World
Outrage in Ukraine over pope’s call for courage to ‘raise the white flag’
The Catholic leader, 87, told a Swiss broadcaster that Ukraine should negotiate with Russia and raised the idea of surrender.
Ukraine has rejected Pope Francis’s call to hold negotiations with Russia more than two years into its invasion, saying that Kyiv will “never” surrender.
“Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on social media Sunday, a day after the pope said Kyiv should “have the courage to raise the white flag”.
The 87-year-old Catholic leader said in an interview with Swiss broadcaster RTS that Ukraine should negotiate with Russia, which has seized large swathes of Ukrainian territory since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
In part of the interview released on Saturday, the Catholic leader raised the prospect of surrender.
“I believe that the strongest are those who see the situation, think about the people, and have the courage to raise the white flag and negotiate,” Pope Francis said in an interview that the Vatican said was conducted in early February.
Kuleba called on the pope to stand “on the side of good” and not put the opposing sides “on the same footing and call it ‘negotiations’”.
The strongest is the one who, in the battle between good and evil, stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it “negotiations”.
At the same time, when it comes to the white flag, we know this Vatican’s strategy from the first half…
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) March 10, 2024
Kuleba also appeared to reference some Catholic church collaboration with Nazi forces during World War II when he said the following: “At the same time, when it comes to the white flag, we know this Vatican strategy from the first half of the 20th century.”
“I urge to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to support Ukraine and its people in their just struggle for their lives,” Kuleba added.
He also thanked Pope Francis for his “constant prayers for peace” and said Kyiv hoped he would visit Ukraine.
“We continue to hope that after two years of devastating war in the heart of Europe, the Pontiff will find an opportunity to pay an Apostolic visit to Ukraine to support over a million Ukrainian Catholics, over five million Greek-Catholics and all Ukrainians,” Kuleba said.
The foreign minister of Poland, a vocal ally of Kyiv, also condemned the pope’s remarks.
“How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine? Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a post on X.
How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine?
Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations. https://t.co/gWNYSUt79u— Radosław Sikorski 🇵🇱🇪🇺 (@sikorskiradek) March 10, 2024
In a separate post, Sikorski made parallels between those calling for negotiations while “denying [Ukraine] the means to defend itself” and European leaders’ “appeasement” of Adolf Hitler before World War II.
Andrii Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See, compared the pope’s comments to calls for “talking with Hitler” while raising “a white flag to satisfy him”.
Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, also said Sunday that surrender is not on the minds of Ukrainians.
“Ukraine is wounded, but unconquered! Ukraine is exhausted, but it stands and will endure. Believe me, it never crosses anyone’s mind to surrender. Even where there is fighting today: listen to our people in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy,” he said.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni later clarified that the pope supported “a stop to hostilities [and] a truce achieved with the courage of negotiations”, rather than an outright Ukrainian surrender.
While Pope Francis has tried to maintain the Vatican’s traditional diplomatic neutrality, he has also expressed some sympathy with the Russian rationale for invading Ukraine, such as when he noted that NATO was “barking at Russia’s door” with its eastward expansion.
Ukraine has remained steadfast on not engaging directly with Russia on peace talks, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying multiple times that peace negotiations must come from the country that has been invaded.
World
Paramount Global Set to Unveil New Leadership Structure; Anxiety Runs High on Earnings Eve
As turmoil continues to surround the future of Paramount Global, details surrounding interim leadership and its proposed Skydance deal are coming to light, multiple sources told Variety.
Sunday was a consequential day in Shari Redstone’s ongoing exclusive bargaining window with David Ellison‘s Skydance, one that would see the Hollywood scion take majority ownership of Paramount Global and its owner National Amusements Inc. Skydance offered its “best and final” offer to Redstone on Sunday, sources added.
On the eve of its quarterly earnings call, two insiders familiar with Paramount Global said the board is expected to announce a new leadership committee to replace ousted CEO Bob Bakish. Expected to be named to these leadership roles are Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins, CBS chief executive George Cheeks and MTV Entertainment Group President Chris McCarthy, the sources said.
Multiple insiders close to Paramount’s ongoing sales process said that letting Bakish go was the right move, but the new leadership structure is problematic at this fragile moment. There will not be a sole leader guiding the corporation through a potential sales process, said the insiders, and Cheeks, Robbins and McCarthy are not accustomed to collaboration across their portfolios. All details that are raising internal and external anxiety. There is, of course, Redstone — who is being closely watched by Wall Street and the media sector.
A third source familiar with the company said Redstone has been resolute in preferring the Skydance bid, which promises to keep her family media empire in tact and on track to provide future shareholder value. Or, she could appease some of her shareholders and evaluate a competing offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment — a deal that would call for major structural changes, with asset liquidation and job losses likely. And that’s if that scenario could survive inevitable regulatory scrutiny.
Heading into earnings, the company has yet to disclose whether its network carriage deal with Charter, the country’s second largest cable operator next to Comcast, has been renewed. It is set to expire April 30.
The flurry of weekend activity is sure to weigh heavy on Paramount Global’s share price on Monday, and change the economics of any potential sale. Paramount Global is scheduled to report first quarter 2024 results tomorrow after market close. The earnings call with analysts — sans Bakish but possibly with the new leadership team — is set to start at 4:30 p.m. ET.
World
Lawmakers call for release of Putin’s ‘political prisoner number one'
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers marked the two-year anniversary of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment by calling for his immediate release.
Kara-Murza, who lives in solitary confinement in a Siberian maximum-security prison, was sentenced to 25 years last April for treason and other related charges as Russian authorities continue their crackdown on domestic dissent.
The Moscow City Court claimed Kara-Murza was guilty of “high treason“ for “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces” when he delivered a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2022 that criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
His sentence is the longest term handed down to a political prisoner in the post-Soviet era.
Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., co-led a group of 80 bipartisan lawmakers urging the Biden administration to declare the Russian dissident as “unlawfully and wrongfully detained.”
Fox News Digital obtained a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Cardin and other lawmakers demanding Kara-Murza’s release and the aforementioned designation.
“There is little time left to end the ongoing and unjust detention of U.S. Legal Permanent Resident and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza,” the letter read in part. “Mr. Kara-Murza’s family has grave concerns that he may not survive much longer. His situation is even more perilous following the killing of Alexei Navalny. Mr. Kara-Murza is the most prominent imprisoned democracy activist still alive in Russia.”
The State Department referred Fox News Digital to spokesperson Matthew Miller’s remarks on Kara-Murza’s two-year imprisonment anniversary but did not provide specifics when asked about efforts to give the Russian opposition leader the designation sought by U.S. lawmakers.
“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful. When making assessments, the Department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks into the totality of the circumstances for each case individually,” a spokesperson said.
Russian human rights lawyer and the Center for European Policy Analysis’ Democracy Fellow Grigory Vaypan told Fox News Digital that Kara-Murza is now Russia’s “prisoner number one.”
AMERICAN BALLERINA WITH DUAL CITIZENSHIP ARRESTED IN RUSSIA, FACING LIFE IN PRISON FOR DONATING $51 TO UKRAINE
“He’s definitely political prisoner number one on Putin’s list, and his life is certainly in danger now that we see with the murder of Navalny that Putin’s regime demonstrates to the world that it’s willing to kill political prisoners in Russia,” Vaypan said.
He added that Kara-Murza, who was reportedly poisoned twice in 2015 and 2017 by agents of the Russian state, is essentially on “Putin’s death row.”
“His health is deteriorating. He has never fully recovered from the effects of those two poisonings. Now, he is not only in prison, he’s on solitary confinement, which is basically indefinite. He can be in his tiny prison cell for many months, and with the effects of those two poisonings, his health is getting worse,” Vaypan explained. “This is why it would be fair to say that he’s essentially on Putin’s death row now.”
Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, counts roughly 700 political prisoners in Russia today.
Political prisoners are further isolated and punished in an effort to prevent them from continuing to speak out against the Russian authorities. They can be put into solitary confinement, deprived of food, mail, phone calls with relatives or family visits.
RUSSIAN POET SENTENCED TO 7 YEARS IN PRISON FOR RECITING VERSES AGAINST WAR IN UKRAINE
“There’s a wide array of those measures that the Russian prison authorities can resort to. And we’re increasingly seeing that, especially after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion [of] Ukraine, we’ve seen more people jailed for exercising their right to free speech,” Vaypan told Fox News Digital. “And we’ve seen an increasing number of people being further harassed and pressured even while in prison.”
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, reflected on the deaths of other Russian opposition figures like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov at the hands of the Putin regime.
“[They] target the most courageous, the most principled, those Russians who risk not only their freedom but very often their lives to show you that Russia can be different,” she said at an event on Capitol Hill.
“As my husband put it, and I quote, ‘It is my hope that when people in the free world today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only the war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who are standing up to them because we are Russians too.’”
World
At least four dead in US after dozens of tornadoes rip through Oklahoma
Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently struck by debris.
At least four people were killed and dozens more injured after multiple tornadoes wreaked havoc in the central state of Oklahoma in the United States.
The tornadoes caused extensive damage in the town of Sulphur, home to about 5,000 people, flattened buildings, threw vehicles into the air and ripped the roofs from houses.
“You just can’t believe the destruction,” Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt said during a visit to the hard-hit town on Sunday afternoon. “It seems like every business downtown has been destroyed.”
A four-month-old baby was among the dead, Hughes County Emergency Management Director Mike Dockrey told Oklahoma television station KOCO.
Stitt said about 30 people were injured, including some who were in a bar when the tornado struck.
Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently cut or struck by debris, and more than 20,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening.
Stitt issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency in 12 counties due to the severe weather, while in a call with the Oklahoma governor, President Joe Biden offered the federal government’s full support with recovery efforts, the White House said in a statement.
The National Weather Service (NWS) reported that 38 possible tornadoes hit the area and that the worst of the storms rolled through Central Oklahoma on Saturday into early Sunday morning, spreading into northwest Texas, western Missouri and Kansas.
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