World Briefing: October 24, 2024

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has arrived in Russia to attend the BRICS summit, where he’s due to meet President Vladimir Putin today. Russia is hosting the three-day summit in Kazan, where the speaker of the regional legislative assembly greeted Guterres after his plane landed at the city’s airport. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry slammed the visit, saying the UN chief made the “wrong choice that does not advance the cause of peace” after earlier rejecting an invitation to attend Kyiv’s peace summit in Switzerland. Guterres is expected to deliver a speech at the BRICS summit, his deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters Tuesday. He said the UN chief will “reaffirm his well-known positions on the war in Ukraine and the conditions for just peace based on the UN Charter.”

The U.S. government has confirmed that some 3000 North Korean soldiers have been deployed to Russia. However it’s not clear whether they’ll be engaged in direct combat with Ukraine. Also not clear is what Russia is offering Pyongyang in return for the military support. Separately, the FT reported that the troops sent to Russia are from North Korea’s Eleventh Army, an elite unit known as the “Storm Corps”, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. Other outlets reported that once they’d arrived in Vladivostok by ship, Pyongyang’s troops were farmed out to multiple bases in the Russian Far East

Context: with the crazed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un placing so much skin in the game, it should raise serious questions what Moscow is offering in return. But a couple of observations: it globalises the Ukraine war much, much further. Russia has now hitched Iran, North Korea, and China (as well as other smaller nations to help power its war machine) into its conflict with Kyiv, having suffered some 500,000 battlefield losses and injuries. It’s been suggested that the DPRK soldiers primary task will be to help Russia claw back occupied territory in Kursk. Sure, bringing Pyongyang into the conflict can be seen as a sign of desperation, but it should also set off alarm bells in western capitals that this war is spreading into global territory - and should be treated as such with maximum response

Five people are dead and 22 injured after an attack at a Turkish aerospace company near the capital, Ankara, Turkey's interior minister says. Ali Yerlikaya says two suspects - a man and a woman - were "neutralised.” He says it is "most likely" that the PKK Kurdish rebel group was behind the attack. CCTV footage from the site at Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) shows a man firing a gun inside the building. TAI is a state-owned arms and aerospace technology firm located in Kahramankazan, about 17 miles (28km) north-west of Ankara. The PKK has been fighting against the Turkish state since the 1980s, calling for greater autonomy for the Kurds. Several countries have listed it as a terror group. Later, strikes were ordered against suspected PKK targets in Syria and Iraq. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who called the attack on TAI "heinous,” cut short a visit to Russia to return home to deal with the crisis. - BBC

Context: It’s not an exaggeration to describe this attack in Turkey’s capital as an extraordinary security breach. Turkish officials will be quick to blame the incident on extremist opponents and follow up with a widespread crackdown on known dissidents. It is noteworthy that the attack was directed at a key state-linked company, which would’ve had tight security protocols in place. I’ve worked in Ankara for UNICEF and am well aware of the tight security in place at strategic locations such as TAI. The Turkish government has reportedly imposed a media blackout and blocked some social media platforms.

The Justice Department warned Elon Musk’s America PAC in recent days that his $1 million sweepstakes to registered voters in swing states may violate federal law, people briefed on the matter told CNN. Musk, who has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump and is spending millions of dollars supporting his candidacy, has publicized the $1 million prize by his political action committee aiming to increase voter registrations in hotly contested states. Musk’s initial promise to pay prizes to registered voters immediately raised concerns from election law experts and some state officials who questioned whether it ran afoul of the law. Federal law bars paying people to register to vote. The language of the petition currently promises $1 million prizes to people chosen at random for signing a petition in support of First and Second Amendment freedoms. But to sign the petition, you must be registered to vote in specific states. - CNN

Ukraine’s population has declined by around 10 million people, or about a quarter, since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, according to the United Nations. The number of Ukrainians living in the country has diminished due to the exodus of refugees, a collapse in fertility, and war deaths, Florence Bauer, the Eastern Europe head of the UN Population Fund, said on Tuesday. The largest deterioration in Ukraine’s population is due to the 6.7 million refugees now living abroad, primarily in Europe. War deaths are also a significant factor. “It’s difficult to have exact numbers, but estimates range around tens of thousands of casualties,” Bauer said. - Al Jazeera

Russian oligarch Musa Bazhaev still owned a Sardinian luxury resort more than two months after the EU imposed sanctions on him following Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, a corporate filing shows. The disclosure was made in an annual statutory document filed in Cyprus on June 26 2022 by Retivia Investments, a Cyprus-based entity that owns the famed Forte Village hotel as well as other assets in Sardinia worth more than €700mn. The filing raises questions over why Italian authorities did not move to freeze the assets in the weeks following April 8 2022, when Bazhaev was put on the EU sanctions list. French authorities seized the oligarch’s villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat at the end of April. Bazhaev’s ownership of the Forte Village was public knowledge since at least 2014 and the Russian donated €500,000 to the Sardinian civil protection agency during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Italian financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, declined to comment, citing “lack of authorisation to discuss the matter”. - FT

The Canadian government will announce a dramatic immigration cut Thursday, reducing new permanent resident numbers by almost 100,000 in 2025 after years of consecutive increases to the country’s immigration targets. Barring any last-minute changes, the federal government is planning to decrease permanent resident intake from 485,000 this year to 395,000 in 2025, National Post has learned. The government is planning to further cut intake to 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027. - National Post

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