18, December 2020
Putin says if Russia had poisoned opposition leader Navalny he would be dead 0
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday rejected reports that Russia’s security services were behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, saying that if they were, the opposition leader would not be alive.
Navalny, 44, fell violently ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August and was hospitalised in the Russian city of Omsk before being transported to Berlin by medical aircraft.
Experts of several Western countries concluded that the Kremlin critic was poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent — a claim that Moscow has repeatedly denied.
A joint media report this week revealed what it said were the names and photos of chemical weapons experts from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that had tailed Navalny for years.
Speaking to reporters at his annual end-of-year press conference, Putin described the report as “the legalisation of materials from the American special services”, adding that the Kremlin critic “has their support”.
The Russian leader said that if Navalny was supported by US special services, then Russia should of course tail him.
“But this does not at all mean that it is necessary to poison him. Who needs him?” Putin said.
If the Russian special services had wanted to poison Navalny, “they would have taken it to the end,” he said.
‘Putin admitted to everything’
The joint report on Navalny led by the investigative website Bellingcat said that the FSB agents had shadowed the opposition leader on a regular basis since 2017.
Bellingcat said it had made the conclusion based on volumes of data, including phone logs and travel records.
The joint report with CNN, Der Spiegel and Russian outlet The Insider did not establish any direct contact between the 44-year-old opposition leader and the named agents.
Navalny said Thursday that Putin’s comments amounted to an admission.
“Putin admitted to everything,” the Kremlin critic wrote on Twitter. “That is, yes, the FSB tailed me for 4 years.”
Navalny had earlier said that Putin was behind his poisoning and that he will return to Russia once he has made a full recovery in Germany.
In response to the poisoning, the European Union has imposed entry bans and frozen the bank accounts of six people suspected of being responsible, including FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov.
Source: AFP
18, December 2020
EU, UK officials concede big gaps remain in post-Brexit talks 0
Britain and the European Union provided sober updates Thursday on the state of post-Brexit trade discussions, with only two weeks to go before a potentially chaotic split.
While Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union’s executive commission, noted “substantial progress on many issues,” she voiced concerns about the discussions taking place around fishing rights. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also warned that a no-deal outcome seemed “very likely.”
The two spoke early Thursday evening, their latest in a series of conversations in the past couple of weeks aimed at unclogging the talks, which have moved at a snail’s pace since Britain left the EU on January 31.
Britain remains within the EU’s tariff-free single market and customs union until December 31. A failure to reach a post-Brexit deal would likely lead to chaos on the borders at the start of 2021 as tariffs and other impediments to trade are enacted by both sides. The talks have gotten bogged down on three main issues — the EU’s access to Britain’s fishing waters, the level playing field to ensure fair competition between businesses, and the governance of any deal.
Following their latest conversation, von der Leyen warned that bridging big differences, in particular on fisheries, “will be very challenging.” Negotiations, she added, would continue Friday.
According to a statement from Johnson’s office, the prime minister stressed that “time was very short” and that it “now looked very likely that agreement would not be reached unless the EU position changed substantially.”
Intractable dispute
Johnson, like von der Leyen, focused on the lack of progress on fisheries. which has proved to be a hugely intractable issue in the talks — even though it accounts for only a very small amount of economic output.
On fisheries, the EU has repeatedly said it wants an agreement that guarantees a reciprocal access to markets and waters. EU fishermen are keen to keep working in British waters and Britain’s seafood industry is extremely dependent on exports to the 27-nation bloc. Johnson has made fisheries and British control over its waters a key demand in the long saga of Britain’s departure from the EU.
According to Downing Street, Johnson stressed that Britain could “not accept a situation where it was the only sovereign country in the world not to be able to control access to its own waters for an extended period and to be faced with fisheries quotas which hugely disadvantaged its own industry.”
The EU’s position, according to Johnson, “was simply not reasonable, and if there was to be an agreement, it needed to shift significantly.”
Earlier, the European Parliament issued a three-day ultimatum to negotiators to strike a trade deal if it is to be in a position to ratify an agreement this year. European lawmakers said they would need to have the terms of any deal in front of them by late Sunday if they were to organize a special gathering before the end of the year.
If a deal comes later, it could only be ratified in 2021, as the Parliament would not have enough time to debate the agreement before that.
An anti-Brexit placard is held in Parliament Square, in London, Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday…
An anti-Brexit placard is held in Parliament Square, in London, Dec. 16, 2020.
‘Intolerable’ uncertainty
“We give until Sunday to Boris Johnson to make a decision,” said Dacian Ciolos, president of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “The uncertainty hanging over citizens and businesses as a result of U.K. choices becomes intolerable.”
A trade deal would ensure there are no tariffs and quotas on trade in goods between the two sides, but there would still be technical costs, partly associated with customs checks and nontariff barriers on services.
Britain’s Parliament must also approve any Brexit deal, and the Christmas break adds to the timing complications. Lawmakers are due to be on vacation from Friday until January 5, but the government has said they can be called back on 48 hours’ notice to approve an agreement if one is struck.
Though both sides would suffer economically from a failure to secure a trade deal, most economists think the British economy would take a greater hit, at least in the near term, as it is relatively more reliant on trade with the EU than vice versa.
Both sides have said they would try to mitigate the impact of a no-deal, but most experts think that whatever short-term measures are put in place, the disruptions to trade will be immense.
“The prime minister repeated that little time was left,” Downing Street said in its statement after the call. “He said that, if no agreement could be reached, the U.K. and the EU would part as friends, with the U.K. trading with the EU on Australian-style terms.”
Australia does not have a free-trade deal with the EU.
(Source: AP)