Reuters World News - On the front line of Ukraine's counteroffensive

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has slowed after retaking a string of villages. We’re on the front line as Ukrainian forces seek to push Russian troops closer to the sea. Time is running out for the missing Titanic tourist sub. We hear about the African men who joined Russia’s Wagner fighters in Ukraine. Plus, Powell in Congress, a gas explosion in China and the New Mexico woodcutters helping protect against wildfires. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're on the front lines as Ukraine's counter-offensive against Russian forces inches forward. There are no safe points, really. It doesn't matter where you are under tree canopy in a trench. You're still at risk of being seen. You're still at risk of falling victim to an artillery shell or a rocket. You're just not fully safe anywhere. The search for the missing Titanic tourist sub intensifies with those on board just hours away from running out of oxygen. We hear about the African men who joined Russia's Wagner fighters in Ukraine.

And in New Mexico, an unlikely alliance between the US Forest Service and traditional woodcutters to protect against wildfires. It's Thursday, June 22nd. This is Reuters World News, with everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. Every weekday. I'm Kim Vinal in London. First, the headlines. We start in the North Atlantic, where an international search team is crisscrossing the waters and the skies above the Titanic, searching for a tourist submersible.

The minivan-sized vessel has just a few hours of oxygen left and five people on board. We have to hold out hope. I think as you're aware, there's still life support available on the subversible, and we'll continue to hold old hope until very end. Sean Leach, the head of a company which jointly owns the missing submersible there. Emergency services on the scene of a gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant in the Chinese city of Yenuan. More than 30 people were killed. A blast rips through a street in the historic Latin quarter of Paris on Wednesday, injuring dozens. Rescue workers are still searching for two missing people, feared buried under the rubble.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is suing Amazon, accusing it of duping millions of consumers into signing up for its prime service and making it hard for them to cancel. Amazon called the FTC's claims false on the facts and the law. We never used the word pause and I wouldn't use it here today. Is that clear enough for you? Fed Chair Jerome Powell telling lawmakers that he would not characterize last week's decision to hold interest rate steady as a pause.

Instead, Powell told Congress that further rate increases are likely. That's a pretty good guess of what will happen if the economy performs about as expected. Now for what's going on in the markets, we have Carmel, Crimmons. And Carmel, it's a pretty good guess that the Bank of England is going to raise rates today, right? Absolutely. After hotter than expected inflation data, investors are now pricing in a near 50% chance that the BOE will raise rates by half a percentage point. And really interestingly, Turkey's central bank is expected to raise its policy rate sharply.

If that happens, that will be a sign that President Erdogan has accepted that he needs to take conventional steps to address soaring inflation. So that will be an interesting one to watch. It's chocker block full of central bank decisions today. We've already had the Norwegian central bank and the Swiss National Bank out. The Norwegians' hiked rates by 50 basis points and the Swiss by 25. In southeast Ukraine, Kyiv's counteroffensive has slowed. President Vladimir Zelenskyy says heavily mined regions have delayed progress.

Our correspondent Max Hunter sent this dispatch about 20 miles from Ukraine's eastern front lines. It's just an ordinary clear June day. Lots of rose bushes growing in this town. Very, very pretty little town, actually. Families walking around. But if you drive even maybe half an hour towards the front line, you immediately enter a different world. There is just a vast amount of ordnance, shells, rockets, other stuff flying across the front line on both sides. And you see it in the way the soldiers walk, in the way they run, the way they behave.

They constantly look up almost kind of flinchingly at the sky. They're absolutely terrified of reconnaissance drones, which are sort of the harbangers of the artillery, right? The drone sees you and then you get incoming pretty much immediately after progress has been rather slow. Ukraine so far announced in total the capture of eight villages. However, when you consider just under 20% of Ukraine's territory is still occupied by Russia, there are thousands more villages still to go. And to be honest, it's going at a pretty slow pace so far. Ukraine has made some southward progress.

And every kilometer Ukraine pushes forward there, it's going to become harder and harder for the Russians to defend because they're going to get pushed closer and closer to the sea. And eventually, in this sort of war where there are just mass barrages of firepower, especially of artillery, that's really, really difficult position to be in. I'm Max Hunter, reporting from Dernetsk region in eastern Ukraine. Staying with those trenches in Ukraine, would you spend six months fighting there if it meant getting out of jail? Russia's Wagner mercenary group bet on the answer being yes. The soldiers for hire company recruited a number of African expats who'd gone to Russia for a better life.

Reuters traced the stories of three of them. Julia Paravaccini is in Nairobi. So, Julia, how did these men go from Africa to fighting in Ukraine? So two of them left their home country, Tanzania and Zambia to pursue studies in Russia, while a third man from the Ivory Coast went to look for a better job. Basically, the three of them wanted a better life. But within years or months since their arrival in Russia, they ended up being jailed on drug charges.

And as they were in jail, the head of Wagner started touring the prisons of the country to recruit for his private army. And he told us personally that he personally recruited two of the guys we profiled and offered them a pardon in exchange for six months of serving in Ukraine. How did things turn out? The two students, so Nemester Remo from Tanzania and Lemecani Nirenda from Zambia, ended up dead on the battlefield, while the third guy from the Ivory Coast, Komenaneboya, actually survived. And last time we spoke to Wagner, we were told he was recovering in a facility and getting medical treatment. Wagner's founder, Yvgeny Progosen, said in a statement to Reuters

that he personally recruited Tarimo and Yerenda from prison. What of the families of these men said? They sort of can't come to terms with how their brilliant students ended up dead in a war that they feel has nothing to do with them. And none of them knew that their relatives had joined Wagner. They knew that something might have happened because they stopped receiving phone calls from prisons from them, but they didn't know what they were up to.

Now, the air quality over New York and other major U.S. cities has improved, but wildfires are still burning across Canada. And much of the U.S. is facing drought conditions, which increase wildfire risk. In northern New Mexico, the U.S. Forest Service is connecting with traditional woodcutters to thin forests and remove the fuel that can supercharge a blaze.

Our reporter Andrew Hay has the story. I visited Tows County. It's a high mountain desert and up there is a lot of forest and that forest is in many cases congested, it's thick. This is after a century where the US Forest Service

prevented local ranchers and sheep herders from taking their livestock up into the foothills and the lower elevations to graze. They also stopped locals from logging and cutting fence posts and cutting firewood in those areas. And so they're actually saying, come on in, cut these small diameter live trees, and we'll actually pay you to do it because you're making the forest healthy. This is the kind of stuff we need to thin out. These little trees that are so close together to protect that big.

tree so I spoke to myrdomo vicente Fernandez he saw the valley to the south just destroyed by fire if a fire were to go through here it would be devastating i mean our watershed would be gone a way of life would be gone the forest service marks the trees that you have to leave and in doing so they actually make the forest healthier because they thin out all these small diameter trees In Taos County, New Mexico, I'm Andrew Hay with Reuters. That's it for this edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow. To make sure you know what's going on in the world,

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