World
EU leaders say Russia responsible for death of Alexei Navalny
![EU leaders say Russia responsible for death of Alexei Navalny EU leaders say Russia responsible for death of Alexei Navalny](https://static.euronews.com/articles/stories/08/24/59/24/1200x675_cmsv2_e481863c-c32e-5309-84f3-d8a368758f2f-8245924.jpg)
Several EU leaders have said they hold the Kremlin directly responsible for the sudden death of Alexei Navalny.
Navalny, 47, the face of Russia’s silenced opposition, died in prison on Friday following years of political persecution at the hands of the state.
The EU, which has long saluted Navalny’s unwavering fight for Russian democracy, had previously attempted to exert pressure on the Kremlin for its systemic repression of government critics.
EU leaders on Friday pinned blame for Navalny’s death – which has rocked Brussels and EU capitals – on Putin’s Russia.
“The EU holds the Russian regime (solely) responsible for this tragic death,” European Council President Charles Michel said on social media platform X.
Michel’s words were echoed by Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, who said: “Let’s be clear: this is Putin’s sole responsibility.”
An official on behalf of the EU’s diplomatic arm, headed by Borrell, also said the bloc held Putin’s Russia directly accountable for Navalny’s passing.
“Russia took his freedom and his life, but not his dignity,” Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, said.
“Alexei Navalny didn’t die in prison, he was killed by the Kremlin’s brutality and its aim to silence the opposition at any cost,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said.
“Alexei Navalny’s death is yet another dark reminder of the rogue regime we’re dealing with – and why Russia and all those responsible must be held accountable for each of their crimes,” said Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, who was listed ‘wanted’ by the Kremlin earlier this week for what it says are charges relating to historical memory.
“Putin’s regime imprisoned and has now tortured to death one of the last symbols of democracy in Russia,” Latvian prime minister Evika Silina said.
“I call on Russia to cease repressing political opposition and release all political prisoners,” Silina added.
The three Baltic EU states are staunch backers of Kyiv and have called for harsh EU measures against Russia for its war in Ukraine and repression at home.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was “deeply disturbed” by the news of his death. “A grim reminder of what Putin and his regime are all about,” she said.
Tributes also poured in from the Belgian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Swedish leaders.
Greatest threat to Putin exterminated
Navalny was seen as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest political opponent and greatest threat to his grip on power.
He was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov prize for freedom of thought in 2021 for his tireless fight against the corruption and human rights abuses in Russia, despite several attempts by the Kremlin to threaten, torture and poison him.
His daughter Daria Navalnaya, receiving the prize while her father was serving a prison sentence at a Russian forced labour colony, gave the following message to the European Parliament on his behalf:
“Say that no one can dare to equate Russia to Putin’s regime. Russia is a part of Europe and we strive to become a part of it,” she said in 2021.
“But we also want Europe to strive for itself, to those amazing ideas, which are at its core. We strive for a Europe of ideas, the celebration of human rights, democracy and integrity.”
In 2020, Navalny was urgently evacuated from a Siberian hospital to Germany, where he was treated after being poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent.
Despite the apparent attempt at assassination by the Russian regime, he returned to Russia in 2021, where he was sentenced to 19 years in a penal colony on charges of extremism.
He had initially been serving his sentence in a prison in central Russia, but was transferred late last year to a “special regime” penal colony above the Arctic Circle.
An EU official said Friday Navalny had been “slowly killed” in prison.
Death could prompt further sanctions
An senior EU official speaking on condition of anonymity said on Friday that Navalny was someone “we really admired and appreciated” and whose fight the bloc had “followed for years.”
But his death also casts a harsh light on the bloc’s inability in the years prior to the war in Ukraine to exert sufficient diplomatic pressure on Russia to comply with its human rights obligations.
In 2021, a year before the start of the war, the bloc slapped sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, on Russian officials responsible for Navalny’s detention under the so-called Magnitsky act.
Further sanctions were imposed on individuals involved in Navalny’s chemical poisoning in November 2022, eight months following the invasion of Ukraine.
His death will be discussed when EU foreign ministers gather in Brussels on Monday.
The official added that the bloc was “ready to see if we can list (sanction) more people involved in this murder.”
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World
Europe reacts to German regional election results. What is the impact?
![Europe reacts to German regional election results. What is the impact? Europe reacts to German regional election results. What is the impact?](https://static.euronews.com/articles/stories/08/69/66/98/1200x675_cmsv2_90e3e99a-2795-5444-90a5-054341c69304-8696698.jpg)
Regional parlaments in Germany have no foreign policy competence and limited influence on national energy policy. But will the results from Saxony and Thuringia influence Germany’s energy transition and its support for Ukraine?
The results of the two regional elections in Germany’s East have sent shock waves through Europe.
That a far-right party known for its relativism and ambiguity about Germany’s Nazi past was able to win was met with horror and disbelief.
The leader of the liberal group in the European Parliament, Valérie Hayer, called it “unprecedented” and “a dark day” for Germany and for Europe.
The European Commissioner for the economy, Paolo Gentiloni, posted a bitter comment on the strong results of the far right and the populist far left: “Friends of Russia in a former USSR satellite state. Enemies of migrants in the German area with little immigration. Rancour against everything and everyone”.
It seems unlikely that the AfD and far-left Sarah Wagenknecht party will turn this majority of opinion into a governing coalition, but could this strong anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russion sentiment influence the German or even the European position on supporting Ukraine?
Peter Hefele is Policy Director at the centre-right think tank Wilfried Martens Centre in Brussels. He told Euronews:
“Luckily, the Länder do not decide on foreign policy. So the support [for Ukraine] in Germany, according to all the polls, we know is quite high and the same goes for Europe. [But] If you look into the numbers of young people who voted – up to 40% – for the extremist parties then this is really about the future and the vision we can give them, and about their hopes.”
Energy transition remains on track but Easterners’ efforts need to be recognised
One of the biggest losers of both regional elections has been the Green party, part of the governing coalition in Berlin. In Thuringia, they failed to get a single legislator elected.
Does that spell trouble for Germany’s ambitious energy transition goals? German Green MEP Michael Bloss believes that the narrative surrounding the transition should focus more on what has already been achieved, especially in Germany’s East, as he explained to Euronews:
“The transition is working. We are almost world leaders in renewables’ acceleration, energy prices are coming down from where they were when Putin blackmailed us with his gas.
There are different things that we need to address in the Eastern parts. We in Germany overall need to appreciate more of what they have already done in terms of transformation and how they have already achieved a lot.”
But with the political landscape changed beyond recognition and former governing coalitions reduced to irrelevance, the newly elected legislators in Saxony and Thuringia will first of all have to somehow find a way of forming a government.
World
Asif Kapadia on Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful in Dystopian Docudrama ‘2073’: ‘If I Don’t Work Again, at Least I Made This Movie’
![Asif Kapadia on Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful in Dystopian Docudrama ‘2073’: ‘If I Don’t Work Again, at Least I Made This Movie’ Asif Kapadia on Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful in Dystopian Docudrama ‘2073’: ‘If I Don’t Work Again, at Least I Made This Movie’](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2073_Reel_01_V_009741_STATIC_WIDE_GOLDEN_GATE_BRIDGE_WILDFIRES_RED_SK_4828.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1)
Asif Kapadia sees a future vision of the world where “chairwoman” Ivanka Trump is celebrating her 30th year as leader of a nightmarish fascist police state that was once America, a land mostly reduced to rubble following an unknown “catastrophe” that occurred in 2036.
“It’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not a joke,” says the British filmmaker of mentioning Donald Trump’s daughter in “2073,” his chilling docudrama about the dystopia humanity is potentially hurtling towards and the very real and very contemporary factors concerning politics, the environment, corruption, race and technology that he says are propelling us in that direction.
“Because if you look at American politics, you have certain families that just keep being in power — the number of people that have come from a tiny gene pool is insane,” he says.
While the inclusion of Ivanka may be a little splash of humor, the rest of “2073” — which comes backed by Neon, Double Agent and Film4 and is world premiering in Venice on Tuesday — offers little else to be tickled by. The film is what Kapadia says is his response to the world — and the entertainment industry — having got to a “place where people cannot say anything” that criticizes the status quo or those in power without risking losing their jobs or worse.
And so “2073” says a lot, a whole lot. The film essentially lays the blame for the impending disaster — be it nuclear war, climate change or whatever it might be — at the foot of leaders, demagogues, tech billionaires and the 1% and what they’re doing to the planet and society. Alongside the Trumps, there’s the Murdochs, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Mohammed Bin Salman, Narendra Modi, the Koch brothers, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and many more, spliced alongside news clips and amateur footage from the last couple of decades showing examples of police brutality, rising fascism, the refugee crisis, mass detentions, bombings and wild fires.
Originally the project — which came about during lockdown (Kapadia put out a tweet asking for help and soon gathered a team of researchers from around the world) — was to be a “doc set in the future where everything from the future will be factual and created out of bits of the present.” But he soon decided to use his drama background to mix the two, creating a version of life in 2073 in which Samantha Morton plays a mute survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past and living underground as surveillance drones patrol the surface.
This past is pieced together using “footage from around 60 different countries, which I made to look like one place,” says Kapadia. Some of footage is extremely recent. In the opening scenes revealing this earth-shattering catastrophe, we see clips of recent devastation in Gaza.
“Having been doing this for a while, if you feel like you’re onto something in a horrible way, the world comes into synch with the film,” he says. The war in Gaza, plus the rise of AI and the growing feeling that the next presidential election could be “the end of democracy in the U.S.” all began after he started making the film. “And then a few weeks ago in England we had all these riots.”
“2073” may seem like an unexpected feature from the Oscar-winning documentarian best-known for “Amy,” “Senna” and “Diego Maradona,” but he claims this trilogy of profiles all came about “by accident,” and were each infused with his previous experience in drama and fiction and were each made that way. “’Senna’ is an action movie, ‘Amy’ is a musical, a Bollywood film, and ‘Diego Maradona’ is a gangster film set in Naples,” he says.
But “2073” — an experimental dystopian thriller — still feels like a major key change for the director, a highly provocative and uncomfortable to watch feature with global themes that he hopes will make people realize that “what’s happening over there will get closer and closer and eventually come to you.”
As he notes: “And if you don’t think that’s a problem, then it’s just a movie. But if it is a problem, then you, me, us … we’ve got to do something.”
Kapadia is already among the most outspoken filmmakers on social media when it comes to discussing politics and especially in condemning Israel for the bloodshed in Gaza. While this hasn’t appeared to have hindered his career in the way it has others, he says “2073” — given the topics and the very powerful, very wealthy people it discusses — might.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have made films and in what I do I’ve been successful,” he explains. “So honestly, I went into this going, ‘I’m going to chuck it all in, I’m not going to be afraid to say what I see and if I don’t work again, fine, at least I made this movie.’ ”
World
Two U.S. soldiers ambushed, assaulted by mob of Turkish nationalists: 'Yankee, go home!'
![Two U.S. soldiers ambushed, assaulted by mob of Turkish nationalists: 'Yankee, go home!' Two U.S. soldiers ambushed, assaulted by mob of Turkish nationalists: 'Yankee, go home!'](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/09/Copy-of-Right-inset-22.png)
A mob of Turkish nationalists attacked U.S. soldiers in western Turkey on Monday, resulting in the arrests of 15 people.
The incident took place in Izmir, which is located on Turkey’s Aegean coast. In a statement, the Izmir governor’s office said the assailants belonged to the Youth Union of Turkey, which is connected to the nationalist Vatan Party.
The governor said that the victims, who were assigned to the USS Wasp, were “physically attacked.” Video posted to social media showed soldiers in civilian clothing yelling for help as they were restrained by a group of anti-American men.
The footage also shows an attacker throwing a plastic bag onto the soldier’s head as the crowd chanted, “Yankee Go Home!”
ISRAEL SHARES DOSSIER SPELLING OUT ALLEGATIONS AGAINST 12 UN EMPLOYEES ALLEGEDLY INVOLVED IN HAMAS ATTACK
Soldiers assigned to the USS Wasp were attacked by Turkish nationalists, according to officials. (Getty Images/iStock)
Five U.S. soldiers intervened during the incident, and authorities eventually arrested all 15 of the men who attacked the soldiers.
The U.S. Embassy in Turkey confirmed the incident in a statement published to social media on Monday, and said that the soldiers are safe.
“We can confirm reports that U.S. service members embarked aboard the USS Wasp were the victims of an assault in İzmir today, and are now safe,” the embassy said.
UN, HUMAN RIGHTS, MEDIA GROUPS RELY ON HAMAS DEATH TOLL IN ‘SYSTEMATIC DECEPTION’: EXPERT
![USS Wasp](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/09/1200/675/GettyImages-2165869998.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Crew members stand aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1) docked at Limassol Port, amid rising tensions in the Middle East, in Limassol, Cyprus, Sunday, August 11, 2024. (Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“We thank Turkish authorities for their rapid response and ongoing investigation.”
In a statement obtained by Reuters, the Youth Union of Turkey said the attack was “deserved” and criticized U.S. support of Israel.
![Turkish protesters](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/09/1200/675/GettyImages-1236122537.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Members of the Youth Union of Turkey (TGB) gather outside the U.S. Embassy to protest envoys of 10 countries over remarks on the Osman Kavala case in Ankara, Turkey on October 25, 2021. (Evrim Aydin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“U.S. soldiers who carry the blood of our soldiers and thousands of Palestinians on their hands cannot dirty our country,” the nationalists said. “Every time you step foot in these lands, we will meet you the way you deserve.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
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