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Belarus has become an accomplice to Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine. Russian troops used it as a launchpad for missile strikes and air raids on Ukraine. In response, Western countries have imposed tough sanctions on Belarus. Maxim Moskalkov reports. Camera: Elena Matusovsky.
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Russia this week shut off a major gas pipeline to Germany as Europe and the U.S. accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of “weaponizing” energy. And as Henry Ridgwell reports from London, there are growing environmental concerns about an unexplained Russian gas flare close to the Arctic.
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Russia closed the major Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany on Wednesday, claiming the three-day shutdown is necessary for the maintenance of turbines. Europe and the U.S. dispute that claim and accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of “weaponizing” energy.  

Last year, Russia supplied 40 percent of the European Union’s gas. In recent weeks, Russia has reduced the flow through Nord Stream 1 to just 20 percent of capacity. Moscow blamed the latest shutdown on Western sanctions that have targeted its economy. 

Visiting the town of Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic coast Tuesday, where the Nord Stream pipeline comes ashore, Markus Soeder, the premier of the German state of Bavaria, said his country was in a difficult position. 

“Putin is playing a game with Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. I think it’s a kind of game. Our problem right now is that we are not in a position to adequately respond to this game,” Soeder told reporters. 

Current European gas prices have soared to about 10 times their average price over the past decade. Germany declared a gas crisis in June and warned that consumers and businesses must cut back. Consumption has since fallen by around 20 percent. 

In a stark speech last week, French President Emmanuel Macron warned of “the end of abundance” and said the French people would have to make sacrifices. 

“Our freedom — the system of freedom, which we are used to living in — has a cost. And at times, if it needs to be defended, that could entail sacrifices to reach the end of certain battles we must carry out,” Macron said at a cabinet meeting August 24. 

Looking for other sources

As Russia turns off the taps, Europe is scrambling to find alternative sources. Imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) have helped Europe fill gas storage sites to 80 percent capacity, two months ahead of the EU target. That has calmed markets and brought down prices in recent days. But storage will only last so long, said Tom O’Donnell, who teaches at the Free University in Berlin and is the founder of energy analyst group The Global Barrel.

“Storage by itself isn’t enough for the winter,” O’Donnell told VOA. “With all the pipelines cut off — which is what we have to expect from Russia, that all their pipelines will be cut off — [even with] all the LNG we can take, that storage is going to last 2½ months in heating season. And then, you know, Europe’s stuck.”

Europe is trying to wean itself off Putin’s gas, but it will take at least two years, O’Donnell said. 

“In the meantime, he has leverage and he will use it all he can before totally loses the business,” O’Donnell said. “The dependence of Europe on Russian-delivered gas by pipeline is much greater than, let’s say, the importance of that money for Putin, because he makes so much more money from oil.” 

Meanwhile, there is growing concern over a Russian gas flare, which has been burning close to the Finnish border for two months. Experts say it’s burning an estimated $10 million worth of gas every day, sending the equivalent of 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

“It is on the site where the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany is starting,” said professor Esa Vakkilainen of Lut University in Lappeenranta, the closest city to the border.

“But it is also a place where the Russians have built an LNG plant to deliver LNG, and that plant was supposed to open this spring,” Vakkilainen told the Reuters news agency. “And so, it is probably operating. But due to the war in Ukraine, there is very little information about what is actually happening there. So, we can only speculate that right now there are some technical difficulties either involved with Nord Stream or with this LNG station.”

Across Europe, new LNG terminals are under construction, old coal and nuclear power plants are being fired up again, and there is a big investment in renewable power. But in the short term, it may not be enough, and governments are warning of a difficult winter ahead.
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The death of the late Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has come at a critical moment in Russia’s history. Society is divided over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and analysts say the government of Vladimir Putin is becoming increasingly authoritarian and repressive, as explained in this report from the VOA Moscow bureau, narrated by Marcus Harton
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Russia on Thursday launched weeklong war games involving forces from China and other nations in a show of growing defense cooperation between Moscow and Beijing as they both face tensions with the U.S.

The maneuvers are also intended to demonstrate that Moscow has sufficient military might for massive drills even as its troops are engaged in military action in Ukraine.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Vostok 2022 (East 2022) exercise will be held until Sept. 7 at seven firing ranges in Russia’s Far East and the Sea of Japan and involve more than 50,000 troops and over 5,000 weapons units, including 140 aircraft and 60 warships.

Russian general staff chief, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, will personally oversee the drills that will involve troops from several ex-Soviet nations, China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Syria.

The Defense Ministry noted that as part of the maneuvers, the Russian and Chinese navies in the Sea of Japan will “practice joint action to protect sea communications, areas of marine economic activity and support for ground troops in littoral areas.”

The drills showcase increasing defense ties between Moscow and Beijing, which have grown stronger since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. China has pointedly refused to criticize Russia’s action, blaming the U.S. and NATO for provoking Moscow, and has blasted punishing sanctions imposed on Moscow. Russia, in turn, has strongly backed China amid the tensions with the U.S. that followed a recent visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Putin has drawn parallels between U.S. support for Ukraine and Pelosi’s trip, describing them both as part of alleged efforts by Washington to foment global instability.

Alexander Gabuyev, a political analyst who closely follows Russia-China ties, noted that “it’s very important for Beijing to show to the U.S. that it has levers to pressure America and its global interests.”

“The joint maneuvers with Moscow, including the naval drills, are intended to signal that if the pressure on Beijing continues it will have no other choice but to strengthen the military partnership with Russia,” Gabuyev said. “It will have a direct impact on the interests of the U.S. and its allies, including Japan.”

He noted that the Kremlin, for its part, wants to show that the country’s military is powerful enough to flex its muscle elsewhere despite the campaign in Ukraine.

“The Russian leadership demonstrates that everything goes according to plan and the country and its military have resources to conduct the maneuvers along with the special military operation,” Gabuyev said.

The exercise continues a series of joint war games by Russia and China in recent years, including naval drills and patrols by long-range bombers over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea. Last year, Russian troops for the first time deployed to Chinese territory for joint maneuvers.

China’s participation in the drills “aims to deepen pragmatic and friendly cooperation between the militaries of the participating countries, enhance the level of strategic cooperation among all participating parties, and enhance the ability to jointly respond to various security threats,” Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Col. Tan Kefei said last week.

Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have developed strong personal ties to bolster a “strategic partnership” between the former Communist rivals as they both are locked in rivalry with the U.S.

Even though Moscow and Beijing in the past rejected the possibility of forging a military alliance, Putin has said that such a prospect can’t be ruled out. He also has noted that Russia has been sharing highly sensitive military technologies with China that helped significantly bolster its defense capability.
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The death of the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms led to the disintegration of the former communist giant in 1991, is seen by many in China as a reminder to avoid the same fate as its neighbor.

Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at 91, is lauded in China for normalizing Sino-Soviet relations, paving the way for solid ties between the two countries in subsequent years. But Beijing also blames him for bringing about the dissolution of its ally, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

While the West saw Gorbachev as a brave hero who brought much needed democratic reforms to his country and freed the Soviet satellite states to be independent, China sees him as a weak leader who failed his country.

Both countries were at a crossroad in the late 1980s. The Soviet Union’s economy was near collapse and changes were urgently needed; China’s people were yearning for political reforms after decades of poverty and political turmoil.

Whereas Gorbachev allowed political reforms, China’s then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping crushed protesters and put reformist General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Zhao Ziyang under house arrest.

At that time and even now, China thinks it made the right decision.

“Back in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping believed Mr. Gorbachev got the perestroika (restructuring) wrong,” said Victor Gao, a former interpreter for Deng. He is currently a professor at China’s Soochow University and vice president of the Center for China and Globalization. “Gorbachev was pushing political reform ahead of economic reform; China under Deng was promoting economic reform ahead of political reform.”

Gorbachev loosened control over not only the USSR’s state-controlled economy but also its political society, leading eventually to satellite states such as Latvia and Lithuania and later Eastern European countries splitting off and chaos in the Russian economy.

To Deng, this was not a smart move.

“Deng believed Gorbachev got the priorities and the sequence wrong. By the end of the day, what matters the most is whether you can bring bread and butter to the table for the people,” Gao said.

Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor of international relations at the International Christian University in Japan, said the Soviet Union’s collapse led China’s leadership to harden its commitment to socialism.

To make sure that socialist principles were sustainable, Deng opened up the Chinese economy, starting by setting up special economic zones to grow prosperity, Nagy said.

His successor, Jiang Zemin, allowed the country’s growing number of capitalists to join the Chinese Communist Party. Current leader Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has campaigned to root out corruption to maintain the legitimacy of the party.

Today, China is much wealthier than it was in the 1980s and is soon to become the world’s biggest economy, whereas Russia still suffers serious economic problems.

The two countries’ different fates also may be because of their “very different” political systems, Nagy said.

“Russia today is a kleptocracy, it’s very few men and it’s always men who run the economy, it’s like a mafia state. They don’t have centralized control and a centralized state. It’s very corrupt,” Nagy said.

In China, the Chinese Communist Party has been able to exert centralized control to govern effectively, he said.

“Whatever you can say about the CCP, in China, 800 million people have been pulled out of poverty, they have really good infrastructure, a lot of people are well off, and this is due to relatively good governance of the party,” Nagy said.

Critics argue that China risks eventual collapse, given problems such as an unhealthy property market, a slowing economy and disruptions from its zero-COVID policy that has led to major cities being locked down.

However, a former Taiwanese official who has dealt with China believes that regardless of the challenges China may face, it is impossible for Chinese leaders to ever accept the disintegration of their country as Gorbachev did.

“Chinese people always have a sense that their country must be unified, it can’t be split for whatever reason. This mindset goes back to the first emperor who unified China. This feeling of unification is very strong among Chinese people,” he said. “The Soviet state on the other hand was made up of many countries. Their views of one nation are not so strong.

“China definitely wouldn’t let Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan split off,” added the former official, who requested anonymity to avoid problems ahead of upcoming local elections in Taiwan.

It is unclear whether China’s growing economy and attendant problems will ever lead to the kind of political reforms that Gorbachev fostered, he said.

Nagy also questions whether China will ever move toward the kind of political reforms initiated by Gorbachev.

“In the Chinese context, I’m not sure a democratic system will be able to deal with all their challenges and manage the stable economic growth without the current control of the state,” he said. “Something more fractious like Taiwanese democracy could create problems in the internal stability in the Chinese context.

“I don’t think any political system can deal with the challenges in China today: demographics, environmental problems, productivity problems in economy, quality of economic growth, debt, water security, food security, selected diversification from Chinese supply chains.”

At the end of the day, Gao said, the Chinese leadership’s top priority is maintaining political stability.

“The collapse of the USSR under Mr. Gorbachev has been closely studied and analyzed by China. China has been successful in navigating through more than four decades of reform and opening to the outside world,” Gao said.

“However … maintaining political stability has always been a most important task. … China believes reform needs to be steady, but not hasty; gradual, but not in one stroke.  Stability needs to be protected at all cost,” Gao said.

“China will continue to push for greater reform and opening to the outside world, in building a unique system of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

In response to Gorbachev’s death, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday: “Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev made positive contribution to the normalization of relations between China and the Soviet Union. We mourn his passing and extend our condolences to his family.”
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U.N. nuclear inspectors expect to begin their work Thursday at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, assessing safety and security matters amid international concern that fighting in the area could endanger the facility.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi told reporters there has been “increased military activity, including this morning,” near the plant.

“But weighing the pros and cons and having come so far, we are not stopping,” Grossi said.

Ukraine and Russia have repeatedly accused each other of shelling the area near the power plant, the largest nuclear facility in Europe and a key source of energy for Ukraine.

That continued Thursday, with Russia saying Ukraine sent a team of troops to try to seize the plant, while Ukraine said Russian forces shelled the route the IAEA team would travel to get to the site.

The company that oversees Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, Enerhoatom, said Russian shelling led the Zaporizhzhia plant’s emergency protection system to shut down one of its reactors.

Grossi said he expects his team’s initial work to last a few days and that he hopes to establish a permanent presence.

With the nuclear plant in the midst of a war zone, world leaders have expressed fears it could be damaged and result in a radiation disaster like that at Ukraine’s Chernobyl plant in 1986.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Wednesday reiterated his call for Russia to fully demilitarize the area around the plant.

“They are playing games. They are gambling with the nuclear security,” Borrell said. “We cannot play war games in the neighborhood of a site like this.”

Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder welcomed the presence of the IAEA team and called on Russia to enable them to do their work at the Zaporizhzhia plant.

Ryder also announced U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will lead a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Sept. 8 at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Ryder said the meeting, the group’s fifth, would bring together defense ministers and senior military officials from 50 nations to discuss the Ukraine conflict and coordination for Ukraine aid.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Wednesday there would be an announcement in the coming days about “future security assistance” for Ukraine on top of the $13 billion already pledged by the United States.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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As the world marks the passing of former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, VOA’s Kane Farabaugh shares the thoughts of international journalists and his own memories of what it was like to report on the international statesman.
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When Caroline Muscat filed Freedom of Information requests in Malta to access public contracts and payments to the director of a prominent media company, the agencies in Malta told her the information “does not exist.”

Muscat, founder and editor of a small independent news website called The Shift, appealed. After investigating, the Data Protection Commission ruled in her favor, ordering the agencies in July 2021 to share the information.

Instead, 40 government ministries and agencies sued The Shift, appealing the ruling.

Some of the lawsuits alleged that The Shift’s requests, filed in December 2020, amounted to harassment of officials, the news website reported.

“This is nothing more than an attempt to dissect our work and cripple us financially,” Muscat told VOA.

To fight the cases, the website needs to raise $40,185 — half of its yearly operational budget.

“We are a community-funded newsroom, and having to raise this amount of money in such a short period of time is close to impossible,” Muscat said.

The Maltese Embassy did not respond to VOA’s request for comment.

Legal fight

The use of mass lawsuits — known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs — to target journalists is not new.

At the time of her death in October 2017, the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 48 libel cases — five criminal and 43 civil.

Many were filed by government officials, including former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who is unrelated to The Shift founder.

The Council of Europe criticized authorities for not immediately dismissing the cases after a car bomb killed Galizia, who came to prominence reporting on political corruption in Malta.

But the tactic is not confined to Malta. Over a decade, 570 cases of SLAPPs have been recorded in Europe, with the number increasing every year, according to data collected by the nongovernmental Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) and Amsterdam Law Clinics.

Oliver Money-Kyrle, head of Europe advocacy and programs at the International Press Institute, described SLAPPs as legal action “with the intent not of winning the case, but with the intent of silencing the person and intimidating them so they either settle out of court, or they withdraw what is being published.”

Corinne Vella of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation — a nonprofit set up after her sister Galizia’s death — said the journalist’s experience aligned with this apparent lack of intent to win the cases.

“Eventually, the cases collapsed because [the plaintiffs] never turned up in court,” Vella said of the lawsuits against Galizia. “So, very clearly, they found excuses just to harass her.”

With The Shift’s case, Vella said it appeared to be “an orchestrated attempt to prevent any information from being accessed by The Shift and being made public.”

SLAPPs are “very effective” in hindering journalists’ work, according to Vella, because of how exhausting, expensive and time-consuming it can be to fend off so many cases.

“It makes you a target in more ways than one because once you’ve hit so many lawsuits, people can start to think that you’ve actually done something wrong,” Vella said. “And this certainly was the case for Daphne.”

Resource drain 

The Shift has argued that its freedom-of-information requests are important to the public interest because they concern the administration of public funds. Since the 40 lawsuits were filed, 12 rulings have been issued, all in favor of the news website.

But those rulings are being appealed.

“You have 40 government agencies — and we’re talking 40 to 60 lawyers over there — that the government is paying to fight an individual newsroom,” Muscat said. “Why? Simply because it does not want to abide by, first of all, the Freedom of Information Act — its own legislation — and two, government-appointed bodies that have already ruled in our favor.”

The rise of SLAPPs in Europe has led to a heightened awareness of the lack of legislative safeguards against such practices.

Since Galizia’s killing, media groups and some members of the European Parliament have advocated for EU-wide legislation protecting journalists from SLAPPs.

In April, the European Commission proposed an anti-SLAPP directive that would allow judges to quickly dismiss such cases.

“[The experiences of] both The Shift and Daphne show very, very clearly just how important it is to have protection mechanisms built into law,” Vella said. “It’s not a matter of tinkering with existing legislation and adding clauses and provisions. There has to be a law that comprehensively protects people from abusive lawsuits.”
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Britain will have a new prime minister next week, nearly two months after the resignation of Boris Johnson in July, following a series of scandals. As Henry Ridgwell reports, Johnson’s successor faces a series of daunting challenges — while Britain’s allies, including Ukraine, are watching closely.
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Mikhail Gorbachev could have been celebrated for involuntarily opening a path toward Ukraine’s independence, but his support for Crimea’s annexation and silence in the face of Russia’s invasion have stained his reputation there.

Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, triggered its demise in 1991, which led to the formation of 15 new independent countries including Ukraine.

But it is no accident that the Ukrainian government is still mute, a day after the death of Gorbachev, whose mother and wife were of Ukrainian origin.

Ukrainians walking through the streets of Kyiv on Wednesday did not mince their words about the leader of the “occupying” and “imperialist” Soviet power.

“I’m very happy he died. The more enemies and their supporters die, the happier I’ll be,” said 32-year-old Oleksandr Stepanov.

Katerina Boyuk, a 17-year-old student, is convinced that Gorbachev “did not really care” about Ukraine and that the country’s independence has “nothing to do” with him.

“He was just the ruler of the USSR, and he couldn’t manage to keep his throne,” she said.

“I think he’s as much of an aggressor as the current Kremlin leaders,” said Vytalya Formantchuk, 43, adding that Gorbachev “put a lot of effort into destroying Ukrainians, their culture and their language.”

The visible hostility of Ukrainians toward Gorbachev also stems from his silence regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Gorbachev, mostly popular in the West, never publicly commented on what has turned out to be the worst conflict in Europe since World War II.

One member of his close circle, Russian journalist Alexei Venediktov, said in July that Gorbachev was “disappointed, of course.”

Even worse, Gorbachev said he “approved” Moscow’s annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014.

He argued that “the people” had spoken in the referendum on the unification of the peninsula to Russia, widely regarded as a sham.

Kyiv never forgave him for that.

Gorbachev is perceived in Ukraine “with a lot of skepticism — we do not share the enthusiasm we’ve been seeing in obituaries all around the world,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, philosopher and editor-in-chief of the ukraineworld.com website.

“His destiny is the same destiny as many Russian reformers who want reforms, but only up to a certain point: when people start questioning Russian imperialism and decolonization,” he said.

Gorbachev was Soviet leader in 1986, when Chernobyl’s No. 4 nuclear reactor exploded, causing the world’s worst nuclear accident and spreading radioactive contamination across Europe.

Moscow first tried to downplay the extent of the disaster, which delayed evacuation of locals.

Gorbachev is widely blamed for this and for the decision to maintain the May 1 parade in Kyiv five days later.

Thousands of people, including many children, marched through the city holding flowers and singing songs, blissfully unaware of the radioactive cloud surrounding them.

Gorbachev “was an ordinary Russian imperialist. He simply did everything he could to save the USSR and restore the Russian Empire, which is now waging war against us,” popular blogger and activist Yuri Kasyanov posted on Facebook.

Disliked by Russians, rejected by Ukrainians, Gorbachev still regularly talked about his Ukrainian roots.

“I am, after all, half Ukrainian. My mother was Ukrainian, and my wife, Raisa, was too. I spoke my very first words in Ukrainian, and the first songs I heard were Ukrainian,” he said in a 2015 interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel.
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The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, says the bloc’s 27 members have agreed to suspend an agreement with Russia, which had made it easier for Russians to obtain tourist visas, as a sanction for Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Borrell announced the decision, which falls short of the total ban on visa issuance some countries sought, on Tuesday after the second day of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in the Czech capital.

A 2007 visa agreement to ease EU entry requirements for Russians was partially suspended in late February, targeting people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, such as Russia’s official delegations and holders of diplomatic passports. But it left so-called “ordinary Russians” untouched, allowing them to continue to enjoy EU visa-facilitation benefits, such as reduced waiting times and costs and the need to present fewer documents when applying.

Countries that share borders with Russia — the Baltic states, Poland, and Finland — have led the drive for more restrictive bans on visas for Russian tourists. With air service barred by the EU on flights from Russia, most travelers are using their land borders to travel on to other EU countries.

Borrell said the agreement is aimed at stopping Russians from “visa shopping” by applying for their travel documents with countries in the bloc where the rules are not as strict. Once granted a visa to an EU country, the holder of the document can then travel freely within the EU’s Schengen Area.

The suspension of the pact makes the EU visa process more complicated, more expensive, and more bureaucratic, as well as increasing waiting times for approval, according to European Commission guidelines.

Germany and France have led the other side of the debate, saying the limiting of visas to Russians would be counterproductive as the EU tries to fight for the “hearts and minds” of those Russians who don’t support Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine.

Kyiv has called for the bloc to ban issuing visas to all Russians except political dissidents.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told RFE/RL in an interview on August 30 that “calling this war a ‘Putin problem’ and not the problem of the Russian society that mostly supports its president is self-deception.”

All 27 EU members had to agree to any measure adopted that would limit the issuance of visas throughout the bloc.
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A new prime minister will take power in Britain next week after the resignation of Boris Johnson in July, following a series of scandals. His successor faces a series of daunting economic and political challenges, while Britain’s allies — especially Ukraine — are watching closely.

The fewer than 200,000 Conservative party members, around 0.3 percent of Britain’s voting population, will choose the next leader of the party and the country. The field has been whittled down to two candidates: former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who resigned from Johnson’s cabinet, and the current foreign secretary, Liz Truss, who polls show as the overwhelming favorite.

Ukraine

Their first challenge: war in Ukraine. Britain has provided around $2.7 billion of military aid to Kyiv since Russia’s invasion in February, second only to the United States. Britain is training hundreds of Ukrainian troops and has pledged to invest millions of dollars in rebuilding the country.

The outgoing prime minister is hugely popular in Kyiv. Bakeries sell Boris Johnson-themed cakes and biscuits, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made no secret of his wish for Johnson to remain in power. So will his departure spell a changing relationship? That’s highly unlikely under Liz Truss, said political analyst Alan Wager of the U.K. in a Changing Europe program at Kings College London.

“There’s almost zero chance of any significant change in the U.K.’s approach to the crisis in Ukraine. [Truss] was foreign secretary under the Boris Johnson administration and many of her key backers are, if you like, hawks when it comes to Ukraine. She’s also committed to increasing U.K. defense spending to 3 percent of gross domestic product and continuing the supply of arms to Ukraine,” Wager told VOA.

Ukraine may be the least complicated of the challenges facing Britain’s next prime minister.

Energy crisis

Domestic gas and electricity prices are set to soar by 80 percent in October, with even higher increases for businesses, compounding the post-COVID-19 economic crisis and raising the prospect of an imminent recession.

Charities say such price rises could be deadly for the most vulnerable in society.

“Families just cannot afford anything close to this. It’s a disaster. Ten thousand people die every year in the U.K. directly because of a cold home. That number is going to skyrocket,” Adam Scorer, chief executive of the charity National Energy Action, told Reuters.

Truss has, for now, ruled out price caps or cash handouts to help people pay their bills — and says tax cuts are the answer.

“What I’m talking about is enabling people to keep more money in their own pockets,” Truss said during a campaign event August 9. “What I don’t believe in is taxing people to the highest level in 70 years and then giving them their own money back. We are Conservatives, we believe in low taxes, and what I’m not going to do is announce the next budget in advance.”

Former chancellor Sunak has pledged more support for energy bills but did not give further details.

“If a British Conservative government goes through the autumn [fall] and winter and does not provide direct support to those vulnerable people, I believe it will be a moral failure and the British people will never forgive us,” Sunak said during a debate August 19 in Manchester.

In a sign of the country’s economic pressures, the British pound has fallen to its lowest level against the U.S. dollar since early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Europe

Meanwhile Britain’s relations with European neighbors remain strained, six years after the country’s vote to leave the European Union. Asked on the campaign trail if the president of France was a friend or foe, Truss said, “The jury’s out. … But if I become prime minister, I will judge him on deeds not words.”

She was applauded by some Conservative party members — but others criticized her for questioning Britain’s relationship with a close neighbor and NATO ally.

Asked about Truss’ comments, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “The British people, Britain, is a friend of France, a strong ally, no matter its leaders — and sometimes despite its leaders.”

Truss has also pledged to rip up the Northern Ireland protocol, a key Brexit customs agreement that Boris Johnson signed with the European Union to avoid a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

“That could lead, in time, to a trade war between the U.K. and the EU,” said analyst Alan Wager.

He added the two candidates are appealing to a relatively tiny electorate and have rarely been tested on the campaign trail.

“The U.K. is entering into this new crisis if you like — this new economic crisis coupled with this international crisis in Ukraine — without its political leaders having to confront the key challenges that the U.K. faces. And that leaves the U.K. extremely vulnerable going into this winter across many fronts,” Wager told VOA.
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