World

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine on Sunday slammed Pope Francis's call to negotiate with Russia two years into its invasion, vowing "never" to surrender after the pontiff said Kyiv should "have the courage to raise the white flag".

The 87-year-old Catholic leader fuelled anger in Kyiv this weekend after he said in an interview that Ukraine should negotiate with Russia, which has seized large swathes of its territory in the offensive.

It is not the first statement by Pope Francis during Moscow's invasion that has caused outrage in Ukraine. The pontiff has also made statements slammed by Russia.

"Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags," Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

He was responding to the Pope's interview to Swiss broadcaster RTS in which the Catholic leader raised the prospect of surrender — two years after Kyiv has battled Russian forces on its territory.

"I believe that the strongest are those who see the situation, think about the people, and have the courage to raise the white flag and negotiate," Pope Francis said in an interview the Vatican said was conducted in early February.

In a sign of how angered Kyiv was, Ukrainian officials compared the statement to some of the Catholic Church collaborating with Nazi Germany in World War II.

"At the same time, when it comes to the white flag, we know this Vatican strategy from the first half of the 20th century," Kuleba said, calling on the Holy See to "avoid repeating the mistakes of the past".

Ukraine's ambassador to the Vatican, Andrii Yurash, went further by comparing the Pope's negotiation suggestion to talking to Adolf Hitler:

"[The] lesson is only one — if we want to finish war, we have to do everything to kill [the] Dragon!," he said on social media.

After the interview was aired, Francis offered fresh prayers for "martyred Ukraine", as Vatican officials said his call was simply intended to end fierce fighting.

On Saturday evening, the Vatican issued a statement insisting the Pope’s use of the phrase “white flag” — a widely used sign of surrender on the battlefield — was intended to mean “a cessation of hostilities, a truce reached with the courage of negotiation”.

But the Pontiff’s words were widely understood as a call for surrender and slammed by some Western diplomats.

“Russia is the aggressor and breaks international law! Therefore Germany asks Moscow to stop the war, not Kyiv!”, said Bernhard Kotsch, Germany’s envoy to the Vatican.

Kuleba said Kyiv hoped Francis would visit his war-torn country after more than two years of battling its bigger neighbour.

“We continue to hope that after two years of devastating war in the heart of Europe, the Pontiff will find an opportunity to pay an Apostolic visit to Ukraine to support over a million Ukrainian Catholics, over 5 million Greek-Catholics and all Ukrainians,” Kuleba said.

Francis drew criticism in the first months after Russia’s February 2022 invasion for failing to name Moscow as the aggressor.

He was also criticised by Ukraine last year when he allegedly praised Russian imperial leaders Peter the Great and Catherine II.

The Pontiff has also caused upset in Russia, when he said in winter 2022 that its “cruellest” forces in Ukraine were “not of the Russian tradition”, but minorities like “the Chechens, the Buryati and so on”.

The Vatican then officially apologised to Moscow.

Last year, Pope Francis appointed a top cardinal to try to broker peace in Ukraine who has visited Moscow, Kyiv, Washington and Beijing.

DIONS, France — French rescue workers were on Sunday searching for seven people, including two children, missing after violent storms swept the south of the country with most believed to have been swept away in cars on flooded bridges.

A family of four, including two children aged four and 13, was caught in the floods while trying late Saturday evening to drive across a bridge over the river Gardon in the village of Dions, north of the city of Nimes, the prefecture said.

The father and the two children were still missing but the mother, 40, who was also in the car, was found by rescuers and taken to hospital, it added.

In Dions on Sunday a helicopter flew over the village and the bursting waters of the Gardon while large numbers of firefighters engaged in search efforts, helped by drones and dogs. The bridge was still submerged.

Rescuers were also searching for two women, believed to be aged 47 and 50, who made an emergency call on a bridge in the town of Goudargues to the north before contact was lost.

Another driver, of Belgian nationality, was also missing and feared to have been swept away from a bridge in the village of Gagnieres also in the Gard department. The road had been closed and a policeman had told the driver not to drive on the bridge, officials said.

A passenger in his vehicle, also Belgian, managed to get out and take refuge in a tree, before being rescued after more than two hours amid the branches.

In the neighbouring department of Ardeche, the manager of a hydroelectric power station who went to check on the facility has also been missing since Saturday evening in the village of Saint Martin de Valamas. Searches are continuing.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said rescuers had carried out a total of 35 operations as the storm and torrential rains swept across the Ardeche and Gard departments. He added that all the vehicles swept away had been found but there was still “not a trace” of those missing.

The prefecture in the Gard department expressed regret that despite multiple warnings about the incoming storm, “we still see behaviour that is dangerous, first of all for the people themselves but also dangerous for the people whose duty it is to come to their aid.”

LISBON — Voters in Portugal went to the polls Sunday in an early election that could see the country join a shift to the right across Europe after eight years of Socialist rule.

Final opinion polls published Friday show the centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) narrowly ahead of the Socialist Party (PS) but short of an outright majority in parliament, which could make the far-right party Chega a king maker for forming a governing coalition.

But analysts warned the results of the election, Portugal’s second in two years, remained wide open given the large number of undecided voters.

Voting stations in the nation of around 10 million people opened at 8:00am (08:00 GMT) with exit poll projections expected at 8:00pm.

“These elections represent a possible change, there would be little point in doing otherwise,” Pedro Resende, a 56-year-old security officer, told AFP at a polling station in Telheiras, a modern upper middle class neighbourhood in northern Lisbon.

The AD has campaigned on promises to boost economic growth by cutting taxes, and to improve the country’s public services.

“We really must turn the page,” the party’s leader, 51-year-old lawyer Luis Montenegro told a packed final rally at Lisbon’s bullring on Friday night.

He has ruled out any post-election agreement with Chega, but other top AD officials have been more ambiguous.

Analysts say a deal with the anti-establishment party may prove the only way for the AD to govern.

Far-right gains 

Chega’s leader Andre Ventura, a former trainee priest who went on to become a television football commentator, has said his party is “as legitimate as the others”.

Chega, which means “Enough”, calls for tougher measures to fight corruption, stricter controls over immigration and chemical castration for some sex offenders.

Just five years old, Chega picked up its first seat in Portugal’s 230-seat parliament in 2019, becoming the first far-right party to win representation in the assembly since a military coup in 1974 toppled a decades-long right-wing dictatorship.

It increased its seats to 12 seats in 2022 and polls suggest it could more than double that number this time. 

That would mirror gains by far-right parties across Europe, where they already govern — often in coalition — in countries such as Italy, Hungary and Slovakia, or are steadily gaining, as in France and Germany.

The election was called after Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa, 62, unexpectedly resigned in November following an influence-peddling probe that involved a search of his official residence and the arrest of his chief of staff.

Though Costa himself was not accused of any crime, he decided not to run again.

‘Time for a change’ 

On his watch unemployment has dropped, the economy expanded by 2.3 per cent last year — one of the fastest rates in the eurozone — and public finances have improved.

But surveys indicate many voters feel Costa’s government squandered the outright majority it won in 2022 by failing to improve unreliable public health services and education or address a housing crisis that has sparked large street protests in what remains one of Western Europe’s poorest countries.

“From my point of view things have worsened a bit. It’s time for a change,” Bernardo Guerra, a 28-year-old personal trainer, told AFP after casting his ballot at a high school in central Lisbon.

“In Portugal there is a lot of corruption, Portugal has a bad image abroad... I hope a new government improves this situation.”

The Socialists’ new leader, 46-year-old former infrastructure minister Pedro Nuno Santos, has defended the government’s record even as he acknowledges it could have done better in some areas.

“The right thinks they’re going to win the election with their usual arrogance and lack of humility. It’s the Portuguese people who will decide,” he said at his final rally on Friday night.

ISLAMABAD — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Pakistan’s slain first female premier Benazir Bhutto who has had a life storied equally by tragedy and farce, is set to become president for a second time on Saturday.

Initially a background character as Bhutto’s consort, Zardari was stained by a bevy of corruption and other allegations, including absurd kidnapping plots and taking kickbacks lavished on hoards of jewellery.

Despite a reputation as “Mr Ten Per cent” — the alleged cut he took for rubber-stamping contracts — a sympathy vote propelled him to office when his wife was assassinated in a 2007 bomb and gun attack.

Between 2008 and 2013, he ushered in constitutional reforms rolling back presidential powers, and the 68-year-old’s second term will see him steer a largely ceremonial office.

He has spent more than 11 years in jail, a long time even by the standards of Pakistani politicians, with a wheeler-dealer’s talent for bouncing back after scandals.

Back in 2009, the New York Times said he had a knack for “artful dodging” — “manoeuvreing himself out of the tight spots he gets himself into”.

Newly sworn-in lawmakers were set to vote him in under the terms of a coalition deal brokered after February 8 elections marred by rigging claims.

Under that deal, Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) will take the presidency, while its historic rivals the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party secured the prime minister’s position for Shehbaz Sharif, who was officially sworn in on Monday.

‘Polo playboy’

Zardari was born in 1955 into a land-owning family from the southern province of Sindh.

“As a child, I was spoilt by my parents as an only son,” he said in a 2000 interview with the Guardian newspaper. “They indulged my every whim.”

He expressed only limited political ambitions as a young man —losing a 1983 local government election.

It was his 1987 arranged marriage with PPP leader Benazir Bhutto that earned him a spot in the political limelight.

Their union — brokered by Bhutto’s mother — was considered an unlikely pairing for a leader-in-waiting from one of Pakistan’s major political dynasties.

Bhutto was an Oxford and Harvard graduate driven by the desire to oust then-president Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who forced her father from the prime minister’s office and had him executed.

Zardari was a university dropout with a reputation for brawling, partying and romancing women at a private disco in his family home.

On the eve of their wedding, Bhutto’s team issued a formal statement denying he was “a playboy who plays polo by day and frequents discos at night”.

Their nuptial celebrations were dubbed the “people’s wedding” — doubling as a political rally in the megacity of Karachi, where a crowd of 100,000 fervently chanted PPP slogans.

Initially, Zardari pledged to keep out of politics.

On the make

Bhutto served as prime minister from 1988 to 1990 — the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim country — and again from 1993 to 1996.

PPP insiders regarded Zardari as a liability, considering him likely to embarrass her leadership.

Their fears were perhaps well-founded. In 1990, he was embroiled in accusations of an absurd plot to extort a businessman by tying a bomb to his leg.

He was jailed for three years on extortion and kidnapping charges but was elected to the national assembly from behind bars.

In Bhutto’s second term, he served as investment minister.

A bombshell New York Times investigation detailed how he tried to engineer vast kickbacks on military contracts over this period while lavishing huge sums on jewellery.

After Bhutto’s government fell in 1996, Zardari was back behind bars within half an hour.

Accidental president

In December 2007, Bhutto was assassinated while on the campaign trail for a third term in office.

Her killing shook the nation to its core, a wave of sympathy carrying the PPP to victory in 2008. The party nominated Zardari as president.

In 2010, he was widely criticised for continuing a European holiday when the nation was devastated by floods that killed almost 1,800 and affected 21 million.

He was also head of state when US commandos trespassed onto Pakistani soil for the 2011 assassination of Osama Bin Laden, an episode that humiliated many compatriots.

He did, however, usher in constitutional reforms rolling back the sweeping powers of the presidency and bolstering parliamentary democracy that had been undermined by three decades of military rule since 1947.

In 2013, Zardari became the first Pakistani president to complete his full term.

He was jailed once again over money laundering charges in 2019 but was released months later.

Zardari and Benazir had three children, including Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the current chairman of the PPP.