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    Confusion over the Alaska summit shows Vladimir Putin still calls the shots

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    In the five months since Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met at the Oval Office in late February, Ukrainian officials have worked hard to repair the damage of that day, which ended with the Ukrainian president being kicked out of the White House.With advice from European allies, Zelenskyy recalibrated his strategy for dealing with the Trump administration, and there was a feeling it was broadly going well. “We managed to reset communications, to find a new language to work with Trump,” said one senior official in Kyiv a week ago.It has also seemed as if Trump’s rhetoric was finally shifting, as he termed Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian cities “disgusting” in recent weeks and set Vladimir Putin a deadline of last Friday to stop the war or face the imposition of crippling new sanctions.Then came envoy Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow last Wednesday. Putin appears to have made no major concessions during the three-hour Kremlin meeting, and in return was rewarded not with debilitating sanctions but with an invitation to meet Trump in Alaska. The offer to thrash out a Ukrainian peace deal at a bilateral summit with Trump represents exactly the sort of great-power deal-making Putin has always craved. It will be his first trip to the US since 2007, with the exception of visits to the UN.Exactly how the Alaska summit will look is still unclear, with a particularly Trumpian kind of confusion and chaos accompanying its announcement. Kyiv, European capitals and even Trump’s own staff have been trying to understand what exactly was agreed in the Kremlin.The first announcements from the White House suggested Putin would meet Trump, followed by a three-way meeting between Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy. This was swiftly denied by Putin. As he put it, “we are still far from creating the conditions” for a meeting with Zelenskyy. An aide denied that the Russian side had ever agreed to a three-way meeting.A White House source told the New York Post on Thursday that if Putin did not agree to meet Zelenskyy, the meeting with Trump would not go ahead. But a few hours later, Trump denied that: he was happy to meet Putin anyway. The back-and-forth gave the distinct impression, not for the first time, that in the relationship between Trump and Putin, it is the Russian president who calls the shots.View image in fullscreenSome administration officials later briefed US media outlets that they may invite Zelenskyy anyway, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said in a Sunday interview he “hopes and assumes” that Zelenskyy will take part. For now, this does not seem likely. A senior White House official told NBC that Trump was “open” to a trilateral summit, but was “focusing on planning the bilateral meeting requested by president Putin”.As worrying for Kyiv as the planned format of the talks is the apparent Russian deal now on the table. The plan, as it has been reported after filtering through the Trump administration and then to European capitals, is that the Ukrainian army should unilaterally withdraw from the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk it still controls, which would presumably include the fortified military stronghold of Kramatorsk. In exchange, the Kremlin would agree to freeze the lines in other places.“Ukrainians will not give their land to occupiers,” Zelenskyy said over the weekend, adding that handing over land to Russia would violate the Ukrainian constitution. He said any deal done without Ukraine was destined to be “stillborn”.Zelenskyy’s public posture that Ukraine will never cede land is true up to a point. Kyiv is unlikely to renounce legal claims to its own territory, but the Ukrainian elite and much of Ukrainian society is increasingly ready for a deal that would recognise Russian de facto control, perhaps for a set period of time, in exchange for ending the fighting.The main problem with such a deal has always been what kind of guarantees Ukraine would receive that Russia would not simply use a ceasefire as time to regroup before attacking again. Brief discussions earlier this year about a European peacekeeping force to police a ceasefire were quickly scaled back to a “reassurance force” stationed far from the frontlines. Ukrainians would therefore have not much to rely on but Putin’s word, which they have learned from experience not to trust.Even still, there is a significant camp in the Ukrainian political and military elite who believe that, after more than three years of war, the situation has become so dire that the country is obliged to take such a deal, simply to allow for a pause in the fighting.The problem for Kyiv is the deal Putin apparently pitched to Witkoff is significantly worse than simply freezing the lines. “As things stand, Ukraine and Europe are on the verge of being confronted with exactly the kind of Faustian deal they feared would emerge back in February,” Sam Greene, a professor at King’s College London, wrote on X.Over the past few days, Zelenskyy and his team have been rallying support among European leaders and trying to put together an alternative, European plan. Unfortunately for Kyiv, previous experience suggests Trump is unwilling or unable to exert real pressure on Putin.“If Putin and Trump reach an agreement directly, Europe will be faced with a fait accompli. Kyiv – even more so,” said Roman Alekhin, a Russian war blogger, on Sunday. It is exactly that prospect Ukraine’s leadership will be doing their utmost to prevent in the days before Friday’s summit. More

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      ‘She’s the one that matters’: the growing influence of Melania on Donald Trump

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      Democrats respond to FBI agreement to locate Texas lawmakers: ‘We will not be intimidated’ – live updates

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      Democrats have responded to the news earlier that the FBI has agreed to assist local law enforcement to track down Democratic lawmakers who left the state to break quorum in protest of the state’s GOP-drawn congressional map.It comes after Republican Senator John Cornyn’s statement earlier, praising FBI director Kash Patel for his support.Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the move in a post on X.“The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” the House minority leader wrote. “We will not be intimidated.”Meanwhile, Illinois governor JB Pritzker underscored on a podcast on Wednesday that Texas lawmakers hadn’t broken any laws. He also said that any arrests by FBI agents would be “unwelcome” in his state.“They’re grandstanding, there’s literally no federal law applicable to this situation,” he added.The US Air Force said it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits, the AP reports.One Air Force sergeant said he was “betrayed and devastated” by the move.The move means that transgender service members will now be faced with the choice of either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service.An Air Force spokesperson told the AP that “although service members with 15 to 18 years of honorable service were permitted to apply for an exception to policy, none of the exceptions to policy were approved.”About a dozen service members had been “prematurely notified” that they would be able to retire before that decision was reversed, according to the spokesperson who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Air Force policy.A memo issued Monday announcing the new policy said that the choice to deny retirement benefits was made “after careful consideration of the individual applications.”Earlier, we reported that two senior FBI officials involved in a number of FBI investigations related to the president were fired. Now, senior politics reporter Chris Stein brings us more details:The Trump administration is forcing out a senior FBI official who resisted demands made earlier this year for the names of agents who investigated the January 6 insurrection, two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.Brian Driscoll briefly served as acting FBI director in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s new term, and his final day at the bureau is Friday, the people told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to discuss the move. Further ousters were possible.The FBI declined to comment to the Guardian.The New York Times further reported that the FBI was forcing out Walter Giardina, a special agent who worked on cases involving Trump as well as Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser to the president who was convicted of contempt of Congress.The ousters were the latest under the FBI director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, who had repeatedly alleged that the bureau had become politicized under Joe Biden. Numerous senior officials, including top agents in charge of big-city field offices, have been pushed out of their jobs, and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst.Here’s the full story:Donald Trump’s administration turned to the US supreme court in an effort to defend its aggressive immigration raids after a federal judge in Los Angeles blocked agents from profiling individuals based on race or language in pursuit of deportation targets.The justice department asked the supreme court in an emergency filing to lift the judge’s order temporarily barring agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally, by relying solely on their race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent.The move comes after a federal judge last month ordered the Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in seven California counties, including Los Angeles.Donald Trump said Thursday that he would meet with Vladimir Putin even if the Russian president won’t meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Trump, when asked by a reporter whether Putin would need to meet with the Ukrainian president to secure a meeting with the US, said: “No, he doesn’t. No.”His comments followed Putin’s remarks earlier in the day that he hoped to meet with Trump next week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates. But the White House was still working through the details of any potential meetings, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.Donald Trump announced he will nominate the Council of Economic Advisers chair Stephen Miran to serve as a Federal Reserve governor.Miran would fill the position opened by Fed governor Adriana Kugler’s surprise resignation last week, as she returns to her tenured professorship at Georgetown University.The term expires on 31 January 2026 and is subject to approval by the Senate.Trump said the White House continues to search for someone to serve in the 14-year Fed Board seat that opens 1 February.Miran has advocated for a far-reaching overhaul of Fed governance that would include shortening board member terms, putting them under the clear control of the president and ending the “revolving door” between the executive branch and the Fed.Trump has unsuccessfully pushed the Fed to cut rates. Miran, if confirmed by the Senate, would have one of 12 votes on monetary policy at the Fed, which voted 9-2 last month to keep rates steady.Donald Trump and Stephen Moore, a fellow at the rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, held an event at the White House on Thursday to show reporters “new numbers” that allege the Bureau of Labor Statistics overstated job creation during the first two years of the Biden administration.“I don’t think it’s an error,” Trump said during today’s event. “I think they did it purposely.”Moore said the data comes from “unpublished Census Bureau data”, and will supposedly be released sometime in the next six months.Moore is Trump’s former economic advisor and co-wrote the book Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy”, which praised the president’s economic plans. In 2019, Trump nominated Moore for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, but he withdrew amid scrutiny for his history of sexist comments and other scandals.Colleges and universities will be forced to disclose more student admissions data to prove that they are not implementing affirmative action policies, according to a directive sent by the White House on Thursday.The move comes as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on the use of race in the higher education application process. Ivy League universities, like Brown University, have reached settlements that require them to release information about applicants’ race.Colleges have been barred from considering race in admissions since 2023, when the supreme court overturned decades of precedent that allowed limited use of race as a factor. Trump’s directive would increase oversight of schools’ admissions processes.“Although the Supreme Court of the United States has definitively held that consideration of race in higher education admissions violates students’ civil rights,” the directive reads, “the persistent lack of available data – paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies – continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in practice.”The directive was confirmed earlier today by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

      The president’s higher tariffs hit major US trading partners today. Trump and members of his cabinet declared it an economic victory, with commerce secretary Howard Lutnick estimating that the tariffs will lead to “$50bn a month” in revenue for the USand treasury secretary Scott Bessent saying a “manufacturing renaissance” was on the horizon in an interview with MSNBC. Countries feeling the hit, however, are now scrambling to respond.

      Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas said today that the FBI had approved his request for the agency to help locate and arrest Democratic state lawmakers, who left the state last week to break quorum in protest over a GOP-drawn congressional map. “We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities,” Cornyn said in a statement.

      In response, undeterred Democrats have fired back. “The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X. “We will not be intimidated.”

      Meanwhile, on Truth Social, Donald Trump announced today that he’s ordered the commerce department to conduct a new census that would exclude undocumented immigrants from the official count. “People who are in our country illegally will not be counted,” the president said. It’s important to note that the US census has historically counted all residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status, as required by the 14th amendment’s “whole number of persons” provision.

      And in Florida, the administration’s immigration agenda hit a snag as a federal judge in Miami ordered a temporary halt to the construction of the detention centre being built in the Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz”. While the injunction says the facility can continue to operate and hold detainees, any further construction must stop while environmental threats to the wetlands are assessed.
      More than 60 countries around the world are scrambling to respond to the latest wave of US tariffs announced by Donald Trump, which came into force on Thursday.The Brazilian government said it was planning a state aid plan for companies affected. The president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said the duties were “unacceptable blackmail”.Switzerland said it was seeking new talks with the US after a last-gasp mission to Washington by its president, Karin Keller-Sutter, failed to stop a 39% tariff blow that industry group Swissmem described as a “horror scenario”.In a statement after an emergency meeting with Keller-Sutter, the Swiss cabinet said the tariffs would “place a substantial strain on Switzerland’s export-oriented economy”.“For the affected sectors, companies and their employees, this is an extraordinarily difficult situation,” Keller-Sutter told reporters.Despite a last-minute reprieve from Trump for Lesotho with tariffs dropping from 50% to 15%, the impoverished African nation said it was already hurting.Textile industry players in the country – which produces jeans and other garments for US companies including Levi and Walmart – said the uncertainty around tariffs over the past few months had already devastated the sector, with orders cancelled and jobs cut.Read more here:A federal judge in Miami has ordered a temporary halt to the construction of the detention centre being built in the Florida everglades known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.The temporary injunction, which lasts for 14 days, states that the facility can continue to operate and hold detainees, but any further construction must stop while any environmental threats to the wetlands are assessed.The plaintiffs – which comprise environmental groups and Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe – argue that the detention center’s construction ultimately violates the National Environmental Policy Act.The federal judiciary said on Thursday that it would be taking “additional steps” to strengthen protections for sensitive case documents after “recent escalated cyber-attacks” on its case management system.Politico first reported the news of a hack that hit the federal courts’ filing system.“Enhancing the security of its systems is a top priority for the Judiciary,” the Federal Courts system wrote in a statement. They didn’t offer any immediate information about who was behind the cyber-attacks.My colleagues are reporting on the latest developments following Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks that he intends to take military control of all of Gaza, before eventually handing it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly.The Israeli prime minister’s statement comes after special envoy Steve Witkoff visited the region last week to assess the ongoing humanitarian crisis, increase the flow of US aid to Gaza.You can follow along here:Democrats have responded to the news earlier that the FBI has agreed to assist local law enforcement to track down Democratic lawmakers who left the state to break quorum in protest of the state’s GOP-drawn congressional map.It comes after Republican Senator John Cornyn’s statement earlier, praising FBI director Kash Patel for his support.Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the move in a post on X.“The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” the House minority leader wrote. “We will not be intimidated.”Meanwhile, Illinois governor JB Pritzker underscored on a podcast on Wednesday that Texas lawmakers hadn’t broken any laws. He also said that any arrests by FBI agents would be “unwelcome” in his state.“They’re grandstanding, there’s literally no federal law applicable to this situation,” he added. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Putin’s propaganda: the strongman myth hides great strategic weakness | Editorial

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      For a quarter of a century, Russian media have cultivated a myth of Vladimir Putin’s inspired leadership. State propaganda allows no hint of presidential fallibility. When things go wrong, official news ignores the setbacks. When problems cannot be downplayed, Mr Putin is portrayed as the wise corrector of errors made by underlings.Foreign perceptions of Mr Putin have been shaped by this image. It has been boosted online by Kremlin influence operations and embraced by nationalist politicians who admire the Russian president’s methods of domestic control and contempt for the rule of law.Until recently, Donald Trump was the most powerful figure in that category. The US president is no convert to democratic pluralism but he has become notably more suspicious of Russia and less effusive in his admiration for its president. He has threatened Moscow with tightened sanctions if there is not progress towards a ceasefire in Ukraine by the end of this week. Steve Witkoff, the White House special envoy, met Mr Putin on Wednesday for talks. The substance of the discussion was unclear.Uncertainty also shrouds the reasons for Mr Trump’s shifting stance and its durability. June’s Nato summit appears to have been critical in nudging the president towards greater appreciation of the alliance and scepticism about Mr Putin’s claims to want peace.The presidential ego is also a factor. Mr Trump campaigned on a pledge to end the Ukraine war and imagined it could be done swiftly. His initial method was to sideline and bully Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, while offering sweeping territorial concessions to Russia. That was a disgraceful betrayal of an embattled democracy and a reward for unprovoked military aggression. It was a gift for the Russian president. Yet Mr Putin was not satisfied and instead intensified the onslaught.Mr Trump has no record of sympathy with Ukraine’s plight, but he is notoriously sensitive to a snub. Mr Putin embarrassed him by refusing to do a quick deal.The Russian president’s motives are also obscure. He may be betting on the US staying keen to secure a ceasefire on a land-for-peace basis, and so grabbing more land before White House patience runs out altogether. But he is also trapped by his own maximalist demands. He has sent hundreds of thousands of young Russians to their deaths on the grounds that the nation is locked in an existential struggle with the west. He has cast Ukraine as a rogue province to be reintegrated into the greater Russian motherland. He has geared the country’s economy for perpetual war. His image as a great military leader is in jeopardy if Mr Zelenskyy is still the president of a viable sovereign country when the guns fall silent.There seems no brilliant plan behind Mr Putin’s determination to continue a brutal war of attrition. He does it through inertia and paranoia. He appears afraid to end the fighting on terms that risk ordinary Russians fully grasping the horrific pointlessness of the whole bloody business.History will surely record Mr Putin’s conduct in Ukraine as the action of a delusional murderer. The myth of the Russian president as some kind of mastermind is just another weapon of propaganda. Its function is to project strength where there is weakness, and make victory seem inevitable when the facts of the war describe a litany of Kremlin failure.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      in US Politics

      World awaits Trump’s next move as Russia ceasefire deadline approaches

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      After taking six months to conclude that Vladimir Putin may not be a kindred transactional authoritarian leader but an ideological nationalist seeking the return of what “belongs to Russia”, the deadline Donald Trump set for the Russian president to agree a Ukraine ceasefire or face US sanctions on oil exports arrives on Friday.What Trump – who some had claimed was a Russian asset – does next to punish Putin could define his presidency.It is a remarkable turnaround and one that seasoned Trump watchers such as Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, said they had never expected. Only months ago the debate was about what further inducements Trump would offer Putin to end the fighting. His administration has not introduced any sanctions against Russia, compared with at least 16 sets of actions in every prior six months back to February 2022, according to a report submitted to the Senate banking committee by top Democrats this week.Trump first set Putin a 50-day deadline then cut weeks off it. “Secondary sanctions and tariffs against China, India and Brazil, which buy Russian oil, are the obvious next step in an attempt to stop the conflict,” the US ambassador to Nato, Matthew Whitaker, predicted on Tuesday.But as the deadline approaches, there is lingering scepticism about how far Trump will go. He has dispatched his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow for the fifth time for last-minute talks and on Friday Trump admitted he did not think sanctions would have much impact as Russians are “wily characters and pretty good at avoiding sanctions”.He has also given himself maximum room for political manoeuvre by ensuring the US Senate did not pass legislation before its summer recess that would have empowered him to slap bone-crushing 500% tariffs on exports from countries that import Russian oil, principally India, China, Brazil and Turkey.View image in fullscreenTrump had argued that the congressional legislation was unnecessary as he can act through executive orders, mentioning instead 100% tariffs on economies that import Russian oil – a whopping number, even if lower than the 500% floated by the Republican senator Lindsey Graham.It is striking that in the run-up to Witkoff’s talks in Moscow that Trump, normally keen to tout his leverage before a negotiation, has given only sketchy detail of the punishments the importers of Russian energy may face, either in terms of US sanctions on foreign refineries importing Russian oil or US tariffs on countries importing Russian oil.Some of Trump’s warnings this week to the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, that he would raise tariffs on India because its government did not care “how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine” do not yet seem to fit into a wider strategy. The tensions appears as much about Trump’s previous complaints with India’s trade practices as its purchases of cheap Russian oil. They are due to start on August 27.Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Century, said if India was to receive a penalty but China – the largest buyer of most Russian crude – did not, the Russian oil trade may just go further underground. Some of Trump’s advisers, notably the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warned China last week of tariff hikes related to Russia energy purchases, but it is hard to see such threats as credible given Trump’s eagerness for a trade deal with China and the risks associated with a sudden stop to trade between China and the US. In 2024 China accounted for 32% of Russian petroleum and oil exports.McFaul told Foreign Policy magazine about a possible boomerang effect if generalised increases in tariffs turn into a full trade war.Trump has wavered about the impact of economic pressure on Putin. Many academics say that sanctions on oil reshape economic relationships and change markets rather than produce changes in state behaviour.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThree years of sanctions on Russia have so far been – at best – a slow burn. Russia chalked up economic growth of 4% in 2023 and 2024, kept unemployment to an astonishing 2%, and even reduced social inequality by sustaining real wage growth that has disproportionately benefited Russians at the lower end of the economic ladder, a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based thinktank, found. The authors predicted that Russia’s economy can withstand the current level of sanctions for at least three more years.But the report also pointed to developing vulnerabilities in Russia. Interest rates are at 18%, inflation stubbornly high and growth is stalling. Russia has had to rework its 2025 budget as oil revenues slipped, largely because of a fall in prices and the discounts importers such as India could demand. As a result, government revenues from Russian oil and gas in May-June were 35% lower than the same period in 2024, the Kyiv School of Economics said in its July review. Russian oil export revenue is projected to drop 16% from $189bn (£142bn) in 2024 to $163bn in 2025 and $151bn in 2026.The federal budget deficit reached 3.7tn rubles ($40.4bn) in the first half of 2025 – 97% of the full-year target of 3.8tn rubles. This is more than five times larger than the deficit in the first half of 2024 and 57% higher than the largest first six-month deficit in recent years (2023). Oil prices are unlikely to recover significantly, meaning Russia will miss its budget target by a wide margin, increasing reliance on its national welfare fund (NWF) and domestic debt issuance.View image in fullscreenThe NWF’s liquid assets are also under pressure, with Russia expected to draw heavily on these reserves by year end. In a report this week, Oxford Economics predicted that Russia “may tip into recession”.The overall reason is simple: the level of military spending, including the cost of voluntary recruitment is distorting the economy. The economist Janis Kluge, who conducts research on Russia at the Berlin thinktank SWP, thinks overall Russian military spending is 8 to 10% of GDP once all expenditure including regional recruitment is included.The pressure could grow. The EU’s most recent sanctions package included a ban from next January on buying oil products made from Russian crude. The package for the first time put sanctions on a big Indian refinery, Nayara Energy, causing Microsoft this week to suspend software services. Other refineries could be placed under sanction – with the UK likely following suit – but the question then arises as to how the supply gap created by the loss of Russian oil can be filled.Moreover, if Trump is joining sanctions, the US and Europe will have to come to a joint decision on the continuing value of the elaborate oil price cap, a Biden-era device designed to squeeze Russian oil profits while keeping the global price of oil low.The cap was introduced across the G7 in December 2022 and operates by withdrawing insurance from any shipping company that has not obtained a certificate that it is selling Russian oil below $60 a barrel, but a multitude of problems have arisen.In recent months, as the price of oil has fallen, it’s become evident the $60 cap was set too high. The cap has also led to the birth of a shadow fleet of oil tankers operating without formal insurance that are now being sanctioned by the EU, the US and the UK. The UK and the EU have agreed to lower the price cap from 2 September to $47.60 a barrel, but Trump is keeping the US cap at $60 a barrel, a recipe for circumvention.The one prerequisite is that Trump must not back off, McFaul said. “Making threats and not carrying through with them is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in diplomacy.” The former ambassador recalled George Shultz, the great Reagan-era US secretary of state, saying “never point a gun at anyone unless you are prepared to shoot”. More

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      Durham disclosures further undermine Gabbard’s claims of plot against Trump

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      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of US national intelligence, hoped to uncover evidence that Barack Obama and his national security team conspired to undermine Donald Trump in a slow-motion coup.But if her crusade was aimed at proving that Obama embarked on a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely show that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump, Gabbard made a mistake. A previously classified annexe to a report by another special counsel, John Durham – appointed towards the end of Trump’s first presidency – has further undermined Gabbard’s case.It was a quixotic enterprise from the start.After all, the 2019 report from Robert Mueller, the original special counsel appointed to investigate the Russia allegations, and a bipartisan five-volume report the following year from the Senate intelligence committee – then chaired by Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state – both affirmed the offending January 2017 intelligence community assessment, which expressed “high confidence” in Russian interference.Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, seemed to validate the intelligence’s premise in 2018 when, standing beside Trump at a news conference in Helsinki, he admitted wanting him to win.The newly unclassified 29-page document from Durham, made public this week, contains a deflating conclusion for Gabbard. It confirms that Russian spies were behind the emails that were originally released as the result of a Russian cyber-hack of internal Democratic information channels and which Trump supporters believed showed the campaign of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, conspiring to accuse him of colluding with Moscow.“The office’s best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the US-based thinktanks,” Durham writes. He is referring to Leonard Benardo, of the Open Society Foundation, funded by George Soros, a philanthropist and bete noire of Trump’s Maga base.One of the emails purportedly from Benardo proposes a plan “to demonize Putin and Trump” and adds: “Later the FBI will put more oil on the fire.”That message and others, including from a Clinton foreign policy aide, Julianne Smith, became part of the so-called “Clinton Plan intelligence”. Benardo and Smith disputed ever writing such emails.In his 2023 report annexe, released on Thursday in heavily redacted form, Durham at least upholds Benardo’s disavowal – concluding that it has been cobbled together from other individuals’ emails to produce something more incriminating than the actuality.For Gabbard, who is feverishly trying to prove the existence of a “deep state” determined to sabotage Trump, emails suspected to have been confected by Russia is hardly a brilliant look in her evidence package.Some former intelligence insiders find that unsurprising – dismissing the idea as a Trump-inspired fiction. “Trump is lying when he speaks of a ‘deep state’,” said Fulton Armstrong, a retired CIA analyst who served under Democratic and Republican administrations. “But if there were one, it would not be Democrat. The culture of that world is deeply Republican.”The national intelligence director – who has never served in the intelligence services or sat on its eponymous congressional committee when she was in the House of Representatives – is likely to see Durham’s finding as immaterial to her quest to put Obama officials on trial for “manufacturing” intelligence.But Gabbard’s insistence – echoing her boss’s view – on the existence of a plot to torpedo Trump was dismissed on Friday by John Brennan, the CIA director under Obama, who told the New Yorker that Obama issued instructions that intelligence showing Russian meddling to be kept hush-hush, at least until polling day, to ensure a fair election.“He made very clear to us [that] he wanted us to try to uncover everything the Russians were doing, but also not to do anything that would in any way interfere in the election,” Brennan said.Gabbard has cited a 2020 House of Representatives intelligence committee report – endorsed only by its Republican members – challenging the assertion that Putin wanted to Trump to win.However, Michael Van Landingham, one of the CIA authors of the 2017 intelligence assessment now in her crosshairs, said credible intelligence cast the Russian leader’s motives in an unambiguous light.“The primary evidence to get to Putin’s mindset was a clandestine source that said, essentially, when Putin realized that Clinton would win the election, he ordered an influence campaign against Hillary Clinton,” Van Landingham told PBS News Hour.“Then we saw a series of events that happened with the hacked US materials by the Russian special services or intelligence services to leak those materials similar to the information a clandestine source had provided. At the same time, we saw lots of members of the Russian media portraying Donald Trump in a more positive light.“There was other information … collected by the US intelligence community … over time, having a high-quality, clandestine source telling you that Putin was counting on Trump’s victory, having members of the Russian state saying Trump would be better to work with because of his views on Russia that don’t represent the US establishment, all of those things gave us high confidence that Putin wanted Trump to win.” More

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      India to still buy oil from Russia despite Trump threats, say officials

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      Indian oil refineries will continue to buy oil from Russia, officials have said, before threatened US sanctions next week against Moscow’s trading partners over the war in Ukraine.Media reports on Friday had suggested India, a big energy importer, would stop buying cheap Russian oil. Trump later told reporters that such a move would be “a good step” if true.“I understand that India is no longer going to be buying oil from Russia,” he said. “That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s right or not. That is a good step. We will see what happens.”However, official sources in India, quoted by the news agency ANI, rebutted Trump’s claim, saying Indian oil companies had not paused Russian imports and that supply decisions were based on “price, grade of crude, inventories, logistics and other economic factors”.Trump’s remarks came a day after the White House announced tariffs of 25% on all Indian goods, along with a penalty for buying arms and energy from Russia amid the war in Ukraine.Trump has given an 8 August deadline for Vladimir Putin to stop the war or risk further sanctions on tariffs on countries that import Russian oil.Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Indian state-owned refineries had suspended Russian oil purchases amid the tariff threats and narrowing price discounts.But on Saturday, the New York Times cited two unnamed senior Indian officials who said there had been no change in Indian government policy related to importing Russian oil. One said the government had “not given any direction to oil companies” to cease buying oil from Russia.“These are long-term oil contracts,” one of the sources said. “It is not so simple to just stop buying overnight.”The sources cited by ANI said Indian oil refineries operated in full compliance with international norms, and that Russian oil had never been directly sanctioned by the US or EU. “Instead, it was subjected to a G7-EU price-cap mechanism designed to limit revenue while ensuring global supplies continued to flow.”They added: “India’s purchases have remained fully legitimate and within the framework of international norms.”The sources also noted that if India had not “absorbed discounted Russian crude combined with Opec+ production cuts of 5.8 mb/d [millions of barrels a day], global oil prices could have surged well beyond the March 2022 peak of US$137/bbl [a barrel], intensifying inflationary pressures worldwide”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRussia is the top oil supplier to India, responsible for about 35% of the country’s supplies. India says that as a major energy importer it must find the cheapest supplies to protect its population against rising costs.On Friday, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, said: “We look at what is available in the markets, what is on offer, and also what is the prevailing global situation or circumstances.”Jaiswal added that India had a “steady and time-tested partnership” with Russia.This partnership has been a point of contention for the White House, with Trump posting on Truth Social on 30 July that while India was “our friend”, it had always bought most of its military equipment from Russia and was “Russia’s largest buyer of ENERGY, along with China, at a time when everyone wants Russia to STOP THE KILLING IN UKRAINE – ALL THINGS NOT GOOD!”In a second post, Trump added: “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”Ukraine’s military said on Saturday it had hit oil facilities inside Russia, including a refinery in Ryazan, causing a fire on its premises. The strike also hit an oil storage facility, a military airfield for drones and an electronics factory. More

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      Trump cuts deadline for Putin to reach Ukraine peace deal to ‘10 or 12 days’

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      Donald Trump’s timeline for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine has sped up, the president said while visiting Nato ally Great Britain on Monday.“I’m going to make a new deadline of about 10, 10 or 12 days from today,” Trump said in response to a question while sitting with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer. “There’s no reason in waiting. There’s no reason in waiting. It’s 50 days. I want to be generous, but we just don’t see any progress being made.”Russian and Ukrainian diplomats met in Istanbul last week, agreeing on little more than a prisoner exchange. Ukraine proposed a summit by the end of August between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, but Russia’s reply was that such a meeting would only be appropriate if it were to sign an agreement. The meeting was the third negotiation in Istanbul. Putin has not attended any of the talks, despite Trump’s exhortations.Trump’s comments in recent weeks reflect the continuing change from his almost-conciliatory posture. US diplomats asked China to stop exports of dual-use goods that the Washington says contribute to Russia’s military industrial base.Trump said he was “disappointed” in Putin earlier on Monday. “We thought we had that settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever. You have bodies lying all over the street, and I say that’s not the way to do it. So we’ll see what happens with that.”Two weeks ago, Trump promised a punishing round of new sanctions against Russia if Putin did not begin a ceasefire period for negotiations. An agreement for European allies to purchase billions of dollars in additional armaments for Ukraine, including Patriot missile defense systems, accompanied the 15 July statement during a meeting with Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump hosted Starmer and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, where ending the war in Ukraine and trade issues have been at the top of the agenda. Before leaving Washington on Friday, Trump said that he was considering secondary sanctions on Russia amid the war in Ukraine. More

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      Trump’s shift on Ukraine has been dramatic – but will it change the war? | Rajan Menon

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      Donald Trump presents himself as a peerless president, an unrivaled negotiator, even a “genius”. So it’s a unique moment when he comes close – I emphasize the qualifier –to conceding that another leader has outfoxed him. Trump suggested as much recently when characterizing Vladimir Putin’s modus operandi. “Putin,” he told reporters on 13 July, “really surprised a lot of people. He talks nice and then bombs everybody in the evening.” Melania Trump may have contributed to this reassessment. As Trump recounted recently, when he told her about a “wonderful conversation” with the Russian leader, she responded, “Oh, really? Another city was just hit.”Trump’s new take on Putin is a break with the past. His esteem for Putin – whose decisions he has described as “savvy” and “genius” – has contrasted starkly with his derisive comments about the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he memorably disrespected during a White House meeting and even blamed for starting the war.As recently as February, he declared that Russia’s invasion didn’t matter to the United States because, unlike Europe, it was separated from Ukraine by “a big, big beautiful ocean”. He criticized Joe Biden’s assistance to Ukraine as a waste of taxpayers’ money.Now, Trump has not only changed his view of Putin, stunning many within his “America First” MagaA movement; he’s decided to start arming Ukraine. Well, sort of.Trump has gone beyond in effect conceding that Putin has played him. He has decided to sell military equipment to individual European countries so that they can supply Ukraine and restock their arsenals with purchases from the United States. The president formally announced the change during his 14 July meeting with Mark Rutte, Nato’s secretary general.There was more. Trump warned Putin that if he did not accept a ceasefire – which he has steadfastly refused, just as he has ignored Trump’s demand to stop bombing Ukraine’s cities – within 50 days, Russia would be slammed with tariffs as high as 100%, as would countries that continued to trade with it after the deadline.Two things are clear. First, Trump’s perspective on Putin has changed, unexpectedly and dramatically. Second, a war that Trump once said was none of America’s business now apparently matters. The president said European countries would buy “top of the line” American military equipment worth “billions of dollars” to arm Ukraine. According to one report citing “a source familiar with the plan”, the total will be $10bn.This all sounds like a very big deal. But here’s where it becomes important to go beyond the headlines and soundbites and delve into the details.Take the $10bn figure. That’s certainly not chump change. Moreover, the main piece of equipment specified so far, the Patriot “long range, high altitude, all weather” missile defense system, will provide desperately needed relief to Ukrainian city dwellers, who have endured relentless waves of drone attacks – several hundred a night – followed by missiles that slice through overwhelmed defenses. Ukraine has some Patriots but needs more: it’s a vast country with a dozen cities whose populations exceed 400,000.However, a Patriot battery (launchers, missiles, a radar system, a control center, antenna masts, and a power generator) costs $1bn, the missiles alone $4m apiece. Ukraine may not need 10 Patriot batteries, but even a smaller number will consume a large proportion of the $10bn package. The other system that has been mentioned is the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (Jassm), which combines stealth technology and GPS guidance with a 230-mile range. Ukraine will be able to use its American-made F-16 jets to fire Jassms into Russia from positions beyond the reach of Russian air defense systems. But a single Jassm costs about $1.5m, so the costs will add up quickly. Additional items have been mentioned but only generically; still, their price must also be figured in, bearing in mind that the war could drag on. So, $10bn could be depleted quickly.Moreover, beyond a certain point the US cannot sell equipment from its own stocks without regard to its military readiness requirements. Precisely for that reason, the defense department recently declined to send Ukraine some of the equipment promised under Joe Biden.And Trump has not said that there will be follow-on sales to benefit Ukraine once the $10bn mark is reached. Even if he were to change his mind, individual European countries would be able to buy only so much American weaponry without straining their finances, especially because France and Italy have opted out of the arrangement. Trump has been uninterested in joining the recent move by the UK and the EU to impose a $47.60 per barrel price cap on Russian oil sales, toughening the $60 limit the west enacted in 2022. Finally, Trump isn’t going to resume Biden’s multibillion-dollar military assistance packages – 70-plus tranches of equipment, according to the DoD.Trump’s 50-day tariff deadline permits Putin to continue his summer offensive, and may even provide an incentive to accelerate it. Russia has already shrugged off Trump’s tariff threat. Its exports to the US in 2024 amounted to $526m, a tiny fraction of its global sales.By contrast, Trump’s secondary tariffs will hurt Russia, which earned $192bn in 2024 from its global exports of oil and related products, much of that sum from India and China. If the president follows through with his threat, Beijing will surely retaliate, and the consequence will be painful: the United States exports to China totaled $144bn last year. Will Trump proceed anyway, and during his ongoing trade wars, which have already started increasing prices in the US? His track record on tariff threats leaves room for doubt.Ukraine’s leaders are understandably elated by Trump’s reappraisal of Putin. But it’s premature to conclude that it’s a turning point that could change the war’s trajectory. Washington’s new policy may prove far less momentous than Maga critics fear and not quite as transformative as Kyiv and its western supporters hope for.

      Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies More