An African delegation arrived in Kyiv, seeking to mediate negotiations between Ukraine and Russia; the United States evaluated the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive; a two-day Ukraine reconstruction conference starts in the United Kingdom on June 21; while the Czech president suggested that Russian citizens living abroad should be under scrutiny of security services.
offers a digest of Western mass media at the end of the June 12–16, 2023, business week.
African peace mission and explosions in Kyiv
The African peace mission arrived in Kyiv amid missile explosions. Photo: Getty Images
At least two explosions rocked Kyiv on Friday when African leaders started their peace mission, seeking to act as mediators between Ukraine and Russia, Reuters reports.
The African delegation has planned to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and afterwards, on June 17, to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg.
After the delegation arrived, two explosions were heard in central Kyiv because of the massive Russian air raid, and the smoke trail of two missiles in the air was witnessed. A Reuters television crew saw the African leaders arriving in Kyiv in a convoy of cars and entering a hotel to use its air raid shelter.
The leaders had begun their visit with a trip to Bucha, where Russian troops committed war crimes following their full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The African peace mission is led by:
- South African President Cyril Ramaphosa,
- Senegal President Macky Sall.
How the African mission wants to reconcile Ukraine and Russia
African leaders hope to establish a dialogue between Ukraine and Russia. Photo: Getty Images
The mission states it can propose a series of "confidence-building measures", according to a draft framework document seen by Reuters. The document states that the objective of the mission is "to promote the importance of peace and to encourage the parties to agree to a diplomacy-led process of negotiations". Among the propositions are:
- a Russian troop pull-back,
- removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Belarus,
- suspension of implementation of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant targeting Putin,
- relief of sanctions against Russia.
Commenting on the visit of the African delegation during a missile attack against Kyiv, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter:
"Putin "builds confidence" by launching the largest missile attack on Kyiv in weeks, exactly amid the visit of African leaders to our capital. Russian missiles are a message to Africa: Russia wants more war, not peace."
What African leaders want from Ukraine and Russia
The African peace mission wants Russia to pull back from Ukraine but also for sanctions against Russia to be relieved. Photo: Getty Images
According to the BBC, South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa offered no timeline or proposals when he announced his peace mission last month.
The mission is an unusual burst of activism given Africa's largely hands-off approach to the war that many here see primarily as a confrontation between Russia and the West.
Interestingly, one of the organizers of the visit is Jean-Yves Ollivier, the head of the U.K.-based Brazzaville Foundation, which focuses primarily on peace and development initiatives in Africa. According to him, the aim is to begin a dialogue on issues that do not directly affect the military situation and build from there.
These issues include a potential swap of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war as well as finding solutions to problems with grain and fertilizer exports that matter to Africa.
Ollivier said the African leaders would seek to persuade the Russians to extend the Black Sea Grain Agreement and urge Kyiv to ease restrictions on the export of Russian fertilizer.
African leaders will hold negotiations with Zelenskyy and Putin. Photo: Getty Images
The delegation includes members from different parts of Africa who have different views on the war: four presidents, Egypt's prime minister, and representatives from Uganda and Congo-Brazzaville.
South Africa and Uganda are seen as leaning towards Russia, while Zambia and the Comoros are closer to the West. Egypt, Senegal, and Congo-Brazzaville have remained largely neutral.
But recently, Ramaphosa's government has come under growing pressure from the U.S. because of its alleged support for Russia's war. This centers on claims of an arms shipment to Moscow, which South Africa has denied.
How the United States evaluate Ukraine’s counteroffensive
Ukraine’s counteroffensive: what the United States thinks of its success. Photo: Getty Images
According to The New York Times, Ukrainian and American officials acknowledged on Thursday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive against formidable Russian defenses has been grueling and bloody, but they insisted that it was making gains and that any verdict on its success was extremely premature.
Last week, Kyiv began a multipronged assault in southeastern Ukraine and retook some small settlements and villages. The U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, acknowledged that Ukraine’s forces were meeting fierce resistance and suffering losses both in human casualties and in the Western tanks and other armored vehicles newly supplied to them.
But such difficulties were expected, and U.S. officials still have high expectations.
He added that Ukraine had the ability to recover and repair some of its disabled armored vehicles.
General Milley commented on the Russian defense:
British analyst on how Ukraine’s counteroffensive is going
Ukraine’s counteroffensive: what British experts think of its success. Photo: Getty Images
The main Russian defensive lines still lie 15 to 20 kilometers (nine to 12 miles) beyond current Ukrainian positions, Jack Watling, a research fellow and specialist in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in Britain, wrote.
Ukrainian forces trying to push forward into these areas will most likely be tracked closely by Russian drones and targeted by Russian artillery. As Ukrainian troops advance they will also be covered by fewer air defenses and could come under even more sustained attack by Russian helicopters and warplanes.
Ukraine’s initial push, Mr. Watling said, is aimed at getting Russia to bring reserve troops from far behind the front line.
"Once these troops are pulled forwards, it will become easier to identify the weak points in the Russian lines," he wrote.
The reconstruction of Ukraine: What do western investors fear?
A two-day Ukraine reconstruction conference starting in the U.K. on June 21 will be at least the sixth since Russia’s full-scale invasion, The Guardian reports.
The first was held on July 4, 2022, in Lugano, Switzerland. Germany held an event in Berlin on October 24, Paris got in on the act on December 13, Warsaw on February 13, and the EU Committee of the Regions held an event just last month, on May 25.
According to The Guardian, the question is, whether systems will be in place to prevent the billions in expected western aid from being embezzled by the political elites, given that Ukraine was ranked by Transparency International in 2021 as the second most corrupt country in Europe, behind only Russia.
The United Kingdom claims its event focused on the role of the private sector in the reconstruction of Ukraine. However, the private sector is not going to risk an investment if it fears the funding is going into not a proposed new bridge but an oligarch’s back pocket, the author argues.
As a recent USAID report says:
So, there is a discussion, of varying degrees of frankness, about the conditions the west can set to help Ukraine kick the corruption habit. Some, such as Henrik Larsen, an adviser to EU missions to Ukraine from 2014 to 2019, insists corruption is not an issue that can wait for the war’s end.
Josh Rudolph, of the German Marshall Fund, says donors have to be more assertive in setting conditions.
The conditionality is currently coming from three sources:
- the seven accession conditions set by the EU last year;
- the international financial institutions;
- an informal group of G7 ambassadors based in Ukraine.
The hope is that a fourth pressure point is evolving in the shape of a G7 multi-agency donor coordination platform set up in January. The G7 platform based in Brussels consists of 12 officials overseen by a triumvirate of Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, the EU director for the European neighborhood, Jan Koopman, and the U.S. deputy national security adviser, Mike Pyle.
Mykhailo Zhernakov, the director of the Kyiv based Dejure Foundation, also shows little patience with the points out that surveys show 60% of Ukrainians want the EU to do more to put pressure on the government to fight corruption.
The Czech president suggested that Russians living abroad should be strictly monitored
Petr Pavel suggested that Russians should be under scrutiny of the security services. Photo: Getty Images
Czech President Petr Pavel says Russian citizens living abroad should be put under "strict surveillance" by intelligence services in their host countries, Politico reports.
According to him, he can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well.
Asked what he implied by "monitoring," Pavel said he meant "being under the scrutiny of the security services."
During World War II, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent — most of whom were American citizens, and half of them children — were forcibly put in internment camps following the December 1941 Pearl Harbor attack by Japanese forces.
The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by U.S. soldiers. Then-President Ronald Reagan formally apologized over the camps back in 1988, while Joe Biden said in February it was "one of the most shameful periods in American history."
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