World roundup: January 27 2025

Stories from China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

January 27, 1944: The Soviet Red Army finally ends the 872 day Siege of Leningrad by driving off the last German forces still remaining in the vicinity of the city. Whether you go by the highest estimates, which put the death toll north of 5 million; the lowest, which put it around 1.2 million; or somewhere in between, Leningrad was one of the longest and deadliest military encounters in recorded history.

January 27, 1945: Exactly one year later, the Red Army liberates the Nazi concentration/extermination camp complex at Auschwitz, in occupied Poland. The Nazis executed some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, most of them Jews. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as “International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”

January 27, 1973: The United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government all sign the Paris Peace Accords, marking the end of the Vietnam War. The deal called for the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam and the imposition of a ceasefire, plus the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Laos and Cambodia. The ceasefire failed almost immediately, but the US was in no position to stop the eventual fall of South Vietnam in 1975.

INTERNATIONAL

Reuters reported last week that the International Criminal Court is taking several steps in anticipation of sanctions against it and its personnel from the Trump administration. Those steps include paying out salaries in advance, in case court employees are cut off from banking institutions, and backing up data, in case the court itself loses its software licenses. This seems reasonable, inasmuch as the first Trump administration did sanction the ICC and there is legislation currently in the US Congress to impose sanctions over the court’s decision to issue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

As expected, European Union foreign ministers agreed on Monday to a very tentative plan to ease the bloc’s sanctions on Syria. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit—they agreed to a “roadmap” for a plan to ease sanctions, which sounds like it’s at least two steps away from any sanctions really being eased. Actually getting to that point could take weeks, and any sanctions that are lifted are likely to be put into some sort of “snap back” mechanism that makes it easy to reimpose them should the Syrian government stray from whatever direction the EU believes it should take.