HAILEY, Idaho — Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, flies in a Gulfstream G650. So do Jeff Bezos and Dan Schulman, PayPal’s chief executive. The jets, roughly 470 of which are in operation, retail for about $75 million each.
Most days, those planes are spread out, ferrying captains of industry to meetings around the globe. But for one week in July, some of them converge on a single 100-foot-wide asphalt runway beside the jagged hills of Idaho’s Wood River Valley.
The occasion is the annual Sun Valley conference, a shoulder-rubbing bonanza organized by the secretive investment bank Allen & Company. Known as “summer camp for billionaires,” the conference kicks off this year on Tuesday, and it draws industry titans and their families — some of whom are watched over by local babysitters bound by nondisclosure agreements. In between organized hikes and fly-fishing at past gatherings, there have been sessions on creativity, climate change and immigration reform.
the ninth hole of the golf course, the head of General Electric expressed interest in selling NBC to Comcast. It is where Mr. Bezos met with the owner of The Washington Post before agreeing to buy the paper, and where Disney pursued a plan to purchase ABC — with Warren Buffett at the center of the discussions.
a year-round population of 1,800.
During a 24-hour period last year as the conference began, more than 300 flights passed through Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey, a small town near Sun Valley, according to data from Flightradar24, an industry data firm. They ranged from tiny propeller planes to long-wing commercial jets. By comparison, two weeks ago, when Mr. Pomeroy gave me a brief tour of the airport, just 44 flights took off or landed there over 24 hours, according to the data firm.
“This is empty right now,” Mr. Pomeroy said, smoothly steering his white 2014 Ford Explorer (what he calls his “mobile command center”) past a swath of freshly paved asphalt. “But in the summer, and during the event in particular, there’s airplanes parked everywhere up here.”
Much like the activities of the conference, elements of the travel there are shrouded in secrecy. Many jets flying in are registered to obscure owners and limited liability companies, some with only winking references to their passengers. The jet that carried Mr. Kraft last year, for example, is registered under “Airkraft One Trust,” according to records from the Federal Aviation Administration. The plane that Mr. Bezos flew in on is registered to Poplar Glen, a Seattle firm.
Representatives for Mr. Kraft and Mr. Bezos declined to comment. Mr. Bezos is not expected to turn up at Sun Valley this year, according to an advance list of guests that was obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Pomeroy plans well in advance to deal with the intense air traffic generated by the conference, which he refers to obliquely as “the annual fly-in event.” Without proper organization, flocks of private jets could stack up in the airspace around Friedman, creating delays and diversions while pilots burn precious fuel.
That was the case for the 2016 conference, which coincided with Mr. Pomeroy’s first week on the job. That year, some aircraft circled overhead or sat on the tarmac for more than an hour and a half, waiting for the airspace and runway to clear.
“I saw airplanes literally lined up to take off from the north end of the field almost all the way down to the south end of the field,” Mr. Pomeroy said, referring to the 7,550-foot runway. “Tail to nose, all the way up the taxiway.”
After that episode, Mr. Pomeroy enlisted Greg Dyer, a former district manager at the F.A.A., to help unclutter the tarmac. The two coordinated with an F.A.A. hub in Salt Lake City to line up flights, sometimes 300 to 500 miles outside Sun Valley. For some flights, the staging begins before the planes take off.
“Before, it looked like an attack — it was just airplanes coming from all points of the compass, all trying to get here at the same time,” said Mr. Dyer, an airport consultant for Jviation-Woolpert.
Last year, delays were kept to a maximum of 20 minutes, and no commercial travelers missed connecting flights because of air traffic caused by the conference, Mr. Pomeroy said.
When moguls are forced to circle in the air, they often loiter in great style. Buyers willing to shell out tens of millions for a high-end private plane are unlikely to balk at an additional $650,000 to outfit the aircraft with Wi-Fi, said Lee Mindel, one of the founders of SheltonMindel, an architectural firm that has designed the interiors of Gulfstream and Bombardier private jets. Some owners, he said, have opted for bespoke flatware from Muriel Grateau in Paris, V’Soske rugs or other luxe features.
“If you have to ask what it costs, you really can’t afford to do it,” Mr. Mindel said.
During the pandemic, when commercial travel slowed because of restrictions, corporate jaunts increased among a subset of executives who didn’t want to be held back, said David Yermack, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He added that it might be cheaper in the long run to compensate chief executives with jet travel than pay them with cash.
“I think it was Napoleon who said, ‘When I realized people would lay down their lives for little pieces of colored ribbon, I knew I could conquer the world,’” Mr. Yermack said.
The glut of flights certainly raises practical concerns. The residents of Hailey, as well as nearby Ketchum and Sun Valley, have complained in the past about the noise created by the jets zooming into Friedman Memorial Airport.
To deal with the complaints, Mr. Pomeroy and the Friedman Memorial Airport Authority curtailed flights between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. and limited the number of takeoffs and landings from the north, over the little city of Hailey.
Before the conference, Mr. Pomeroy sends a letter to incoming pilots about what to expect, admonishing them to keep the noise to a minimum.
“While the overwhelming majority of users during this event are respectful of our program and community, only a few operators who blatantly disregard our program, or who are negligent in educating themselves about our program, leave a negative impression on all of us,” Mr. Pomeroy wrote this year.
Allen & Company’s stinginess about some conference details extends to the airport. But Mr. Pomeroy and his team get enough information to conclude when the moguls will arrive and are about to leave town.
When the schmoozing is over next week, Mr. Pomeroy will begin the arduous task of ushering the corporate titans out of Idaho. Often that means closing the airport briefly to arrivals while they hustle out departures for an hour.
As the last jets get ready to leave, Mr. Pomeroy said, he and his team breathe a sigh of relief.
“Afterward, I am ready to hit the river for some serious fly-fishing for a day or two,” he said.
A Ryanair plane prepares to take off from Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport on the first of three days cabin crew strike in Lisbon, Portugal, June 24, 2022. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes/File Photo
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DUBLIN, June 26 (Reuters) – Less than 2% of Ryanair (RYA.I) flights scheduled between Friday and Sunday were affected by cabin crew strikes, the Irish low-cost carrier said.
Ryanair (RYA.I) cabin crew unions in Belgium, Spain, Portugal, France and Italy had announced plans for action over the weekend with crews in Spain set to strike again on June 30 and July 1-2. read more
“Less than 2% of Ryanair’s 9,000 flights operating this weekend (24/25/26 June) have been affected by minor and poorly supported crew strikes,” Ryanair said in a statement.
Unions have said the Irish airline does not respect local labour laws covering issues such as the minimum wage and have urged management to improve working conditions. read more
Ryanair, which told Reuters last week it had negotiated labour agreements covering 90% of its staff across Europe, says it offers staff competitive and fair conditions. It has said it does not expect widespread disruption this summer.
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Writing by Conor Humphries. Editing by Jane Merriman
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Ryanair says move to curb entry of fraudulent passport holders
Afrikaans spoken by only 12% of South Africans
South African government clamping down on fake documents
DUBLIN/JOHANNESBURG, June 6 (Reuters) – Ryanair (RYA.I) is requiring South African passengers to prove their nationality before travelling by completing a test in Afrikaans, a language used by just 12% of the population that has long been identified with apartheid and the white minority.
Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, which does not operate flights to and from South Africa, said it required any UK-bound passengers from the country to fill in the “simple questionnaire” due to what it described as a high prevalence of fraudulent South African passports.
“If they are unable to complete this questionnaire, they will be refused travel and issued with a full refund,” a spokesman for the Irish airline said.
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South Africa’s Home Affairs department, which has warned of syndicates selling fake passports, said it would issue a statement on the Ryanair test.
The UK High Commission in South Africa said on Twitter that the Ryanair test was not a British government requirement to enter the United Kingdom. The Irish High Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The low cost carrier said the test would apply to any South African passport holder flying to Britain from another part of Europe on the carrier. The airline did not immediately respond to a query about why it would apply to those routes, given Britain says it is not a requirement.
Zinhle Novazi, a South African attorney, faced the test when travelling by Ryanair from Ibiza, Spain, to London on May 29.
A Ryanair aircraft lands on the southern runway at Gatwick Airport in Crawley, Britain, August 25, 2021. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo
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Some of the questions include naming the highest mountain in South Africa, its largest city and one national holiday.
“I was able to answer the questions,” said Novazi, who learnt Afrikaans in school but is not a native speaker of the language. She was then allowed to board the plane.
Novazi wrote to South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation on June 1 but has not received a response.
The department did not respond to a request for comment.
The test triggered a backlash from South Africans in Johannesburg.
“It’s very discriminatory to a whole host of South Africans who don’t speak Afrikaans,” Siphiwe Gwala told Reuters.
“They’re using this (test) in a manner that is utterly absurd,” Conrad Steenkamp, the chief executive officer of the Afrikaans Language Council, said.
Afrikaans is the third most spoken of 11 official languages in South Africa, used by 12% of the 58 million people in the country. It has long been identified with the ideology of apartheid andwas considered the official language until the end of apartheid in 1994.
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Reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin, Promit Mukherjee and Nqobile Dludla in Johannesburg; Editing by Alison Williams and James Macharia Chege
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
DAVOS, Switzerland — Fears of a global food crisis are swelling as Russian attacks on Ukraine’s ability to produce and export grain have choked off one of the world’s breadbaskets, fueling charges that President Vladimir V. Putin is using food as a powerful new weapon in his three-month-old war.
World leaders called on Tuesday for international action to deliver 20 million tons of grain now trapped in Ukraine, predicting that the alternative could be hunger in some countries and political unrest in others, in what could be the gravest global repercussion yet of Russia’s assault on its neighbor. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where worries about the war’s consequences have eclipsed almost every other issue, speakers reached for apocalyptic language to describe the threat.
“It’s a perfect storm within a perfect storm,” said David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. Calling the situation “absolutely critical,” he warned, “We will have famines around the world.”
The world’s food distribution network was already strained by pandemic-related disruptions, and exports from Ukraine, ordinarily among the world’s biggest suppliers, have plummeted because of the war. Russia has seized some the country’s Black Sea ports and blockaded the rest, trapping cargo vessels laden with corn, wheat, sunflower seeds, barley and oats.
Russian forces have taken control of some of Ukraine’s most productive farmland, destroyed Ukrainian infrastructure that is vital to raising and shipping grain, and littered farm fields with explosives. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive branch, told the political and business leaders gathered in Davos that Russia — an even bigger exporter — had confiscated Ukrainian grain stocks and agricultural machinery.
“On top of this,” she said, “Russia is now hoarding its own food exports as a form of blackmail, holding back supplies to increase global prices, or trading wheat in exchange for political support.”
A tractor working a field at a farm near Lviv, in western Ukraine.Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The fighting in Ukraine is increasingly concentrated in a small pocket of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where Russia’s battered forces are making slow, bloody progress as they try to encircle the strategically important city of Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost Ukrainian stronghold.
Within the city, once an industrial hub, the devastation from Russian artillery is evident on every street in the form of shattered buildings, burned-out vehicles and cratered pavement. Russian pincers approaching the city from the north and south are separated by just 16 miles, but face “strong Ukrainian resistance,” the British Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.
Three months into the war, the United States and its allies have shown remarkable solidarity so far in supporting Ukraine with weapons and other aid, and in punishing Russia with economic sanctions, but the limits of that unity are being tested. Finland and Sweden have signaled that they want to abandon their long-held neutrality to join NATO, but that plan is being held up by one member country, Turkey. At the same time, Hungary is blocking an E.U. plan to embargo imports of Russian oil.
Within both blocs, officials have offered assurances, without specifics, that the roadblocks will soon be overcome. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said Tuesday that he was confident Sweden and Finland would join the alliance, though “I cannot tell you exactly how and when.” Diplomats from the two Nordic countries traveled to Turkey for talks on the issue.
The European Union, heavily dependent on Russian fuels, has already agreed to a phased embargo on natural gas from Russia, and the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, warned that Europe could face gas rationing next winter.
“I’m advising several European governments to prepare a contingency plan,” Mr. Birol said at Davos. He added that “Europe is paying for its over-dependence on Russian energy.”
Ukraine has applied to join the European Union, and on Tuesday its government rejected a French proposal for something short of full membership. Russia has vehemently opposed any expansion of NATO and E.U. membership for Ukraine, but its aggression has backfired, making those associations more attractive to its neighbors.
Increasingly isolated, the Kremlin has looked to Beijing for support, and Russia held joint military maneuvers on Tuesday with China, their first since the war in Ukraine began. The show of force included bomber flights over the Sea of Japan, while President Biden was not far away, in Tokyo, for meetings with world leaders.
A damaged street corner in the city of Sievierodonetsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region on Tuesday.Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
But the food crisis took center stage at Davos, where President Andrzej Duda of Poland warned that famine in Africa and elsewhere would prompt a flood of migration to Europe, where searing memories are fresh of the 2015-2016 migration wave that strained E.U. unity and empowered xenophobic nationalist movements.
Ukraine and Russia ordinarily account for about one-quarter of the grain traded internationally; in recent years, Ukraine had exported an average of about 3.5 million tons of per month. In March, only 300,000 tons were shipped out, though exports rebounded somewhat to more than a million tons in April and could reach 1.5 million tons in May, said Roman Slaston, the chief of Ukraine’s agricultural industry group.
Ukraine’s agriculture ministry says that the Black Sea blockade has prevented 14 million tons of corn, 7 million tons of wheat and 3 million tons of sunflower seeds from reaching world markets. Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow of stealing Ukraine’s produce and then selling it abroad as Russian.
Western officials are circulating proposals for getting grain out of Ukraine, such as having multiple countries send warships to escort cargo ships from Ukrainian ports and run the blockade, but that runs the danger of a shooting confrontation with Russian vessels. Sending ships from NATO countries is considered particularly risky — like the rejected idea of having NATO members enforce a no-fly zone to keep Russian warplanes away from Ukraine — so much of the talk has been about countries outside the alliance taking part.
But Mr. Stoltenberg, the NATO chief, warned that breaking the Black Sea blockade would be very hard.
“Is it possible to get it out on ships? That is a difficult task. It’s not an easy way forward,” he said.
Ukraine has continued to ship grain overland through Europe, and work is underway to expand such routes, Ms. von der Leyen and Mr. Slaston said — but doing so on a scale great enough to replace seagoing shipment would be very difficult. The railways in Eastern Europe use different gauges, which means switching equipment when going long distances, and many of Ukraine’s railroads, highways and bridges have been damaged by Russian attacks.
“I do feel responsible for my people to make products and to give them something to eat”, says Andriy, right, at the farm near Lviv where he has worked for six years.Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
One farmer said he lost 50 rail cars full of grain when his cargo got stranded between Russian airstrikes in front of and behind the train.
But the problem is not limited to shipping — farming, itself, has been greatly diminished by the war. In some places, fighting has simply made the work too dangerous. In others, Russian strikes on fuel depots have left farmers unable to power their tractors.
Farmers accuse Russian forces of regularly targeting their grain silos and seizing their grain stores, particularly in the south.
And perhaps most frightening are the countless mines left by retreating Russian forces, especially in the north. The Ukrainian Deminers Association, a group that locates and removes explosives, says nearly 45 percent of the fields it has inspected in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions were mined.
Gordie Siebring, a farmer based near the Belarusian border, said Ukrainian military authorities warned him he could not sow the fields closest to the frontier because of the mine threat, meaning he has been unable to plant 8 to 10 percent of his field. Neighboring farmers have it much worse, he said, because Russian mines have made over two-thirds of their fields too dangerous to use.
“If they are as close as 10 to 15 kilometers away, they can launch mines with artillery,” he said. “These mines have small parachutes and land in the fields and have sensors that cause detonation later. Those are really causing havoc.”
Another threat to global supplies, experts say, is that countries will hoard their own food stocks. Robert Habeck, the vice chancellor and minister of economic affairs of Germany, said countries should curb their use of grain to make biofuel and to feed livestock.
“Markets have to stay open,” Mr. Habeck said in an interview. “The worst thing that can happen now is that every country cares for its own supply, saves all the wheat, saves all the food, and does not give it to the market, because then we have no chance of securing the food supply.”
A crowd gathering to receive food supplies in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv last week.Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
Before the war, droughts in North America and the Horn of Africa, poor harvests in China and France, and the pandemic were already squeezing food supplies, leaving the world uncommonly vulnerable. By December, global wheat prices had risen about 80 percent in a little over a year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Even before Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s border, experts were warning of “a massive surge in food insecurity and the threat of famine,” said Adam Tooze, director of the European Institute at Columbia University.
The war, he said, is “impacting an incredibly fragile food system.”
At the same time, the spike in oil and gas prices caused by the war has triggered an even sharper increase in the cost of fertilizers made in part from those fuels.
Ms. von der Leyen said E.U. countries were increasing their own grain production and working with the World Food Program to ship available stocks to vulnerable countries at affordable prices.
“Global cooperation is the antidote to Russia’s blackmail,” she said.
Mark Landler, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Patricia Cohen reported from Davos, Switzerland, and Erika Solomon from Lviv, Ukraine. Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall from Sievierodonetsk, Ukraine; Edward Wong from Washington; Matthew Mpoke Bigg from Krakow, Poland; and Monika Pronczuk from Brussels.
BRUSSELS — Reverberations from the Ukraine war widened on Wednesday, jolting energy markets and spilling across borders, as Russia responded to the West’s escalating arms shipments and economic penalties by halting gas supplies to two European nations and threatening further unspecified retaliation.
The European Union’s top official described as “blackmail” the announcement that Russia was suspending shipments of natural gas to Poland and Bulgaria. Though the immediate impact was likely to be limited, the cutoff was the Kremlin’s toughest retaliation yet against a U.S.-led alliance that President Vladimir V. Putin has accused of waging a proxy war aimed at weakening Russia.
Even as news of a U.S.-Russia prisoner exchange offered a glimmer of hope for diplomatic engagement, Mr. Putin warned that he would order more “counterstrikes” against any adversaries that “create threats of a strategic nature unacceptable to Russia.”
At the same time, a series of explosions across Ukraine’s borders stoked fears that the war, now in its third month, might spread. Blasts were reported in three Russian districts on Wednesday morning, and suspicion fell on Ukrainian forces, which are benefiting from increasingly sophisticated weapons and intelligence from the United States and its allies.
Those blasts came a day after explosions shook Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, on Ukraine’s southwestern flank. Some analysts — and Ukrainian and Moldovan officials — said it was likely that Russia, which has thousands of troops in Transnistria, had orchestrated the explosions to create a pretext to invade Ukraine from that direction.
Taken together, the developments raised the risk of worse to come.
“What’s the ‘so what’ of this escalatory cycle? Further escalation becomes more likely as animosity builds,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting organization. “The chance that Russia hits a staging facility in Poland goes up. The risk that NATO supplies aircraft to Ukraine goes up. Ukraine could strike bigger targets in Russia. Moscow could cut gas to more European nations.”
Economists warned that Europe could face a sharp slowdown of growth if the cutoff of sales by Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas company, spreads — or if Europe imposes an embargo on Russian gas. European natural gas prices surged as much as 28 percent on Wednesday and the euro’s value fell below $1.06 for the first time in five years on rising concerns about energy security and a slowdown in European growth. The currency has fallen nearly 4 percent against the U.S. dollar in April alone.
Gazprom’s stated reason for halting gas deliveries was the refusal by Poland and Bulgaria to pay in rubles, a new requirement Russia announced last month, despite the fact that its foreign contracts generally call for payment in dollars or euros. Most European buyers have not complied, which would subvert European Union financial sanctions imposed on Russia after the Ukraine invasion and help prop up the battered ruble.
The European Union had been preparing for the possibility that Russia might halt natural gas deliveries, said Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president. Nonetheless, she told a news conference, the Russian move was an attempt “to use gas as an instrument of blackmail.”
Poland and Bulgaria will quickly receive gas supplies from neighboring E.U. countries to compensate for the loss of Russian gas, she said, declaring that “the era of Russian fossil fuels in Europe is coming to an end.”
Both Poland and Bulgaria said the Russian cutoff would have little impact. In Poland, where electricity is largely generated with coal, not gas, the government sought to assuage any public fears. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki assured Poles that gas storage tanks were three-quarters full — much higher than in other countries.
And if the Kremlin’s plan was to intimidate Poland and Bulgaria with a future of unheated homes and cold meals in the hope of fracturing Western unity to aid Ukraine, it may have miscalculated. On a sunny spring day in Warsaw, the Polish capital, many people reacted with shrugs to the news — mixed with disbelief that anyone would ever view Russia as a trustworthy supplier.
“We have nothing to worry about if the weather stays like this,” said Joanna Gres, a ballet dancer with a troupe attached to the Polish military.
Bulgaria, too, has sufficient gas supplies for the next month, Alexander Nikolov, the energy minister, told Bulgarian news media, vowing that the country would “not negotiate under pressure and with its head bowed. ”
A top German official said the flow of Russian gas to Germany, Russia’s biggest energy customer, remained steady, while adding that the country could live off existing reserves until at least next winter.
Russia announced the cutoff a day after 40 U.S.-led allies met at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany and pledged to provide Ukraine with long-term military aid, following a weekend visit to the country by top Biden administration officials who said they want to see Russia not only defeated but degraded militarily.
That toughened American message is viewed by Mr. Putin and his subordinates as validation of their argument that the Ukraine war is really about the American desire to weaken Russia, and they are indirectly at war with NATO.
Despite fears of a broadened war, there was also a small measure of cooperation on Wednesday between Russia and the United States, which announced a prisoner swap.
They confirmed that Trevor R. Reed, a former Marine convicted on charges that his family said were bogus, had been freed, an unexpected diplomatic success. Mr. Reed, first detained in 2019, was released in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot sentenced to a lengthy term in the United States on cocaine-trafficking charges.
Trevor R. Reed before a hearing in Moscow in 2020.Credit…Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters
Other Americans remain in detention in Russia, including Paul Whelan, who was sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on espionage charges during a trial that was closed to the public; and Brittney Griner, a basketball star arrested in mid-February on drug charges that could carry a sentence of up to 10 years.
Neither the American nor Russian sides gave any indication that the exchange signaled a broader diplomatic effort to de-escalate the Ukraine crisis.
Sehii Schevchuuk with some of the abandoned dogs he cares for as water boils in front of his bombed-out apartment block in the Kyiv suburb of Horenka on Wednesday.Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Ukraine appeared to have attempted to strike deeper into Russian territory overnight, although officials on both sides were vague about the details. Three local governors described drone flights and explosions as attacks.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a close adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, also described the explosions inside Russia as attacks on sites that Russia had used to launch the invasion, but he attributed them to “karma” — not the Ukrainian military.
As described by the three Russian governors and Russian media, an ammunition depot was set afire near Belgorod, a city less than 20 miles from the border, two explosions were reported in Voronezh, nearly 200 miles from the border, and a Ukrainian drone was shot down over Kursk, about 70 miles from the border. If Ukraine was responsible, the attacks in Kursk and Voronezh would be the deepest inside Russia since the Feb. 24 invasion.
In Moscow, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary for Mr. Putin’s security council, urged Russian officials across a wide swath of the southwestern region near Ukraine to ensure emergency alerts and civil defense facilities were “working reliably.”
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has generally declined to discuss reports of attacks on Russian soil. Ukrainian officials have, for example, declined to comment on Russia’s claim that two Ukrainian helicopters fired on an oil depot in Belgorod in early April. In more than two months of war, the fighting has largely been contained within Ukraine’s borders.
Over the past few weeks Russian forces have concentrated on a full-scale assault in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where analysts say Russia is making slow and measured advances on the ground as it confronts entrenched Ukrainian troops.
The pace of Russia’s ground assault appears more planned and deliberate than the initial invasion in February, which aimed at seizing more Ukrainian territory and depended on swift advances of tanks — a strategy that failed, at great cost to Russian forces.
Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern Luhansk region in February, before the Russian invasion.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Military analysts with the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington research group, said in their Tuesday assessment that Russian forces had “adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine,” which is allowing them to “bring more combat power to bear” in their narrower goal of capturing just the eastern region.
Ukrainian troops have been defending positions in Donbas region since 2014, when secessionists there, backed by Russia, declared themselves the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels, Neil MacFarquhar from Istanbul, and Shashank Bengali and Megan Specia from London. Reporting was contributed by Andrew Higgins from Warsaw, Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia, Cora Engelbrechtfrom Krakow, Poland, Liz Aldermanfrom Paris, Jane Arraf from Lviv, Ukraine, Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.
The logo of China Eastern Airlines is pictured at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China March 21, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
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BEIJING, April 17 (Reuters) – China Eastern Airlines (600115.SS) has started putting its Boeing 737-800 jetliners back in use for commercial flights less than a month since a crash killed 132 people and led the company to ground 223 of the aircraft, the carrier said on Sunday.
The airline said it had conducted systematic tests, structural checkups and verified airworthiness data for each of the aircraft, and that test flights would be carried out on all planes before they resumed commercial services.
Boeing 737-800 planes with registration numbers close to the one that crashed on March 21 are still undergoing maintenance checks and evaluation, the company told Reuters in a statement.
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Flightradar24 data showed earlier in the day that China Eastern flight MU5843, operated by a three-year-old Boeing 737-800 aircraft, took off from the southwestern city of Kunming at 09:58 a.m. (0158 GMT) on Sunday and landed at 11:03 a.m. in Chengdu, also in southwestern China.
That aircraft, which completed a test flight on Saturday, later returned back to Kunming, according to Flightradar24.
Another Boeing 737-800 jet conducted a test flight early on Sunday in Shanghai, where China Eastern is based, Flightradar24 data showed.
On March 21, flight MU5735, which was en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, crashed in the mountains of Guangxi and killed 123 passengers and nine crew members in mainland China’s deadliest aviation disaster in 28 years.
China has retrieved both of the black boxes and said it would submit a preliminary report to the U.N. aviation agency ICAO within 30 days of the event. read more
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Reporting by Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Helen Popper
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BELGRADE, Serbia — Mindful of the angry and still-unhealed wounds left by NATO’s bombing of Serbia more than 20 years ago, Ukraine’s ambassador appeared on Serbian television after Russia invaded and bombed his country in the hope of rousing sympathy.
Instead of getting time to explain Ukraine’s misery, however, the ambassador, Oleksandr Aleksandrovych, had to sit through rants by pro-Russian Serbian commentators, and long videos of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, denouncing Ukraine as a nest of Nazis. The show, broadcast by the pro-government Happy TV, lasted three hours, more than half of which featured Mr. Putin.
Angry at the on-air ambush, the ambassador complained to the producer about the pro-Kremlin propaganda exercise, but was told not to take it personally and that Mr. Putin “is good for our ratings.”
A mural of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia alongside the Serbian word for “brother” in Belgrade.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
That Russia’s leader, viewed by many in the West, including President Biden, as a war criminal, serves in Serbia as a lure for viewers is a reminder that the Kremlin still has admirers in Europe.
While Germany, Poland and several other E.U. countries display solidarity with Ukraine by flying its flag outside their Belgrade embassies, a nearby street pays tribute to Mr. Putin. A mural painted on the wall features an image of the Russian leader alongside the Serbian word for “brother.”
Part of Mr. Putin’s allure lies in his image as a strongman, an appealing model for President Aleksandr Vucic, the increasingly authoritarian leader of Serbia, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the belligerently illiberal leader of Hungary. Facing elections on Sunday, the Serbian and Hungarian leaders also look to Russia as a reliable source of energy to keep their voters happy. Opinion polls suggest both will win.
Then there is history, or at least a mythologized version of the past, that, in the case of Serbia, presents Russia, a fellow Slavic and Orthodox Christian nation, as an unwavering friend and protector down the centuries.
Pictures of Mr. Putin on mugs at a souvinir shop in Belgrade. Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
But perhaps most important is Mr. Putin’s role as a lodestar for nations that, no matter what their past crimes, see themselves as sufferers, not aggressors, and whose politics and psyche revolve around cults of victimhood nurtured by resentment and grievance against the West.
Arijan Djan, a Belgrade-based psychotherapist, said she had been shocked by the lack of empathy among many Serbs for the suffering of Ukrainians but realized that many still bore the scars of past trauma that obliterated all feeling for the pain of others.
“Individuals who suffer traumas that they have never dealt with cannot feel empathy,” she said. Societies, like trauma-scarred individuals, she added, “just repeat the same stories of their own suffering over and over again,” a broken record that “deletes all responsibility” for what they have done to others.
A sense of victimhood runs deep in Serbia, viewing crimes committed by ethnic kin during the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a defensive response to suffering visited on Serbs, just as Mr. Putin presents his bloody invasion of Ukraine as a righteous effort to protect persecuted ethnic Russians who belong in “Russky mir,” or the “Russian world.”
“Putin’s ‘Russian world’ is an exact copy of and what our nationalists call Greater Serbia,” said Bosko Jaksic, a pro-Western newspaper columnist. Both, he added, feed on partially remembered histories of past injustice and erased memories of their own sins.
A memorial for a girl who was killed in the NATO bombardments of 1999 in Belgrade.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The victim narrative is so strong among some in Serbia that Informer, a raucous tabloid newspaper that often reflects the thinking of Mr. Vucic, the president, last month reported Russia’s preparations for its invasion of Ukraine with a front-page headline recasting Moscow as a blameless innocent: “Ukraine attacks Russia!” it screamed.
The Serbian government, wary of burning bridges with the West but sensitive to widespread public sympathy for Russia as a fellow wronged victim, has since pushed news outlets to take a more neutral stand, said Zoran Gavrilovic, the executive director of Birodi, an independent media monitoring group in Serbia. Russia is almost never criticized, he said, but abuse of Ukraine has subsided.
Mr. Aleksandrovych, the Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia, said he welcomed the change of tone but that he still struggled to get Serbians to look beyond their own suffering at NATO’s hands in 1999. “Because of the trauma of what happened 23 years ago, whatever bad happens in the world is seen as America’s fault,” he said.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Serbia, Oleksandr Aleksandrovych, sorting donations to Ukrainian refugees with an aide in Belgrade.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Hungary, allied with the losing side in two world wars, also nurses an oversize victim complex, rooted in the loss of large chunks of its territory. Mr. Orban has stoked those resentments eagerly for years, often siding with Russia over Ukraine, which controls a slice of former Hungarian land and has featured prominently in his efforts to present himself as a defender of ethnic Hungarians living beyond the country’s border.
In neighboring Serbia, Mr. Vucic, anxious to avoid alienating pro-Russia voters ahead of Sunday’s election, has balked at imposing sanctions on Russia and at suspending flights between Belgrade and Moscow. But Serbia did vote in favor of a United Nations resolution on March 2 condemning Russia’s invasion.
That was enough to win praise for Mr. Vucic from Victoria Nuland, an American under secretary of state, who thanked Serbia “for its support for Ukraine.” But it did not stop Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, from on Monday suggesting Belgrade as a good place to hold peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv.
Serbs who want their country to join the European Union and stop dancing between East and West accuse Mr. Vucic of playing a double game. “There are tectonic changes taking place and we are trying to sleep through them,” said Vladimir Medjak, vice president of European Movement Serbia, a lobbying group pushing for E.U. membership.
Serbia, he said, is “not so much pro-Russian as NATO-hating.”
Instead of moving toward Europe, he added: “We are still talking about what happened in the 1990s. It is an endless loop. We are stuck talking about the same things over and over.”
More than two decades after the fighting ended in the Balkans, many Serbs still dismiss war crimes in Srebrenica, where Serb soldiers massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995, and in Kosovo, where brutal Serb persecution of ethnic Albanians prompted NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign, as the flip side of suffering inflicted on ethnic Serbs.
President Aleksandr Vucic of Serbia, anxious to avoid alienating pro-Russian voters ahead of Sunday’s election, has balked at imposing sanctions on Russia. Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Asked whether she approved of the war unleashed by Mr. Putin as she walked by the Belgrade mural in his honor, Milica Zuric, a 25-year-old bank worker, responded by asking why Western media focused on Ukraine’s agonies when “you had no interest in Serbian pain” caused by NATO warplanes in 1999. “Nobody cried over what happened to us,” she said.
With much of the world’s media focused last week on Russia’s destruction of Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city, Serbia commemorated the start of NATO’s bombing campaign. Front pages were plastered with photos of buildings and railway lines destroyed by NATO. “We cannot forget. We know what it is to live under bombardment,” read the headline of Kurir, a pro-government tabloid.
A small group of protesters gathered outside the United States Embassy and then joined a much bigger pro-Russia demonstration, with protesters waving Russian flags and banners adorned with the letter Z, which has become an emblem of support for Russia’s invasion.
Damnjan Knezevic, the leader of People’s Patrol, a far-right group that organized the gathering, said he felt solidarity with Russia because it had been portrayed as an aggressor in the West, just as Serbia was in the 1990s, when, he believes, “Serbia was in reality the biggest victim.” Russia had a duty to protect ethnic kin in Ukraine just as Serbia did in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Mr. Knezevic said.
Damnjan Knezevic, the leader of People’s Patrol, a far-right group, said he felt solidarity with Russia because it had been portrayed as an aggressor in the West, just as Serbia had been in the 1990s.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Bosko Obradovic, the leader of Dveri, a conservative party, said he lamented civilian casualties in Ukraine but insisted that “NATO has a huge responsibility” for their fate.
Mr. Obradovic on Sunday gathered cheering supporters for a pre-election rally in a Belgrade movie house. A stall outside the entrance sold Serbian paratrooper berets, military caps and big Russian flags.
Predrag Markovic, director for the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, said that history served as the bedrock of nationhood but, distorted by political agendas, “always offers the wrong lessons.” The only case of a country in Europe fully acknowledging its past crimes, he added, was Germany after World War II.
“Everyone else has a story of victimization.” Mr. Markovic said.
A mural praising Russian forces in a residential area in Belgrade.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
British Airways tail fins are pictured at Heathrow Airport in London, Britain, May 17, 2021. REUTERS/John Sibley/File Photo
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LONDON, Feb 26 (Reuters) – British Airways (BA) said it would cancel all short-haul flights from London’s Heathrow airport until midday on Saturday as it deals with an IT failure.
The airline has said the problem, which came to light on Friday and affected its website, app, and airport operations, was not caused by a cyber attack but was a hardware issue.
BA has been caught up in tit-for-tat bans by Russia and Britain that have stopped their respective national carriers from using each other’s airspace.
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“We are extremely sorry that due to the continuing technical issues we are facing we have regrettably had to cancel all short-haul flights from Heathrow today until midday,” the airline said in a statement.
“Our long-haul services at Heathrow and all flights at Gatwick and London City Airport are due to operate as planned, but customers may experience some delays. Our website ba.com is working and customers can check-in online and at the airport,” the airline said.
It advised passengers to check on its website for the latest information before travelling to the airport as more disruption was expected.
BA, owned by IAG (ICAG.L), was hit by a major computer system failure in 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future.
The company said customers would be offered a full refund for cancelled services or could rebook at a later date for free.
“We know we have let our customers down and we will do everything we can to make this up to them – but for now our focus is on getting as many customers and flights away as we can.”
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Reporting by Michael Holden Editing by Catherine Evans and Mark Potter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine could have economic repercussions globally and in the United States, ramping up uncertainty, roiling commodity markets and potentially pushing up inflation as gas and food prices rise around the world.
Russia is a major producer of oil and natural gas, and the brewing geopolitical conflict has sent prices of both sharply higher in recent weeks. It is also the world’s largest wheat exporter, and is a major food supplier to Europe.
The United States imports relatively little directly from Russia, but a commodities crunch caused by a conflict could have knock-on effects that at least temporarily drive up prices for raw materials and finished goods when much of the world, including the United States, is experiencing rapid inflation.
Global unrest could also spook American consumers, prompting them to cut back on spending and other economic activity. If the slowdown were to become severe, it could make it harder for the Federal Reserve, which is planning to raise interest rates in March, to decide how quickly and how aggressively to increase borrowing costs. Central bankers noted in minutes from their most recent meeting that geopolitical risks “could cause increases in global energy prices or exacerbate global supply shortages,” but also that they were a risk to the outlook for growth.
contending with quickly rising prices, businesses are trying to navigate roiled supply chains and people report feeling pessimistic about their financial outlooks despite strong economic growth.
“The level of economic uncertainty is going to rise, which is going to be negative for households and firms,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, noting that the effect would be felt most acutely in Europe and to a lesser degree in the United States.
A major and immediate economic implication of a showdown in Eastern Europe ties back to oil and gas. Russia produces 10 million barrels of oil a day, roughly 10 percent of global demand, and is Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas, which is used to fuel power plants and provide heat to homes and businesses.
The United States imports comparatively little Russian oil, but energy commodity markets are global, meaning a change in prices in one part of the world influences how much people pay for energy elsewhere.
It is unclear how much a conflict would push up prices, but energy markets have already been jittery — and fuel prices have risen sharply — on the prospect of an invasion.
loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.
What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems.
Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth.
Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.
If a conflict drives global uncertainty and causes investors to pour money into dollars, pushing up the value of the currency, it could actually make United States imports cheaper.
Other trade risks loom. Unrest at the nexus of Europe and Asia could pose risk for supply chains that have been roiled by the pandemic.
Phil Levy, the chief economist at Flexport, said that Russia and Ukraine were far less linked into global supply chains than a country like China, but that conflict in the area could disrupt flights from Asia to Europe. That could pose a challenge for industries that move products by air, like electronics, fast fashion and even automakers, he said at an event at the National Press Foundation on Feb. 9.
“Air has been a means of getting around supply chain problems,” Mr. Levy said. “If your factory was going to shut because you don’t have a key part, you might fly in that key part.”
Some companies may not yet realize their true exposure to a potential crisis.
Victor Meyer, the chief operating officer of Supply Wisdom, which helps companies analyze their supply chains for risk, said that some companies were surprised by the extent of their exposure to the region during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, when it annexed Crimea.
Mr. Meyer noted that if he were a chief security officer of a company with ties to Ukraine, “I would militate rather strongly to unwind my exposure.”
There could also be other indirect effects on the economy, including rattling consumer confidence.
Households are sitting on cash stockpiles and probably could afford higher prices at the pump, but climbing energy costs are likely to make them unhappy at a moment when prices overall are already climbing and economic sentiment has swooned.
“The hit would be easily absorbed, but it would make consumers even more miserable, and we have to assume that a war in Europe would depress confidence directly too,” Ian Shepherdson at Pantheon Macroeconomics wrote in a Feb. 15 note.
Another risk to American economic activity may be underrated, Mr. Obstfeld said: The threat of cyberattack. Russia could respond to sanctions from the United States with digital retaliation, roiling digital life at a time when the internet has become central to economic existence.
“The Russians are the best in the world at this,” he said. “And we don’t know the extent to which they have burrowed into our systems.”
MOSCOW — Vladimir Pozner was an English-language Soviet propaganda editor in Moscow in 1962, a job that gave him rare access to American newspapers and magazines. That allowed him to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis outside the Soviet media filter, and sense a world at the brink of war.
Mr. Pozner, a longtime Russian television journalist, says he now feels something similar.
“The smell of war is very strong,” he said in an interview on Friday, a day when shelling intensified along the front line in eastern Ukraine. “If we talk about the relationship between Russia and the West — and in particular, the United States — I feel that it is as bad as it was at any time in the Cold War, and perhaps, in a certain sense, even worse.”
Unlike 1962, it is not the threat of nuclear war but of a major land war that now looms over Europe. But the feeling that Russia and the United States are entering a new version of the Cold War — long posited by some commentators on both sides of the Atlantic — has become inescapable.
President Biden hinted at it on Tuesday in the East Room of the White House, pledging that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “we will rally the world to oppose its aggression.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drove the matter home on Saturday, when he oversaw a test launch of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that can evade American defenses.
whether Mr. Putin is staging an elaborate, expensive bluff or is truly on the verge of launching the biggest military offensive in Europe since 1945. But it does appear clear that Mr. Putin’s overarching aim is to revise the outcome of the original Cold War, even if it is at the cost of deepening a new one.
Mr. Putin is seeking to undo a European security order created when his country was weak and vulnerable after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and to recreate the sort of geopolitical buffer zone that Russian rulers over the centuries have felt they needed. He is signaling that he is prepared to accomplish this by diplomatic means, but also through the use of force.
The crisis has already brought Mr. Putin some tactical wins as well as perilous risks. Since first mounting a threatening troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders last spring, he has managed to seize Washington’s attention — a goal for a Kremlin that, as in the Cold War, sees confrontation with the United States as its defining conflict. But his actions have also spurred anti-Russian attitudes and further united Europe and the United States against Russia — something that should worry the Kremlin given the West’s still-far-greater global economic and political might.
now looms as the more serious strategic adversary in the long term.
But to Mr. Putin, the fight to roll back his country’s defeat in the original Cold War has already lasted at least 15 years. He declared his rejection of an America-led world order in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, warning of “unexploded ordnance” left behind from the Cold War: “ideological stereotypes” and “double standards” that allowed Washington to rule the world while crimping Russia’s development.
This weekend, in one of the many ominous developments of recent days, Russia is skipping the Munich conference — an annual meeting at which Western officials have been able to sit down with their Russian counterparts throughout the prior tensions of Mr. Putin’s rule.
Instead, the Kremlin released footage of Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s situation room, directing test launches of its modernized arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles from bombers, submarines and land-based launchers. It was a carefully timed reminder that, as Russian television recently told viewers, the country can turn American cities “into radioactive ash.”
And Mr. Putin has massed a monumental force to Ukraine’s north, east and south in order to signal that the Kremlin sees the former Soviet republic’s pro-Western shift as such a dire threat that it is willing to fight a war to stop it. The confrontation in some ways evokes the Berlin crisis of 1961, when the Soviets demanded that Western forces leave Berlin, and East Germany eventually built the wall that divided East and West. To some Russians, the fact that Ukraine is much closer to Russia than Berlin is what makes the new Cold War even more dangerous.
“Back then, the frontier ran through Berlin,” said Mr. Suslov, the Moscow analyst. “Now the frontier goes through Kharkiv” — a Ukrainian city on the Russian border that is a day’s drive from Moscow.
The Cold War may also offer parallels for what could happen within Russia in the event of war. Analysts predict an even more authoritarian swing by the Kremlin, and an even more ruthless hunt for internal enemies purportedly sponsored by the West. Mr. Pozner, a state television host who was born in Paris, grew up in part in New York and moved to Moscow in 1952, posited that Russia’s foes in the West could even be quietly hoping for war because it could weaken and discredit the country.
“I’m very worried,” Mr. Pozner said. “A Russian invasion of Ukraine is a catastrophe for Russia, first and foremost, in the sense of Russia’s reputation and what’s going to go on inside Russia as a result.”
Some Russian analysts think Mr. Putin could still de-escalate the crisis and walk away with a tactical victory. The threat of war has started a discussion in Ukraine and in the West about the idea that Kyiv may disavow NATO membership. And the United States has already offered talks on a number of initiatives that Moscow is interested in, including on the placement of missiles in Europe and on limiting long-range bomber flights.
But Mr. Putin is making clear he wants more than that: a wide-ranging, legally binding agreement to unwind the NATO presence in Eastern Europe.
The intensity of the crisis that Mr. Putin has engineered is evident in the harsh language that the Kremlin has deployed. Standing this month alongside President Emmanuel Macron of France at the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had no choice but to carry out a 2015 peace plan that Russia was pushing: “You may like it, you may not like it — deal with it, my gorgeous.” Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, in a joint news conference with his visiting British counterpart, Liz Truss, said their discussion had resembled that of a “mute person with a deaf person.”
“Sometimes discussions were rather heated between Soviet and American leaders,” said Pavel Palazhchenko, a former Soviet diplomat. “But probably not to that extent and not as publicly as now. There is really no parallel.”
Mr. Palazhchenko, who translated for the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in his summits with American presidents, describes that language as an outgrowth of a Russian frustration with the country’s security concerns being ignored. During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow came together over landmark arms control agreements. During the Putin era, little of that has happened.
“This is a clear emotional and psychological reaction to the years and even decades of the West and the U.S. being rather dismissive of Russian security concerns,” Mr. Palazhchenko said.
Doug Lute, a former American ambassador to NATO, rejects the notion of past disrespect for Russian interests, especially given that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is “the only existential threat to the United States in the world.” But like Mr. Palazhchenko, he also sees lessons in the Cold War for emerging from the current crisis.
“It may be that we settle into a period where we have dramatically different worldviews or dramatically different ambitions but even despite that political contest, there’s space to do things in our mutual interest,” Mr. Lute said. “The Cold War could be a model for competing and cooperating at the same time.”
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