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Such decisions pave the way for alleged perpetrators to be tried in a US military court martial process, an alternative justice system in which victims are often not given the same protections as they would get in a British court.

The government and police reviews were launched after the Guardian uncovered a series of cases in which British police forces allowed the American military to take over investigations into allegations of serious sexual offences.

When the first case was revealed in June, Downing Street said it was “very concerning” that UK authorities were not involved in the prosecution of an American fighter pilot accused of raping and strangling a British woman, Sarah Steele, in his apartment after they met on a dating app.

After Cambridgeshire police allowed US military police to take control of the case, the pilot, Capt Jacob Wulfson, was prosecuted in a court martial on a US airbase in Suffolk. The jury, an all-male panel of air force officers, convicted Wulfson of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted him of sexual assault.

Victims of sexual attacks by US military personnel that would meet a common definition of rape in the UK are finding that their attackers are instead being prosecuted for lesser offences.

Under the set of laws that govern US forces, known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), the crime of rape carries a narrower definition than that adopted by the British courts, meaning many cases are charged instead as sexual assault.

Wulfson was given a six-month sentence which he is serving at the US base RAF Lakenheath.

In recent weeks, Home Office and justice ministers met Steele to discuss her case and whether changes should be made to how UK police and prosecutors handle cases involving US military personnel.

A government spokesperson said Steele had “shown incredible bravery in coming forward” and ministers had “committed to identifying and learning any lessons from this case to ensure that victims are supported and treated with the seriousness, dignity and compassion they deserve”.

The spokesperson said officials were working closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) “to look at the guidance in place to ensure that cases are correctly referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for advice”.

Ministers have promised to press the US government for a full account of what happened in the Wulfson case. In a statement, the Foreign Office said it had “been engaging with the US on this matter”.

The Guardian has unearthed several other cases involving US air force personnel who avoided UK courts despite their alleged crimes occurring while off duty. In each, local police handed over the investigation to military prosecutors, sometimes within days of receiving a report of a crime on UK soil.

Hannes Marschalek allegedly exposed himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire. He admitted a charge of indecent conduct after negotiating a plea bargain at a court martial. The conviction was later quashed on technical grounds.

Tyrion Davis allegedly raped two British woman in Suffolk. He was convicted of one count of sexual assault when he was court martialled but acquitted of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact.

James Loubeau, who was accused of a “spree” of rapes and sexual assaults in East Anglia, drugging some women and breaking into the homes of others, also avoided the British courts.

He was acquitted at a court martial where he was tried over allegations from just one of the six women who accused him of attacking them. He was later convicted in a court in Miami over another woman’s allegations, after an FBI investigation into his alleged attacks on women in England.

Suffolk police had handed over the Loubeau case to military prosecutors just 11 days after two British women contacted the force to say he and another US airman had drugged and raped them after a meeting in a nightclub.

In response to the Guardian’s reporting on such cases, Gavin Stephens, the chair of the NPCC, has written to all chief constables in England and Wales to ensure forces understand their legal obligations in cases involving visiting US forces.

A source familiar with discussions in government said ministers were alarmed to learn that UK police forces may not be seeking advice from the CPS before handing over investigations to the US military.

Under legislation dating back to the 1950s, visiting US armed forces in the UK can prosecute their own personnel if the offences were committed while they were on duty or against another member of the military, its property, or a dependant such as a spouse or child.

In all other cases, the British police have the first option on whether to launch an investigation into visiting US military personnel. However, the cases uncovered by the Guardian suggest the US has pushed to take control of investigations over which it does not have primary jurisdiction. British police appear to be acquiescing to these requests.

Two police forces – Suffolk and Cambridgeshire – are conducting their own reviews of how they handle investigations involving US military personnel.

In a statement, Cambridgeshire police said: “We are conducting a policy review being led by our investigation standards department.” The force added that the review was looking at cases going back to 2018, and it did not yet know how many there had been.

Suffolk police said: “We are in the process of reviewing the decision-making surrounding the transfer of primacy to the US air force and around case transfer practices more generally.”

More than 12,000 US military personnel are stationed in the UK, operating from at least 15 bases and facilities. The largest concentration of personnel is at two US military installations in Suffolk, RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall. Large numbers of US forces live in the surrounding areas, including in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.

Concern about US service personnel avoiding the British justice system has been raised by MPs from across the political parties. Nick Timothy, the Conservative justice spokesperson, said Wulfson “should have been fully investigated by the English police and prosecuted in our courts”.

Jess Brown-Fuller, the Liberal Democrats’ justice spokesperson, said: “The British public expect crimes committed in England to be prosecuted in the English courts under English law. That expectation should not change simply because the accused is a member of the foreign military.”

Responding to a question in parliament about the Steele case earlier this month, the justice minister, Sarah Sackman, said: “Our thoughts are with the victim, and with the other victims whose experiences have subsequently come to light.” %!s()

In June, Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed putting a new figure on the plinth: Ivan Mazepa, a Cossack military and political leader, who broke with Moscow and fought for Ukraine’s independence. “I am certain that where Lenin fell, Mazepa will stand firm,” Zelenskyy said. He spoke next to a bust of Mazepa in the Pechersk Lavra, an ancient Kyiv monastery hit by Russian missiles.

The proposed swap of Lenin for Mazepa has triggered a lively debate about monuments and what they say about changing national identity. After winning independence in 1991, Ukraine removed large numbers of Soviet-era statues and renamed streets as part of “decommunisation”. The process sped up in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and fighting began in the Donbas, and moved even faster after Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion that aimed to scrub Ukraine from Europe’s map.

Nataliia Kryvda, a professor of the history of culture at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, said Ukraine was going through an unfinished period of decolonisation. “The USSR absorbed national cultures. It tried to make a single nation of Soviet citizens. Russia today looks at Ukraine and says we are one people. It isn’t true. We have our own mindset, historical destiny, beliefs and dreams. Our identity is a dynamic process,” she said.

Standing next to the ex-Lenin plinth, Kryvda said she was in favour of a Mazepa monument. “Why not? He’s our leader. Each culture needs to mark its space with memorials. They objectify memory,” she said. She described Mazepa as a “contradictory personality” and not an “ideal hero”.

“He really was a friend and political partner of Russia, right up until the moment he dramatically changed his life and history,” she added.

As hetman, or head, of Cossack Ukraine, Mazepa sought to balance the demands of neighbouring Moscow and Warsaw. In 1708, the Russian emperor Peter the Great refused to protect Ukrainian territory from invading Swedes. Mazepa abandoned the tsar and formed an alliance with the Swedish King Charles XII, an act that ended in defeat and led the Bolsheviks to call modern Ukrainian patriots “Mazepists”.

“Mazepa was the architect of European Ukraine,” Kryvda said.

In his speech at the Pechersk Lavra, Zelenskyy said Russia had smeared Mazepa for centuries, depicting him as a traitor. Their goal, he said, was to make Ukrainians “view their own history through the eyes of others”.

Alim Aliev, a writer and Crimean Tatar campaigner, said Ukraine was belatedly recovering its identity. “We are reclaiming our own voices and names,” he said. He cited the example of the 20th-century Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasyl Stus, whose image will appear in September on a new 2,000 Hryvnia note. Stus studied in Donetsk, the eastern Donbas city occupied by Russia, and led Ukraine’s national revival. He died in 1985 in a Soviet prison camp.

In Aliev’s view, Ukraine was now speaking about its past “without mediators” and said it was appropriate that statues of the 19th-century Russian poet Pushkin had been taken down across the country. “He had a totally imperial view of Crimea,” Aliev said, citing Pushkin’s narrative poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. “He exoticises Crimean Tatars and describes us from a colonial perspective.” Of the Mazepa statue, he added: “I don’t think it’s a controversial idea.”

Last month workmen took away a monument to another Russian literary giant Mikhail Bulgakov. It had stood since 2007 outside the house where Bulgakov lived, in one of Kyiv’s most attractive streets, St Andrew’s Descent. Kyiv’s city council voted to remove it. Other plaques to Bulgakov, born in Kyiv to a Russian family when it was part of the Russian empire, have already been taken down, including one outside the university where he studied medicine. Bulgakov’s museum – housed in the writer’s home – remains open.

The museum’s director, Liudmyla Habianuri, said she was not opposed to the sculpture’s removal and dismissed a petition to keep it as “bland”. She acknowledged that Bulgakov had written negatively about Ukrainian nationalist forces in his Kyiv novel The White Guard, set in the winter of 1918-19, amid revolution and war. She stressed, however: “Bulgakov was a witness to his times. And a satirist. He didn’t like anybody. That included communists and priests.”

Habianuri said Russia’s war had prompted Ukrainians to ask: “‘Who am I?’ It’s a very painful question,” she said. “If I speak Russian and watch Russian films and the Russians are killing me then I must give all that up. Then I’m Ukrainian. And if I’m Ukrainian, I must become Ukrainian as quickly as possible.”

This has led people to join the struggle for identity, she said, either via social media or by attacking monuments.

Bulgakov, she said, was a frequent subject of such struggles. “Right now there is a table with only two columns: plus or minus. As a Russian, who didn’t write from the perspective of Ukraine’s defenders, Bulgakov can’t get a plus sign.”

Habianuri said a process of “simplification” was under way but was delighted when demonstrators pulled down the Lenin statue, saying: “The man was an enemy of humanity itself.” Mazepa, she said, was a “unique person” who had inspired a notable poem by Lord Byron. But she questioned whether the plinth was a fitting spot for a memorial.

“I understand it’s a quick jab at Russia. But it’s not the right place for a hero,” she said. “The Germans hanged people there during the second world war.”

Unlike Lenin, the Bulgakov statue was carefully packed up and returned to the family of its late sculptor, Mykola Rapay. His daughter, Kateryna, declined a request from the Guardian for the work to be photographed at its new location. She said she had given official guarantees that the monument would remain “out of public space”.

“These are not my whims,” she said. “The sculpture is not my property. I am the guarantor of its preservation.”

Over at the Pechersk Lavra tourists walked past the new Mazepa bust, which has been erected in front of a fountain and a pleasant shady garden. It sits next to the complex’s 11th-century Dormition Cathedral, used in medieval times for the burial of prominent figures. Last week a boy photographed his father next to the new monument.

Mazepa, a patron of the arts, donated money to pay for the cathedral’s baroque renovation. In June, a Russian drone crashed into its roof, causing a fire, and blackening external pictures of saints. Other icons and religious artefacts were rescued.

One Ukrainian visitor, Olena Polishchuk, said she had come to the Lavra from the UK, where she has lived since Putin’s big invasion. What did she think of Mazepa? “He’s a famous man. I’m glad he’s being commemorated. He’s an important part of our history,” she said. %!s()

In Ghana and Nigeria, almost half (41% and 40% respectively) of young people aged 18 to 24 were optimistic, with Liberia not far behind (37%). A further one in 10 (11%) young people were uncertain about the impact, according to the African Youth Survey, which interviewed almost 5,000 people across 16 of the continent’s 54 recognised countries.

The Trump administration announced in early 2025 that it was eliminating more than 90% of USAID’s foreign contracts and $60bn in overall US assistance around the world. US foreign aid had been designed to play a critical role in tackling poverty, hunger and inequality worldwide.

Other countries, including Britain, France and Germany, have also been slashing aid budgets. The UK announced in February 2025 that the aid budget would be cut from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in 2027, its lowest level as a percentage of national income since records began. The UN target is 0.7%.

Ivor Ichikowitz, whose South African family foundation commissioned the report, said: “The big picture [from the survey] is that the youth is concerned about governments that are overly influenced by foreign powers. What they’re saying is that African governments need to take agency and responsibility for their own reality.”

Africa has the youngest population in the world, with 70% of sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30, according to the UN. The median age of the continent is 19 years and six months. By 2030, Africa will be home to more than 40% of the world’s youth.

The sudden USAID cuts were met with public outrage and pushback from development and humanitarian organisations. They caused the closure of vital services, including maternity clinics, and medicine shortages at a time when UN agencies are struggling to find money for their humanitarian work and food insecurity has been worsened by the climate crisis.

According to the survey, nearly half of African youth (46%) did believe the closure of USAID would have a damaging impact on their countries, with healthcare services and disease prevention seen as the areas most affected. This anxiety is highest in Mozambique (76%), followed by Kenya (63%) and Rwanda (63%), where youth feel the cuts will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable members of society.

Degan Ali, executive director of Adeso, an African non-profit incubating ideas and enterprises to lower aid dependency, said that while the cuts were carried out in a “hugely irresponsible and inhumane” manner, she was not surprised that a significant proportion of young people saw positivity there. “I think it’s a reflection of the general feeling. A lot of people find aid very demeaning,” she said. “They didn’t feel that the aid was being used for the right things and there is a sense of ‘We can do this for ourselves’. The younger generation feel like our leaders are the duty bearers and are supposed to be handling the needs of our communities.”

She said people believed that the aid that comes into a country is not going to the right causes or the right people. “There’s all this money going into the development sector, but they’re not really seeing major changes on the ground,” she said. “The younger generation is very politically active and more savvy. They are pushing back and trying to hold their leaders accountable.”

She also said that the youth was looking towards African role models on the continent, a move exemplified by the popularity of Burkina Faso’s military leader, Ibrahim Traoré, who portrays himself as a pan-Africanist figure leading his nation out of the clutches of western imperialism and neocolonialism.

“He is one of the more popular leaders across the entire continent of Africa,” said Ali. “There are matatus (minibus taxis) that have his name on in Nairobi, Kenya. The youth see that he is turning around a very poor country and that he really cares about his people. That further motivates young people to protest and say, ‘We don’t need aid, we have enough resources in our country and we need our leaders to behave differently.’”

Hibak Kalfan, executive director of Near, a network of civil society organisations from the global south, said the shuttering of USAID had led to the closure of initiatives and organisations across the whole continent, but had also created the opportunity to reconsider resources and sustainability. “It has put a real light on the fact that [organisations] have been highly dependent on bilateral external funding for years, and the future of aid will depend on a diversity of resources,” she said. %!s()

Morales backed protests in June by farmers and truckers against an economic crisis, rising living costs and conservative President Rodrigo Paz’s austerity plans.

“They will not intimidate us,” he responded to the charges in a post on X.

Morales said the government was going after him “to conceal the true drama Bolivia is experiencing: a deep economic and social crisis…a model that has abandoned the people and protects corruption”.

Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, rose from poverty to serve three terms as president, one of Latin America’s longest-serving leaders.

He was in office from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster, when he was forced to resign after elections tainted by claims of fraud.

Initially refusing to leave power, he eventually had to go, casting a shadow over nearly 14 years of economic progress and poverty reduction mixed with accusations of political heavy-handedness.

He went into exile in Mexico and later, Argentina, returning a year later after his political ally Luis Arce won the presidency.

In late 2024, allegations surfaced against him of trafficking a minor and statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl who became pregnant.

By early 2025, Morales’s supporters cut off roads and paralysed the country in protest against the charges, which he rejected. He has also refused to appear at court hearings.

As the unrest over Bolivia’s economic crisis was brewing in May, Morales was found in contempt of court, and a renewed warrant for his arrest on the rape charges was issued.

His supporters threatened to “throw the country into turmoil” if he was arrested, at a time when protests had shut down roads and forced the government to airlift food to some areas.

After Paz declared a state of emergency in June and the protests slowed, the latest investigation began, triggered by a criminal complaint over Morales’s involvement with the demonstrations.

The complaint, filed by the civic group Comit pro Santa Cruz and later picked up by the Interior Ministry, alleges that Morales’s supporters “caused a shortage of food, fuel and medicine” by blocking transport in the country for 53 days.

The charges filed on Wednesday were outlined in a document published by local media, according to German wire service DPA.

The order instructs police to detain Morales and bring him to the special anticorruption unit.

“We will continue fighting alongside the people, as we have always done, with the conviction that Bolivia deserves a different path: one of dignity, sovereignty, social justice, and the recovery of hope for all,” said Morales responding to the latest charges. %!s()

A missile strike killed at least six people including two girls aged 5 and 12 in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine, the head of its military administration said. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warned the country hours in advance of Moscow launching the massive attack.

In Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s hometown, Oleksandr Vilkul, the ‌city’s defence council head, said: “In a village on the outskirts of Kryvyi Rih, a direct strike by an Iskander-M ballistic missile, launched from Voronezh, hit a private house where a large family lived, killing girls aged five and 12 and four adults.” A further eight people were wounded.

Six ⁠more people, including two children, were killed in the regions of Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava.

In Kyiv, “sadly, one death has been confirmed” the military administration for the capital city announced. The Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, reported fires in several districts. Earlier, he posted: “The enemy is attacking the capital with ballistic weapons. The threat of further attack remains present. Stay in shelters!”

In ‌Lviv, close to Poland, rescue workers were scrambling to clear rubble to reach those trapped after Russian missiles damaged two apartment buildings and injured 26, officials said.

Late on Wednesday, Zelenskyy had posted: “The Russians prepared a massive attack several days ago, and there is a high probability that the strike will be carried out tonight … Please, in all regions of Ukraine, pay attention to air raid alerts today and stay safe.”

As the attacks took place, Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine, protectively scrambled fighter ​jets to protect ​its airspace, its armed forces said.

“Fighter aircraft and ​an early warning ‌aircraft have ​begun operations while ​ground-based air defence systems and radar reconnaissance systems have reached a state of readiness.”

An unidentified object ⁠was detected ⁠in Polish ​airspace overnight and ⁠later the probable crash site ⁠was found near ‌the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia in the Lublin province, ‌the Polish military said.

Zelenskyy also repeated his request to Ukraine’s allies to supply Kyiv with the missiles its air defence system lacks. “It is important that our partners fully ​understand what is happening and that the protection of people’s lives depends directly on their willingness, or lack of willingness, to provide air defence missiles.”

Meanwhile in Russia, a ⁠warehouse of ⁠online ⁠retailer Wildberries in ​the western ⁠city of ⁠Penza ​caught ‌fire from a Ukrainian ‌drone attack, ‌said the regional governor, Oleg Melnichenko. One person was ​injured and around ⁠200 people ​were evacuated from ​the ​site, he ​added.

Wildberries ⁠said ⁠another fire ⁠broke out at its logistics ⁠facility ​in ‌Sarapul ‌in Russia’s ‌Udmurtia region after a drone attack.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse %!s()