‘Massive’ Russian strikes on Ukraine hit negotiation table as well as people, Kyiv says – Europe live
Here are some dramatic photos from Russia’s drone and missile strike in Kyiv last night:
Russia launches ‘brutal’ attack on Ukraine as peace talks continue
Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack targeting Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, early on Saturday, as US, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in the United Arab Emirates for the second day of tripartite peace talks. “Peace efforts? Trilateral meeting in the UAE? Diplomacy? For Ukrainians, this was another night of Russian terror,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, said after the latest Russian assault on critical infrastructure. “Cynically, Putin ordered a brutal massive missile strike against Ukraine right while delegations are meeting in Abu Dhabi to advance the America-led peace process. His missiles hit not only our people, but also the negotiation table.” With Kyiv and other cities in the midst of widespread outages of heat, water and power after Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, officials in Kyiv said one person had been killed and at least 15 injured in strikes that continued until morning. Engineers in Kyiv are facing the huge task of reconnecting apartment buildings to heating, reporting that 6,000 of the city’s apartment blocks were without heat on Saturday morning, 4,000 more than previous days, including many of which recently had been reconnected. Initial estimates suggested that at least 1.2 million consumers were without power across the country, including 800,000 in Kyiv. The Ukrainian air force said Russia had used 396 drones and missiles in the attacks, as officials warned that up to 80% of Ukraine now faced emergency power cuts in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The Russian strikes, taking place in the middle of the first tripartite talks of the war, come in tandem with Russia continuing to insist it must control the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, underlining doubts that Moscow is serious about peace. Speaking in the aftermath of the strikes, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said agreements on air defence made with the US president, Donald Trump, in Davos this week must be “fully implemented”. Zelenskyy and Trump met at the World Economic Forum on Thursday and discussed air defence support for Ukraine, although afterwards neither leader specified what was agreed. The Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said: “Currently, one person is known to have died and four to have been wounded,” he wrote in a social media post, adding that three of the injured had been hospitalised. Fires broke out in several buildings hit by drone debris while heat and water services in parts of the capital were interrupted, he said. The strikes come amid a worsening mid-winter energy crisis focused on the capital, where many have been left without heat and power for a prolonged period. On Friday Klitschko said that about 1,940 residential buildings in the capital remained without heating after renewed attacks, adding “and this may not be the most difficult moment yet”. According to Klitschko’s office, 600,000 residents have left the city temporarily during the January power crisis that has left entire blocks across the city in darkness. Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, reported strikes in at least four districts. A medical facility was among the buildings damaged. Kyiv has already endured two mass overnight attacks this year that have knocked out power and heating to hundreds of residential buildings. Emergency workers were still engaged in restoring services to residents, with overnight temperatures dipping to –13C (9F). In Kharkiv, a frequent target 30km (18 miles) from the Russian border, the city’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said 25 drones had hit several districts over two and a half hours, with at least 14 people injured. Writing on Telegram, Terekhov said the drones had struck a dormitory for displaced people, a hospital and a maternity hospital. The latest attacks occurred after negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the US completed the first of two days of peace talks aimed at finding a resolution to the nearly four-year-old war. The first known direct contact between Ukrainian and Russian officials on the US-backed proposal began on Friday. Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Rustem Umerov, said the discussions focused “on the parameters for ending Russia’s war and the further logic of the negotiation process”. An initial US draft drew heavy criticism in Kyiv and western Europe for sticking too closely to Moscow’s line, while later iterations prompted pushback from Russia for floating the idea of European peacekeepers. Both sides say the fate of territory in the eastern Donbas region is one of the main outstanding issues in the search for a settlement to a war that has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions and decimated parts of Ukraine.
‘Repatriate the gold’: German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults
Germany is facing calls to withdraw its billions of euros’ worth of gold from US vaults, spurred on by the shift in transatlantic relations and the unpredictability of Donald Trump. Germany holds the world’s second biggest national gold reserves after the US, of which approximately €164bn (£122bn) worth – 1,236 tonnes – is stored in New York. Emanuel Mönch, a leading economist and former head of research at Germany’s federal bank, the Bundesbank, called for the gold to be brought home, saying it was too “risky” for it to be kept in the US under the current administration. “Given the current geopolitical situation, it seems risky to store so much gold in the US,” he told the financial newspaper Handelsblatt. “In the interest of greater strategic independence from the US, the Bundesbank would therefore be well advised to consider repatriating the gold.” Stefan Kornelius, the spokesperson for Friedrich Merz’s coalition government, said recently that withdrawal of the gold reserves was not currently under consideration. But Mönch is only the latest in a string of economists and financial experts to argue that such a move would be in keeping with the greater strategic independence that Europe’s largest economy has been seeking from the US in recent months. Michael Jäger, the head of the European Taxpayers Association (TAE) as well as the Association of German Taxpayers, has also said Berlin should make its move, arguing that the US’s stated desire to seize Greenland should concentrate minds. “Trump is unpredictable and he does everything to generate revenue. That’s why our gold is no longer safe in the Fed’s vaults,” Jäger told the Rheinische Post. “What happens if the Greenland provocation continues? … The risk is increasing that the German Bundesbank will no longer be able to access its gold. Therefore, it should repatriate its reserves.” Jäger said he had written last year to the Bundesbank and the finance ministry, urging them to “bring our gold home”. Until recently the gold issue has been the preserve mainly of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has repeatedly urged the return of the gold for patriotic reasons. But it has increasingly crept into the mainstream discourse. Katharina Beck, the finance spokesperson for the opposition Greens in the Bundestag, has also spoken out in favour of relocating the gold bars, calling them an “important anchor of stability and trust”, which “must not become pawns in geopolitical disputes”. However, Clemens Fuest, the president of the Institute for Economic Research (Ifo) and one of the country’s most prominent economists, warned against such a move, saying it could lead to unintended consequences and would “only pour oil on the fire of the current situation”, he told the Rheinische Post. Germany’s total gold reserves are worth almost €450bn. Just over half are held at the Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main, 37% in the vaults of the US Federal Reserve in New York and 12% at the Bank of England in London, the global centre of gold trading. The Bundesbank says it regularly undertakes an audit of the supplies of gold it holds in storage. Speaking last October at the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) autumn meetings in Washington DC, the Bundesbank president, Joachim Nagel, assured attenders there was “no cause for concern” over the German gold held at the US Federal Reserve. Frauke Heiligenstadt, the parliamentary group spokesperson on financial policy for the Social Democrats, junior partners in the government, said that while she understood concerns about the gold reserves, there was no need for panic. “Germany’s gold reserves are well diversified,” she said. Because half of them are located in Frankfurt, “our ability to act is guaranteed”. Having gold in New York made sense, she added, because “Germany, Europe and the US are closely linked in terms of financial policy”. But, amid Trump’s hardening rhetoric towards his western partners, an increasing number of Merz’s Christian Democrats have been speaking out in favour of relocation. “Due to the Trump administration, the US is no longer a reliable partner,” Ulrike Neyer, a professor of economics at the University of Düsseldorf, told the Rheinische Post.
Pentagon to reduce its role in deterrence of North Korea
The Pentagon foresees a “more limited” role in deterring North Korea, with South Korea taking primary responsibility for the task, a Pentagon policy document released on Friday said, in a move likely to raise concern in Seoul. South Korea hosts about 28,500 US troops in combined defence against North Korea’s military threat and Seoul has raised its defence budget by 7.5% for this year. “South Korea is capable of taking primary responsibility for deterring North Korea with critical but more limited US support,” said the National Defense Strategy, a document that guides the Pentagon’s policies. “This shift in the balance of responsibility is consistent with America’s interest in updating US force posture on the Korean Peninsula,” the document added. In recent years, some US officials have signalled a desire to make US forces in South Korea more flexible to operate outside the Korean peninsula in response to a broader range of threats, such as defending Taiwan and checking China’s growing military reach. South Korea has resisted the idea of shifting the role of US troops, but has worked to grow its defence capabilities in the past 20 years, to take on a wartime command of the combined US-South Korean forces. South Korea has 450,000 troops. The shift is part of what Washington has called “alliance modernisation” under the Trump administration. South Korean president Lee Jae Myung has himself pushed for greater defence autonomy, criticising in September what he called “the submissive mindset that self-reliant defence is impossible without foreign troops”. In a statement on Saturday, South Korea’s defence ministry said US Forces in Korea remained central to the alliance and would continue to deter North Korean aggression. The Pentagon document makes no mention of denuclearising the Korean peninsula, the second major strategy paper to omit the language. The Biden administration in 2022 explicitly stated “complete and verifiable denuclearisation” as a goal, suggesting Washington may be shifting towards managing North Korea’s nuclear arsenal rather than seeking its elimination. The wide-ranging document, which each new administration publishes, said the Pentagon’s priority was defending the homeland. In the Indo-Pacific region, the document said, the Pentagon was focused on ensuring China could not dominate the US or its allies. “This does not require regime change or some other existential struggle. Rather, a decent peace, on terms favourable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under, is possible,” the document said, without mentioning Taiwan by name in the roughly 25-page document. China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has not ruled out the use of force to take control of the island. Taiwan rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims and says only the people of Taiwan can decide their future. With Reuters
‘You feel obligated’: African workers on the pain – and pride – of the ‘black tax’
From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month. Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the “black tax”, whereby one person’s salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family. For those sending money, the payments are both a burden and badge of pride. In Nigeria’s economic engine, Lagos, salaried workers surveyed last year said that an average of 20% of their monthly wages went to supporting relatives. In South Africa, where unemployment is above 42%, one wage supports almost four people, according to Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group, a research and campaign organisation. Research in Kenya found that the pressure to give money to family members made entrepreneurs limit the growth of their businesses. Remittances from Africans outside the continent have also been sustaining homes and dreams, paying for everything from rent to healthcare and school fees. They totalled $100bn (£74bn) in 2022, more than aid or foreign investment, according to the African Development Bank. Many well-educated young professionals aim for high-paying careers so they can also build wealth for the next generations, who they hope will avoid the struggles they went through when growing up. The Guardian spoke to people on the continent and in the diaspora about the privileges and pressures of supporting family members while also hoping to provide future generations with financial stability. Kenya Anthony Kimere, a Kenyan, relocated to Europe 36 years ago, studying then working in Italy before moving to Germany, Denmark and now the UK, where he drives Transport for London buses. Over that time, he’s supported his extended family back home in various ways, including sending upkeep to his grandparents, paying school fees for his cousin, and contributing to the payment of medical bills for many other relatives. While he mostly gets direct requests for support, he had a “subconscious feeling” to help out of obligation or a sense of responsibility because, having grown up in Kenya, he went through some of the challenges his kin are experiencing and therefore understood and related with the difficulties, he said. “You feel obligated to give back because you know the situation,” said the 55-year-old, who grew up in the town of Timau, in central Kenya. “You know your background, you know the people you have left behind, so you are quite aware of the challenges they go through.” He added: “I understand we people don’t have the same luck.” Kimere, who has a large extended family, acknowledged that sometimes the assistance took a toll on his personal finances. “The more people there are, the more frequent problems might be,” he said. Zimbabwe Fungai Mangwanya experienced hyperinflation and economic collapse while growing up in Zimbabwe. Seeing his grandmother struggle to make ends meet as she raised him was a huge motivation to pick a high-earning career. The data analyst, who is 35, moved to the UK in 2022 with his wife so they could support those who had raised them and build wealth for future generations. “As you’re getting into adolescence, you begin to see what’s going on with the economy … and you see how tough some areas are. So you begin to try and try and try and put yourself in that narrow band of people that have better opportunities,” he said. “My grandmother worked over 40 years in education, but then because of the volatility of our economy everything that she worked for kind of came crashing down. She was getting a pension that was hardly enough to pay her water bill, but at the same time, she still needed to survive.” While Mangwanya’s grandmother and his wife’s uncle – who raised her – died last year, he still supports his aunt, his brother and a cousin who is in university. He and his wife also want to build wealth for the children they hope to have. “For me, it’s just to be able to say that my child can go to whatever school they want across the world, or they can venture into whatever career, and they can still make their mistakes and restart without the worry of: where is my next meal going to come from?” South Africa Mpho Hlefana reached her goal of running a marketing department before she turned 40, several years before her target. But she still worries about losing everything. “I think about it all the time, so I feel like I need to overcompensate as much as possible earlier on, [which] decreases the potential risk,” said Hlefana, who is 37. Hlefana grew up initially in Soshanguve, formerly a black-only township north of Pretoria. Her father worked in HR and her mother was a teacher, and both instilled in her the value of education, discipline and hard work. The family then moved to the more affluent Pretoria suburb of Queenswood, to be closer to good schools. Hlefana loved dancing, but decided to study marketing at the University of Pretoria: “I didn’t come from a lot of money. I watched my parents cobble together money to get us into really good schools so we could get a great educational background.” While the end of white minority apartheid rule in 1994 opened up many previously inaccessible education and employment opportunities for black South Africans, South Africa remains deeply unequal along racial lines. In 2023, the average white household income was almost five times as high as the average black household, according to official data. After university, Hlefana moved to Johannesburg: “Johannesburg has always been painted as the city of lights and the city of opportunity … If you wanted to make the most money in South Africa you had to move to Johannesburg.” Hlefana, who is going through a separation from the father of her children, said she wanted to keep building wealth so she could provide her daughters, who are four and six, with their first homes and cars: “They should essentially, similar to what my parents said to me, do better than I have.” West Africa Some European countries already tax remittances, and this month a 1% remittance tax came into force in the US. For Eguono Lucia Edafioka, a Nigerian doctoral student in history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, remittances will go on regardless. “The way I see it, for most people who send money home, the money is usually for needs, not wants or luxuries,” she said. “When the money you send is for food and medicine, and just things to ensure the survival of family members, especially aged parents, you don’t really have a choice.” Experts warn that a small tax on outbound transfers from diaspora hubs such as the US could disproportionately affect lower-income migrants, who already face high transaction fees. Speaking before the new US tax came into force, Abednego Kwame, a 32-year-old Ghanaian management consultant living in Linden, New Jersey, said he was already bracing for what was coming. Since relocating from Accra a few years ago, he has been a primary source of support to his parents and younger sister. There have also been intermittent requests from a few other relatives and some friends dealing with soaring costs of living back home. “I budget, and when somebody asks me for money and it’s within my budget, I just send it,” he said. Like Edafioka, he doesn’t expect the new tax to put a strain on relationships with relatives back home. “My dad’s content with whatever I send,” he says. “If I send him $90 instead of $100, he’s not going to complain.”
Ukraine war briefing: energy crisis worsens amid more Russia airstrikes
Russia sent a delegation led by GRU military intelligence chief, Adm Igor Kostyukov, to day one of the peace talks between Ukraine, Russia and the US, in Abu Dhabi on Friday, indicating a focus on military rather than political negotiations. It has also repeated its demand that Ukraine leave Donbas before the talks start. The talks will resume on Saturday. The talks are the highest-level known summit between the three countries since the beginning of the war, and come as Ukraine faces a harsh winter with much of its civilian energy infrastructure damaged by Russia. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the three sides were meeting at “negotiator level” – in a format for the first time “in a long time”. The talks come after a seventh meeting between Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where the main topics of discussion were Russia’s demands for territory and Ukraine’s security guarantees. Witkoff was accompanied in Moscow by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Josh Gruenbaum, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. Russian strikes killed one and injured at least 15 people in Kyiv and the north-eastern city of Kharkiv overnight . Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said one person was killed in the capital and four injured, including three being treated in hospital. Klitschko said the strikes had triggered fires in districts on either side of the Dnipro River, which bisects the capital. He said heating and water supplies had been disrupted in parts of the city east of the river. Ukraine’s air force said both drones and missiles had been deployed in the assault on the capital. Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, reported strikes in at least four districts. A medical facility was among the buildings damaged. The mayor of Kharkiv reported an attack by Iranian-made Shahed drones that wounded more than 11 people and damaged several residential buildings in two districts of the city near the Russian border. Ukraine’s energy situation “significantly” worsened on Friday after recent Russian air attacks, triggering emergency power outages in most regions, Kyiv’s grid operator said. Moscow has increased airstrikes in recent weeks, further damaging battered infrastructure and leaving large numbers of residents without power and heating during a subzero cold snap. CEO of Ukraine’s top private energy firm, Maxim Timchenko, said the situation was “close to a humanitarian catastrophe” and that any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine must include a halt to attacks on energy infrastructure. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni said on Friday she hoped Donald Trump would end the conflict in Ukraine so she could nominate him for the Nobel peace prize. “I trust that if he makes a difference … in achieving a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, for Ukraine too … finally, we too could nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel peace prize,” she told a press conference. Italy has been invited to join Trump’s “board of peace” however, Italy’s constitutional rules do not allow the country to join an organisation led by a single foreign leader, according to media reports. Russia has begun using a new model of high-speed drone against Ukraine amid claims by Kyiv’s military intelligence directorate that key parts are sourced from western and Chinese companies. Wreckage recovered from a so-called Geran-5 long-range attack drone that was fired at Ukraine in early January points to a series of new capabilities that experts believe could pose a serious threat to Ukraine’s already struggling air defence if deployed widely. The increasing speed of Russian attack drones has been cited by members of Ukraine’s small-fire mobile air defence teams as an increasing challenge as the window of time to shoot them down gets smaller. Russia “deliberately” wants to deprive Ukrainians of energy to break their spirit, but “will fail”, according to EU commissioner for preparedness and crisis management Hadja Lahbib. The European Commission is deploying 447 emergency generators from EU reserves to Ukraine. “The EU will not let Russia freeze Ukraine into submission and will continue helping Ukrainians get through this winter,” said Lahbib.
A distraction, a threat: how Ukrainians have viewed the Greenland crisis
In the Benedikt cafe in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, one wall is covered by a giant map with countries and territories cut out of lacquered wooden pieces, with Greenland at its apex. The waiter has not been following news of the Greenland crisis and Donald Trump’s desire to annex the Danish territory. But the echoes of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin’s imperial land grab of the waiter’s own country are clear to him. “They’re crazy. The pair of them.” For those paying more attention in Ukraine, amid Russian airstrikes, the freezing cold and power cuts, the correspondences are not only clear, but often alarming – even if for now Trump has switched from sabre rattling to trying to rationalise a vague and incoherent deal he thinks he struck for the territory with Nato. “There are three basic problems,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on foreign policy and inter-parliamentary relations and an expert on international law. “Firstly, it is a distraction from the situation we are in now. And any distraction among our European partners weakens the coalition supporting us. It weakens Nato, and it weakens transatlantic solidarity.” Then there is the question of how Trump’s demands and actions undermine the post-second world war international rules-based order. “As an international lawyer, one of the key principles is that territorial integrity is sacrosanct. We support the territorial integrity of Denmark. And what I am afraid of is [that the Greenland issue plays into] Putin’s idea of dividing the world into spheres of influence.” Leo Litra of the New Europe Center, wrote for Ukrainska Pravda this week: “US actions regarding Greenland effectively legitimise aggressive territorial claims by stronger states against their neighbours (and not only their neighbours). “This is precisely the logic underpinning Russia’s aggression. Such policies have met with unequivocal condemnation until now. “Developments surrounding Greenland pose a direct threat to Ukraine’s defence in its war against Russia and force a fundamental reassessment of Europe’s entire security architecture, as well as its relationship with its principal ally, the United States – a role Washington has long played.” It is also little secret to Ukrainians how the Greenland crisis has been playing in Russia and what the logic of the Kremlin’s framing means for them. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday: “Regardless of whether it’s good or bad and whether it complies with international law or not, there are international experts who believe that if Trump takes control of Greenland he will go down in history, and not only the US history but world history.” “Without discussing whether it’s good or bad, it’s hard not to agree with these experts,” Peskov added. On Tuesday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, echoed, in reference to Greenland, some of the arguments Moscow has used to justify its illegal invasion of Ukraine. “In principle, Greenland isn’t a natural part of Denmark,” he said. Russian-controlled bot networks have been used to amplify Kremlin disinformation on Ukraine through the prism of Greenland, including a fake video of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the false claim he backed sending Ukrainian troops to defend the Arctic territory. For ordinary Ukrainians the crisis that has swirled around Greenland underlines another issue of concern, even amid continuing high-profile diplomacy to end the war: a sense of European exhaustion with the conflict and a dangerous waning of attention. For Zelenskyy, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, the Greenland crisis was emblematic of a dithering and divided Europe buffeted by more powerful forces. “Just last year, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words ‘Europe needs to know how to defend itself,’” Zelenskyy said. “A year has passed, and nothing has changed.” He added: “Europe remains in Greenland mode: maybe someone somewhere will do something.” Others, however, see the refocusing of attention as evidence of exhaustion with the war in Ukraine, four years after Russia’s invasion. “As a Ukrainian who has been living in a state of war for four years now, I feel not so much Europe’s indifference as its war fatigue,” said Oleksii Striapko, an IT specialist in Kharkiv. “When new crises arise, such as those in the Middle East, tensions in the Arctic, Donald Trump’s statements about Nato, Greenland or the ‘quick end to the war’, the media and politicians naturally switch their focus. The information space cannot withstand constant concentration on one conflict for years. “And Trump’s statements undermine the sense of stability. Europe is increasingly thinking not only about Ukraine, but also about its own security without the guaranteed support of the US. The world has entered a phase of parallel conflicts. Ukraine is no longer the ‘only big war’ even if it remains so in terms of scale and consequences.” Some are more sanguine, seeing Trump’s comments and ambitions in terms of a wider rhetorical critique of Europe, also being pushed aggressively by the US vice-president, JD Vance. “In the context of global events, I believe Europe can consolidate around the problem on the continent, namely Russia’s war against Ukraine,” said Bohdan Honcharenko, an entrepreneur in Kyiv. “The challenges with Greenland are not something to be afraid of, because military intervention is impossible without the approval of the US Congress, so these are just Trump’s attacks on Europe.” He repeated a thought also offered by Merezhko: that the crisis may contain a “silver lining” in persuading Europeans that they need to take responsibility for the continent’s security, including over the issue of Ukraine and the Russian threat to Europe. “We’re strong in technology, drone security, modern combat tactics and other military aspects. Therefore, the consolidation of Europe around Ukraine will strengthen, and accordingly, our support will grow. “So panic is unnecessary.”
New Zealand landslide: rescue efforts called off for six people buried in disaster
Efforts to rescue six people buried by a landslide at a New Zealand holiday park ended on Saturday, with police shifting into a recovery operation. Police Supt Tim Anderson said human remains had been uncovered on Friday night beneath the mountains of dirt and debris that crashed into a campsite in Mount Maunganui on Thursday, adding that it could take several days to locate all of the victims due to the unstable ground. Anderson said it was “heartbreaking” that six people remained unaccounted for, including a 15-year-old, after camper vans, caravans and a shower block were buried in a mudslide brought on by heavy rain. He said it was now “highly unlikely” that more than six people had been caught under the landslide. “There’s still a lot of mud and other aspects [around the site] so my primary consideration today is actually the safety of the staff working on it,” he said on Saturday. “There are really strict parameters around those that are working on site right now.” The remains will be transported to a mortuary in Hamilton. Chief coroner Anna Tutton warned that the identification process could be “painful” and “lengthy”. For the past two days, the holiday town in the northern part of the country has staged a series of vigils, holding out hope that the search and rescue personnel would be successful. Prime minister Christopher Luxon said on Saturday “every New Zealander has been hoping for a miracle” and that the switch to a recovery operation was “the news we have all been dreading”. “Police have confirmed fatalities at the campground and the reality that no one would have been able to survive, therefore the rescue operation taking place there is now moving to a recovery. “To the families who have lost loved ones – every New Zealander is grieving with you.” More poor weather is forecast for the area on Saturday with thunderstorms and hail possible, potentially hampering the recovery operation at the campsite. New Zealand authorities are facing questions over why people were not evacuated after reports of a landslip at the campsite and neighbouring areas earlier on Thursday. Two people died in a separate landslide on Thursday in the neighbouring harbourside city of Tauranga. One of the people killed was a Chinese national, officials said.