White House National Security Council spokesman Admiral John Kirby has described reports that a Russian cargo ship transported weapons from a port in South Africa to Russia in December as a “serious issue”.
Speaking to Sky News, he said: “We have consistently and strongly urged countries not to provide any support for Russia’s war.
“We don’t believe that anybody should be making it easier for Mr Putin to kill innocent Ukrainian people, period.
“We’ve had multiple conversations at multiple levels, with multiple countries about those concerns, but obviously I’m not going to get into the diplomatic conversations themselves.
“It’s a serious issue.”
Supplying weapons
America’s ambassador to South Africa said on Thursday that he was confident a Russian ship, the Lady R, had picked up weapons in the country last year, which would represent a breach of Pretoria’s declared neutrality in the war.
Image: John Kirby said no nation should be ‘looking for ways to make it easier for Mr Putin’. Pic: AP
“We are confident that weapons were loaded on to that vessel, and I would bet my life on the accuracy of that assertion,” Ambassador Rueben Brigety told journalists in South Africa.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded, saying his government would open an inquiry.
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“The matter is being looked into and in time, we’ll be able to speak about [it],” the president said.
Phone call
The development comes as both President Ramaphosa and President Putin spoke by phone in a call, which the Kremlin claimed was initiated by the South African side.
In a brief summary of the call, released by the Kremlin, the two “expressed their intentions to further intensify mutually beneficial ties in various fields”.
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4:14
What is Ukraine’s new counteroffensive?
According to the Kremlin, Mr Putin told Mr Ramaphosa that Moscow had never refused the “diplomatic track” to resolving the conflict in Ukraine.
Kremlin officials said that President Putin supported President Ramaphosa’s peace proposal, which involves African leaders in an initiative to bring about peace.
Summit in August
Russia and South Africa are both members of the BRICS group of nations including Brazil, Indiaand China.
The next BRICS summit is to be held in Durban, South Africa, on 15 August. It is not clear if President Putin will defy sanctions on his travel to attend the summit.
Both Russia and China have placed a significant focus on Africa in recent years. China especially has a significant economic footprint in counties across the African continent.
Joe Biden has not yet visited Africa as US president and his administration has been accused of neglecting the continent.
The consequence, geopolitically, has been a pivot for many African nations towards both Beijing and Moscow.
During the Putin-Ramaphosa phone call, the Russian president repeated an offer to deliver Russian grain and fertilisers free of charge to African countries.
At the White House, Admiral Kirby would not be drawn further on the issue of the Lady R cargo ship, but added: “No other nation should be looking for ways to make it easier for Mr Putin to kill the Ukrainian people, they [Russia] are the aggressor.
“They need to leave. They shouldn’t be there in the first place.
“And nobody should be looking for any way to make it easier for him to conduct this war and leave it at that.”
The moment could have felt so different. It should have felt so different.
It was supposed to come a long time ago, and it was supposed to be the outcome of a peace process, of reconciliation, of understanding, of coexistence and of healing.
If it had happened the right way, then we’d be celebrating two states living alongside each other, coexisting, sharing a capital city.
Image: Destroyed buildings in Gaza, as seen from Israeli side of the border.
Pic: Reuters
Instead, the recognition of Palestine as a state comes out of the rubble of Gaza.
It has come as a last-ditch effort to save all vanishing chances of a Palestinian state.
Essentially, the countries which have recognised Palestine here at the UN in New York are jumping to the endpoint and hope to now fill in the gaps.
Those gaps are huge.
Even before the horror of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, there was almost no realistic prospect of a two-state solution.
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3:45
Two-state solution in ‘profound peril’
Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and Benjamin Netanyahu’s divide-and-conquer strategy for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza had made reconciliation increasingly hard.
The Hamas attack set back what little hope there was even further, while settlement expansion by the Israelis in the West Bank accelerated since then.
Image: An updated map of Israel and Palestine on the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office website after the UK recognised the state of Palestine
The same questions which have made all this so intractable remain.
How to share a capital city? Who controls Jerusalem’s Old City, where the holy sites are located? If it’s shared, then how?
What happens to the settlements in the West Bank? If land swaps take place, then where? What happens to Gaza? Who governs the Palestinians?
And how are the moderates on both sides emboldened to dominate the discourse and the policy?
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7:55
Two-state solution ‘encourages terrorism’
Hope rests with Trump
Right now, Palestinian extremism is holding out in Gaza with the hostages, and Israeli extremism is dominant on the other side, with Netanyahu now threatening to fully annex the West Bank as a reaction to the recognition declarations at the UN.
It all feels pretty bleak and desperate. If there is cause for some hope, it rests with Donald Trump.
Image: Donald Trump is the only man who can influence Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu (below). Pic: AP
Image: Pic: Reuters
Over the next 24 hours in New York, he will meet key Arab and Muslim leaders from the Middle East and Asia to present his latest plan for peace in Gaza.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan will all participate in the meeting.
Image: Delegates applaud after Emmanuel Macron announced France’s recognition of a state of Palestine. Pic: AP
They will listen to his plan, some may offer peacekeeping troops (a significant development if they do), some may offer to provide funding to rebuild the strip and, crucially, all are likely to tell him that his Abraham Accords plan – to forge ahead with diplomatic normalisation between Muslim nations and Israel – will not happen if Israel pushes ahead with any West Bank annexation.
Netanyahu will address the UN at the end of the week, before travelling to the White House on Monday, where he will tell Trump what he plans to do next in both Gaza and the West Bank.
If Trump wants his Abraham Accords to expand and not collapse – and remember the accords represent a genuine diplomatic game changer for the region, one Trump is rightly proud of – then he will force Netanyahu to stop in Gaza and stop in the West Bank.
Emmanuel Macron was in his element. Touring the UN’s main hall, hugging fellow leaders before taking to the podium.
He was here to make history. France, the country that carved up the Middle East over a hundred years ago along with Britain, finally giving the Palestinians what they believe is long overdue.
Yvette Cooper witnessed the event looking on. Her prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, did the same over the weekend. Foregoing such hallowed surroundings, he beat the French to it by a day.
“Peace is much more demanding, much more difficult than all wars,” said Macron, “but the time has come.”
There were cheers as he recognised the state of Palestine.
The time for what? Not for peace that is for sure. The war in Gaza rages and the West Bank simmers with settler violence against Palestinians.
The French and British believe Israel is actively working against the possibility of a Palestinian state. Attacks on Palestinians, land seizures, the relentless pace of settlement construction is finishing off the chances of a two-state solution to the conflict, so time for unilateral action they believe.
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1:37
Could UK recognition of Palestinian state affect US relationship?
Without the horizon of a state of their own, Palestinians will resort to more and more extreme means.
The Israelis say they have already done so on 7 October and this move only rewards the wicked extremism of Hamas.
But the Netanyahu government has undeniably sought to divide and weaken the Palestinians and has always opposed a Palestinian state.
Israel still has the support of Donald Trump, but opinion polls suggest even in America public sentiment is moving against them. That shift will be hard to reverse.
More than three quarters of the UN’s member nations now recognise a state of Palestine, four out of five of the security council’s permanent members.
The move is hugely problematic. Where exactly is the state, what are its borders, will it now be held to account for its extremists, who exactly is its government?
But more and more countries believe it had to happen. That leaves Israel increasingly ostracised and for a small country in a difficult neighbourhood that is not a good place to be, however strong it is militarily.
China will evacuate 400,000 people over a super typhoon that slammed into the Philippines and Taiwan today.
Super Typhoon Ragasa, which is heading to southeastern China, has sustained winds of 134mph.
Thousands of people have already been evacuated from homes and schools in the Philippines and Taiwan, with hundreds of thousands more to leave their homes in China.
More than 8,200 were evacuated to safety in Cagayan while 1,220 fled to emergency shelters in Apayao, which is prone to flash floods and landslides.
Image: The projected route of Super Typhoon Ragasa, by the Japanese Typhoon Centre. Pic: Japan Meteorological Agency
Domestic flights were suspended in northern provinces hit by the typhoon, and fishing boats and inter-island ferries were prohibited from leaving ports over rough seas.
In Taiwan’s southern Taitung and Pingtung counties, closures were ordered in some coastal and mountainous areas along with the Orchid and Green islands.
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Officials in southern Chinese tech hub, Shenzhen, said they planned to relocate around 400,000 people including people in low-lying and flood-prone areas.
Image: Strong waves batter Basco, Batanes province, northern Philippines, on Monday. (AP Photo/Justine Mark Pillie Fajardo)
Shenzhen’s airport added it will halt flights from Tuesday night.
In Fujian province, on China’s southeast coast, 50 ferry routes were suspended.
According to China’s National Meteorological Centre, the typhoon will make landfall in the coastal area between Shenzhen city and Xuwen county in Guangdong province on Wednesday.
Image: The International Space Station captures the eye of Typhoon Ragasa. (Pic: NASA/Reuters)
A tropical cyclone with sustained winds of 115mph or higher is categorised in the Philippines as a super typhoon.
The term was adopted years ago to demonstrate the urgency tied to extreme weather disturbances.
Ragasa was heading west and was forecast to remain in the South China Sea until at least Wednesday while passing south of Taiwan and Hong Kong, before landfall on the China mainland.
The Philippines’ weather agency warned there was “a high risk of life-threatening storm surge with peak heights exceeding three metres within the next 24 hours over the low-lying or exposed coastal localities” of the northern provinces of Cagayan, Batanes, Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur.
Power was cut out on Calayan island and in the entire northern mountain province of Apayao, west of Cagayan, disaster officials said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties from Ragasa, which is known locally in the Philippines as Nando.
On Monday, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr suspended government work and all classes on Monday in the capital, Manila, and 29 provinces in the main northern Luzon region.