Navalny ally found guilty in absentia
Russian dissident and Kremlin critic Leonid Volkov, a prominent ally of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sentenced in absentia on Wednesday to 18 years in prison.
The sentence was handed out by a Russian military court that found Volkov guilty on dozens of charges, including spreading fake news about the war in Ukraine and “justifying terrorism”.
Volkov, who lives in Lithuania, made light of the verdict, describing the accompanying 2-million rouble ($25,400) fine as a slap on the wrist. “And they didn’t ban me from using the internet! Well, I’ll use it then,” he wrote on social media.
In a subsequent post, he corrected himself and said, after reading the full verdict, that he had in fact been banned from using the internet for 10 years.
“And I’ve already started using it. Damn. What should I do?” he wrote, tongue-in-cheek.
Navalny, the most prominent domestic critic of President Vladimir Putin, died suddenly in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony at the age of 47. He had been serving prison terms totalling more than 30 years on fraud, extremism and other charges that he said were trumped up to silence him. Reuters
Musk may want to repair relationship with Trump
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk said on Wednesday he regretted some of the posts he made last week about US President Donald Trump as they had gone “too far”. Trump said on Saturday his relationship with Musk was over after they exchanged insults on social media, with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO describing the president’s sweeping tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”.
Musk has since deleted some posts critical of Trump, including one signalling support for impeaching the president, and sources close to the world’s richest man said his anger has started to subside and he may want to repair the relationship.
“I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X on Wednesday, without saying which specific posts he was talking about.
Tesla shares rose 2.3% in pre-market trading after Musk’s post, with some market analysts seeing signs that the relationship between Musk and Trump can improve again.
Shawn Campbell, adviser and investor at Camelthorn Investments, said Trump's administration included people who had in the past said “some pretty nasty things” about him.
“So clearly this relationship can be restored, just likely not to where it once was,” said Campbell, who personally holds Tesla shares. “The stakes between the richest man in the world and leader of the most powerful nation in the world are just so big, with billions of dollars of government contracts at stake, not to mention the power to investigate, regulate and tax.” Reuters
National Guard ‘inflaming LA protests’
US President Donald Trump said he sent in the National Guard and Marines to “liberate” Los Angeles from the violence of protesters, but some residents of Little Tokyo, a neighbourhood hit hardest by the unrest said “no thanks” Mr President.
A dozen people who live, work or frequent the neighbourhood, where Japanese is heard spoken as frequently as English in shops and restaurants, on Tuesday said that Trump’s use of the military was inflaming the protests against recent immigration raids in Los Angeles.
“The president sending in the National Guard and Marines has only made things worse, it’s made the protesters go crazy,” said Sulieti Havili, who lives nearby. The Trump administration said its immigration raids are rounding up de facto criminals for lacking proper documents to stay in the US.
California governor Gavin Newsom has said the use of military personnel to combat the protests had “inflamed a combustible situation” and warned that “democracy is under assault”. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass said that Trump’s use of troops was a deliberate effort to create “chaos”. Reuters
EU lending arm to help fund defence industry
The EU’s lending arm, the European Investment Bank (EIB), has tripled a scheme to help fund the bloc’s defence industry to €3bn and signed a deal with Germany’s Deutsche Bank to start funnelling the money to the bloc’s military firms.
The EIB announced on Wednesday it would provide a €500m loan to the German lender which will then onlend the money to small- and medium-sized firms throughout the EU’s security and defence supply chain. It is the first time the EIB has provided so-called intermediated financing for the defence sector and is expected to announce a similar deal with France’s BPCE next week and other banks in the bloc in the coming weeks.
The EIB is prohibited from investing directly in weapons but it has started investing more broadly in the defence sector over the past year as part of Europe’s efforts to build up its security capabilities.
The bank’s president, Nadia Calviño, announced the plan at a summit in Brussels saying that strengthening Europe’s security and defence was now “central” to the bank’s mission and would help address “the urgent need for investment” in the sector.
The threefold increase in the EIB’s lending, which was initially approved in December, reflected exceptionally strong interest by commercial banks across Europe to be involved in the defence ramp up efforts, the EIB said. Reuters
Argentina court upholds verdict against Kirchner
Buenos Aires — Argentina’s Supreme Court upheld a guilty verdict that sentenced powerful two-term former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to six years in prison for defrauding the state and banned her from public office.
Kirchner, 72, a polarising figure and leftist who served as president from 2007 to 2015, was convicted by a trial court in 2022 for a fraud scheme that steered public road work projects in the Patagonia to a close ally while she was president. She has denied wrongdoing and claims she is a victim of political persecution.
The Supreme Court’s three judges left in effect an appellate court decision that had previously upheld the guilty verdict. A lower court will decide whether to grant Kirchner house arrest due to her age. Kirchner had announced this month plans to run in legislative elections scheduled for September.
Reuters
US prepares to evacuate Iraqi embassy
Baghdad/Washington — The US is preparing to evacuate its Iraqi embassy due to heightened security risks in the region, three US and two Iraqi sources said on Wednesday while a US official said military dependants could also leave Bahrain.
The sources did not specify which security risks had prompted the decision to evacuate and the state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to strike Iran if stuttering talks over its nuclear programme fail and on Wednesday he said he was growing less confident that Tehran would agree to stop enriching uranium, a key American demand.
Iranian defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh said Iran would hit US bases if the nuclear talks failed, leading to war. Reuters
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