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    My First Thought When I Heard Joe Biden’s News

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    Joe Biden called me out of the blue last month. Something was on his mind. It was a few weeks before he went in for tests on the small nodule found on his prostate and received the tough diagnosis that was released publicly on Sunday. “Mr. President, what’s up?” I asked, as I stepped outside a D.C. restaurant to hear better, leaving my family at the dinner table.What was up? He wanted to talk about “the future of the NATO alliance.”He told me he was planning to give a speech to remind people how incredibly valuable the Atlantic alliance has been over decades to preserve world peace and prosperity and how crazy it was to think that the Trump administration and its congressional allies would risk breaking it up. He wanted to bat around some ideas. He would call a few days later, he said, but we never had the follow-up, because, I suspect, cancer got in the way.I am not going to get into the argument today over whether Biden should have dropped out earlier from the 2024 presidential race. Immediately after his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump, I urged him to do so then — but with a heavy heart.The heavy heart was not just because we have known each other since we traveled together to Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul in 2001.It is because Biden has an unbreakable gut connection to how important America is to the world, one that I deeply share.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Meeting With Zelensky Offers Ukrainians a Glimmer of Hope

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      The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow. But the short meeting of the leaders, and subsequent comments, appeared to be a change in tone.President Trump’s standing among Ukrainians is practically on life support. But many cheered one statement he made on Saturday after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky, questioning why President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would continue to pummel Ukraine as the United States is trying to broker peace talks.“It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social after meeting with Mr. Zelensky on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral, adding that Mr. Putin may need to be “dealt with differently” — with more sanctions. The day’s events were a victory of sorts for Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine at a critical juncture in the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow. The proposal would force Kyiv to abandon its aspirations of joining NATO, offer Ukraine only vague security guarantees, and see the United States officially recognizing Crimea as Russian. Ukraine has rejected that deal, which the Trump administration had described as its final offer.But now, Ukrainians see a small glimmer of hope that Mr. Trump will not try to force Ukraine into a lopsided peace plan. It first emerged in the fallout from a massive Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s capital early Thursday that killed 12 people and injured almost 90. “Vladimir, STOP!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, in a rare rebuke of Mr. Putin.And then, the hope grew slightly on Saturday when Mr. Zelensky managed to wrangle about 15 minutes with Mr. Trump in Rome. Photos released by the Ukrainian government showed the two men sitting in chairs and leaning toward each other, talking like equals — a vastly different scene than a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office in late February that ended with Mr. Zelensky’s abrupt departure from the White House and the temporary freezing of all U.S. aid.The photos from Rome “were extraordinary,” said Volodymyr Dubovyk, the director of the Center for International Studies at Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University. He added that it was good for Mr. Zelensky to have some time alone with Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ukrainian Peace Plan Hints at Concessions, but Major Obstacles Remain

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      Officials in Kyiv plan to deliver their proposal to President Trump’s team, after rejecting a White House plan that would have given the Kremlin much of what it wants.Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counterproposal to a Trump administration plan that has drawn criticism for conceding too much to Russia. While the counteroffer digs in on some of Kyiv’s earlier demands, it hints at possible concessions on issues that have long been seen as intractable.Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for common ground. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.Mr. Trump flew to Rome on Friday to attend the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday; Mr. Zelensky had planned to as well, but his spokesman said on Friday that this would depend on the situation in Ukraine, where Russian attacks this week on the capital, Kyiv, and elsewhere have left dozens dead and wounded.In a social media post after landing in Rome, Mr. Trump said Russia and Ukraine were “very close to a deal” and urged the two sides to meet directly to “finish it off.” Earlier in the day, he said it was possible he and Mr. Zelensky could meet on the sidelines of the funeral. A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if Mr. Zelensky goes to Rome, he might try to present Mr. Trump with Ukraine’s counterproposal personally.“In the coming days, very significant meetings may take place — meetings that should bring us closer to silence for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said on Friday in remarks that were uncharacteristically optimistic when compared with the tone of previous statements this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Army Sergeant Gets 7 Years for Selling Military Secrets to Chinese Conspirator

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      Korbein Schultz, 25, who was an intelligence analyst, accepted $42,000 in bribes for sensitive documents, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in 2024.A former U.S. Army intelligence analyst with top secret security clearance was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for selling classified military information to a foreign national who was most likely connected to the Chinese government, federal prosecutors said.The analyst, Sgt. Korbein Schultz, 25, sent at least 92 sensitive documents to a conspirator, who was not named, in a period of less than two years, the authorities said. The material included technical manuals for intercontinental ballistic missile systems and information on Chinese military tactics, they said.Mr. Schultz, of Wills Point, Texas, received $42,000 in exchange for the information, according to the Justice Department.He pleaded guilty last August to six criminal counts that included conspiracy to obtain and transmit national defense data, bribery of a public official and exporting technical defense data. The counts all together could have brought a sentence of up to 65 years in prison.Mr. Schultz will also be required to complete three years of supervised release as part of his sentence, which was handed down in federal court in Nashville.“Protecting classified information is paramount to our national security, and this sentencing reflects the ramifications when there is a breach of that trust,” Brig. Gen. Rhett R. Cox, the commanding general of the Army Counterintelligence Command, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This soldier’s actions put Army personnel at risk, placing individual gain above personal honor.”Mary Kathryn Harcombe, a federal public defender who represented Mr. Schultz, declined to comment on the sentence.Mr. Schultz, who was assigned to the 506th Infantry Battalion, was arrested in March 2024 at Fort Campbell in Kentucky.Prosecutors said that he had shared his Army unit’s operational order with the conspirator before the unit was deployed to Eastern Europe to support NATO operations. The conspirator contacted him shortly after he had received his top secret security clearance, they said.He also supplied the person with details on U.S. military exercises in South Korea and the Philippines, in addition to lessons learned by the U.S. Army from the Ukraine-Russia war that are applicable to Taiwan’s defense, the authorities said.Military officials said that Mr. Schultz had given his contact in China technical manuals for the HH-60 helicopter and the F-22A fighter aircraft, along with a tactical playbook on how to counter unmanned aerial systems in large-scale combat operations.According to the indictment, Mr. Schultz unsuccessfully tried to recruit another Army intelligence officer to help him obtain more sensitive documents for the conspirator, who reportedly lived in Hong Kong and worked for a geopolitical consulting firm overseas. More

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      Can Trump Really Negotiate Peace in Ukraine, Russians Wonder

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      Many thought President Trump would be able to finish the war. Now they are not so sure.Many Russians cheered President Trump’s election because they thought he could make a deal for a negotiated peace in Ukraine that would satisfy the Kremlin.Three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, the disappointment in Moscow is palpable.In interviews, people in the Kremlin’s orbit have revealed frustration both with Mr. Trump’s whirlwind approach to the talks and with President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparent inflexibility in the negotiations. With Mr. Trump and his top diplomat warning on Friday that the United States could walk away from the discussion, some of them fear that a collapse in talks could lead to a further escalation of the fighting.Movement toward peace is going “much more slowly than it should be, and not the way one would want it to be,” said Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a liberal politician in Moscow who held a rare meeting with Mr. Putin in 2023 to urge a cease-fire. In the meantime, he said, Mr. Putin “is just fighting, he’s seizing the moment. He wants to achieve the maximum before substantive talks.”The question now is whether Mr. Putin climbs down from demands that seem little changed from the cease-fire conditions he outlined last summer, when he said Ukraine would have to agree not to join NATO and also withdraw from a large swath of territory before Russia stopped fighting.For now, the increasingly blunt warnings from Mr. Trump and his lieutenants that they could run out of patience have had little effect. Mr. Putin has not budged from his rejection of a monthlong cease-fire that Ukraine agreed to in March.On Saturday, Mr. Putin declared a one-day “Easter truce,” a tactic that appeared aimed at showing that Russia was still interested in peace.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War

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      <!–> [–><!–> [–><!–>On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –> <!–> [–> <!–> ]–> <!–> –><!–> –><!–> […] More

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      Search for Missing US Soldiers in Lithuania Continues as Crews Work to Extract Vehicle

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      The search in dense, muddy swampland came after the U.S. Army vehicle disappeared in a waterlogged area on Tuesday.The president of Lithuania on Friday visited swampland near his country’s border with Belarus, saying he was “hoping for a miracle” as military and civilian rescue crews worked frantically to extract a heavy United States Army vehicle carrying four American soldiers that disappeared in the waterlogged forest area on Tuesday.The American vehicle, an M88 Hercules, went missing during a military training exercise and was found on Wednesday submerged in a muddy bog. The soldiers have not been found, and efforts to reach the vehicle have been hampered by deep mud and water from a nearby lake.A Lithuanian official involved in the rescue mission who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter said tracks in the ground indicated that the American vehicle had veered off a sandy path toward a small pond and then turned abruptly into a wooded area that ended up being a swamp. It seemed to have sunk quickly, the person said, but it was unclear what happened to the crew.“Although many skeptics would probably say that there is nothing to hope for in these circumstances, I want to hope,” President Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania said during a visit to the site on Friday. “I am still hoping for a miracle,” he added.The missing soldiers, from the First Brigade, Third Infantry Division, were training near Pabrade, a city in eastern Lithuania near the border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia and a stalwart supporter of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.The U.S. ambassador to Lithuania, Kara C. McDonald, speaking to the news media next to Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nauseda, at the site of a rescue operation on Friday.Janis Laizans/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Putin Visits Kursk to Cheer Russian Troops Trying to Oust Ukraine

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      The trip comes as President Trump looks to secure the Russian leader’s support for a 30-day cease-fire.Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, dressed in fatigues, visited a command post near the front in Kursk late Wednesday to cheer on his military’s ejection of Ukrainian forces from much of the territory they had been occupying in the Russian border region.The Russian leader’s pointed visit came a day after a U.S. delegation met in Saudi Arabia with Ukrainian officials, who agreed to a 30-day cease-fire in the war. American officials planned to take the proposal to Mr. Putin, who has previously said he is not interested in a temporary truce.Dressed in a green camouflage uniform, Mr. Putin sat at a desk with maps spread out in front of him, according to photos released by the Kremlin. He appeared with Russia’s top military officer, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov.In video footage released by Russian state media, Mr. Putin praised the Russian military formations that had taken back much of the territory captured by Ukraine in the Kursk region. He called on the troops to seize the territory for good from Ukrainian forces, who have been occupying portions of the Russian border region since last summer. Kyiv had hoped to use the territory as a bargaining chip in peace talks.The Russian leader also demanded that Ukrainian forces taken prisoner in the region be treated and prosecuted as terrorists under Russian law. General Gerasimov said more than 400 Ukrainian troops had been captured in the operations.“People who are on the territory of the Kursk region, committing crimes here against the civilian population and opposing our armed forces, law enforcement agencies and special services, in accordance with the laws of the Russian Federation, are terrorists,” Mr. Putin said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Europe Welcomes a Ukraine Cease-Fire Offer and a Revival of U.S. Aid

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      Europeans reacted with relief to the announcement on Tuesday that Ukraine had agreed with the United States on a 30-day cease-fire in its war with Russia and anxiously awaited Moscow’s response.They were relieved because Washington announced simultaneously that it would immediately restore military and intelligence support for Ukraine. And there was expectation that Russia must now respond in kind, or presumably President Trump would put some kind of pressure on Moscow analogous at least to the blunt instruments he used against Ukraine.“The ball is now in Russia’s court,” said the two European Union leaders, António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, in coordinated messages on social media welcoming the deal and echoing the statement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.But in the same sentence the European leaders also welcomed the resumption of U.S. security support to Ukraine, giving it equal emphasis.“We welcome today’s news from Jeddah on the U.S.-Ukraine talks, including the proposal for a cease-fire agreement and the resumption of U.S. intelligence sharing and security assistance,” the message said on Tuesday. “This is a positive development that can be a step toward a comprehensive, just and lasting peace for Ukraine.”They also tried to remind Mr. Trump and his team that if Washington wants Europe to guarantee any peace deal in Ukraine, Europe wants to be at the negotiating table. “The European Union,” the message said (hint, hint), “is ready to play its full part, together with its partners, in the upcoming peace negotiations.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More