Tag Archives: Access to Information

Roundup: A major agreement with the EU

Posted on by

At the Canada-EU summit in Brussels yesterday, Mark Carney signed a new security and defence partnership, and the joint communiqué was very, very long. A lot of stuff that might have been part of a G7 communiqué, but that wasn’t going to happen given how much time and energy was spent managing Trump and the Americans, and that included a lot of talk about upholding the rules-based international order, or combatting climate change, and that kind of thing, that would have caused Trump to throw another one of his public tantrums. But that’s the world we live in now.

This means that Canada is now on the road to participating in programmes like ReArm Europe, which seeks to drive down the cost of joint military procurement projects by increasing the scale of the buys, and helps to keep those industries in Europe rather than relying on the American defence-industrial complex, but the hope is that this agreement will open the Canadian market to those procurements as well (though I am curious to know how many Canadian firms are actually Canadian and not just American branch-plants).

Today will be the big NATO summit where increasing the expected defence spending target is the major focus, though there will likely be some sidebars around de-escalation with Israel and Iran. Ukraine will also be a focus, though president Zelenskyy is not expected to attend (though he was in the UK yesterday to sign new agreements on military production there, and to have lunch with the King at Windsor Castle). Nevertheless, that five percent target—to ostensibly be divided up as 3.5% operational spending and 1.5% in related spending that has some kind of a defence-adjacent component—is going to be incredibly difficult for the majority of countries to achieve, but especially to sustain. You already have some countries who met their two percent target by front-loading a bunch of procurement, but they have no idea how they’ll manage to stay at two percent, let alone 3.5%-plus going forward. (It’s also a dumb metric because it doesn’t deal with contributions to operations, and the disparity between the denominators among member countries is pretty vast, to say nothing about the fact that it’s easier to hit your targets if you crash your economy to drag your denominator down). One hopes there will be some cooler heads around the table, but it looks like the 5 percent is a done deal, which will create problems down the road.

https://bsky.app/profile/plagasse.bsky.social/post/3lsbzgrlhpk2u

Ukraine Dispatch

The attack on Kyiv early Monday wound up killing at least ten, including a child, as an apartment block was struck. Ukraine says that it attacked and set ablaze an oil depot in Russia’s Rostov region.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1937171580552966364?s=61

Continue reading →

Roundup: A big defence commitment?

Posted on by

Yesterday, at Fort York in Toronto, prime minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would meet its NATO commitment of two percent of GDP by the end of next fiscal year instead of by 2030, in part through use of greater pay, more funds for sustainment, support for the defence industry, and some good ol’ creative accounting. Carney prefaced this by making a very real point about the changing nature of America’s place in the world: “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony, charging for access to its markets and reducing its relative contribution to our collective security.”

One of the big question marks has to do with the status of the Coast Guard, and how it gets folded into the calculation around defence spending—there were mixed messages on whether it stays under Department of Fisheries and Oceans, of if it will be moved into Department of National Defence (though there is also an argument for it to go to Public Safety), and the question of whether or not to arm those ships is a fraught one because of the training requirements for armaments. It sounds like there will be things like CSE’s cyber-capability being counted as part of this calculation as well, which again, seems to be more fudging numbers that we typically accused other nations of doing while we were more “pure” in terms of what we counted toward our spending commitments, and that seems to be going away.

I would add that while we get a bunch of competing narratives around the target, whether it’s the Conservatives’ memory-holing the fact that they cut defence spending to below one percent of GDP (in order to achieve a false balance on the books in time for the 2015 election), or the notion that we are nothing more than freeloaders in NATO, we should keep reminding people that even with lower per-capita defence spending, we have been punching above our weight taking on the tough missions in NATO (Kandahar, leading a multi-country brigade in Latvia) where as other allies who have met their two percent targets don’t contribute (looking at you, Greece). A poor metric of spending is not a good indicator of contribution, but it has created a whole false narrative that we should be correcting, but that’s too much work for the pundit class, who are more interested in hand-wringing and calling Justin Trudeau names than they are in looking at our actual contributions. (Here’s a timeline of the spending target melodrama).

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia made another massive overnight attack against Ukraine, launching 479 drones and twenty missiles of various types, targeting the western and central parts of the county. Another prisoner swap did go ahead yesterday.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1932086386145841186

Continue reading →

Roundup: The PBO immolates his credibility

Posted on by

In their need to constantly frame issues as both-sides, The Canadian Press inadvertently downplayed the severity of what happened with the notice that the Parliamentary Budget Officer quietly put on his website to say that they got some of their analysis on the federal carbon levy wrong. The CP story focused it on a Liberal MP writing the PBO to get him to broadcast the correction, rather than framing the story as the PBO made an error, and giving the briefest of mentions to the MP and his open letter, because that letter shouldn’t have been the story.

The story, as it turns out, is not only that the PBO made the mistake in his analysis, it’s that he is steadfastly refusing to take any responsibility for it, never mind that this particular report has been politically charged and is at the centre of much of the debate over the carbon levy. Putting aside that the report itself was not very well done (the distributional analysis was undermined by his insistence on including average figures and that the calculation on the impact of the price were done in the absence of any kind of counterfactual, and in a binary price/no price way that is in itself inherently misleading, the fact that the PBO didn’t advertise that there was a problem with the report, didn’t include any kind of correction (he’s planning a fully re-done report in the fall), and he’s saying thing that don’t logically follow, such as it’s too complex to recalculate like this…but the outcome from the error is unlikely to change the outcome of that portion of the report (this being the impact on the broader economy, which the Conservatives misleadingly cherry-pick to “prove” households are worse off). So, in addition to refusing to take responsibility, he won’t pick a lane.

But it gets worse. Yves Giroux went on Power & Politics to discuss this incident, and immolated his credibility as he not only continued to refuse to take any responsibility, but tried to prevaricate, and make excuses with a wall of bafflegab, but he also started arguing that his “small office” shouldn’t be responsible for the climate-related economic modelling that MPs are demanding, that the government should be doing it, but his one job is literally doing this kind of analysis to provide an independent analysis from the government’s. Of course, Giroux has always had a problem sticking within the bounds of his legislated mandate, and has preferred to act like a talking head pundit and opining on all kinds of things the government is doing, while still insisting that he’s independent and hence more credible than the government as a result. And I’m not too surprised that Giroux is trying to avoid taking any responsibility, being that he is a career civil servant for whom responsibility is something to be avoided, but in refusing to do so, he has tainted his office. There can’t be trust about his numbers going forward, and as was pointed out, especially if he’s going to be costing election platform promises (which he’s done a pretty shite job of so far, such as sticking his letterhead on Andrew Scheer’s handwaving), but that was something the PBO never should have done in the first place. This should be a resignation-worthy offence, but so should it have been when he decided he wanted to be a television pundit. But we’ll see if he can finally accept responsibility and do the right thing here and step down.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Four people were injured in a Russian missile attack on Kharkiv early Thursday morning. NATO’s secretary general is proposing a way to help Trump-proof military aid for Ukraine, but there will be obstacles that include Hungary’s objections. Reuters has a lengthy look at the front lines in Donetsk.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Ford bringing back 1890s patronage

Posted on by

Ontario premier Doug Ford made a rousing defence for his appointing two former senior staffers onto the committee tasked with appointing provincial judges, saying that it’s “democracy” for him to make “like-minded” appointments, which is like a throwback to the 1890s. It’s very true that control of patronage was one of the key reasons why Responsible Government happened in the Canadian colonies back in the 1840s, but there has been a move over decades to professionalise and de-politicise, most especially with the judiciary, and when Ford is talking about needing to appoint his people so that he can get “tough” judges and justices of the peace on the bench, that’s a warning sign that he is backsliding on democratic norms (and he has had a history of very partisan patronage appointments since the very beginning of his government). It’s not that Ford has any particular coherent ideology other than he thinks that locking people up and throwing away the key will please voters, Charter rights, or the presumption of innocence be damned.

https://twitter.com/dwjudson/status/1761064514298986702

This kind of talk undermines the justice system, because it leaves the impression that judges are acting in partisan ways, or who were appointed because of partisan leanings, which is not a feature in the Canadian legal system. And the point Judson made about contagion is because there are people on the political right who feel that they can move the goalposts of what is acceptable for political interference in institutions that should be impartial or independent—and that is a very, very big problem at a time when the political right is undermining whatever institutions they can. It’s a key feature of Orbánism, coming out of Hungary, which the right in America and Canada keeps lapping up. That’s incredibly damaging, and it needs to be called out when it happens, even if Ford isn’t doing this for the sake of becoming like Orbán, but for his own populist ends.

https://twitter.com/dwjudson/status/1761228183674712200

Meanwhile, as an example of premiers politicizing the judiciary, Quebec premier François Legault is attacking the Quebec Court of Appeal as being federally-appointed after they handed him his ass on his attempt to prevent asylum-seekers from accessing the subsidised child care system. Part of this was blasting the Parti Québécois for agreeing with the decision, accusing their leader of “prostrating himself before Ottawa.” That said, Legault is appealing the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, which is also federally-appointed, so I’m not sure why this will be any different if his logic holds. Unsurprisingly, the Quebec bar association is denouncing this, but this is exactly the kind of contagion being referred to with Ford’s comments, and how they undermine confidence in the justice system. Legault is doing it for his own purposes, and it’s a problem just as much as Ford’s comments.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians launched another drone attack against Odesa, which hit a residential building and killed one person and injured another three. Russians are also claiming that they are pushing further west after security Avdiivka. Ukraine took out one of Russia’s early warning aircraft, which is part of their air defences and of which they have very few remaining. Four Western leaders including Justin Trudeau have arrived in Kyiv to show solidarity as the war enters its third year. Ukrainian officials have launched investigations into 122,000 suspected war crimes since the beginning of the invasion, and 511 perpetrators have been identified to date. Meanwhile, Russia has been cranking up its production and refurbishment of old equipment, but there are questions as to whether quantity can outdo quality.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Bad Supreme Court reporting is bad

Posted on by

There is a reason why journalists should have beats, and why it can be dangerous to write about topics or institutions when you’re not familiar with them. There was a case in point yesterday in the National Post which was trying to sound some kind of alarm about what’s going on at the Supreme Court of Canada—except there’s actually no story here. I’m really not trying to pick on the reporter of the piece, because he’s a good journalist, but he just doesn’t know the file, and got swept up in what a particular lawyer was telling him without having a proper bullshit detector.

The supposed crisis is that the Court is hearing fewer cases lately, and a lot of what it is hearing is being decided in rulings from the bench, meaning they generally don’t release written decisions, and that this is somehow bad for developing case law. Because he talked to one lawyer who tracks stats, he figures that’s the story. Except it’s really not. They’re hearing fewer cases as a direct result of the pandemic, which slowed down the ability to hear cases at the trial court level, which then slows down appeals, which slows down their ability to get to the Supreme Court. They piece pooh-poohs that almost four years later this is still a problem, when of course it is. These things take a long time, particularly when courts were operating on a minimal standard for nearly two years. And because they were operating minimally, most of what they did hear were criminal cases, because they have timelines attached lest they get stayed for delays. That means that most of what does filter up to the Supreme Court are criminal cases, many of them as of right (meaning that at the appeal level, it wasn’t unanimous, so it automatically goes to the Supreme Court of Canada). That’s why a lot of these cases are being decided from the bench—there isn’t any matter of national importance being decided, so they have few needs for written rulings. In the Court’s current session, only two of the cases are not criminal because that’s how the lower courts have been operating. It’s a problem for sure, but it’s one because provinces aren’t funding courts adequately, and the federal government is too slow to make appointments to fill vacancies. This is not a Supreme Court problem.

Furthermore, the piece quotes from a literal constitutional crank—a particular law professor who is of the “burn it all down” school—because it’s a lazy journalist’s trick to make the piece sound more controversial or edgy. But here, he’s saying that he can’t believe they weren’t hearing certain cases without actually saying what he wanted them to hear, and then, out of nowhere, says the Court is going to have to expand, but doesn’t explain why. It makes no sense other than it’s piggybacking on an American issue that has nothing to do with our Court. There is also concern that the court’s decisions are a lot more divided these days and not unanimous without actually exploring that. This is largely because of the different styles of chief justice—under Beverley McLachlin, she strove for more unanimous decisions, and in the end, many of the rulings became so narrowly focused in order to achieve unanimity that they were largely useless for the purposes of developing case law. There is more dissent now because Richard Wagner isn’t concerned with achieving unanimity to the detriment of the decisions, and you have a couple of judges on the court who like to be contrarians. That’s not a bad thing. There is no crisis with the Supreme Court, and if the reporter had any grounding in the institution, he would have seen that there’s no smoke, no fire, and stats without context are useless.

Ukraine Dispatch:

The fighting is now inside the city of Avdiivka, which Russians have been trying to capture for months. There was another prisoner swap yesterday, with 100 exchanged on each side. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has replaced the top army commander, looking for fresh ideas on how to push Russian invaders back. (More about the new chief here).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Another diminished Auditor General Day

Posted on by

It was Auditor General Day yesterday, and she had five reports that weren’t terribly complimentary of the government and its efforts, especially as some have been in the works for years and are making progress that is far too slow for the task at hand.

  1. In spite of working to make changes to the processing, there is still a massive backlog of permanent resident applications at Citizenship and Immigration, as well as a major problem with asylum claims that are taking years to be processed.
  2. The efforts to combat racism in government departments and the RCMP are falling short (which is not a huge surprise because this government has a particular problem of saying “intersectional” and “GBA+” and assuming that it will magically fix things rather than doing the actual hard work).
  3. The work to modernise the critical IT infrastructure of the government, particularly when it comes to delivering services Canadians rely on, is getting worse and Treasury Board doesn’t have plans yet on how to replace some of it (which should be alarming).
  4. Modernising the delivery of benefits like CPP, EI, and OAS is behind schedule and facing cost overruns, because of course it is.
  5. Canadians can’t get access to critical antimicrobial drugs as drug resistant strains get worse, and while data collection is improving, there remain gaps in access, which the Pandemic made worse.

You might also note that only three of those five items had news stories attached to them, and not all five. Even more to the point, two were Canadian Press wire stories, one came from the Globe and Mail, and that was it. The National Post had their own version of the immigration story, but of the major outlets, that was all that got covered. It used to be that on Auditor General days, the lock-up room at the OAG was packed, and each outlet sent several reporters to ensure that most of the reports got adequate coverage (some of the special audits of Crown corporations excepted). What we see now is a sad indictment of just how diminished our media capacity is, and how little value we are placing on these reports, which is a problem.

Ukraine Dispatch:

New overnight attacks focused on both the north and south of Ukraine, but no casualties have been reported yet. Russian forces resumed their onslaught of the eastern city of Avdiivka, which Ukrainian forces continued to hold at bay. Russians have also stepped up their bid to re-take the city of Kupiansk, which was liberated late last year. Meanwhile, Ukraine is looking to fill 2000 judicial vacancies (and we thought it was bad in Canada), while also looking to vet the current roster of judges for malfeasance as they work toward cleaning up corruption in order to meet the conditions for acceptance into the EU.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Cabinet retreat missives

Posted on by

We are starting to see the parade of ministers being trotted out to the media from the Cabinet retreat in Charlottetown, PEI, and first up on everyone’s mind is housing and what the federal government should do about it. And they did hear from experts like Mike Moffatt yesterday, which is good, so we’ll see if anything comes of it. But of course, legacy media has glommed onto the issue of international students and whether they will cap them, without also exploring how that has become a necessary revenue stream for universities after provincial cutbacks and freezes, or the fact that there are a plethora of private colleges that the provinces are supposed to be regulating who have been abusing their ability to bring in international students basically to defraud them of hundreds of thousands of dollars while providing them a substandard education. That should be where more attention is being paid, but we all know that legacy media loves to blame the federal government instead of the provinces, so here we are.

We also heard from Dominic LeBlanc who again gave assurances that a public inquiry into foreign interference is in the works, but they are now trying to find a sitting judge who can lead it, because apparently all of the retired ones and other eminent Canadians who could do the job have all told them no—because who wants to subject themselves to partisan character assassination day-in-and-day-out? Of course, I half suspect that they’re going to get some pushback from the chief justices of the provinces about who could be made available considering that the federal government has been slow to make appointments and it’s contributing to delays and backlogs in the system as is, and taking someone out of circulation for another eighteen months doesn’t help the situation any.

Other ministerial soundbites include Chrystia Freeland insisting that they remain focused on the economy.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they have retaken a strategic south-eastern village as part of the counteroffensive, which continues its southward push. In addition to advanced Western weapons, the Ukrainians have developed a “mini-Grad” rocket launcher made up of old Soviet parts. In Athens, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Balkan leaders, as well as European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen. Ukrainian media is reporting that a group of saboteurs coordinated with Ukrainian military intelligence services to carry out drone attacks on air bases deep inside Russia, destroying and damaging aircraft. In Denmark, eight Ukrainian pilots have begun their F-16 fighter training.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Bell Media’s plea to the CRTC

Posted on by

We’ve been talking a lot about the state of media in Canada lately, and the awfulness hasn’t stopped as Bell Media is now asking the CRTC to let it get out of its local news requirements citing that they are losing money. But this isn’t a surprise—news is generally money-losing for broadcasters, but it’s content with a lot of eyeballs that they can charge a lot of advertising dollars for.

But let’s also be up front—Bell is making money hand over fist because they are part of the telecom oligopoly in this country, and are an extremely profitable company. Their local news obligations are part of the price of admission, and the CRTC is not being shy about this. With the Rogers-Shaw merger, one of the conditions they imposed was the creation of a certain number of hours of new information programming from their stations, which basically amounts to a new one-hour documentary per week, for nearly every week of the year. And this is a condition of their broadcast licence, so they can’t get out of it.

With this in mind, I’m pretty confident that the CRTC is going to tell Bell Media to get stuffed, and possibly even impose more news obligations as part of their licencing requirements because they’re aware of the state of news media. And the fact that the new CRTC Commissioner was a competition lawyer gives me some added confidence in this because she gets the problems associated with centralized news production and how local markets suffer as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch:

At least three people in Ukraine were killed by Russian attacks, two of them on a trolleybus that came under fire in Kherson. There were also reports of heavy Russian missile attacks overnight. Ukraine has also signalled that the main thrust of its counteroffensive has yet to happen, which is obvious from the fact that they haven’t yet committed the bulk of their forces. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also ordered an audit of the heads of military draft offices after allegations of corruption.

https://twitter.com/kyivpost/status/1672148522488016897

Meanwhile, things are blowing up in Russia, quite literally, as the head of the Wagner mercenary group has turned on the Russian military, and has so far seized the military command in Rostov, and allegedly plans to head to Moscow in order to confront the military leadership there. Thus far, it’s hard to say if this is a mutiny or a military coup, and it’s hard to get any accurate information without an independent press in Russia, so everything should be taken with a shaker full of salt, but it’s going to be an interesting few days.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Exit David Johnston

Posted on by

Around 5.30 PM on a Friday evening, the Rt. Hon. David Johnston tendered his resignation as the special rapporteur on foreign interference, citing that the political firestorm around him has reached a point where his job of trying to restore confidence in our electoral system is now impossible, and while he does not counsel a public inquiry, he did urge consultation on choosing a replacement, for what it’s worth. Of course, what this really means is that instead of doing the work of the actual process part of this issue, sorting out what happened in the senior levels of bureaucracy and how to fix it going forward, we now get to spend the next six months fighting over a name that will be acceptable to all parties, whether it’s to continue the existing process or a public inquiry like everyone thinks they want.

In response, the Conservatives crowed and declared that this “proves” that Johnston was flawed from the start, and that his determination that we don’t need a public inquiry was also wrong, so launch a public inquiry, with a lot of Trudeau Foundation conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure. The Bloc were insisting that the head of an inquiry be chosen by Parliament (which is wrong and insane), while the NDP were declaring victory and patting themselves on the back because Johnston, in their estimation, heeded their motion to resign, never mind that he said nothing about that in his resignation letter, and repudiated their performance while at committee. (Peter Julian insisted that by his action of resigning, he took the NDP’s position, which is the most self-aggrandising bullshit this side of Pierre Poilievre). But the underlying notion that Parliament choose the head of an inquiry is both contrary to the law, which clearly states that the head of an inquiry is a Governor-in-Council appointment, and it also launders accountability going forward, which of course MPs can’t get their heads around because almost none of them understands that their role is about holding government to account.

None of this solves the underlying problem that a public inquiry is not magic. Everyone demanding one seems to think it can be wrapped up in the space of a few months, and that can be broad enough in scope to fully understand how deep Chinese infiltration goes into our country, while also providing concrete recommendations for protecting the next election. That’s not going to happen in a few months—that kind of scoping takes years, and is not going to get to the fundamental issue here, which is that this is ultimately a process story about the machinery of government, dealing with classified information, and that a public inquiry can’t hear most of it. That is, if they can find someone to head it who meets everyone’s satisfaction and who is willing to put themselves through the character assassination that will follow. This is one giant mess, and there’s more than enough blame to go around to absolutely everyone, and it’s not going to get any better.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian authorities claim that they have repelled a Ukrainian advance into Zaporizhzhia, and inflicted heavy casualties, but there is no confirmation of these claims. Meanwhile, more Ukrainians are being evacuated from flooded homes after Russia destroyed the dam on the Dnipro river.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1667133462787047425?s=61&t=OQl-ixPj-I_27b0NFGeMZg

https://twitter.com/kyivpost/status/1667094711994052609?s=61&t=OQl-ixPj-I_27b0NFGeMZg

Continue reading →

Roundup: The optics ouroboros

Posted on by

So, that big CBC/Radio-Canada “scoop” that dominated the news yesterday about Justin Trudeau’s Christmas vacation. Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I figured I would make a few remarks, because there were some very obvious things about it that were just being shrugged off, or actively ignored by some of my fellow journalists. To begin with, there is not a lot of substance to the story. It’s some typical cheap outrage—how dare the prime minister go on a luxury vacation on taxpayer dollars when there are people struggling in Canada—mixed with a specious connection that doesn’t mean anything in substance, but which looks bad when you make it sound sinister in order to fit it in with the current nonsense around the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Fit those two in a particular frame that makes it sound salacious, and you have the makings of a story that dominates Question Period. Congratulations! You’ve set the agenda for the day, you can pat yourselves on the back to your heart’s content.

But the whole connection to the Foundation is a construction that implies a relationship that doesn’t exist. Yes, the Trudeau and Green families have been friends for 50 years, but the donation to the Foundation was a bequest after the death of one of the Green family members, and it was done two years ago, which was eight years after Trudeau stepped away from any involvement in the Foundation. Implying that there was something untoward about the donation and then vacationing with Trudeau—who has been family friends his entire life—is simply scandal-mongering. And this gets justified with the pearl-clutching about “optics!” But you’re the one creating the optics with the distorted framing of the situation, so you’re literally inventing a mess that doesn’t actually exist, so that you can report on the invented mess, and then report on the follow-up reactions from other political leaders who will tut about “optics.” Which you created in the first place with your framing, like some kind of ouroboros. Very convenient, that.

None of this is to say that Trudeau shouldn’t know better than to take these kinds of trips, because he knows full well that there is an intrinsic culture of petty and mean cheapness in Canadian media, and that his opponents will take full advantage of it. And lo, the story also quotes unnamed Liberal Sources™ who are once again shocked and dismayed that the prime minister once again did something with poor optics, because that’s who he is. And Trudeau then made it worse, as pointed out in my QP recap, by not answering about the gift of the accommodations, which just perpetuates the story rather than cutting it off at the start. “Yes, I accepted the gift of the accommodations. Yes, the Ethics Commissioner cleared it. Yes, I paid the equivalent commercial rate for the flight.” And it stops their ability to try and stretch this into a scandal. But Trudeau and the people who advise his communications are so tone-deaf that they keep doing this. They keep stepping on every rake in their path, every single gods damned time.

Ukraine Dispatch:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited troops in the eastern city of Avdiivka, which is facing an advance like Bakhmut, which itself is facing an increase in Russian shelling and air strikes. Ukraine has reached a deal with Poland about grain and other food products transiting that country, but the future of the Black Sea deal remains in doubt.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1648431809200553985

Continue reading →