Reuters World News - Trump’s revenge, Russia’s party problem and Ukraine’s battle fatigue

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

A court victory for Donald Trump and what his "revenge" might include if he wins the White House a second time. A rapper is jailed and celebrities lose sponsorship deals after a semi-naked party that has left President Vladimir Putin unamused. The war in Ukraine is taking its toll on the mental health of soldiers, but many of those being treated want to return to the frontline. 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, a semi-naked party in Russia sparks a wartime backlash. Ukraine's army faces an invisible enemy, stress, and Donald Trump plans a campaign of retribution if he wins a second term. It's Thursday, December 28th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm David Spencer in. London. The battle for who is on the ballot in 2024 continues, and this time it's a victory for Donald

Trump. On Wednesday, Michigan's Supreme Court declined to hear a case seeking to disqualify him from the state's presidential primary. Four voters in the swing state argued the former president should be barred for his role in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. A similar effort succeeded in Colorado earlier this month, although the Colorado Republican Party has asked the US Supreme Court to intervene, and Trump himself is expected to launch an appeal. The court battles feed into Trump's narrative ahead of the election. Earlier this week, he posted a poll on true social, highlighting the word voters most associate with a potential second Trump term. That word, revenge. Trump has repeatedly promised retribution against his political opponents if he wins.

We will restore law and order to our communities, and I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical out-of-control prosecutor, of which we have many. Trump in Iowa this month, part of his plan is to drastically slash the federal workforce and in doing so remake the government in his own. image. Tim Reed is one of our National Affairs reporters. Tim, how might Trump do this? In fact, Trump did it or tried to do it once already. Late in his first term when he was president, he introduced something called Schedule F, which would reclassify up to 50,000 federal civil servants as essentially employees at will that could be fired overnight. So what Trump wants to do in a second term, if he is re-elected, is reintroduce Schedule F, which was rescinded by Joe Biden as soon as Biden became president. How would that actually work?

So under Schedule F, a Trump administration would ask every government agency to send them a list of employees they think could have their employment protections stripped away. And then armed with that list, they would potentially start firing these employees, and not only would they fire tens of thousands of civil servants, they want to replace them with like-minded MAGA conservatives who would then be inside the federal bureaucracy and much more willing to carry out Trump's agenda. Now, Trump likes to call this draining the swamp or eliminating the deep state. What's the danger here? Well, critics of this plan, and there are many of them, they say that an impartial government civil service is incredibly important. So the fear is that if Trump can bend the federal bureaucracy to his own will, that's just another way that he could start to become an American autocrat without some sort of block on his agenda.

in this weekend for a deeper dive into the elections around the globe in the coming year and what they could mean for democracy. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ordered his country's military to accelerate war preparations, according to state media. News agency KCNA reported that Kim said North Korea would expand cooperation with what he called anti-imperialist independent countries and accused the US of unprecedented confrontational moves. Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says the country has struck important deals after talks with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

He gave no more details. The closed-door negotiations focused on trade, the economy and security, but also on migration. To Russia, where a semi-naked celebrity party has caused outrage and a bit of a headache for the Kremlin. Photos show guests in barely their outfits or sporting bare chests, one turned up with only a sock to hide his modesty and has since been jailed. Other attendees are being threatened with tax cases and could lose sponsorship deals. Andrew Osborne is in Moscow. Andrew, why has this party become such an incident? I mean, in previous years in Russia, this kind of event would frankly not have made the kind of waves that it is making now. But the big difference now, of course,

is that, you know, in many ways, Russia has become a different country. And that's because, of course, the war in Ukraine is going on. People are dying at the front. And, you know, food prices are galloping. Inflation is rising. You know, a lot of Russians are frankly struggling to get by. This was really a display of excess that really rubbed a lot of Russians up the wrong way. For example, the host of this particular party was wearing jewelry, which was worth around $250,000 US dollars, which is a huge amount of money. At a time of war, this really doesn't look good, does it? Yes, I think the war has changed a lot, if not everything, inside Russia.

I mean, certainly if you think back to the 1990s in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, flashiness and crassness, frankly, was the watchword for many newly minted Russians. That has, of course, changed a lot, though, with time. but the war really has changed the whole paradigm. And another important thing to mention here is that once the war started, many of the supporters of the conflict are very socially conservative, so-called turbopatriates. What we've seen happen, and Putin has embraced this, is that there really is a push now by Putin, by the Kremlin, to double down on social conservatism.

He's always talking about family values. Russians to have eight or more children. Russia's Supreme Court recently outlawed LGBT activists as extremists. You know, this party all plays into that agenda and it really clashes and jars with the kind of message which the Kremlin is pushing. Meanwhile, on the battlefield, the war in Ukraine is seemingly at deadlock, with both sides struggling to make advances. Here, in a makeshift class in eastern Ukraine, a former psychiatrist is addressing a group of soldiers on how to cope with the stress of war. They speak openly about symptoms of PTSD, but there is also a desire and a need to return to the fight. Charlotte Bruno has visited a number of facilities to see Ukraine's

efforts to repair soldiers as many prepare for a return to the front line. So when we met Finn, it was right after the training for combat and operational stress control. And during that training, the soldiers had been given some advice on how to deal with acute stress. And after the training, we sat down with Finn, who is a soldier in his 20s, and he joined the army as a volunteer. He said that he will not give up, that he wants to go back. that he talked about the solidarity between soldiers in his unit, but members of his unit asked him to take a break because they had realised before him that he needed it.

Olegovsky, he is the head of the combat stress control group of the brigade. He gave the training while we were at the medical center, and so his mission includes visiting troops that are near the front line. So they would, for example, do debriefing sessions after combat. They also do group sessions, for instance, to process grief, and he also offers individual consultations. They can be very long time, much longer. And they are getting a lot of concussions,

a lot of combat fatigue is very prevalent. So he spoke about this balance between reinforcing positive attitudes and motivation as well as being present for soldiers who are struggling to cope with the stress of war. And what we've heard a lot among these soldiers is that although they were aware that they need to recover and that it can take time, we felt a very strong sense of duty and obligation to return to support their unit in every capacity they could because they said that at the moment everyone is needed.

That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.