Sydney restaurateur Judith Lewis couldn’t save the mezuzah, a framed parchment inked with Hebrew prayers, that was hanging in her family’s café when arsonists set it alight in the early hours one Sunday in late October.

The symbol of Jewish faith was badly damaged in the blaze that destroyed Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, which had served Sydneysiders kosher food for more than 50 years at a location just 20 minutes walk from Bondi Beach.

Lewis has bought new mezuzahs, but can’t bring herself to hang them in the café’s new premises in the nearby suburb of Darlinghurst. She’s not sure why. “I’ve got them sitting on my desk and I’m a little bit hesitant to put them up … something’s holding me back at the moment,” she said.

Many among Australia’s 117,000-strong Jewish population are anxious after a spate of antisemitic attacks in its two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne – including arson attacks on synagogues, and swastikas scrawled on buildings and cars.

Around a dozen people have been arrested but Jewish leaders are demanding more action from government officials, who say they don’t want to see anti-Israel sentiment spill into violence on Australian streets after 15 months of war in Gaza.

Authorities are investigating 15 “serious allegations” among more than 166 reports of antisemitic attacks received since mid-December, when Special Operation Avalite was formed to address rising antisemitism, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw said in a statement Tuesday.

Officers are looking beyond suspects accused of carrying out the crimes, to “overseas actors” who may have paid for their services, he added, a line of inquiry repeated in subsequent days.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters Wednesday: “It’s unclear who or where the payments are coming from.”

Albanese wouldn’t be drawn further on the police investigation but said Five Eyes – Australia’s security alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand – was “playing a role.”

“This isn’t something that began yesterday,” he said. “These things are ongoing, which is why people have been rounded up, arrested, charged, and are currently in jail without bail.”

Text messages suggest paid jobs

Ten people have been charged under Strike Force Pearl, a police task force formed in the state of New South Wales in December to investigate antisemitic hate crimes in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

“We don’t know who the principals are,” Webb said. “(We) can’t rule out that they’re only domestic, or that they might be international.”

Text messages exchanged between two men who pleaded guilty to one of the Sydney arson attacks point to the involvement of a third person pulling the strings.

Local media, citing court documents, reported that a mobile phone seized from one of the men contained a reference to a third person who went by the handle “jamesbond” on the encrypted app Signal.

“Jamesbond” seemed to berate the other two over an arson attack on Curly Lewis Brewing, a popular bar near Bondi Beach that was set alight on October 17.

“…Its not even 2 per cent burned f*** me dead,” said the message, according to local media, citing the court documents. One of the suspects later wrote to the other: “I’m starting to think he sent us to the wrong place lol,” local media reported.

One of the men told police he was acting under duress because he owed drug money and had received death threats, according to local media, citing court documents.

Lewis from Lewis’ Continental Kitchen believes the perpetrators may have intended to target her premises, located on Curlewis Street, but got the bar’s name confused with the street. Her place was allegedly set on fire just three days later by two other suspects.

Lewis believes the attacks were orchestrated by an outside player. “I don’t know who’s directing these fires and this graffiti and all this damage, because it’s definitely not the people who are doing it,” she said. “I’m really concerned about the higher-up level.”

Racist hate crimes

Security has been upgraded at Jewish sites in Sydney including synagogues, schools and places of business, and authorities are adopting increasingly tough language against those accused of antisemitic crimes.

“It is completely disgusting, and these bastards will be round up by New South Wales Police,” said NSW Premier Chris Minns on Tuesday, hours after a childcare center near a synagogue was torched.

Some Jewish groups have accused the government of being slow to respond, a claim advanced by the leading opposition party, which has given the attacks – and the response to them – an extra political dimension just months before a federal election.

Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton told Sky News Wednesday the rise in antisemitic attacks “was entirely predictable because of what we saw on the steps of the Opera House.”

He was referring to the events of October 9, 2023 – two days after the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel that started the Gaza war – when hundreds of demonstrators waved Palestinian flags to protest a decision to light up the Sydney Opera House in the colors of the Israeli flag.

Dutton has repeatedly criticized Albanese for what he says was a “weak” response to the protest, and continues to push the government to escalate the issue. Albanese, who’s due to call an election in the coming weeks, denies he’s been slow to act.

“What we need to do is to bring the country together, not look for difference, not look for division, not look for political advantage,” he said.

A similar message was sent Wednesday in a joint statement by multi-faith and human rights groups that said Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians had also been targeted by hate crimes.

“Political leaders should condemn recent hate crimes and acts of discrimination. However, they should not seek to politicize racist attacks for political gain,” the statement said.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) condemned the attacks in a statement Thursday, saying they were part of a wave of “racism-driven hate crimes” across the country. APAN said many Palestinians and their supporters did not report harassment and abuse against them for “fear of retribution and inaction.”

Michelle Berkon is a member of Jews Against the Occupation ’48, a minority group of Jewish Australians who condemn the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and actively support the Palestinian cause.

She said it was “very malicious” to suggest, as some have, that Palestinians or their supporters were behind the antisemitic attacks. “Who stands to benefit from this? It’s certainly not the Palestinians, is it?” she said.

‘Outrageous’ arson sentence

Authorities insist that the theory of “overseas actors” paying local criminals is just one line of inquiry. They’re also looking into whether any young people have been radicalized online or encouraged to commit antisemitic acts.

The 10 people arrested so far by NSW Police are aged between 19 and 40. One of the two men who exchanged text messages over the Curly Lewis Brewing fire, a 31-year-old man, was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in prison, with a non-parole period of 10 months.

Lewis, whose café was burned to the ground, said the sentence was too lenient, calling it “outrageous.” “He should be given the full sentence of 10 years,” she said. Police said they would appeal the sentence.

On the heels of a national cabinet meeting, involving all state and territory ministers, police commissioners across Australia met and issued a joint statement, saying a strong policing response is needed now more than ever to keep the community safe.

Max Kaiser, executive officer of the Jewish Council Australia, says policing alone won’t address the broader issue of racism in Australia – that requires education and a community approach that brings together different faiths.

“It’s important that there obviously is some form of targeted police response to these particular incidents,” he said. “But unfortunately, there’s a strong intersection between a law-and-order, tough-on-crime response and politics in Australia.”

“Everyone wants the perpetrators to be caught, and the attacks brought to an end, if that’s possible, but the underlying issues are still there, and they can’t be solved through more arrests.”

Lewis wants the perpetrators to pay for what they did, with a hefty sentence behind bars. “They destroyed our thriving business of 55 years,” she said, of the café started by her parents, one of the first in Sydney to offer kosher food.

But she’s been heartened by the response of suppliers and community members who’ve rallied around the café, helping it to reopen, albeit with fewer staff and a steep drop in trade, just three weeks later.

“The one thing that really, really stunned me was, right from the beginning, after the fire, people would come up and say, ‘Tell us what we can do. We can clean, we can do whatever you want,’” Lewis said.

“Everyone wanted to help, and it was fantastic.”

Belarusians are voting in a closely managed presidential election that is all but certain to extend the rule of Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994 and Europe’s longest-serving leader.

The last time Belarus held a presidential election in 2020, Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory with more than 80% of the vote. The opposition cried foul, claiming that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was the rightful winner. Hundreds of thousands protested in the capital, Minsk, sparking the harshest crackdown in the country’s post-Soviet history.

This year, with voting underway, Tsikhanouskaya is not asking Belarusians to take to the streets again. The costs are too high, she says.

She should know. Since the brutal regime response in 2020, Tsikhanouskaya has lived in exile with her two children. Human rights activists say Belarus is holding more than 1,200 political prisoners, including Tsikhanouskaya’s husband, Sergei, whom she has been unable to contact for nearly two years.

Tsikhanouskaya only ran in 2020 after her husband was jailed and prevented from running. Perhaps underestimating the political novice, Lukashenko allowed Tsikhanouskaya to run against him – an oversight that led to the greatest threat he faced in his decades-long rule.

Now, Lukashenko is facing only token challengers, one of whom has said he is running “not instead of, but alongside the president.” For the first time, no independent observers will monitor the vote and polling stations abroad will not be open, depriving some 3.5 million citizens outside the country of their vote.

While not calling for large-scale demonstrations, Tsikhanouskaya has urged Belarusians to voice their dissent at the ballot box.

“We’re asking those forced to take part in this sham election to vote against all candidates,” she wrote on Telegram.

Tsikhanouskaya’s opposition movement has said the “elections” are merely “a meticulously orchestrated charade designed to perpetuate the illegitimate dictator’s grip on power.” The European Parliament and US State Department have also labelled the election a “sham.”

“Repression is born of weakness, not strength. The unprecedented measures to stifle any opposition make it clear that the Lukashenko regime fears its own people,” the State Department said last week.

After casting his ballot Sunday, Lukashenko told journalists he did not care whether the West recognizes Belarus’ election or not.

Lukashenko, a 70-year-old former Soviet collective farm boss, survived the scare in 2020 in part thanks to his longtime ally Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose support has become existential for the Belarusian regime.

After state media employees resigned in solidarity with the opposition, Putin sent Kremlin propagandists to replace them. Since then, Minsk’s dependence on Moscow has only deepened.

But Moscow has been exacting a price for its support. Russia used Belarus as a launch pad for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Lukashenko has since allowed Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil. In December, Lukashenko said he was also preparing to receive Russia’s new ballistic missile, the “Oreshnik,” first used in a strike on Ukraine late last year.

Although Lukashenko is “more dependent on Russia and on Putin personally than ever before,” there may be limits to this alliance, said Gould-Davies, now a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank.

“Belarus has provided a wide range of valuable services to Russia, but the thing of course that it hasn’t done is send its own forces (to Ukraine),” he said, suggesting he may fear a backlash among his own troops or wider population if he did so.

“Ordinary Belarusians, emphatically, do not see this as their war, and they could not be persuaded that it is, no matter how much propaganda the Belarusian state were to pump out to them,” he said.

Since 2020, Lukashenko’s regime has stepped up its efforts to stamp out dissent. By the end of December 2024, Belarus was holding 1,265 political prisoners, according to Viasna, a human rights group.

Among them is Ales Bialiatski, the founder of Viasna who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, alongside human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine, for his documentation of rights abuses. The oldest prisoner is Mikhail Liapeika, 76, who was sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment after insulting Lukashenko.

Pavel Sapelka, a lawyer with Viasna, has said many detainees are held in conditions and subjected to treatment that amounts to “torture.”

Lukashenko will be 74 if he completes his seventh term in office. But he has given no indication that he intends to step down. “As long as I have health, I will stay with you,” he said during a visit to a church outside Minsk earlier this month.

Last week, Lukashenko mocked opposition leaders he said were waiting for him to “drop dead.”

“They say: ‘He is about to die, his voice is not the same, he has trouble speaking.’ Don’t hold your breath,” Lukashenko said.

Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s economy has surpassed expectations. Its figures are, if not rosy, not ruinous either. Last year, the war economy likely grew faster than the United States and all major European economies. Unemployment is at a record low. And if the ballooning defense budget has cramped other spending, that’s only temporary.

These statistics send a message to audiences at home and abroad, said Elina Ribakova, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. To the Russian public: “We’re still standing.” To Ukraine’s allies: “We can outlast you.”

Projecting an image of Russia’s economic strength has real-world consequences. Some in the West have questioned whether the sanctions imposed by Ukraine’s backers – and dismissed by President Vladimir Putin as mere “logistical hurdles” – work at all. If they don’t, why bother?

But other experts say this image of resilience is a mirage – one carefully curated by the Kremlin to make its adversaries think Russia’s economy is in good shape. As the war nears its third anniversary, this mask is starting to slip.

To explain Russia’s apparent economic might, analysts have turned to metaphor. Some have used the phrase “on steroids,” to describe growth that is rapid, but unnatural and unsustainable.

Russia may soon feel the pain after the party. Increasingly disgruntled Russian officials have warned that Russia’s economy is hitting the limits of what it can produce, driving up prices. Inflation accelerated last year despite the central bank hiking interest rates to 21% in October, a two-decade high.

While signing a flurry of executive orders on his first day back in the White House, US President Donald Trump said Russia’s economy was a sign that the country was in “big trouble,” and that Putin was “destroying Russia by not making a deal” on Ukraine.

Evidence of that trouble includes the impact of new sanctions, persistent labor shortages and signs of a credit bubble. Despite recent battlefield gains, analysts say Russia’s worsening economic problems could bring Putin to the negotiating table sooner than expected and may make sanctions relief a more powerful bargaining chip for the West.

Shadow budget

Throughout the war, the Kremlin has made extensive use of a strategy known as “reflexive control,” aimed at shaping an adversary’s perceptions in a way that leads the adversary – in this case, Ukraine’s Western backers – to choose actions that benefit Russia.

Weapons are a case in point. Every time the West has considered sending new technology to Ukraine – first, modern tanks, then fighter jets, then long-range weapons – the Kremlin has warned of dire consequences, potentially involving a nuclear strike. This has slowed the supply of weapons to Kyiv, benefiting Moscow.

The economy is no different. The Kremlin wants to convince Ukraine’s allies, particularly the United States, of Russia’s economic strength. If Russia can fund its war for years, the US might support a ceasefire that favors the Kremlin’s goals. Controlling perceptions is paramount, observers say.

And so, it helps to boast of Russia’s economic might. At his marathon annual press conference last month, Putin said Russia’s economy was growing “in spite of everything,” outstripping Europe and the US.

Economic growth and low unemployment have become Putin’s “trump cards,” Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote recently.

But these headline numbers conceal concerning trends. Russia is hiding the true cost of its war by using a shadow “off-budget financing scheme,” according to a new report by Craig Kennedy, an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

While Russia’s “highly scrutinized” defense budget remains at sustainable levels, there has been a parallel and “largely overlooked” surge in corporate borrowing. These loans look private but really are disguised state spending, Kennedy wrote.

On February 25, 2022 – day 2 of the full-scale invasion – Russia enacted a law that empowers the state to force banks to lend to businesses providing goods and services for the war on terms set by the state, he noted.

Between the middle of that year and late 2024, Russia saw an “anomalous” 71% surge in private credit, by an amount equal to 19.4% of its gross domestic product, according to Kennedy. He estimates up to 60% of these loans (as much as $249 billion) have been made to war-related firms. “These are loans that the state has compelled banks to extend to largely uncreditworthy, war-related businesses on concessionary terms,” he wrote.

This means Russia is spending almost twice as much on the war as official figures indicate, Kennedy noted.

The funding scheme could lead to a far-reaching credit crisis, he warned, in large part by imposing heavy debt loads on war-related companies that are likely to default over time, which risks overwhelming banks with “a wave of toxic debt.”

Savers’ jitters

Kennedy’s analysis has provoked a range of responses. A Financial Times commentary said it showed Putin was sitting on a “ticking financial time bomb.”

Others are more temperate. Prokopenko and Alexander Kolyandr, a scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis, have also disputed some of Kennedy’s findings, writing this month that fears of a banking crisis are “overblown.”

Tymofiy Mylovanov, head of the Kyiv School of Economics and Ukraine’s former economy minister, said the findings were concerning, but not necessarily destructive.

One such trigger could be panic among ordinary Russians, who know how it feels to have their savings wiped out. If they believe their deposits are at risk, this could spark bank runs.

Since the fall, rumors have swirled that the central bank could freeze customers’ deposits, which have ballooned as savers have rushed to profit from high interest rates. The Bank of Russia has called the idea “absurd.” But this has done little to reassure Russians, Mylovanov said.

“The fact that they are talking about it is a sign of trouble,” he said. “They cannot not talk about it.”

Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s New People party, Alexei Nechayev, has proposed a new law to prevent the central bank from freezing customers’ deposits without the Duma’s consent.

While the central bank tries to inspire confidence, some are voicing doubts about its governor, Elvira Nabiullina. Although she was credited with saving the economy at the war’s outset, some of Russia’s elite have since turned on her. The head of the state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec said the central bank’s high key interest rate was hampering exports, while the chair of oil giant Gazprom Neft said expensive credit could impact companies providing services to the oil industry, raising “serious concerns.”

Even Putin, a longtime supporter of Nabiullina, made a muted complaint during his year-end press conference, saying the central bank could have used instruments other than interest rate hikes and acted “more efficiently and at an earlier stage.”

Headwinds

Even without a credit crisis, Russia’s economy faces serious headwinds in 2025.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that Russian GDP grew 3.8% in 2024, but forecasts just 1.4% growth this year.

Putin recently conceded that “the amount of products has not grown as much as consumption has” – a classic recipe for price rises. Inflation accelerated to 9.5% last year, from 7.4% in 2023. Some supermarkets locked butter in cabinets to prevent thefts.

Although wages are up, this reflects problems in the labor market. Putin boasts of Russia’s record-low 2.3% unemployment rate, but this sword is double-edged. Low unemployment means higher wages, as Russian companies – short of 1.6 million skilled workers – must pay more to attract labor.

Russia could offset this by encouraging immigration, but Central Asian migrants – long used to plug gaps in the workforce – have faced rising xenophobia after recent terror attacks in Russia stoked ethnic tensions.

Most importantly, Western sanctions are beginning to inflict serious pain. A package announced by the Biden administration in its final days targeted Moscow’s “shadow fleet” – aging oil tankers used to dodge earlier sanctions on Russia’s oil exports. Dozens of these ships have dropped anchor around the world, unable to dock and unload due to the new measures. China and India – whose oil and gas purchases from Russia have helped fund its war – are reportedly looking for other suppliers.

Kyiv’s refusal to renew a gas transit agreement that allowed Russian gas to flow through Ukraine will cost Gazprom up to $5 billion a year in sales, Reuters has reported. The energy giant posted a loss of almost $7 billion in 2023 – its first in nearly 25 years – and is considering axing more than 1,500 jobs. Less money for Gazprom means less for Russia’s war chest.

The growing economic strain is causing Russia’s social contract to creak, said Prokopenko, the Carnegie fellow.

With this support “dwindling” – as war spending eats into budgets for other services – Prokopenko warned there was now “a clear divergence between the expectations of the population and the Kremlin’s capacity to deliver.”

Moscow cannot keep financing the war and the regular economy at the same time as maintaining broader economic stability, she said. Although the Kremlin has so far fudged all three, something may soon have to give.

Three people were killed and 31 others injured by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese government said, as residents of villages near the border defied orders by Israel’s military not to return to their homes.

“One citizen was martyred in Houla, and nine others were injured and transferred to the Tebnine Governmental Hospital, where they are receiving treatment,” Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said in a statement on Sunday.

The statement said that eight people had also been injured in Kfar Kila and transferred to the Marjayoun Governmental Hospital for treatment.

Two people were killed in the towns of Blida and Aitaroun, according to the health ministry, after the Israeli military launched attacks on Lebanese citizens attempting to enter towns still occupied by Israeli forces.

Lebanon’s president Joseph Aoun said he was “monitoring this issue at the highest levels” in a statement.

“Lebanon’s sovereignty and the unity of its territory are not subject to compromise,” he said and promised residents of the south he would “ensure your rights and dignity.”

The deaths come as Israel’s military ordered residents of dozens of southern Lebanese villages not to return to their homes earlier in the morning as a deadline expired Sunday to withdraw forces from the area under a ceasefire agreement that ended months of conflict with Hezbollah.

“Urgent!! A new reminder to the residents of southern Lebanon: Until further notice you are prohibited from moving south to the line of villages and their surroundings,” Avichay Adraee, Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), wrote on X.

The post included a map of southern Lebanon with an area along the border with Israel shaded red and a list of more than 60 villages residents were prohibited from accessing.

“The Defense Forces do not intend to target you and therefore at this stage you are prohibited from returning to your homes from this line south until further notice. Anyone who moves south of this line puts themselves at risk,” Adraee said.

Israel’s government said Friday that the military would not withdraw from Lebanon by Sunday’s deadline, in violation of a ceasefire agreement.

Israel was expected to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon as part of the deal, but the Israeli government said some its forces would remain, blaming Lebanon for failing to uphold its end of the agreement.