Month: June 2018

European leaders failed to breach bitter divisions over migration during a mini-summit in Brussels Sunday, making chances increasingly slim they will reach any significant deal for managing the ongoing influx of economic migrants and asylum-seekers at a full-blown European Union meeting later this week.

Still, some leaders cited modest progress on a few issues — including a plan to set up migrant reception centers that is backed by France and Spain — even as Italy called for a major overhaul of the EU’s current system of dealing with migration.

“I think it was better than expected, there was some progress that has been achieved,” Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said, echoing a similar assessment by his Spanish counterpart, with both describing frank exchanges in the afternoon meeting.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the leaders discussed closer cooperation with non-EU countries, such as transit countries, in managing migration flows, as well as secondary migration movements within the bloc.

“We need to improve the internal functioning [of migration] to have an approach that is above all pragmatic, efficient, which fights against illegal migration but doesn’t go against our principles,” Macron said, describing what he saw as a consensus achieved during the meeting.

Yet agreement on a broad, overarching migration plan appeared elusive, and the summit was handicapped from the start, after being boycotted by eastern European countries deeply hostile over pressure to take in more asylum-seekers.

Their position, shared by Austria, stands in sharp contrast to a multiple-point plan outlined by Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte on Sunday that would increase responsibility for all EU countries in dealing with migrants, including handling asylum claims of those arriving on Italian and other European shores.

“At this moment, the only thing that can be done is laying the groundwork of what a consensus could look like in the future,” said Marie de Somer, a migration expert at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think-tank. “The divides are too deep to see a compromise arriving within the next few days.”

Stranded migrants

The meeting came even as new reports came in of migrants stranded at sea, some in rickety boats off the Libyan coast and others in humanitarian rescue ships that have so far failed to be granted entrance at a European port.

A recent poll shows migration tops European concerns — even as the number of migrants arriving to European shores has plummeted in recent months — to just 41,000 so far this year, compared to a high of 1.2 million in 2015.

“The crisis now is not a migration crisis, it’s not a crisis of numbers, it’s a political crisis,” de Somer said.

The political stakes are indeed high across the 28-member bloc where anti-migrant sentiment has catapulted populists to power in Italy, Austria and Hungary, and helped shape the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

They may be the highest for Chancellor Angela Markel of Germany, which has taken in the lion’s share of asylum-seekers. She faces intense pressure to bring home a European migration deal this week that more fairly spreads the burden, or risk possible collapse of her coalition government.

Merkel left the summit saying there was “a lot of goodwill” during the meeting, and participants agreed to strengthen external borders and share the migration burden among all countries.

The apparent progress Sunday on “secondary” migration movements, including those reaching Germany, may help ease the political pressure Merkel faces. Her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, has threatened to turn migrants away if EU leaders fail to reach agreement on these flows.

There was also some support for screening African migrants heading to Europe in North Africa and the Balkans, an idea that has sparked some concern about migrant rights, particularly after a 2016 EU migrant deal with Turkey.

Amnesty International described such reception centers as “docking platforms for refugees and asylum-seekers,” and called their creation as “irresponsible as it is dangerous.”

Analyst de Somer called it “worrisome” that ideas such as the reception centers is “taken on when EU members states have difficulties finding solutions and compromises. So instead of looking inwards, they look outwards.”

No game changer

There was little chance Sunday’s meeting would be a game changer — especially after four eastern European states, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — announced they would boycott it. Along with Austria, the four countries strongly oppose migrant quotas that would see them taking in more migrants, citing security risks.

Currently, frontline Mediterranean states, notably Italy and Greece, are grappling with the bulk of new arrivals, and asylum demands skewed toward western Mediterranean and richer northern European states.  In 2017, for example, Germany received nearly a quarter-million requests for refugee status and Italy nearly 130,000 — compared to just over 5,000 for Poland.

Analyst de Somer believes progress in forging a European migration plan might be made incrementally, for example threats of ending the open-border Schengen system, which is popular among Europeans, to get eastern European countries to accept more migrants.

“Perhaps the outlook of losing Schengen can move things in the near future,” she said.

For his part, Macron has called for sanctions against states refusing to take in migrants — a stance that has drawn ire from Italy’s new government and is likely to be unpopular with eastern Europeans as well.

The differences have sometimes turned personal, with Italy’s new hardline Interior Minister Matteo Salvini most recently calling Macron “arrogant.”

“France will accept lessons from nobody,” Macron responded, noting the country ranked second in the number of asylum requests so far this year.

Meanwhile, the migrants themselves remained front and center in European news Sunday, as one humanitarian vessel remained stranded at sea in search of a safe harbor. Meanwhile, Italy reportedly rejected the request of another, Proactiva, to rescue several migrant boats in apparent distress, passing on the burden to the Libyan coast guard.

Earlier this month, Italy’s refused to accept another migrant rescue ship, Aquarius. The vessel ultimately docked in the Spanish port of Valencia.

 
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They are accustomed to police raids in River Village, a litter-strewn, dusty camp of mobile homes just beyond Rome’s ring-road and far from the foreign tourists and ancient sites of the Eternal City.

Last April, local police raided the camp, one of 148 government-recognized camps in Italy for Roma and Sinti people. They searched for stolen vehicles and checked residency papers.Ten people were arrested, 25 cars impounded and an illegal landfill of dangerous waste was sealed off.

The raid was taken as a signal by CasaPound, a neo-fascist grassroots group turned political party, to organize a demonstration a few days later to demand the camp’s closure, which houses 400 people, half of them minors, saying it had become “a perfect example of abuse and illegality and degradation.” That in turn in turn goaded gypsies and their supporters in anti-far-right groups to mount a counter-protest complaining of state abuse and the use of the “iron heel of fascism and Nazism.”

There was no violence that day, only an exchange insults.

But a week after Italy’s hardline interior secretary Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Lega party, called for a head count of Roma people with a view to deporting those without papers, fears are growing that vigilante attacks on Roma camps, formal and informal, are only a matter of time.

“The politicians blow their whistles and the dogs come barking,” says Giuseppe, a Roma.

Salvini has promised mass deportations of migrants in Italy illegally and has blocked the docking at Italian ports of NGO ships carrying mainly economic migrants from sub-Sahara Africa after they have been plucked from rickety dinghies in the Mediterranean.

“Irregular [undocumented] foreigners will be deported via agreements with other countries, but Italian Roma unfortunately you have to keep at home,” Salvini told a north Italian broadcaster last week. His remarks prompted a chorus of outrage from critics as well as disapproval from leaders of the Lega’s coalition partners, the Five Star Movement.

The Lega has already said it wants measures that would make it easier for authorities to remove Roma children from their families, if they are found not to be attending school.

Italy’s Roma and Sinti population is estimated at between 130,000 to 170,000 with almost half believed to be Italian citizens. Most of the non-Italians, originate from the Balkans and Romania, but many are considered stateless, making it legally impossible to deport them anywhere. Deporting those with other EU nationalities would be difficult, breaching the bloc’s rules of freedom of movement, although not entirely impossible on grounds of national security, say legal experts.

Salvini’s proposal for a Roma registry would also appear to be still-born. In 2008, the government of Silvio Berlusconi proposed a Roma census to appease its Lega coalition partners, only for it to be deemed unconstitutional by the courts, notes Francesco Palermo, a leading human rights expert.

But he and others fear Salvini is playing with fire.

Many Italians have long resented and feared Roma people, associating them with crime. Polls suggest that two-thirds of Italians think all Roma and Sinti should be expelled. Berlusconi’s embrace of a head-count fed anti-Roma hostility, prompting local police raids and creating the climate for a jump in vigilante attacks on camps of Roma and Sinti people and hate crimes towards them.

A Roma camp was burned to the ground in Naples by locals with the assistance of organized crime. The police stood by and watched.

The then leader of the Lega, Umberto Bossi, a minister in the Berlusconi government, declared, “The people do what the political class isn’t able to do.”

Then as now, the “Roma question” invoked chilling memories of the Mussolini era when foreign gypsies were expelled on grounds of public health and Italian-born ones were brutally treated in internment camps.

Now, Marcello Zuinisi, founder of the Associazione Nazione Rom, an organization lobbying for Roma people, has said he doesn’t expect any government action to come from Salvini’s pledge. “I don’t think he is going to do anything.It’s just talk,” he told reporters. But some fear the talk itself can have unpredictable consequences.
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Turks began voting Sunday for a new president and parliament in elections that pose the biggest challenge to Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party since they swept to power more than a decade and a half ago.

The elections will also usher in a powerful new executive presidency long sought by Erdogan and backed by a small majority of Turks in a 2017 referendum. Critics say it will further erode democracy in the NATO member state and entrench one-man rule.

More than 56 million people were registered to vote at 180,000 ballot boxes across Turkey. Voting began at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) and will end at 5 p.m. (1400 GMT).

Erdogan, the most popular but also divisive leader in modern Turkish history, moved the elections forward from November 2019, arguing the new powers would better enable him to tackle the nation’s mounting economic problems — the lira has lost 20 percent against the dollar this year — and deal with Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey and in neighboring Iraq and Syria.

Opposition galvanizes

But he reckoned without Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate of the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), whose feisty performance at campaign rallies has galvanized Turkey’s long-demoralized and divided opposition.

Addressing a rally in Istanbul on Saturday attended by hundreds of thousands of people, Ince promised to reverse what he and opposition parties see as a swing towards authoritarian rule under Erdogan in the country of 81 million people.

“If Erdogan wins, your phones will continue to be listened to. … Fear will continue to reign. … If Ince wins, the courts will be independent,” said Ince, adding he would lift Turkey’s state of emergency within 48 hours of being elected.

Coup attempt, then crackdown

Turkey has been under emergency rule, which restricts some personal freedoms and allows the government to bypass parliament with emergency decrees, for nearly two years following an attempted military coup in July 2016.

Erdogan blamed the coup on his former ally, U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, and has waged a sweeping crackdown on the preacher’s followers in Turkey. The United Nations say some 160,000 people have been detained and nearly as many more, including teachers, judges and soldiers, sacked.

The president’s critics, including the European Union, which Turkey still nominally aspires to join, say Erdogan has used the crackdown to stifle dissent. Few newspapers or other media openly criticize the government, and he has received far more election coverage than other presidential candidates.

Erdogan, who defends his tough measures as essential for national security, told his supporters at rallies Saturday that if re-elected he would press ahead with more of the big infrastructure projects that have helped turn Turkey into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies during his time in office.

“If he wins, I think the obstacles before us will disappear and we will have control,” said Nesrin Cuha, 37, a call center worker, who wore a headscarf. Religiously observant Muslims form the bedrock of Erdogan’s support.

“The opposition will not be a nuisance anymore with the new presidential system,” said another Erdogan supporter, retired sailor Engin Ozmen, 60.

Polls predict run-off

Polls show Erdogan falling short of a first-round victory in the presidential race but he would be expected to win a run-off on July 8, while his AK Party could lose its parliamentary majority, possibly heralding increased tensions between president and parliament.

Other presidential candidates include Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), who is now in jail on terrorism-related charges that he denies. If the HDP exceeds the 10 percent threshold of votes needed to enter parliament, it will be harder for the AKP to get a majority.
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Before it became one of the venues for the World Cup, the city of Volgograd in southwest Russia was famous for an overabundance of small, annoying flies called midges. While the small two-winged flies don’t bite, soccer fans are finding that they don’t leave you alone either. VOA’s Mariama Diallo takes a look at what Russian officials are doing to make the sporting life more comfortable for World Cup fans and players.
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More than 1,000 Macedonians protested on Saturday evening against the change of the name of the former Yugoslav Republic which was agreed with neighboring Greece to end a decades-long dispute.

Last week, the foreign ministers of Greece and Macedonia signed an accord to rename the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic the “Republic of North Macedonia.”

The agreement, which unlocked Macedonia’s path to possible European Union and NATO membership, triggered protests by nationalists.

The protest on Saturday evening organized by Macedonia’s biggest opposition party, VMRO-DPMNE, was peaceful. Protesters held banners reading “We don’t want to give up the name” and waved Macedonian flags as they demanded annulment of the agreement with Greece.

Macedonia, which declared its independence in 1991, avoided the wars that battered some other ex-Yugoslav republics. But Greece refused to accept the country’s name, saying it implied territorial claims on the Greek province of Macedonia and amounted to an appropriation of its ancient civilization. Greece blocked Macedonia’s efforts to join the European Union and NATO.

Macedonia has to amend its constitution to conform with the provisions of the deal. A referendum is also expected in Macedonia in the autumn.

Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov also opposes the accord. He refused to sign the agreement even though it was ratified by parliament on Wednesday.
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The Vatican tribunal on Saturday convicted a former Holy See diplomat and sentenced him to five years in prison for possessing and distributing child pornography in the first such trial of its kind inside the Vatican.

Monsignor Carlo Capella admitted to viewing the images during what he called a period of “fragility” and interior crisis sparked by a job transfer to the Vatican embassy in Washington. He apologized to his family and the Holy See, and appealed for leniency by saying the episode was just a “bump in the road” of a priestly vocation he loved and wanted to continue.

Tribunal President Giuseppe Dalla Torre read out the verdict after a two-day trial and sentenced Capella to five years and a fine of 5,000 euros ($5,830 ).

Prosecutor Gian Piero Milano had asked for the sentence to be stiffer due to what he called the “great” amount of material seized, which included 40 to 55 photos, films and Japanese animation found on his cellphone, an iCloud and Tumblr account, which Capella accessed even after he had been recalled by the Vatican in August 2017.

Capella’s attorney disputed that Capella had distributed the material. He denied the amount of porn was excessive and noted that his client had cooperated with investigators, repented and was seeking psychological help.

The Vatican recalled Capella, the No. 4 official in its Washington embassy, after the U.S. State Department notified it of a “possible violation of laws relating to child pornography images” by one of its diplomats in Washington.

Soon after, Canadian police issued an arrest warrant for Capella, accusing him of having accessed, possessed and distributed child porn over the Christmas 2016 holiday from a church in Windsor, Ontario using a social networking site.

During the first day of the trial on Friday, prosecutors and Vatican investigators revealed that the material featuring children aged 14-17 engaged in sexual acts.

Capella admitted to having viewed the material during a period of internal crisis brought on by his job transfer from the Vatican secretariat of state to Washington. He said he realized now that it was vulgar and “improper.”

During a final statement Saturday begging for the minimum sentence, Capella apologized for the pain his “fragility” and “weakness” had caused his family, his diocese and the Holy See.

“I hope that this situation can be considered a bump in the road” and that the case could also could be useful for the church, he said.

Capella was a high-ranking priest in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. He served on the Italy desk in the Vatican’s secretariat of state and was part of the official delegation that negotiated a tax treaty with Italy before being posted to the U.S. embassy in 2016.

A canon lawyer, Capella is listed online as having written a 2003 paper for the Pontifical Lateran University on priestly celibacy and the church’s criminal code.

 
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U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry will meet Russia’s energy minister next week in Washington, a person familiar with the situation said Friday, as the two countries compete to supply global markets with natural gas and crude.

Perry will meet Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak on Tuesday, in the context of the World Gas Conference in Washington, the source said.

Meetings between top energy officials from Russia and the United States, two of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, have been rare in recent years.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have cooled over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and as the Trump administration blames the Russian government for cyber attacks that targeted the U.S. power grid over the last two years.

The two countries are competing to sell natural gas to Europe. Russia’s Gazprom, the European Union’s biggest gas supplier, and several Western energy companies hope to open Nord Stream 2, a pipeline to bring Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

The United States, meanwhile, has begun some sales of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to Poland and Lithuania, though LNG shipments can be more expensive than gas sent via pipeline.

The United States says the advantage of its LNG is dependability and stable pricing.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump opposes the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as did the administration of former President Barack Obama. Washington believes that the pipeline would give Russia, which has at times frozen deliveries to parts of Europe over pricing disputes, more power over the region.

The meeting comes as U.S. national security adviser John Bolton plans to visit Moscow next week to prepare for a possible meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Perry and Novak will also likely talk about oil markets. On Friday, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed in Vienna to raise oil output by a modest amount after consumers had called for producers to curb rising fuel prices.

Russia, which is not an OPEC member, began cooperating last year with the group for the first time, holding back production to support global oil prices. Before the Vienna OPEC meeting, Novak said Moscow would propose a gradual increase in output from oil-producing countries, starting in July.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose a 20 percent tariff on vehicles assembled in the European Union and shipped to the United States, in retaliation for European tariffs on American imports.

On Friday, the day new EU tariffs went into effect, Trump tweeted, “…if these Tariffs and Barriers are not soon broken down and removed, we will be placing a 20% Tariff on all of their cars coming into the U.S. Build them here!”

Auto industry experts say such tariffs could negatively impact the U.S. economy, as well as Europe’s.

“It’s really a tangle; it’s not a simple question” of cars being made in one place and sold in another, Kasper Peters, communications manager of ACEA, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, said Friday in an interview with VOA.

In March, ACEA Secretary General Erik Jonnaert noted the impact European carmakers with plants in the United States have on local economies. “EU manufacturers do not only import vehicles into the U.S. They also have a major manufacturing footprint there, providing significant local employment and generating tax revenue,” Jonnaert said in a statement.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said earlier this week that his department plans to wrap up by July or August an investigation into whether imported cars and car parts are a threat to national security. But Daniel Price, a former senior economic adviser to President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post that Trump’s threat of new tariffs “short-circuited the … process and conclusively undercut the stated national security rationale of that investigation.”

The new EU tariffs enacted Friday apply to billions of dollars’ worth of American goods — including jeans, bourbon and motorcycles.

The action is the latest response to Trump’s decision to tax imported steel and aluminum.

The U.S. is scheduled to start taxing more than $30 billion in Chinese imports in two weeks.

Like the EU, China has promised to retaliate immediately, putting the world’s two largest economies at odds. 

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president, John Murphy, was cited by the Associated Press as saying he estimates that $75 billion in U.S. products could be subjected to new foreign tariffs by the end of the first week of July.

Separately, a spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry said, “The U.S. is abusing the tariff methods and starting trade wars all around the world.”

“Clarity [is] still lacking about how far things will ultimately go between [the] U.S. and China and the potential ripple effect for world trade,” said financial analyst Mike van Dulken.

During his presidential campaign, Trump promised to apply tariffs, saying countries around the world had been exploiting the U.S.

A former White House trade adviser says Trump “has been so belligerent that it becomes almost impossible for democratically elected leaders — or even a non-democratic leader like [Chinese President] Xi Jinping — to appear to kowtow and give in.”

Phillip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said, “The president has made it very hard for other countries to give him what he wants.”
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Kremlin officials are discussing a possible meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and United States National Security Adviser John Bolton when he visits Moscow next week, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

The Kremlin confirmed Thursday Bolton was planning to visit the Russian capital to discuss plans for a possible summit next month between Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Bolton will meet next week with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Russia’s, Reuters reported Friday — citing Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency.

National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis confirmed Thursday in a tweet that “On June 25-27, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton will meet with U.S. allies in London and Rome to discuss national security issues, and travel to Moscow to discuss a potential meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin.”

Media reports Thursday quoted unnamed sources who said the meeting is expected to take place next month during Trump’s visit to Europe. The two leaders could meet before the July 11-12 NATO summit in Brussels, or following President Trump’s visit to Britain two days later.

A location has not been disclosed, but several foreign media organizations reported earlier that Putin and Trump could meet in one of the European capitals following the NATO summit. Some media reports say Vienna is a possible venue.

Trump has expressed interest in restoring Putin’s standing on the global stage. Trump proposed earlier this month at the G-7 summit in Quebec that Russia be readmitted to the Group of Eight countries. Russia’s membership was suspended after its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
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In comments at odds with his home state’s whiskey distillers, Kentucky’s Republican governor is downplaying fears that the European Union’s retaliatory tariffs could disrupt the booming market for the Bluegrass state’s iconic bourbon industry.

“There’s always the potential for some type of impact, but I don’t think it will be a tremendous impact,” Governor Matt Bevin said when asked about tariffs during a TV interview this week with Bloomberg.

Bevin, a regular at bourbon industry events celebrating new or expanded facilities, called the tariffs that took effect Friday a “money grab” by the EU, but sounded confident that Kentucky bourbon will expand its share of the vast European whiskey market.

“Europeans are still going to drink more bourbon this year than they did last year; they’re just going to pay more for it because their government is going to take some of it,” he said this week during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Bevin referred to Europe as a “small portion” of the bourbon market, but the Kentucky Distillers’ Association said EU countries accounted for nearly $200 million of the more than $450 million in total exports of Kentucky bourbon and other distilled spirits in 2017.

Kentucky whiskey exports to EU countries have grown more than 10 percent annually in the past five years, said the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, which represents dozens of distillers, large and small. Kentucky whiskey exports overall rose by a whopping 23 percent last year, it said.

The governor’s comments downplaying the effect of tariffs stood in stark contrast to the distillers’ group, which warned that duties on American whiskey would have a “significant impact” on investment and employment in the state’s $8.5 billion bourbon sector.

“As we have said for the past few months, there are no winners in a trade war, only casualties and consequences,” the Kentucky Distillers’ Association said in its statement, which was released shortly after Bevin’s comments but did not directly refer to the governor.

Tariffs will drive up the price of Kentucky whiskey in EU markets where customers have plenty of spirits to choose from.

If a trade war breaks out, bourbon wouldn’t be the state’s biggest casualty, said University of Kentucky economics professor Ken Troske.

Kentucky’s auto parts sector could be hit hard, since many of its products are shipped to auto assembly plants in Canada and Mexico, he said Friday. Many of those vehicles are sent to the U.S. for sale. “Kentucky is a big, big player in that,” Troske said.

As for the bourbon sector, he said: “I don’t think tariffs are going to slow the growth down that much.”

The EU’s tariff action comes in response to Republican President Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on European steel and aluminum. Its retaliatory move targets other American goods including Harley Davidson bikes, cranberries, peanut butter and playing cards.

Kentucky produces about 95 percent of the world’s bourbon, with such brands as Jim Beam, Evan Williams, Wild Turkey, Maker’s Mark, Woodford Reserve and Four Roses. The industry supplies about 17,500 Kentucky jobs, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association.

The industry is in the midst of a building boom, with more than $1.1 billion in projects planned, under way or completed in the past five years, it said. The construction includes expanded production facilities and new tourism centers.

Bevin, who routinely lavishes praise on Trump, said this week that the back-and-forth trade actions reflect “a certain amount of posturing that’s going on. It’s part of the negotiation process.” The governor said the EU has more to lose in a trade dispute.

“If they want to play this game with the United States, ultimately they’re going to lose,” he said during the Bloomberg interview. “So I don’t see that this will have long-term implications on trade between the EU and the U.S. I really don’t, but especially as it relates to bourbon. People in Europe still love bourbon, they’re still going to buy it and the European Union will just make money off it.”

Other trade disputes

Bevin’s downplaying of tariffs ran counter to comments by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who said during a recent speech in Louisville that tariffs “will not be good for the economy” and expressed hope that “we pull back from the brink.”

American spirits makers are being targeted for duties in other trade disputes. Mexico imposed tariffs on U.S. whiskey in response to Trump administration duties on Mexican steel and aluminum, while other countries including China and Canada are taking aim at American spirits.

Wall Street has been closely monitoring threats of a trade war. Vivien Azer, an analyst at Cowen & Co., said in a recent note that tariffs could affect a “notable piece” of international sales for Kentucky-based Brown-Forman Corp. The producer of such brands as Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and Woodford Reserve tried to hedge against tariff-related price increases by stockpiling inventories overseas.

Small and mid-sized distilleries often don’t have the financial wherewithal to stockpile supplies. But even for the biggest distillers, stockpiling offers “only a short-term fix, as there’s only so much excess inventory” they could ship, Azer said.

But if the trade dispute drags on, “we would generally expect the tariff impact to subside over time as pricing and consumer purchase behavior adjusts,” Azer wrote.
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With World Cup 2018 now firmly under way in Russia, the Kremlin indicated it was back to business Thursday, holding a new round of talks with neighboring Ukraine and hinting at movement toward a possible summit meeting with President Donald Trump as early as next month.

President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone with his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko, as the two leaders tried to bridge differences over the stalled Minsk peace accords aimed at curtailing violence in east Ukraine that has killed an estimated 10,000 civilians. 

According to a statement issued by Poroshenko’s press office, the Ukrainian leader pressed Putin to allow the deployment of U.N.-backed peacekeepers into the Donbass territory in east Ukraine, largely held by Russian-backed rebels, as “an important instrument in the fulfillment of Minsk.”

Another pressing issue, the fate of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Senstov, currently serving a 20-year sentence in northern Russia on charges of carrying out a terrorist act in opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Sentsov is more than a month into a hunger strike aimed at gaining the release of about 70 Ukrainians in Russian prisons as a result of Moscow’s simmering proxy war in Ukraine. 

In recent days, Russia and Ukraine have moved toward an agreement to allow human rights envoys to access imprisoned nationals on both sides of the conflict, including Sentsov.

But the Russian leader has thus far ruled out a trade with Ukraine for Sentsov on grounds that he, as a resident of Crimea, is now a Russian citizen and the Kremlin has no right to interfere in court decisions. 

Trump-Putin Summit?

Meanwhile, Kremlin officials announced that a top White House envoy is headed to Moscow to lay the groundwork for a summit as early as next month between Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.

In his weekly call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, insisted neither Moscow nor Washington was ready to issue a formal statement with details but did confirm media reports that U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton would visit Russia next week. 

“As far as we know, such a visit will indeed take place.  This is all we can say at the moment,” said Peskov in comments carried by the Interfax news agency.

Both Trump and Putin have long expressed interest in a formal summit but the sudden push for a July meeting seems to have gained traction in the wake of what the White House argues was a successful meeting earlier this month with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un in Singapore. 

In a replay reminiscent of the scramble to arrange the North Korean summit, Bolton and Russian officials will seek to hash out logistics, including the date, time, and location as well as any potential joint communique to come out of a meeting with the Russian leader.

(Both Russian and U.S. media report Austria would be the desired host country, either before or after Trump’s visit to the NATO summit in Brussels July 11.)

Trump, observers note, is hemmed in by an investigation into contacts between his presidential campaign and Russian government agents on the road to his 2016 election win.

Putin, too, has previously acknowledged that allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. elections, charges the Russian president vehemently denies, starkly limit options for a productive summit.

The U.S. president has repeatedly seemed eager to defy both his critics and foreign policy expectations when it comes to Russia — recently even angering traditional U.S. allies at the G-7 summit in Quebec, when he argued Russia should be reinstated to the Group of Eight countries, despite being kicked out for its annexation of Crimea.

For that reason, Russian political observers suggest most Kremlin officials saw a Trump-Putin summit, in whatever form, as a win, “a priori.” Relations, they note, could hardly be worse than they are now.

“For Russian foreign policy, holding a summit between Putin and Trump has become something of a fixation,” writes Russian foreign policy analyst Vladimir Frolov, in The Republic, an independent online publication.  

“For whatever reason, it’s thought that the meeting could resolve all problems, if only the leaders could talk face to face, without intermediaries, when Trump has none of his advisors to hold him back, and he can finally make good on his campaign promise to improve relations with Russia.”

 
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Turkey announced Thursday that it would impose tariffs on $1.8 billion worth of U.S. goods in retaliation for U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

The World Trade Organization said the new Turkish tariffs would amount to $266.5 million on products including cars, coal, paper, rice and tobacco.

Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci said in a statement that Turkey would not allow itself “to be wrongly blamed for America’s economic challenges.”

He continued, “We are part of the solution, not the problem.”

On Wednesday, the EU announced that it had compiled a list of U.S. products on which it would begin charging import duties of 25 percent, a move that could escalate into a full-blown trade war, especially if U.S. President Donald Trump follows through with his threat to impose tariffs on European cars.

“We did not want to be in this position. However, the unilateral and unjustified decision of the U.S. to impose steel and aluminum tariffs on the EU means that we are left with no other choice,” EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a statement.

The commission, which manages the daily business of the EU, adopted a law that places duties on $3.2 billion worth of U.S. goods, including aluminum and steel products, agricultural products, bourbon and motorcycles.

Malmstrom said that the EU response was consistent with World Trade Organization rules and that the tariffs would be lifted if the U.S. rescinded its metal tariffs, which amount to $7.41 billion.

Trump slapped tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum on the EU, Canada and Mexico, which went into effect at the beginning of June.

Canada said it would impose retaliatory tariffs on $12.5 billion worth of U.S. products on July 1.

Mexico imposed tariffs two weeks ago on a range of U.S. products, including steel, pork and bourbon.
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Advisers to President Vladimir Putin have questioned the legality of a slew of criminal cases opened against members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia and asked the General Prosecutor’s office to protect the group’s freedom of belief.

Russia’s Supreme Court ruled in April last year that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were an “extremist” organisation and must disband, a move the group unsuccessfully appealed.

Since then, at least 19 members have been detained on criminal charges in Russia with one, Danish citizen Dennis Christensen, now held for more than a year and put on trial for extremism.

The Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, which advises Putin but does not have policy-making powers itself, said it believed law enforcement agencies were flouting the constitution and misinterpreting last year’s ruling by locking people up for collective bible reading and praying.

“It cannot but be a cause for concern because the criminal prosecutions and detentions have taken on a systemic character,” the council said in a statement which the Jehovah’s Witnesses publicized on Thursday.

“The situation evokes associations with the Soviet period when Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered groundless repression because of their faith.”

The fact that the council has intervened on the group’s behalf does not necessarily mean that Putin will take up their cause though the subject is likely to be raised at the council’s next meeting with the Russian leader.

‘Glimmer of optimism’

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a United States-based Christian denomination known for its door-to-door preaching and rejection of military service and blood transfusions, has around 170,000 followers in Russia.

The U.S. State Department on Monday said it was deeply concerned by what it described as the growing number of religious prisoners held in Russia, saying that people were being persecuted “in retaliation for peaceful religious practice.”

And on Tuesday, more than 60 well-known Russian writers, historians and rights activists signed an appeal demanding the authorities stop prosecuting the group, describing the legal onslaught on its members as a test for Russian society.

Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a member of the European Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses, said on Thursday the council’s intervention had given his group “a glimmer of optimism.”

“We hope that common sense will prevail and that someone wise … will say that this has all gone too far,” he said. “If the authorities can do this to us they can apply the same logic to do the same to anyone in Russia.”
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