Has the Ukraine conflict reached a turning point?

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Speaker 5 This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Speaker 5 I'm Alex Ritzen and at 18 hours GMT on Tuesday the 25th of November, these are our main stories.

Speaker 5 US officials tell the BBC Ukraine is ready to sign a peace deal, but Russia signals it could reject a modified plan.

Speaker 5 The bishop in charge of the latest Nigerian kidnap school says the authorities have done little to rescue his missing students.

Speaker 5 UN figures suggest a woman or girl is killed by a partner or family member somewhere in the world every 10 minutes.

Speaker 6 Also, in this podcast, air travel is a miracle of American ingenuity.

Speaker 5 The US government tells holiday travelers to dress and behave properly at airports.

Speaker 5 Could we be at a turning point with the war in Ukraine? President Trump has already said he's optimistic, and U.S. officials are now suggesting Ukraine could be ready to sign a peace deal.

Speaker 5 That leaves Russia. Can Moscow be persuaded to agree? Or will this latest diplomatic effort falter as others have done before?

Speaker 5 I spoke to our diplomatic correspondent, Paul Adams, who began by explaining how we got to this point.

Speaker 7 Well, it is a confusing picture, Alex, and I think listeners can be forgiven for wondering what on earth is going on.

Speaker 7 You had this plan unveiled in a rather clumsy fashion, leaked late last week, an American proposal which many people really saw as a Russian wish list, possibly even drafted by the Russians.

Speaker 7 That led to a sort of sense of panic among Ukraine's European backers. We had a flurry of activity over the weekend.

Speaker 7 And by the end of yesterday, you had the Ukrainian leader, President Zelensky, saying that he thought that things were kind of moving in the right direction.

Speaker 7 I think we have seen a very concerted effort, especially by the Europeans, to modify, not to dismiss the American initiative, because, frankly, standing in Donald Trump's way, they have concluded, is not the way to go.

Speaker 7 And in fact, the British Prime Minister, Kierstahmer, was talking about this, saying that there were elements of the original 28-point draft that came out last week that were seen as unacceptable, but that there was much that could be worked on.

Speaker 7 And so the idea is to try and influence American thinking. We've been here before.
We saw it in the wake of the Alaska summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 7 We're seeing it again now with the Europeans trying to steer the process in a direction more favourable to Kiev. And that's really where we are now.

Speaker 7 At the end of the meeting in Geneva over the weekend, a new draft has emerged.

Speaker 7 We don't know exactly what it looks like, but the Americans have taken it to show it to the Russians in Abu Dhabi, and we're waiting to see what comes of that.

Speaker 5 Have we heard from Russia?

Speaker 7 Well, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has joined a chorus of Russian officials saying that they do not like any European meddling in this, anything that smacks of a European effort to get in the way of a process that the Russians thought they were conducting just solely with the Americans.

Speaker 7 That is regarded as deeply worrying for the Kremlin.

Speaker 7 In terms of what has changed, I think clearly the Europeans have tried to influence especially the stuff about Ukraine being told to give up territory in order for there to be a peace process.

Speaker 7 The European draft, which emerged over the weekend, stripped all reference to territorial concessions and said that everything had to be negotiated.

Speaker 7 It also changed the size of Ukraine's military up from the 600,000 stated in the original draft last week to 800,000 and plenty of other changes too. But it is very much a work in progress.

Speaker 7 But I think now the Russians feel that maybe things are not heading in their direction.

Speaker 5 Paul Adams. So, where might these negotiations leave Russia in the long term? After years out in the cold, could Russia be brought back from the international wilderness?

Speaker 5 My colleague Anna Foster spoke to the EU's foreign policy chief, Kaya Kallas, and asked her if Russia should be allowed to rejoin the G seven, making it the G eight again.

Speaker 8 No, definitely not. We can't go back to business as usual.
I mean, how can you possibly imagine that?

Speaker 8 All the destruction, all the killing that they have done, and also all the breaches of the international law, and then we just look away and say, oh, it's nothing. We just go and continue as before.

Speaker 8 I think it is important to keep in mind why Russia is making a good face towards the United States again, because they are actually under a lot of pressure.

Speaker 8 They want us to see that and think that Ukraine is under a lot of pressure and they can't outlast.

Speaker 8 But actually, if you look at the facts, if you look how Russia's economy is doing, if you look how the sanctions on oil are working, if you look at the discussions that we have on the Russian frozen assets and the reparations loan, actually, they are very worried that

Speaker 8 they need to get the good agreement now. That's why they are asking for the territories that they haven't even conquered militarily.
That's why they are asking all these things.

Speaker 8 Our focus should be on Russia, who is the aggressor in this case.

Speaker 9 Why do you think the U.S., and in particular Donald Trump, are doing this now? Do you think he, even after all of this time, understands the Ukrainian position?

Speaker 8 No, President Trump genuinely wants peace, like also the Ukrainians and Europeans. I mean, you can't blame him for that.
I think this is a very, very noble cause.

Speaker 8 Just the question is what really brings peace and what brings long-lasting and sustainable peace that we don't have

Speaker 8 future aggression.

Speaker 9 And that is why it's peace at any cost. Is that what he's pursuing?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 8 it definitely wants to have peace and wants to have it soon.

Speaker 8 This is true, and also Ukrainians want to have peace because their people are being killed and their energy infrastructure is being bombed.

Speaker 8 But if we want to end this for good, we really, really need to have concessions on Russian side. Because if you look at those points,

Speaker 8 the points shouldn't be

Speaker 8 how to make it easier for Russia to invade again,

Speaker 8 to downsize the Ukrainian army and all these points, but actually how to make it impossible for Russia to invade again.

Speaker 8 And that means, you know, honoring their international obligations, you know, downsizing their nuclear, their army, their military budget.

Speaker 8 All these things are the concessions that we need to see from the Russian side.

Speaker 5 The EU's foreign policy chief, Kaya Kallas.

Speaker 5 There's been heavy criticism of the Nigerian authorities after hundreds of students were abducted from a school last week.

Speaker 5 More than 300 children and staff are now thought to have been kidnapped from the school in a remote part of Niger state, making it one of the worst mass abductions the country has seen.

Speaker 5 The Christian Association of Nigeria, which is in charge of the school, has said the authorities have made no meaningful effort to rescue the students.

Speaker 5 Bishop Boulas Johanna is the chairman of the association.

Speaker 11 Not much has been done.

Speaker 11 We on our own part, what we have done is collection of these names so that we know exactly who are those who are affected, who are missing. That's what we have been doing.

Speaker 11 It will affect because people will be scared, especially the villagers, like our school there now.

Speaker 11 If you notice that it was so difficult for us to get them, that is why it's so difficult to get in touch with them.

Speaker 5 More than 200 school children were kidnapped from the town of Chibok back in 2014. The Bring Back Our Girls movement drew global attention to those abductions.

Speaker 5 The organization has urged officials to stop negotiating with kidnappers and prosecute those responsible for past security failures.

Speaker 5 Africa correspondent Maine Jones, who's in Niger State, gave us this update.

Speaker 12 So, at the moment, all we know is that the search operation to find those students is ongoing here in Niger State, with the governor saying that they will leave no stone left unturned to find those children.

Speaker 12 I spoke to one of the parents in the community where this happened, a village called Papiri, which is incredibly remote, very difficult to get to.

Speaker 12 And he says that three of his children were taken on Friday. They haven't heard anything about how the search is going.

Speaker 12 They're incredibly anxious because they're worried that the kids were taken in the middle of the night, wearing very little, and it gets quite cool in the evenings here.

Speaker 12 They're worried they could be sick, that they don't have enough to eat.

Speaker 12 So there's lots of anxiety around the search for the kids and the fact that we're not exactly sure how well it's going and how quickly these children will be found.

Speaker 5 Well, that is the key point today, isn't it? The church leaders in charge of the school are accusing the authorities of doing essentially little or nothing. Is that fair?

Speaker 12 For the members of the community and people who in this part of the country have had to deal with this problem past decade and have the you have these periodic seasons where you get a kind of spate of kidnappings happening, there is a lot of frustration.

Speaker 12 For them, they feel like the government hasn't got a kind of comprehensive strategy to deal with this problem. You mentioned the hashtag Bring Back Our Girls movement.

Speaker 12 They drew attention to this issue over a decade ago when the Chipotle girls were taken. And they say that these latest kidnappings are not isolated incidents.

Speaker 12 They say they are part of what they call a quote a systematic pattern in this region and they want to see more done. It's not clear exactly what more could look like.

Speaker 12 The Nigerian government is saying that they've spoken to the American authorities.

Speaker 12 They've decided to put together a joint security venture to exchange intelligence and potentially be supplied with weapons. We've reached out to the State Department to get confirmation about this.

Speaker 12 This follows a high-level meeting in Washington, D.C. between Nigerian and American officials.

Speaker 12 It's not clear that that would change the situation either, but it does signal a willingness on the Nigerian authorities to maybe look outside of their borders to try and find a solution.

Speaker 5 And we were talking yesterday about the plan to hire 30,000 new police officers. That can't be done overnight, can it?

Speaker 12 No, absolutely not. It takes a really long time.

Speaker 12 And the problem with police in Nigeria, having lived here almost seven years myself, is that they're often incredibly underpaid, and that leads to issues with low morale, corruption.

Speaker 12 The government said it wants to hire 30,000 more police officers. Will they be paying these police officers more money? How will they be encouraging them to kind of stick with their duties?

Speaker 12 Because one way policemen make their money at the moment in Nigeria is protecting VIPs, where they can get tips and bonuses at the end of the year.

Speaker 12 So the government has these plans, but it's not clear that they have the budgets to implement them, and that may be a challenge for them.

Speaker 5 to old age. Dr.
Alexa Moseley, post-doctorate research associate at Cambridge University, led the study and told us about the shifts.

Speaker 13 It's different for each point, and these, of course, are just averages. So around nine years old, we're seeing this shift.
There's quite a lot going on in each one.

Speaker 13 For example, from infancy through nine years old, we're seeing the brain become less efficient. But from nine to 32, we're actually seeing that flip in the brain's becoming more efficient.

Speaker 13 We're looking at large, what we call white matter tracts, which are the big connections in the brain between different regions and those appear to be strengthening and weakening.

Speaker 13 We know from past work that the way the brain's wired is related to important outcomes in things like neurodevelopment, mental health, and neurological conditions and what we are establishing in our study is that the brain is organizing in a distinct manner at different ages.

Speaker 13 And so this might give us some insight into why the brain might be more vulnerable to different things at different points in time.

Speaker 13 We're hoping this kind of sets the stage for what we expect the brain to be doing at different points.

Speaker 13 So for example, we know that about two-thirds of people who are going to have a mental health disorder develop that disorder before the age of 25.

Speaker 13 And from our study, we see that there's a continuous and characteristic way the brain's wiring from 9 to 32. And so the next question is, are those two things related?

Speaker 5 Dr. Alexa Mosley from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Speaker 5 Now, with the US holiday of Thanksgiving just around the corner, an estimated 30 million people are preparing to fly to see their relatives and they're being told to behave themselves on board, not by their parents, but by the US Department of Transport.

Speaker 5 Stephanie Prentiss has this report.

Speaker 14 Some of you might have noticed that we've launched a civility campaign.

Speaker 15 US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at an airport in New Jersey telling his fellow Americans to mind their manners during one of the country's busiest periods for travel.

Speaker 14 You might not be able to find a seat as you're by your gate because of the number of flights that are going out or coming in, but I think we have to think about how do we do a better job.

Speaker 14 We should say a pleasing thank you to our pilots and to our flight attendants.

Speaker 15 The comments follow the release of a promotional video from his department urging travelers to hark back to better times.

Speaker 6 Air travel is a miracle of American ingenuity. We build airports to launch a golden age of travel across the skies.
We respected the dignity of air travel.

Speaker 15 The video shows archive footage of neatly dressed families calmly traveling throughout previous decades, then takes a turn to the modern day.

Speaker 15 Using footage of viral moments posted online, including bare feet being used to scroll on an in-flight touchscreen, people beating each other with wet floor signs in an airport terminal, and many, many acts of violence, along with high altitude hostility over key airline issues.

Speaker 15 Maintaining standards of dress was also suggested.

Speaker 14 Whether it's a pair of jeans and

Speaker 14 a decent shirt, I would encourage people to maybe dress a little better, which

Speaker 14 encourages us to maybe behave all a little better. Let's try not to wear slippers and

Speaker 14 pajamas as we come to the airport. I think that's positive.

Speaker 15 Though one disgruntled passenger was quick to post that with current delays, he didn't intend to sleep on the floor of an airport wearing a three-piece suit.

Speaker 15 And California Governor Gavin Newsom responded with a photo of Sean Duffy's cabinet colleague Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
walking barefoot down the aisle of a plane.

Speaker 12 Manners don't stop at the gate.

Speaker 15 Some travelers welcomed the civility message when it was posted on social media.

Speaker 15 Others pointed out that it comes after months of travel chaos in the US due to the government shutdown and a week after officials scrapped a plan to give passengers compensation for cancellations and long delays, suggesting the better behavior should come from the people who govern America.

Speaker 5 Stephanie Prentiss

Speaker 5 Still to come in this podcast. What's more important? A billion dollars worth of shipwreck treasure or the preservation of an important seabed archaeological site.

Speaker 16 The things that we have there are not important because of what they're worth, as economic value, you know, but because of what they can tell us.

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Speaker 5 It's a familiar feeling for anyone who's been waiting for their ride home and they get the news that their bus or taxi or train or whatever has broken down.

Speaker 5 So you've got to wait for the replacement service. Although, in this case, you're several hundred kilometers up in space.

Speaker 5 The countdown and liftoff of the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft heading to the Tiangong space station to rescue the three stranded Chinese astronauts.

Speaker 5 The original vessel, which is due to bring them down, had to be given to the previous crew after theirs got damaged by debris in space.

Speaker 5 I heard more from our correspondent in Beijing, Stephen MacDonnell.

Speaker 18 Perhaps the best way is for me just to go through the sequence of events so people understand how potentially dangerous this all was.

Speaker 18 So there you have three astronauts or Ticonauts as they're sometimes referred to here.

Speaker 18 And they were waiting on their Tiangong station for the relief crew to arrive.

Speaker 18 The relief crew, they turn up, they dock their vessel on the Tiangong station, and the theory is they have a bit of a handover and then the original crew goes back to earth now the problem is their capsule to return to earth was damaged by a piece of debris which has struck and smashed a window apparently space junk or something along those lines and so that capsule couldn't be used they used the relief crew's vessel to get back to earth thus leaving the relief crew stuck up in Tiangong with no way to get home.

Speaker 18 Now in theory, theory, people might think it's not such a big deal because they aren't due to come back to Earth till next April anyway.

Speaker 18 But the problem is, what if something goes wrong with the station? What if one of them gets injured? They need a way to get out of there.

Speaker 18 And so they'll be feeling much better today because, as we speak, there's been a successful launch of an unmanned rocket, which has now enabled a return capsule to dock on the Tiangong station, thus giving them a way out of there.

Speaker 18 As for the broken broken vessel, there's two options. One is to fix it, to send it back to Earth.

Speaker 18 The other apparently is just to remove it from the station because it's taking up one of the docking points.

Speaker 18 That's not ideal though, because then you've got another piece of space junk flying around the Earth, creating yet more debris, the type of debris which damaged it in the first place.

Speaker 18 However, for the astronauts up on that station, they'd be feeling much better right now than they were a few hours ago.

Speaker 5 Briefly, Stephen, it is easy to forget just how dangerous what these people do is, isn't it?

Speaker 18 Yeah, absolutely. Everybody takes it for granted now that, especially the Chinese space program, it's very efficient.

Speaker 18 They've been able to successfully send another rocket up there, but that rocket wasn't supposed to go till next year. What if it hadn't been ready yet? What if something went wrong with that rocket?

Speaker 18 What if it didn't successfully take off?

Speaker 18 So, yes, indeed, it still is very dangerous in space, and it shows why these competing missions, especially between the US and China, there is so much at stake in terms of what they're trying to do next, like to put another astronaut on the moon, for example, something that's expected very soon.

Speaker 5 Stephen MacDonnell.

Speaker 5 Data released by the United Nations shows that last year, 50,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by partners or family members.

Speaker 5 It's the equivalent of one woman or girl being killed every 10 minutes or so.

Speaker 5 These type of intimate partner killings make up the majority of the even greater number of cases of femicide around the world every year, a grim set of data which the UN says show little sign of improving.

Speaker 5 Sarah Hendricks is director of the Policy and Programme Division at UN Women and spoke to Tim Franks.

Speaker 19 Indeed, today, in fact, marks the 26th year that we commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women across the United Nations.

Speaker 19 And what we see is a very stark truth, and that is for more than two decades, the needle has barely moved, with rates of intimate partner violence showing only a 0.2% annual decline.

Speaker 19 And the femicide estimates really deepen this truth. They show that for far too many women and girls, the most dangerous place actually remains in their home.
Femicides do not emerge suddenly.

Speaker 19 They are, in fact, the fatal final act in a

Speaker 19 deeply egregious continuum of violence that is visible, but it is too often ignored long before a woman is killed.

Speaker 19 And really today in this day of commemoration, too many of the women and girls are not actually here to mark this day.

Speaker 19 And we really owe them, I think, recognition of what these numbers are telling us, the lives behind them.

Speaker 5 And just very briefly, Sarah, I assume that these, I mean, these numbers, in truth, they're probably an undercount.

Speaker 19 Indeed, you are correct. We are seeing that data is needed and better data and statistics are required.

Speaker 19 In fact, for femicide specifically, we know that good data saves lives.

Speaker 19 And that's why UN Women and UNODC have jointly developed a statistical framework for measuring the gender-related killing of women and girls. And we're now working with countries to implement that.

Speaker 5 Sarah Hendricks from UN Women.

Speaker 5 It's been called one of the biggest criminal and human trafficking operations of modern times.

Speaker 5 In fact, its reach is so vast that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has estimated that the so-called scam centers of Southeast Asia generate an annual revenue of just under $40 billion.

Speaker 5 The operations in these centers involve defrauding internet and telephone users with romance and business cons.

Speaker 5 Myanmar is notorious for hosting scam cities, entire compounds built for the purpose of cyber scam operations, which are now the focus of a renewed crackdown. Ed Butler reports.

Speaker 5 Six months ago, along with my fixer E, I walked along the Mui River that divides Thailand and Myanmar, looking across at KK Park.

Speaker 5 It was at the time a huge, imposing complex with high walls and razor wire, one of the region's most notorious scam centers. Today, the scene looks a little different.

Speaker 5 Last month, a Myanmar military plane bombed KK Park. The attack on one small part of this complex caused chaos.
Large numbers of foreign workers imprisoned inside managed to escape.

Speaker 5 Aid worker Judah Tanner has been helping to repatriate some of them.

Speaker 20 Hundreds of people were fleeing. From what we've been able to gather, the company bosses had actually fled the scam centers.

Speaker 5 In this video received by the BBC, a small group of Ethiopians and Filipinos are ferried across the river. This was part of a daring rescue.

Speaker 5 Other videos posted online show migrants trying to swim across the river. Not all of them made it.
Bodies have since been discovered downstream.

Speaker 5 The Myanmar military didn't stop with KK Park. It's now started clearing parts of the biggest of all the Myanmar scam developments at Shwekoko.

Speaker 5 The reasons why the military has chosen to counter the scammers in this way remains a little mysterious.

Speaker 5 It says it's striking a blow for the rule of law, but activists say it has for years been taking a cut of the scam proceeds itself.

Speaker 5 These attacks are just an attempt to extort a bigger share of the profits, they reckon, or it's trying to appease its key regional ally, China, Judah Tanner again.

Speaker 20 China put out a request to the Myanmar group that they wanted at least 30,000 Chinese people to be rescued and sent home.

Speaker 5 What's clear is that the combination of this military action in Myanmar and the recent US indictment and sanctioning of a Cambodian conglomerate accused of involvement in scams has represented a setback for one of the world's fastest growing and most lucrative criminal networks.

Speaker 5 British warships? It was said to have been carrying one of the largest amounts of valuables ever lost at sea. Treasure hunters tried to find it for years.

Speaker 5 Ten years ago, it was located, and, as everyone suspected, it was full of gold, silver, gems, and jewellery worth at least a billion dollars.

Speaker 5 Colombian scientists have now brought up the first objects from the ship, a cannon, three coins, and a porcelain cup.

Speaker 5 There are arguments about who owns this hoard, a battle that's moved to the courts, but conservationists think the wreck and its cargo should be left where it is so they can slowly learn about the past.

Speaker 5 Mariana Caruya is with the San Jose Galleon project. She spoke to Rob Young.

Speaker 16 It's a great experience.

Speaker 16 I'm sorry, but I cry every time I talk about it. Those objects, we decided to work with them because they have information that was

Speaker 16 important for our investigation. That's why we chose only a few of them and for a special reason each one.
The canyon for example we were looking for a date that we can work with and also

Speaker 16 some information on the inscriptions. For the coins it's the same thing.
And for the porcelain we are trying to find out why we have Chinese porcelain in a ship that's coming from America to Europe.

Speaker 16 So we've been working over a year. I feel like an ambassador of what's going on here.

Speaker 5 Is the plan to bring everything up?

Speaker 16 Of course not. We are just trying to answer the questions that we have in the project.
As you know, in modern archaeology, we try just to work with the questions that we have. Also, in order to have

Speaker 16 stuff for the future, other people in the future are gonna to have different questions with the information that we are giving them.

Speaker 5 So you're saying then that billions of dollars worth of gold, of silver, of jewels will be left under the sea?

Speaker 16 We are not working because of the economic value of what we have there.

Speaker 16 The objects that we have, we are working so hard in Colombia to make people know that the things that we have there are not important because of what they're worth, as economic value, you you know, but because of what they can tell us about the people who lived in that time.

Speaker 16 And I think that's worth more.

Speaker 5 The site is known as the Holy Grail of Shipwrecks. Are you confident that its location will remain secret? Because it's a state secret, isn't it? Nobody's allowed to know exactly where it is.

Speaker 16 Nobody is allowed.

Speaker 16 We must see the value of these places beyond economics, because we are trying to build a story about what you're asking me. And we only have answers if we have stuff to study.

Speaker 16 If we don't have anything, what's left? Some objects without a context. And the value of this object is precisely the context around it.

Speaker 5 Ariana Caruja from the San Jose Galleon Project.

Speaker 5 And that's all from us for now. But there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.
If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

Speaker 5 The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

Speaker 5 You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod.

Speaker 5 This edition was mixed by Gareth Jones, and the producer was Michael Bristow. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Alex Ritzen. Until next time, goodbye.

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