The Interview

A report released by Amnesty International marking one year since the withdrawal of US and NATO troops concludes that the Taliban has decimated the rights of girls and women in Afghanistan. To understand exactly what's happening in the country today, FRANCE 24 spoke to Dr. Habiba Sarabi, a former Afghan minister for women's affairs and former governor of Bamiyan province. She urged the international community to "take responsibility for the Afghan people and Afghan women in particular".

FRANCE 24 sat down with Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation. The ministry was created in 2019 because President Volodymyr Zelensky had promised that Ukraine would be a pioneering e-government. Since the Russian invasion, digital transformation has been put on a "war footing", Fedorov said. He told FRANCE 24's Gulliver Cragg about several projects: a chatbot that allows people to send information about the movements of the Russian army, a joint project on drones with the Ukrainian military, as well as the use of artificial intelligence for facial recognition. The latter includes identifying slain Russian soldiers and informing their families via social media.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba spoke to FRANCE 24 about the four-way agreement on the export of Ukrainian wheat, the delivery of arms to Ukraine and the military situation on the ground, especially around the city of Kherson. He stressed that Ukraine would do everything in its power to resume the export of agricultural products and combat famine and rising food prices, especially in Africa and Asia.

The world faces a catastrophic collapse of societies if action is not taken to stop the breaching of “planetary boundaries” – safe spaces within which humanity could continue to develop and thrive. That is the stark warning from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. One of the centre’s researchers, Tom Cernev, who authored a paper that was recently published by the UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, is our guest in the France 24 interview.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame sat down with our special correspondent Marc Perelman in Kigali to talk of the ceasefire agreement reached this week with the Democratic Republic of Congo to ease tensions between the two countries.

In an interview with FRANCE 24, British Foreign Minister Liz Truss said that the United Kingdom is prepared to keep supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes for Kyiv to repel the Russian military. "We're in it for the long haul and that's also true of our NATO allies and our G7 allies," she explained. Truss added that diplomatic tensions between Paris and London have been put aside as Western states unite around supporting Ukraine.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke to FRANCE 24 a day after the visit of the French, German, Italian and Romanian leaders to Kyiv and Irpin. While welcoming this display of European unity with Ukraine, Podolyak called for more heavy weapons to be sent to his country. He said that such a move would change the situation on the ground in favour of the Ukrainian troops, faced with Russian advances in the eastern Donbas region.

Rwanda's Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta granted an interview to FRANCE 24 to discuss the increasingly tense situation with neighbouring DR Congo. Earlier this Friday, a Congolese soldier crossed the border and was killed by Rwandan security forces, while two Rwandan soldiers were wounded. Fighting between Congolese troops and a rebel movement called the M23 has inflamed tensions between the two neighbours. Biruta dismissed fears that the tensions could lead to a war. He also insisted that Rwanda was "committed" to its deal with the UK to take in asylum seekers, despite the first flight being cancelled earlier this week.

Egypt's Minister of International Cooperation, Rania A. Al-Mashat, granted an interview to FRANCE 24 in Ivory Coast's economic capital Abidjan. Although the war in Ukraine is threatening Egypt's food security, the minister believes that "pre-emptive action" undertaken by Cairo in the past few years will help "mitigate" the impact of a possible wheat shortage. Al-Mashat also called for the COP27 climate summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in November to be one turning of "pledges" into "implementation".

After being definitively acquitted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court last year, Charles Blé Goudé, the former right-hand man of ex-Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo, is expected to soon return to Ivory Coast after more than a decade in exile. On May 30, Blé Goudé received an Ivorian passport via the current president, Alassane Ouattara. In an interview with FRANCE 24, Blé Goudé discussed his upcoming return home, as well as his political ambitions.