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      Trump speaks with Putin and advises him not to escalate Ukraine war – report

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      Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.The US president-elect advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, the Post reported.It added that Trump expressed interest in follow-up conversations on “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon”.During the election campaign, Trump said he would find a solution to end the war “within a day”, but did not explain how he would do so.According to one former US official who was familiar with the call and spoke to the Washington Post, Trump likely does not want to begin his second presidential term with an escalation in the Ukraine war, “giving him incentive to want to keep the war from worsening”.In a statement to the outlet, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “President Trump won a historic election decisively and leaders from around the world know America will return to prominence on the world stage. That is why leaders have begun the process of developing stronger relationships with the 45th and 47th president because he represents global peace and stability.”Trump had also spoken to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, according to media reports.Biden has invited Trump to come to the Oval Office on Wednesday, and on Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden’s top message will be his commitment to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. He will also talk to Trump about what’s happening in Europe, in Asia and the Middle East.“President Biden will have the opportunity over the next 70 days to make the case to the Congress and to the incoming administration that the United States should not walk away from Ukraine, that walking away from Ukraine means more instability in Europe,” Sullivan told CBS.Washington has provided tens of billions of dollars worth of US military and economic aid to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022, funding that Trump has repeatedly criticised and rallied against with other Republican lawmakers.Ukraine’s foreign ministry disputed a claim in the Washington Post article that Kyiv was informed of the call and did not object to the conversation taking place. “Reports that the Ukrainian side was informed in advance of the alleged call are false. Subsequently, Ukraine could not have endorsed or opposed the call,” foreign ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi told Reuters.On Friday, the Kremlin said Putin was ready to discuss Ukraine with Trump but that it did not mean that he was willing to alter Moscow’s demands.On 14 June, Putin set out his terms for an end to the war: Ukraine would have to drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw all its troops from all the territory of four regions claimed by Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUkraine rejected that, saying it would be tantamount to capitulation, and that Zelenskyy has put forward a “victory plan” that includes requests for additional military support from the west.Also on Sunday, Trump spoke to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “The chancellor emphasised the German government’s willingness to continue the decades of successful cooperation between the two countries’ governments. They also agreed to work together towards a return to peace in Europe,” a German government spokesperson said.In a call last week with South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, Trump said the US was interested in working with Seoul in the shipbuilding industry, particularly in naval shipbuilding, as well as “promoting genuine peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region,”, the South Korean leader said.Trump’s call with Putin comes just a day after Bryan Lanza, a senior political adviser to Trump, told the BBC that Ukraine should focus on achieving peace instead of “a vision for winning”.“When Zelenskyy says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace, once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelenskyy: Crimea is gone,” Lanza told the BBC.After his comments, a Trump spokesperson said Lanza “was a contractor for the campaign” and that he “does not work for President Trump and does not speak for him”. More

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      Ukraine’s MPs hopeful Donald Trump’s victory ‘not a catastrophe’ for war effort

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      Ukrainian politicians are expressing tentative hopes that the return of Donald Trump to the White House will not necessarily lead to a rapid and humiliating forced peace.An initial 25-minute post-election call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, during which the president-elect handed the phone to Elon Musk, is said to have been positive in tone and no specifics of any peace proposals were discussed.Zelenskyy also thanked Musk for making the Starlink satellite internet service available for use by his country’s military, for whom it is a vital communications tool on the front line.Though Trump promised to “stop wars” in his first speech after his victory over Kamala Harris became apparent last week, there are no settled outlines of a peace plan yet, giving Kyiv breathing space to press its own case.Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian opposition MP, said: “I don’t think that Trump’s victory is a catastrophe. Ukraine is now his business and if negotiations lead to a disaster it will be his, like Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This is a person who loves to win.”Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin on the phone on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post has reported. The US president-elect advised Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, according to the Post.Ukrainians emphasise the complexity of negotiating with the Russian president, who they hope may overplay his hand with maximalist demands or irritate the notoriously prickly American leader.“At some point, Trump has to present a plan to Putin and we will see if Putin wants to stick to it. From that moment there is a new reality,” Goncharenko said. “In the meantime, we have to work with the US and with US public opinion.”Putin has already praised Trump’s courage for his defiant behaviour after surviving an assassination attempt in July, describing him as “a real man”, though Moscow has said its goals in invading Ukraine – once described as “demilitarisation and denazification” – remain unchanged.The Russian president congratulated Trump on his victory and said: “He turned out to be a courageous person. People show who they are in extraordinary circumstances. This is where a person reveals himself. And he showed himself, in my opinion, in a very correct manner, courageously. Like a man.”He said he was ready for dialogue with Trump. “What was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to bring about the end of the Ukrainian crisis, in my opinion this deserves attention at least.”On Sunday, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, was upbeat but non-specific. “Trump during his election talked about how he perceives everything through deals, that he can make a deal that can lead to peace,” he said, though he added campaign trail statements were not always borne out.A day after his phone call with Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, acknowledged that the president-elect thought he could move fast. “I believe that President Trump really wants a quick decision,” he said at a meeting of the European Political Community in Budapest. “He wants that. It doesn’t mean that it will happen this way.”Specific proposals for a peace deal in Ukraine from senior Republicans are competing and to some extent contradictory. A critical factor will be Trump’s appointments to the state department and Pentagon as well as his choice of national security adviser.In June, the retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who previously both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s national security council, presented a proposal to Trump that would force Ukraine to negotiate by threatening to cut off military aid, freezing the conflict along the current frontlines.In September, JD Vance, now the vice-president-elect, proposed something similar, a plan that would allow Russia to take control of the 20% of Ukraine it currently occupies, and stipulating that Ukraine would never be allowed to join Nato.Another plan partly proposed by Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state under Trump now considered to be a candidate for defence secretary, involves a de facto partition based on the current frontlines while lifting “all restrictions on the type of weapons Ukraine can obtain and use” – including British Storm Shadow missiles. This would be paid for with money obtained from Russian foreign exchange reserves; $50bn in loans from G7 members was announced last month.Over the weekend, the Trump campaign distanced themselves from a comment made by another campaign adviser, Bryan Lanza, who said “Crimea is gone,” arguing the occupied territories were lost for good. Lanza “does not speak for” Trump, a spokesperson for the Republican said.All such proposals are diametrically opposed to Zelenskyy’s own “victory plan” presented publicly last month, which called for Nato membership plus unrestricted use of western weapons to force a restoration of its internationally recognised territory.Across Ukraine there is a certain fatalism. Maria Avdeeva, a Kyiv-based fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute thinktank, said: “I think Ukrainians have already learned the lesson that we have to count on ourselves” – a refrain that crops up repeatedly in conversation.Ukraine is already struggling on the battlefield to a degree not seen since the spring of 2022, particularly on the southern part of the eastern from, where Ukraine has lost 9km in a week in some areas as Russia presses forward aggressively, incurring, according to UK estimates, numbers of troops killed and wounded of as high as 1,354 a day.The numbers of cases of Ukrainian desertion (18,196) and soldiers going absent without leave (35,307) between January and September are double those of the whole of 2023, according to leaked figures from the prosecutor general’s office, suggesting a growing weariness in parts of the armed forces.Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s most senior military commander, said on Saturday: “The situation remains challenging and shows signs of escalation. The enemy, leveraging its numerical advantage, is continuing offensive actions and is focusing its main efforts on the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions.” More

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      Russia Says It Shot Down Waves of Drones Above Moscow

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      Officials said that more than 30 drones had been intercepted over suburban areas of the Russian capital in what was the biggest such attack since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Russia said its air defenses had shot down waves of Ukrainian drones over Moscow’s suburbs on Sunday morning, responding to what it called a “massive” attack that wounded at least one person and temporarily halted flights at three regional airports.Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said on Telegram that 32 drones had been shot down over the suburbs of Domodedovo, Ramenskoye and Kolomna in the largest such attack on the capital since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Defense Ministry said 34 drones were shot down above Moscow in the attack.The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, described the attack as “massive” and said that a 52-year-old woman was hospitalized with “burns to her face, neck and hands.”Flights at three regional airports, Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky, were halted on Sunday morning for several hours because of the drone attack, which was also directed at other regions in western Russia.In total, the Defense Ministry said it had shot down 70 Ukrainian drones over six Russian regions on Sunday, including the ones in Moscow. The Ukrainian military did not immediately make any announcements on the attacks reported by Russia.Also in the attacks early Sunday, local officials said a total of 23 drones had been shot down in the Russian border regions of Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk, where drone strikes occur more regularly. Drones also struck the western Kaluga and Tula regions.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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      50,000 Russian and North Korean Troops Mass Ahead of Attack, U.S. Says

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      Ukrainian officials expect a counteroffensive in western Russia to begin in the coming days as North Korea’s troops train with Russian forces.The Russian military has assembled a force of 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean troops, as it prepares to begin an assault aimed at reclaiming territory seized by Ukraine in the Kursk region of Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.A new U.S. assessment concludes that Russia has massed the force without having to pull soldiers out of Ukraine’s east — its main battlefield priority — allowing Moscow to press on multiple fronts simultaneously.Russian troops have been clawing back some of the territory that Ukraine captured in Kursk this year. They have been attacking Ukrainian positions with missile strikes and artillery fire, but they have not yet begun a major assault there, U.S. officials said.Ukrainian officials say they expect such an attack involving the North Korean troops in the coming days.For now, the North Koreans are training with Russian forces in the far western part of Kursk.The Russian-North Korean offensive looms as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to re-enter office with a stated goal of ending the war quickly. Mr. Trump has said little about how he would settle the conflict, but Vice President-elect JD Vance has outlined a plan that would allow Russia to keep the territory it has seized in Ukraine.Some U.S. military and intelligence officials have grown more pessimistic about Ukraine’s overall prospects, noting that Russia has steadily gained ground, both in Kursk and in eastern Ukraine. Officials say the setbacks are partly a result of Ukraine’s failure to solve critical shortfalls in troop strength.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 Should Not Let Putin Claim Victory in Ukraine, Says NATO Official

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      Adm. Rob Bauer warned against any peace deal that was too favorable to Russia, arguing that it could undermine American interests.A senior NATO military official suggested on Saturday that any peace deal negotiated by President-elect Donald J. Trump that allowed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to claim victory in Ukraine would undermine the interests of the United States.In a wide-ranging interview on the sidelines of a European defense summit in Prague, Adm. Rob Bauer, the Dutch chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, said: “If you allow a nation like Russia to win, to come out of this as the victor, then what does it mean for other autocratic states in the world where the U.S. has also interests?”He added: “It’s important enough to talk about Ukraine on its own, but there is more at stake than just Ukraine.”Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he could end the war in Ukraine in a day, without saying how. A settlement outlined by Vice President-elect JD Vance in September echoes what people close to the Kremlin say Mr. Putin wants: allowing Russia to keep the territory it has captured and guaranteeing that Ukraine will not join NATO.A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s transition team, Karoline Leavitt, said he was re-elected because the American people “trust him to lead our country and restore peace through strength around the world.”“When he returns to the White House, he will take the necessary actions to do just that,” Ms. Leavitt said on Saturday.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 Long Global Trail of Resentment Behind Trump’s Resurrection

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      As the Cold War wound down almost four decades ago, a top adviser to the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, warned the West that “we are going to do the most terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.”In the celebrations of the triumph of Western liberal democracy, of free trade and open societies, few considered how disorienting the end of a binary world of good and evil would be.But when the spread of democracy in newly freed societies looked more like the spread of divisive global capitalism, when social fracture grew and shared truth died, when hope collapsed in the communities technology left behind, a yearning for the certainties of the providential authoritarian leader set in.“In the absence of a shared reality, or shared facts, or a shared threat, reason had no weight beside emotion,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French political scientist. “And so a dislocated world of danger has produced a hunger for the strongman.”A different Russia, briefly imagined as a partner of the West, eventually became an enemy once more. But by the time it invaded Ukraine in 2022, disillusionment with Western liberalism had gone so far that President Vladimir V. Putin’s tirades against the supposed decadence of the West enjoyed wide support among far-right nationalist movements across Europe, in the United States and elsewhere. Western allies stood firm in defense of Ukrainian democracy, but even that commitment is wobbling.The curious resurrection and resounding victory of Donald J. Trump amounted to the apotheosis of a long-gathering revolt against the established order. No warning of the fragility of democracy or freedom, no allusion to 20th-century cataclysm or Mr. Trump’s attraction to dictators, could hold back the tide.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 and Musk-fueled falsehoods and threats backdrop US election

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      Americans went to the polls on Tuesday against a backdrop of misinformation – much of it suspected of originating in Russia – as the FBI warned of fake videos and non-credible threats of terrorism aimed at disrupting the US presidential election and discouraging voting.These tensions were stoked by Donald Trump supporters, and the former US president himself. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s most vocal surrogate, tweeted a video of support that appeared to reference the far-right QAnon ideology.The video, showing footage of the January 6 insurrection and featuring Van Halen’s song Jump as a soundtrack, came after an earlier social media post from the entrepreneur that repeated elements of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy from the 2016 presidential election.“The hammer of justice is coming,” read that earlier post.The flood of untruths was fed by Trump on Tuesday as he falsely claimed he had a “big lead” in opinion polls while casting doubt on the reliability of voting machines. Having already baselessly claimed that there was Democratic “cheating” in Pennsylvania, the Republican nominee said it was “an outrage” that it took so long to count votes in swing states.The former president also took liberties with the truth in an early election day video on his Truth Social platform. In an apparent reference to transgender boxers, the video featured Trump complaining that “men could beat up women and win medals” – a supposed example of how American values had collapsed under Joe Biden’s presidency, which the Republican has tied to his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.The disinformation and false statements from the Trump campaign came as voting in one key battleground state, Georgia, already faced disruption following what appeared to fake bomb threats against at least two polling stations.The threats were made against polling stations at Etris Community Center and Gullatt elementary school in Union City, on the outskirts of Atlanta, according to Fulton county police. Union City’s population is nearly 90% Black, according to the US Census Bureau, fuelling suspicions that the threats were aimed at disrupting a cohort expected to mainly vote for Harris.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told journalists that the “non-credible” threats came from Russia.“We identified the source, and it was from Russia,” he said, saying he believed that the source had been a Russian troll farm.“They’re up to mischief, it seems, and they don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election,” he added. “Anything that can get us to fight amongst ourselves – they can count that as a victory.”The bomb threats followed a warning from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] on Monday that Russia, Iran and China were involved in efforts at election disruption but that Russia was “the most active threat”.“Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences, judging from information available to the IC [intelligence community],” an ODNI statement said.“These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials. We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through election day and in the days and weeks after polls close.”In line with that statement, the FBI on Tuesday dismissed a video – made to look like a news clip and purporting to emanate from the bureau – advising Americans to “vote remotely” due to a “high terror threat” at poling stations.“This video is not authentic and does not accurately represent the current threat posture or polling location safety,” the bureau said.It also disavowed a separate video falsely depicting a political rigging voting among prison inmates.In a statement, the FBI said there were “two instances of its name and insignia being misused in promoting false narratives surrounding the election,” USA Today reported.The second video features a fake FBI press release alleging that officials at five prisons in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona rigged voting among inmates and conspired with a political party. “This video is also not authentic, and its contents are false,” the FBI said.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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