandon, who said France must be ready to “lose its children”.

Three US soldiers have been killed in an attack in Syria’s central city of Palmyra.

It is the first known deadly attack on US forces since former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was deposed last year. Washington has accused the ISIL (ISIS) group of carrying out the assault.

The government in Damascus has expanded its ties with Washington and joined a coalition to fight the ISIL group.

But how much of a security challenge is ISIL in Syria?

Will the US now reinforce its military presence? What risks could that pose?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Colin Clarke – executive director of The Soufan Center

Dareen Khalifa – senior adviser at the International Crisis Group

Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has said he will sign an executive order labelling fentanyl, and its core precursors, as a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD), in the latest instance of his administration using increasingly militarised language to justify its operations against drug cartels and smugglers.

The announcement on Monday comes after the Trump administration’s repeated references to drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists” and its designation of Latin American cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”.

The administration has repeatedly claimed that international drug smuggling groups are not criminal networks bent on profit, but organisations aimed at destabilising the US.

“There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States, in part because they want to kill Americans,” Trump said on Monday during a White House event.

“That’s why today, I’m taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country,” he added.

“With this historic executive order I will sign today, we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.”

It was not immediately clear if the label would have any practical impact, or what bearing it would have on fentanyl legally bought for medical use.

The executive order called simply for a series of actions from the heads of executive agencies to “eliminate the threat of illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to the United States”.

Under current US law, which the president cannot unilaterally change, a weapon of mass destruction is defined as “any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors”.

The definition includes “any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector”, as well as “any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life”.

It also defines a WMD as any “destructive device”, including traditional bombs, missiles, grenades or items that can be converted to expel a projectile.

Increased threats

The Trump administration has used efforts to mitigate fentanyl smuggling as a pretext for increasing tariffs on Mexico and China.

The administration has also used its wider campaign against drugs to justify strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific – in what rights groups say could amount to extrajudicial killings – and to justify surging military assets off the coast of Venezuela.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to begin land attacks on Venezuelan territory to counter drug smuggling.

He repeated the threat on Monday. “We’re going to start hitting them on land, which is a lot easier to do, frankly,” he said.

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro has maintained that the US pressure campaign is aimed at toppling his government.

Despite the heightened rhetoric against Venezuela, regional experts have noted that the country, and South America, are not known hubs for fentanyl production or exports.

“To be perfectly clear, there is no fentanyl coming from Venezuela or elsewhere in South America,” John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) said during an expert briefing earlier this month.