MOSCOW: A Russian warship fired warning shots with automatic weapons on Sunday on a Palau-flagged dry cargo ship in the southwestern Black Sea as it made its way toward Ukraine, the Russian defense ministry said.
Russia last month scuppered a UN-brokered grain deal that ensured Ukraine could get its agricultural produce to market via the Black Sea and Moscow cautioned that it would deem all ships heading to Ukrainian waters to be potentially carrying weapons.
Russia said in a statement that its Vasily Bykov patrol ship had fired automatic weapons on the Sukru Okan vessel after the latter’s captain failed to respond to a request to halt for an inspection.
The Sukru Okan was making its way toward the Ukrainian port of Izmail, the defense ministry said. Refinitiv shipping data showed the ship was heading north toward the coast of Bulgaria.
“To forcibly stop the vessel, warning fire was opened from automatic weapons,” the Russian defense ministry said.
The Russian military boarded the vessel with the help of a Ka-29 helicopter.
“After the inspection group completed its work on board, the Sukru Okan continued on its way to the port of Izmail,” the defense ministry said.
Reuters could not immediately reach the vessel or its owners for comment.
Ukraine and the West say Russia’s steps amount to a de-facto blockade of Ukrainian ports that threatens to cut off the flow of wheat and sunflower seeds from Ukraine to world markets.
Ukraine’s response — sea-drone attacks on a Russian oil tanker and a warship at its Novorossiysk naval base, next door to a major grain and oil port — has added to these new dangers for transport in the Black Sea.
Russia and Ukraine are two of the world’s top agricultural producers, and major players in the wheat, barley, maize, rapeseed, rapeseed oil, sunflower seed and sunflower oil markets. Russia is also dominant in the fertilizer market.
Russian warship fires warning shots on cargo ship in Black Sea
https://arab.news/n7ern
Russian warship fires warning shots on cargo ship in Black Sea
- Ukraine and the West say Russia’s steps amount to a de-facto blockade of Ukrainian ports
- Russia and Ukraine are two of the world’s top agricultural producers
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
