Efforts to supply weapons to Ukraine face multiple obstacles
Providing quick deliveries of appropriate military equipment will be challenging
Volodymyr Zelensky’s response was unequivocal. Offered evacuation by the US from Kyiv on Friday, he replied: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
That evening at a crisis summit of Nato leaders, dozens of western countries declared they would give the Ukrainian president what he had asked for to support his country’s resistance against Russia’s invasion.
The US pledged $350mn of military aid, in addition to the $650mn it has committed over the past year. By Saturday evening, even Germany had reversed its historic position of never sending weapons to conflict zones.
But promising aid is one thing, western defence sources and analysts caution. The challenge is to deliver it to Ukraine’s armed forces fast enough, or to a resistance movement should the Zelensky administration fall.
“The political rhetoric of support for a resistance is easy, delivering it in practice is harder,” said John Raine, senior adviser for geopolitical due diligence at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London.
“It requires investing in the legal and political structures needed to sustain it, and the supply chain logistics that actually dock the military aid with the resistance forces that will use it.”
The first challenge is to ensure deliveries are of appropriate military equipment that augments existing capacity and requires little training.
“Simple kit is best,” one senior defence source said. “That means secure communications and night vision equipment, handheld anti-tank and anti-air craft missiles, and of course ammunition.”
It is one thing to accept refugees, as Poland is so commendably doing now. But it is another thing to shift weapons clandestinely across a border at night — an action Russia might view as a casus belli
Senior former western intelligence official
“Ukraine’s forces will be using between four and 10 times what they would expect to use from exercises, and the less well-trained may be using more still,” he added.
Getting the supplies to Ukrainian forces is also a challenge. In the lead-up to Russia’s attack on Thursday, Nato allies could deliver equipment by air or land, direct to military depots. But Ukraine’s skies are now dominated by Russian fighter jets, and Nato allies have said they will not provide air cover as that would effectively mean declaring war on Moscow. Many Ukrainian airfields have also been rendered unusable by missile strikes.
As a result, future deliveries will have to move in more covert conveys through contested territory, most likely from Poland which shares a 535km border with Ukraine and has been the main destination for the Nato troops deployed to its eastern flank this year.
On Saturday, there were reports that airborne Russian forces had landed in western Ukraine, potentially complicating deliveries further.
“Nothing has been cut off by the Russian advance,” a senior western intelligence official said. “There’s a broad range of . . . political and military assistance that can still be provided.”
There are some simple guidelines such aid convoys will probably follow, defence sources say. Trucks will need to avoid moving in bumper to bumper convoys and travel at a variable pace so they are harder to track and attack, and carry air defence weapons such as Stinger missiles and multi-barrel machine guns to deter Russian jets.
“The important thing is guard the handovers, get the supplies to the right place and then disperse them. You can’t just deposit in a depot,” said the defence source. “It’s complex but not difficult.”
Such operations become harder if field units are encircled — as may soon happen to Ukrainian troops fighting in the east of the country.
“Ukraine’s tactical units started the conflict with 10 days of munitions and that will now have been reduced,” said Jack Watling, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “There is more in stockpiles but it has to be moved out to operational units . . . tricky if they are being surrounded.”
The last challenge is perhaps the most complex of all: what to do if Kyiv is taken, the Zelensky administration falls and Ukraine’s army and territorial reserve fragment into a mosaic of resistance forces, armed militias and civil movements.
“Nato only works with governments,” another western intelligence official said.
Weapons might also fall into Russian hands and be turned against the resistance. Poland, although it recently signed a tripartite security agreement with Ukraine and the UK, might balk at remaining a base for supplies in such a confusing scenario.
“It is one thing to accept refugees, as Poland is so commendably doing now,” said a senior former western intelligence official. “But it is another thing to shift weapons clandestinely across a border at night — an action Russia might view as a casus belli.”
Western experience of supporting rebel movements — be that in Central America or Afghanistan in the 1980s, or Syria in this century — has been fraught with legal, political and ethical controversy. The one country that has made it a central tenet of its military strategy is Iran, which has cultivated and sustained a network of allies across the Middle East, analysts said.
Sustaining resistance movements “can be a highly dynamic process as the conflict evolves often unexpectedly”, Raine said.
Nor is there any recent precedent of western countries supporting the resistance movement of an internationally recognised government in exile. The last time that happened, analysts say, was during the second world war, when Charles de Gaulle rallied the French resistance from London.
“If the government falls, Zelensky will need to escape Kyiv for Lviv or Poland,” said the defence source. “There is a large and rich Ukrainian diaspora that can provide support. He represents hope, and the promise that Ukraine will return. It’s important that he survives.”
Chip sanctions aim for Russia’s military and its tech industry hopes
Targeted US effort to cut off semiconductor supply copies tactics used against China’s Huawei
The US has for years used the power of the dollar to cut adversaries off from global finance. Now, it is using the prevalence of American technology to cut Russia off from global chip supplies.
Far-reaching export controls announced by Washington are intended to isolate Russia from the world’s tech economy and stymie its military capabilities, while allowing ordinary citizens in the country to still buy mobile phones, dishwashers and laptops.
The measure is part of a wave of US and western sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that have also targeted financial institutions, leading companies and the wealthy oligarchs that surround the administration of President Vladimir Putin.
The tech-related export controls are “novel and complex” in their structure, said Kevin Wolf, a former senior commerce department official, designed to have an impact on government and industrial groups rather than ordinary consumers.
“What the administration has done here is set out a structure to cut Russia off from chips and said that this is a policy and a mission,” said Wolf. “And this isn’t going to go away. There is massive allied co-operation on this.”
The move shuts off supply from leading US groups such as Intel and Nvidia.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, which controls more than half the global market for made-to-order chips, has also pledged full compliance with the new export controls.
The US honed its ability to cut companies off from semiconductors by using its export control powers on Chinese telecoms company Huawei during the Trump administration.
After first restricting the sale the US technology to Huawei by putting it on its trade blacklist, Washington ratcheted up pressure by applying the so-called foreign direct product rule. This allowed the US to reach beyond borders and control products made outside the country if they are designed or manufactured using American technology.
“Huawei was a trial run,” said Christopher Timura, a trade lawyer at Washington’s Gibson Dunn. “The US didn’t see a dramatic impact on Huawei until it developed the entity list foreign direct product rule.”
Using this same power against Russia broadly for some items, and more stringently against a specific list of 49 military entities, means the country is now effectively denied access to high-end semiconductors and other tech imports critical to its military advancement.
“Russia is very well prepared but over time this is going to degrade their military capabilities severely,” said Julia Friedlander, a former US Treasury official.
The blockade will also affect Russian tech more broadly, said Jim Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This puts paid to Russia’s tech ambitions. Russia was already falling behind in emerging tech, and this just pushes them further back.”
Putin has tried to wean Russia off dependence on foreign technology after western governments peppered the country with sanctions following its invasion of Crimea in 2014, but the measures had little success.
Yandex, Russia’s leading US-listed tech giant, boasts one of the world’s leading supercomputers that powers its automated online translation services and relies on hardware made by US-based Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said in January that “dishwashers and other such household items are not the most sacred things in our society, as important as they are for home comforts”.
Russia has vowed to respond to the sanctions “based on its own interests” and warned that its countermeasures might be “asymmetric”.
Despite these far-reaching US restrictions, analysts have predicted that some Chinese companies, especially those that have themselves been the target of US sanctions, might help Russia circumvent the export controls.
“Now that it’s almost certain that Huawei’s competitors like Ericsson would pull out of Russia and from co-operation in making 5G equipment, this will create space for Huawei,” said Artyom Lukin, an associate professor at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok.
“Huawei could monopolise the Russian telecom equipment market: as a result of western sanctions, China could gain 100 per cent control over our country’s tech supplies,” Lukin added.
US restrictions on tech exports to Russia might also lure Chinese semiconductor companies to jump into the gap. SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, is itself under US sanctions. The company was put on the entity list after the US government determined some of the chips it made ended up with users defined as military-linked.
SMIC has since lost access to the equipment it needs to build production lines at the most advanced process technology level. It has, however, been able to continue buying machinery for expanding capacity using slightly older technology.
A senior Biden administration official rejected the idea that China would help Russia circumvent US sanctions.
“China alone can’t supply all of Russia’s critical needs for the military,” the official said. “And it certainly can’t compensate Russia for everything that we’re essentially restricting through these rules, especially as it relates to the production of semiconductors. China accounts for only 16 per cent of global capacity.”
Martin Chorzempa of the Washington-based Peterson Institute think-tank said: “Even China, with its thriving technology ecosystem and immense government subsidies, has failed to produce advanced chips. It’s unimaginable that Russia would be capable of doing so.”
Lunar property rights: buy me to the moon
If you can buy a home in the metaverse, why not on the moon?
If you can buy a home in the metaverse, why not on the moon? The heavenly body has already hosted visitors, played a key role in earthly geopolitics and may be home to untold mineral treasures. Traffic jams, collisions and debris all point to outer space facing some of the issues that bedevil planet earth. High time, reckons the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, to consider privatisation.
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This is a long shot, to put it mildly. As things stand, the moon — like other celestial bodies — cannot be appropriated by any sovereign or militia, under the Outer Space Treaty it is the “province of all mankind”. Changing that would require international consensus and a mindset shift rather too grand for a world struggling with earthly borders and reappraising globalisation.
Virtually every country has lunar ambitions but the big muscle comes from the US, Russia and China, an uneasy set of bedfellows at the best of times. Increasingly, space is in the sights of individuals who have amassed earthly wealth: Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin founder Richard Branson, among others. That illustrates the shift in motivations, from national pride to financial incentives. The global space economy was worth an estimated £270bn in 2019 and is projected to almost double to £490bn by the end of this decade.
There would be losers too from a carve-up that allotted parcels to the modern equivalent of 16th century colonisers. Imagine a sovereign controlling not just a gas pipeline but entire communications. The UK has estimated that blocked access to global navigation satellite systems for just five days could cost the country £5.2bn. Consider too that the triumvirate of countries leading the way have vastly different ideas about both property and human rights.
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Rebecca Lowe, the author of the paper, proposes getting round this with temporary and conditional ownership of plots. Owners, more akin to long term renters, could not hand their plots down from generation to generation.
Because rent cannot be paid to the man in the moon, a philanthropic fund would take the money and redistribute it into areas of common good such as conservation, say, or scientific endeavours.
Plenty of critics see this as about as likely as chunks of moon going on sale at the local fromagerie. But precisely because humanity has made such a hash of carving up the earth, it is a worthwhile debate to start.
Roman Abramovich cedes ‘stewardship’ of Chelsea FC to charitable foundation
Move by oligarch comes as sanctions intensify over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Roman Abramovich said he was ceding day-to-day management of Chelsea football club, as Russia’s assault on Ukraine leads to calls for targeted western sanctions on the elite group of oligarchs with links to president Vladimir Putin.
The Russian-Israeli businessman announced on Saturday that he would relinquish the running of the English Premier League team to its charitable foundation.
Abramovich was not on a list of Russian individuals targeted this week by UK economic sanctions, despite calls from at least one Labour member of parliament that his assets should be seized.
His ownership of Chelsea has made Abramovich an unlikely household name in English football and beyond, while also serving as a stark and early example of how Russia’s elite sought to snap up trophy assets in the UK.
“He’s really doing it to stop the club becoming hostage to anti-Russian sanctions, which are going to be around for a while now,” a friend of the billionaire told the FT.
The announcement does not mean that Chelsea is for sale but is intended to blunt concerns that have gripped the club, its coach and players since the war began earlier this week, according to people close to the situation.
“During my nearly 20-year ownership of Chelsea FC, I have always viewed my role as a custodian of the Club,” Abramovich said. “I have always taken decisions with the Club’s best interest at heart.”
“That is why I am today giving trustees of Chelsea’s charitable foundation the stewardship and care of Chelsea FC,” he added.
Bruce Buck, an American who is the club’s chair and who has worked closely with Abramovich for years since his time as a senior lawyer in the London office of US legal firm Skadden Arps, declined to comment.
The war in Ukraine has triggered the beginnings of a western sporting boycott of Russia. Earlier this week, the Champions League final, the biggest game in European club football, was moved from St Petersburg to Paris.
This season’s Russian Formula One Grand Prix has been cancelled. The International Olympic Committee has urged sporting bodies to stop holding events in Russia or its close ally Belarus. Other sporting groups have withdrawn or begun to re-evaluate sponsorships from Russian companies.
Buyers have been circling Chelsea for years, and in 2018, Abramovich appointed US merchant bank Raine to put a value on the team after multiple interested buyers made approaches to acquire it.
Earlier that year, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire founder of chemicals group Ineos, withdrew a bid after being cited a sale price in excess of £2bn, according to people with knowledge of the talks. Private equity group Silver Lake also showed interest that year.
Abramovich’s Fordstam entity, through which he owns Chelsea, has accumulated losses of almost £1.1bn through June 2021. Fordstam has close to £1.5bn in debt in the form of loans from Abramovich. In theory, he could call in the debt, which would need to be repaid within 18 months.
Abramovich’s wealth transformed Chelsea into one of the most powerful teams in global football, spending hundreds of millions of pounds on superstar players and coaches.
Under his ownership, the club has twice won the Champions League, among numerous major titles. As recently as February, he celebrated on the pitch with players after Chelsea won the Fifa Club World Cup tournament in Abu Dhabi.
His fortune helped Chelsea revolutionise football on and off the pitch, creating a domestic rival to the then-dominant Manchester United and ushering in a new era of big money foreign owners in the Premier League.
Abramovich earned his fortune in Russia’s turbulent 1990s by acquiring privatised oil and gas assets from the state, then selling them back to the Kremlin at a large profit. He owns an estate on the so-called Billionaire’s Row in Kensington Palace Gardens and, together with partner Alexander Abramov, controls London-listed steelmaker Evraz.
In 2018, Abramovich withdrew his UK visa renewal application after authorities delayed its processing following the nerve agent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. He remained active in club affairs but preferred to watch most of Chelsea’s matches on TV, according to friends. The oligarch subsequently became an Israeli citizen later that year and obtained a Portuguese passport in 2021.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, his daughter Sofia, 27, shared a post on Instagram that read: “Putin wants a war with Ukraine,” according to screenshots posted on social media. “The biggest and most successful lie of Kremlin’s propaganda is that most Russians stand with Putin.”
On Saturday, Garage, the Moscow contemporary art museum he co-founded with his former partner Dasha Zhukova, said in a statement that it would “stop work on all exhibitions until the human and political tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine has ceased”.
Barron’s Weekend Summary: The biggest implication for the U.S. of the Russia-Ukraine military conflict may not actually be what happens in the region.
Cover Story:
-The biggest implication for the U.S. of the Russia-Ukraine military conflict may not actually be what happens in the region. Rather, it is likely to be whether the U.S.’s response to the conflict emboldens bigger economic rivals, namely China, and what that means for the long-term investment landscape.
Tech Trader:
-In 2020, the sharp and short bear market turned out to be a spectacular buying opportunity, as the Federal Reserve and other central banks flooded the market with cash and interest rates dropped effectively to zero. The result sent high-growth tech stocks to dizzying heights. That was then; this is now. The Fed is getting ready to shut the money spigot, telegraphing multiple rate increases in 2022. The concern is that we’re overheating. But it isn’t hard to see why the bears lost their grip on Thursday, and cash flooded in.
The Trader:
-Energy is at the crux of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Oil prices rose sharply when the invasion began, with Brent crude rising as high as $105 a barrel on Thursday morning, the highest level since 2014. European natural-gas prices jumped 60%. But global supply will stay relatively high as Robert Yawger, director of energy futures at Mizuho Securities, called President Joe Biden’s response “soft.”
-oth gold and Bitcoin are perceived as a “store or value” against inflation. Each benefits from scarcity. If governments depreciate their currencies by running up debts and printing money, the story goes, Bitcoin could serve as a bulwark against inflation and loss of purchasing power—even taking some of gold’s market share. Yet Bitcoin’s high volatility and ailing price make it increasingly hard to accept it as more than a speculative bet. It tumbled 10% on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine.
-Lowe’s and Home Depot each delivered better-than-expected quarterly results, but Home Depot offered a more cautious tone about the year ahead. Lowe’s, in contrast, raised its guidance a couple of months after providing its initial full-year outlook. Home Depot traded lower, while Lowe’s climbed.
Features:
-Russia’s credit rating was cut to junk by S&P Global Ratings, part of a wide review by all major rating agencies to grade the soundness of the gas-exporting giant’s financial health after the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moody’s Investors Service, meanwhile, said late Friday it has placed Russia’s and Ukraine’s credit ratings on review for possible downgrades, again to speculative, or junk, ratings for Russia.
-Berkshire Hathaway will host an in-person shareholder meeting in Omaha this spring following two years of virtual events—but only shareholders vaccinated against Covid-19 will be allowed to attend, the company said Saturday. The announcement marks a return to the pre-Covid revelry that earned the three-day event the nickname Woodstock for Capitalists. The meeting will take place at CHI Health Center in Omaha on April 30 and will be streamed on CNBC.
European Trader:
-The popularity of streaming sources had many worried that movie theatres would be relegated to history. Those fears proved unfounded, and the ranks of movie theaters are actually growing again. New builds in the Middle East and China could increase the number of global screens to 240,000 from 200,000, according to Berenberg analyst Trion Reid, citing Barco management in a December note. Barco has up to a 60% market share in Chinese cinemas. That should boost earnings. In a February note, Reid forecasted that revenue for the first half of 2022 could increase 20%.
-Russia’s Ukraine incursion is going to have a serious effect on our economy and the economies in Europe. Energy, currencies, trade, and the global central banks’ response to this may be radically different than what was thought yesterday. Countries will be scrambling to respond to the invasion, and mistakes will be made. One looming question: Will the invasion be contained to Ukraine, or will it spread to other Eastern European countries, as Russia tries to reassemble the U.S.S.R.?
Emerging Markets:
-Historically, geopolitical tensions have been bearish for risky assets, including emerging markets. Yet today, as Russia wages war on Ukraine, investors should resist the urge to sell. Emerging markets such as Brazil, Indonesia, and India are much stronger financially than they have been in many years, and much cheaper versus the U.S. than they have been in a couple of decades. As a result, they could offer a relatively decent refuge in a widening storm.
Russia’s attack complicates what had been the most promising backdrop for developing countries in years. But it doesn’t derail the argument for these markets and, in some cases, strengthens it further.
Commodities:
Many investors were already getting nervous before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rising inflation, the near-certainty of higher interest rates, and the expectation that corporate profits would pull back all pointed to dramatically lower stock and bond returns than investors had grown accustomed to. The members of Barron’s Roundtable, which met this year on Jan. 10, forecasted S&P 500 index returns ranging from double-digit losses to a gain of just 8%. And that was before war broke out in Europe, causing energy prices to rise and leading to even higher inflation. Geopolitical crises, however, tend to limit the Federal Reserve’s ability to raise interest rates; rising inflation and a slowing economy can lead to pernicious stagflation, not seen since the oil crisis of the 1970s.
Streetwise:
Jack Hough asked two market strategists whether U.S. investors should buy stocks here despite the pall of war in Ukraine. One says definitely, and the other says to hold off. Both are convincing. This is why he recommends using an odd number of investment advisors. If there’s a cheerful sign now, it’s that investors are gloomy, says Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, which sells market analysis to money managers. A measure called the Investors Intelligence bulls and bears ratio fell this past week, to 1.04, from 1.32 two weeks prior. That means there are roughly as many bears as bulls, which is unusual, and which Yardeni has found to signal a good buying opportunity.
Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-There was intense street fighting across Kyiv on Saturday, and the latest Western intelligence reports indicated that the Russian advance had been slowed. But the Russian priority remained the capture of Kyiv.
-President Volodymyr Zelensky praised his outmanned military, saying it has “successfully repelled enemy attacks,” and urged Western countries for more support.
-Russia continued to send more troops into Ukraine, renewing its advance after the Kremlin said it had ordered a pause on Friday.
-Across Ukraine, people huddled in air raid shelters, lined up at bank machines and stocked up on essentials.
-Despite the Kremlin’s efforts to obscure the offensive in Ukraine, the costs of the war were already evident in both economic and social turmoil.
-President Vladimir Putin has for years been idolized by a Who’s Who of populist, nationalist leaders. They are now stumbling over what to say.
-European companies that have operations in Russia are preparing for collateral damage as Western sanctions aim to penalize Russia’s economy.
-As a public defender, Supreme Court nominee helped clients others avoided. Ambitious lawyers usually become prosecutors. Ketanji Brown Jackson worked on behalf of criminal defendants and Guantánamo detainees.
-Nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court is both bold and politically savvy, Democrats told us. Republicans are divided over how much of a fight to put up.
-Chris Licht, a creator of ‘Morning Joe’ and ‘Colbert’ Producer, is set to run CNN. He will take over CNN as the network gets a new corporate owner. He replaces Jeff Zucker, the network president who abruptly resigned this month.
-Some Indigenous leaders have allied with the developers building on sacred land in Cape Town, prompting a debate over who speaks for First Nations people.
-From Cancún to Tulum, several gang-related incidents have killed or injured international visitors. That hasn’t stopped vacationers from arriving.
-Hundreds of passengers were rescued after a blaze on a passenger ferry that burned for most of a week. At least three more are believed to be missing.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Officials in Kyiv said the center of the city remained under government and military control on Saturday, as outgunned troops continued to resist the biggest invasion force in Europe in half a century. Gunfire and explosions were heard in several parts of the capital overnight.
-EU resistance to ejecting Russian banks from the Swift financial messaging system is eroding after Italy said it would not stand in the way of such a move, while Germany came under intense pressure to back it.
Italian prime minister Mario Draghi told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a call on Saturday that Rome would fully support EU work on sanctions against Russia, “including those encompassing Swift”.
-From crude oil to diesel to natural gas, the fossil fuels that power the global economy are trading at or towards record levels, threatening to redraw geopolitical relations between producers and consumers, drive up inflation and potentially even disrupt the fight against climate change.
-By Saturday, three days into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, armed men in military fatigues — with yellow masking tape encircling their sleeves to mark themselves as Ukrainians — were organizing patrols and assistance to the troops defending Kyiv as enemy soldiers closed in. Russian agents are believed to already be in the city center.
-Russian airlines were cut off from an increasing swath of European airspace on Saturday, as tit-for-tat flight bans disrupted commercial aviation and forced some planes on long detours.
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia all announced bans on Russian airlines using their airspace or landing at their airports, joining the UK, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland in sealing off their skies. The bans apply to all Russian airlines, including flag carrier Aeroflot.
-Warren Buffett on Saturday lamented the few attractive investments available to his sprawling $713B Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, warning that low interest rates over the past two years had inflated valuations across financial markets.
-The Federal Reserve will fail to control inflation if it delivers only six quarter-point rate rises this year as markets expect, according to almost half of leading academics polled by the Financial Times.
-Stephen Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone Group, received a record $1.1B in income in 2021, and was one of three insiders at the world’s largest private equity group to receive over $160M as its profits soared.
-US president Joe Biden announced on Friday he would nominate federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, saying she is “one of our nation’s brightest legal minds and will be an exceptional justice”.
Jackson would, if confirmed, fill a vacancy at the country’s highest court left by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, who last month said he would step aside at the end of the court’s current term, typically in late June or early July, assuming his successor had been nominated and confirmed.
-Hong Kong is one of the most isolated cities in the world, with arrivals forced to endure a two-week hotel quarantine if they can get in. A ban on inbound flights from nine countries, including the US and UK, was recently extended to April.
-PwC Canada has been fined more than $900,000 by Canadian and US accounting regulators over exam cheating involving 1,100 of its auditors. The watchdogs found that the Big Four firm failed to spot that staff were sharing answers in exams between 2016 and 2020 because of shortcomings in its internal standards and test supervision.
-Why has the post-cold-war order broken apart in a violent fight over Ukraine? It is now beyond question that that order has crumbled, and that Europe will once again, as in 1989, bear a line of division between Moscow-centric and Washington-centric blocs.
THE NEW YORK POST
-Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had President Trump still been in office, a majority of Americans said according to the results of a new poll.
-Ukraine’s vice prime minister called on SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk to help the embattled nation with communication satellites on Saturday, as they faced a third day of assaults from Russia: “@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand,” Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted, later sharing the post on his Telegram account as well.
-The Biden administration said it will follow in the footsteps of the European Union and impose sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his decision to send troops into Ukraine. But the practical implications of such a move, which is also reportedly being considered by the United Kingdom, are unclear for a variety of reasons.
-Shares of Foot Locker fell by as much as 35% during trading on Wall Street on Friday as the company said it expects profits to take a hit thanks to Nike’s new strategy of selling direct to consumers. The apparel store released its earnings report on Friday, predicting that none of its vendors will generate more than 60% of total purchases for fiscal year 2022.