Month: September 2023

France’s ambassador to Niger left the country early on Wednesday morning, around one month after the military government ordered his expulsion and days after President Emmanuel Macron said the diplomat would be pulled out and French troops withdrawn. Relations between Niger and France, its former colonial ruler which maintained a military presence in the country …

Russia Wednesday accused the United States and Britain of helping Ukraine carry out an attack last week against the headquarters Russian Black Sea fleet in Russia-occupied Crimea. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing that the attack was “planned in advance using Western intelligence means, NATO satellite assets, and reconnaissance planes.” Zakharova …

The United States government ramped up its diplomatic efforts and humanitarian assistance for thousands of ethnic Armenians fleeing the Nagorno-Karabakh region. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports on how the crisis is evolving, after Azerbaijan regained control last week of the breakaway territory. …

Six young people from Portugal will argue that governments across Europe aren’t doing enough to protect people from the harms of climate change at the European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday, in the latest and largest instance of activists taking governments to court to force climate action. The lawyers representing the young adults and …

Forty-two thousand women serve in the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense recently officially approved a female uniform. Lesia Bakalets has the story from Kyiv. VOA footage by Yevhenii Shynkar. …

A Russian court on Tuesday rejected Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny’s appeal against a decision to imprison him on extremism charges for almost two decades. On August 4, judges of the Moscow City Court convicted Navalny on extremism charges and sentenced him to 19 years in prison, ruling that his previously handed prison sentences will be …

At least 20 people were killed and nearly 300 others injured by an explosion at a crowded gas station in Nagorno-Karabakh as thousands of people rushed to flee into Armenia, separatist authorities in the region said Tuesday. More than 13,500 people — about 12% of the region’s population — have fled across the border since …

The captain of a river cruise boat that collided with another vessel in Hungary’s capital in 2019, killing at least 27 people who were mostly tourists from South Korea, was found guilty on Tuesday of negligence leading to a fatal mass catastrophe and sentenced to five years and six months in prison.  Judge Leona Nemeth …

Tensions between Serbia and Kosovo flared anew over the weekend when some 30 heavily armed Serbs barricaded themselves in an Orthodox monastery in northern Kosovo, setting off a daylong gunbattle with police that left one officer and three attackers dead. Sunday’s clash was one of the worst since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. …