A month after Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash, Russian authorities are attempting to assert control over the parallel military structure.
“Prigozhin is alive.” The phrase remains among the most popular queries in Russia’s Yandex search engine a month after the crash of the Embraer Legacy jet on Aug. 23 that killed Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The reports came as Turkish forces pounded strategic economic installations today in the Kurdish-run zone, including oil installations and power stations.
A US F-16 fighter jet has downed an unmanned Turkish drone close to a coalition facility in northeastern Syria, where 900 US special operation forces are deployed, a move that is likely to escalate tensions between the two NATO allies, the Pentagon has confirmed.
North African states have seen an uptick in the number of migrants arriving and risking the perilous Mediterranean crossing to Southern Europe since a military coup in Niger severed cooperation between the West African nation and the EU.
“We stand with Artsakh,” reads a poster using the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh that hangs at Mirzoyan Library, a popular cafe and hangout spot for local hipsters and Russian emigres in the heart of the Armenian capital.
This place was recently transformed into a hub for humanitarian aid as volunteers started collecting and distributing boxes filled with clothing, shoes, food, hygiene products and children’s toys to assist refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh.
During a visit by a Moscow Times reporter last week, Russian and Armenian volunteers were packing cars with humanitarian aid destined for tens of thousands of refugees pouring into Armenia from the disputed territory.
A number of Russians who relocated to Armenia when Moscow started its war against Ukraine are now assisting ethnic Armenians who left Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan launched an “anti-terrorist operation” in the majority-Armenian enclave last month.
The Ethos charity, opened last year by a group of Russian emigres who moved to Yerevan following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, has had to re-orient its charity work, which initially focused on refugees from Ukraine, toward the influx of Armenian refugees, Ethos head Yevgeny Yevsyukov told The Moscow Times.
In addition to collecting humanitarian aid in Yerevan, the organization has also established distribution points in multiple Armenian cities, including Goris, a city in the southern Syunik province where ethnic Armenians sought refuge from Azerbaijan’s offensive.
Volunteers say they work almost nonstop in Goris, which has taken in a major portion of the 100,000 refugees who fled from Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Refugees were forced to sleep outdoors and use the streets as toilets because local hotels and camps were unable to accommodate everyone,” Yevsyukov said, describing the situation in Goris.
Ethos said it received over 30,000 requests for assistance from refugees in the week following the escalation of the conflict.
Many refugees had to leave their homes in a rush with no opportunity to pack their belongings when Baku lifted its nearly 10-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh’s only road to Armenia — a blockade which resulted in dire shortages of medicine, food, fuel and other necessities.
According to Yevsyukov, around 30 businesses and organizations, including Russian companies, are currently providing assistance to Ethos. Volunteers said that along with distributing food and clothes, they also started offering mental health support and legal assistance to refugees.
Ethos is not the only group of Russian volunteers providing assistance to refugees.
“I had no other option because offering help is not something extraordinary. It’s important to help people,” said one Russian woman, who organized a charity event and collected clothes and personal hygiene products for refugees.
“We must do what we can, and if we cannot change the political situation, then we can help those affected by it,” the woman, who recently moved to Yerevan and spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Moscow Times.
Another Russian emigre, Valeria Kopirovskaya, 29, who moved from Moscow to Yerevan last year, has organized charity film screenings to benefit Ukrainian refugees. But she too redirected her charitable efforts towards assisting refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in recent weeks.
“I am trying to organize classes for children in the refugee camp because their schooling has been interrupted. We are planning to offer needlework and music lessons,” Kopirovskaya said, adding that she was also looking for therapists and psychiatrists for displaced people.
In the neighboring Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Anna, a Russian in her 30s who owns a vintage shop, started collecting clothing donations for Nagorno-Karabakh refugees.
“I thought only a few of my friends would bring their old jackets and hoodies to the store, but in just a week we collected about 200 kilograms of clothes, sneakers, jackets and toys for children,” said Anna, who declined to provide her surname.
According to Anna, the main problem lies in transporting the aid across the Armenian-Georgian border.
“The Armenian customs did not believe that these clothes were for refugees and not for sale and demanded a duty for shipping the cargo, which we cannot pay. We are now trying to enlist the support of the Armenian Embassy in Georgia or the Armenian diaspora,” Anna told The Moscow Times. “As a last resort, we will try to collect donations in order to rent several minivans and transport clothes ourselves.”
In addition to problems with logistics, some volunteers said they had encountered obstacles from local Armenian authorities.
“When the Azerbaijani ‘military operation’ started, we contacted the Goris administration. They provided us with the contacts of 500 families in need of assistance. However, when we delivered the aid, a person from the city administration informed us that the authorities had forbidden them from accepting our aid,” Yevsyukov told The Moscow Times, adding that “the local authorities said they don’t need help.”
According to Yevsyukov, Ethos’ office in Yerevan was also raided by police officers who checked volunteers’ passports.
“It seems as if [the authorities] just don’t want to show that they can’t cope with a huge flow of work,” Yevsyukov said.
The United Nations said this week that up to 1,000 ethnic Armenians remain in Nagorno-Karabakh out of its total population of 120,000.
Baku this week published its reintegration plan that says it guarantees residents of Nagorno-Karabakh — which was an autonomous region within Azerbaijan under the Soviet Union — equality of rights and freedoms, as well as the safety of every resident “regardless of ethnicity, religion, or language.”
However, Armenians said they feared repression and ethnic cleansing from Azerbaijani forces if they were to return.
Many Nagorno-Karabakh residents also felt let down by Moscow when, as they say, Russia’s peacekeepers, who were deployed to the region following the 2020 war between Baku and Yerevan, were unable to prevent Azerbaijan’s offensive last month.
“Refugees react differently to Russians. Of course, some of them are offended and upset because the Russian peacekeepers were passive when Azerbaijan launched its ‘military operation’,” Yevsyukov said, recalling his conversations with people from Nagorno-Karabakh.
“But there was nothing rude to us on their part. They asked where we were from. We answered that we were from Russia.”
“They thanked us.”
It’s a new October war. Early Saturday morning, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched its biggest assault on Israel in decades. Thousands of rockets arced from Gaza into Israel; black towers of smoke rose from where they struck. On motorcycles, trucks, and even paragliders, Palestinian militants darted into Israeli communities. Reports indicate that more than a hundred Israelis have been killed, and hundreds more have been injured. “We are at war, not in an operation, not in rounds of fighting—at war,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, as Israeli forces began air strikes in Gaza in response to Hamas’s assault.
Lately there have been growing indications that a war against Israel may break out in September or October 2023. The trigger may be spiraling violent clashes resulting in many casualties, or the use of new weapons leading to many fatalities on the Israeli side, in the face of which Israel will be unable to suffice with its regular counterterrorism measures.[1] While neither Hamas nor Hizbullah are eager to start a comprehensive confrontation with Israel,[2] such a confrontation could result from an uncontrolled deterioration on the ground[3] or from the use of new and unusually deadly weapons by these movements.
Hamas is the largest Palestinian extremist Islamic group, characterized as a terrorist organization by most of Europe, but many other countries. Now it has come to the fore again after entering southern Israel this morning in a surprise attack that is still ongoing at this moment .
Cyprus wishes to oppose by any legal means the flow of illegal immigrants from Lebanon and the trafficking of persons from various circles, which is why it is proposing drastic measures to the neighboring country.
De ce spionii israelienii n-au anticipat atacul palestinian declanșat de organizația Hamas
Serviciile secrete israeliene, incluzând aici Shin Bet – departamentul de informații intern, Mossad – agenția sa de spionaj extern, precum și toate activele Forțelor de Apărare (IDF), nu au reușit să anticipeze atacul coordonat lansat de Hamas sâmbătă dimineața, în ceea ce echivalează cu un eșec major pentru Israel, cred analiștii. Aceasta deși statul evreu are unul dintre cele mai extinse și sofisticate rețele de informații din Orientul Mijlociu, cu informatori ce activează în interiorul grupărilor militante din teritoriile palestiniene și în Liban și Siria. Unele voci au comparat eșecul spionilor israelieni cu cel al serviciilor de securitate americane, care a permis teroriștilor arabi să deturneze patru avioane comerciale și să atace Statele Unite la 11 septembrie 2001, în cel mai grav atentat terorist din istorie.
The United States on Thursday shot down an armed Turkish drone that was operating near its troops in Syria, the Pentagon said, the first time Washington has brought down an aircraft of NATO ally Turkey.
A Turkish defense ministry official said the drone that was shot down did not belong to the Turkish armed forces, but did not say whose property it was.