NICOSIA: The European Commission will propose setting up a regional firefighting hub based in Cyprus that could also assist Middle East countries in battling major wildfires, the head of the bloc’s executive arm said Wednesday.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in her annual address to the European Parliament that it was necessary to “give ourselves the tools” to combat wildfires made worse by climate change as summers become “hotter, harsher and more dangerous.”
“This summer, we all saw the pictures of Europe’s forests and villages on fire,” Von der Leyen said. “More than a million hectares were burned. ... The scale of the damage is enormous. And we know it is not a one-off.”
The announcement comes as reports have suggested that climate change worsened wildfires in southern Europe this summer, with the likelihood of similar wildfire outbreaks rising sharply.
Von der Leyen did not provide specifics on how the Cyprus-based hub will operate or what resources it will have.
Cypriot officials proposed setting up such a hub on the Mediterranean island nation as early as 2022, with additional firefighting aircraft that could quickly respond to wildfires, particularly in Mideast countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides hailed the announcement on social media as “hugely important” for the region. His government spokesman Constantinos Letymbiotis said the creation of such a hub would bolster the EU’s operational capabilities along its southern axis and also benefit the bloc’s Mideast neighbors.
In July, Cyprus suffered one of its worst wildfires in recent memory that killed two elderly people trying to flee the fast-moving flames in their car. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and more than 40 square miles of land in the southern foothills of the Troodos mountain range were scorched.
A few weeks before the wildfire’s outbreak, Cyprus’ Environment Minister Maria Panayiotou said the country was in the process of bolstering its fleet of firefighting aircraft. She said tenders were out for three fixed-wing aircraft with a water-carrying capacity of 3,000 liters (800 gallons), each in line with EU guidelines, as part of a five-year plan for the island nation to build a state-owned fleet with 10 such planes.
As in previous years, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Lebanon dispatched helicopters and other fixed-wing aircraft to help Cypriot authorities put out July’s wildfire. Cyprus — the closest EU member country to the Middle East — often reciprocates when it receives calls for help.
Cyprus will host a regional firefighting hub as climate change worsens blazes
https://arab.news/j7af4
Cyprus will host a regional firefighting hub as climate change worsens blazes
- Von der Leyen said: “The scale of the damage is enormous. And we know it is not a one-off”
- She didn’t provide specifics on how the Cyprus-based hub will operate or what resources it will have
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
