WORLD BRIEFING: July 17, 2024
Today’s World Briefing blog comes to you from Amsterdam, where the tenth anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH17 will be commemorated at a somber event near Schiphol Airport. The Boeing 777 enroute from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by a Russian Buk missile over eastern Ukraine with 298 souls aboard. I was part of the team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which first responded to the tragedy, arriving some 20 hours after Flight MH17 was struck at 33,000 feet on July 17, 2014. As CNN’s John Avalon later put it: the attack on MH17 would be remembered as one of the two “defining crimes of our time” – the other being the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey. For the Netherlands it was considered “the biggest war crimes scene since the Second World War,” Dutch TV journalist Jeroen Akkermans said.
US authorities were warned about a potential assassination plot against former President Donald Trump by Iran weeks before the deadly shooting at Saturday’s rally — underscoring concerns about the level of protection that the presidential candidate was given, according to a report. Although there is no known connection between Thomas Matthew Crooks and the Iranian republic — considered a rogue state by the US government — advance knowledge of such a threat appears wildly out of alignment with Trump’s level of protection at the Butler, Pa., rally. The Trump campaign declined to address the outlet’s inquiry whether it was aware of the threat, but the Secret Service has “added protective resources and capabilities to the former President’s security detail,” agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement. - NY Post
European politicians and diplomats had already prepared for changes to their relationship with the US in the event of a second Donald Trump presidency. Now that the Republican candidate has chosen Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate, those differences appear even more stark on prospects for the war in Ukraine, security and trade. A vocal critic of US aid to Ukraine, Mr Vance told this year’s Munich Security Conference that Europe should wake up to the US having to “pivot” its focus to East Asia. “The American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy," he said. Nils Schmid, a senior MP in German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party, told the BBC that he was confident a Republican presidency would continue to stay within Nato, even if JD Vance came across as "more isolationist" and Donald Trump remained "unpredictable". However, he warned of a new round of "trade wars" with the US under a second Trump presidency. - BBC
The Russian Interior Ministry on July 17 added two journalists -- Andrei Zakharov and Dmitry Fomintsev -- to its wanted list on unspecified charges amid an ongoing crackdown on independent media. Media reports said Zakharov, who worked in his native St. Petersburg and Moscow, is suspected of evading the duties of a "foreign agent," while Fomintsev, who is from the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, is accused of "insulting believers' feelings" by posting materials online criticizing an Orthodox priest. Both Zakharov and Fomintsev are currently living outside Russia. - RFE/RL
