WORLD BRIEFING: June 27, 2024
NATO will offer Ukraine a new headquarters to manage its military assistance at its upcoming 75th anniversary summit in Washington, officials said, an assurance of the alliance’s long-term commitment to the country’s security that has been heralded as a “bridge” to Kyiv’s eventual membership. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — along with some Central European nations — had fervently hoped his country would be offered membership negotiations by NATO at the summit, which runs from July 9 to 11. Instead, the alliance will announce that it has agreed to set up a mission in Germany to coordinate aid of all kinds to Ukraine over the longer term, American and NATO officials said. The move is intended to send a strong signal of allied commitment, both to Kyiv and to Moscow, which hopes the West will grow tired of supporting the war. Because the mission will be under NATO’s auspices, it is designed to function even if Donald J. Trump, a sharp critic of the alliance and of aid to Ukraine, wins the U.S. presidency in November. - NYT
Bolivia’s president Luis Arce has urged citizens to take to the streets to defend the country’s democracy from an apparent coup attempt after heavily armed army troops seized control of La Paz’s political heart and military police were filmed trying to force their way into the former government palace. “We need the Bolivian people to mobilize and organize themselves against this coup d’état and in favour of democracy,” Arce said in a video message filmed at the Great House of the People, the official presidential residence in Bolivia’s de facto capital of La Paz. Flanked by members of his cabinet, Arce declared: “We cannot allow, once again, attempted coups to claim Bolivian lives.” - The Guardian
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas is poised to become the EU's top diplomat following weeks of intense political maneuvering over its most senior posts, elevating a staunch defender of liberal democracy, shaped by her personal experience of Soviet occupation, to a crucial role shaping and advancing the bloc's security and defense goals. The nomination of the EU foreign policy chief requires a "qualified majority" within the European Council, which is composed of the heads of state or government of the EU member states. That vote is expected during an EU leaders' summit on June 27-28 in Brussels. Before being appointed for a five-year term, Kallas will need approval by the European Parliament following hearings slated for this fall. Sources in Brussels familiar with the negotiations over the EU's top jobs told RFE/RL that there is agreement among the bloc's 27 members on Kallas. She would replace veteran Spanish Socialist politician Josep Borrell, whose tenure has spanned a global pandemic, wars on the EU's periphery in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine, a border crisis with Belarus, and high-profile divisions over Israel's conduct of its war with EU- and U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. - RFE/RL
Stella Assange thanked the spectrum of lawmakers who campaigned for her husband, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, to be freed during her visit Thursday to Australia’s Parliament House, where political leaders differed over how welcome the convicted felon was in his homeland. “Julian is overjoyed and so grateful to the Australian people, to the members of Parliament and to the government and also the opposition who came together to voice the need for his release,” Stella Assange said. Assange has made no public comment since he arrived in Australia on Wednesday after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with U.S. Justice Department prosecutors that ended his 14-year legal battle for freedom. - AP
A federal grand jury in the U.S. state of Maryland has returned an indictment charging a 22-year-old Russian citizen with conspiracy to hack into Ukrainian government computer systems and destroy them and their data. The man named in the indictment, Amin Stigal, allegedly conspired with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency and then launched cyberattacks against the Ukrainian government just before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release on June 26. According to court documents, Stigal and members of the GRU conspired in January 2022 to use a U.S.-based company’s services to distribute malware to dozens of Ukrainian government entities’ computer systems and destroy them and related data stored on them in advance of the Russian invasion. On January 13, 2022, Stigal and the GRU conspirators attacked multiple Ukrainian government agencies, the Justice Department's news release said. The list included the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry, the State Treasury, the Judiciary Administration, the Education and Science Ministry, and the Agriculture Ministry. The conspirators infected computers on the agencies’ networks with malware called WhisperGate, which was designed to look like ransomware but was actually designed to completely destroy the targeted computer and related data. - RFE/RL
