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Freed Houthi prisoners stand as they wait to board an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)-chartered plane at Aden Airport, in Aden, Yemen.
Hard Numbers: Yemen prisoner swap, North Korea’s new missile, Germany ditches Russian imports, gender parity in Kiwi cabinet, Juice headed to Jupiter
900: In the biggest prisoner exchange in Yemen since 2020, 900 prisoners are expected to be swapped in the days ahead as part of ongoing talks between Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, and the Saudi-backed government. The confidence-building measure comes amid rising hopes that Yemen's brutal eight-year war might soon come to an end.
1,000: North Korea launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile test in a month, with some reporting that Pyongyang tested an advanced, harder-to-detect missile for the first time. Following a 1,000-kilometer flight (620 miles), the missile landed in waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Japanese authorities on the northern island of Hokkaido urged residents to seek shelter.
91: German imports of Russian goods dropped by 91% during the first year of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Moscow had previously been the country’s 11th-biggest source of imports, but as a result of Western sanctions has since dropped to … 46th place.
10: Jacinda Ardern may have bowed out, but women leaders are getting ahead in New Zealand. For the first time, the country has gender parity in the cabinet. Thanks to a reshuffle by PM Chris Hipkins, there are now 10 women and 10 men in his cabinet.
8: Citing poor weather conditions, the European Space Agency has delayed the launch of a satellite to the planet Jupiter, an ambitious mission that will take eight years. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer project, dubbed Juice, aims to explore whether the fifth planet's major moons hold deep bodies of water. The agency will try again in the coming days.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.
What We're Watching: Zelensky snubs Berlin, IMF warns of debt shock, Indonesia passes sexual assault bill
The latest from Ukraine
In a stunning rebuke, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday refused to host German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was planning a solidarity tour to Kyiv along with the presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Zelensky’s snub comes just days after he rolled out the red carpet for British PM Boris Johnson and strolled around the Ukrainian capital with him. Part of this is about Steinmeier specifically: during his two stints as German foreign minister – including in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea – he showed great deference to Moscow. What’s more, he’s good buddies with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who is famously cozy with the Kremlin himself. But Zelensky is also peeved at the Germans more broadly for failing to kick their Russian gas habit and sever economic ties with Moscow. Critics have also condemned Berlin for not sending Kyiv enough weapons. Still, was Zelensky’s decision to shame Europe’s largest economy a wise move? After all, he will still need Germany on board to further isolate Vladimir Putin – economically and militarily. That’s all the more true since Putin said Tuesday that peace talks with Kyiv have reached “a dead end,” vowing that his troops would continue to pursue their “noble” aims in Ukraine.
A developing world debt bomb
Poorer countries face a perfect storm of debt problems, according to a new report by the International Monetary Fund, and wealthier countries must take notice. “Most emerging market and developing economies are ill-prepared to face the coming debt shock,” said David Malpass, president of the World Bank Group, on Monday. The pandemic forced many developing countries to borrow heavily to manage the emergency. Sharp increases in food and fuel prices triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine make matters worse. China is lending less as it manages private-sector debt problems, a surge in COVID cases, and fears that existing debts to developing countries won’t be repaid. Rising interest rates in the US and Europe will make borrowing more expensive for poorer countries. “About 60 percent of low-income countries are now in, or at risk of, distress,” the report says. But debt isn’t a problem only for those who owe. Lender countries know they need to work with heavily indebted governments not only to ensure debts can be repaid as fully and as quickly as possible, but to help them avoid the human, economic, and political emergencies that create crises that cross borders. That’s why the IMF has called on lending nations to take “a cooperative approach to ease the debt burdens of the most vulnerable countries, [and] foster greater debt sustainability.”
Indonesian parliament greenlights sexual assault bill
After six years of stalling and deliberations, Indonesia’s parliament has passed a landmark sexual assault bill. The measure includes prison terms of up to 12 years for sexual assault committed within a marriage – something excluded from earlier definitions of sexual abuse – and formally outlaws forced marriages. The bill’s passage is a triumph over resistance that came chiefly from Islamist parties. But critics say the law still doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t include a clear definition of what constitutes rape, and it caps punishment for sexual abuse of minors at just nine years. What’s more, the new law won’t apply to Aceh province, home to 5.5 million people, which is governed by Sharia law under an agreement between Jakarta and local insurgents that dates back to 2005. Flogging in Aceh for adultery and “promiscuous” activity, which includes gay sex, is commonplace. More broadly, gender-based violence is rife in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Women are often treated as second-class citizens, while rape and abuse often go unpunished.The EU has imposed largely symbolic sanctions on Russian officials over the jailing of Putin critic Alexei Navalny. What's keeping Europe from taking a tougher stance against the Kremlin?
Why doesn’t the EU hit Russia harder?
Earlier this week the European Union agreed to slap sanctions on a handful of senior Russian officials over the jailing of top Putin critic Alexei Navalny. Using a new set of sanctions designed specifically to target human rights abuses, Brussels will freeze bank accounts and deny visas to four of Russia's top justice and security officials involved in Navalny's case.
As punishments go, that's not particularly drastic: surely it stings a bit to lose access to European banks and beaches, but no one suspects that these measures are going to convince the Kremlin to free Navalny. The dissident's own people have called on Brussels to do more.
So why does the EU, the world's largest economic bloc, seem to have so little leverage over a country whose economy is barely larger than Spain's? A few things to bear in mind.
Russia keeps the heat running in Europe. The European Union depends on Moscow for some 40 percent of its gas imports and 30 percent of oil imports. For some EU countries, the numbers are even higher: Germany gets half its gas from Russian companies and is moving ahead with a new Russian gas pipeline as we speak. In Eastern Europe, the dependency ranges from roughly two-thirds in the cases of, say, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, to a straight 100 percent in the case of Finland.
The EU needs Russian cooperation outside of Europe too. Over the past decade, Moscow has shrewdly positioned itself as a kingmaker in several crises beyond Europe's borders that reverberate within the union. In Syria, Libya, the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, Russian military or mercenaries exert an outsized role in conflicts that have generated large numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Europe.
There isn't really an "EU". The European Union is actually 27 member states, each with their own interests and views on Russia. Germany, for example, has to balance its ambitions of staking out a firmer pro-democracy European foreign policy against the energy needs of its powerful industries. France has long sought closer cooperation with Moscow on geopolitical issues across the Middle East and Africa. Many former Eastern Bloc states, meanwhile, have begun to see Moscow as a useful counterweight to an overbearing or incompetent Brussels. And of course, the UK, which historically took a harder line against Russia, is now no longer part of the EU at all.
Doing more would require a tough stomach. To be clear, it's not that the EU doesn't have ways to seriously hurt the Kremlin. Sanctioning Russia's oil and gas exports or its foreign debt would deal a big blow to Putin's regime. But the blowback for Europe would be tremendous — European consumers and factories would likely suffer massive energy shocks, while financial markets and banks that trade Russian debt would see turmoil.
After all, there's a reason that even in 2014 — when Russia invaded an EU partner state and started a civil war there — both Europe (and the US, with far less vulnerability to Russian retaliation than its European friends) stopped short of making big moves like this.
The bottom line: Europe is keen to be a more active global player on security and human rights. But when it comes to Russia, reality bites hard.CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the Baltics as a whole receive 100 percent of their gas from Russia. While the dependency is very high -- ranging from 79 percent in the case of Estonia to 93 percent in Latvia -- Finland is the only member state that actually depends fully on Russia for natural gas. We regret the error and thank reader Guido W. for pointing it out.
Angela Merkel's missed connection
On Angela Merkel's last Valentine's Day as chancellor, she thinks back to East Germany, 1987. He was a foreign agent, she a quantum chemist. What might have been?