Middle East Crisis: Palestinians Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza’s Shrinking ‘Humanitarian Zone’
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Safety is not assured in the zone where Israel has directed civilians to flee, people there say.
An area that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone and has ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to go to has become an overcrowded “hell,” where food and water are scarce and safety is not guaranteed, according to some of the displaced Palestinians there.
“The truth is that this area is anything but humanitarian,” said Kamel Mohammed, a 36-year-old sheltering in a tent with nine family members. He added, “Our life in these camps is like hell.”
Mr. Mohammed described the humanitarian zone, a once-vacant strip of coastal land known as Al-Mawasi, as a “barren sand desert” crammed with displaced families that offers “no sense of safety.” The high cost of materials and the lack of assistance have forced many families to share tents, he said.
“A tent that used to accommodate four to seven people now houses 15 to 17 people from two or more families,” he said.
Mr. Mohammed listed the privations people in Al-Mawasi face: “no drinkable water, no healthy food,” and only “primitive bathrooms.” The heat is scorching under the sun, with no trees to provide shade, and, because the area is on the shore, it becomes windy and chilly at night. “We do not have the means for a decent life,” Mr. Mohammed said.
The Israeli military has issued a string of evacuation orders in recent weeks, uprooting tens of thousands of people in various parts of the Gaza Strip, and at Israel’s urging, many of them have moved into the Mawasi humanitarian zone. The Israeli military has characterized it as safer than other parts of the Gaza Strip, but has made clear that it will go after Hamas anywhere it believes it has a presence.
Israel has adjusted the borders of the humanitarian zone several times, shrinking the area by more than a fifth last month. Maps and analysis of satellite imagery show that the zone is crammed with people and often hit by airstrikes.
On Sunday, the Israeli military ordered another section of the zone to be evacuated because it was planning to fight in the area, where it said Hamas had “embedded terrorist infrastructure.”
Israel has previously mounted attacks inside the zone, including one strike on the outskirts of the southern city of Khan Younis last month that was meant to kill the commander of Hamas’s military wing, Muhammad Deif. Gazan health authorities say that strike killed at least 90 people.
“It is no longer a safe area,” said Nisreen Joudeh, a 37-year-old mother of four who has been sheltering in the humanitarian zone for the last few months. “We really feel that we could die any minute,” she added.
Palestinians from other parts of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military said that it was operating over the weekend, have also been fleeing to the humanitarian zone in recent days, Ms. Joudeh said.
She added that a few families who had been sheltering in Al-Mawasi for a long time have been leaving the area.
Israel first designated the Mawasi area a “humanitarian zone” in October, after it began asking residents of Gaza City to move southward ahead of its ground invasion into northern Gaza.
The zone started out as an area roughly a half-mile wide and around three miles long, according to a military map, but it was expanded several times as Israeli forces invaded southern Gaza. By May, the area was roughly four miles wide and about nine miles long, a military map shows.
On Friday, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office said the humanitarian zone covered about 18 square miles, or nearly 13 percent of the Gaza Strip.
Many of the roughly 1.4 million people who left Rafah as Israel pressed farther into the town squeezed into the humanitarian zone.
Mona al-Farra, who is sheltering in Al-Mawasi with nine other family members, said the severe overcrowding — along with shortages of water, medicine and food — is causing disease to spread, especially skin rashes among children, who are also hungry.
Ms. al-Farra said the sound of airstrikes coupled with Israeli evacuation orders were making her and her family “feel constantly threatened and in danger.” She said the people in the zone have nowhere else to flee.
“We live in an area that is considered humanitarian and is supposed to be safe, but it is not,” she said. “There is no safe place for us or our children.”
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.
Key Developments
Iran criticizes European leaders who urged restraint, and other news.
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Iran sharply criticized three European leaders who had called for restraint in the crisis with Israel, saying Tehran reserved the right to defend its sovereignty. Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said in a statement on Tuesday that the they had ignored Israeli “crimes and terrorism” against Palestinians and in the Middle East. On Monday, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany had urged Iran and its allies not to retaliate for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran because it could disrupt efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel assailed Itamar Ben-Gvir, his national security minister, on Tuesday after Mr. Ben-Gvir visited a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem, along with dozens of other Jews who prayed there in violation of longstanding arrangements. Mr. Ben-Gvir was seen in videos singing songs and saying he supported Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the location of two ancient Jewish temples. The site is known to Muslims as the Aqsa Mosque compound and the place from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. “It is the government and the prime minister who determine policy on the Temple Mount,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. For years, the government has quietly allowed Jews to pray at the site, but in the videos from Tuesday, dozens of Jewish visitors are seen fully prostrating themselves in prayer.
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Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday, and Mr. Putin said Russia was doing “everything to support the Palestinian people.” Mr. Putin long projected friendly relations with Israel, but the war in Ukraine has strained ties, with Russia increasingly beholden to Israel’s enemy, Iran, a key weapons supplier. Mr. Abbas is in Moscow until Wednesday, and then is due to travel to Turkey. There, he is expected to give a rare address to the country’s Parliament, and to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a harsh critic of Israel.
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Houthi authorities have been occupying the United Nations human rights office in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since a raid earlier this month that flouted the organization’s diplomatic immunity, U.N. officials in Geneva said on Tuesday. The Iranian-backed rebels, who have attacked Israel and ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinians, have also stepped up hostile actions against the United Nations and other international organizations. Houthi authorities seized control of equipment, files and vehicles in the Aug. 3 raid on the U.N. office. Days before, the U.N. rights chief, Volker Türk, suspended the office’s work over security fears after Houthi authorities accused some staff members of spying for Israeli and American intelligence agencies. The Houthis arrested 13 U.N. staff members in June and now hold 17, who are being held incommunicado.
On the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, the war in Gaza resonates.
Rules that were adopted to guide conduct in conflicts after World War II are as relevant as ever 75 years after the ratification of these directives, known as the Geneva Conventions. But debate rages about the global community’s commitment to them.
“Seventy-five years ago today, the Geneva Conventions were put in place to protect civilians in times of wars,” Philippe Lazzarini, chief of the United Nations agency for Palestinians, known as UNRWA, wrote in a post on social media on Monday to note the anniversary of their adoption.
The rules are meant to limit the devastating impact of wars and everyone ostensibly agrees on them, he added. But he said that the rules “have been blatantly broken” on a daily basis in Gaza by both the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas. And he accused United Nations member states of failing “in their responsibilities to respect the conventions and ensure that parties to the conflict respect them under all circumstances.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, in a statement on the anniversary, recalled the “tragedies” of World War II that led to their ratification and called on all nations to reaffirm their commitment to respecting those rules. “Faced with the horrible reality of war, parties to armed conflict must comply with international humanitarian law to mitigate many of war’s worst humanitarian consequences, support pathways to peace, and advance the protection of civilians and other victims,” he said.
The comments came after an Israeli strike on a former school compound in northern Gaza on Saturday killed dozens of Palestinians, drawing international censure. Gazan health authorities, who do not distinguish between militants and civilians in reporting casualties in the war, said more than 100 people had been killed.
The Israeli military defended the attack, as it has numerous other strikes throughout the war, arguing that Hamas and other militants were using schools, hospitals and homes in Gaza City as military command centers in violation of international humanitarian law, and that Israel had conducted precise strikes based on intelligence. On Monday, in a statement, the military said that it had identified 31 militants “so far” from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad who had been killed in the operation.
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, condemned the attack in a statement on Monday that mourned “the continued loss of life in Gaza, including women and children” and noted that the school complex had been sheltering displaced Palestinian families.
“The secretary general underlines that international humanitarian law, including the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack, must be upheld at all times,” Mr. Guterres said, referring to concepts articulated in the Geneva Conventions.
Those principles require militaries to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to take precautions to protect noncombatants, including by ensuring that the attacks are proportional. But there is no precise formula that dictates what might constitute a proportional strike, international humanitarian law experts say.
Instead, military commanders are expected to use a balancing test, using a “reasonable commander” standard to assess whether there could be “incidental harm” from an attack that is excessive to the military advantage anticipated. The test is subjective. It gives military operators some discretion to exercise judgment while recognizing that war is violent.
The rules of war have “a humanitarian goal,” said Allen S. Weiner, director of Stanford University Law School’s Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. They try to “ameliorate suffering,” he said, but they are “not a tool for pacifism.”
The war in Gaza has been “a huge challenge for the application of international humanitarian law,” Mr. Weiner said.
Much of the concern surrounding Gaza has been about whether the Israeli military’s operations have caused excessive “incidental harm.” But it is very difficult for observers to make a judgment on proportionality without access to the Israeli military’s intelligence and other information underlying decision-making, he said.
People are “demoralized” about international humanitarian law, Mr. Weiner said, because of the death tolls in Gaza and the “Whac-a-Mole” nature of Israel’s military operations, as civilians have been repeatedly called on to evacuate areas that the Israeli military has previously claimed to have been cleared of militants. After more than 10 months of war, the Gazan Health Ministry says nearly 40,000 people have been killed.
But Mr. Weiner said it was worth remembering World War II and the bombing campaigns that led to the ratification of the Geneva Conventions.
“Imagine what the conflict would be like if we didn’t have these rules,” he said.
Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
Here’s why Iran may be waiting to retaliate against Israel.
Iran vowed revenge at the end of last month after a top Hamas leader was killed in Tehran, leading many in Israel to fear an imminent attack. Nearly two weeks have passed and no large-scale response has materialized, leaving Israel and the wider Middle East on edge.
The crisis comes at an especially delicate moment in Iran, which analysts say is trying to formulate a response that doesn’t let an assassination on its soil go unpunished, while avoiding an all-out war against a powerful adversary. It also comes as a new government in Tehran has taken office, which could be slowing a decision on how to respond.
Here’s a look at the crisis and the factors that could determine what happens next:
Why has Iran vowed revenge?
Iran and Hamas officials have promised to avenge the death of Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, who was killed in Tehran on July 31 after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Iran, which backs Hamas, blamed Israel for the assassination. Israeli leaders have not said their forces were responsible.
A day earlier, Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in Hezbollah, which is also supported by Iran, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The Israeli government said that strike was in retaliation for a rocket fired from Lebanon that struck a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing at least 12 people, mostly teenagers and children. Hezbollah has denied carrying out that attack.
But Mr. Haniyeh’s killing was seen as the greater blow to Tehran because it took place on Iranian soil. In response, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the matter. Failing to follow through on that threat would suggest that Iran’s system of deterrence, built up over years and at great cost, was in fact hollow, analysts said.
Why hasn’t Iran responded yet?
A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanaani, said that “it is necessary to punish Israel,” echoing comments from other senior Iranian officials. But he also said that “Tehran is not interested in escalating the regional conflicts.”
Furthermore, the new president’s cabinet, including the foreign minister, is yet to be approved, which is likely to have slowed internal deliberations, said Sanam Vakil, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House, a research group in London.
At the same time, Mr. Pezeshkian, who is seen as a reformist, may try to balance a perceived need to project strength with his government’s broader interest in alleviating the effects of Western economic sanctions and in preventing Iran from becoming further isolated internationally, Ms. Vakil said.
“The response has to be carefully calibrated so as not to slam shut the door of negotiations with the West that could lead to potential sanctions relief,” Ms. Vakil said.
A military response that is viewed as largely symbolic is also risky from Tehran’s perspective, but it would be unlikely to deter Israel from conducting further attacks, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director of Crisis Group, a think tank.
That leaves the option of a substantive response, but that would, in turn, likely provoke a bigger Israeli response — and Tehran would not be able to control the cycle of escalation that could follow, Mr. Vaez said.
“Israel has checkmated Iran in this situation because Iran is left with no good options,” said Mr. Vaez. He and Ms. Vakil both said that it is difficult to discern Iran’s intentions.
What could an Iranian response look like?
Iran could strike Israel from multiple directions and in different forms. Tehran maintains a network of proxy forces including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi militia in Yemen, giving it the ability to attack targets from northern Israel to the Red Sea.
Two Israeli officials and a senior Western intelligence official said last week that, based on the latest information, Hezbollah will likely strike first in a separate attack before Iran conducts its own retaliation.
In April, Tehran attacked Israel with around 300 missiles and drones, a response to an apparent Israeli strike on an Iranian embassy complex. Almost all were shot down by Israel’s air defenses assisted by the United States and other allies. It was the first direct attack by Iran after a clandestine war with Israel that had been conducted for years by land, sea, air and cyberspace and, as such, represented a significant escalation.
The attack in April caused light damage to an Israeli air base in the Negev desert and seriously wounded a 7-year-old girl. Now Israel is bracing for what could be a bigger attack.
How is Israel preparing?
The Israeli authorities have told people to stock food and water in fortified safe rooms, and hospitals have made plans to move patients to underground wards. At the same time, rescue teams have been positioned in cities.
U.S. and Israeli diplomats and security officials had some advanced knowledge of its scope and intensity of Iran’s attack in April, which facilitated defensive preparations. By the same token, the nearly two weeks that have passed since Mr. Haniyeh’s killing have allowed time for heightened readiness in Israel.
Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was “prepared for defense, as well as offense.”
That said, military analysts say that Iran and Hezbollah could potentially overwhelm Israel’s defenses by firing enough missiles simultaneously. They could also launch swarms of drones that fly at low altitude, making them difficult to detect and destroy.
How are the United States and others responding?
Diplomats have feared for months that back-and-forth strikes between Israel and Iran could escalate into a regional conflict that would compound both the war in Gaza and the conflict on Israel’s border with Lebanon. As a result, they have worked to forestall or minimize Iran’s reaction. In the latest example, the leaders of United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy called on Iran on Monday to “stand down” its threat of military action and said they supported Israel’s defense against Iranian aggression. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain also telephoned the Iranian president with a similar message.
Mr. Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, on Tuesday criticized a separate call for restraint by Britain, France and Germany, saying Tehran reserved the right to defend its sovereignty. The three European leaders had ignored Israeli “crimes and terrorism” against Palestinians and in the Middle East, he said.
The foreign minister of Jordan, an ally of the United States, has traveled to Tehran in recent days for meetings. Saudi Arabia last week convened an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a forum of Muslim countries, at which it called the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh a violation of Iran’s sovereignty while urging de-escalation by all sides.
The United States has stepped up its military readiness. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has ordered additional combat aircraft, warships and a guided-missile submarine to the Middle East in response to threats, both to bolster Israel’s capacity to thwart any potential attack and to reinforce the message that it would support the country militarily.
At the same time, the Biden administration has sought to jump-start cease-fire talks for Gaza. The Biden administration and Arab mediators are planning a meeting in the region on Thursday to try to advance a deal. Israel has said it will send its negotiators, but Hamas has not said if it will participate.
Netanyahu Clashes With Defense Minister on Gaza, Exposing Schisms
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed his defense minister on Monday, exposing deep rifts within the Israeli government as the Middle East entered a high-wire week, suspended between the prospect of a wider regional conflict and intensive diplomatic efforts to prevent one.
Mr. Netanyahu criticized the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, after Israeli news media reported that Mr. Gallant had disparaged his goal of achieving a “total victory” over Hamas in the Gaza Strip by telling lawmakers in a private security briefing on Monday that it was “nonsense.”
“When Gallant adopts the anti-Israel narrative, he harms the chances of reaching a hostage-release deal,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. Victory over Hamas and the release of hostages, the statement said, is the “clear directive of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the cabinet, and it obligates everyone — including Gallant.”
The public scolding came as the Middle East braced for a possible escalation in violence and the United States continued its military buildup in the region, dispatching the guided-missile submarine Georgia there.
Iran and its most powerful regional proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, have vowed to retaliate for the killings nearly two weeks ago of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in an explosion in Tehran and of a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Iran has blamed Israel for the death of Mr. Haniyeh, who was in Iran to attend the inauguration of its new president. Israel has not confirmed or denied if it was behind the attack, although U.S. officials have privately assessed that it was.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has promised to deliver a “severe punishment” for the assassination on Iranian soil. Mr. Netanyahu has vowed, in turn, to “exact a heavy price for any act of aggression against us, from whatever quarter.”
At a news conference clearly intended to reassure a jittery Israeli public, the chief spokesman for Israel’s military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said, “We are prepared at peak readiness in offense and defense, and we will act according to the directives of the government.”
On Monday, John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman at the White House, told reporters that President Biden had spoken to European leaders about the tensions in the region. Mr. Kirby said the United States agreed with Israel’s assessment that an attack by Iran and its proxies could happen “as soon as this week.”
He said that the White House still expected Gaza cease-fire talks to resume on Thursday, though he conceded that an Iranian attack could derail those plans. “We fully expect that to move forward, and they need to move forward,” Mr. Kirby said.
Mr. Biden, along with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, said last week that they were prepared to present a “final” proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza at the meeting. On Monday, the White House released a joint statement from Mr. Biden and the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy endorsing the effort to broker a cease-fire on Thursday, saying, “There is no further time to lose.”
The leaders also “called on Iran to stand down its ongoing threats of a military attack against Israel.”
Several senior Biden administration officials are fanning out across the Middle East this week to make a full-court press to nail down a Gaza cease-fire deal and, possibly, to try to avert an attack by Iran or its proxies against Israel, U.S. officials said late Monday.
The officials being dispatched include William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, who is traveling to Qatar; Brett McGurk, Mr. Biden’s Middle East coordinator, who is heading to Egypt and Qatar; and Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, who is visiting Lebanon.
Middle East Crisis: Live Updates
- On the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, the war in Gaza resonates.
- Safety is not assured in the zone where Israel has directed civilians to flee, people there say.
- Iran criticizes European leaders who urged restraint, and other news.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office has said that Israel would send a negotiating team to the meeting, which is expected to take place in Cairo or the Qatari capital, Doha. It was unclear whether Hamas would take part in the talks. In a statement on Sunday, Hamas suggested it was not interested in participating, saying it had already agreed to a framework for a cease-fire.
In the absence of a truce, the Israeli military pressed ahead with its offensive, ordering civilians on Sunday to evacuate part of a designated safe zone it had established in southwestern Gaza, as it prepared to attack what it said was “embedded terrorist infrastructure” there. Israel’s military said it was urging civilians to move to other areas it said were safe.
But nowhere in Gaza is safe, many Palestinians say, and even the areas designated by the Israeli military as humanitarian zones lack basic necessities.
“The truth is that this area is anything but humanitarian,” said Kamel Mohammed, 36, who was sheltering in a tent with nine relatives in a coastal strip of Gaza known as Al-Mawasi.
“We do not have the means for a decent life,” Mr. Mohammed said. “No drinkable water, no healthy food, and we have resorted to building primitive bathrooms.”
Facing international condemnation for an airstrike on Saturday that hit a school compound used to shelter Palestinians in northern Gaza, Israel on Monday said that the strike had killed 31 militants. According to Gaza’s health officials, more than 100 Palestinians were killed; the Gazan tallies do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
With the Middle East on edge, the American defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, spoke to Mr. Gallant on Sunday and “reiterated the United States’ commitment to take every possible step to defend Israel,” according to the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder.
General Ryder also made the unusual disclosure that the submarine Georgia had been sent to the Middle East. The Pentagon rarely announces the movements of its submarine fleet, and the disclosure underscored the seriousness of the crisis. The Georgia can fire cruise missiles and carry teams of Navy SEAL commandos.
General Ryder noted that Mr. Austin had already ordered additional combat aircraft and warships capable of shooting down missiles and drones to the region. Mr. Austin has also directed the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, equipped with F-35 fighter jets, to accelerate its arrival in the region, joining the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying warships already in the Gulf of Oman.
The Lincoln is expected to arrive in the next several days, and could overlap with the Roosevelt for at least a couple of weeks, doubling the carrier firepower in the region.
“Are we trying to send a message? Absolutely,” General Ryder told reporters on Monday. “We’re looking to de-escalate tensions.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s dress-down of Mr. Gallant reflected longstanding divisions in his right-wing government over the prosecution of the war in Gaza and the fate of the approximately 115 hostages still in Gaza, an unknown number of whom have died.
Mr. Gallant, a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, has clashed with the prime minister before.
Last year, he called on Mr. Netanyahu’s government to suspend a proposal to overhaul the Israeli judiciary after it led to widespread protests. And in May, Mr. Gallant said the lack of a postwar plan for governing Gaza could force Israel into a permanent occupation, costing it “in blood and many victims, for no purpose.”
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Gallant did not confirm or deny whether he had dismissed as “nonsense” the prime minister’s goal of “total victory” over Hamas. An Israeli lawmaker who attended Mr. Gallant’s security briefing confirmed, however, that the defense minister had used the term.
“During a security briefing I gave today to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee,” Mr. Gallant said in the statement, “I emphasized I was determined to achieve the war’s goals and continue fighting until Hamas is dismantled and the hostages are returned.”
Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s rebuke of Mr. Gallant, he was not planning to fire him as defense minister, according to an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity and was not authorized to communicate with reporters.
Reporting was contributed by Hiba Yazbek, Ameera Harouda, Abu Bakr Bashir, Patrick Kingsley, Julian Barnes, Adam Entous and Michael D. Shear.
What to Know About Ukraine’s Cross-Border Assault Into Russia
Ukraine pressed ahead with its assault inside Russian territory on Tuesday, a week into the biggest foreign incursion into the country since World War II.
While Russian officials on Tuesday insisted that the situation was under control, Col. Roman Kostenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament serving in the country’s military, told a local news outlet that the “advance is ongoing.”
The cross-border attack caught Russia by surprise and signified a shift in tactics for Kyiv, more than two years after Moscow’s troops poured across Ukraine’s border in a full-scale invasion.
The rapid advance by Ukrainian forces has been an embarrassment for the Kremlin and aims to alter the narrative of the war at a time when Kyiv’s forces are stretched thin on the front lines of their own country.
Here’s what to know about Ukraine’s cross-border operation in Russia.
What happened?
Ukrainian troops and armored vehicles stormed into the Kursk region of western Russia the morning of Aug. 6, punching through border defenses and seizing several settlements in heavy fighting that left a trail of dead and ruin.
The assault opened a new front in the 30-month war and did not just catch Russia off guard: Some Ukrainian soldiers and U.S. officials also said they lacked advance notice.
Russia’s top general estimated that Ukraine had deployed 1,000 soldiers for the incursion, while U.S. officials said Ukraine had sent several thousand. Military analysts have said the attack involved elements of at least four brigades in a rare example of a successful operation involving support from artillery, air defenses and electronic warfare. That translated into quick advances on the ground.
How far into Russia have Ukrainian troops advanced?
Ukrainian forces advanced several miles into Russia within the first 24 hours of the incursion.
By Monday, the Kursk region’s acting governor, Aleksei Smirnov, said that 28 towns and villages were under Ukrainian control. Ukrainian troops had pushed seven miles into Russian territory along a 25-mile front, he said, adding that 12 civilians had died in the fighting.
His claims could not be independently verified, though the description of the extent of Ukraine’s advance was roughly in line with analysts’ estimates. The head of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, on Monday claimed Kyiv had control of “about 1,000 square kilometers,” or just under 400 square miles.
Why is this significant?
Kyiv has regularly bombarded Russian oil refineries and airfields with a fleet of homemade drones since Moscow’s full-scale invasion began. It has also helped stage two other ground attacks. Those, however, were smaller forays into Russia by Russian exile groups backed by the Ukrainian Army and ended in quick retreats.
Until last week, Ukrainian forces had not counterattacked into Russia. The gains in Kursk are the quickest for Ukrainian forces since they reclaimed the Kherson region of their own country in November 2022.
How has the Kremlin responded?
As Ukrainian forces pushed deeper into Russia, Moscow scrambled to shore up its defenses and President Vladimir V. Putin convened his security services to coordinate a response.
The Russian military said it was sending more troops and armored vehicles to try to repel the attack, with Russian television broadcasting images of columns of military trucks.
While the efforts appear to have helped stall further advances by Ukrainian troops, Kyiv’s forces are holding ground a week into the incursion. They claimed on Saturday to have captured a small village in the neighboring Belgorod region, and analysts say their forces control most of the Kursk town of Sudzha, about six miles from the border.
Russian officials and the state news media have repeatedly claimed to have the situation under control — most recently on Tuesday — only to then lose more ground.
“The operation to neutralize” Ukrainian units, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday, “is in progress.”
And what about Putin?
The incursion has embarrassed Mr. Putin and his military establishment, prompting questions about Russia’s level of preparedness.
Underscoring how the surprise attack rattled the Kremlin, Mr. Putin lashed out at the West in a tense televised meeting with his top officials on Monday.
“The West is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians,” he said, repeating his frequent depiction of the war, which he started, as a proxy campaign against Russia by the West. “The enemy will certainly get the response he deserves, and all our goals, without doubt, will be accomplished.”
Mr. Putin directed his military to push out Ukraine’s troops and to work with the border guard service to “ensure the reliable protection of the state border” — an acknowledgment that Russia had failed in that regard.
What has Ukraine said?
It took days for Ukraine to publicly acknowledge the cross-border operation, with the military staying silent in the face of accusations and statements from Russian officials.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine’s most explicit reference to the Kursk region incursion came only on Monday night, when he said that Russia had launched attacks from the area.
“Therefore, our operations are purely a security matter for Ukraine,” he said in his nightly address. But he also hinted at another rationale, adding: “Russia brought war to others, and now it’s coming home.”
What is the goal of Ukraine’s incursion?
Analysts say that Ukraine’s offensive most likely has two main aims: Draw Russian forces from the front lines in eastern Ukraine and seize territory that could serve as a bargaining chip in future peace talks.
The operation could also offer a much-needed morale boost for Ukrainians, whose forces have been losing ground to Russian troops for months.
But military analysts have questioned whether Kyiv’s cross-border assault is worth the risk, given that Ukrainian forces are already stretched on the front lines of their own country, including suffering from shortages of troops and ammunition.
How is it affecting the fight inside Ukraine?
Russian forces have been pummeling Ukrainian forces in the east even as Moscow races to respond to the incursion into the Kursk region, according to Ukrainian military officials.
And there is little indication so far that Russia is redirecting frontline forces from eastern Ukraine. Instead of pulling those brigades, Russia appeared to be redeploying lower-level units to the Kursk region, according to a briefing on Sunday by the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based research organization.
While Kyiv’s allies have in the past been wary that Ukrainian incursions in Russia could escalate the war, the United States has suggested that the assault in the Kursk region does not violate American guidance.
However, senior American officials have said privately that they understood Kyiv’s need to change the optics and the narrative of the war, but that they were skeptical Ukraine could hold the territory long enough to force Russia to divert significant forces from the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.
What happens next?
It remains unclear whether Ukraine will try to solidify control over the land it has captured or be forced to retreat.
Russian officials have warned that the incursion could expand. The authorities in the Belgorod region have said they are evacuating a district and Mr. Putin, in his televised meeting, told the governor of a third border region — Bryansk — that it appeared “relatively calm” for now but “this doesn’t mean that the same situation will remain tomorrow.”
On Tuesday, a spokesman for Russia’s emergencies ministry, Artyom Sharov, said more than 2,000 people had left or been evacuated from “borderline districts” in the Kursk region over the past 24 hours, the state news agency Tass reported.
Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.
At a Russian Border Post, Scenes of Ruin After Ukraine’s Surprise Attack
Andrew E. Kramer
David Guttenfelder
Reported from the Sudzha border control post in Russia
All that remained of a Russian border post was a tableau of destruction: Sheet metal flapped in the wind, customs declarations fluttered about, and stray dogs roamed under a road-spanning sign that said, “Russia.”
Kicking up dust, Ukrainian armored vehicles rumbled past, unimpeded, as the flow of men and weaponry carried on in the biggest foreign incursion into Russia since World War II, an offensive now nearing the end of its first week since the breach of the border here in Sudzha and at several other sites.
At the crossing point, a Ukrainian soldier posted on the roadside waved at the forces passing by, days after Russia’s head of the general staff declared that the attack had been rebuffed.
At the border, the detritus of a losing battle — and signs of soldiers caught by surprise — were scattered about: bullet cartridges tinkled underfoot, discarded body armor lay on the asphalt.
Taking the fight to Russian soil was a weighty moment for Ukraine in its war with Russia, coming two and a half years after Russia launched a full-scale invasion and 10 years after Russia intervened militarily to seize territory and support separatist client states in eastern Ukraine.
Within the first month of the war, Ukraine did strike back with a cross-border helicopter assault and has regularly bombarded Russian oil refineries and airfields with a fleet of homemade drones. Two smaller, earlier forays into Russia by Russian exile groups backed by the Ukrainian Army ended in quick retreats.
But until last week, Ukraine forces had not counterattacked into Russia.
Ukrainian troops sliced easily through a thinly defended border, pushing tens of miles into Russia and shifting the narrative of the war after a glum year in which Ukraine had struggled, often in vain, to hold back Russian advances across its eastern front.
By Monday, Ukraine’s commanding general had told President Volodymyr Zelensky that his troops held 390 square miles of territory in Russia’s southeastern Kursk region. Two dozen settlements were overrun.
“I’m happy to be riding a tank into Russia, and it is better than them driving tanks into our country,” said one Ukrainian soldier who was interviewed by The New York Times while squatting atop a tank parked along the supply route for the fighting, a dusty, bustling highway for armored vehicles, fuel trucks and pickups.
Not all the fighting has gone Ukraine’s way. Along the road, flatbeds also hauled damaged, American-made MaxxPro armored vehicles in the opposite direction.
Near the road, several houses had been leveled by Russian aerial bombs, a testament to the ferocious air attacks that have been Russia’s response so far. Where the road passed a high, open plain, plumes of smoke rose from all directions.
Risks abound for Ukraine. The offensive is intended to force Russia to divert troops from a grinding fight in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, which has not happened so far, and to gain leverage for peace talks, though none are scheduled.
Whether Ukraine can hold Russian land long enough for these strategic goals remains an open question.
President Vladimir V. Putin has vowed the attack would not soften his negotiating stance. And even as Russia tried to respond to the incursion, its forces have continued to hit Ukrainian forces in the east of that country, officials said on Monday.
But Ukrainian armored columns rumbling into Russia is a remarkable turn in the war.
Ukrainian troops breached the border on Tuesday in a surprise attack that began by clearing paths through minefields. Armored vehicles followed, smashing through the thin defenses of young conscript soldiers and border guards.
The attack on the border post visited by The New York Times, the Sudzha crossing point, an isolated spot in an expanse of farm fields, left a raw scene of ruin just a few hundred miles south of Moscow. The Times went a few hundred yards into Russian territory.
On Monday, about a dozen Ukrainian soldiers, their faces covered with surgical masks, were grunting and cursing as they pulled dead Russian soldiers from a hall with passport control booths, zipping them into body bags.
The now-obliterated border post, despite a few sandbagged gun emplacements, had clearly been unprepared for the tank and artillery assault.
Ukraine had done its own preparations surreptitiously. Thick summer foliage in the oak and maple forests hid heavy weaponry. Ostensible training exercises disguised troop movements. Soldiers had fanned out, sleeping in abandoned homes in villages.
Only at the last moment, according to a deputy Ukrainian brigade commander, were even senior officers told of the offensive. The commander, who asked to be identified only by his first name and rank, Lt. Col. Artem, in keeping with military protocol, said he had summoned subordinate officers to a meeting on a roadside in a forest to make an announcement. They would invade Russia. This was three days before the attack. Rank-and-file soldiers learned only a day before.
“The idea that we would really enter Russian territory seemed to be something unbelievable,” Colonel Artem said.
“There was a very tight limit on those who knew” of the attack plan, Colonel Artem said. Still, as the news moved down the ranks, the army relied on its soldiers’ discretion. The officers did not collect soldiers’ phones, he said, trusting they would keep the secret.
The strategy was to break quickly through border defenses and maneuver on the roads, blocking Russian counterattacks and taking advantage of the rolling, pastoral landscape in this part of Russia that is interspersed with swamps and lakes, limiting Russian opportunities to move off road.
The attack, which has led to the taking of an unspecified number of prisoners and set off a so-far disjointed Russian response put under the command of a domestic intelligence agency rather than the army, has already achieved an objective, Colonel Artem said. “It is a blow to the authority of Russia, which presents itself as a victorious empire,” he said. “But we created a buffer zone inside that country.”
The attack’s secrecy was paramount.
Last year, after the government had telegraphed for months a counteroffensive in southern Ukraine that ultimately failed, a research institute affiliated with the Ministry of Defense studied successful military operations from World War I, World War II, Arab-Israeli wars and other conflicts. It found a common thread: silence by the political leadership until after objectives were achieved.
This week, Ukrainian officials waited days to even acknowledge they had invaded Russia.
“Sharing details, commenting and boasting are only appropriate after the operation is complete,” said Ivan Kyrychevskyi, a military expert for the Ukrainian analytical group Defense Express.
Along the border, the secrecy came at a cost. Unable to warn residents, Ukraine was left scrambling to evacuate them after Russia responded with a bombing campaign in Ukrainian border villages. Ukraine has said it will evacuate 20,000 people living within six miles of the border.
Natalia Vyalina, 44, a kindergarten teacher living in the Ukrainian village of Khotyn, heard tracked vehicles moving on the roads Tuesday morning as the attack got underway. By that afternoon, her village had been bombed. Though she was forced to flee, she approved of Ukraine’s strategy.
“Let them try being occupied, being invaded, to hear how children cry in bomb shelters, to see how the old people suffer,” she said at a shelter for people displaced from the border area.
“I want the war to be over,” said Vera Prostatina, 65, a retired accountant forced from her home. “But now the Russians capture villages and towns. Let this be a lesson to them. The enemy should be punished. They brought war to us and destroyed our lives. Now I want it to be over, for them and for us.”
The fighting is raging over a rural area on both sides of the border, with rolling hills and expansive views of sunflower and wheat fields. In the Ukrainian town of Yunakivka, about five miles from the border, goats grazing on the roadsides looked up, chewing, to watch the Ukrainian military convoys pass.
A few hundred yards inside Russia, the road surface was pocked with craters from mortars. A road sign showing directions to turn toward Ukraine or Russia was peppered with shrapnel. Explosions had peeled back the blue sheet metal of the Russian border post.
Blood stains on the floors and scattered bandages spoke to the Russian soldiers’ losing fight in this spot.
Scenes of Russian routs have surfaced before in the war, north of Kyiv, the capital; in the northeastern Kharkiv region; and the southern Kherson region. But here, Russia faltered on its own soil.
The stern bureaucracy of signs directing people’s actions, seen everywhere in Russia but particularly intimidating for travelers at passport-control points, had become powerless.
An explosion had torn through the passport-control hall. Flat screens dangled from the roof by wires. Outside, rubles fluttered on the roadside, uncollected by the Ukrainians.
Reporting was contributed by Borys Viktjuk from the Sudzha, Russia, border crossing; Yurii Shyvala from Sumy, Ukraine; and Stas Kozliuk and Dzvinka Pinchuk from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Where Students Run the Streets: Bangladesh in Limbo
The two black V.I.P. vehicles, their hoods adorned with Bangladesh’s national flag according to state protocol, idled late one recent evening in a ground-floor parking lot at the University of Dhaka.
The cars were waiting for two students, both 26. Just a week before, they were hounded leaders of a youth-driven popular uprising against the country’s seemingly unbreakable prime minister. Now, after her astonishing ouster, the two are cabinet ministers in the country’s interim government.
Inside the parking lot, young women and men milled around these unlikeliest of government officials, asking questions and posing for selfies. On a pillar at the entrance, spray-painted graffiti declared the moment: “Revolution is not a dinner party.”
Outside, the streets of this country of 170 million people are run by students.
After overcoming a deadly crackdown and toppling Bangladesh’s iron-fisted leader, Sheikh Hasina, the student protesters are now seeking to set a new course for a nation born in bloody rupture five decades ago and marked by political violence ever since.
The magnitude of their task is not lost on anyone. Not on the young leaders and mobilizers themselves, who have been surprised by what they have achieved and are scrambling to protect the spaces that have fallen into their hands.
Ms. Hasina’s power had grown so all-consuming that her departure triggered a near-total collapse of the state. A wave of violence, including revenge killings and arson, persisted after her departure, with the country’s long-persecuted Hindu minority, in particular, gripped with fear. Almost all of the country’s police officers went into hiding, afraid of reprisals for the force’s role in the deaths of hundreds of young protesters.
Students are managing traffic in Dhaka, the congested capital city — checking licenses and reminding people to use helmets. In some roundabouts, the punishments they are doling out to rule breakers are straight out of the classroom: an hour of standing for a wrong turn, 30 minutes for not wearing a seatbelt.
One female student, who looked no older than 16, tried to ease traffic on a busy street with the zeal of an overachiever, shouting what were more pleas than orders to every “bhaiya,” Bengali for brother.
“Bhaiya — helmet!” she implored one man who raced by on his motorbike. “Bhaiya — footpath, footpath!” she yelled at a group of pedestrians.
A car carrying New York Times journalists was stopped by a boy who looked no older than 12. He asked to see a driver’s license.
In another corner of the city where some of the worst violence had taken place, Salman Khan, 17, and two other students manned a roundabout, occasionally pulling aside the fanciest of cars. What exactly were they looking for?
“Black money, black money,” Mr. Khan said, explaining that many of Ms. Hasina’s senior officials were on the run.
Outside her sprawling official residence, which protesters had breached and looted as she fled to India last week, a teenage student sat on a chair and spoke nonstop on a phone.
This was her duty station. When an army soldier called on her for something, she held out her free hand, in a motion meant to silence him — a single gesture that encapsulated all that has suddenly changed in Bangladesh.
Guiding the students who now run this country is a very different figure: the 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. He is gambling his storied legacy as a helper of the poor to be the interim leader of a nation in disarray. But he has accepted the mantle of handpicked grandfatherly figure for what the students describe as “generational transformation.”
“I’m doing this because this is what the youth of the country wanted, and I wanted to help them to do it,” Mr. Yunus said over the weekend in a briefing with reporters. “It’s not my dream, it’s their dream.”
Nahid Islam, a key student protest leader who said he had been blindfolded and tortured by security forces, described the immense pressure that had now fallen on the movement, “even though we weren’t prepared for it.”
“The day Hasina resigned, we realized everyone wanted to hear from us — what’s next for Bangladesh? How will Bangladesh be governed? How will the government be formed?” he said in an interview in the University of Dhaka parking lot.
Mr. Islam and a second leader, Asif Mahmud, are two of the 17 ministers in the cabinet. Mr. Mahmud oversees the ministry of youth and sports. Mr. Islam’s portfolio in particular has a whiff of justice — he is in charge of the information technology ministry, after Ms. Hasina had shut down the internet to try to break the movement.
“It’s a coincidence,” Mr. Islam said, smiling.
Behind the scenes, other student leaders are trying to figure out how to enact their idealistic vision for the future, even in this moment of chaotic uncertainty.
Mahfuj Alam, 26, one of the leaders tasked with canvassing input for a road map, said the country needed a new political settlement founded on three principles: dignity, compassion and responsibility.
“We want coordinated change, complex change which will facilitate upcoming governments to be democratic, to be accountable,” Mr. Alam said.
The student leaders said the country must break from its cycle of violence, and from the way it has been run for most of its history. Power has swung between two dynastic political parties that alternate between perpetrator and victim of the country’s brutal politics. The students are equally wary of a third force, the Jamaat-e-Islami party, the Islamist movement that Ms. Hasina had banned as radical.
The students want to move away from the binaries — the two dynastic parties, but also the “militant Islamism” and “militant secularism” that the country has been caught between in recent years.
“This generation is really, really aspiring for real changes,” Mr. Alam said, “not mere talking or blabbering about some families, about some histories, about some glories.”
But before the Bangladesh of tomorrow can be conjured, security must be restored today.
The country finds itself in a peculiar reality: The military, with its own history of abuses, has been deployed to guard the police. Dozens of police officers were killed in retaliation for Ms. Hasina’s crackdown on protesters, and many officers fear returning to their jobs.
On the desk of one army officer positioned outside a police station was a pile of unclaimed badges belonging to police officers who had fled. He sat between the carcasses of burned vehicles; the station behind him was a charred ruin.
A man in his 60s walked up with dried blood and wounds on his face. He wanted to lodge a complaint against workers from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main opposition to Ms. Hasina, saying they had attacked him on his way to work at the courts. The officer, Masud Rana, said that “this police station is not operational” and could not do much. He eventually appeased the man by writing his name in a ledger.
“Our main work is to ensure the security of the police,” the officer said.
Later, a woman approached with a request that the army definitely could not help with. A police officer, she said, had taken about $400 in bribes to release her son in a drug case. Could someone pay her back the money?
The interim government is rushing to find creative ways to lure police officers back to work and reduce the toxicity associated with them. There have been leadership changes and talk of new uniforms. In a first step toward a return to a uniformed presence, young cadets and scouts have been placed at roundabouts.
In one stood Tahia, an 18-year-old cadet who was directing traffic with half a dozen other young women. A man waited quietly nearby on the footpath, occasionally pulling out a bottle of water to give to Tahia. It was her father.
Asked what he did for a living, the man grinned nervously and dodged the question. Minutes later, he whispered in a reporter’s ear: “Both her parents are police constables.”
The interim government faces an enormous task not only in restoring law and order but also in reopening the economy. And its members understand that they could be short on time. The caretaker government may last only as long as it shows it can deliver something different.
Pretty soon, the interim leaders will find themselves in the push and pull of the established political parties and their business backers, who want an election to be held quickly.
An immediate test may come on Thursday, when the Awami League, the party of Ms. Hasina, has called for a march. That could put the party — with scant law enforcement presence — face to face on the streets with the movement that brought it down after 15 years in power.
But the caretaker leaders are hopeful that a trump card will buy them time. In toppling Ms. Hasina, they demonstrated that they had a wide-ranging mobilizing power that the organized parties lacked. Those parties, they say, have been discredited by the kind of politics that ignored the young nation’s aspirations.
“If we go to our homes right now, there will be no change,” Mr. Alam, one of the student leaders, said. “We don’t want to let them relax.”
Head of Panel That Ruled Against Jordan Chiles Represents Romania in Other Cases
The head of a panel that ruled that the American gymnast Jordan Chiles had to give up her Olympic bronze medal in favor of a Romanian athlete has represented Romania for almost a decade in arbitration cases, documents show.
The three members of a special tribunal convened for the Olympics by the Court of Arbitration for Sport after Romania lodged a complaint ruled that a successful appeal made by Chiles’s coach over the points awarded to her in the floor exercise competition was initiated four seconds late. The Romanian athlete, Ana Barbosu, was awarded the bronze medal as a result of the panel’s decision, and Chiles was dropped to fifth place.
The result left Chiles broken hearted: It took away her only individual medal at the Games, and means her appearance on the podium — the first all-Black medals stand at a women’s gymnastics event at the Olympics — is now left with an asterisk. Chiles posted four broken heart emojis on a black background on social media on Saturday after the decision was announced, and later said she was stepping away from social media altogether amid a torrent of racial abuse.
The decision to reallocate the medals in the floor exercise outraged U.S. Olympic and gymnastics officials, who have threatened to take their fight to the Swiss courts. The revelation that Hamid G. Gharavi, a member of the panel who took part in the decision to resolve the dispute in favor of a Romanian team — despite having a long relationship with Romania’s government — is sure to inflame the case further.
Very little is known about the deliberation and how the panel reached its verdict, with the court publishing just a one-page statement confirming the decisions it made. A detailed document outlining the full reasoning behind the outcome will eventually be sent to all the parties involved.
U.S.A. Gymnastics said on Monday it had been notified by the court that under its rules, the decision cannot be reconsidered “even when conclusive new evidence is presented.”
The gymnastics federation said it would continue to pursue “every possible avenue” for an appeal, including before the Swiss Federal Tribunal. That body, the only one that can hear an appeal against a decision by CAS, the sports court, only considers breaches of process and not new evidence related to the case itself.
In 2021, the Swiss court famously requested a new hearing for a doping case involving a top Chinese swimmer, whose lawyers successfully presented evidence that the chair of the tribunal may have had an anti-Chinese bias based on his social media posts.
Under the court’s rules, panel members, including the chair, must complete a conflict of interest form before reviewing each case that lists three possible outcomes.
The first and third are explicit, revealing no conflict or a conflict so significant that they would require their recusing themselves from a case. The second is more nuanced, allowing arbitrators to reveal potential conflicts but giving them a chance to explain why the potential conflict should not prevent them from hearing a case.
Details first published by The International Institute for Conflict Resolution and Prevention, a nonprofit organization, show that Mr. Gharavi, the presiding arbitrator in the hearing and a lawyer based in France, is currently serving as legal counsel to Romania in disputes at the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes. Mr. Gharavi’s work on behalf of Romania dates back almost a decade.
Under the sports court’s rules, arbitrators are required to complete conflict of interest declarations before every hearing.
“The issue is whether an Olympic arbitrator who currently represents a country on the global stage can decide a case involving a gymnast of that country, in an unbiased manner,” three arbitration experts wrote in an opinion published on the institute for conflict resolution’s website. “Is it realistic to expect such arbitrator can decide against the interests of that country or of that country’s gymnast, who in this case is represented by the Federation of Romanian Gymnasts?”
Mr. Gharavi said he could not comment on anything related to the case and suggested all such inquires be directed to CAS, which is charged with serving as the final arbiter on global sports disputes. The court said in an email that Mr. Gharavi had disclosed his work with Romania in writing and that none of the parties involved in the hearing had objected to his appointment as the panel’s chair.
“In accordance with the Guidelines on conflicts of interest issued by the International Bar Association (IBA), CAS has no reason to remove an arbitrator making such disclosure if the parties do not object to his/her appointment,” the court said in its statement.
Katherine Simpson, an international arbitrator and one of the authors of the opinion piece that first disclosed Mr. Gharavi’s work for Romania, said that even if none of the parties objected, his work on behalf of Romania was significant and meant he would automatically have had to recuse himself under the IBA’s so-called red list of non-waivable activities.
“I don’t understand — especially given the visibility of the case — why he was proposed for this case and why he did not refuse the case when it was offered,” said Ms. Simpson, who is unconnected to the case.
Mr. Gharavi won a case on behalf of Romania as recently as June, and his biography on his firm’s website lists Romania as a regular client.
The court later issued a separate statement confirming that it could not reopen the case. It said all the parties involved had had what it described as “ample opportunities” to present their arguments and objections. New evidence, if found, could be used to ask the Swiss Federal Tribunal to order the case be reopened and the CAS “would also reopen the case spontaneously if all parties agree.”
Such an outcome, however, is extremely rare.
CAS rulings are almost always the final word in such cases, with the Swiss tribunal typically rejecting most appeals of the rulings. But the Chiles case is likely to bring new scrutiny about how such matters are handled in international sports. Cases are almost always heard behind closed doors, with the full rationales for decisions sometimes limited to just the parties involved in cases, leaving sports fans and athletes unsure about exactly why certain outcomes have been reached.
Why China’s and Russia’s Militaries Are Training Together
China and Russia have pressed an informal political and economic alliance against the West. Now they are stepping up the cooperation between their militaries with increasingly provocative joint war games.
Chinese and Russian long-range bombers patrolled together near Alaska for the first time last month. Days earlier, the countries held live-fire naval drills in the hotly contested South China Sea for the first time in eight years. And they have more frequently buzzed the skies and sailed the waters together near Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, where America has strategic interests.
The military exercises are, in some ways, the most vivid expression of an alignment between China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as they have sought to challenge their chief geopolitical rival, the United States.
China has been frustrated by American trade restrictions and Washington’s building of security alliances in Asia. It has pushed back by trying to court European countries with trade and building its influence among poorer countries with investments. But those efforts can go only so far in countering the dominance of the United States.
“Beijing increasingly feels that diplomatic and economic actions are not enough to get its points across to Washington, so it is relying more on its military as a tool for signaling. Partnering with Russia is a way to amplify Beijing’s messaging,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
To Washington, the exercises sow doubts about whether the United States could prevail in a war in Asia against the combined forces of China and Russia. While American war planners have long considered scenarios with China and Russia individually, they have paid less attention to the prospect of the two nuclear-armed states fighting together because it had long seemed so unlikely.
The joint Chinese and Russian bomber patrol near Alaska last month underscored the threat. By taking off from a Russian air base, nuclear-capable Chinese bombers were able to fly about 200 miles from the Alaskan coast, a distance that would have been unreachable taking off from China.
Not Just About Fighting
The strengthening alignment between China and Russia has been key to the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. The United States says Mr. Putin would not be able to sustain the war effort if China did not continue to buy huge quantities of Russian oil and supply Russia with dual-use technology that can be applied to the battlefield.
Beijing needs Russia as its only major-power partner to counterbalance the United States.
“China finds itself in a very difficult geopolitical situation,” said Alexander Korolev, an expert on China-Russia relations at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “It doesn’t really have any allies. Russia is the only country that can make a difference.”
The biggest difference Russia brings to bear should it join China in any conflict is the threat of its nuclear arsenal, the world’s largest.
At the same time, “there are many things Russia can do to help China that doesn’t include fighting,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow in international studies at Stanford University and the author of “Upstart: How China Became a Great Power.”
Russia’s 2,500-mile land border with China could prove critical for the delivery of arms, oil and other supplies if the United States and its allies ever succeeded in imposing a sea blockade on China. Russia could also deny access to airspace near its borders, particularly close to Japan, where the United States maintains bases.
“In a protracted war scenario, that support will make it much harder to get China to capitulate,” Dr. Mastro said.
Pushing the Limits
To send an effective signal, military exercises typically have to set new precedents. That was the case on July 24 when two Chinese Xi’an H-6 and two Russian Tu-95 “Bear” nuclear-capable strategic bombers conducted a joint patrol near the United States for the first time.
The aircraft were believed to have taken off from Anadyr airfield in Chukotka, an eastern region of Russia, according to the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, which examined satellite imagery of Chinese military aircraft at Anadyr.
The four bombers entered the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, a buffer zone in international airspace that would have been out of reach for the Xi’an H-6 if it had taken off from China, because of the plane’s 3,700-mile maximum range. The patrol, which was intercepted by U.S. and Canadian fighter jets, took place two days after the Pentagon released its new Arctic strategy report, which noted increased Chinese and Russian cooperation in the region and the threat it posed to the United States.
The use of a Russian air base by Chinese military planes may be an indication that the two militaries can communicate, work together and use each other’s resources, part of what in military speak is known as interoperability. It also reflects a growing level of trust between two countries that have not always been friendly.
The two countries have also hinted at establishing a shared missile defense system, which could provide both China and Russia with an earlier warning of a nuclear strike, allowing them to respond more quickly.
Concern in the United States
China’s and Russia’s militaries are far from being as integrated as the U.S. military is with its NATO partners, military experts say, but the growing cooperation between them has raised concerns in Washington.
A report released last month by the congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy described China’s and Russia’s deepening alignment as “the most significant strategic development in recent years.”
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told a Senate hearing this year that American officials needed to consider how Russia might help if China decided to invade Taiwan, the self-governing island claimed by Beijing that the United States is widely expected to defend.
Such potential help might not necessarily entail joining a conflict in Asia. Becca Wasser, who runs war games at the Center for a New American Security, said a scenario that often comes up during the center’s simulations of a conflict with China is one in which Russia starts a war elsewhere that diverts American forces.
“China could look to Russia, which is increasingly becoming a junior partner in that relationship, to open a second theater to distract the United States and some of its allies,” Ms. Wasser said. “That could reduce the amount of resources and attention that are brought to bear on China.”
China and Russia have held military exercises together for two decades. China says there is nothing unusual about this military cooperation, and that it does not target any third country. It accuses the United States of being provocative by flying and sailing close to China.
Song Zhongping, an independent defense analyst based in Beijing and a former Chinese military officer, said he expected the exercises, particularly near Alaska, to grow in frequency to counter American pressure.
“Though we say the military exercises do not target any third party, it actually has a target: the hegemony of the U.S., and the bloc that the U.S. built with its alliance for containment against China,” Mr. Song said.
Olivia Wang contributed reporting.
Fires Near Athens Leave a Path of Destruction
One person dead. Homes and buildings charred. Huge tracts of forestland destroyed, the burned area leaving a thick scar covering nearly 25,000 acres northeast of Athens, the Greek capital, according to European satellite images.
Although the Greek authorities said on Tuesday that the threat to Athens posed by major wildfires that tore through its northern suburbs a day earlier had diminished, the damage caused has been “massive,” Vasilios Vathrakogiannis, the country’s fire service spokesman, said in a telephone interview.
And the true extent of the damage cannot be accurately assessed until the fires are completely doused, he said.
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