(Refiles with additional reporting credit)

By Jonathan Spicer

ISTANBUL -Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a flurry of Western sanctions on Moscow, at least one oligarch and thousands of other Russians have arrived in Turkey, seen as a safe place to stay, invest and hold assets despite its NATO membership.

Acting as a safe haven raises risks for Turkey’s government, banks and businesses that could face tough decisions and penalties if the United States and others ramp up pressure on Moscow with broader “secondary” sanctions.

Here is what is at stake:

WHY IS TURKEY ATTRACTIVE TO RUSSIANS?

Turkey has said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is unacceptable but opposes the sanctions on principle and is not enforcing them.

Turkey’s economy, already battered by a currency crisis and soaring inflation, relies heavily on Russian oil, gas, trade and tourism.

Some 14,000 Russians have reportedly arrived in Turkey since the war began on Feb. 24, many carrying wads of cash due to blocks on their U.S. credit cards and challenges in doing basic banking. Realtors say many are using cash and converted crypto currencies to buy property as a safe investment.

Roman Abramovich, one of several Russian oligarchs blacklisted by the West, has also visited Turkey and two of his superyachts worth a combined $1.2 billion docked at Turkish resorts last week. Oligarchs could invest more, sources familiar with private talks have told Reuters.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday Russian oligarchs and citizens were “of course” welcome and could do business in Turkey according to international law.

CAN THE SAFE HAVEN LAST?

Western governments have already seized some oligarchs’ assets, have frozen Russia’s reserves and ousted it from the SWIFT banking system, and they could press Ankara to tighten loop holes. Analysts say they could impose secondary sanctions on those doing business with the main target, Russia.

“If the humanitarian tragedy persists and Putin has no intention of backing down, I think secondary sanctions are inevitable,” said Hakan Akbas, founding partner of Istanbul-based Strategic Advisory Services, which deals with sanctions.

“The West will pay more attention to any potential loop-hole countries so they don’t become safe havens,” he said. “Ankara’s hands would be tied… and it would inevitably have to take a tougher stance against Russia.”

This could send a chill through Turkish banks and companies dealing with Russian clients or doing business abroad. In 2020, the U.S. Treasury applied secondary sanctions on Turkey’s Defence Industry Directorate, its chief and others over Ankara’s purchase of Russian S-400 missiles.

Yet given Turkey’s efforts to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv, it could avoid the sanctions crossfire. Another round of peace talks is due to take place in Istanbul this week.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has welcomed Ankara’s diplomatic role, while adding “we would very much like Turkey to implement all the sanctions”.

HOW ARE BANKS AND COMPANIES PREPARING?

Faced with a flood of new Russian customers, Turkish banks have resisted some deposit and transfer requests and ramped up compliance checks for fear of contravening sanctions.

This has frustrated some Russians. But it reflects caution across the sector that seeks to avoid a repetition of the years-long U.S. prosecution of Turkish state lender Halkbank, which is accused of having helped Iran evade U.S. sanctions.

The BDDK bank regulator said it has given no instruction to limit citizens of any country. But a senior banking source said the sanctions were nonetheless “perceived as a new risk” and firms had met several times to discuss it since the war began.

Akbas said big Turkish companies and conglomerates have more than $10 billion in assets in Russia, and Moscow is now pressing them to continue operations and pay workers or risk bankruptcy.

Many of them do far more business in the West and may have to make a “binary decision” whether to leave Russia as several big U.S. and European brands have done, he said.

Any sanctions fallout could further bruise Turkey’s reputation among foreign investors after years of unorthodox monetary policy and outflows.

That reputation took another hit last year when an international watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, downgraded Turkey to a so-called grey list for failing to head off money laundering and terrorist financing.

(Reporting by Jonathan Spicer; Additional reporting by Birsen Altayli, Ebru Tuncay and Can Sezer in Istanbul;Editing by Gareth Jones)

MEXICO CITY -Gunmen massacred 20 people on Sunday night in a suspected gangland attack at a clandestine cockfighting venue in western Mexico, authorities said, in one of the worst mass shootings under the current government.

The killings took place in Las Tinajas in the state of Michoacan, where the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has been fighting local gangs for control of drug routes.

“It was a massacre of one group by another,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told a regular news conference, expressing his regret at the deaths.

He blamed criminal gangs in the area for the killings and said a team was on the way to investigate the crime.

Seventeen of the dead were men and three were women, and officials secured 15 vehicles as part of the investigation, Michoacan state prosecutors said in a statement.

All the victims had gunshot wounds, and the last of them died on his way to hospital, authorities said.

Four people were being treated for injuries.

Michoacan has long been one of the most lawless areas in Mexico, and last month, the United States temporarily suspended shipments of avocados from the state after U.S. inspectors received threats. The suspension was later lifted.

Gang violence was fuelling record levels of homicides by the time President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in late 2018 pledging to pacify the country, adopting a less confrontational approach to dealing with organized crime.

But widespread violence has persisted, and average annual homicide totals are on track to be the highest under any Mexican administration since modern records began.

Homicides were down nationally during the first two months of 2022 compared to the same period last year, but they were up in Michoacan, according to official government data.

Las Tinajas is in the municipality of Zinapecuaro, about 50 km (30 miles) northeast of the state capital, Morelia.

(Reporting by Frank Jack Daniel in London and Mexico City Newsroom; Editing by John Stonestreet, Ed Osmond and Bernadette Baum)

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON -The Kremlin said on Monday that U.S. President Joe Biden’s remark that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” was a cause for alarm, a guarded response to the first public call from the United States for an end to Putin’s 22-year rule.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the end of a speech to a crowd in Warsaw. He cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a battle in a much broader conflict between democracy and autocracy.

The White House tried to clarify Biden’s remarks and the U.S. president said on Sunday he had not been publicly calling for regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear warheads than any other power.

Asked about Biden’s comment, which received little coverage on Russian state television, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “This is a statement that is certainly alarming.”

“We will continue to track the statements of the U.S. president in the most attentive way,” Peskov told reporters.

Putin has not commented publicly on Biden’s remark – which comes amid Moscow’s biggest confrontation with the West since the end of the Cold War.

In his first live appearance since the remark, Putin was shown on state television on Monday being briefed by Alexander Sergeev, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on the accumulation of carbon in molluscs and the use of artifical intelligence to decipher ancient Tibetan manuscripts.

Biden last year cast Putin as “a killer”. After that comment, Biden phoned Putin who then said he was satisfied with the U.S. leader’s explanation for the remark.

‘REGIME CHANGE’?

Such a blunt remark from Biden on the need to end Putin’s power, however, appeared to breach the norms of U.S-Russian relations and also, bizarrely, align with the narrative of the former KGB spies who form Putin’s closest circle in the Kremlin.

“It is unusual for the president to talk about regime change so bluntly,” William Wohlforth, professor of government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, told Reuters.

“But it wouldn’t seem that unusual from the perspective of Putin’s propaganda as he often describes that as the goal of U.S. foreign policy,” Wohlforth said.

Putin’s inner circle, including Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev, previously head of the powerful Federal Security Service spy agency, has long argued that the United States is plotting a revolution in Russia.

Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012, said on March 23 the world could spiral towards a nuclear dystopia if Washington pressed on with what the Kremlin casts as a long-term plot to destroy Russia.

Medvedev painted a grim picture of a post-Putin Russia, saying it could lead to an unstable leadership in Moscow “with a maximum number of nuclear weapons aimed at targets in the United States and Europe”.

IDEOLOGICAL WAR

Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since Boris Yeltsin resigned on the last day of 1999, casts the war in Ukraine as necessary to protect his country’s vital interests in the face of a United States he says is bent on world hegemony. He is particularly keen to quash Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO.

Ukraine says it is fighting for its very survival against a Russian imperial-style land grab that has divided the two biggest Eastern Slav peoples.

Biden’s remark on ending Putin’s rule overshadowed a speech which had a much broader theme: the battle between democracy and autocracy.

That indicates a much longer war, according to Russian aluminium tycoon Oleg Deripaska.

“Now some sort of hellish ideological mobilisation is underway from all sides,” he said on Sunday.

“It appears all sides are recklessly gearing up for a long-term war that will have tragic consequences for the entire world,” said Deripaska, who has been sanctioned by the United States and Britain.

Under constitutional changes approved in 2020, Putin, who turns 70 this year, could seek election for two more 6-year terms as president, allowing him to stay in power until 2036.

The Kremlin says Putin is a democratically elected leader and that it is for the Russian people, not Washington, to decide who leads their country.

(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Gareth Jones)

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON -The White House on Monday said it is proposing $15 billion over 10 years in election assistance to states and to support vote-by-mail efforts.

The 2023 budget proposal calls for $10 billion in new assistance to states for election equipment and personnel and to “increase access and security.”

President Joe Biden is also proposing $5 billion to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to expand delivery capacity in underserved areas “and support for vote-by-mail, including making ballots postage free and reducing the cost of other election-related mail.”

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, voting by mail jumped dramatically, with 46% of votes cast by mail in the November 2020 presidential election, up from 21% in the 2016 election, the USPS Inspector General said.

In the 2020 election, the Postal Service delivered more than 135 million ballots.

In August 2020, then President Donald Trump sparked a firestorm when he said without additional funding from Congress “they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

That prompted U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to say Trump’s comments about election mail were “incorrect” and said USPS had adequate funding to handle mailed ballots.

In December, USPS and the NAACP reached a settlement to resolve a 2020 lawsuit over election mail that the Justice Department said would ensure prioritizing delivering ballots in future elections.

USPS agreed for the 2022 mid-term congressional election to take the same extraordinary measures used to deliver ballots in the November 2020 election. The Postal Service also agreed for elections through 2028 to post guidance documents publicly reflecting its “good faith efforts to prioritize monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail.”

Several courts ordered USPS to take extraordinary measures to ensure ballot deliveries, especially since a record number of Americans opted to vote by mail during the pandemic.

(Reporting by David ShepardsonEditing by Marguerita Choy)

By Catarina Demony

SAO JORGE, Portugal -Fatima Viveiros was a little girl when she decided to become a volcanologist. It was a dream come true and now, at age 44, she is putting her skills to use to protect her home in Portugal’s Azores islands.

The lush mid-Atlantic volcanic island of Sao Jorge, where she grew up, has been rattled by more than 14,000 small earthquakes in the past seven days.

Viveiros and other experts fear the tremors, which have reached a magnitude of up to 3.3 on the Richter scale, could trigger a volcanic eruption for the first time since 1808, or a powerful earthquake.

“My home is located on an active volcanic system,” said Viveiros, who works for the region’s CIVISA seismo-volcanic surveillance centre.

“When (something happens) in our home we must be a little cold-blooded, so our feelings don’t affect our thinking,” she added. “But the feelings are there because it’s my home, my people.”

Viveiros was carrying a yellow machine on her back to measure soil gases on Sao Jorge.

Soil gases, such as carbon dioxide and sulphur, are indicators of volcanic activity, and Viveiros and her team have been battling Sao Jorge’s rain and strong winds for days to dig for answers. So far, the levels remain normal.

The island’s sudden increase in seismic activity is reminiscent of the earthquakes detected before the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on Spain’s La Palma island last year, some 1,400 km (870 miles) southeast of the Azores.

Over 85 days, that eruption destroyed thousands of properties and crops.

Viveiros, who travelled to La Palma at the time to support the Canary Islands Volcanology Institute and monitor soil gases there, said Sao Jorge’s volcanic system was similar to the one on the Spanish island.

“One of the possible scenarios on the table is that we see something similar to what happened in La Palma,” she added.

‘ABNORMALITY’

Spanish and other international teams of experts are prepared to travel to Sao Jorge if needed, Viveiros said.

CIVISA raised the volcanic alert to Level 4 on Wednesday, meaning there is a “real possibility” the volcano could erupt.

Jose Bolieiro, the president of the Azores, which is an autonomous region of Portugal, said the number of earthquakes that hit Sao Jorge in recent days was double those recorded in the region as a whole last year.

“There is clearly an abnormality,” he told reporters.

Although authorities have said an eruption was not imminent, around 1,500 people have left the island by air or sea in recent days. Many have no idea when they will be able to return.

Arriving by helicopter, Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa visited Sao Jorge on Sunday to attend a briefing about the situation and calm the local population. He also visited a historic tower that survived the 1808 eruption.

Later on Sunday, Rebelo de Sousa interacted with locals in Calheta, a town on the eastern part of the island where people have sought safety. Most of the seismic activity has been in the western side of Sao Jorge.

He drank a traditional Azorean spirit, kissed and hugged members of the crowd and took selfies with them.

Dozens of soldiers have been mobilised to Sao Jorge where they are staying in large tents with beds that could accommodate 100 people in case of an evacuation. Sao Jorge’s municipalities also have transformed various facilities into temporary reception centers.

As soldiers worked behind him, Major Rodolfo Romeiro told Reuters more resources would be sent to the island next week.

“Our mission is to help the population,” Romeiro said. “In these situations the motivation (of the armed forces) is even greater.”

(Reporting by Catarina Demony, Guillermo Martinez and Pedro Nunes; Editing by Pravin Char and Paul Simao)

By Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS – The European Commission called on EU governments on Monday to end national programmes to sell citizenship to investors, also known as golden passports schemes, and urged them to suspend the sale of visas to Russians and Belarusians.

The move follows a new push from the European Parliament to shrink and regulate the multi-billion-euro citizenship and visa industry which the EU has long considered a security risk.

It comes amid concerns that people hit by European Union sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be holders of EU golden visas or passports.

“Some Russian or Belarusian nationals who are subject to sanctions or are significantly supporting the war in Ukraine might have acquired EU citizenship or privileged access to the EU, including to travel freely in the Schengen area, under these schemes,” the European Commission said on Monday.

Since the start of the Russian aggression, which Moscow calls a special operation, the EU has blacklisted nearly 700 top politicians, businessmen and military staff accused of supporting the Kremlin.

The Commission urged an immediate end to existing national programmes for the sale of passports. Currently only Malta, Cyprus and Bulgaria have such schemes and they have all committed to ending them. Bulgaria’s parliament has recently voted to end its programme.

Brussels also said governments should check whether sanctioned people were holding a golden passport or visa they had issued.

The European Commission said it did not know whether sanctioned people were among the beneficiaries of the programme. A spokesman declined to clarify whether it had asked EU states to provide lists of people who had bought visas or passports.

Countries should determine whether to annul those passports and should immediately withdraw residence permits, the Commission said.

Several EU countries run golden visa schemes and have had golden passports programmes.

The Commission refrained from calling for the end of golden visa programmes, but urged strict checks and asked EU governments to suspend the granting of residence permits to Russians and Belarusians. (This version of the story corrects to Bulgaria’s parliament instead of Cyprus’ parliament in paragraph 6)

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Edmund Blair, Philippa Fletcher and Grant McCool)