- Russian mercenary chief sets out ambitions for an ‘army with an ideology’ Reuters.com
- After losing more than 30,000 soldiers, the brutal Wagner Group is now recruiting in Russian schools Yahoo News
- Russian mercenary group Wagner’s chief reveals ‘political ambitions’, to run for Ukraine’s president in 2024 WION
- Wagner Group announces new recruitment centers, with some reportedly located in schools Meduza
- Russian mercenary chief sets out ambitions for an ‘army with an ideology’ ThePrint
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Ambitions
China’s Xi Jinping Stakes Out Ambitions, With Himself at the Center
HONG KONG—Chinese leader
Xi Jinping
cast himself as the decisive helmsman his country needs in surmounting great adversity, pledging to build a more secure, powerful and egalitarian nation as he signaled plans to extend his decadelong rule.
In a Sunday speech, opening a Communist Party congress where he is set to defy recent norms and claim a third term as party chief, Mr. Xi issued a robust defense of his record, shaking off concerns over Covid-19, a sluggish economy and troubled ties with the U.S. He recalled his efforts to curb corruption, rally public support for the party and champion China’s political system as a counterweight to Western liberal democracy.
A campaign of “self-revolution,” marked by forceful crackdowns on corruption and political dissent, Mr. Xi said, has “ensured that the party will never change in quality, change its color, or change its flavor”—party parlance for threats to Communist rule in China.
In televised remarks delivered from Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Mr. Xi also claimed significant successes in fighting Covid-19, enforcing order in Hong Kong and curtailing what he called separatist activism in the island democracy of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.
He reiterated that Beijing won’t renounce the use of force in unifying Taiwan, so as to deter outside interference and splittist elements. “The complete unification of the motherland must be realized, and it will be realized,“ he said, drawing loud applause.
Mr. Xi directed parts of his speech to addressing concerns about China’s ties to the rest of the world, amid rising geopolitical tensions and Beijing’s own Covid-imposed isolation, reaffirming his support for globalization and adherence to a decades-old national policy of “reform and opening up.”
While Mr. Xi warned of risks, challenges and “even dangerous storms” ahead, his report to the congress largely promised a continuation of his firm-handed rule at home and a more assertive exercise of power abroad, including by making the military combat-ready.
“The work report was unambiguously about continuity,” Joseph Torigian, a professor in Chinese politics and foreign policy at American University, said on Twitter. “Although historic, this Congress will almost certainly not signify fundamental new policy directions.”
In laying out his economic goals, Mr. Xi renewed his promise of a new era of “common prosperity,” in which the party exercises greater control over private capital and distributes China’s wealth more evenly. Such efforts have unnerved entrepreneurs at home and investors from abroad after sweeping regulatory crackdowns on Chinese tech giants and private businesses in recent years.
President Xi addressed several topics including Taiwan, Hong Kong and the fight against Covid-19 in his speech at the party gathering in Beijing.
Photo:
Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
Mr. Xi also trumpeted what he called “Chinese-style modernization,” doubling down on his program of party-led economic planning and development. He reiterated calls for ensuring China’s economic self-reliance, urging more indigenous efforts to develop high-end technologies that can serve the nation’s strategic needs—a demand that comes as the U.S. ramps up efforts to deny China access to critical components such as advanced semiconductors.
Since taking power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has assumed a degree of autocratic authority unseen since the Mao Zedong era and upended recent retirement practices to allow himself to stay in office indefinitely.
By taking a third term as party chief, the 69-year-old Mr. Xi would depart from the decadelong leadership cycle that his predecessor set and dismantle succession norms designed to prevent a return to a Mao-style dictatorship. Political analysts expect Mr. Xi to promote protégés and allies into senior party roles and thereby cement his political supremacy.
Mr. Xi devoted much of his speech to emphasizing how his party aligns itself with the Chinese people. “The country is the people, and the people are the country,” he said. The entire party must always “share its destiny and connect heart-to-heart with the people.”
The party has in recent years increasingly described Mr. Xi as renmin lingxiu, or “people’s leader,” a designation that echoes Mao’s title of weida lingxiu, or “great leader.” Party insiders say the congress could confer more tokens of power on Mr. Xi, such as by formally designating him renmin lingxiu and cementing his claim to being on par with Mao as China’s greatest statesmen.
Another possibility would involve shortening the label of Mr. Xi’s political philosophy, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” to simply “Xi Jinping Thought.” This would directly mirror “Mao Zedong Thought,” which the party exalts as a guiding ideology second only to Marxism-Leninism.
Mr. Xi’s speech, lasting about 104 minutes, was roughly half the length of his remarks at the 2017 congress, where he spoke for more than 200 minutes. State broadcaster China Central Television said Mr. Xi’s address on Sunday comprised highlights from a full report that congress delegates will review over the coming week.
In the Sunday speech, Mr. Xi declared that the party had scored “historic victories” under his watch, citing the party’s centennial last year, its stewardship over a “new era” in Chinese socialism, and his campaign to eradicate rural poverty. He also reiterated long-term goals that he first laid out five years ago: ensuring that China achieves a degree of “socialist modernization” by 2035 and becomes a “modern socialist power” by the middle of the 21st century.
Some analysts have cited the 2035 target—when Mr. Xi believes China should have become a more equal and prosperous society with an innovative economy and a modernized military—as a possible timeline for his stint as paramount leader.
The party has pitched its twice-a-decade congress as a triumphant moment for China, even as it confronts wide-ranging challenges. Mr. Xi’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 has throttled the domestic economy with repeated lockdowns and disruptions, exacerbated by a property-market slump.
Tensions with the U.S. and other Western powers have intensified as they challenge Beijing’s push for technological supremacy, territorial claims over Taiwan and continued support for Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Xi didn’t mention the war in Ukraine during his speech, which wasn’t expected to go into detail on foreign affairs.
Despite tightened security and censorship, frustrations with Mr. Xi’s policies boiled over into overt dissent on Thursday, when a protest took place on a highway bridge in Beijing. Dark smoke swirled over protest banners condemning Mr. Xi as a “traitorous dictator”—a rare display of defiance that was quickly snuffed out by local authorities.
More than 2,300 delegates were present at the Great Hall of the People, including retired party elders. Mr. Xi’s immediate predecessor,
Hu Jintao,
occupied a seat on the dais next to the incumbent’s. Notable absentees included
Jiang Zemin,
the 96-year-old former leader who served as general secretary for 13 years until 2002, as well as former Premier
Zhu Rongji,
who turns 94 this month.
Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese Communist Party’s twice-a-decade congress opened on Sunday.
Photo:
Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
The congress, which ends Saturday, will vote on the proposed changes to the party charter and elect a new Central Committee, which since 2007 has comprised more than 370 full and nonvoting alternate members, drawn from senior ranks of the party, government, military and state industry.
The new Central Committee will convene the day after to choose the next Politburo and its elite Standing Committee, the party’s top decision-making body. The Politburo has comprised 25 full members since 2007, while the Politburo Standing Committee has featured seven members since 2012, when it was reduced from nine.
The share of seats that Xi allies occupy in the next leadership would offer clues on how much clout the Chinese leader can exert in pursuing his priorities. Analysts say Mr. Xi isn’t likely to designate any potential successors, as doing so would undermine his own authority.
Top state positions, including the next premier and other ministerial roles, won’t be finalized until China’s annual legislative session next spring.
In his Sunday remarks, Mr. Xi didn’t say whether he plans to stay in power to fulfill the vision he outlined. Mr. Xi would turn 74 years old by the end of his third term, two years younger than Mr. Jiang was when he stepped down as party chief in 2002.
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
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‘I don’t want to die for someone else’s ambitions’: Russian men face mobilization
CNN
—
Tension was in the air as a long trail of cars lined up near the Petkuhovo checkpoint on the border between Russia and Kazakhstan late Friday night.
Andrei Alekseev, a 27-year-old engineer from the city of Yekaterinburg, was among many men in the queue who were fleeing Russia in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization orders.
Cars had to go through Russian and Kazakh border checks, both of which lasted about two hours.
Alekseev woke up to the news of Putin’s mobilization order on Wednesday morning and he knew he had to flee Russia. He met up with his friends that night to discuss their next steps and decided to avoid taking any risks and to leave Russia with no plan in mind.
On Saturday, Putin signed the law on military service, setting a jail term of up to 10 years for evading military duty due to mobilization, and up to 15 years in prison for wartime desertion.
The legal amendments also introduce concepts of “mobilization, martial law and wartime” to the Russian Criminal Code. Putin also signed a decree granting university students a deferment from mobilization.
“At the border, all the men were asked whether they served in the army and what is their military service category,” Alekseev told CNN.
“I felt that the border guards were very understanding, however, I had friends who crossed the border to Kazakhstan at a different checkpoint and they were met with grueling questions, it took them seven hours to cross,” he told CNN.
Suffering heavy losses in Ukraine this month amid Ukraine’s counter-offensive, Putin raised the stakes this week with the draft and his backing for referendums in the occupied territories in Ukraine.
The decree signed by Putin appears to allow for wider mobilization than he suggested in the speech that aired on Wednesday. According to the address, 300,000 reservists would be drafted to the front, breaking his promises earlier in the war that there would be no mobilization. However, the decree itself puts no cap on how many people can be mobilized.
“Mobilization is called ‘partial,’ but no parameters of this partiality, neither geographical, nor in terms of criteria, are specified,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist, wrote on her social media page.
“According to this text, anyone can be drafted, except for workers of the military-industrial complex.”
Men aged 18 to 60 across Russia are now facing mobilization as reservists to fight Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Once Alekseev and his wife crossed into Kazahstan, they found that all of the hotels in the border towns were booked, so the couple drove to Astana, the country’s capital, where they are now looking for an apartment.
“Three days ago, I did not think that I would be in Kazakhstan and looking for an apartment here. We are planning to stay for two months, then maybe go to Uzbekistan to renew the period of stay, I will look for work at international companies,” he told CNN.
Kirill Ponomarev, 23, who also fled Russia via a Kazakhstan border, said he struggled to book a ticket. The night before Putin’s address he was looking up tickets out of Russia.
“For some reason, I couldn’t buy a ticket, the night before while waiting for Putin’s speech. And then I fell asleep without buying a ticket, when I woke up, ticket prices jumped,” Ponomarev told CNN.
Men rushed to the borders exchanging tips on Telegram channels and among friends. One-way flights out of Russia sold out within hours of the mobilization announcement.
Four of the five EU countries bordering Russia have banned entry for Russians on tourist visas, while queues to cross land borders out of Russia to the former Soviet countries Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia take over 24 hours to cross.
The Kremlin mocked Russians’ reactions by calling it a “hysterical and overly-emotional reaction.”
Meanwhile, protests broke out across Russia on Wednesday and brutal detentions followed with reports of detained protesters being handed draft letters at police stations. According to the independent monitoring group OVD-Info, more than 1,300 people were detained by authorities in at least 43 cities across Russia.
While all men aged below 60 in Russia now share the fear of getting drafted, Putin’s mobilization disproportionately affects poorer, more ethnically diverse regions of Russia, according to Alexandra Garmazhapova, president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, who spoke to CNN.
“In Buryatia, mobilization is not partial, everyone is mobilized. Summons come to students, pensioners, fathers of many children, people with disabilities,” she told CNN.
Garmazhapova, whose organization provides legal help to mobilised men and their relatives, says every day she hears multiple stories of people being drafted without any regard to age, military history or health conditions.
“Yesterday afternoon, a taxi driver went to refuel the car, and when he was standing at a gas station, a bus passed by with the recruits,” she told CNN.
“The bus stopped abruptly when they saw him and they stuffed him into this bus. They didn’t give him any things to take, nothing. His car was left at this gas station, then relatives took it away,” she said.
Those men who stayed behind in Russia, now take extra caution when leaving their house. Kirill, a 27-year-old IT professional from St. Petersburg who declined to give his surname, said he is starting to think about moving after most of his friends have already received draft letters.
“I adore St. Petersburg but I am starting to have thoughts about moving. Today, I lived another day and tomorrow it might not be safe for me to get into a taxi without a risk of getting drafted,” Kirill told CNN.
“For now, I am keeping an eye on the situation and how it develops. For me, going to war or going to prison are ‘bad options, so hopefully, I can avoid both,” he said.
Kirill, who is half-Ukrainian, said he cannot imagine going to war and killing Ukrainians. “I will not be able to explain my actions to relatives who are in Ukraine. We talk every day,” he said.
Some men were lucky to find out the news of mobilization orders from abroad. Ilya, 35, was on vacation with his family in Turkey when he received a text from his co-workers in Kurgan, a city in the Urals region of Russia, that his office had received a draft letter for him.
His wife and child returned to Russia while he stayed behind in Turkey. “I don’t want war, I don’t want to die for someone else’s ambitions, I don’t want to prove anything to anyone, it was a difficult decision to not return to Russia, very difficult, I don’t know when I can now see my family, my loved ones,” Ilya told CNN.
Ilya served in the Russian army years ago, so is considered to be in the reserve. “I am at a loss and do not know what to do, how to provide for my family being so far from them. I’m deep in debt because of such sudden forced decisions, and I’m just morally exhausted,” he said.
Since the start of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, economic sanctions on Russia made any international transactions close to impossible. Ilya said he wants to be reunited with his family.
Kanye West relaunches his political ambitions and vows to CURE cancer
Kanye West has said he is open to returning to politics, insisting that he had not been put off by his failed presidential bid in 2020.
The rapper, whose father battled stomach cancer in 2018, said that he intended to work to cure the disease.
He said he would work on promoting ‘fresh air and food’.
In October 2018, West said his father Ray’s cancer was in remission, and he was embarking on a strange diet to celebrate.
‘Overcome fear,’ Kanye captioned an Instagram photo showing the insects. ‘My dad and I are going to eat this plate of bugs to celebrate him beating cancer. No more fear.’
He discussed in the wide-ranging interview his co-parenting with ex-wife Kim Kardashian, saying they clashed on certain issues, but worked to resolve them.
Asked on Thursday if he had future political aspirations, West replied: ‘Yes, absolutely.
‘You know, that time wasn’t in God’s time. I’m sure there are lives that were saved.
‘I’m sure God had me fall on the sword and say this is not the time,’ he told ABC News on Thursday night.
‘But he’s a redeemer. He’s given me this oxygen, he’s given me this platform, he’s put amazing people around me.
‘He’s given me new purposes. A new lease on life. New air to breathe. And a new respect.’
He added that he was spending time with Jared Kushner.
Kanye West has spoken to ABC News, in an interview that previewed on Thursday night
‘His brother said he’d kill him if he went back to the White House. That’s the answer,’ West replied, when asked whether that was a genuine friendship or a political move.
West said he had met the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, and thought ‘he would make a really good president, also.’
Linsey Davis asked: ‘In addition to you?’
West replied with a smile.
Davis asked him whether he thought social media was helpful or harmful to him.
In a series of Instagram posts last month, the rapper – who has been open in the past about his bipolar disorder diagnosis and ongoing struggles with mental illness – accused Kardashian of trying to control their children’s lives and schooling.
West said he thought social media could be helpful and harmful.
‘That’s one of my favorite questions of this interview,’ West said.
‘We can use a car to rush somebody to the hospital. Or we could use a car and accidentally hit somebody while we’re rushing somebody to the hospital.
‘It’s all about how we use it.’
West, 45, was asked by Linsey Davis about his relationship with social media
Davis asked whether he felt social media was helpful or harmful to him
West and Kardashian have four children together: North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm
West was asked about his parenting style, and what it was like to co-parent with his ex-wife Kim Kardashian.
She filed for divorce in February 2021, and their separation was finalized in June this year.
The couple share four children – daughter North, nine; six-year-old son Saint; daughter Chicago, four, and three-year-old son Psalm.
‘I have a voice, and I don’t agree with certain things, as a dad and as a Christian,’ he said.
‘I have a right to have a voice on what my kids are wearing, what they are watching, what they are eating.’
His comments come weeks after he accused his ex-wife and Hulu, the Kardashian family’s streaming giant partner, of railroading him when choosing where the kids go to school.
He compared himself to a sperm donor, arguing that he had been left without a say, and fumed over the fact that the children were attending an expensive private school in Los Angeles when he wanted them to go to his school, the Donda Academy, set up in honor of his late mother.
‘I have a platform, and I get to say what so many dads can’t say out loud. There are so many situations where an entire family can go and basically take control of the kids.
‘I know so many people that hit me, like, out of Chicago, and say: yo, I just went through the same thing as you.
‘People will call me and say hey, are you OK? And I’m like, well I’m OK now because I said something. But I wasn’t OK before with the situation, and that’s why I said something.
Kardashian dated comedian Pete Davidson after her split from West. The pair parted ways earlier this year
‘And there are little nuances of what was happening before at Gap. What was happening at Adidas. And what was happening at home.
‘It was all something of a disregard for what I co-created.
‘I co-created the children. I co-created the product at Adidas. I co-created the product at Gap.
‘And I let everyone know that there is actually a through-line, a parallel.
‘And that does touch on discrimination.’
He accused Kardashian, in a conversation he shared on Instagram, of disrespecting him because she is ‘half white’.
‘Y’all don’t have so so over my black children and where they go to school,’ he wrote in one message.
The Chicago-born musician and businessman, however, said on Thursday he had a ‘new respect’ for Kardashian, and that he always wanted her to be ‘calm’.
‘This is the mother of my children, and I apologize for any stress that I have caused, even in my frustration, because God calls me to be stronger,’ he said.
‘I need this person to be less stressed and of the best, sound mind and as calm as possible to be able to raise those children at the end of the day.’
West posted screenshots of his text conversations with his ex-wife where she begged him to stop mentioning her mother, Kris Jenner, and to stop airing their dirty laundry
He wrote something resembling a poem that alluded to the Kardashians on Hulu while speaking more about his mental health and his children’s school
‘Whatever I’m doing, it’s not working’, Kim joked of her approach to romance during a recent appearance on James Corden’s Late Late Show
At Donda, he said children ‘spread’ and ‘sing’ the gospel.
He added that his aim was ‘to build a school that gives kids practical tools that they need in the world.’
He said, in an interview earlier this month, he wanted children to learn about space travel in a ‘shoutout to Elon Musk’.
‘We have to allow for self-confidence. So many schools take away from the confidence that these future leaders have for themselves.
‘Those less confident leaders lead on lying, as opposed to leading on the truth first.
‘We have to educate the critical mass on esteem, on religions – all the religions. We have to educate the critical mass on yoga, financial literacy, we have to expose information.
‘We have to educate on physics – how do things actually work? How do pipes and water actually work? Our school is around engineering.’
Photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com last week show the eerie campus that was deserted in the middle of the day on September 14, a Wednesday.
There were no cars in the parking lot and no signs of life.
The school, that aims to provide a Christian education, could have been observing the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a saints day celebrated on September 14 that commemorates the discovery of the cross that Jesus Christ was crucified on.
There are around 100 students enrolled at the school in addition to 16 full-time teachers. It’s unclear where they were on the day the pictures were taken.
West was in New York City on September 14, at Fashion Week.
Photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com show the eerie campus that was deserted in the middle of the day on September 14, a Wednesday
Little was known about the school until Rolling Stone published an expose. The school is named for West’s mother, Donda
On the school’s website, the Donda Academy says its goal is ‘to provide youth with the passion, purpose and spiritual foundations they need to thrive in tomorrow’s world
The website describes the school as providing students with ‘a world-class education that includes a rigorous core curriculum, and an emphasis on sustainability, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving
West is seen leaving the VOGUE World: New York during September 2022 New York Fashion Week on September 12
Little was known about the school until Rolling Stone published an expose.
The school is named West’s mother, Donda.
On the school’s website, the Donda Academy says its goal is ‘to provide youth with the passion, purpose and spiritual foundations they need to thrive in tomorrow’s world.’
The website describes the school as providing students with ‘a world-class education that includes a rigorous core curriculum, and an emphasis on sustainability, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving.’
The school teaches pre-K through to 12th grade. Tuition for the school costs $15,000 per year. Around half of the students are receiving financial aid.
Among the students is singer Keyshia Cole’s son Daniel.
West said on Thursday that he was continuing his legal fight with Adidas and Gap
On Thursday, West vowed to continue with his legal fight with Adidas and Gap, saying: ‘We got new lawyers…we really had to level up and really show them who’s the new boss in town.’
He was confronted with the infamous 2013 video of him unleashing on journalist Sway Calloway, who asked him, in a radio interview, why he didn’t launch the clothing and shoe brand alone.
West replied angrily: ‘You don’t got the answers, Sway!’
On Thursday, he relented, that he had been right all along.
‘You know what, I’d go ahead and say Sway had the answer. People are gonna be like ‘no!”
He said he now intends to sell Yeezy products direct to consumers.
During the ABC interview, he said he thought people believed he was ‘crazy’ because of his faith.
‘When I finally go to heaven and get to talk to God, I’m going to say: why did you let all these people think I was so crazy?
‘And God is going to say, well, it was a camouflage. I was protecting you.’
West has been open in the past about his bipolar diagnosis.
In a candid 2019 interview with David Letterman for his Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, he explained how he felt during manic episodes.
‘You have this moment [where] you feel everyone wants to kill you. You pretty much don’t trust anyone.
‘When you’re in this state, you’re hyper-paranoid about everything, everyone.
‘This is my experience, other people have different experiences. Everyone now is an actor. Everything’s a conspiracy.
‘You feel the government is putting chips in your head. You feel you’re being recorded.
‘You feel all these things.’
At the time, he advocated for taking daily medication.
‘If you don’t take medication every day to keep you at a certain state, you have a potential to ramp up and it can take you to a point where you can even end up in the hospital.
‘And you start acting erratic, as TMZ would put it.’
Meta’s chip deal with Qualcomm may reflect its unrealized VR ambitions
Qualcomm and Meta have signed a multi-year agreement promising to team up on custom versions of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR chips for the “future roadmap of Quest products” and “other devices,” as Mark Zuckerberg put it.
While, in some ways, the move is business as usual — the Quest 2 is powered by the Snapdragon XR2 chipset — it could provide insight into Meta’s compromises as it faces declines in revenue and tries to keep the spiraling expenses of Mark’s metaverse project in check.
What the Qualcomm deal shows is that Meta’s upcoming headsets, which reportedly include a high-end headset codenamed Cambria and, later, new versions of its cheaper Quest headset, won’t run on completely customized Meta-designed silicon.
This is despite competing companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google making product decisions around custom chip designs like M2, Graviton3, and Tensor — and the fact that Meta’s had a team dedicated to doing the same since 2018. This press release says the chips will be “customized” for Meta’s needs. Still, we don’t know how much space that can put between its “premium” devices and other manufacturers’ hardware that hews closely to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR reference designs.
In April, The Verge reported that Meta employees were working with semiconductor fabs — the companies that actually produce the physical chips — to make custom chips for its as-of-yet unannounced AR headset. That same month, The Information reported that some of Meta’s efforts to create custom chips were hitting roadblocks, pushing it to use a Qualcomm chip for its second-gen Ray-Bay smart glasses instead of its own silicon.
Tyler Yee, a Meta spokesperson, said that the company doesn’t discuss details about how its roadmap has evolved and wouldn’t comment on any specific plans it may have had for custom chips for Quest products. However, Yee did share a statement on the company’s “general approach to custom silicon,” saying that Meta doesn’t believe in a “one-size-fits-all approach” for the tech powering its future devices.
“There could be situations where we use off-the-shelf silicon or work with industry partners on customizations, while also exploring our own novel silicon solutions. There could also be scenarios where we use both partner and custom solutions in the same product,” he said. “It is all about doing what is needed to create the best metaverse experiences possible.”
The backdrop to all this is a company facing a lot of pressure. Meta’s revenue has dipped for the first time (thanks in part to Apple’s changes to how apps are allowed to track users), and Zuckerberg explicitly stated plans to turn up the heat on employees while admitting, “I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.” At the same time, he’s making a massive bet on the metaverse — the company is spending, and losing, billions of dollars per year on the project, which includes AR and VR headsets.
It’s a high-stakes game that Meta would presumably want to play as close to the chest as possible. But for now, it seems the hardware customers access Zuckerberg’s Metaverse with (if they’re going to do that at all, instead of just playing Beat Saber) will remain powered by somebody else’s chips.
Zelensky Warns That Russian Ambitions Don’t End With Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine—Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky
warned that Russia had its sights set on other European countries if its troops push past Ukrainian forces trying to hold back a renewed Russian offensive in the south and east of the country.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine was intended only as a beginning, then they want to capture other countries,” Mr. Zelensky said late Friday, renewing his calls for more weapons and support from the West.
Moscow’s gains over the besieged port city of Mariupol likely have begun to free up troops to push further west along Ukraine’s southern regions, where Russian troops have made the most progress since the start of its invasion in February.
On Saturday two Russian missiles hit an unspecified military asset and two residential buildings in the coastal city of Odessa, more than 300 miles west of Mariupol, according to a post on the city government’s Telegram social-media account. Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff,
Andriy Yermak,
wrote on his Telegram account that at least five civilians, including an infant, were killed and 18 people wounded. Russian officials didn’t comment Saturday on any action in Odessa.
A Russian general said Friday that Moscow wanted to establish a land corridor from Mariupol to Crimea and onward to the Russian-backed territory of Transnistria, a separatist region established inside neighboring Moldova with Moscow’s help, to support Russian speakers there.
Moldova on Friday summoned Russia’s ambassador over the comments of Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekayev, deputy commander of Russia’s Central Military District, saying they “are unfounded and contradict the position of the Russian Federation supporting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova.”
The general’s statements, on which the Kremlin declined to comment after they aired on state media, underscored one of Kyiv’s central rallying cries for Western support in its fight against Russia: that a revisionist Russia, under President
Vladimir Putin,
is trying to re-establish a Soviet-era sphere of influence that reaches deep inside Europe.
It also highlighted how the Kremlin has sought to use the so-called separatist republics it has backed across the Caucasus region and Eastern Europe as a pretext to exert control beyond Russia’s borders.
Transnistria broke away from former Soviet Republic Moldova following its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 in an effort to stay within the Soviet bloc. The Soviet 14th Guards Army intervened months later on the side of the separatists and have stayed in the separatist region as what Moscow calls a peacekeeping force.
Police officers climbed into a burned apartment after a Russian rocket attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Friday.
Photo:
Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Residential buildings heavily damaged during Ukraine-Russia conflict in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine.
Photo:
ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS
Russia has made meaningful gains along Ukraine’s coast of the Azov Sea and is seeking to make further headway west on the country’s Black Sea coast. But Ukraine retains control of the port cities of Odessa, near the border with Moldova, and Mykolaiv, where it is working to push back Russian troops. An unknown number of Ukrainian forces also remain in the tunnels and underground bunkers of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
Russian strongholds in the south and east have come into renewed focus in recent weeks following Moscow’s withdrawal of troops from around Kyiv after a failed attempt to take the capital.
Ukraine’s general staff said Saturday that Russian forces have made a tactical push from the Russian-controlled separatist regions in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine to position themselves for an assault on Slovyansk. That city was a center of civilian disappearances and torture at the hands of Russian-backed troops later pushed out by Ukraine during the 2014 conflict in the region.
“In the Donetsk direction, the Russian enemy is conducting offensive operations along the entire line of contact,” Ukraine’s general staff said Saturday. It said Russia’s 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Guards Brigade, which Kyiv says was responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Ukrainians in the city of Bucha, had now taken positions in eastern Ukraine but had suffered heavy losses.
Evacuees from the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol boarded a train departing Zaporizhzhia on Friday for the relative safety of Lviv in the west of the country.
Photo:
ed jones/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A satellite image shows what appear to be new graves dug at a cemetery near Mariupol, Ukraine, at the end of March.
Photo:
MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/REUTERS
Those battles don’t so far amount to the concerted Russian offensive that Ukraine and Western countries expected in what Moscow has called the second phase of the war, according to military analysts. The U.K. Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russia had made no major gains in the previous 24 hours.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Saturday its forces had used high-precision air-based missiles to strike 25 Ukrainian armored vehicles and three weapons depots overnight. It also said it had shot down a Ukrainian Su-25 aircraft in the region of Kharkiv and destroyed 15 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles.
With the battle for Donbas pitting conventional forces against each other, Ukraine is struggling to make up for its disadvantage in artillery and a shortage of Soviet-standard ammunition—one reason why Mr. Zelensky has asked the U.S. and allies to supply NATO-standard heavy weapons. Analysts say it will take weeks for Kyiv to train its forces on the Western systems and use them to full effect.
Ukraine’s military has been able to partly offset Russia’s overwhelming advantage in aircraft by using Western-supplied antiaircraft missiles, such as Stingers and Starstreaks, to down several Russian jet fighters, helicopters and drones in recent days, according to footage of wreckage posted by Ukrainian troops and verified by military analysts. Ukraine said Friday it lost an An-26B transport plane that hit a power line in the Zaporizhzhia region, leaving at least one crew member dead.
The U.S. has been the first to provide Ukraine with NATO-standard 155-mm howitzers. President Biden said Thursday that Washington’s latest $800 million military-aid package would include 72 of the towed artillery pieces in addition to 18 pledged the previous week.
On Friday, Canada said its military had also sent an unspecified number of 155-mm howitzers and antiarmor ammunition to Ukraine. Canadian Broadcasting Corp., citing a military source, reported the package would include GPS-guided Excalibur rounds, which are valued at about $112,000 per round.
French President
Emmanuel Macron
said Paris was providing Ukraine with Caesar self-propelled 155-mm artillery pieces, in an interview published Friday by the newspaper Ouest-France. The newspaper, citing military sources, reported that Paris was transferring 12 Caesars, which have a range of some 40 kilometers, equivalent to about 25 miles, and that Ukrainian soldiers would begin training Saturday in France.
An Orthodox Easter mass in Lviv, Ukraine, on Saturday. Easter in the Ukrainian Orthodox church falls on April 24 this year.
Photo:
mykola tys/epa/Shutterstock
—Mauro Orru contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Yuliya Chernova at yuliya.chernova@wsj.com
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PlayStation Will Keep Making Single-Player Games as Live-Service Ambitions Expand
With PlayStation’s acquisition of Haven earlier this week, the platform holder is pushing deeper into the live-service space. But PlayStation reiterates that it will continue to create the premier single-player games that it has been known for these last few years.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, head of PlayStation Studios Herman Hulst says, “Obviously we will always carry on making these single-player narrative-based games such as Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us, and Horizon Forbidden West.”
He continued, explaining, “But you’ve spotted correctly that we have invested in live service games, because that’s incredibly exciting for us. It allows us to build larger worlds, it allows us to create really meaningful social connections between players.”