Two wars and their horrors, two earthquakes and their tragic results, balloons and a pocket submarine, a coronation and the mid-flight decapitation of an oligarch have partly made the international news of the year that completes. A look back at these significant moments of a year that has just passed in a troubled world.
January 28: Weather balloon or spy?
It could only have been an anecdote, that of a weather balloon drifting in the sky of Alaska, then of Montana, on January 28. But with its platform capable of containing a ton of material, its passage above the nuclear silos of Malmstrom Air Force Base and above all the fact that it seemed to arrive discreetly from China, the flying object was above all at the origin of a major diplomatic crisis between Beijing, Washington and even Ottawa. Between suspicions, accusations, allegations and denials, five balloons will ultimately place their undeclared trajectory at the center of attention for several days. One will be shot down by the United States over the Atlantic. Another by Canada above the Yukon, leaving in their fall of 60,000 feet (18 kilometers) some elements of evidence, but still a great mystery about the real intentions placed by the Chinese communist dictatorship in these helium tanks.
February 5 to 6: Double earthquake in Türkiye
Hell only opened for a mere two minutes on the night of February 5 to 6 in southern Turkey. Barely two minutes, yet the cause of a catastrophic toll: 50,000 souls swept away by a seismic shock of magnitude 7.8, then another of 7.5 to 7.9 which occurred 9 hours later, without warning, in this fragile area of the globe located at the confluence of the Anatolian, African and Arabian plates. In neighboring Syria, also affected by these tremors, more than 5,000 people have also died. Amplified by poverty and corruption which, in the last years of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime, resulted in buildings that did not meet seismic standards, the tragedy had the symbolic weight to derail the electoral campaign of the authoritarian president, then in power. quest for a new mandate. Three months later, however, he was re-elected.
March 17: Putin, this war criminal
It was an incredible slap in the face that the International Criminal Court (ICC) inflicted on March 17 on Russian President Vladimir Putin by issuing an international arrest warrant against him for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of thousands of children in Ukraine and for their illegal deportation to Russia. These mass kidnappings, orchestrated in times of conflict, are considered a “war crime” by the international tribunal. Ironically, Moscow admitted this crime while boasting of having supervised the transfer of millions of Ukrainian civilians to its territory since 2022, including more than 720,000 children. Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, indicted with Putin by the ICC, even became the mother figure of this program of deportation and adoption of these children by Russian couples. Moscow, however, took the news with its usual complacency, leaving former President Dmitry Medvedev to compare these “mandates” to toilet paper.
March 25: From Waco to the White House
You had to hear them, the supporters of Donald Trump gathered at the airport in Waco, Texas, on March 25, defend their candidate. How ? Speaking here of him as a victim hunted by justice in the pay of the Democrats and there, of a leader whose return to the White House is for them only a question of time. On the eve of his first criminal indictment — for paying a bribe to a porn actress — it is undoubtedly no coincidence that the populist chose this city marked by the tragedy of the siege of the sect of the Davidians, a fanatical group openly anti-system, to hold the first political rally of its presidential campaign, 20 months before the election. A crossroads of symbolism, for this great manipulator of opinions, who a few days before going on stage, in this environment charged by memory, had warned the world: if he were to be accused by the justice of his country, this would result in “death and destruction”.
May 6: Charles and Camilla crowned
Eight months after acceding to the throne of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, upon the death of his mother, Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, now Charles III, was crowned on May 6 from Westminster Abbey in London, in the company of his wife and queen consort, Camilla Parker Bowles. At 73, Charles becomes the oldest monarch to be placed at the heart of this old-fashioned, religious and staid protocol which attracts a global elite of stars, politicians and crowned heads, as well as several million television viewers around the world. The solemn spirit, however, struggles to mask the anachronism of the moment, as does the fact that it celebrates a monarchy now in decline in the United Kingdom. 62% of British people today say they want to preserve this political and symbolic framework, compared to 90% in the 1980s. In Quebec, this anti-monarchical feeling is shared by… 71% of respondents to a recent survey.
June 6: Who benefited from the destruction of the Kakhovka dam?
In war, the first victim is the truth, they say, and the continuing mystery surrounding the June 6 destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine certainly demonstrates this. Six months later, it is still impossible to know exactly who, the Russians or the Ukrainians, ultimately orchestrated the breakdown of this construction, and to achieve what objective? This is because both camps easily emerge losers from this tragedy: Russia, finding itself faced with an important source of water supply, for Crimea which it has occupied since 2014, contaminated and Ukraine, faced with land flooded on the banks of the Dnieper, thus compromising his counter-offensive. Only one certainty remains: the explosion of the dam left more than 50 dead, and caused an environmental tragedy whose “repair” will take years and cost nearly 1.31 billion US dollars, said the Ukrainian Minister of Defense. ‘Environment, Ruslan Strilets.
June 18: The fragility of a titan
To captivate by combining human tragedy and absurd concordance of destiny: this is what we did, despite themselves, in June, the occupants of the Titana pocket submersible from the OceanGate company supposed to take its four rich extreme tourists and its pilot to a depth of 4,000 meters in the North Atlantic for the high-risk observation of the wreck of the Titanic. Problem: the project was wrecked, first with the disappearance of the submarine on the sonars 1 hour 45 minutes after leaving the surface of the water, followed by a long media tension of this silence, against a backdrop of risky hypotheses and calculation of survival time and oxygen reserves. A very long time for a tragedy which ultimately played out in a fraction of a second: that of the implosion of the vessel, not approved for such an adventure, and which left very little debris at the bottom of the sea. , found 500 meters from the wreck of the other unsinkable.
August 23: The fall of the Wagner group
He will have died as he lived: in violence and horror. On August 23, the Russian oligarch and notorious delinquent in Vladimir Putin’s close circle, Yevgeny Prigojine, lost his life in the crash – “accidental”, according to the Kremlin – of his private plane between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Two months earlier, to the day, the man in charge of Putin’s dirty deeds had launched his troops in an astonishing march on the Russian capital, a rebellion resembling a putsch, aimed, according to him, at denouncing the lack of support from the regime towards its Wagner Group mercenaries fighting in Ukraine. The gesture was described as an “internal betrayal” by the Russian dictator and an “attempted mutiny” by the Russian secret services, thus placing the destiny of this close friend of Putin on a new plan of theft, with consequences as sordid as they were disastrous.
September 19: The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh
It was only a matter of time, but everything happened very quickly. Three years after a 44-day blitzkrieg that weakened Armenian positions in Nagorno-Karabakh and led to a fragile peace, Azerbaijan finally “reestablished its sovereignty” over the enclave in September, after a 10-month blockade followed by an armed offensive launched which lasted only 24 hours. The inertia of the Russian troops, although responsible for ensuring peace between the Armenians and the Azeris, just like the new alliances that oil has given rise to between the regime of the Azerbaijani president, the autocrat Ilham Aliev, and several Western capitals, will have facilitated this fall and placed the Armenians at the heart of another humanitarian crisis taking place too far away to move enough people.
October 7: Hamas attack on Israel
And to think that Israel was on the verge of normalizing its diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors by the end of the year! But on October 7, everything changed, with a wave of anger driven by frustrations and unprecedented violence that Hamas, the terrorist group controlling the Gaza Strip, decided to unleash on Israel, leaving behind the trauma of A thousand deaths, hundreds of hostages, rapes, unspeakable abuses… The pogrom – since it must be properly named – initially aroused indignation throughout the world. But the devastating violence of Israel’s response, led by a coalition of extremists dropping their bombs on civilians in the Palestinian territory, has since blurred the lines between victims and perpetrators. More than 20,000 Palestinians, the majority women, children and adolescents, have died in this new war. An assessment which recalls the urgency of finding a definitive solution to this conflict which, for more than 75 years, has been bogged down in unbearable cycles of hatred and revenge.