Wednesday, March 19

Russia’s war against Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during the plenary session of Russia Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, March 18, 2025, in Moscow, Russia. Putin spoke prior to his telephone call with U.S. President Donald Trump. (Contributor/Getty Images)

Trump-Putin call: Russia agrees to 30-day pause of energy infrastructure strikes. "Vladimir Putin responded positively to this initiative and immediately gave the appropriate command to the Russian military," the Kremlin said.

Kremlin demands halt to foreign military aid**, intelligence to Ukraine as condition for avoiding war escalation.** The Kremlin has demanded a complete cessation of foreign military aid and intelligence to Ukraine as a "key condition for avoiding an escalation of the war," according to a statement released on March 18.

Kyiv supports energy sector ceasefire**, expects military aid to continue, Zelensky says.** "We will support such a proposal, but we're very interested in the details," Zelensky said after the Trump-Putin call.

US announces another round of negotiations in Middle East on war in Ukraine. "This conflict should never have started and should have been ended long ago with sincere and good faith peace efforts," the White House's statement read.

'I don't want us to be on Putin's menu' — Zelensky says negotiations must include Ukraine. "We are an independent state. Without us, I think it's wrong to negotiate," President Volodymyr Zelensky said on March 18.

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Putin didn't mention military aid in phone call, Trump says. Trump also said it was "a great call" and that the U.S. hopes to expand trade with Russia, including deals on "very big forms of rare earth."

Ukraine withdraws from one front-line sector in Donetsk Oblast, commander says. "This allowed us not only to save our soldiers, but also to improve our defense. (Russia) is suffering losses, and we can act more effectively," Lieutenant General Serhii Naiev said.

Ukrainian forces attempted to enter Belgorod Oblast**, repelled by Russian forces, Russia claims.** The Russian Defense Ministry claimed on March 18 that the Ukrainian Armed Forces attempted to enter Russia's Belgorod Oblast but were repelled by the Russian military.

Zelensky arrives in Finland for official visit to discuss security and strengthen ties. President Volodymyr Zelensky and First Lady Olena Zelenska arrived in Finland for an official visit on March 18. The plane carrying the couple landed at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in the afternoon.

Russian energy giant Gazprom suffers $13.1 billion loss in 2024. Gazprom's losses averaged $251 million per week, $35 million per day, or $1.4 million per hour. While the company's total revenue increased by 11% and its gas revenue by 14%, it still ended the year with a sales loss of 192 billion rubles ($2.3 billion).

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Meet the Ukrainian fashion brand that's making heritage trendy

Natalia Kamenska had grown tired of a fashion industry she felt was too focused on mass production and commercial interests, rather than creativity. While in the Carpathian mountains, Kamenska encountered a “gunia,” a traditional western Ukrainian shag fur coat that weighs around six kilos (13 pounds).

Photo: Gunia

Learn more




Polish right takes hard line on Ukraine ahead of presidential vote

With the Polish presidential elections just two months away, two of the country's leading right-wing candidates have become increasingly antagonistic toward Ukraine and its leadership. Both men have made headlines by public spats with Ukrainian officials and denounced Kyiv as ungrateful for Polish aid.

Photo: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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Ukraine war latest: Putin, Trump hold 1.5-hour call, discuss ceasefire in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to a 30-day pause of energy infrastructure strikes during a call with U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a readout of the call issued by the Kremlin on March 18.

Photo: Maxim Shemetov/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

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Human cost of Russia’s war

2 killed, 13 injured in Russian attacks across Ukraine over past day. Ukrainian air defenses shot down 63 of the 137 Russian attack and decoy drones overnight over 12 oblasts, the Air Force said. Sixty-four decoy drones reportedly disappeared from radars without causing damage.

General Staff: Russia has lost 897,010 troops in Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022. The number includes 1,560 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.

International response

UK reportedly hopes US drones, satellites will help monitor Ukraine ceasefire. The U.S. military has 247 military satellites and thousands of commercial satellites, providing an "unrivaled picture" of eastern Ukraine that European forces would struggle to replicate, the Times wrote.

UK, EU to discuss confiscating Russian assets ahead of Ukraine peace talks, Bloomberg reports. Negotiations will focus on establishing the legal and financial framework to seize Russian assets, despite opposition from some EU member states, particularly Belgium and Germany.

Italy, Spain hesitant on EU's $43 billion military aid to Ukraine plan. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said the proposal needed further discussion and that Italy was awaiting the outcome of the upcoming call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump boasts of saving 'surrounded' Ukrainian soldiers despite Kyiv denying encirclement in Kursk Oblast. U.S. President Donald Trump claimed on March 17 that he took an unspecified action to save "surrounded" Ukrainian soldiers, apparently referring to his earlier and unsubstantiated claims of Kyiv's troops being encircled in Russia's Kursk Oblast.

Trump's aid cuts threaten supply of HIV treatments to Ukraine**, 7 more countries, WHO warns.** The World Health Organization warned that Kenya, Haiti, Lesotho, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Ukraine could run out of critical antiretroviral drugs in the coming months.

Russian negotiator says he expects talks with Musk on space, tech. Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said he expects Russia to hold talks with U.S. billionaire and President Donald Trump's ally, Elon Musk, in the near future, the pro-state news agency RBK reported on March 18.

In other news

Notorious judge dismissed amid accusations of criminal activity, power grab. Judge Pavlo Vovk was held responsible for "committing a significant disciplinary offense, gross or systematic neglect of duties that is incompatible with the status of a judge or revealed his incompatibility with the position he holds."

France to deploy fighter jets with nuclear warheads on German border by 2035, Macron says. France will deploy Rafale fighter jets equipped with supersonic nuclear warheads along its border with Germany in 2035, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on March 18 at the Luxeuil-Saint-Sauveur Airbase, according to BFMTV.

Telegram CEO Durov returns to Dubai amid French investigation. Pavel Durov, Telegram's Russian-born founder and CEO, said that the investigating judges allowed him to depart even though the probe is ongoing.

Poland, Baltics to withdraw from anti-personnel mine ban treaty. The defense ministers of the four nations argued that the security situation in the region has "fundamentally deteriorated" and that military threats to NATO member states bordering Russia and Belarus have "significantly increased."

EU approves over $2 billion in economic support for Moldova. The Reform and Growth Facility, which includes 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in low-interest loans and 385 million euros ($420 million) in grants, will cover the period of 2025-2027 and is part of the EU's long-term Moldova Growth Plan.

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🔔#Earthquake (#séisme) M3.3 strikes 1 km W of Petit Trou de Nippes (#Haiti) 32 min ago. More info: https://m.emsc.eu/?id=1783673

Donate to the Haitian Bridge Alliance

https://haitianbridgealliance.org/

#Haiti #MutualAid

Mental Health Resources: How to get immediate help in Ohio for Haitians and Haitian-Americans
Comprehensive guide to mental health support, with resources available for Haitians in Springfield, Columbus, and beyond.

https://haitiantimes.com/2024/09/18/mental-health-help-ohio-haitians/

#Haiti #HaitianAmerican
#Haitian #Ohio #Columbus #Springfield

"what’s going on in Haiti is actually very important, because it’s — I don’t think it’s a plan that the U.S. wanted, which is why they rushed Henry to Kenya to sign this bilateral agreement, after the Kenyan courts said that it was unconstitutional for Kenya to send its police to Haiti. But I think things changed faster than they anticipated, and so now they’re scrambling for a new plan in Haiti. And in the meantime, what’s happening is our people, that are the people — the poor people on the ground, are the ones suffering."

~Jemima Pierre

#Haiti

""Guy Philippe was around in 2004. In fact, Guy Philippe was trained by the U.S. in Ecuador and spent a lot of time training in — living and training in the Dominican Republic. So, in the lead-up to coup d’état against Aristide in 2004, what you had is — all the fall of 2003, what you had, Guy Philippe and his armed groups would ransack — would cross into the border and ransack and attack police stations and so on and so forth. Back then, which is fascinating, if you look up in the news, the Western media portrayed him as a freedom fighter. He was the hero standing up against the evil Aristide, according to the West. And so they supported him. And he would say later that he was actually being funded by the CIA and so on.

[...]

Guy Philippe was arrested by the U.S. and put in prison for drug trafficking. And we have to understand this, because even during his trial, there are certain things that were kept secret because it implicated the U.S. government. And so, he served six years in prison as a criminal in the U.S., and now the U.S. dumped him in Haiti in November 2023, after serving six years of a nine-year term.

[...]

everyone pretends that Haiti — you know, are saying that Haiti is at war, and so on and so forth, but the reality is, Guy Philippe is giving interviews to all the mainstream press. Guy Philippe gives more interviews than the local people who are organizing against repression. We don’t hear them in The Washington Post, but we hear Guy Philippe. But I wonder what the U.S. role is for Guy Philippe right now. And as far as I’m concerned, he should be tried for treason, because he was behind — he worked with the U.S. to actually remove our elected president. And so, we have to be very careful about what the U.S. is bringing, what the mainstream media is bringing to us as real and as the situation, when we know the situation is actually very much controlled by the U.S. and the Core Group when it comes to Haiti."

~Jemima Pierre

#Haiti

"And so, the problem is, if this goes on and if they don’t take into account other solutions that Haitians have been putting together — you know, in early 2021, you had La Fanmi Lavalas come up with Sali Piblik, which means that we need to start over and change the system. We had the Montana Accords. We have local groups that actually had a solution before the Moïse assassination. The U.S. government was trying to protect Moïse and basically ignored all these local solutions. And so, now they cannot say that they’re here to help Haiti, as much as trying to figure out how to put in place another unpopular and illegal government, and so then we’ll have the same problem a few years down the line.

The other thing I want to quickly say — I know, in a hurry — is that the people funding these armed groups are part of the oligarchy. And most of the guns and ammunition are coming from the U.S. People must remember that in the late 2022, in early 2023, the Canadian government sanctioned three of the richest oligarchs in Haiti. That’s Gilbert Bigio, Reynold Deeb and Sherif Abdallah. The Canadian government also sanctioned former President Michel Martelly and other — and Laurent Lamothe, his prime minister, all of them because they — for drug trafficking, but also for funding these armed groups. And so, in the news we get, you get these guys that look, you know, like raggedy — ragged and poor, but then the people really funding them, because Haiti does not manufacture guns, are these elites that are behind all the violence. And so I also want to put that into very clear context so that we know that this is a very complex problem that’s very much set up by the 2004 coup, but also perpetuated by the oligarchy and the U.S., which work together to keep Haiti unstable, so that we can say Haiti is ungovernable and we need to come in and save it."

~Jemima Pierre

#Haiti

"You know, we say the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. In 2004, as has been revealed and admitted to, the U.S., France and Canada got together and backed a coup d’état against the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And the U.S. Marines flew into his home, put him on a plane with his security officials, his wife and aide, and flew them to the Central African Republic. And people can actually go to the Democracy Now! archives, which covered this live. And I remember listening to this happening live.

And the point of this was that this coup d’état, which was led by two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, was then sanctioned by the U.N. when these same two members of the U.N. Security Council — and that’s the U.S. and France — basically pushed the U.N. Security Council into sending a multinational military force to Haiti armed under Chapter VII deployment. And that itself was illegal, because the original coup d’état was illegal. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti and the deputy ambassador were in the process — they’re the ones that named who the interim president would be, put together a Council of Sages, and basically restructured Haiti’s elected president. And back then we had 7,000 elected officials; today we have zero. And over time, I say Haiti has been under occupation, because it is this military occupation, the MINUSTAH occupation, that went from 2004 to 2007, that established the Core Group, that — it’s an unelected group of Western officials, including Brazil, which led the military arm of the occupation in 2004 under Lula, which led then — which has been controlling all the actions in Haiti, down to naming who the prime minister would be, Ariel Henry, after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse.

I have to quickly say, though, one of the key things that happened is, in 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands, when the U.S. pushed the sitting president, René Préval, to have elections — and the WikiLeaks papers revealed to us later that Hillary Clinton actually flew to Haiti and changed the election results, where Michel Martelly of the PHTK political party did not make the first round, but the U.S. forced the Haitian election council to actually make him — put him in the second round. And so, establishing the PHTK, Michel Martelly, a neo-Duvalierist, as Haiti’s president with under 20% of the people voting, with the largest political party in Haiti, Lavalas, not being able to participate, we set the stage for what we see today. "

~Jemima Pierre

#Haiti

"Haiti is under a state of emergency, with tens of thousands displaced amid the fighting, and United Nations officials warn the country’s health system is nearing collapse. Ariel Henry was appointed prime minister after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, but he is currently stranded outside the country after a trip to Kenya, where he was seeking a U.N.-backed security force to help him maintain power. For more, we speak with Haitian American scholar Jemima Pierre, who says the unrest in Haiti today can be traced to decisions made two decades ago by the United States and other outside powers. “The root of this crisis is not last week, it’s not this week, it’s not even Ariel Henry. But we have to go back to 2004 with the coup-d’état,” says Pierre. She adds that because successive security plans have been sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, “the whole world is participating in the occupation of Haiti unwittingly.”"

~Amy Goodman and Jemima Pierre, The World Is Participating in the Occupation of Haiti Unwittingly, Scholar Says

#Haiti

via Black for Palestine

Radical Resistances: Haiti, Palestine and the Fight Against Empire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4TGjp61-ks

Resources Here

#Haiti
#Palestine

#share #Gaza #Ukraine #Yemen #Congo #Sudan #Haiti #lestweforget

Trump's 90-day suspension of foreign aid sent shock waves around the world, leaving millions of people without life-saving support — and hundreds of thousands without jobs. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/03/02/world/politics/usaid-jobs-syria-haiti/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #worldnews #politics #usaid #syria #haiti #us #donaldtrump #republicans #elsalvador #nigeria #kenya #afghanistan

"As the CIA’s man in Port-au-Prince at the start of the millennium, (ambassaor James) Foley was on the frontlines of a brutal #coup that displaced popular, legitimately-elected, #antiimperialist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power, and all the horrors that followed."

#USAID Exported #CIA #Balkans Terror (paid for #Osama-recruited #KLA #Kosovo mercs... essentially #alQaeda) to #Haiti
https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/26/usaid-exported-cia-balkan-terror-to-haiti/ #Destabilization #DestabilizationOperation #Imperialism #alQaeda #terrorists

Bandengewalt: Offenbar mindestens 40 Tote bei Angriffen in Haiti

Einem Medienbericht zufolge verüben auf Haiti bewaffnete Banden seit mehreren Tagen Angriffe auf eine Gemeinde. Laut deren Bürgermeister ist die Ortschaft umstellt. Mindestens 40 Menschen sollen bereits getötet worden sein.

➡️ https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/haiti-port-au-prince-angriff-tote-bandengewalt-102.html?at_medium=mastodon&at_campaign=tagesschau.de

#Haiti #Kenscoff

Los jacobinos negros, la revolución de Haití y el fin de la esclavitud https://marioespinozapino.com/2023/10/20/los-jacobinos-negros-la-revolucion-de-haiti-y-el-fin-de-la-esclavitud/ #África #Cultura, #Haití, #Historia, #Marxismo, #MarxismoNegro, #Política, #Revolución, #CLRJames

[Haïti] Accord trouvé pour un gouvernement transitoire @lexpress #Haiti #électionslexpress.fr/actualite/mond…

Haiti: Heaven or Hell?

I wrote this article 8 years ago. I described how Haiti is a libertarian heaven.

It still is.

https://tiereddemocraticgovernance.org/blog_details.php?blog_cat_id=24&id=31

#tiereddemocraticgovernance
#haiti

‘Fear of what’s to happen’: Haitians in Ohio city brace for Trump’s return https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/19/springfield-ohio-haitian-immigrants-trump #USimmigration #DonaldTrump #USpolitics #JDVance #USnews #Haiti #Ohio

█ Donald Trump és "un risc" per als drets humans, segons Human Rights Watch ▓▒░ L'ONG critica que Washington, igual que Alemanya, han deixat que Israel cometi crims de guerra de forma deliberada
https://www.ccma.cat/324/donald-trump-es-un-risc-per-als-drets-humans-segons-human-rights-watch/noticia/3331027/?ext=MASTODON_ONLINE

#guerraagaza #dretshumans #israel #xina #russia #haiti #324cat #donaldtrump #gaza #afganistan

█ 15 anys després del terratrèmol d'Haití, una segona generació d'infants té el futur amenaçat ▓▒░ Save the Children alerta que els nens nascuts després del sisme del 2010 són presoners de la violència, la inestabilitat i la precarietat, que dificulten el seu accés a l'educació
https://www.ccma.cat/324/15-anys-despres-del-terratremol-dhaiti-una-segona-generacio-dinfants-te-el-futur-amenacat/noticia/3330286/?ext=MASTODON_ONLINE

#324cat #haiti

#Haiti

15 Jahre nach dem Beben in Haiti herrschen Chaos und Gewalt

Vor genau 15 Jahren wurde Haiti vom schwersten Beben in der Geschichte Nord- und Südamerikas erschüttert. Mehr als 200.000 Menschen starben, fast zwei Millionen wurden obdachlos. Heute versinkt das Land in Chaos und Gewalt. Von A. Hanke.

➡️ https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/haiti-erdbeben-jahrestag-100.html?at_medium=mastodon&at_campaign=tagesschau.de

#Haiti #Erdbeben

https://www.europesays.com/1755080/ Haitian president demands reparations from France – Caribbean Life #Caricom #france #haiti #LeslieVoltaire #reparations

> “The two main criminals are France and the US. They owe Haiti enormous reparations.. we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, ‘We’re sorry we did it,’ ... To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes... against #Haiti, and the US gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people. Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.” — #NoamChomsky
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/08/haiti-and-american-neocolonialism/
#GrantInskeep #uspol

Central American troops arrive in Haiti to reinforce mission to restore order
About 150 military police officers from Central America have arrived in Haiti to reinforce the embattled government's fight against violent gangs.
#politics #military #crime #Haiti #CentralAmerica
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/central-american-troops-arrive-in-haiti-to-reinforce-mission-to-restore-order-1.7165025

Al suave les tocó llevar un escuadrón antimaras a #Haití https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/central-american-troops-arrive-haiti-fight-gangs-2025-01-03/