Author: admin

The decision to scale back operations around the capital, Kyiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv is the first sign of tangible progress from talks.

But it is unclear how extensive any reduction in military activity might be, and Ukraine remains sceptical.

The US and UK also said the pledge should be treated with caution.

On Tuesday, Russia’s deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said the country would “radically, by several times reduce the military activity” around Kyiv and Chernihiv.

He added that there had been progress on”the neutrality and non-nuclear status” of Ukraine, which are two key concerns for Moscow.

But Russia’s pledge to scale back its forces was met with scepticism. “Ukrainians are not naive people,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an overnight video address.

“We can say that the signals… are positive, but those signals do not drown out the explosions or Russian shells,” he added.

“We’ve only seen a small number begin to move away from Kyiv,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, adding that people should be “prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine”.

The UK Defence Ministry also warned that Russia will likely “seek to divert combat power from the north to their offensive in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east”.

Russia has already refocused its campaign on Ukraine’s eastern regions. It has suffered a series of setbacks to the north of the capital, Kyiv, and is also seeking to capture a land corridor which stretches along the south coast to the Russian border.

The discussions lasted around three hours. Very little was leaked, and nearly all media were kept away in a packed area on a pavement outside.

The key points became clear as members of the Ukrainian delegation came out onto the street an hour before the expected finish.

The negotiators said they had proposed to Russia that Ukraine adopt a neutral status in exchange for security guarantees – an international mechanism where guarantor countries would act to protect Ukraine in future.

In return Kyiv would not join Nato, a key Russian demand. This was not a new pledge, but it was spelt out in the clearest detail yet.

Many are sceptical about what Russia’s announcement about reducing military operations actually means; whether it’s a pledge to pull back or merely an acceptance it has already failed in those areas and will instead turn its full force further east.

Western countries, therefore, are saying they will judge Russia by its actions and not its words.

Read more from Tom here.

During the ceasefire talks on Tuesday, Ukraine proposed to become a neutral state in exchange for security guarantees. A key aim of Russia’s invasion was to stop Ukraine joining the Nato alliance and Russian officials said the talks had moved to a practical stage.

Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chaly told reporters that its offer of neutrality – which means it would not ally itself militarily with others – was a chance to “restore the territorial integrity and security of Ukraine through diplomatic and political means”.

Russian forces have encircled Chernihiv, where officials say up to 400 people have been killed and some 130,000 residents are without heating, electricity or water supplies.

Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said talks had been “meaningful” and Ukraine’s proposals on neutrality would be put to President Vladimir Putin. However, he made clear that before a presidential summit could happen a treaty would have to be drafted and approved by negotiators, and then signed by foreign ministers.

“This is not a ceasefire but this is our aspiration, gradually to reach a de-escalation of the conflict at least on these fronts,” Mr Medinsky told Russian state news agency Tass.

The projects’ aims included improving education, health and agriculture.

They also had a “strong focus on ensuring that girls and women participate and benefit from the support,” the bank had said earlier.

Last week, the Taliban reversed a decision to allow the schools to open following months of restrictions.

The Taliban said schools would only reopen after a decision over uniforms for female students had been made in accordance with “Sharia law and Afghan tradition”.

The move has drawn international condemnation, while on Saturday protestors gathered close to the Ministry of Education in the country’s capital Kabul to demand that the schools be reopened.

The World Bank projects were targeted at giving women and girls as much access to services in Afghanistan, as men.

They are financed by the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which was frozen last year after the Taliban took control of the country.

At the start of this month, the executive board of the World Bank approved a plan to use more than $1bn from the fund to support “urgent needs” including those in education, agriculture and health.

Under the plan, the money would not be handed to Taliban authorities, and was instead to be distributed through United Nations agencies and aid groups.

“As a first step, the ARTF donors will decide on four projects of approximately $600m to support urgent needs in the education, health, and agriculture sectors, as well as community livelihoods,” the bank said in a statement on 1 March.

“This $600m will be supplemented with additional allocations from the ARTF during 2022 as conditions allow,” it added.

“This phased approach is designed to be flexible and adaptive, recognising that the situation on the ground remains fluid.”

The BBC understands that the projects will be restarted only when the bank is confident that its goals can be met.

On Friday, a joint statement by officials from 10 countries, including the US and UK, described the Taliban’s actions as “profoundly disturbing”.

The US State Department has also cancelled meetings with the Taliban, which were scheduled to take place in Qatar.

The law follows more than 100 years and 200 failed attempts by US lawmakers to pass anti-lynching legislation.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act is named for the black teenager whose brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.

Perpetrators of a lynching – death or injury resulting from a hate crime – will face up to 30 years in jail.

Mr Biden said: “Thank you for never giving up, never ever giving up.

“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone, belongs in America, not everyone is created equal.”

He added: “Racial hate isn’t an old problem – it’s a persistent problem. Hate never goes away. It only hides.”

The bill was passed unanimously in the Senate earlier this month. The House had voted overwhelmingly in support of the legislation last month. Three Republicans voted no: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew Clyde of Georgia. They argued that it was already a hate crime to lynch people in the US.

Lynching is murder by a mob with no due process or rule of law. Across the US, thousands of people, mainly African Americans, were lynched by white mobs, often by hanging or torture, in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Some 4,400 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Those who participated in lynchings were often celebrated and acted with impunity.

“Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy,” the bill’s sponsor, Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, said ahead of its passage.

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, the House passed an earlier iteration of the bill, but it was blocked in the Senate.

Many racial justice advocates have described the death of Floyd, as well as the murder of Ahmaud Arbery – who was hunted down and shot by three white men in Georgia in 2020 – as modern-day lynchings.

By Chelsea Bailey, BBC News

One would be forgiven for thinking that lynching was already a hate crime in the United States. After all, it’s been decades since Billie Holiday’s haunting ballad, Strange Fruit, told of “black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze”, and mobs of white Americans no longer line up to take commemorative photos beneath hanging trees.

But that’s exactly why the Emmett Till Antilynching Act is so significant. Lynchings may not look the same way they did in the past, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.

Many regard the murders of black Americans James Byrd Jr, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd as modern-day lynchings.

The bill signed into law on Tuesday bears the name of a black teenager whose mother held an open-casket funeral to force the world to see the gruesome effect of racial violence in the US.

For many, the fact that it took Congress more than 65 years to pass the legislation would seem to speak volumes about America’s tacit stance on the subject.

The first anti-lynching bill was introduced in 1900, by George Henry White, the only black man then serving in Congress. The bill failed and continued to fail for more than 120 years.

Lynching is not unique to America, but its use for racial terror and suppression is. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,300 black Americans were lynched between the post-Civil War Reconstruction period and 1950. And those are just the murders that were documented.

Confronting America’s gruesome past continues to be a subject of contention. Sometimes, it can take more than a century.