TOKYO: The Russian ambassador to Japan, Mikhail Galuzin, is expected to leave his post in November, without specifying his successor, Japanese media quoted Russian “sources” as saying.
His departure comes amid strained bilateral relations over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began in February and Japan’s full participation in Western sanctions against Moscow.
Galuzin, 62, assumed the position of ambassador in March 2018. He is known for his expertise in Japanese affairs, having held diplomatic posts in Japan four times since the days of the Soviet Union.
Galuzin joined the Russian Foreign Ministry in 1983, and served as Minister and Counselor of the Russian Embassy in Japan from 2001 to 2008. He also served as Russia’s ambassador to Indonesia from 2012 to 2017, before being appointed to Japan by President Vladimir Putin in January 2018.
Galuzin entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union in 1983. From 1983 to 1986 he served at the Embassy of the Soviet Union in Japan, from 1992 to 1997 the Russian Embassy to Japan, and from 2001 to 2008 Minister of the Embassy of Japan,
Galuzin is firmly committed to Moscow’s position on issues related to its war on Ukraine and the islands controlled by Russia and claimed by Japan, known as the Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kuril Islands in Russia.
In early October, he was summoned to the Japanese Foreign Ministry after it ordered a Russian diplomat based in Sapporo to leave in retaliation for Moscow’s expulsion of a Japanese consul the previous month.
Galuzin said at the time that such a move would only further deteriorate bilateral relations.
Galuzin had said in an exclusive interview with ANJ that Japanese sanctions on his country would cause damage to Japan. Russia has suspended its talks with Tokyo to sign a peace treaty to resolve the territorial dispute and issued decisions banning dozens of Japanese politicians, lawmakers and media people from entering Russia.
In an interview with Arab News Japan, Galuzin criticized Japan for “incorrectly applying wide sanctions,” but also said that the cooperation between the two nations has been “very valuable and mutually beneficial for decades.”
Galuzin also warned against Japan forming nuclear alliances with others and against involving NATO in East Asia. “We think the policy of the US and its allies, including Japan, to involve NATO in the Asia-Pacific region issues is very dangerous because, wherever NATO was involved, there is no peace, no stability and no prosperity. Look at what happened in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Yugoslavia was destroyed and divided.
“Instead of Asian groupings, the US tries to create a group of US-centered coalitions like AUKUS, Quad, US-Japan, US-(South) Korea and US-Australia military alliances. They are closed structures that divide the region, not consolidate it. We recommend that Asian countries consider whether it is good for the region’s future to welcome NATO here,” he said.
On current Japan-Russia relations and future prospects, the ambassador said Russia sees Japan, the G7 and other European countries’ positions as based on “double standards” because they did not previously speak out against the US’ “past aggression” against countries like Yugoslavia.
“For instance, the American aggression against Iraq was based on allegations that Iraq had arms of mass destruction, which turned out to be a lie. However, they attacked and destroyed Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, which led to the Middle East becoming a hub for … widespread international terrorism,” he said.
“The G7 countries, including the Japanese leadership, misinterpreted the goals and tasks of our (Russian) special military operation in Ukraine and completely ignored an obvious fact that a huge and very real threat was coming from the Ukrainian government policy toward Russia,” he told Arab News Japan.
“After the 2014 bloody coup d’état, which led to an illegal regime change in Ukraine, the society there has been educated to hate all things related to Russia, including language, culture, traditions, common history and relations, destroying millions of ties between people,” he said.
Moreover, he claimed that radical Ukrainian forces, whom he labeled as Nazis, had seized power and declared war on everything related to Russia, especially in what is known as the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics. These breakaway groups had rejected the coup not only because they considered it illegal, but as a result of the regime tried to prohibit the Russian language in Ukraine, called to oust all Russians from Crimea, and cut all ties with Russia, he added.
“That regime of Ukrainian Nazis also received a huge amount of lethal arms from NATO to attack the population, mainly of Russian origin, killing 14,000 people and injuring hundreds, including children. They caused widespread devastation in that region. It has been ongoing genocide for the last eight years that nobody has paid attention to except Russia,” according to Galuzin.
“The Kyiv regime had rejected the Minsk agreements on peaceful settlement in the eastern part of Ukraine.”
Galuzin said that the Russian government believed a possible dangerous nuclear war could be ignited if Kyiv joined NATO, which had several nations armed with these weapons.
Galuzin claimed that Russia found documents showing the Ukrainian regime, in cooperation with the US, preparing for “the production of biological weaponry, relying on more than 30 military biological facilities located in Ukraine and controlled by the Pentagon.”
Russian ambassador to Japan will leave his post in late November
https://arab.news/vxrv7
Russian ambassador to Japan will leave his post in late November
- His departure comes amid strained bilateral relations over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began in February and Japan’s full participation in Western sanctions against Moscow
- Galuzin entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union in 1983
Russian jailed for 25 years over army office arson bid
Prosecutors accused Baburin of seeking to help the Azov battalion
MOSCOW: A Russian court on Monday sentenced a man to 25 years in jail for planning to set fire to a Siberian military enlistment office in 2022, the year Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine.
Rights groups have called jail term against Ilya Baburin a record sentence, and stressed that the arson never happened.
Russia saw a wave of arson attacks on army offices however after the Kremlin announced an unpopular military mobilization drive in September 2022.
A military court in Novosibirsk handed down the sentence. Prosecutors accused Baburin of seeking to help the Azov battalion, a branch of the Ukrainian military branded a terror organization in Russia.
Baburin “created a plan to set the military commissariat in Novosibirsk on fire,” prosecutors said.
They said he recruited somebody to throw a Molotov cocktail at the army office but the unnamed person instead reported him to the FSB security service.
Baburin was acting on Ukrainian orders and that he had “established contact” with members of the Azov battalion, prosecutors said.
TASS news agency published footage of Baburin in court, wearing a tracksuit and smiling inside a glass cage for defendants.
“I did not set anything on fire,” Baburin said in court, according to the independent Dozhd TV channel.
He accused the FSB of trying to “gain points” during Moscow’s Ukraine campaign and of “investigating absurd crimes.”
Baburin, who was arrested in September 2022, was found guilty of a string of offenses, including “terrorism” and “treason.”
His lawyer Vasily Dubkov argued in court this month that “nobody was harmed,” according to a transcript of a statement delivered in court and published by the Perviy Otdel rights group.
“Baburin does not look like a spy giving out state secrets and did not have or hand out state secrets,” Dubkov said.
Separately, a military court in Saint Petersburg on Monday sentenced a cadet to eight years in prison for attempting to set railway infrastructure on fire last year.
The court said Timur Kursanov was undergoing military service at an army institute and had taken orders from an unnamed person online who wanted to “involve him in arson acts in exchange for money aimed at destroying transport infrastructure.”
The court said he was arrested during a failed attempt to set fire to a railway intersection in Saint Petersburg in May last year.
Ship that caused deadly Baltimore bridge collapse has been refloated and is moving back to port
- The disaster killed six construction workers and snarled traffic into Baltimore Harbor
- Several tugboats are escorting the Dali on its 2.5-mile path to the marine terminal
BALTIMORE: The container ship that caused the deadly collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was refloated Monday and has begun slowly moving back to port.
The Dali has remained at the collapse site since it lost power and crashed into one of the bridge’s supporting columns on March 26, killing six construction workers and snarling traffic into Baltimore Harbor.
The ship appeared to start moving shortly after 6 a.m. as crews started to maneuver it out of the wreckage. It started and stopped a few times before slowly backing away from the collapse site.
Officials said it would move at about 1 mph on the roughly 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) trip, a fraction of the speed it was traveling when it lost power and crashed into the bridge. Pieces of the bridge’s steel trusses protruded from its bow, which remained covered in concrete from the collapsed roadway.
Officials have said they plan to unload the ship’s containers and complete some short-term repairs while it’s docked in Baltimore.
Monday morning’s high tide had been expected to bring the best conditions for crews to refloat and start moving the ship, according to a statement from the Key Bridge Response Unified Command.
Several tugboats were escorting the Dali on its path to the marine terminal. The work is expected to last at least 21 hours.
Crews conducted a controlled demolition on May 13 to break down the largest remaining span of the collapsed bridge.
The Dali experienced four electrical blackouts within about 10 hours before leaving the Port of Baltimore for Sri Lanka and hitting the bridge, according to a preliminary report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Philippines blames China for loss of giant clams in disputed shoal and urges environmental inquiry
- Philippines has blamed Chinese fishermen for a massive loss of giant clams in a disputed shoal controlled by China’s coast guard
- There was no immediate response from China
MANILA: The Philippines blamed Chinese fishermen on Monday for a massive loss of giant clams in a disputed shoal controlled by China’s coast guard in the South China Sea and urged an international inquiry into the amount of environmental damage in the area.
The Philippine coast guard presented surveillance photographs of Chinese fishermen harvesting large numbers of giant clams for a number of years in a lagoon at Scarborough Shoal, but said signs of such activities stopped in March 2019.
Parts of the surrounding coral appeared to be badly scarred, in what the coast guard said was apparently a futile search by the Chinese for more clams. The lagoon is a prominent fishing area which Filipinos call Bajo de Masinloc and the Chinese calll Huangyan Dao off the northwestern Philippines.
“Those were the last remaining giant clams that we saw in Bajo de Masinloc,” Philippine coast guard spokesperson Commodore Jay Tarriela said at a news conference.
“We are alarmed and worried about the situation that’s happening there,” National Security Council Assistant Director General Jonathan Malaya said. He said China should allow an independent inquiry by experts from the United Nations and environmental groups.
The Chinese Embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Beijing has repeatedly asserted its sovereignty over much of the busy South China Sea. The territorial disputes involve China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. The Indonesian navy has also been involved in skirmishes with the Chinese coast guard and fishing vessels in the Natuna waters in the margins of the South China Sea.
The Philippines has adopted a policy of publicizing China’s increasingly assertive actions in the contested waters to gain international support, and the news conference was its latest effort to condemn China’s stewardship of Scarborough Shoal.
China effectively seized the shoal in 2012 after a standoff that ended when Philippine government ships withdrew based on what Manila said was a deal brokered by American officials to ease the dangerous confrontation. China reneged on its promise to remove its ships and has since surrounded the shoal with coast guard and suspected militia ships, according to Philippine officials.
Since then, the Chinese coast guard has had a series of skirmishes with Philippine patrol ships and fishing boats, which have been prevented from entering the lagoon, ringed by mostly submerged coral outcrops. Three weeks ago, Chinese ships fired powerful water cannons that damaged Philippine coast guard and fisheries vessels.
“They’re preventing us from getting into the lagoon,” Malaya said. “We can ask third-party environmental groups or even the United Nations to do a fact-finding mission to determine the environmental situation.”
The Philippines has brought its territorial disputes with China to international arbitration and largely won. The 2016 ruling invalidated China’s expansive claims to much of the South China Sea, a key global trade route, on historical grounds and cited Chinese government actions that resulted in environmental damage in the offshore region.
China refused to participate in the arbitration, rejected its ruling and continues to defy it.
The territorial hostilities have sparked fears of a larger conflict that could involve the US, which has warned that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines, its long-time treaty ally, if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.
UK’s infected blood scandal could and should have been avoided, inquiry finds
LONDON: Britain’s infected blood scandal that has killed 3,000 people and left thousands more suffering with hepatitis or HIV was no accident, a public inquiry found on Monday, blaming a catalogue of failures by government and doctors.
Inquiry chair Brian Langstaff said more than 30,000 people received infected blood and blood products in the 1970s and 1980s from Britain’s state-funded National Health Service, destroying lives, dreams and families.
The use of infected blood, despite the known risks, has resulted in thousands of victims in the United States, France, Canada and other countries, in part after US prisoners and other high-risk groups were paid to provide blood.
In Britain around 1,250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with HIV, including about 380 children, the inquiry found.
Three quarters of them died.
“This disaster was not an accident,” Langstaff said. “The infections happened because those in authority — doctors, the blood services and successive governments — did not put patient safety first.”
He said proper compensation must now be paid.
The government, which in 2015 said it was “something that never should have happened”, agreed in 2022 to pay an interim 100,000 pounds ($126,990) to those affected.
The infected blood and blood products, some of which were imported from the United States, were used for transfusions, which were not always clinically needed, and as treatments for bleeding disorders like haemophilia.
Haemophiliacs received Factor 8 concentrates, often imported from the United States or Austria, which carried a higher risk of causing hepatitis.
Some of the concentrates were infected with HIV in the 1980s, the inquiry said, but authorities failed to switch to safer alternatives and they decided in July 1983, a year after risks were apparent, not to suspend their importation.
Systemic failures resulted in between 80 and 100 people becoming infected with HIV by transfusion, it said, and about 26,800 were infected with Hepatitis C, often from receiving blood after childbirth or an operation.
Both groups were failed by doctors’ complacency about Hepatitis C and being slow to respond to the risks of AIDS, it said, compounded by an absence of meaningful apology or redress.
He said patients were exposed to risks despite it being well known that blood could cause severe infection, in the case of hepatitis since the end of World War Two.
Treatment practices that could have reduced the risks were not adopted, he said, noting blood was collected from prisoners, who had a higher prevalence of hepatitis, until 1984.
Some of the victims were further betrayed by being used in medical trials without their knowledge or consent, he said.
“It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK,” Langstaff said.
The British inquiry, which started in 2018, does not have the power to recommend prosecutions. ($1 = 0.7875 pounds)
Protesters block New Caledonia roads as French police pour in
- Protests erupted last week, sparked by anger among indigenous Kanak people over a constitutional amendment approved in France that would change who is allowed to participate in elections
- Pro-independence political parties say they want the French government to withdraw the electoral reform before they restart talks
SYDNEY/PARIS: A thousand police arrived in New Caledonia from France and streets were relatively calm after a week of unrest, the French High Commission said on Monday, but roads were blocked by protesters and the airport remained shut, stranding tourists.
Blockades of roads would continue, Field Action Co-ordination Cell (CCAT), the activist group organising the protests in the French-ruled Pacific island, said in a statement, urging protesters to use a peaceful approach.
Road blocks were making it a challenge to get food supplies to stores in several areas or to provide secure travel for medical staff, New Caledonia government officials said, adding, however, that there were no shortages of supplies or staff.
Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said "the situation there is deeply concerning", after a night of fire and looting.
France's top official in the territory, Louis Le Franc, said on Sunday a police operation to regain control of the road from capital Noumea to the international airport would take several days. Gendarmes had dismantled 76 road blocks, the High Commission said on Monday.
Airline Aircalin said the airport would remained closed until Thursday.
Protests erupted last week, sparked by anger among indigenous Kanak people over a constitutional amendment approved in France that would change who is allowed to participate in elections, which local leaders fear will dilute the Kanak vote.
Six people have been killed and the unrest has left a trail of burnt businesses and cars and looted shops, with road barricades restricting access to medicine and food. The business chamber said 150 companies had been looted and burnt.
EVACUATIONS AWAITED
Pro-independence political parties say they want the French government to withdraw the electoral reform before they restart talks.
"We need strong actions [from the government] to calm the situation ... this is a political, not a security issue," said Dominique Fochi, secretary general of the pro-independence Caledonian Union.
Shares of Australian nickel miners were on the rise as underlying prices surged by 7% over the weekend due to unrest in New Caledonia, a key global supplier of the metal.
Australia's Albanese earlier told ABC radio his country was awaiting approval from French authorities to send an evacuation flight to pick up tourists stranded in New Caledonia hotels.
Around 300 Australians have registered with consular officials in the French territory, which lies in the southwest Pacific, some 1,500 km (930 miles) east of Australia.
There were around 3,200 people waiting to leave or enter New Caledonia as commercial flights were cancelled due to the unrest that broke out last week, the local government said.
New Zealand defence aircraft were on standby and also awaiting the French go-ahead to repatriate nationals, its Foreign Minister Winston Peters wrote in a post on X on Sunday.
