The world in 2024: The death of Navalny, the fall of Assad and the return of Trump PHOTO

After the elections in Russia held in March, Vladimir Putin began his fifth term. Ursula von der Leyen also remained at the head of the European Commission after the elections for the European Parliament in June, in which the right, by the way, strengthened.

Sweden became a member, and Mark Rutte became the Secretary General of NATO. On the first day of 2024, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Iran and Ethiopia joined BRICS. BRICS was originally made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and the Republic of South Africa, and over time, other countries from the Global South began to join the association, while more countries announced their accession.

On January 12, US and British naval forces carried out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. It was the first direct engagement of these countries against the fighting capabilities of the Houthis, who are normally supported by Iran. The Houthis, a Shiite militant group from the extreme southwest of Arabia, have in the past intensively attacked commercial, trading ships in the Red Sea, in international waters.

Frederik X became the new king of Denmark on January 14, after his mother Margaret II decided to abdicate after 52 years of reign.

The change in the throne took place in an appropriate ceremony, with the presence of the new Crown Prince Christian, after which Queen Margareta formally left Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen. Queen Margaret, the longest-reigning monarch in Denmark's history, inherited the throne from her father, King Frederik IX, in January 1972.

American businessman Elon Musk announced on January 30 that the first patient to have a chip implanted in his brain through the Telepathy program of his company Neuralink is successfully recovering.

Neuralink has previously stated that its initial goal is to allow people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died on February 16 in the penal correctional colony IK-3 in the Arctic circle, in the north of the Urals, at the age of 48.

Navalny, a lawyer by profession, started actively engaging in politics in 2000, as a member of the Yabloko party, and entered politics more seriously during the protests in Russia in 2011/2012.

His candidacy in the 2018 presidential elections was rejected by the court because it was established that in 2013 in Kirov he was sentenced to a five-year suspended prison sentence for embezzlement, i.e. misappropriation of timber valued at around $500,000 from a state-owned company.

After being poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, for which he accused the Russian authorities, he stayed in Germany for treatment. He returned to Russia on January 17, 2021 and was arrested immediately after landing.

He has been convicted on multiple occasions, most recently in August 2023, when he was found guilty of allegedly founding and financing an extremist organization. On February 19, the Council of the European Union launched a military maritime operation to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, EUNAVFOR ASPIDES, in areas threatened by the Yemeni Houthis with numerous attacks on commercial vessels.

The military and naval forces of Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands and Sweden participated in the operation.

In the north of the Gaza Strip on February 29, over a hundred Palestinians were killed and more than 700 wounded while waiting in line for food. Israeli officials claimed that many of the casualties were the result of a stampede, while Hamas representatives claimed that the casualties were the result of an attack by the Israeli army. However, Israeli IDF officials did not deny that their members fired at Palestinians who were moving towards the soldiers and the checkpoint.

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According to Palestinian sources, in an attack near the Netzarim Corridor, in the north of the Gaza Strip, 118 Palestinian civilians were killed while waiting in line for food, and 760 were wounded or injured. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced on March 7 that Sweden had officially become the 32nd member. Alliances. Stoltenberg then emphasized that this makes NATO stronger, and Sweden and the entire Alliance become safer.

Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok signed a document two days earlier approving Sweden's accession. In Krasnogorsk, Moscow Region, on March 22, a terrorist attack took place in the Crocus City Hall concert hall, in which 145 people were killed, while 551 were wounded.

The terrorists shot people at close range, attacked with cold weapons and threw explosive devices, and a large fire followed. The attack on Crocus City Hall, in Krasnogorsk, a suburb of Moscow, was carried out by Muslim extremists.

The Assembly of Indonesia made a decision on March 28 to grant a special status to the capital Jakarta, after it was decided that the new capital, the administrative center, would be Nusantara, in the east of the island of Borneo.

Jakarta is threatened by subsidence, as the city with ten million inhabitants is gradually sinking, at an average of 1 to 15 cm per year, and almost half of the city's surface is below sea level.

The construction of Nusantara, the new capital, is the brainchild of President Joko Widodo, and the relocation of the administration is planned by the end of 2024. The largest Ukrainian thermal power plant, Trypilska, in the Kyiv region, was completely destroyed in the Russian bombing on April 11.

The Tripliska thermal power plant was the leading supplier of electricity to the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions. Demonstrations broke out in the Georgian capital Tbilisi on May 1, due to the announcement of the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence.

The new law stipulates that organizations that receive more than 20 percent of funds from abroad must be registered as dependent on foreign influence. During the protests in Tbilisi, the police detained 63 people, and six police officers were injured.

Representatives of the opposition believe that the new law was adopted under the influence of Moscow. Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili previously announced that she would veto the new law.

Violent riots broke out in New Caledonia on May 13, and the French government declared a state of emergency in the overseas territory two days later and sent 1,000 French reinforcements to the island.

The riot, accompanied by casualties, arson and looting, broke out due to the dissatisfaction of the native population, the Kanaks, with the electoral law that equates the rights of settlers with the natives.

Referendums were previously held in New Caledonia in which separation from France was rejected. Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, was wounded on May 15, in an assassination attempt.

The shooting took place in front of the House of Culture, in the town of Handlova, northeast of Bratislava, where a meeting of the Slovak Government was previously held. The attacker was Juraj Cintula, a poet and founder of the Movement Against Violence, who criticized Fico for not doing enough to curb gambling in the country.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and the country's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian were killed on May 19 when their helicopter crashed while flying over mountainous terrain during heavy fog in northwest Iran's Verzegan region on the border with Azerbaijan.

On June 12, Russian peacekeepers withdrew from the Nagorno-Karabakh (Upper Karabakh) region, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. Russian peacekeeping forces, initially numbering 1,960 soldiers, came with the mandate of separating the previously warring parties, as direct hostilities ceased in November 2020.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan took control of Karabakh, ending the region's independence from Baku, forcing virtually the entire Armenian population to leave Karabakh.

In Yerevan, in Armenia, parallel mass protests took place.

WikiLeaks founder, Australian journalist Julian Assange left Britain on June 25 for the Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific.

Prosecutors from the US previously said that he should plead guilty to violating the US Espionage Act that week, as part of the deal, he agreed to plead guilty to one count. The indictment charges him with conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents.

In 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with a series of diplomatic cables.

The more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic correspondence and battlefield reports, as well as a 2007 video of a US helicopter gunship shooting down in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists.

Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European warrant, later dropped. He was taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​where he stayed for seven years, in 2019, when he was imprisoned for failure to pay bail, and then fought against extradition to the US for almost five years.

On June 26, NATO member countries elected Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as Secretary General of the Alliance.

Rutte was elected as the head of NATO after his only opponent for the post, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, announced a week earlier that he was withdrawing from the candidacy. Then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg praised his successor Rutte on the same day as a "strong leader and consensus builder".

On July 6, representatives of the three countries of the Sahel region - Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso - signed an agreement on the establishment of a confederal community. The three West African countries, headed by military administrations, have decided on close cooperation, mutual assistance at all levels, as well as joint resistance and defense in the event that one of the three countries is threatened.

Previous membership in the ECOWAS community of West African countries was rejected, as well as the previous traditional closeness with France, which until recently had a military presence in those countries.

The agreement was signed at the first summit of the Alliance of Sahelian States (AES), and Niger's military leader, General Abdurahaman Tiani, described the event as a culmination of determination and shared will to restore national sovereignty.

On July 13, Donald Trump, then the candidate of the Republicans in the upcoming presidential elections in the USA, was assassinated, during which his ear was slightly injured. The attack happened while Trump was on stage at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

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The person who shot at Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania was soon killed, and a visitor to the rally also died in the incident. Sheikh Hasina Wazed, Prime Minister of Bangladesh resigned and fled to neighboring India on August 5, in a military plane.

She left the country after mass unrest, despite the fact that she won a fourth term in the elections in January, which were boycotted by the opposition.

On August 20, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, voted to ban the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UPC). The law, which was supported by 265 deputies, became legally binding 30 days after its publication.

Numerous members of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, including non-combat personnel, were injured on September 17 and 18, when pagers and radio communication devices exploded.

At least 37 people died and around 3,000 were wounded, many seriously, in a spectacular action by the Israeli secret service. More than 400 injured were in critical condition, and among the injured was the ambassador of Iran in Beirut. The wave of explosions lasted about an hour after the first detonations. The Israeli army has not commented on these events.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was also killed in an Israeli attack ten days later. In the general elections in Austria on September 29, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) received the most votes, winning 29.2 percent of the votes.

Second place was the moderate right-wing Austrian People's Party of Chancellor Karl Nehammer, which won 26.2 percent of the vote, and the Social Democrats got 20 percent of the vote.

By the way, the FPO, together with the ruling Hungarian party Fidesz and the Czech right-wing party ANO, founded the parliamentary group "Patriots for Europe", the third largest in the European Parliament, at the end of July. On October 1, the Israeli army began its invasion of Lebanon, and it was announced that the goal of the action was the dismantling and destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure.

IDF spokesman Hagari said the ground operation was undertaken to ensure that all 60,000 Israelis could "return safely to their homes in northern Israel".

Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump won the election for President of the United States of America on November 5. According to the number of votes received, he far surpassed his opponent Kamala Harris, representative of the Democrats.

Trump, the future 47th president of the USA, won 312 of the required 270 electoral votes, and Kamala Harris 226. Republicans also won majorities in both houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Trump defeated opponent Kamala Harris in all seven so-called swing states. The main slogan of Trump, like the previous time, was that "he will make America great again!" On November 17, India successfully test-fired a domestically produced long-range hypersonic missile.

The missile, developed by the country's Defense Research and Development Organization with partners in the country's defense industry, is designed to carry payloads for ranges of more than 1,500 kilometers.

The test firing was carried out from Abdul Kalam Island off the east coast of Odisha state. India is thus ranked among the few nations that possess such advanced technologies.

Currently, they are owned by the USA, Russia, China, North Korea, and more countries are working on them. Hypersonic missiles are the pinnacle of modern missile technology, they fly lower, are harder to detect, reach targets faster, with the ability to change the target after launch.

On December 4, the French Parliament voted no-confidence in the government led by Michel Barnier, and on December 23, French President Emmanuel Macron's cabinet announced that a new government, headed by Prime Minister Francois Bairro, had been appointed.

Macron previously decided to dissolve parliament in June, prompting snap elections that resulted in a parliament split into three groups without a clear majority.

On December 6, the Constitutional Court of Romania annulled the results of the first round of presidential elections. Right-wing Kalin Georgescu, who is believed to be inclined towards Moscow, received the most votes in the first round.

Outgoing Romanian President Klaus Iohannis previously released declassified documents describing an alleged highly organized campaign for Georgescu on social media.

The documents contain an intelligence assessment that Russia is conducting hybrid attacks on Romania. Syrian rebels captured Damascus, the country's capital, on December 8.

Despite their lightning successes in the previous days, Damascus's fall so quickly stunned the world. Officials of the new government, yesterday's guerrillas motivated by Islamic fanaticism, expressed their willingness to cooperate with the international community.

Bashar al-Assad, the long-time president of Syria, left the country with his family for Moscow, where he was granted asylum. Russian forces, previously active in the civil war in that country, did not react, and the question remains of their bases, the only ones Moscow has in the Mediterranean.

South Korea's parliament voted to impeach President Yun Suk-yeol on Dec. 14, after he previously imposed a state of emergency to root out what he said were "anti-state forces." He lifted the state of emergency hours later after the assembly objected to that decision.

The German government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz fell on December 16 after a vote of no confidence. 207 deputies voted for the survival of Scholz's government, 394 were against, and 116 deputies abstained.

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Scholz had previously asked the Bundestag for a vote of confidence and lost the vote after the ruling coalition collapsed. He submitted the request for a vote of confidence after the collapse of the ruling coalition, caused by Scholz's decision to dismiss Finance Minister Christian Lindner.

Because of this, there was a division between the Social Democrats and the Greens, on the one hand, and Lindner's Liberals, on the other.

On December 27, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier dissolved the Bundestag and announced early parliamentary elections for February 23, 2025.

General Igor Kirillov, head of the sector for radiological, chemical and biological protection of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed on December 17 in an explosion in the southeast of Moscow.

The explosive device was placed in a scooter leaning against the entrance to the building where Kirillov was staying, and in addition to Kirillov, his assistant also died in the explosion.