Donald Trump’s threats to wipe out a civilisation and Israel’s alleged use of white phosphorus in Lebanon have once again shone a spotlight on the rules of war.

“Collective punishment on a population and the targeting of protected civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international law,” legal experts told ABC News of Trump’s threats, while his promises to take the country’s oil, “which could amount to pillaging” is also “barred under the law”.

In Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said it was able to verify that Israel was again using the “notorious weapon”, “reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war”, said The Guardian.

When asked whether his threats constituted a war crime, Donald Trump answered, “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon”.

So what constitutes a ‘war crime’?

War crimes are “violations of international humanitarian law” that, unlike genocide and crimes against humanity, “always take place in the context of an armed conflict, whether international or not”, said the United Nations.

These include cases of murder, torture, pillage, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and non-combatants such as humanitarian aid workers, as well as the deliberate targeting of religious and educational buildings, hospitals and, in some cases, vital infrastructure such as power stations and key transport links.

The use of weapons banned by international conventions, such as chemical weapons or cluster munitions, can also be considered a war crime.

What are the major conventions and treaties?

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols introduced in subsequent decades are international treaties that serve as the “most important rules limiting the barbarity of war”, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Ratified by all 196 UN member states, in times of war they protect non-combatants, such as civilians, medics, aid workers, and those who can no longer fight, including the wounded, sick or prisoners of war.

There are also additional conventions banning the use of biological weapons (1972), certain conventional weapons (1980), chemical weapons (1993), anti-personnel mines (1997), and cluster munitions (2008).

What happens if someone breaks the rules?

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established under the Rome Statute in 2002, “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression”.

“Champions of the court say it deters would-be war criminals, bolsters the rule of law, and offers justice to victims of atrocities,” said the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank. Yet it has, since inception, also “faced criticism from many parties” and has been fundamentally weakened by the refusal of several major powers to join.

As well as the US, Russia and China, non-signatories include India, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Recent arrest warrants for national leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have “generated mixed reactions from Washington and raised questions over the future of the court”, said the CFR.

As “no formal ICC jurisdiction applies” to countries that have not signed up to the ICC, the “more immediate legal framework” remains the Geneva conventions of 1949 onwards, said The Guardian.

The Conventions and their Protocols contain stringent rules to deal with those who commit what are known as “grave breaches”, who must be pursued and tried or extradited, whatever their nationality.

The key point here, said Professor Andrew Clapham in OpionioJuris, is that the rules for offences deemed war crimes under the Geneva code apply to “everyone irrespective of whether their state has ratified the ICC Statute, and they can be tried in multiple states around the world, irrespective of whether those states are parties to the ICC Statute”.

“The idea that anyone can avoid accountability for grave breaches by sticking to non-ICC states for one’s trips is fallacious when that person is alleged to have committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”

“Just a few weeks ago, Nato marked the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with fresh pledges of solidarity and assistance,” said The Daily Telegraph. Today, that war “risks becoming the forgotten conflict”.

Advanced US-made weapons that Kyiv's allies could have bought to help it deflect Russian attacks are being fired at cheap Iranian drones instead – depleting supplies that could take years to restock. European leaders are distracted by threats to their allies in the Gulf region, and the potential shocks to their economies.

Feeding the war machine

To cap Kyiv's dismay, Donald Trump has suspended sanctions on Russian oil, said the Daily Mail. The deal – apparently struck during an hour-long call with Vladimir Putin – should “curb rising prices” on US forecourts, but at what cost to Europe's security? It was recently reported that Moscow might be forced to slash its non-military spending by 10%, owing to the spiralling cost of its war in Ukraine and the impact of sanctions. Now it can feed its “bloody war machine” with billions in extra oil revenues instead.

The war presents “political opportunities” for Russia too, said Mark Galeotti in The Sunday Times. Trump's broadsides against Keir Starmer, and Madrid's fury at Berlin for not backing it in the face of his attacks, have great propaganda value. The Kremlin is also looking at this as a case study for just how united Europe is likely to be against future challenges, “especially as America pivots away”. Still, any glee in Moscow will have been tempered by Washington's decision to strike Iran while nuclear talks were ongoing. This caught Moscow off-guard, and dented its confidence in its ability to read the US president.

‘Extremely triggered’

Tehran is not just an ally of Moscow, said Cathy Young on The Bulwark. It has also been a role model for it – showing the possibility of surviving both Western sanctions and popular discontent. Now the Americans have killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Putin has again been exposed as unable, or unwilling, to help an ally in trouble – a humiliating outcome for a man who liked to pose as the “leader of global resistance to Western hegemony”.

Events in Iran may shake Putin in other ways, too: he is said to be “extremely triggered” by the assassinations of dictators elsewhere. And while Ukraine being pushed down the agenda would be a win for him, this war could also leave Trump too busy to force Kyiv into a bad peace deal with Russia. Similarly, if the war drags on, it might boost Putin, or cost the Republicans the midterms, and so empower Kyiv's allies in Washington. In the fog of war, future-gazing is a mug's game.

Even though it has long been known that Russia engages in censorship of its citizens, recent experiments in Moscow are raising fears that the Russian government is augmenting its information blockade. This new era of censorship, which involves blacking out internet communications other than approved websites, has raised concerns in Russia and among outside observers.

‘Severely limit what people can see’

Throughout March, people in Moscow have “found themselves without connectivity on their phones” due to internet outages created by the Kremlin, said NBC News. These blackouts have “disrupted the daily lives of millions of residents and hit businesses that rely on mobile internet,” though the Russian government has repeatedly said this is being done in the name of security due to threats from the war in Ukraine.

Certain “websites and apps, including government portals and banking services, may remain accessible through ‘whitelists,’” said Business Insider, as the Kremlin may allow “certain services to keep operating even while broader internet access is restricted.” Beyond government portals, some of the sites on these Russian whitelists may also include “state media outlets and Russian homegrown apps such as Max, a messaging platform controlled by the government,” said The Wall Street Journal.

This effort to control internet access is not new: Russia has been “honing and testing similar infrastructure for the past year,” said the Journal. Many officials believe these rolling blackouts will “likely be in place until the end of the war.” This comes as Russians are already “contending with rising inflation and economic strain more than four years into the war in Ukraine.”

‘Massive headache’

As the Kremlin continues to clamp down harder, many Russians, particularly those in the workforce, say they are having trouble going about their lives. The outages are a “massive headache,” Dmitry, a consultant in Moscow, said to The Guardian. “I’m having trouble ordering a taxi, sending work emails or even just messaging my family.” The blackouts are also “slamming businesses that rely on cellphone internet,” said The Associated Press.

Muscovites who run “cafes, restaurants and shops that rely on mobile internet have suffered massive losses as customers have been unable to pay for the services,” said the AP. Many of the city’s ATMs and parking meters that “rely on cellphone internet stopped working,” further complicating Moscow life. Businesses in the city “lost between 3 and 5 billion rubles [$38 million to $63 million] in five days of shutdowns.” However, businesses with “broadband access and residents with broadband at home have not been affected.”

Many are turning to more low-tech options, with Russians buying old-school technology like walkie-talkies and pagers. Sales of walkie-talkies “increased by 27%, sales of pagers for communication with clients and staff by 73%, and landline telephones by about a quarter,” said Russian news outlet RBC. Muscovites are also looking for less high-tech ways to navigate the area. “Sales of road maps increased by 170% in physical units, foldable maps by 70% and Moscow maps by 20%.”

Russia’s plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space could be “catastrophic”, a Canadian military leader has warned on Ukrinform.

Moscow’s reported ambitions “appear quite alarming”, said Brigadier General Christopher Horner, commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Frying electronics 

Satellite warfare has been a threat for some years and the latest “devastating” development is the “possibility of Russia detonating a nuclear weapon in space”, said the Daily Mail.

In 2024 the US believed the Kremlin was developing an “anti-satellite missile tipped with a nuclear warhead for a potential surprise attack in low orbit”. Simulated blast tests by nuclear experts at the Pentagon have suggested that such an attack would destroy thousands of Western satellites.

Satellite networks are “critical to everything from banks synchronising their transactions to navigation tasks that ranged from guiding planes and ships to ensuring a pizza delivery driver finds the right address”.

An anti-satellite nuke would “combine a physical attack that would ripple outwards, destroying more satellites”, with the nuclear component being “used to fry their electronics”, said The Associated Press.

It could “render low-Earth orbit unusable for satellites for as long as a year”, said Republican member of Congress Mike Turner, and the effects would be “devastating”. The US and its allies could be “vulnerable to economic upheaval” and “even a nuclear attack”. The scenario is “the Cuban Missile crisis in space”, said Turner.

Satellite killers

If Russia were to deploy such a “satellite-killing weapon”, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, The New York Times said in 2024. This kind of space weaponisation from Russia and China is “one of the primary reasons” the US Space Force was established, said AP.

Now countries are “scrambling to create their own rocket and space programmes to exploit commercial prospects and ensure they aren’t dependent on foreign satellites”, said Fortune.

The US Space Force was launched in 2019 to protect US interests in space and to defend its satellites from attacks by enemies. It’s “far smaller” than the US Army, Navy or Air Force, but it’s “growing”.

Meanwhile, Horner warned that Canada doesn’t have the “capability” to disable a potential Russian nuclear bomb in space. So “my only advice as a military officer is to put pressure” on Moscow so that they don’t follow through with the plan, because that would be an “incredibly terrible thing”.

“Vladimir Putin has not achieved his goals,” said a defiant Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a televised address marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The February 2022 invasion was meant to be a “short and successful military operation” that would “force Kyiv back into Moscow’s orbit” and “overturn the entire post-Cold War security architecture in Europe”, said the BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. “It didn’t go to plan”, leaving Russia with an ever-mounting cost.

What did the commentators say?

As the conflict enters its fifth year, Russian victory seems as far away as ever and it has little to show for its estimated 1.2 million casualties, according to Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. The average pace of Russia’s progress has sometimes been as little as 15 metres per day, “slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century”.

Russia’s economy is finally starting to teeter. It faces a huge shortfall in oil revenues and has been forced to sell gold reserves to cover its budget deficit.

The West has always believed that domestic discontent as a result of the ongoing sanctions would “persuade Putin to abandon the war”, said Peter Rutland and Elizaveta Gaufman on The Conversation. This, in turn, was “based on the assumption that the legitimacy of Putinism rests on a social contract” that offers Russians stability and income in exchange for loyalty.

But this approach “tends to downplay the role of ideology”, which has been successfully exploited by the Kremlin to spin the war as an existential threat and maintain support for the president, according to data from Statista.

This narrative has also been deployed externally, towards Russia’s opponents. The idea emanating from the Kremlin that Ukraine’s front line faces “imminent collapse” is “an effort to coerce the West and Ukraine into capitulating to Russian demands that Russia cannot secure itself militarily”, said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. This is a “false narrative”.

The West should “stop buying into Moscow’s bluff that Russia is invincible” and “use the Kremlin’s weaknesses and double down on its support for Ukraine to bring about real negotiations to end the war”, said Jana Kobzova and Leo Litra for the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The notion that ‘time is on the Russian side’ betrays a lack of strategic patience and, even more importantly, squandered opportunities to exploit Moscow’s growing structural vulnerabilities.”

What next?

“Standard economic theory suggests that deteriorating conditions should push the Kremlin towards negotiations on ending the war,” said The Economist. “A rational actor facing mounting costs seeks an exit.”

Yet there is little sign that Putin has any intention of yielding on his push for the “capitulation” of Ukraine, Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya told The I Paper. If no peace deal can be struck, the war could even “escalate further”, with the possible involvement of China a “growing factor”, as well as fears of a “new nuclear race”, said The i Paper.

Russia can “probably continue waging war for the foreseeable future”, said The Economist, but every additional year “raises systemic risk: of fiscal crisis, of institutional breakdown, of damage so severe that no post-war policy can repair it”.

So the question for Western allies is “what kind of Russia will emerge” when its appetite for war finally fades, “and whether anyone has a plan for what comes next”.

Donald Trump’s controversial Board of Peace meets for the first time today to discuss the reconstruction of Gaza.

But as members prepared for the Washington summit, a “bitter dispute” between Europe and the US over the future of Gaza has “broken out into the open”, said The Guardian. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, has said that the board is a “personal vehicle for the US president”.

What did the commentators say?

European leaders initially “rushed to praise” Trump’s announcement of a peace deal, said Esther Webber on Politico, but “now they’re not so sure they want anything to do with it”. There was some “jockeying for position on the panel” at first, but the board’s charter has “triggered alarm” among some “key European allies”.

“Sceptics” noted that the charter “makes no direct reference to Gaza” and could “effectively create a shadow United Nations”. Countries seeking a permanent seat have been asked to contribute at least $1 billion, “creating another political obstacle”.

The EU shouldn’t join, said James Moran on the Centre for European Policy Studies, because the board currently includes Benjamin Netanyahu, an “ICC indicted war criminal”, and a second one, Vladimir Putin, has also been “invited”. Also, Trump’s “threats and pronouncements” very much suggest that he has “little intention of properly respecting the UN Charter”.

Although European countries are “sceptical”, Eric Alter, from the Atlantic Council, told The Times, Trump is the “only one to be able to gather these 20 to 30 countries right now”. Europeans, Alter said, are taking a risk by not participating in an organisation that “could help at least the Gaza situation”.

The Board of Peace is the “only game in town” for those interested in bettering the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Israel-Palestine programme at the Arab Center Washington DC, told Al Jazeera. But it is “extremely and intimately tied to the persona of Donald Trump”.

For the EU the “issue” is “where and how to engage”, said Katarzyna Sidło for the European Union Institute for Security Studies. “To play a more active role in the next phase of the Gaza process, the EU does not need board membership so much as political will.” European governments and institutions can “work within the existing international framework anchored in UN Security Council Resolution 2803”.

Trump’s “recent retreat” from threats of military action against Greenland showed that a “united European front amplifies influence”. A “similarly unified EU-wide position” could “also help persuade” the US to reopen the Rafah crossing and reinforce an “internationally backed presence on the ground”.

What next?

“Despite concerns”, the EU was expected to send its commissioner for the Mediterranean, Dubravka Suica, as an observer to today’s meeting, said Al Jazeera. But two EU member nations – Bulgaria and Hungary – have “come on board” and joined Trump’s fledgling group.

Together with Kosovo and Albania, who have also joined as board members, they will attend today. Italy, Cyprus, Greece and Romania confirmed they would send representatives as “observers”, while Romania’s President Nicusor Dan will attend in person.

So how will today’s meeting go? “If Trump uses his authority under the charter to order everyone around, block any proposals he doesn’t like, and run this in a completely personalistic fashion,” Richard Gowan, from International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera, “I think even countries that want to make nice with Trump will wonder what they’re getting into.”

But if “Trump shows his mellower side. If he’s actually willing to listen, in particular to the Arab group and what they’re saying about what Gaza needs, if it looks like a genuine conversation in a genuine contact group”, then that “will at least suggest that it can be a serious sort of diplomatic framework”.

Moscow is calling it “necro-propaganda” but intelligence services and chemical weapons experts from five European countries are united in their verdict: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed by a rare toxin found in some poison dart frogs.

Traces of epibatidine, a neurotoxin 200 times more potent than morphine, were found in samples taken from Navalny’s body after he died, two years ago, in a Siberian penal colony. Only the Russian government had “the means, the motive and the opportunity” to use such a poison on a prisoner, said Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.

“Precise, deniable” and “grimly familiar”, said NBC, the use of poison to eliminate enemies “has become less a medieval cliché” than Russia’s current “geopolitical signature flourish”.

What is the history of Russia’s use of poison?

The Kremlin has long used rare poisons “to dispose of inconvenient people”, said The Independent. There are credible reports of a Soviet “poison programme” as far back as the 1920s. Poison was mainly used to eliminate internal opposition but, in 1978, the Western world was shocked by the London assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov with a ricin-filled pellet, fired from the tip of an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge.

In recent years, Russian military and security services have been implicated in a growing number of high-profile poison attacks overseas. In 2004, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko, running against a Russian favourite, was left permanently disfigured by a dioxin attack. In 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko died after drinking a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel. And, in 2018, two Russian GRU agents were implicated in the novichok attack on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

Two years later, an attempt was made to kill Navalny with novichok during a flight to Moscow but he survived after his plane was diverted so he could be taken to hospital. This was, however, only a temporary reprieve for Vladimir Putin’s most vocal and effective critic.

Why is poison the Kremlin’s weapon of choice?

The advantage of toxins is “their deniability and terror”, said The Times. They send “a very clear message: ‘If you screw with us, terrible things will happen’”, a security source told the paper. Not only can the state kill but “it can do so without ever admitting it has done anything at all”.

The effects of epibatidine, the toxin said to be used in Navalny’s fatal poisoning, are “devastating’, said Sky News. It will cause “paralysis, respiratory arrest and an agonising death”. If the Kremlin “did choose to use such an exotic substance to silence a critic, it demonstrates an unusual level of ruthlessness”.

Will there be any consequences for Russia?

A group of European ministers have reported the results of their lab tests on the Navalny samples to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Russia claims “Western fabulists” are using a Russian citizen’s death to make “strident accusations” of assassination with “zero evidence”.

The “extraordinary announcement” about the frog poison at an international security conference in Munich was deliberately co-ordinated by the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands “to grab global headlines in much the same way as” Navalny's “actual death did”, said Sky News. “The intent was to make sure perpetrators cannot hide in the shadows.” Potential repercussions could include sanctions or even criminal prosecutions of individuals involved.

The hope is that this kind of “greater scrutiny“ will “deter the Kremlin” from poison attacks overseas. It is, “at the very least, evidence of a growing resolve amongst Nato allies” to stand up to Putin.

And, “in the short term, the main international consequence” will be “to make it impossible” for America’s European allies “to swallow any Trump peace plan for Ukraine that rewards Putin”, said The Independent. “Poison, it turns out, can be a boomerang.”

After three decades of checking the global proliferation of nuclear weapons for both the United States and Russia, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) has come to its inevitable end. And that demise is sparking questions about what might fill the void the treaty leaves behind.

A continuation of earlier mutual arms control pacts, the New START Treaty represented the latest in more than half a century of U.S.-Russian cooperation to stem the tide of weapons of mass destruction — and its Thursday expiration marks the last of such endeavors. With no concrete plans for a similar nonproliferation pact to replace it, is the world now on the cusp of a Cold War-style atomic arms race?

What did the commentators say?

The dissolution of the New START Treaty, which regulated the amount of nuclear weapon-capable hardware deployed by both nations, comes at an “especially fraught time,” said Politico. Both Russia and China have been “expanding” their nuclear arsenals recently, and the Defense Department has launched a “series of internal meetings” to prepare for a “post-New START world.”

President Donald Trump, for his part, has “indicated that he would like a new deal” but said he “wanted it to include China.” But Chinese officials, said The New York Times, have “made clear they are not interested.” Broadly then, the treaty’s end signifies more than an expiration date, as multiple countries begin testing “new types and configurations of nuclear weapons” few could have envisioned when the Senate narrowly “ratified the New START treaty in 2010.”

Trump’s insistence that China be included in future antiproliferation treaties was “almost certainly a poison pill” intended to “stop any progress on renewing the existing treaty,” said The Atlantic. However hard two-party arms negotiations may be to achieve, “multilateral arms treaties are exponentially more difficult.” Complicating the situation further, Trump, in his second term, is surrounded by people who oppose most treaties as “annoying limitations on American power.”

The treaty’s end should “alarm everyone,” said Russian politician and former President Dmitry Medvedev, one of the original signatories to the 2010 deal. It is a “sobering comment” from someone whose “recent rhetoric has included nuclear threats,” said the BBC. Not only is the treaty’s expiration a “significant break in more than five decades of bilateral nuclear arms control,” said Chatham House, but by signaling a “move away from nuclear restraint,” the lapse ultimately makes the world a “more dangerous place.”

What next?

The loss of the New START Treaty is not only an end to “numeric limits” of nuclear arms but halts the “predictable flow of notifications, data exchanges, on-site inspections and other transparency mechanisms that reduced uncertainty and helped sustain predictability,” said Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies Professor Katarzyna Zysk to The Barents Observer. Absent that regularity, Russia will have to “plan against a U.S. force posture that is less observed,” leading to a “higher degree of uncertainty.”

The implicit message of allowing the treaty to lapse will be “received most clearly in Beijing,” said The Diplomat. While China’s nuclear arsenal is small in comparison to those amassed by the U.S. and Russia, the treaty’s end signals that “negotiated restraint among major powers is temporary and expendable.” Rather than curbing China’s atomic ambitions, the change only reinforces the “case for accelerating it in anticipation of a world without limits.”

The treaty’s end has also “sparked debate” among European leadership over “how to possibly shape” the continent’s nuclear defenses, said DW. In one outcome under consideration, the nuclear powers of France and the U.K. “extend their protection to other nations, such as Germany.”

If the White House thinks it “will be easy” to negotiate a “new ‘better’ treaty” now that this one has expired, “they are mistaken,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at the arms control advocacy group Defense Priorities, at The Guardian. Trump may be the ultimate dealmaker,” but when it comes to nuclear proliferation, he would have been “better off hanging on to the agreement” he let lapse before “trying to get a better one.”

After several days of bombast and speculation, President Donald Trump debuted his “Board of Peace” to a global audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. Flanked by nearly two dozen heads of state, Trump said that, once fully operational, his board will be able to do “pretty much whatever we want to do” — although, he promised, “we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations.” But as a fuller picture of this multinational body comes into focus, so too do questions about the board’s governance, structure and its potentially world-disrupting aims.

‘Board of action’

While “initially envisioned to shepherd” Trump’s plans for post-war Gaza, senior Trump administration officials framed the board during its Thursday signing ceremony as a “vehicle for broader ambitions,” said The Washington Post. While officials have advertised the board as a “tool to resolve global conflicts” with a scope “rivaling the U.N.,” it is “unclear” if Trump’s pledge to work alongside the U.N. will “ease concerns among some leaders” that he is trying to “sideline the international body.”

“This isn’t the United States,” Trump said Thursday, “this is for the world.” The group “can spread it out to other things” as it works in Gaza. “This is not just a board of peace,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “This is a board of action.”

Since Trump’s board has “morphed into something far more ambitious” than its initial Gaza-centric impetus, international “skepticism about its membership and mandate” has prompted some countries “usually closest to Washington” to “take a pass,” said The Associated Press. Representatives at the body’s signing ceremony in Davos were “mostly from the Middle East, Asia and South America,” said CNN. The 19 nations present were “far fewer than the roughly 35 that a senior administration official predicted,” and European leaders were “visibly absent.”

Despite initially inviting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to join the nascent group, Trump rescinded the offer after Carney delivered a Davos speech “describing a ‘rupture’” with the U.S. “over tariffs and Greenland,” said USA Today. Similarly, by denying invitations to the African Union and sub-Saharan nations on the continent, Trump has “shown his disdain for Africa yet again,” said Bloomberg.

Simmering tensions between some of the body’s newly signed member-states could ultimately taint the enterprise. After initially spurning the board, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed this week to join, despite recent polling showing that 53% of Israelis “view the Turkish-Qatari involvement in the Board of Peace as an ‘Israeli failure,’” said Al Jazeera.

Lifetime leadership and ‘voluntary’ contributions

Unsurprisingly, Trump is “expected to chair the board” and could potentially “hold the position for life,” said ABC News. The group will also feature “senior political, diplomatic and business figures,” including billionaires Jared Kushner and Marc Rowan, said Fox News. At the same time, initial reports of a required $1 billion buy-in have been downplayed by the White House. Participation beyond any “voluntary” donation “does not carry any mandatory funding obligation,” an anonymous administration official said to the Post.

Ultimately, Trump’s board is a “direct assault on the United Nations,” said Marc Weller, an international law professor at University of Cambridge, to The New York Times. The project is "likely to be seen as a takeover of the world order" by “one individual in his own image.”

Delegations from the US, Ukraine and Russia have met together for the first time since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, buoying hopes of a peace deal despite continued sticking points over territory.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters that talks overnight between Vladimir Putin and the US had been “substantive, constructive and very frank”, ahead of the two-day summit in Abu Dhabi. But despite the positive noises, Russia, which occupies about 20% of Ukraine, “is pushing for full control of the country’s eastern Donbas region as part of a deal”, something Kyiv has warned against, claiming that “ceding ground would embolden Moscow”, said The Times.

What did the commentators say?

US envoy Steve Witkoff said negotiations were “down to one issue”, suggesting an agreement was perhaps within reach. “I think we’ve got it down to one issue, and we have discussed iterations of that issue, and that means it’s solvable,” he said.

While Donald Trump and his colleagues “appear to believe Putin is ready and willing to agree to a ceasefire”, said CNBC, Ukraine remains sceptical, believing “Russia’s manpower advantage on the battlefield and incremental advances means it is willing to continue the war and is playing for time by drawing out talks”. Coupled with this “it isn’t clear that the meetings on Ukraine this week come with any new proposals beyond those that have already been rejected by Russia”, said Politico’s Felicia Schwartz.

From Ukraine’s perspective, “these first, trilateral talks are a kind of crunch time”, said Sarah Rainsford, the BBC’s Eastern Europe correspondent. “The focus will be US security guarantees for Ukraine – and, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy puts it, it’s a chance to see whether Moscow is really serious about peace or just playing games.”

The crux of that issue is that for Putin “deception is the default setting”, said The Hill’s Andrew Chakhoyan. “He does not negotiate – he manipulates.” As former Ukrainian commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi wrote in the New York Post: “Russia’s negotiators, like its generals, fight to exhaust, confuse and divide. Their aim is not peace but delay; not compromise in pursuit of accord but conquest through deception.”

“It feels like we've been here before: highly anticipated high-profile summits that change little on the ground in Ukraine,” said Sky News’s Sally Lockwood. “And yet – this time feels different.” The speed at which all three sides agreed to meet in the UAE means there is “a sense that neither side would have shown up without at least contemplating a compromise they might be willing to accept”.

What next?

The timing of these talks “is especially significant as Ukraine faces its harshest winter of the war, with widespread power outages caused by Russian strikes on energy infrastructure”, said Modern Diplomacy. But while these conditions “add urgency to negotiations” they also “fuel Ukrainian scepticism about Russia’s stated interest in peace”.

Along with the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, separate economic discussions between Moscow and Washington are also planned, signalling parallel diplomatic tracks.

It’s there where the US can really turn the screw. “The first step to defeating Russian cognitive warfare is simple: stop playing by Russia’s dirty rules,” said The Hill’s Chakhoyan. “Stop accepting Putin’s framing.” Putin lies “because his only path to victory runs through Washington’s self-deterrence and Europe’s indecisiveness. The greatest lie of all is that we have no choice but to accept it.”

Donald Trump may allow America’s last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with Russia to lapse. “If it expires, it expires,” he told The New York Times of the agreement, which runs out on 5 February.

If the New START agreement, signed in 2010, is not renewed or replaced, it would leave the “world’s two largest nuclear powers free to expand their arsenals without limit, for the first time in half a century”, said the paper.

What is it?

START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is a series of bilateral nuclear arms control treaties between the US and Russia, which began with START I in 1991. They aim to limit and reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by both countries.

Crucially, the New START agreement caps deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 each and delivery vehicles (such as missiles and bombers) at 700.

Will it be replaced?

Moscow and Washington are both “preoccupied by the war in Ukraine”, so they haven’t “held any talks on a successor treaty”, said Reuters, but there have been some informal statements from both sides.

In September, Vladimir Putin proposed that both parties should adhere to the START limits for a further 12 months. He has also argued that the nuclear stockpiles of Britain and France should be up for negotiation. Both countries have rejected that suggestion.

Trump hasn’t responded formally, but he told The New York Times that he would prefer a broader deal that could involve “a couple of other players,” without naming them.

Western experts are “divided” on Putin’s suggestion, said Reuters, because although it would “buy time to chart a way forward” and send a “political signal that both sides want to preserve a vestige of arms control”, it would allow Russia to keep developing weapons systems outside the scope of the treaty.

Then there is China. One US analyst argued that the US agreeing to Putin’s proposal would “send a message” to Beijing that Washington would not “build up its strategic nuclear forces in response to China’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal”.

Beijing has accelerated its nuclear programme and now has an estimated 600 warheads, but the Pentagon estimates it will have more than 1,000 by 2030.

Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that America may look to increase its stockpile in the face of this, which could lead to a “Cold War-like arms race”.

What does this mean for the world?

If New START simply expires, it would be the first time in around five decades that the world’s two largest nuclear powers would operate without any formal constraints on their arsenals. Between them, the two countries have about 87% of the world’s nuclear warheads.

But although the agreement saved superpowers “a bit of money” and provided a “forum that was useful for cooperation”, it didn’t “fundamentally change the probability of war”, Mark Bell, from the University of Minnesota, told New Scientist. It is the unthinkable results of nuclear conflict, rather than treaties, that prevent such wars, he said.

Putin has suggested that Moscow could voluntarily continue observing the limits if Washington did the same. The two countries could also share data about their deployed forces after the expiration.

As for Trump, he has previously said he would like to pursue “denuclearisation” with Russia and China to reduce the “tremendous amounts of money” each nation spends on nuclear weapons.

The UK and France have agreed to deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal with Russia, as part of a broader package of security guarantees aimed at preventing a repeat of Vladimir Putin’s invasion nearly four years ago.

After talks in Paris, Keir Starmer said both countries will, in the event of a ceasefire, “establish military hubs across Ukraine” and build protected weapon facilities “to support Ukraine’s defensive needs”.

Their agreement – along with wider security guarantees from the Coalition of the Willing – has the backing of the Trump administration. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a “huge step forward”. But Russia has previously rejected any idea of a “reassurance force” in Ukraine.

What did the commentators say?

The announcement from Starmer and Emmanuel Macron is “not a magic wand”, said Bel Trew in The Independent. “But it is a key moment.” France and Britain have, according to Zelenskyy, already “worked out in detail” the “force deployment”, including numbers, weapons components required.

Perhaps to reassure a wary French public, Macron said that “these are not forces that will be engaged in combat” but rather deployed “away from the contact line” to provide the necessary “reassurance”.

“This does seem at first glance to be a well-developed framework for ending the conflict in Ukraine,” said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator. But one of the most “obvious problems” is that “it is not at all clear that the UK and France have the military resources available to do what they say”.

There are “deep divisions” over increased defence spending in France and “the British army is the smallest it has been since the 1790s”. About 7,500 UK personnel are already deployed internationally and “resources for our leadership of the Nato Multinational Battlegroup in Estonia are stretched”. Given this, “where will we find ‘boots on the ground’ for Ukraine?”

Then there is the lack of public appetite for a prolonged military intervention overseas. On this, Starmer “begins from a stronger position than almost any of his counterparts” in the EU, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. UK voters are “among the most pro-Ukraine in Europe”: a recent YouGov poll of voters in six European countries found 56% of Brits support sending peacekeepers to Ukraine, compared to 40% in France and Italy and 36% in Poland. That “speaks to the strength of this consensus – albeit one yet to be tested by events”.

What next?

Of all the wider security guarantees agreed in Paris, the “binding commitment to support Ukraine in the case of future armed attack” is the one most “riddled with questions”, said Euronews. Each Coalition of the Willing government “would have to convince their parliaments, many of which are paralysed by political deadlock, to agree to an exceptionally consequential commitment”.

Then there is Putin, who has shown “no sign” that he is “willing to countenance any of this”, said Politico. This week’s potentially game-changing breakthrough does, however, “thrust the ball further into his court”.

A peace deal in Ukraine means more than ending the fighting now. Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants to ensure Russia does not invade his country again. The only way that can happen, he says, is if the United States guarantees Ukraine’s defense in — and against — any future war.

Zelenskyy is hoping for “security guarantees from the United States that could span up to 50 years” as part of any peace agreement with Russia, said USA Today. The Ukrainian leader wants President Donald Trump to “consider a longer commitment” than the 15-year guarantee he has reportedly approved. “Realistically, this war will not end” without a defense commitment, said Zelenskyy. Trump, who has been eager to extricate the U.S. from its backing of Ukraine, vowed any pledge would heavily involve “Kyiv’s allies in Europe,” said The Wall Street Journal. “There will be a security agreement, it’ll be a strong agreement and the European nations are very much involved,” Trump said Sunday.

Protecting Ukraine against another war

A peace deal involving “international security guarantees” appears to be coming into view, David Ignatius said at The Washington Post. Despite Trump’s “inexplicable sympathy” for Russia, the president’s team appears to recognize that any peace proposal will fail “unless Zelenskyy can sell it to a brave but exhausted country.” That means the plan must include measures to protect Ukraine against future invasion, as well as support for the country’s “future economic prosperity.” Without those elements, the American leader will not get the peace deal he so clearly wants. “Trump should make a reasonable deal that will last.”

Trump must “avoid promising to fight a direct war with Russia” to defend Ukraine, Andrew Day said at The American Conservative. It is surprising that Trump appears ready to “extend America’s superpower shield” to Ukraine after he “slashed U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort” and blasted Zelenskyy as a “manipulative ingrate.” But the president’s “notorious fixation on getting a deal” has taken priority. The challenge: Russia will oppose any “military partnership” between Ukraine and the West. Trump should instead push for an “armed non-alignment” model that leaves Kyiv prepared to “deter — but not threaten — Russia.”

Another brutal year?

Europe’s commitment to increasing its financial and military support may make Trump more amenable to backing Ukraine’s play, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. said at The Wall Street Journal. The president is “drawn to teams that are winning and mobilizing resources on their own” because that lets him “step in and take credit for their success.”

The question now is whether Putin “will tolerate a deal that safeguards Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Comfort Ero and Richard Atwood said at Foreign Policy. Putin’s war demands include “limits on the Ukrainian military’s size and foreign support,” and most European observers believe he wants a “pliant government” in Kyiv that is “shorn of a strong deterrent” against Moscow’s power. That would seem to weigh against his acceptance of U.S. security guarantees. For now, the “likeliest scenario next year is a continued brutal slog at the front.”

Following “two days of whirlwind diplomacy” at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Donald Trump has insisted he is “making progress towards ending two destructive conflicts in eastern Europe and the Middle East”, said John Bowden on The Independent.

The US president met his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Sunday in his Palm Beach “Winter White House” and then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday.

What did the commentators say?

The details of Trump’s “supposed gains” in both discussions “remain unclear” beyond his own assertions, and “there is little evidence to support the idea that either the war in Ukraine or the horrific conditions in Gaza will abate any time soon”, said Bowden.

The president remains “evasive” about how he plans to “force various parties” in Ukraine and the Middle East to “get fully on board with his peacemaking agenda” beyond “vague threats and coercion”.

Zelenskyy said the 20-point peace plan for Ukraine is 90% agreed, while Trump said a security guarantee for the country is “close to 95%” completed. But there are “still a few main sticking points”, said the BBC, including how much territory Kyiv will be asked to hand to Moscow, the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and plans to turn part of the Donbas region into a demilitarised economic zone.

In reality, talking between Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin “has not even begun”, said Ben Hall in the Financial Times. Both are “locked in another titanic if less murderous struggle: the battle for Donald Trump’s mind”. Neither side wants to be “seen as the obstacle to peace and then punished for being so”.

Netanyahu is a man who “knows how to talk to President Trump”, said Lara Spirit in The Times. After awarding the US president the Israel Prize, the state’s highest cultural honour, and thanking him for his help on behalf of Israelis, he will “probably be walking away from Florida largely happy with what he heard”. Trump “praised” him and “issued statements of support” on the Gaza ceasefire, Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the Israeli leader’s “hopes of securing a presidential pardon”.

He “got what he came for” on Gaza, said Mark Stone on Sky News, although there were some “intriguing divergences” between him and Trump on Syria and the West Bank. After two “December days in Palm Beach” I have “sunburn and whiplash”. While “the sunburn is my fault”, Trump’s “head-spinning” style of diplomacy is “to blame for the whiplash”.

What next?

With US midterm elections due next year, Trump will need to focus on “the economy and the cost of living” rather than “foreign conflicts”, said Stone.

The president “knows that”, and so do “America’s adversaries and its troublesome allies”. The question is what they will “gamble on in 2026”, knowing that Trump “may not care – or may simply go along with it”. The rest of us should “buckle up”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy raised both eyebrows and hopes across Eastern Europe this week after offering a surprising concession in the fraught negotiations to end Russia’s ongoing invasion. He told reporters on Tuesday that he would be willing to pull troops from parts of the contested Donbas region that Ukraine shares with Russia to establish an internationally monitored demilitarized zone, so long as Moscow does the same with the territory it controls in the area. Donbas, Zelenskyy said, is the “most difficult point” in negotiations to end the war between both nations.

‘Thorny territorial disputes’

Zelenskyy’s openness to a Donbas demilitarized zone comes as part of a “revised 20-point peace plan” crafted by American and Ukrainian negotiators that “covers a broad range of issues,” The New York Times said. The blueprint outlines everything from “potential territorial arrangements” to “security guarantees” and plans for rebuilding areas damaged in the war. Zelenskyy’s Donbas comments are the “closest” the Ukrainian leader has come to addressing the “thorny territorial disputes” that have “repeatedly derailed peace talks” in the region. Russia, which occupies the majority of the Donbas region, has “insisted that Ukraine relinquish” what remaining territory it controls in the area in an “ultimatum that Ukraine has rejected,” said The Associated Press.

Donbas has emerged as one of the “chief sticking points” in the current peace plan, with Kyiv afraid that “surrendering fortified positions” across the region might help Russia to “stage further attacks,” The Wall Street Journal said. The United States has pushed for a “compromise” over the area by encouraging the development of a “free economic zone” in the demilitarized territory.

In his remarks Tuesday, Zelenskyy “stressed that Ukraine is against the withdrawal,” Politico said. But “there are two options,” said Zelenskyy: “Either the war continues, or something will have to be decided regarding all potential economic zones.” The significance of his concession notwithstanding, it remains “difficult to imagine Russia accepting such terms,” considering how controlling the contested region has been “one of its main war objectives,” said Le Monde.

Referendum and nuclear problem

Beyond tactical fears of renewed Russian aggression in the region, Ukraine must also contend with “humanitarian concerns related to the relocation of residents” and the risk of a “serious blow to national morale” should it give up significant territory, the Times said. Accordingly, any demilitarized zone will need to be “approved by Ukrainians through a referendum.” The proposed peace plan also calls for a “joint U.S.-Ukrainian-Russian management” of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, “Europe’s largest,” currently under Russian control, said CBS News. Zelenskyy has stressed, however, that Ukraine “doesn’t want any Russian oversight of the facility.”

It is “now up to the Russian Federation to respond to this proposed agreement,” said Le Monde. To that end, Zelenskyy predicted, Moscow will be “ready to accept a plan in any case.”

“They can’t say to President Trump: ‘Listen, we’re against a peaceful settlement,’” Zelenskyy explained at his press briefing. “If they try to block everything, President Trump will then have to arm us heavily, while imposing every possible sanction on them.” In response to Ukraine’s apparent territorial flexibility, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a gathering of top Russian businessmen that a “partial exchange of territories from the Russian side is not ruled out,” said Russia's Kommersant newspaper, per Reuters. “In essence,” said the news service, “Putin wants the whole of Donbas” but is open to other territorial swaps “outside that area.”

The United States under President Donald Trump appears to be readying for war in Venezuela or at least is seeking to depose leader Nicolás Maduro. But it remains unclear why, exactly, the White House has decided to take aim at the regime in Caracas.

Trump has “repeatedly” shifted the public rationale for targeting Venezuela, said The Wall Street Journal. Drugs have been offered as a reason but so has ownership of oil fields formerly owned by U.S. companies. American officials say that “multiple rationales” have been discussed during internal administration discussions, but Congress has largely been left out of the loop. Some GOP members are concerned about “defending the prospects of U.S. military action” to anti-war MAGA voters in November. “I want to know what’s going to happen next,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said after a meeting with national security officials.

Minerals? Oil? Putin?

Trump’s focus on Venezuela is “about oil, not drugs,” Chris Brennan said at USA Today. Venezuela must “return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land and other Assets that they previously stole from us” during the nationalization of that country’s oil industry, Trump said in a Truth Social post. But a war in pursuit of oil profits would be the kind of “American military adventurism” that Trump once decried.

“It is minerals, not drugs,” Krystal Kauffman said at The Hill. Rare minerals used in high technology and advanced manufacturing are “emerging as geopolitical currency” in the race to shape the next century, and Venezuela claims more than a trillion dollars in reserves. If that is the objective, the Trump administration should “negotiate agreements” instead of wage war. “Venezuelans deserve more than to become collateral in a global resource race.”

Venezuela is a “client state of Russia,” David Marcus said at Fox News. Action against Venezuela would be proof that Vladimir Putin “cannot keep his sketchy global friends safe.” The Russian leader is already “stretched” by the Ukraine war and U.S. sanctions. Trump’s target in Venezuela “isn’t really Maduro, it’s Putin.”

Maduro’s regime is “both an importer and exporter of instability,” Bret Stephens said at The New York Times. His government’s ties to China, Russia and Iran give those countries a “significant foothold in the Americas,” while Venezuela’s chaos has produced a “mass exodus of refugees and migrants.” Maduro should be given a chance to leave the country, but “any morally serious person should want this to end.”

A nation-building trap

The Trump administration has asked American oil companies if they want to return to Venezuela but is “getting no takers,” said Politico. Oil markets are already “glutted with supply,” and prices are at “nearly five-year lows,” giving oil companies little incentive to risk “pouring huge investments” into the country’s oil infrastructure. Forcing Maduro out of power would probably be the “easy part,” Gregory J. Wallance said at The Hill. It is the governing afterward that would be difficult. Trump could become the latest American president to “fall into the nation-building trap.”

What happened

The Kremlin Sunday applauded President Donald Trump’s new national security strategy, saying its “adjustments” are “largely consistent with our vision.” The document, released Friday, seeks “strategic stability” with Russia, asserts U.S. dominance over Latin America and is sharply critical of the country’s traditional European allies, claiming Western Europe faces “civilizational erasure.”

Who said what

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s response, delivered by spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, was “the first time that Moscow has so fulsomely praised such a document from its former Cold War foe,” Reuters said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “made only a passing reference to Russia” in a speech Saturday on the new U.S. military focus, Politico said, but he laid out a “more conciliatory approach to China’s armed forces,” the focus of recent national defense strategies. The Trump administration will “seek a stable peace, fair trade and respectful relations with China,” Hegseth said, including “respecting” Beijing’s “historic military buildup.”

The strategy “reinforces, in sometimes chilly and bellicose terms, Trump’s ‘America First’ philosophy, which favors nonintervention overseas,” The Associated Press said. But the administration “in some respects, wants to have it both ways when it comes to foreign relations,” Politico said. For example, the document proposes “a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

“Little of this is surprising,” Ishaan Tharoor said at The Washington Post, but the strategy starkly “underscored the depth of ideological vehemence within the White House” against the European Union and in favor of Europe’s far right. The continent’s immigration policies, “cratering” birthrates, “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” could make it “unrecognizable in 20 years or less,” the document said, so it’s “far from obvious” that “certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” Trump’s assessment of Europe sometimes “sounds like Putin talking about Europe,” Jürgen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesperson for Germany’s ruling alliance, told DW.

What next?

The U.S. “remains our most important ally” in NATO, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul told reporters, but Europe does “not need outside advice” on “freedom of expression or the organization of our free societies.”

The spectre of Donald Trump looms large over the first state visit by Vladimir Putin to India since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.

Putin was met on arrival with a warm embrace by Narendra Modi and the two leaders are due to discuss deals over oil, arms, working visas and strengthened diplomatic ties between the two countries.

Following an opening press conference, two things “stood out”, said the BBC: first, a “conspicuous display of mutual respect”; and second, an “absence of any blockbuster announcement”.

The “need” for both countries right now is to boost “bilateral trade”, as Russia is “reeling” from Western sanctions and India is “facing 50% tariffs from Washington”.

What did the commentators say?

Modi continues to walk a diplomatic “tightrope” between Russia and the US, said Foreign Policy. Putin’s two-day visit is a stern “test” of how well India can “balance ties” with the two countries.

The summit comes at a “critical juncture” for both Russia and India, mostly due to the looming presence of the US, said The Guardian. Trump’s re-election has “upended years of closely nurtured US-India relations”, causing disruption with “inflammatory rhetoric” and “punishing” import tariffs. As a result, Delhi has been thrown “into a tailspin”.

Putin, too, is not in Trump’s good books. He has rejected the latest US-proposed peace plan for Ukraine, and is looking to bolster Russia’s recent battlefield advances that have “strengthened his hand” with diplomatic gains.

“The question of oil also looms large.” Modi has “insisted that India would continue to buy Russian oil” – Moscow supplies over 35% of India’s crude oil imports, compared to only around 2% before the war in Ukraine began. However, heavy US-imposed sanctions have led to a “notable slowdown” in this supply to appease Trump, not to mention India having “agreed to import more US oil and gas”.

“India is rolling out the red carpet for the Russian president”, undermining global efforts to cast him as an “international pariah”, said Bloomberg. India, though still wanting to maintain economic ties with the US, is looking to diversify and “gain more access to the Russian market”. Most likely, this week could see an agreement reached over the “shipment of marine products and agricultural goods”, both of which would be in India’s favour.

Russia’s interests are clear too. India, with a population of around 1.5 billion and the “fastest growing major economy” in the world, is a “hugely attractive market” for Russian goods and resources, said Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Russia editor.

Putin’s enthusiasm is plentiful. One “priority” is weapons sales, with reported deals on exporting “state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets and air defence systems”. Due to the war in Ukraine, Russia has also been hit with a labour shortage, and India presents itself as a “valuable source of skilled workers”. Most importantly, the main benefit is geopolitical: the Kremlin “enjoys demonstrating that Western efforts to isolate it over the war in Ukraine have failed”.

What next?

Any progression towards a peace deal in Ukraine would “give India more breathing room” with the US than it had six months ago. Then, Trump’s “ire” towards Modi “ran high” and he imposed additional 25% tariffs on the country, said The Wall Street Journal.

Putin is expected to offer “Russia’s latest arms” to “bolster the long-standing relationship” between them. Even if this were to fall through, the mere prospect of a summit shows that the relationship is on an “upswing”, according to one expert.

The latest Ukraine peace talks with Vladimir Putin have failed again to make a breakthrough, and Europe has begun to think the unthinkable. In the face of Russia’s increasing cyberattacks, sabotage and violations of its airspace, it’s making plans to be more aggressive – economically and militarily.

The European Commission is moving ahead with plans to further fund Ukraine, either with a loan based on Russia’s frozen assets or a loan based on common borrowing. And, with Russian “drones and agents unleashing attacks across Nato countries”, Europe is “doing what would have seemed outlandish just a few years ago”, said Politico. It’s “planning how to hit back”.

What did the commentators say?

Russian “hybrid attacks” on European countries – GPS jamming, drone-buzzing, election interference, ship or aircraft incursions – have been going on for years “but the sheer scale and frequency” right now is “unprecedented”, said Victor Jack and Laura Kayali on Politico. Such an aggressive testing of Europe’s limits has prompted calls for a step up in response, with ideas ranging from “joint offensive cyber operations” to “surprise Nato-led military exercises”.

Many diplomats – “particularly those from eastern European countries” – have “urged Nato to stop being merely reactive”, said Richard Milne in the Financial Times. We are thinking of “being more aggressive or more proactive”, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of Nato’s military committee, told Milne. “A pre-emptive strike” could even be considered a “defensive action”. The Russian foreign ministry swiftly called Dragone’s comments “extremely irresponsible” and a sign that Nato is “moving towards escalation”.

Nato has successfully countered hybrid attacks before. Its Baltic Sentry ship and air patrols stopped the cutting of undersea cables in 2023 and 2024 “by vessels linked to Russia’s shadow fleet”, said the FT’s Milne. But there are “still worries in the alliance” about such measures.

Putin “may see the EU and Nato as rivals or even enemies” but Europe “does not want war with a nuclear-armed Russia”, said Jack and Kayali in Politico. “It has to figure out how to respond in a way that deters Moscow but does not cross any Kremlin red lines that could lead to open warfare”.

“The ratcheting up of the Ukraine conflict into what is perceived as a European war is already well underway,” said Laura Tingle on ABC News. Though Putin has called it “laughable” that Russia could attack Europe, it’s “no laughing matter to a host of European political and military leaders”. The discourse “is all getting very alarming (or alarmist, depending on your perspective)”. It’s clear that “something has now been unleashed in Europe which is going to be hard to put back in the bottle”.

What next?

“Europe’s efforts to rearm” have publicly “moved into overdrive” but “behind the headlines lies a more uneven reality”, said Anna Conkling in the Brussels-based The Parliament magazine. Europe is still “split between countries rapidly expanding their militaries and those still constrained by years of underinvestment and fiscal fragility”.

Some states are powering ahead, while “others drag their feet”, risking a “two-speed defence model“ that could leave Europe “dangerously exposed”. This means “the buy-in of the largest countries” is “all the more important for Europe’s defence to reach a critical mass”.

As Volodymyr Zelenskyy scrambles to strengthen European support for Ukraine’s position in the peace talks, he finds himself without his long-time chief of staff and lead negotiator. Andriy Yermak, Ukraine’s de facto deputy leader, resigned on Friday after a dramatic anti-corruption raid on his house, and has now announced he is off to the front line.

Yermak was so influential, the political system “had come to be known in Ukraine as Yermakshchina – the era of Yermak”, said Andrew E. Kramer in The New York Times. His departure is a “seismic event”. With him no longer around to oversee domestic policy, “keep a lid on power struggles within the military and oversee peace negotiations,” Zelenskyy’s “political control may weaken” just at the time he is looking to agree an end to the war.

What did the commentators say?

Nicknamed the “green cardinal” for his early adoption of battle fatigues, Yermak was “in every way” the “second-most powerful man in Ukraine”. A close ally of Zelenskyy, he acted more like an “unelected vice-president than a simple chief of staff” and, according to many officials and diplomats, was often “the de facto decision maker”, said Christopher Miller in the Financial Times.

His departure will be “extremely painful” for Zelenskyy – “physically and psychologically”, Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko told The Washington Post’s Siobhan O'Grady. “Yermak was always next to him. But Zelenskyy is adaptive. He learns quickly. I don’t think it’s a catastrophe – but it is a serious challenge.”

Yermak had become a deeply unpopular figure in Ukraine who “somehow aggregated all the dissatisfaction with what” Zelenskyy “does wrong”, Nataliya Gumenyuk of Ukrainian news site Hromadske told Andrew Carey at CNN. So, “a key question will be whether his departure increases the domestic pressure on Zelenskyy himself, or in fact turns the tide”.

What it could do is dilute the concentration of authority in Ukraine. And that could actually “strengthen Zelenskyy both domestically but also internationally”, William Taylor, a former US ambassador to Ukraine told the FT’s Miller. “Zelenskyy has some young, competent people who could step in.”

What next?

The scandal over corruption in the state energy company has weakened Zelenskyy domestically and, this week, Ukrainian MPs will be asked to vote on his budget. Losing that vote would not be terminal but it would be “another blow to Zelenskyy’s credibility as leader”, said Dominic Hauschild in The Times.

On the international front, Zelenskyy has moved quickly to replace Yermak as lead negotiator in the peace talks. With the president facing “a new round of US pressure to reach a deal to end Russia’s war”, and Moscow continuing to “relentlessly bombard his country”, the stage is set for one of Zelenskyy’s “most politically perilous moments yet”, said O’Grady in The Washington Post.

As for Yermak, in an “impassioned text message” to the New York Post, he said was going to the front and was “prepared for any reprisals. I am an honest and decent person.”

After days of frantic diplomacy, Donald Trump claimed this week that his negotiators had made “tremendous progress” towards ending the Ukraine War. The Ukrainian leadership indicated that it had accepted the “core terms” of a US-backed peace plan – and Trump said that his envoy, Steve Witkoff, would be dispatched to the Kremlin for talks with Vladimir Putin next week. However, significant doubts remained, both about the exact terms of the deal, and about Russia’s position. On Wednesday, Russian officials indicated that the deal was not acceptable.

Last week, Trump had piled great pressure on Kyiv to sign up to a 28-point plan that the US had drawn up following Witkoff’s talks with Russian envoys in Miami. That proposal echoed Moscow’s maximalist war aims, by calling for Kyiv to cede the rest of the Donbas region, and to limit its army to 600,000 personnel. It caused alarm among Ukraine’s European allies, whose 19-point counter-proposal is believed to form the basis of the deal Kyiv later accepted.

Pro-Russia bias

Effectively, the US-Russia peace plan amounted to a demand for Ukraine’s “outright surrender”, said The Times. It would have handed over Ukraine’s “fortress belt” in the Donbas, which it has spent years defending, and denied it meaningful security guarantees. If Zelenskyy had bowed to Trump’s ultimatum to agree to its terms by Thanksgiving, 27 November, or lose access to US weapons and intelligence, he’d surely have had to resign.

This peace plan was reportedly leaked by Moscow, said The Economist – and AI analysis suggests it was translated from the original Russian. Either way, it again “betrayed” Trump’s pro-Russia bias, and his indifference to Ukraine; as did his dismissive suggestion that Zelenskyy can “fight his little heart out” if no deal is struck, and his grousing on social media that “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS.”

Sobering question

There was a “grim familiarity” to events last week, said The Guardian. As in August, when Trump hosted Putin in Alaska, Kyiv and its European allies had been excluded from talks which would decide their future, and were left scrambling to improve a Moscow-friendly deal.

Europe’s leaders were confronted with a sobering question, said Michael D. Shear in The New York Times: was the US about to force Ukraine to “capitulate”, to the detriment of Nato and the benefit of Putin – “all without even bothering to consult with them”? It looked that way for a while; but by Tuesday, the crisis had been averted by European leaders who have honed their “how-to-handle-Trump playbook” during a year of similar episodes. Rather than lashing out, they “embraced” the plan to keep Trump onside, while insisting that it was only a starting point for negotiations. “The goal was to slow the process and eliminate some of the provisions they saw as crossing Europe’s red lines.”

The Europeans succeeded in shrinking the 28-point plan to 19 points, said Roger Boyes in The Times. But several of Russia’s key demands remained: no Western military presence in Ukraine, no Nato membership. And the fundamental questions – how to divide the land, and security guarantees against future invasions – remained apparently unresolved. As usual with Trump’s “drive-by diplomacy”, nothing adds up.

‘Miserable choice’

With the knotty questions about territory yet to be resolved, Russia is “trying to pour cold water on the prospects of an imminent peace breakthrough”, said Samuel Ramani in The Daily Telegraph. It continues to bombard Ukrainian cities; its officials have dismissed the new proposals as “not constructive”.

For Kyiv, the risk now is that Putin will talk Trump into backing favourable terms for Russia, said Tim Ross et al in Politico. That would leave Zelenskyy with a “miserable choice”: either take an offer “cooked up by Trump and Putin”, or hope that his European allies finally make good on their bold promises of help.

Sooner or later, though, he’ll have to make a deal, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. During four years of war, Ukraine has sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties. Millions of its citizens have fled abroad, and its economy lies in ruins. A bad settlement could imperil its future as a “genuinely independent” nation. But make no mistake: “the continuation of the war is also deeply damaging to Ukraine”.

What happened

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that his administration had made “tremendous progress” toward ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. The original Moscow-tilted 28-point peace proposal “has been fine-tuned, with additional input from both sides,” he wrote on social media, and there are “only a few remaining points of disagreement.” Trump told reporters Tuesday night that his envoy Steve Witkoff would visit Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next week, while Army Secretary Dan Driscoll will continue to meet with Ukrainian officials.

Trump shrugged off a leaked Oct. 14 phone call, published by Bloomberg on Tuesday, in which Witkoff coached Putin envoy Yuri Ushakov on selling Trump a Russia-friendly peace deal. “I haven’t heard it, but it’s a standard thing,” Trump told reporters. “He’s got to sell this to Ukraine. He’s got to sell Ukraine to Russia. That’s what a dealmaker does.”

Who said what

“Momentum had been picking up over the U.S.-led negotiations,” The Washington Post said, “but a landing zone for a deal that can satisfy both sides remains extremely narrow.” Moscow and Kyiv are at odds over post-war security guarantees, and Trump’s plan calls on “Ukraine to concede the entirety of its eastern Donbas region, even though a vast swath of that land remains in Ukrainian control,” The Associated Press said.

“Giving up territory Russia hadn’t conquered” is one of Ukraine’s “red lines,” The Wall Street Journal said, but Witkoff suggested in his leaked call that losing the rest of the Donbas province of Donetsk was inevitable. “Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere,” Witkoff told Ushakov, according to the Bloomberg transcript. The call proves Witkoff “cannot be trusted to lead these negotiations,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said on social media. “Would a Russian paid agent do less than he? He should be fired.”

What next?

Trump told reporters that his earlier Thanksgiving ultimatum for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree to the deal was no longer operational, and the new “deadline for me is when it’s over.” He said on social media that he looked forward to “hopefully meeting” with Zelenskyy and Putin “soon, but ONLY when the deal to end this War is FINAL or, in its final stages.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has framed the 28-point US peace plan to end the war in Ukraine as an impossible choice: between losing national dignity or losing the support of its most important ally.

The plan, which has been widely decried as a Kremlin wish list, would allow Russia to keep Crimea, as well as Luhansk and Donetsk and other territory in the Donbas that Ukraine has successfully defended for nearly four years. It would halve the size of Ukraine’s army, ban it from launching long-range missiles and end its hope of joining Nato. In return, Ukraine would receive as yet unspecified security guarantees.

For Zelenskyy, such demands are unpalatable but he may end up having to swallow at least some of them.

What did the commentators say?

Nearly four years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian president faces “a triple threat at home and abroad”, said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph. There have been “huge losses on the front lines as winter draws in” and “growing anger” over a scandal in which officials allegedly stole millions from the state nuclear energy provider. Now Donald Trump is pushing a “controversial” peace plan, most of which appears “calculated to be unacceptable to Kyiv”.

“Having Zelenskyy in a bind, though, is one thing,” said Freeman. “Getting him to sell the deal to the Ukrainian public is another, as it tears up red lines that Kyiv has drawn in very thick blood.” Any peace agreement would require constitutional changes voted through by a supermajority in Ukraine’s parliament. This appears unlikely given the reaction of the Ukrainian public and politicians to Trump’s 28-point plan.

The power-company scandal, as well an unsuccessful attempt to curb the independence of two national anti-corruption watchdogs earlier this year, have “delivered a devastating blow to Zelenskyy’s international reputation and to the Ukrainian cause at large”, said Leonid Ragozin on Al Jazeera. He is “emerging out of it as a lame duck who will do what he is told by whoever is pulling the strings”, which, right now, looks to be the US president.

“Yet this very vulnerability” makes Zelenskyy “even less likely to yield to the Trump administration”, said Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal. “No Ukrainian president – and especially not a weakened Zelenskyy – has a mandate to agree to anything like this,” Nico Lange, a former senior German defence official, told the paper. “If he does, he would not be president any more when he comes home.”

What next?

The Trump administration has given Ukraine until Thursday to agree to the deal – or risk losing all US support and “imperilling Ukraine’s troops, who rely deeply on American intelligence sharing” and “US weapons”, said Siobhan O’Grady in The Washington Post.

But, in the rush to exploit Ukraine’s weakness, Trump may have “inadvertently strengthened Zelenskyy at home, at least for the time being”, said Cassandra Vinograd and Andrew E. Kramer in The New York Times. “The 28-point plan has shifted” the nation’s focus away from domestic scandal and allowed the president to “reprise his most successful role: as rally-er in chief”.

EU officials are meeting today to discuss what would be a 20th sanctions package against Russia, focusing on the “shadow fleet” helping circumvent existing sanctions on Moscow’s oil and gas imports.

In the 19th package announced in October, the EU listed 557 vessels believed to be acting as a proxy for Russia in international waters.

What is the shadow fleet?

It refers to a group of largely Russian-owned vessels, usually tankers, that sail under various non-Russian flags. On board, they carry sanctioned commodities like oil to customers such as India and China, to bypass sanctions and export caps.

“Flag hopping” allows ships to “switch identities” by “jumping from one registry to another”, said The Parliament Magazine. Ships slip under the radar by “exploiting lenient registries” in countries such as Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands.

Over the last year in particular, it has become “so easy now to re-register somewhere else” that the practice has “escalated to an unprecedented peak”, leaving Russian tankers hiding in plain sight.

Analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that shadow tankers ship around 62% of Russia’s crude oil exports, which in October alone brought almost £10 billion into Kremlin coffers, said the BBC.

What other problems does it cause?

The issues around the shadow fleet are particularly acute in the Baltic region, which is seeing more such vessels pass through its waters, said The Guardian. Maritime areas around Finland and Sweden were seen as a potential “Nato lake” when the two countries joined the Western military alliance in 2023 and 2024 respectively, but they have since become a “battleground for hybrid warfare”.

In August, Finnish authorities filed charges against crew members of a tanker suspected of damaging undersea cables by dragging its anchor in December 2024. The damage was reported to cost the owners “at least €60 million” in repair costs, said The Guardian.

But unless there is tangible or substantial evidence of a crime – infringing environmental, fishing or sea traffic law – the Swedish and Finnish coastguards’ ability to act is “extremely limited”.

The issues go beyond violation of sanctions. Ships sailing without displaying or registering under a valid national flag are operating “without proper insurance”, said the BBC. If a major spill were to occur, the financial fallout and clean-up operation would be huge.

How can governments counter them?

Establishing jurisdiction is challenging. National law can only apply in a country’s territorial waters, usually defined as within 12 nautical miles of the coast. Further out to sea, “freedom of navigation is a golden rule”. National governments have neither the legal ability, nor political appetite, to risk “escalating” the issue.

One way of tackling the shadow fleet is to boost powers to board suspected vessels for inspection, said Politico. In a draft declaration prepared last month for a meeting of EU foreign ministers, the EU proposed “more robust enforcement actions tackling the shadow fleet”, including pre-authorised boarding of suspected shadow fleet vessels, supported by bilateral agreements.

The draft also offered incentives to flag states to deregister sanctioned vessels. This appears to be having an effect. Earlier this year, Panama, the largest ship registry, committed to rejecting bulk carriers over the age of 15 years, which are often used in shadow fleets as their provenance is harder to ascertain.

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Vladimir Putin has said that Russia has successfully tested an (unarmed) underwater nuclear-torpedo powerful enough to “put entire states out of operation”. Speaking at an event for veterans of the Ukraine war last week, the Russian president said “there is nothing like” the Poseidon missile.

What is the weapon?

Russia’s new nuclear submarine, Khabarovsk, is armed with autonomous Poseidon missiles. Said to be 20 metres long and nearly two metres wide, they are capable of travelling up to 6,200 miles at speeds of up to 115 mph, deep below the surface of the water. According to arms control experts, the weapon breaks “most of the traditional nuclear deterrence and classification rules”, said The Guardian. “Launched from a submarine like a torpedo”, it is thought that they are “able to loiter as an underwater drone” before deploying a nuclear warhead “capable of triggering a radioactive tsunami to render coastal cities uninhabitable”.

“Compared to an intercontinental ballistic missile it is very slow”, said Naval News, but still fast enough to be “realistically uncatchable to existing torpedoes”, while its operating depth (said to be up to 1,000 metres) puts it “beyond reach” of defences.

What did Moscow say?

There’s “nothing like this in the world in terms of the speed and the depth of the movement of this unmanned vehicle”, and it’s “unlikely there ever will be”, Putin said, claiming that there are “no ways to intercept” it.

Kremlin defence minister Andrei Belousov said Khabarovsk and its missiles will “enable” Russia to “successfully secure” its maritime borders and “protect its national interests in various parts of the world’s oceans”.

A sensational report on Russian television boasted that one Poseidon missile could cause enough damage to “plunge Britain into the depths of the sea”, said the Daily Mail.

The more excessive Russian boasts of a “100 megaton ‘tsunami bomb’” are not reliable, said Naval News. “More recent estimates are two megatons”, which is still roughly 100 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

A new nuclear arms race?

News of the submarine launch has prompted Donald Trump to order the US military to restart nuclear tests for the first time in 33 years. But he said that the US would test on “an equal basis” to other countries, so as neither China nor Russia has carried out an “actual explosive nuclear test”, Trump “probably” means “reciprocal testing of nuclear-capable missiles” rather than the “actual explosive warheads that sit on top of them”, said The Telegraph.

His announcement still “bolstered concerns” that the world is “sliding into a new nuclear arms race”, said the Financial Times, as “much of the cold war-era arms control architecture has collapsed”. A return to US testing “would be a highly retrograde step”, providing a premise for Russia and China and other nuclear states to ramp up their nuclear weapons programmes, in turn encouraging non-nuclear states to “pursue their own”.

It wasn’t as calamitous as his first Oval Office encounter in February, said The Guardian, but Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s latest visit to the White House last Friday did not go well.

Ukraine’s president had hoped that Donald Trump, who has taken a tougher line against Russia in recent weeks, might agree to sell Kyiv long-range Tomahawk missiles. But Trump, who had shared a two-hour phone call with Vladimir Putin the previous day at the Russian leader’s request, not only ruled that option out but lectured Zelenskyy on the need to make territorial concessions. He apparently tossed aside maps of Ukraine during the ill-tempered meeting, warning Zelensky to accept Putin’s terms or be “destroyed” by Russia.

Reality check

Trump’s harsh tone should concentrate the minds of European leaders as they explore the idea of using frozen Russian assets to secure a £122 billion loan to Kyiv. It’s now clear that the US can’t be relied on. This makes Europe’s support for Ukraine more important than ever. Trump’s rejection of Ukraine’s request for Tomahawks has been presented as a concession to Moscow, said Jennifer Kavanagh on UnHerd, but that’s “unfair”.

The fact is, “these missiles were never truly on the table”. Kyiv isn’t equipped to launch them, and the Pentagon can’t really spare any – and Trump may be right in any case to argue that they wouldn’t shift the war’s trajectory decisively. The recent “diplomatic scramble” has delivered a reality check to Kyiv, but also to Moscow: Trump later pushed for a ceasefire along current lines, seemingly rebuffing Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede the rest of the Donbas.

‘Rattling Russia’s cage’

By dispelling some false hopes, Trump may have improved the chances of the two sides resigning themselves to an imperfect armistice. The mere possibility that Trump might send Tomahawks to Ukraine certainly prompted anxiety in Moscow, said The Washington Post. But once he withdrew the threat, the Kremlin soon lost interest in diplomacy. A planned meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest was shelved on Tuesday, after Russia rejected the idea of a ceasefire along current battle lines. Russia once again harked back to the “root causes” of the conflict, which is really just code for its desire to snuff out Ukrainian sovereignty.

The lesson of this episode is that “pressure works on Russia”. Trump should “put Tomahawks back on the table”, as well as German long-range Taurus missiles. At some point this war will end in a deal, most likely one involving some territory for Russia and robust security guarantees for Ukraine. “Rattling Russia’s cage some more might bring Putin to his senses.”

What happened

The White House Tuesday said there were “no plans” for President Donald Trump to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin “in the immediate future,” less than a week after Trump said they would meet in Budapest “within two weeks or so” for Ukraine peace talks. Trump told reporters Tuesday he didn’t “want to have a wasted meeting” with Putin or a “waste of time, so we’ll see what happens.”

Who said what

This “latest twist in Trump’s stop-and-go effort to resolve the war in Ukraine” followed a phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the White House called “productive,” The Associated Press said. Trump on Monday “embraced a ceasefire proposal backed by Kyiv and European leaders to freeze the conflict on the current front line,” the BBC said, but Lavrov shot that idea down Tuesday, insisting on the “complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops” from Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The “back-and-forth is the latest example of the cycle” in which Trump “teases some kind of diplomatic breakthrough, only to be pulled back” by Putin, The New York Times said. Trump has “by turns courted the Russian leader and threatened him — but has never taken action to punish Russia in a meaningful way,” and Ukraine always “seems to lose any traction” in the process.

What next?

Trump “suggested that decisions about the meeting would be made in the coming days,” the AP said. His “hesitancy in meeting Putin will likely come as a relief to European leaders, who have accused Putin of stalling for time with diplomacy while trying to gain ground on the battlefield.”

What happened

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed during a “very productive” phone conversation to meet in Budapest “within two weeks or so” to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin said Russia had requested the two-hour call, which took place as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was en route to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Trump today.

Who said what

Trump said on social media that he and Putin made “great progress” during their call and would meet in Hungary’s capital “to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War between Russia and Ukraine to an end.” Trump “has long courted Putin” but is becoming “increasingly critical” of the Russian leader as he flouts Trump’s Ukraine peace efforts, The Washington Post said. Thursday's call was an “opportunity for Putin to regain the initiative and promote Russian narratives” before Zelenskyy arrived and tried to persuade Trump to arm Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.

“Moscow is rushing to resume dialogue as soon as it hears about Tomahawks,” Zelenskyy said on social media after arriving in D.C. Putin’s call “appeared to dim prospects” that Trump would approve the long-range missiles for Kyiv, as seemed likely earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal said. Moscow’s “long-range curveball” fits an increasingly “familiar pattern,” the BBC said: “Every time Trump grows increasingly frustrated with Putin’s intransigence over Ukraine,” the Russian leader calls and Trump “backs off his threats to apply tougher sanctions or supply more destructive weapons.”

What next?

Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio would meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as soon as next week to lay the groundwork for the Budapest summit.

Ukraine is taking the war deep inside Russia, and it wants U.S. help to do so. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy believes American-made Tomahawk missiles could finally force Vladimir Putin into peace talks.

Tomahawk cruise missiles could reach Russian targets “far beyond any of the weapons the U.S. has provided to Kyiv until now,” said The Wall Street Journal. The Biden administration “never seriously considered” providing the weapons to Ukraine over concerns the move would “prompt a confrontation with Moscow,” but President Donald Trump has suggested he might allow it. “I’ll make a determination on that,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

Ukraine believes the missiles would give it the capability to hit Russian “military targets and energy facilities” thanks to their 1,000-mile range, said The Hill. Kyiv is already using drones to hit enemy oil refineries far from the front lines, but the U.S. weapons would “do even more damage against them, which definitely would hurt Russia,” said military analyst Emil Kastehelmi. Moscow has been “scathing” about the prospect, said CNBC. Introducing Tomahawks into the conflict would be “truly a serious escalation,” said a Kremlin spokesman.

What did the commentators say?

“Putin has no intention of voluntarily giving up his campaign against Ukraine,” said Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. But Trump could force him to the negotiating table by furnishing the Tomahawks and “imposing unsustainable military and financial costs on Russia.” The U.S. should ignore Moscow’s talk of “escalation.” Russia, after all, has fired more than 2,400 cruise missiles into Ukraine since the start of the war. “It would be a proportional response to Putin’s escalation.”

The question is “whether Russia’s latest threats deserve to be taken seriously,” said Peter Dickinson at The Atlantic Council’s blog. Moscow has repeatedly warned of reprisals against U.S. weapons support for Ukraine, “only to then do nothing when these red lines are subsequently crossed.” Putin has managed to limit support for Ukraine by “exploiting the West’s collective fear of escalation.” Sending Tomahawks to Kyiv could mark an “important turning point in the biggest European war since World War II.”

“Getting the Tomahawks is one thing — using them is another,” said Leo Chiu at Kyiv Post. Complex “launch platforms and guidance expertise” are required to actually operate the missiles, which means the proposed deal would be “largely symbolic” unless accompanied by Pentagon support. The unanswered question: “Would Kyiv be able to use the missiles if the transfer comes to fruition?”

What next?

Trump might be “bluffing” by considering Zelenskyy’s request, said The New York Times. It might also be a sign of his “growing frustration” with Putin for not doing more to end the war. The Russian leader “just doesn’t want to end that war, and I think it’s making him look very bad,” the president said this week. One ominous sign for Ukraine was that Trump announced Thursday he will meet Putin in Hungary for more talks on the war.

“If a war can be stopped in one region, then surely other wars can be stopped as well – including the Russian war,” said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Following Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, Zelenskyy is pushing for “stronger military capabilities” to enhance the prospect of counter-attacks against Russia, said the BBC.

Zelenskyy and Trump spoke on the telephone on Saturday, an indication of a “warming of relations” between the two leaders, said The Guardian. The conversation centred on the proposed US provision of Tomahawk cruise missiles, whose 1,500-mile range could pose a significant threat to Moscow.

What did the commentators say?

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin could be an “unlikely casualty” of the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, said UnHerd. Trump’s main takeaway from the Middle East negotiations has been that “pressure and arm-twisting succeed while friendly overtures do not garner results”: a conclusion that undermines Trump’s red-carpet attitude towards Putin so far.

With “next year’s Nobel Peace Prize to win”, the prospect of another conflict to resolve could reinforce the strategy of “pushing” rather than “luring” Putin to the negotiating table.

But there’s no guarantee that Trump’s attention will now turn to Eastern Europe, said RFE/RL. The US President looks to have “achieved headway” and celebrated the “pomp and circumstance” of his 20-point peace deal, but talks with the Russians have “appeared to lose steam” in recent months.

Achieving resolutions to each conflict are two very different undertakings. Israel is “diplomatically isolated” to such an extent that it “depends” on US support, and as it is the “largest recipient of US aid in the world”, American leverage is substantial. Russia, on the other hand, presents a separate challenge as it “enjoys” economic backing from China and military endorsement from North Korea.

Obtaining US Tomahawk missiles could prove decisive, as Ukraine’s strategy involves an “increasing number of long-range strikes into Russian territory that have expanded and remade the battlefield”, said Atlantic Council. The war has become more of a “technology race than a battle for territory”. Ukrainian engineers are “rushing to innovate” more quickly than Russia, due to their inferior size and their refusal to deliberately target civilians; Putin, meanwhile, “prioritises” attacks on Ukraine’s population.

Russia’s position might not be as strong as we have been led to believe, as it continually “bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains”, said Politico. Russia lost more than 280,000 soldiers in Ukraine between January and August, Ukrainian intelligence services claim, with around a third of those killed, and the rest either missing, wounded or captured.

What next?

Russia “warned” in September that if the US agreed to the use of Tomahawks in Ukraine, it could mean they were “directly involved in the war”, said The Times.

The conflict in Ukraine may be the “most difficult international conflict in the world to resolve”, said RFE/RL. “Influential” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has also called for “massive secondary tariffs to cripple Russia’s revenues from fossil fuels” to further turn the screw on Russia.

Though the introduction of Tomahawks into the conversation is a “step in the right direction”, said UnHerd, “if recent success has taught the US president anything”, it is that “he will need to apply even more pressure” on Putin and Russia.

The public “should be in a state of collective outrage and revulsion” at the crimes of Nathan Gill, said Neil Mackay in The Herald.

Gill, Reform UK’s former leader in Wales, has admitted accepting bribes in exchange for making statements in favour of Russia while he was a member of the European Parliament.

‘In bed with Putin’

The 52-year-old pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery between December 2018 and July 2019 involving payments from Oleg Voloshyn, whom the US government once described as a “pawn” of Russia’s secret services.

But instead of outrage, there’s “a collective sense of ‘oh well, so now we know the rumours were true’”, said Mackay. That “tells you all you need to know about Reform”. Gill may no longer be a member of Nigel Farage’s party, but when it comes to connections between Russia and the British far-right, “there’s much to pick over”.

Farage is “in bed with Putin”, Rachel Reeves claimed at the recent Labour conference. Boris Johnson, a one-time Farage ally, also described his stance on Russia as “extremely dangerous”. The former prime minister recently told the “Harry Cole Saves the West” show that he had “serious anxieties” about Reform’s position on the Ukraine war.

The Reform leader does have a “long record of falling for even the most inventive of Kremlin cock-and-bull tales”, said The Telegraph. His response to Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 “proved his willingness to believe Russian propaganda”. Putin’s “cover story” was that Ukraine had “provoked its own invasion” by applying to join the EU and Nato. That year Farage told the European Parliament that “amongst the long list of foreign policy failures” had been “the unnecessary provocation” of Putin – although Putin had already annexed Crimea.

Far from retreating from this speech, he “retweeted it approvingly” last year. Even on the day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “he could not stop himself from repeating the Kremlin’s cover story that the whole tragedy was a ‘consequence of EU and Nato expansion’”.

Until the channel was banned, Farage had a regular paid role on Kremlin broadcaster Russia Today, voicing similar views. Such thoughts raise “a vital question: is there anything he would not believe if the Kremlin claimed it to be true?”

‘Ideological alignment’

During the last general election, ABC News in Australia discovered a “network of Facebook pages” spreading “pro-Kremlin talking points” and posting support for Reform. Some of the posts were shared by Reform candidates.

In March, The New York Times reported that “one of the biggest corporate donors” to Reform had “sold almost $2 million” worth of sensitive technology to “a major supplier of Moscow’s blacklisted state weapons agency” – just two days after Farage was announced as party leader.

There is “no suggestion” that Farage ever received illegal bribes for his opinions about Russia, said Byline Times. But the Gill case highlights “a consistent alignment between senior members of Reform and Kremlin messaging”. And as Reform continues to rise in UK polls, that “ideological alignment raises urgent questions in need of answers”.

A person or a party “does not need to be a paid stooge of the Kremlin to be a threat to national security”, said Mackay. “Simply being in any way simpatico with Putin should be enough in this day and age to render a movement or an individual so beyond the moral pale as to be unelectable.”

“Russia is at war with Europe,” said Ivo Daalder on Politico. It has been attacking Ukraine for over a decade now, “with increasing ferocity since its full-scale invasion in 2022”. Now, though, it is increasingly waging a “wider war”. Until recently, European nations have preferred to see Moscow’s operations – “the assassinations, cyberattacks, sabotage of critical infrastructure, disinformation campaigns” as falling into “a grey zone beneath the level of armed conflict”.

But over the past month, its escalating incursions have become hard to ignore. Russian drones have been launched at Poland and Romania. Fighter jets have invaded Estonian airspace. Russian aircraft have buzzed a German frigate in the Baltic. Unidentified drones have brought Danish airports to a standstill. Europe’s leaders are slowly starting to recognise the reality. “We are not at war,” said Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, this week, “but we are no longer at peace either.”

‘Systematic disruption’

“Russia’s aim is to sow division,” said Edward Lucas in The Times. It is in “some difficulty” in Ukraine. Its offensive has stalled. Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries are causing fuel shortages and growing economic pain (VAT is set to rise). But instead of coming to the table, Vladimir Putin is “cranking up attacks on Ukraine’s European backers”. He hopes that “systematic disruption” will convince many Europeans that the price of helping Ukraine is too high. Sending jets into Nato airspace is designed “to plant corrosive, highly specific dilemmas in our minds”. Are we really willing to risk war with Russia over a sliver of northern Estonia? Would the US back up its Nato allies? Until it meets solid resistance, Russia “will seek to intimidate us”.

Still, it’s hard to calibrate the response, said Taz Ali in The Independent. It’s one thing for Poland, with its large air force, to promise to shoot down any Russian jet in its airspace. But are the Italian fighters patrolling the Baltic really going to call Putin’s bluff?

‘Invoking war’?

Russian subversion and sabotage certainly pose a threat, said Mark Galeotti in The Spectator. But is the situation “apocalyptic” enough to merit the word “war”? So far, the main costs to Europe’s nations have been “airport delays” and “essentially trivial Russian airspace violations”. The truth is that both Russian and Western leaders are “invoking war” for political ends.

In Russia, as the economic costs begin to mount, claiming that the nation is at war with Nato helps to make sacrifices more “palatable”. It’s the same story in the rest of Europe. It’s clear that Donald Trump expects Europeans to foot the bill for Ukraine’s conflict. The talk of war makes it easier to “accept the price to be paid”.

This month, Russian drones and fighter jets have encroached on the airspace of several Nato countries, including Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Estonia. And unidentified drone sightings have caused disruption at airports in Denmark.

These incursions, said Politico, raise “difficult questions” for the Nato alliance. Although “Moscow insists it’s done nothing wrong”, Poland has shot down some of the drones that flew over its skies, and several Nato nations are warning that “they’re ready to shoot down Russian aircraft entering their airspace”.

What did the commentators say?

The central question is whether or not it was Russia’s deliberate intention to breach Nato airspace. There is “no consensus view” on this among member states, said CNN, after speaking to “a dozen senior US and Western military, intelligence and diplomatic” officials. That puts the alliance in an “uncomfortable position”.

The Estonian incident – in which three MiG-31 fighter jets flew over the Baltic Sea for 12 minutes with their transponders off and without communicating with air traffic control – “appears hard to write off as a mistake”, said Archie Bland in The Guardian.

But there is a “fundamental difference” between Moscow’s and Nato’s rules of engagement, Charly Salonius-Pasternak, of the Helsinki-based Nordic West Office think tank, told Politico. “Russia has said they think they are in a military conflict” with the West but “we do not see it that way”. Nato’s parameters do not require the immediate use of force in response to an assumed incursion during peacetime. Nobody would “start World War Three because of this”, Ukrainian military analyst Mykola Bielieskov told the news site.

What next?

Nato’s response to “Russia’s reckless acts will continue to be robust”, said the North Atlantic Council. And the option of “shooting down a Russian jet that is intruding on our airspace is on the table”, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen yesterday. On the sidelines of this week’s UN General Assembly in New York, Donald Trump said he believed this is an option Nato countries should take.

But even shooting down Russian drones could be a challenge, said Yasir Atalan on Foreign Policy. The West will find it hard to do so “at a sustainable cost”. The price of scrambling fighter jets or deploying expensive missiles is much, much higher than what Russia is spending on each drone. Nato countries will need to follow Ukraine in finding “cheaper options, such as interceptor drones and energy lasers”, if they intend to withstand “large-scale drone attacks”.

Days after Polish and Nato forces scrambled to shoot down Russian drones that had flown into Poland’s airspace, Russian troops gathered in neighbouring Belarus for largescale war games; Indian and Iranian troops also participated. The Zapad 2025 exercises included a simulated nuclear strike. Although they were billed as defensive, analysts said they were designed to intimidate Europe.

In total, 19 drones crossed into Poland last Wednesday. Moscow’s allies claimed that they had strayed there accidentally, but days later, another Russian drone violated Romanian airspace. Warsaw said the incursion was a test of Nato’s defensive capabilities, and invoked Article 4, which brings a threat to the attention of its council. Nato then launched an operation to bolster its eastern flank. Donald Trump said he would impose tougher sanctions on Russia – but only if all Nato members stop buying Russian oil and gas and slap heavy tariffs on China.

‘Chinks in the alliance’s armour’

The sheer scale of the incursion into Poland makes it clear that this was a “calculated escalation” by Vladimir Putin”, said The Daily Telegraph. Emboldened by Trump’s indulgence, he wanted to see if Nato had the resolve to respond. Poland has painful recent experience of invasion and occupation, said The Independent. So its PM Donald Tusk’s warning that the prospect of conflict in Europe is “closer than at any time since the Second World War”, has to be taken seriously: this was the first time in Nato’s history that its member states have had to directly attack Russian forces, albeit unmanned ones.

Fortunately, for all Trump’s vacillations, Nato was still strong enough to answer the call. Yet there are “chinks in the alliance’s armour”, said The Times. Two of its members, Hungary and Slovakia, are “virtual allies of Russia”. And the leader of the US, its most powerful member, treats the Ukraine War as a “business opportunity”. Trump is making European nations buy US weapons to give to Kyiv; now he’s trying to stop them buying Russian gas, to boost sales of US liquefied natural gas.

Warning shots

Ever since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Western strategists have been asking who the Kremlin would target next, said Mark Almond in the Daily Mail. The consensus was that “small, militarily weak nations on Russia’s border”, such as Latvia or Estonia, would be the target. Yet instead, Putin picked Poland, a country which spends nearly 5% of its GDP on defence – the highest share of any Nato member – and has the third-largest standing army in the alliance, after the US and Turkey.

Does this suggest we are “teetering on the edge of World War Three”? These warning shorts certainly expose our weaknesses, said Edward Lucas in The Times. “The US insists (rightly) that Europe must take the lead in standing up to Russia.” But without it, there is nothing like a unified European alliance. Political stances vary wildly, while even supportive nations, such as France, Spain and Belgium, flinch at the risk and the cost.

Trump’s ‘latest wheeze’

Europe’s Nato powers have more than enough air power to keep the Russians out, said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Daily Telegraph. But they should go further, by establishing a no-fly zone in western Ukraine. This would save thousands of lives; and as a display of power, it could be the “catalyst to get Putin around the negotiating table”.

Nonsense, said Jennifer Kavanagh on UnHerd. Ukraine – in dire straits militarily – has an interest in exaggerating the Russian threat to Europe, to scare the continent into giving more aid. Instead of responding in a bellicose fashion, and risking a wider war, Western leaders should tamp down their rhetoric and “double down on diplomacy”.

Unfortunately, any diplomatic efforts are liable to be scuppered by Trump, said Jason Corcoran in The Moscow Times. His “latest wheeze” – promising to ramp up sanctions on Russia if Nato imposes tariffs of 50% to 100% on Chinese imports – is a “cynical stalling tactic”. He knows that this would be economic suicide for Europe. He is letting Moscow “off the hook, granting Putin much-needed breathing room as the war rages on”.

India’s participation in the Zapad war games, led by the highly respected Kumaon Regiment, has “raised eyebrows” amid signs that the US may be losing a “key ally” in Asia, says Lorraine Mallinder on Al Jazeera. But despite recent tensions over US tariffs, Trump confirmed last week that India and the US were continuing negotiations. Denmark announced on Wednesday that it would buy long-range precision missiles and drones, for the first time, to combat the threat from Russia. “Russia is testing us,” said Danish PM Mette Frederiksen.

Peace in Europe seems further away than at any time since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.

Far from forcing a ceasefire between Vladimir Putin and Kyiv, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has seen an escalation in Russian aerial attacks, culminating in this morning's dramatic drone incursion into Poland.

“Putin just keeps escalating, expanding his war, and testing the West. The longer he faces no strength in response, the more aggressive he gets,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X. “A weak response now will provoke Russia even more – and then Russian missiles and drones will fly even further into Europe.”

What did the commentators say?

Recent attempts to bring Russia to the negotiating table have focused predominantly on diplomatic efforts. By sending his envoys to meet directly with Russian negotiators and “literally rolling out the red carpet for Putin”, Trump believed he “could reset the bilateral relationship”, said Alexandra Vacroux in the Los Angeles Times. “It did. But not the way Trump intended.”

Last month’s Alaskan summit “convinced the Russians that the current administration is willing to throw the sources of American global power out the window”. At the same time, Putin has positioned Russia at the centre of a new global power alliance, alongside China and India.

The Kremlin has insisted on its own “security guarantees” before laying down arms. These “reflect a list of grievances” that Putin refers to in shorthand as “the root causes” of the war, said The New York Times. They include a guarantee Ukraine will never join Nato, limits on Ukraine's military capabilities and, most contentiously, to be part of any international security guarantees provided to Kyiv, "which analysts have equated with the fox guarding the henhouse”.

Western efforts to craft a security deal for Ukraine without considering the Kremlin’s position make them unlikely to succeed, said Samuel Charap, a Russia expert at RAND Corporation, a security research organisation in Washington.

Putin knows his maximalist demands are unpalatable to Ukraine and many of its allies, but he believes he is slowly winning on the battlefield so has little reason to broker a ceasefire agreement while he still holds out hope of a major breakthrough that will secure Moscow better terms – or even the collapse of Ukraine’s defences.

The alternative, as set out by Kęstutis Budrys, Lithuania’s foreign minister, this morning, is a ramping up of sanctions which “must strike at the heart of the Kremlin's war economy".

“In fact,” said Vacroux, “the Kremlin indicated a readiness to talk with Trump about the war only when Trump threatened very, very powerful’ sanctions in mid-July”.

What next?

Amid “frustration within the White House at the difficulty of brokering a peace deal” – and perhaps acknowledging that sanctions may be the quickest way to bring the war to an end – the Financial Times reported Trump has made an “extraordinary demand” that the EU follow the US on imposing tariffs on India and China for buying Russian oil and gas.

European capitals have been discussing potential secondary sanctions aimed at escalating economic pressure on Russia, but “many are nervous given the EU’s trade relations with Beijing and New Delhi”.

“It’s a question of, do the Europeans have the political will to bring the war to an end?” one US official said. “Any of these things will of course be costly, and for the president to do it, we need our EU partners and ideally all of our partners with us. And we'll share the pain together.”

What happened

Russia fired more than 800 attack drones and 13 missiles at cities across Ukraine on Saturday night and early Sunday, in Moscow's largest aerial assault since launching its full-scale invasion in 2022. At least four people were killed, including a woman and her infant, and a main government building, in a heavily guarded section of Kyiv, was struck for the first time in the war.

Who said what

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said the fire-damaged Cabinet of Ministers building would be restored, "but lost lives cannot be returned." President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media that "such killings now, when real diplomacy could have already begun long ago, are a deliberate crime and a prolongation of the war." European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the Kremlin was "mocking diplomacy."

French President Emmanuel Macron said last Thursday that 26 countries had agreed to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine after fighting stops. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded on Friday that such European troops would be considered "legitimate targets for destruction."

What next?

President Donald Trump said "yes" last night when asked if he was ready to move to a second phase of sanctioning Russia. That's the "closest he has come to suggesting he is on the verge of ramping up sanctions against Moscow," Reuters said, though "he did not elaborate." The "latest in a series of deadlines Trump has given Putin to show progress toward peace came and went last week," The Wall Street Journal said.

The leaders of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – a quartet described by Western policy analysts as the "axis of upheaval" – have met in public for the first time today at a huge military parade in Beijing.

China's display of laser weapons, nuclear ballistic missiles and giant underwater drones capped off a two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit of mostly non-Western world leaders, where President Xi Jinping urged them to take advantage of the turmoil sparked by Donald Trump's trade war, and work together to challenge the US-led world order.

Xi outlined his plan for "a more just and reasonable global governance system", telling the assembled leaders they should "shoulder together the shared responsibility of promoting regional peace, stability and prosperity". But the subsequent display of Chinese military might, in the presence of aggressor nations, undermine that message of unity.

What did the commentators say?

The sight of the leaders of China, Russia and India – the three most powerful countries not aligned with the West – "smiling and laughing" at the summit "like good friends" was "almost certainly intended" for a US audience, said The New York Times. It showed how "geopolitical disruption" caused by Trump has given China and Russia "a platform to rally" other countries.

The "tableau" was meant to convey the "close bond" between Xi and Vladimir Putin as "leaders of an alternative world order", while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to show the US "that India has other important friends".

Last week, Trump's 50% tariffs on Indian goods – punishment for the country's continued purchase of Russian oil – came into effect. India is "drifting closer to China and doubling down on its ties with Russia", said Semafor, "as Trump's tariff regime further fractures New Delhi's relationship with Washington".

Modi's visit to China – his first in seven years – "showcased his willingness to mend ties" with Xi, despite an unresolved border dispute. Modi also lauded India's "close cooperation" with Moscow during a "warm meeting" with Putin, "defying pressure from Trump to unwind India's dependence on Russian energy".

This was "a carefully choreographed summit", designed to showcase Xi's "vision of a new world order", said CNN. And, by following it up with a parade of China's "cutting-edge" weapons and "thousands of goose-stepping soldiers", Xi is sending a message that China is "a force that wants to reset global rules", unafraid to challenge the West.

"The message isn't new but Beijing is betting it lands differently" now that the US has "cut off its vast network of foreign aid". With the US "shaking up its alliances and causing economic pain" for friend and foe alike, Xi sees "an opportune moment".

But China's "attempt to take advantage of Trumpian chaos" has its limits, Amanda Hsiao, China director at the Eurasia Group consultancy, told the Financial Times. For many, the attendance of Putin, "amid his war on Ukraine", and of international pariah Kim Jong Un, will "undercut Beijing's message as champion of stability and multilateralism", said the paper.

It's clear that Xi is using the parade, officially celebrating his country's victory over Japan in the Second World War, to "recast history", with China as "guardian of the postwar international order". And he sees the projection of military power as strengthening "China's claims of sovereignty over Taiwan", towards which Beijing has grown increasingly aggressive.

But China is grappling with its own domestic issues, said the BBC: "a sluggish economy, youth unemployment and plummeting house prices". Even at Xi's big "moment in the spotlight", there is "discontent, even disillusionment".

What next?

Xi said leaders at the summit had agreed to China's proposals for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation development bank, and he pledged hundreds of millions in loans and grants to countries in the group.

But, despite "warm ties with Moscow", India cannot replace the West's economic support with sanction-battered Russia, said The New York Times. And even China has been "looking warily at Moscow's growing influence over North Korea".

Optics was "a key part of this summit, and the White House should grasp that its policies will result in other countries looking for alternatives to meet their interests", said Manoj Kewalramani, head of Indo-Pacific studies at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore. But "optics do little to alleviate the fault lines that exist in the troika of India, China and Russia".

What happened

Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders from across Asia Monday at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin. Xi took thinly veiled jabs at the U.S. and President Donald Trump's disruptive economic policies as he promoted a vision of an "orderly multipolar world" with China as one of its leaders. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing this morning to join Xi and Putin.

Who said what

Xi proposed an SCO development bank and offered other benefits for members of the regional organization, founded with Russia in 2001 as a Eurasian security bloc, but he "did not set out any concrete measures," Reuters said. Still, he "used the summit as an opportunity to mend ties with New Delhi," and "Putin and Modi were shown holding hands as they walked jovially" toward Xi in an "image designed to convey a mood of solidarity" against the West.

For now, the three leaders are mostly "united in a sense of aggrievement with the U.S. rather than a sense of common purpose," Carla Freeman of Johns Hopkins University told The Washington Post. "These are big countries with their own agendas."

But Trump's "steep tariffs on India and the tone coming from the White House have pushed New Delhi closer to China and Russia," The Associated Press said. Trump's "gentle treatment of Vladimir Putin has done nothing to pull Russia away from China," Michael Fullilove at Australia's Lowy Institute told The Wall Street Journal. "His rough treatment of Narendra Modi, on the other hand, is pushing India closer to Russia and warming up its relations with China."

What next?

Putin, Kim and other leaders are expected to sit alongside Xi Wednesday at a massive military parade to mark Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. But Modi, in an "act of careful diplomatic balancing," visited Japan before arriving in Tianjin and "will skip the parade and its display of Chinese-made weapons," the Post said.

What happened

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Sunday marked his country's 34th Independence Day from Soviet Russia with a speech in Kyiv's central Maidan square, flanked by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. envoy Keith Kellogg. From Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told NBC's "Meet the Press" that President Vladimir Putin had no plans to meet with Zelenskyy for peace talks pushed by President Donald Trump.

Who said what

"We are building a Ukraine that will have enough strength and power to live in security and peace," Zelenskyy said. "Putin can be stopped," said Carney, announcing that Canada will invest $1.5 billion (2 billion Canadian dollars) in military assistance for Ukraine. "The Russian economy is weakening. He is becoming increasingly isolated, while our alliance is growing stronger."

Norway said Sunday it was working with Germany to provide Ukraine with two more Patriot air defense systems. The Trump administration, meanwhile, "has for months been blocking Ukraine's use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russia," The Wall Street Journal said, "limiting Kyiv from employing a powerful weapon in its fight against Moscow's invasion."

What next?

"Trump thought the red carpet would impress Putin," Mykhailo Samus, the director of a Kyiv think tank, told The New York Times, but "Putin just wants to grab Ukraine and is not interested either in money or in red carpets." Russia had already "made significant concessions," Vice President J.D. Vance told "Meet the Press," including recognizing that Ukraine would have "territorial integrity" after the war and Moscow cannot "install a puppet regime in Kyiv."

European countries are working with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on proposed "security guarantees" to protect any future peace deal, measures that Donald Trump has suggested he will support after the historic White House meeting earlier this week.

There is a "wide spectrum" of what this could mean in practice, said the BBC, and a "big question mark" remains over what guarantees Russia will be willing to accept.

What did the commentators say?

The "inherent contradiction" of any security guarantees is that they must be "robust enough" to deter Russia from a future attack, but "not so robust" that Russia refuses to accept them and "threatens to target Western assets" in Ukraine, said the BBC. "Nobody wants to start World War Three."

Trump has ruled out Nato membership for Ukraine and US boots on the ground, but Europe still hopes that Washington will agree to provide logistics and intelligence, and a backstop of military air support if Russia were to renege on any peace deal.

Even for Europe, "I don't think boots on the ground is a credible answer", military analyst Sean Bell told Sky News. Policing the 600-mile border would require 100,000 soldiers at a time and a force of 300,000 to allow for training and rotations. The entire UK army would only make up 10% of that, with France likely to be able to contribute a further 10%.

It's unclear what Putin and Trump agreed at the Alaska summit but the White House claimed Russia had accepted "Nato-style protection" for Ukraine. US special envoy Steve Witkoff described the security guarantees that Putin had accepted as "Article 5-like", referring to Nato's mutual defence clause.

Keir Starmer said the coalition of the willing is "preparing for the deployment of a reassurance force" in the event of "hostilities ending". In practice, that is likely to involve "protecting Ukraine from the skies and sea" and helping to train and replenish its depleted armed forces – or an agreement "with only the threat of military involvement once any deal is breached", said The Times.

What next?

The question remains: how would the coalition respond if its forces were attacked or Russia re-invaded?

"A formal pledge to fight Russia would amount to Article 5 by other means", while a "vague mandate" might "tempt Russia to test European resolve", said The Economist. France's President Emmanuel Macron said the ultimate guarantee would be the strengthening of Ukraine's own – currently much beleaguered – armed forces and thus Russia should not be allowed to impose limits on the size or capability of those forces in a peace deal.

But Kyiv and Moscow's positions remain far apart on territory, said The Economist, and the "Trumpian vision of a peace deal" relies on Russia agreeing to security guarantees for Ukraine, "a state it denies exists".

What happened

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump at the White House Monday before the two leaders were joined by the heads of NATO and key European allies who had flocked to Washington, D.C., to backstop Ukraine. All the leaders emerged upbeat, though there was little sign of tangible progress toward ending Russia's 3 1/2-year war in Ukraine.

Who said what

The "tone and style" of Zelenskyy's private meeting with Trump was "far different" from their Oval Office sit-down in February, when Zelenskyy was "hounded out of the White House," The Associated Press said. This time, Trump voiced support for guaranteeing Ukraine's security, Zelenskyy "expressed his gratitude and wore dressier clothes," and Vice President J.D. Vance "kept his mouth shut."

Monday's "cordial but inconclusive" meetings largely "focused on what security guarantees the European nations and the United States would provide Ukraine" if Zelenskyy agreed to a peace deal, The New York Times said. Trump also took 40 minutes to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin to "begin setting up a possible direct meeting" between him and Zelenskyy, with Trump joining later.

Zelenskyy "quickly embraced" a meeting with Putin, but the "Kremlin gave a noncommittal response," The Wall Street Journal said. Ukraine's president also called Trump's signal that the U.S. would participate in securing his country's security "a major step forward." Trump said Washington would "help" the Europeans ensure security for Ukraine, and give Kyiv "very good protection and very good security," though he did not offer details. Earlier Monday, Russia's Foreign Ministry "ruled out the deployment of troops from NATO countries to help secure a peace deal," Reuters said, contradicting Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.

What next?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the "overall security guarantees coordination effort" to prepare for a Trump-Putin-Zelenskyy summit, Politico said. Zelenskyy said the guarantees "will somehow be formalized on paper within the next week to 10 days."

What happened

European and NATO leaders said Sunday they would accompany Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House as he meets with President Donald Trump today following Trump's talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. Trump went into the Alaska summit demanding that Putin agree to a ceasefire but left siding with Russia's proposal to proceed to full peace talks.

Who said what

After his disastrous meeting with Trump in February, Zelenskyy is heading to the White House "with backup," The New York Times said. The leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, NATO and the European Commission "are flying in" to "make sure that a viable, defensible Ukraine survives whatever carving up of its territory is about to happen at the negotiating table."

Trump and his team initially disclosed few details about Friday's summit, but according to Reuters, sources familiar with the Kremlin's thinking said Putin proposed that "Russia would relinquish tiny pockets of occupied Ukraine and Kyiv would cede swathes of its eastern land which Moscow has been unable to capture." Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN Sunday that Russia also made an important "concession": that the U.S. "could offer Article 5-like protection" to Kyiv, "which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO."

Trump last night said on social media that there was "NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE" and Zelenskyy "can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to." The Trump team's "fresh, if still vague, support for providing security guarantees" has narrowed one "gap" with Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal said, but a "chasm over Moscow’s territorial demands remains," making for "treacherous" diplomatic terrain at today's meeting.

What next?

The European leaders are "determined" to hammer out "'cast-iron' security guarantees" for Ukraine at today's meeting, the BBC said, and to ensure Trump "is not being swayed by his obvious personal rapport" with Putin "into giving in to the Russian leaders' demands."

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 131.
Mark Galeotti is the author of Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, published by Osprey and out in paperback now

For all that he can scarcely walk past a tank or a fighter jet without a photo opportunity of him peering out of the cupola or ensconced in the cockpit, Vladimir Putin is no soldier.

He did his bare minimum reserve officer training at university, being assigned a technical rank of lieutenant, but abandoned it as soon as he could. He shows little sign of understanding the realities of warfare, from strategy and tactics to the unavoidable necessities of logistics.

This is something even Russian soldiers – even before the current war in Ukraine – uncomfortably acknowledge. Once, I was talking to a couple of officers, and when we had got past their inevitable wariness at talking to a Westerner (some drinks helped) it became clear that they had a complex attitude towards their commander-in-chief: at once respecting him as a strong and capable national leader, but at the same time unconvinced he truly understood warfare.

The irony is that, for all but three of the 25 years Putin has now directly and indirectly ruled Russia, he has been at war, declared or undeclared, domestic or foreign. Most of these wars were, in one way or another, victories, especially because they were limited in scale and objectives.

Nonetheless, it seems clear that the lessons Putin derived from them, sometimes accurate but often deeply mistaken, led him to his fateful decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, and shaped his thinking as to how that should best be done.

The Second Chechen War: 1999 – 2009

When Putin first came to power, the challenge was to fight a domestic war with what he had at his disposal, after at least 20 years of catastrophic military decline. The rebellious Chechen people of southern Russia had in essence fought Moscow to a draw in the First Chechen War (1994-96), and even while still prime minister and president-in-waiting in 1999, Putin was determined to address this challenge.

In September 1999, a series of explosions in apartment buildings across Russia killed more than 300 people. The Chechens were blamed, and this was used to justify a renewed campaign. In October, Russian troops crossed the Chechen border, in a war that would be the making of Putin's reputation as a tough, ruthless and indomitable leader.

Unlike the previous war, the Second Chechen War was backed by massive force, supported by a comprehensive information campaign to justify its brutal methods, and also drew on Chechens willing to fight for Moscow.

This was an ugly conflict, even by the standards of civil wars. The Chechen capital, Grozny, was flattened. Chechen men were rounded up for infamous 'filtration camps', The official death toll was 5,200 Russian soldiers and police and over 16,000 rebels, but estimates of the civilian casualties range from 30,000-80,000.

Nonetheless, Moscow had demonstrated that it had the will and ability to keep its provinces in line. Most importantly, Putin felt he had proven not just that the Russian bear still had its claws, but that the ruthless use of force worked.

So long as he kept hostile journalists out and pitched this as simply a policing action against terrorists and jihadists, then his people would be happy and the West would do little but complain, and wring its hands when Russia presented it with a fait accompli.

The Georgian War: 2008

Chechnya, though, was at least legally part of the Russian Federation. What would happen when Moscow launched an operation abroad? Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili had long been a thorn in Putin's side, with his vehement anti-Russian rhetoric and his eager courtship of NATO.

To Putin – at the time technically just the prime minister, not the president, but still the undisputed master of Russia – Georgia needed to be reminded that it was part of Moscow's sphere of interest, not least to provide a warning to other neighbouring states thinking of challenging the self-proclaimed regional hegemon.

Two break-away regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would be the pretext. Saakashvili was provoked into attacking South Ossetia, Moscow denounced this as an act of aggression and invaded, pushing government forces out of the break-away regions.

From Putin's point of view, this was another triumph. His personal bête noire Saakashvili was humbled and Georgia's drift towards the West halted. He seemed less than concerned with the details, which were rather more mixed.

Of course, Russia was always going to be able to beat tiny Georgia, whose total military amounted to just 30,000 troops, of whom many of the best were serving in the multinational force in Iraq.

However, it turned out not to have been as easy as anticipated, with the Russian offensive dogged by blunders. Half its aircraft losses were to friendly fire incidents, for example, and generals found themselves having to borrow journalists' satellite phones to give orders.

That said, this gave then-Defence Minister Serdyukov and his Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov the opportunity finally to force serious reform on the conservative generals. It was seriously overdue: only 17 percent of the Ground Forces and 3 percent of the Air Force's regiments were combat ready and half the Navy's ships were not seaworthy.

The so-called 'New Look' reforms were meant to create more capable, mobile, flexible and professional forces based on smaller brigades and battalion tactical groups rather than the old divisions. This entailed shrinking the total armed forces by 130,000 men, especially by pruning the top-heavy officer corps (one in three were dismissed), while increasing the proportion of volunteer kontraktniki to conscripts.

These reforms, ironically, possibly even undermined Russia’s capacity to fight a mass war, geared as they were to generating forces able to deploy in small-scale interventions. Many of the reforms have been subsequently reversed since the invasion of Ukraine.

Crimea and Syria: 2014-15

Under Serdyukov and his successor, Sergei Shoigu, real progress was made. However, it was at best partial. In effect, by 2014 Russia had two armies: one which had been quite successfully reformed, largely comprising the special forces and other elite units, and a rump that was still quite some way from the 'New Look' ideal.

Nonetheless, this was enough for the seizure of Crimea following Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' at the start of 2014.

The Crimean Peninsula was strategically and politically crucial to Putin: home of the Black Sea Fleet and something almost every one of his subjects considered rightly theirs (it had been Russian until 1954).

When Kyiv was taken over by a new government keen on getting closer to the West, Putin decided that Crimea ought to be 'returned' and what followed was a textbook military operation. The so-called 'little green men' – Russian special forces – took over the peninsula almost without a shot being fired and it was then annexed.

One would have been hard-pressed to imagine more propitious conditions for such a coup de main: the Ukrainian military was in disarray, the new government was weak, the West did not want a confrontation, and thousands of Russian troops were already present on the peninsula.

It was a genuine triumph, but it was not a true test of the whole Russian military machine. Nonetheless, Putin was to gain an exaggerated sense of Russia's military capabilities, not fully appreciating just how unusual the circumstances were and how far its small scope required the deployment of just the best of the best.

Much the same could be said of the military deployment in Syria from 2015. Faced with the risk that Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime could fall to popular revolt, and also eager to hit back against a West that was trying politically to isolate Russia since its Crimean annexation, Moscow decided on a limited intervention.

In September 2015, Russian combat aircraft flew to their new base at Khmeimim in Syria, in the start of an operation that would see the ruthless use of air power, mercenaries and special forces to secure the regime.

While Syria was the most asymmetric of conflicts, where Russian air power was virtually unchallenged and where the enemy was divided, a militarily prepared and unified Ukraine was able to deny air superiority to its enemy.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 131. Subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

Forged In War by Mark Galeotti, published by Osprey, is on sale now

In the build-up to the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska today, the US president has made vague references to territorial swaps – a terrifying prospect for Ukraine and its allies "given that all the territory in question" is Ukrainian, said the BBC.

Vladimir Putin is said to be demanding control of the Donbas, a region consisting of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died trying to defend the Donbas, which is home to key industrial assets and millions of people, as well as being a fortified line protecting Ukrainian territory to the north and west.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has maintained that ceding land is impossible, because Ukraine is prohibited from doing so by its constitution. But Donald Trump appears to be giving this argument short shrift. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One earlier, Trump said land swaps would be "discussed" but that ultimately the greenlight would have to come from Kyiv. "I've got to let Ukraine make that decision," he said, "and I think they'll make a proper decision."

What did the commentators say?

Zelenskyy has stood his ground, telling journalists on Tuesday: "I am not going to surrender my country, because I have no right to do so." The Ukrainian president's red lines are that Ukraine "will not hand over any of its territory", that it must be "fully involved in any negotiation" and that Kyiv must receive "security guarantees as part of any peace deal", said the Financial Times.

"I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, 'Well, I have to get constitutional approval'," Trump told reporters on Monday. "I mean, he's got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap?"

More than three-quarters of Ukrainians "oppose trading land for a promise of peace", said The New York Times. Crucially, inside the military, "that figure is much, much higher," said Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center. Given that Trump has previously withdrawn military support and financial aid from Ukraine, it's hard to imagine what other leverage to accept a land-swap arrangement might be on the table.

Russia and the US have reportedly discussed a "model" that "mirrors Israel’s occupation of the West Bank", whereby Russia would have military and economic control of occupied areas technically under Ukrainian sovereignty, a source told The Times. Apparently the idea was raised "weeks ago" in discussions between Steve Witkoff, Trump's peace envoy, and his Russian counterparts. The White House has denied that this is part of its plan.

For Zelenskyy, this is a juncture of "maximum pressure" domestically as well as on the battlefield, said the FT. Trump's team "are aware this is a moment of weakness for Zelenskyy", who is contending with sinking popularity at home, said former EU diplomat Balázs Jarábik. There is a danger that any agreement the president might make involving any surrender of Ukrainian territory to Russia would fail to be ratified by his parliament.

What next?

The US president called the Alaska summit a "feel-out meeting" and the White House described it as a "listening exercise", perhaps to lower expectations in case a deal is not reached.

In a call with Zelenskyy and European leaders on Wednesday, Trump apparently agreed that a ceasefire would be a prerequisite before any peace negotiations. That hasn't allayed fears that Trump and Putin will hatch a plan redrawing borders in Russia's favour and then force Ukraine to agree.

Zelenskyy has said that ceding territory, particularly in the strategically important Donbas region, would be a "springboard for a future new offensive" by Russia.

What happened

Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses and advanced several miles near the eastern stronghold of Pokrovsk Tuesday, an unexpected incursion widely seen as part of President Vladimir Putin's efforts to boost his bargaining position ahead of his summit with President Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday. The White House Tuesday sought to temper expectations for the summit, calling it a "listening exercise for the president."

Who said what

Trump "is agreeing to this meeting" at Putin's request, with a goal to "walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. When Trump announced the summit last week, the BBC said, he "sounded positive that the meeting could result in concrete steps toward peace." His "initially higher expectations" appeared to be "based in part on a misunderstanding from a meeting between his envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Putin in Moscow last week on the terms Russia might accept," The Washington Post said.

The lowering of expectations is "good news," a senior European diplomat told the Post. Ukraine and its European allies "fear that Trump, keen to claim credit for making peace and seal new business deals" with Russia, might end up rewarding Putin for "11 years of efforts to seize Ukrainian territory," Reuters said. Trump said in recent days that a peace deal would involve "some land swapping."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters Tuesday it was "clear to us" that Putin's goal with the new offensive was to convince Trump that "Russia is moving forward, advancing, while Ukraine is losing." He reiterated that giving up Ukrainian territory was not on the table.

What next?

Zelenskyy was scheduled to participate in a video conference today with Trump and the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, Finland, Italy, Poland and NATO. All sides, the BBC said, "will try to convince Trump of the need not to be swayed by Putin when the two meet at the hastily organized summit" at a U.S. military base in Anchorage.

"If you're not at the table, you're on the menu", so the famous saying in international diplomacy goes.

As Donald Trump prepares to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, there is concern in Kyiv and other European capitals that they could negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine over the head of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is not invited to the talks.

European leaders – who will also be absent – have sought to present a united front with Ukraine. They issued a statement saying that "the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine", and that "international borders must not be changed by force".

What did the commentators say?

The "worst-case scenario" for Kyiv and Europe is that Trump and Putin reach an agreement on what the US president calls "land swaps". This would, "in reality, mean Ukraine ceding large swaths of its territory permanently to Russia", said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. The deal would then be "presented to Ukraine as a fait accompli".

While Ukraine want "agreement on a ceasefire – with the threat of secondary sanctions on Russia if Putin restarts the war" before any discussion on territory, it has to be realistic about the state of the war as things stand.

Russia now occupies nearly a fifth of the country and this year has slowly but steadily been utilising its superior manpower and supplies to make territorial gains.

Understanding this, Zelenskyy has told European leaders ahead of Friday's summit that while giving up Ukrainian land held by Kyiv remains a red line – and something prohibited by the constitution – Ukrainian territory in Russia's control could be on the table. This represents a "softening" of his negotiating position and "would mean freezing the front line where it is and handing Russia de facto control of the territory it occupies in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea", said The Telegraph.

"The critical distinction is between de facto and de jure concessions of territory," said Rachman. A legal recognition is "rightly unacceptable" to Kyiv, but an informal "recognition of Russian occupation of some territory as a brutal reality – in the context of a broader peace deal – may be necessary".

If it can maintain its independence and democratic institutions, then Ukraine "making some de facto territorial concessions might be a painful but acceptable concession".

Whether this outcome is acceptable to Putin is another matter entirely. "While the Kremlin's propaganda machine would be able to spin such relatively modest gains as a glorious victory to Russia's people, Putin would not be able to fool himself," said The Times.

As the president and his allies "have made clear on multiple occasions, Russia is not just fighting for land; it is seeking to eliminate Ukraine as an independent state".

Putin's "unchanging goal is to subjugate Kyiv, however long it takes and by whatever means necessary".

What next?

Trump "remains wedded to the notion that 'land swapping' will shape any deal to end the war in Ukraine", said Sky News.

He has said that Friday's meeting with Putin is to "feel out" what the "parameters" are for a future ceasefire. This is a "strategic preemption perhaps, setting expectations low, and preparing the public for failure".

But, "having played the ultimate card of a presidential summit, the only result that counts will be the full and complete ceasefire that President Trump has long demanded and that Ukraine accepted five months ago", said CNN.

"Short of that, the summit will be a failure with peace further out of reach for the foreseeable future."

What happened

European leaders over the weekend presented top U.S. officials with a unified framework for President Donald Trump's scheduled Ukraine peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. Putin told Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff at the Kremlin last week that Russia would agree to a ceasefire if Kyiv withdrew from Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. Ukraine's European allies said Russia needed to halt its fighting before any discussions of reciprocal land swaps.

Who said what

The European governments and Ukraine "scrambled" to "draw a common red line" after Putin's offer was clarified and Trump "let lapse his self-imposed deadline" to punish Moscow's intransigence, The Wall Street Journal said. Russian officials and commentators "crowed about landing" the Alaska summit, The Washington Post said. Trump handed Putin his first invitation to the U.S. since 2007, "apparently without the Kremlin having made any clear concessions over its war in Ukraine."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said it was unacceptable for any agreements to be reached "over the heads of the Europeans, over the heads of the Ukrainians." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated that his country would not cede any land to the Russian invaders.

What next?

Vice President J.D. Vance said on Fox News Sunday that the White House was working on "scheduling and things like that" for when Putin, Trump and Zelenskyy "could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict." The U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, told CNN that Trump could still invite Zelenskyy to the Alaska summit.

Not for the first time, Donald Trump might have jumped the gun when it comes to Vladimir Putin, leaving President Zelenskyy and a mutually agreeable ceasefire in Ukraine appearing equally lost.

President Trump's hope that he can end the war in Ukraine is "impossibly optimistic", said CNN. He plans to meet the Russian president as soon as next week – although Moscow might "bristle at the rush" – and Trump told European leaders on Wednesday that he wants to follow it with a trilateral meeting between him, Putin and Zelenskyy.

But while Yuri Ushakov, a key Putin aide, confirmed that the US and Russia have "essentially reached" an agreement to hold a meeting between Putin and Trump "in the coming days", the prospect of a three-way summit looks very unlikely. "This was just something mentioned by the American side during the meeting in the Kremlin. But this was not discussed. The Russian side left this option completely without comment," said Ushakov.

What did the commentators say?

Putin's reasons for continuing the war are stronger than "any incentive Trump can give him to end it", said CNN.

Taking part in negotiations could just be a stalling tactic to buy time while Russia's summer military offensive continues to make gains in eastern Ukraine. Pressure from Trump might deliver a partial win, such as a promise to halt air attacks on civilians, but "Russian ceasefire pledges are often not worth the paper they are written on".

"The entire Putin regime is based on not just concluding this war on Russian terms but continuing to fight it … the entire economy is propped up around the war," David Salvo, a Russia expert, told CNN.

Regardless of the outcome, the mere occurrence of a meeting with Trump would "represent something of a victory" for Putin, who has largely been ostracised by Nato leaders since the Ukraine invasion, said The New York Times.

The plan reflects the US president's "deep belief that his powers of persuasion, especially in an in-person meeting, are the only way to strike a bargain". That instinct was behind Trump's attempts in his first term to negotiate with Kim Jong Un of North Korea – meetings that were "cordial and an utter failure", theatrical photo opportunities that did nothing to slow North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

Putin could use Trump's preference for face-to-face negotiations to his advantage by manipulating Trump's eagerness for a deal to put pressure on Zelenskyy to make concessions, said The Washington Post.

While the US president signalled his impatience with Russia by punishing India with higher tariffs for buying Russian oil, they won't take effect for three weeks, which gives Russian forces more time to advance in Ukraine. A partial ceasefire could disproportionately hamper Ukraine, which relies on drones to attack key Russian military production facilities, without halting Russia's slow but steady progress on the ground.

What next?

Up for discussion at the meeting could be the fact that the Trump administration has proposed a tough new sanctions package designed to "strike at the core of Russia's war financing: its global oil exports" and a crackdown on its "shadow fleet" of ageing oil tankers that carry Russian crude to India, China and other countries, said Time. A bipartisan Senate bill seeks to impose tariffs of up to 500% on countries that continue to import Russian energy and Trump has said he is "very strongly" considering endorsing it.

If a meeting goes ahead, there are no signs that Putin would concede his unwavering demands. Trump sees himself as a great dealmaker but he has splintered so many alliances since taking office in January that Russia is now in a relatively stronger position.

"Because Donald Trump has changed so many deadlines and he's twisted one way or another, I don't think Putin takes him seriously," Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at New York's The New School, told the BBC.

Today marks 80 years since the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

More than 140,000 people died – tens of thousands instantaneously – with 70,000 perishing in a second bomb over Nagasaki three days later.

Yet as the world marks the anniversary, it seems that many of today's leaders have failed to learn the lessons of that terrible epoch-defining day.

What did the commentators say?

The memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seared itself "into the conscience of global leaders and the public", and "cast a long shadow over global efforts to contain nuclear arms", said Stephen Herzog, professor of the practice, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, on The Conversation.

From the late 1960s onwards a series of landmark non-proliferation and test-ban treaties sought to limit the number and use of nuclear weapons worldwide.

Eighty years after the first atomic bomb "we have blundered into a new age of nuclear perils", said Jason Farago in The New York Times.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine led then-US President Joe Biden to say that the risk of nuclear "Armageddon" had not been so high since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier this year, the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, issued a similar warning that we stand "closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before".

China is expanding its own nuclear arsenal, North Korea continues to build its nuclear capabilities, and tensions between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan remain high after a short war earlier this year.

This week, Russia announced it could renew the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles amid mounting tensions with the US. It comes just days after Donald Trump announced he was deploying two US nuclear submarines closer to Russia as a response to what he called "highly provocative" comments by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

The last arms control treaty between the Cold War superpowers – the 2011 New Start treaty which places restrictions on strategic nuclear arms including intercontinental missiles – is set to expire in just six months, and "the very principle of arms control may die with it", said Farago.

"All this with remarkably little outcry." The Federation of American Scientists estimates that there are around 12,000 nuclear warheads remaining on Earth today, "and yet we have let the bomb be absorbed back into Second World War dad history".

What next?

Time was when a US president "treated any declarations about nuclear weapons with utter gravity and sobriety", said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. Trump's latest outburst on his Truth Social platform signals we have entered a "new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes".

The same could be said of Vladimir Putin. Since the start of the war in Ukraine the Russian president and his allies have made a series of nuclear threats against Kyiv and its partners.

In response, the US air force is believed to have increased the number of nuclear bombs stationed in Britain, the first time this has happened since the end of the Cold War, Hans Kristensen, nuclear information project director at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Guardian.

It would also indicate that "Nato has changed its policy of not responding with new nuclear weapons to Russia's nuclear threats and behaviour".

The lack of historical perspective, and willingness to learn from history, is a specific problem for a man like Trump who "appears to have no sense of the past or the future", said Nichols. "He lives in the now, and winning the moment is always the most important thing."