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      In Ukraine’s Frontline Town of Sloviansk, a Taste of Normalcy Beckons

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      Serhii Kovalov doesn’t like sushi. Nor does the sushi chef at his restaurant in eastern Ukraine.But when customers started asking for it, Mr. Kovalov navigated both enemy shelling and ordinary supply-chain issues to get fresh fish for Philadelphia rolls to his frontline town, Sloviansk.Now, as Russian forces have drawn closer and life gets more bleak, many Sloviansk residents are weighing whether to flee. Not Mr. Kovalov. He’s determined to keep serving sushi to soldiers and civilians who are seeking comfort, sustenance or a taste of something special after more than three years of war.“I know I’m needed here,” the 30-year-old Mr. Kovalov said, gesturing at the restaurant and the town outside that has long been in Russia’s cross hairs. “So I stay.”Sushi has long been wildly popular in Ukraine, and for people in Sloviansk, this treat provides a sense of much-needed normalcy.When Sloviansk came under attack in February 2022 when Russia’s full-scale invasion began, sushi wasn’t even on the menu at Mr. Kovalov’s restaurant, Slavnyi Horod, or “Glorious City.”Serhii Kovalov, the restaurant’s owner, in front of an apartment he was living in with his wife when it was hit by a Russian missile in 2022.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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      ‘I escaped one gulag only to end up in another’: Russian asylum seekers face Ice detention in the US

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      For most of the four years of Joe Biden was in office, citizens of Russia and other post-Soviet states seeking asylum in the US were generally released into the country while they awaited hearings on their claim in immigration court.But since last summer, many have been detained upon entering the US, and some of them have been held for more than a year, lawyers, activists and detainees say. Some children have been separated from their parents.“My Russian clients tell me, ‘Now our prison is 80% Russian, the remaining 20% are from rotating nationalities who stay for a while,’” said immigration attorney Julia Nikolaev, who has been advocating for detainees’ rights alongside representatives of the Russian opposition. “Only Russians and a few other post-Soviet nationals remain in detention until their final hearings.”Alexei Demin, a 62-year-old former naval officer from Moscow, was detained in July of last year.In the last 20 years, Demin rarely missed an anti-Vladimir Putin protest in the Russian capital. He had become concerned almost immediately after Putin, a former KGB agent, rose to power, he said. For years, he criticized Putin’s regime on Facebook, and he was detained twice at protests. Still, he never imagined that he would end up fleeing his homeland for fear that Putin’s regime would imprison him. Or that he would end up imprisoned in the US.When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a colleague asked Demin why he wasn’t enlisting to fight. He replied: “If I go, it will be on Ukraine’s side.” Soon, as the crackdown on dissent in Russia intensified amid the war, Demin and his wife, like many others who had long openly opposed Putin, fled to the US to seek political asylum. For years, Russians have been among the top five nationalities granted asylum.The couple arrived in the US in the summer of 2024, after securing an appointment through CBP One, the app launched by the Biden administration (and since then shut down by Donald Trump) allowing asylum applicants to schedule to meet with immigration officials. At their appointment, Demin and his wife were detained, separated and sent to detention centers in different states. They haven’t seen each other since.His predicament, Demin said, was “a trap and a blatant injustice”.“This is how the US treats people who protest against Russia’s policies,” he said in a call from a detention center in Virginia in January.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) does not release public data on the number of people from post-Soviet countries it holds in detention. But Nikolaev said that law enforcement officials have privately acknowledged to her that asylum seekers from those countries are being held longer.Other activists say they have seen similar patterns. The non-profit Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR) has played an active role in assisting detainees in immigration detention centers, finding lawyers and working with the government officials.Dmitry Valuev, president of RADR, said it was an issue that affected not only Russians, but also citizens of several other post-Soviet countries.There have been reports that some immigrants arriving from post-Soviet states are facing increased scrutiny over fears they are connected to Islamist terrorist organizations. It’s unclear what prompted US authorities to keep the Russian asylum seekers in detention. One theory is that immigration officials are targeting Russians and other post-Soviet nationals as spies.Eric Rubin, former US ambassador to Bulgaria who also served as a deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Moscow, said that the complicated history of US-Russia diplomacy can hurt Russian asylum applicants.“When you meet Russians in the United States, obviously you need to wonder whether some of them are actually working for Russian intelligence. Some of them are, most of them are not,” said Rubin.Nikolaev isn’t so sure. “Russian spies can enter the country with European passports, visas and all the right documents,” she said.Nikolaev in January took her concerns to US government officials, alongside Ilya Yashin, a leading Russian opposition figure. They met with officials at the national security council, who requested a list of separated families, Nikolaev said.The Department of Homeland Security, Ice and the national security council did not respond to repeated questions about detention policies or the specific cases outlined in this article.In a statement, the White House said that the duration of cases varies based on legal proceedings and any protections sought. The White House also said there had been “zero instances of children from any of the countries you mentioned being separated from their families by US immigration authorities in this entire fiscal year”.View image in fullscreenBut Galina Kaplunova, 26, an illustrator and anti-Putin activist, was detained and separated from her child and mother at the US border last August.In the summer of 2024, Kaplunova’s husband, a Kremlin supporter, had threatened to take her child away and report her to the police for her political activism, Kaplunova said. A native of St Petersburg, she had been detained multiple times at protests and had volunteered in opposition leaders’ campaign offices. Two days after her husband made the threat, Kaplunova, her four-year-old son and her mother fled to the US.At the US border with Mexico, Ice agents separated Kaplunova from her son, she said. He was placed in foster care, while she and her mother were sent to different detention centers in separate states.After being separated, her son was placed with a Mexican American family, she said. He didn’t speak English, so communicated with them through Google Translate.“I fled Russia so they wouldn’t take my child or jail me. But the US did,” she said.About two months after being detained and separated, Kaplunova was released and reunited with her son, she said. It was a miracle, she said.Now Kaplunova and her son now live in California. Her mother is still detained. Her son is afraid of being abandoned. Whenever she tries to discuss his time in foster care, he simply says he doesn’t remember it.“It’s as if he erased that part of his life so he wouldn’t have to remember it,” she said.He learned some English in foster care, but refuses to speak it with his mother.“Maybe he associates English with something bad, something negative,” she said.Valuev, the president of RADR, said that long periods of detention can hurt applicants’ asylum cases. Hiring a lawyer from within a detention center is nearly impossible due to the lack of internet access, he said. “Detainees are given a list of contacts, but most of these numbers don’t answer the phone,” he said.Additionally, many detainees have no access to materials for their asylum cases because their documents were stored on computers and phones that were confiscated.Vladislav Krasnov, a protest organizer and activist from Moscow, said he spent 444 days in a Louisiana detention center. Krasnov fled Russia in 2022 after Putin announced a draft. He crossed the border with the CBP One appointment and was swiftly detained. Now free, he is still waiting for a court hearing to review his asylum case.Reflecting on his experience, he said he was shocked by the welcome he got in the United States. “I escaped one gulag only to end up in another,” Krasnov said.He was also angry at Russian opposition leaders for not paying attention to his plight until recently.“Last summer, I watched Yulia Navalnaya hugging Biden in the Oval Office. Then she talked on the phone with [Kamala] Harris, and Harris declared that America supports people fighting for Russia’s freedom. To put it mildly, I had a complete breakdown at that moment, sitting in detention,” Krasnov said.About 300 detainees from Russia and other post-Soviet countries filed a lawsuit last November, calling their detention discriminatory, and demanding freedom for people they argue were held without a justification. A federal judge ruled in February that the court lacked the jurisdiction to review the detention policy and dismissed the case.View image in fullscreenAmong those mentioned in the lawsuit was Polina Guseva, a political activist and volunteer on the team of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Guseva arrived in the US in July 2024, applied for asylum and was sent to a detention center. She said Ice officers at the Louisiana detention facility where she’s being held “openly say that Russians are not being released”.Still, she does not regret coming to the US, she said, adding safety concerns in Russia left her with no other choice.“Two thoughts help me a lot. First, better to be here than to be raped with a dumbbell in a Russian prison,” Guseva said. “And second, my friend Daniil Kholodny is still in prison in Russia. He was the technical director of the Navalny Live YouTube channel. He was tried alongside Alexei Navalny in his last trial and sentenced to eight years. He has been imprisoned for more than two years now. If he can hold on, why shouldn’t I?”Alexei Demin, the former naval officer and longtime protester, was supposed to have his first asylum court hearing reviewing his asylum case in early February, but the hearing was rescheduled to mid-April because of the judge’s sickness. By that time, he will have been in detention for more than 300 days. More

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      Ukraine Retreats From Most of Russia’s Kursk Region

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      The daring campaign Ukraine launched last summer to seize and occupy Russian territory appears to be nearing an end.Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from all but a sliver of land in Russia’s Kursk region, according to military analysts and soldiers, as their monthslong campaign to seize and occupy Russian territory appears to be nearing an end in the face of Moscow’s counterattacks.At the height of the offensive, Ukrainian forces controlled some 500 square miles of Russian territory. By Sunday, they were clinging to a narrow strip of land along the Russian-Ukrainian border, covering barely 30 square miles, according to Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group.“The end of the battle is coming,” Mr. Paroinen said in a phone interview.The amount of Russian territory still under Ukrainian control could not be independently confirmed, and soldiers reported fierce fighting in the area. But amid a swift Russian advance backed by relentless airstrikes and drone assaults, Ukrainian troops over the past week have withdrawn from several villages in the Kursk region as well as from Sudzha, the main town under their control.The Ukrainian military command said that the troops had pulled back to what it described as more defensible ground inside Russia along the border, using hilly terrain to gain better fire control over approaching Russian forces. On Saturday, it released a map of the battlefield showing the sliver of land that Ukraine still controls in the Kursk region.But it remains unclear how long Ukrainian forces can hold onto that patch.The continuing fighting in Kursk is now less about holding Russian territory, Ukrainian soldiers said, and more about controlling the best defensive positions to prevent the Russians from pushing into the Sumy region of Ukraine and opening a new front in the war.“We continue to hold positions on the Kursk front,” an assault platoon commander, who asked to be identified only by his call sign, Boroda, said by phone. “The only difference is that our positions have shifted significantly closer to the border.”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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      Protest Against Serbian Leader Draws Over 100,000 in Biggest Crowd Yet

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      The rally on Saturday in the capital, Belgrade, came as protests have spread to towns around the country and have drawn increasingly insistent calls that President Aleksandar Vucic step aside.A student-led protest movement in Serbia rallied more than 100,000 people for a huge peaceful street demonstration on Saturday in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, defying warnings from the country’s embattled strongman leader that months of unrest were careening out of control into violence.Saturday’s rally, the biggest outpouring of public discontent in Serbia in decades, was preceded by a drumbeat of warnings from President Aleksandar Vucic and his expansive media apparatus that protesters were planning violent attacks to provoke “civil war” and seize power.Opposition politicians added to a foreboding mood by claiming that they had received information from inside Serbia’s security service of secret plans to arrest Mr. Vucic’s political rivals.But Saturday’s rally, which began outside the Parliament building in Belgrade and soon engulfed the city center, passed without major incident. Supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park near Parliament and threw stones at students. But fears that the government would deploy war veterans and soccer hooligans linked to organized crime gangs to beat protesters — as it has in the past — did not materialize.Farmers on tractors, students and anti-government demonstrators taking part in a protest, in front of the parliament building, in Belgrade on Saturday.Mitar Mitrovic/ReutersThe Belgrade police said the protesters numbered 107,000 while students at Belgrade University’s faculty of dramatic arts, which helped organize the rally, put the turnout at 800,000.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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      Ukraine ceasefire plans moving to operational phase, Starmer says

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      Keir Starmer has called for the “guns to fall silent in Ukraine” and said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”.The UK prime minister said Vladimir Putin’s “yes, but” approach to a proposed ceasefire was not good enough, and the Russian president would have to negotiate “sooner or later”.He accused Putin of trying to delay peace, and said it must become a reality after more than three years of war.Starmer was speaking at a press conference in Downing Street after a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing”, including the European Commission, European nations, Nato, Canada, Ukraine, Australia and New Zealand on Saturday morning.The meeting was addressed by Starmer, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte.Starmer told journalists: “Sooner or later Putin will have to come to the table. So this is the moment. Let the guns fall silent, let the barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all stop, and agree to a ceasefire now.”He added: “Now is the time to engage in discussion on a mechanism to manage and monitor a full ceasefire, and agree to serious negotiations towards not just a pause, but a lasting peace, backed by strong security arrangements through our coalition of the willing.”He said the meeting had led to “new commitments”, including on the wider defence and security of Europe.“We won’t sit back and wait for Putin to act,” he said. “Instead we will keep pushing forward, so the group I convened today is more important than ever.”He added: “We agreed we will keep increasing the pressure on Russia, keep the military aid flowing to Ukraine, and keep tightening the restrictions on Russia’s economy to weaken Putin’s war machine and bring him to the table.“And we agreed to accelerate our practical work to support a potential deal. So we will now move into an operational phase.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOf the military meeting on Thursday, he said it would lead to “strong and robust plans … to swing in behind a peace deal and guarantee Ukraine’s future security”.Starmer had earlier called Ukraine and Zelenskyy the “party of peace”.He said Donald Trump was “absolutely committed to the lasting peace that is needed in Ukraine, and everything he’s doing is geared towards that end”.He told journalists Europe needed to improve its own defence and security, and said the UK was talking to the US on a daily basis about the war.Kyiv has already accepted plans for an immediate 30-day ceasefire but, on Thursday, Putin set out sweeping conditions that he wanted to be met before Russia would agree. They include a guarantee that Ukraine would not rearm or mobilise during the truce.Starmer said: “Volodymyr had committed to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, but Putin is trying to delay, saying there must be a painstaking study before a ceasefire can take place. Well the world needs action, not a study, not empty words and conditions.”On Saturday, Zelenskyy posted on X that Russian forces were building up along the eastern border of Ukraine, which could signal an attack on the Sumy region.He said: “The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy. It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war.”The Ukrainian president said his forces were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region, and were not facing an encirclement, despite claims by his Russian and US counterparts.Starmer said: “President Trump has offered Putin the way forward to a lasting peace. Now we must make this a reality. So this is the moment to keep driving towards the outcome that we want to see, to end the killing, a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, and lasting security for all of us.” More

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      US official heading Ukraine peace plan has history of empathizing with Russia

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      A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations.Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.Kellogg has been seen as a hawk on Russia, but he also wrote that “the US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia”. Earlier this month, after a disastrous Washington DC meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on 28 February, US aid to Ukraine was paused, as was intelligence sharing.Kellogg is also surrounded by some key staff who share a rightwing nationalist world view or have links to far-right populist figures.After spending the Biden years at the rightwing and Trumpist America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Kellogg took at least two young AFPI staffers with him to assist him as Trump’s presidential special envoy to Russia and Ukraine.One, Gloria McDonald, is a senior policy adviser to Kellogg after co-authoring several of his AFPI publications, according to her LinkedIn profile. McDonald’s résumé contains no foreign policy experience besides her AFPI policy analyst work and two short Trump-era internships at the US embassy in Kyiv, with her second four-month stint coming after Donald Trump fired then ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.Another ex-AFPI staffer, Zach Bauder, is employed as a special assistant to Kellogg, according to a LinkedIn profile reviewed by the Guardian. He was also a field operative for the chaotic 2022 congressional campaign of the far-right Republican Joe Kent, now Trump’s pick for the National Counterterrorism Center chief.The Guardian sought to confirm their appointments with the state department. In response, a state department spokesperson wrote that they do not comment on personnel. Emails were also sent to Bauder and McDonald’s presumed state department email addresses requesting comment.Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) documents show that another Kent operative, Matt Braynard, approached Bauder while acting as a lobbyist for the Japanese rightwing populist party Sanseitō, whose leader’s “conspiracist, anti-globalist worldview” has included promoting antisemitic and pro-Russian positions.Braynard’s Fara declaration says that Bauder shared his “interest in meeting with organization leadership”.The revelations about the special envoy’s pro-Russia writings and the far-right connections of his staff come at a time when the Trump administration has been accused of seeking to hand Russia victory in its war at the expense of Ukraine and other European allies, and when the employment of young, ideological staffers across government agencies has drawn scrutiny.However, over the last week Russia has reportedly criticized Kellogg and he was recently excluded from high-level talks on ending the war after Moscow said it didn’t want him involved, NBC News reported. Kellogg was absent from two recent diplomatic summits about the war in Saudi Arabia even though the talks came under his remit.Kellogg’s op-edsKellogg retired from the US army in 2003 as a lieutenant general. He was a prominent figure in the national security hierarchy of the first Trump administration. In 2017 he was the acting national security adviser in the wake of the departure of Michael Flynn. He was chief of staff for the national security council from Trump’s inauguration until April 2018, and then replaced HR McMaster as the national security adviser, a position he held until the inauguration of Joe Biden.From 2021 until his recall into the second Trump administration, Kellogg became the chair of the Center for a New American Security at AFPI, a rightwing thinktank founded after Trump’s defeat by prominent figures in his first administration including the policy adviser Brooke Rollins and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.Described as a “White House in waiting” for Trump’s second term, AFPI has supplied at least 11 Trump cabinet secretaries and agency heads, reportedly more than any other organization.Senior Trump appointments with AFPI ties include the FBI director, Kash Patel, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, and the attorney general, Pam Bondi.At AFPI, Kellogg articulated what he called an “America first” foreign policy. Since 2022, that took the form of increasingly strident criticism of US efforts to assist in the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.Before the Russian invasion had even commenced, Kellogg wrote that “Ukraine is primarily a European issue to solve”, and empathized with Russia’s point of view: “To Russia, the issue of Ukraine is deeper and more personal. To Russia, it is about their security.”Before the invasion, he urged that Ukraine be “armed to the teeth” as a deterrent, but opposed “a no-fly zone and other ways to engage American military forces in the Ukraine conflict”.After the invasion, Kellogg increasingly reserved his criticisms for the Biden administration, Nato allies and Ukraine, with sympathy withheld from all except Putin and Russia.In June 2022, in a statement co-written with Fred Fleitz, Kellogg wrote of Biden’s announcement of $1.2bn in aid to Ukraine: “This newest call for additional aid is a nonstarter and is not in the best interest of the American people.”View image in fullscreenHis turn against the administration and US allies was most evident from late 2023, including in reports and opinion articles Kellogg wrote with McDonald, then a senior policy analyst at AFPI.McDonald was given the AFPI role with scant previous experience, according to her biography at AFPI’s website, her LinkedIn profile, and information from public records and data brokers.In 2018 and 2019, McDonald did summer internships at the US embassy in Kyiv, per her LinkedIn page. In 2017, she did another internship with a Republican congressman, Dave Brat. Her time at AFPI is the only full-time work experience she takes into her apparent appointment as Kellogg’s most senior adviser in his efforts to implement Trump’s mooted peace deal.In one co-written report, the pair argue that the best course of action for the US is to concede any possibility of Ukraine’s membership in Nato in advance of peace negotiations.“In the case of granting Ukraine NATO membership,” they write, “the US eliminates the very incentive that would bring Russia to the negotiating table. By taking this issue off the table in the near term, however, the US offers an incentive for Russia to join peace talks and agree to an end-state.”They also specifically criticize the Biden administration’s guarantee that Ukraine would be involved in any negotiations.“The Biden Administration’s policy of ‘nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine’ and arming Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’ has, therefore, only served to remove the urgency of reaching a negotiated end-state to the war.”They further recommend withholding arms from Ukraine in order to force it to the negotiating table: “The US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia to negotiate an end state to this conflict.”In a co-written opinion article for the rightwing Washington Times website in December 2023, the pair focused on a recent Zelenskyy visit to the US that included meetings with defense contractors.The pair claimed that this was evidence “our national security policy is being unduly influenced by the interests of the military-industrial complex.”In the piece, they elaborate on this conspiracy narrative about Ukraine and the military-industrial complex: “The US withdrawal from Afghanistan significantly reduced defense contractors’ profits,” they write, adding that “the proxy war in Ukraine, however, not only reignited these defense contracting revenue but also spurred global military spending, which was raised to a historic $2.24 trillion after Russia invaded.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an April 2024 AFPI report written with Fleitz, Kellogg placed the blame for the war largely on Biden, suggesting that his attitude towards Russia was provocative.“Biden’s hostile policy toward Russia not only needlessly made it an enemy of the United States,” they wrote, “but it also drove Russia into the arms of China and led to the development of a new Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis.”They wrote: “It was in America’s best interests to maintain peace with Putin and not provoke and alienate him with aggressive globalist human rights and pro-democracy campaigns or an effort to promote Ukrainian membership in NATO.”They also wrote that Putin’s sabre-rattling at the beginning of 2022 should have induced the US to make a deal, writing: “It was in America’s interest to make a deal with Putin on Ukraine joining NATO, especially by January 2022 when there were signs that a Russian invasion was imminent.”They describe ongoing support of the Ukraine war effort as “expensive virtue signaling and not a constructive policy to promote peace and global stability”.Kellogg and Fleitz appear to recommend that Russia be allowed to keep any territorial gains, arguing that the US should “continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement”.Again, Kellogg signs off on excluding Ukraine from EU membership, writing: “President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal”.Zach Bauder’s roleAlong with Kellogg and McDonald, the policy adviser, another staffer, Bauder, has come via the AFPI pipeline.And although Bauder has less apparent experience in foreign affairs than even McDonald, he does have international connections that appear related to his 2022 field work for a far-right candidate’s congressional campaign.Bauder – who only graduated from rightwing Hillsdale College last year – is employed as a special assistant to Kellogg, according to his LinkedIn page.Besides internships at AFPI and the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Bauder’s only work experience besides working as an operations coordinator at AFPI in 2023 was field organizing for the failed 2022 congressional campaign of Kent.The Guardian has previously reported on Kent’s far-right political positions and unanswered questions about his campaign finances and employment.Daily Beast reporting in January 2024 implicated Braynard, a “former top aide” of Kent’s who had “white nationalist ties” in campaign finance issues. A significant proportion of 2022 campaign disbursements went to a company belonging to Braynard’s wife.After being connected with Bauder on Kent’s campaign, Braynard apparently tapped the relationship in his lobbying work for Sanseitō, the far-right populist party in Japan.Fara rules require lobbyists for foreign entities to lodge declarations that specify not only who they are working for, and how much they are paying, but who they make contact with in the course of pursuing their client’s aims.A September 2024 Fara filing from Braynard indicates that he had worked as a paid lobbyist for Sanseitō.Rob Fahey is an assistant professor in the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Shinjuku, Japan, who has written some of the scarce English language research on the far-right party.In a telephone conversation, he said the party had grown out of “the anti-vaccine, anti-masking social movement” touched off in Japan by the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that party members were “terminally online, and they are very, very deeply involved in the conspiracy framework that is a core part of the Maga movement as well”.Fahey said Sanseitō was part of the “new conspiratorial hard right in Japan” whose “media diet comes from the American conspiratorial ecosystem”.Fahey added that Sanseitō largely “see the war in Ukraine as through the same lens as American conspiracy theorists: it’s Nato’s fault, and Nato is part of the new world order”.Braynard’s filing says that the aim of his lobbying for the group is for them to “win Japanese elections”.On Braynard’s account in the Fara declaration, “the principal, party leader Sohei Kamiya, had planned a trip to the US”.He continues: “The principal was interested in appearing on Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson’s podcast, so I texted the producers of those shows. I also contacted Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage Foundation, and America First Policy Center to ask if they would be interested in meeting with the principal to discuss common, populist conservative policies.”In his list of the people he contacted, along with producers for Carlson and Bannon and a Heritage Foundation staffer, Braynard lists Bauder.The filing said he texted Bauder, described as “formerly and then again more recently staff of America First Policy Institute, but not employed by them at the time I contacted him”.Following the Oval Office meltdown with Zelenskyy, it has seemed that Trump himself has been calling the shots on a cooling relationship with Ukraine and the other western allies. But he apparently still has the support of his special envoy.This week, the Guardian reported that Kellogg told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting of the suspension of intelligence sharing that “they brought it on themselves, the Ukrainians,” and that it was a punishment akin to “hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose”. More

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      Russia Presses Offensive in Kursk Amid Cease-Fire Talks With U.S.

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      Moscow said it had retaken two villages outside the town of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the claim.Moscow is pressing its offensive to retake the full territory of Russia’s Kursk region from Ukraine as negotiations between the White House and the Kremlin continue over a possible cease-fire in the three-year war.Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that its forces had retaken two villages outside Sudzha, the main Russian town that Ukraine occupied since its surprise offensive into Russia last summer but appears to have lost in recent days. Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on Russia’s newest claim and have not confirmed a retreat by its forces from Sudzha.Moscow’s advances on the Kursk front came a day after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called on Ukrainian forces still fighting in the region to lay down their arms. Mr. Putin said he would spare their lives if they surrendered.The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, reiterated Mr. Putin’s demand in comments to the state news agency Tass on Saturday.“It’s still valid,” Mr. Peskov said, although he added that “time was running out.”The Russian leader has said that Ukrainian forces are encircled in the region, an assertion that President Trump repeated in a message on Truth Social.But President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine denied that the Ukrainian troops were surrounded.“Our troops continue to hold back Russian and North Korean groupings in the Kursk region,” Mr. Zelensky said in a post Saturday on Facebook, referring to North Korean fighters who have been assisting Russia in Kursk. “There is no encirclement of our troops.”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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      Republican Russophilia: how Trump Putin-ised a party of cold war hawks

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      In speech that ran for 100 minutes there was one moment when Donald Trump drew more applause from Democrats than Republicans. As the president told Congress last week how the US had sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, his political opponents clapped and unfurled a Ukrainian flag – while his own party sat in stony silence.It was a telling insight into Republicans’ transformation, in the space of a generation, from a party of cold war hawks to one of “America first” isolationists. Where Trump has led, many Republicans have obediently followed, all the way into the embrace of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin – with huge implications for the global democratic order.“The reversal is dramatic and the willingness of the Republican party to go along with it continues to be breathtaking,” said Charlie Sykes, a political commentator and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind. “At least for a while it appeared that Republicans were still going to be supportive of Ukraine. But now that Trump has completely reversed our foreign policy there seems to be very little pushback.”Last month, Trump set up a peace process that began with the US and Russia’s top diplomats meeting in Saudi Arabia – with no seat at the table for Ukrainian officials. He branded Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator”, a term he has never applied to the authoritarian Putin.Along with Vice-President JD Vance, he berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, a spectacle that prompted the Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin to observe that Ronald Reagan, a Republican president who was an inveterate foe of Soviet aggression, “must be rolling over in his grave”. Trump suspended offensive cyber operations against Russia and paused military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine until it agreed to a 30-day ceasefire.The Oval Office shakedown shocked the world but there was strikingly little criticism from Republicans. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, sank into a couch and said nothing as the shouting raged around him. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had previously been supportive of Zelenskyy, even suggested that the Ukrainian president should resign.Speaking at a Center for American Progress thinktank event in Washington this week, Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama administration official, said: “What you fundamentally believe matters little if you’re acting against those beliefs.“It was astonishing to see Republican leaders who on a Monday were praising Zelenskyy and by the Tuesday were removing any reference to him from their websites. It’s an extraordinary thing to see people who used to be pretty serious on this issue, like Lindsey Graham, suddenly saying the things.”Meanwhile, other Russia hawks such as the former vice-president Mike Pence, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have been sidelined. Republicans who were not shy about countering Trump’s foreign policy ideas during his first term are now standing by him – in public at least.Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank and author of Reagan: His Life and Legend, said: “Absent Trump, I don’t think you would see this reorientation of the Republican party. Even with Trump a lot of Republicans, especially on Capitol Hill, are very uneasy about it and don’t like what Trump is doing but they’re afraid to speak out.”View image in fullscreenOthers suggest that loyalty to or fear of Trump may not be the only explanation. Younger Republicans are questioning the legitimacy of institutions such as Nato and the United Nations and following far-right influencers such as Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Putin in Russia last year and claimed that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city in my country”.Critics say Trump, Carlson and the “Make America great again” movement see in Russia an idealised version of white Christian nationalism, in contrast to the “woke” values of western Europe. Putin has mocked the US embassy for flying a rainbow flag and suggested that transgenderism is “on the verge of a crime against humanity”.From this perspective, the struggle is no longer capitalism against communism but rather woke against unwoke. In various speeches Putin has railed against the west’s “obsessive emphasis on race”, “modern cancel culture” and “reverse racism”. He said of the west: “They invented five or six genders: transformers, trans – you see, I do not even understand what it is.”All are familiar talking points from the Maga playbook. Indeed, last year, on the rightwing strategist Steven Bannon’s War Room podcast, the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said: “Let’s talk about what this really is, Steve: this is a war against Christianity. The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians; the Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that; they’re not attacking Christianity. As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.”Bannon has made no secret of his desire to bring down the European Union and “globalist” forces. Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under Barack Obama, draws a comparison with conservative “red” states and liberal “blue” states within the US. “Let’s make it real American tangible,” he said. “Russia is a red state and France and England and Nato – they’re blue states.”During the cold war, it was hardline anti-communism that was core to the Republican brand. Reagan branded the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and stepped up US military spending. But when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, relations improved.Reagan and Gorbachev held several summits that led to key arms control agreements. Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush, worked closely with Gorbachev and, later, Boris Yeltsin as the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, encouraging a transition to democracy and capitalism.View image in fullscreenEarly in Republican George W Bush’s presidency, he had a relatively positive relationship with Putin, memorably saying he had “looked into Putin’s soul” and found him trustworthy. The two cooperated on counter-terrorism following the 9/11 attacks but tensions grew over the Iraq war and US support for Georgia and Ukraine.By 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, relations had significantly deteriorated. Obama, a Democrat, initially pursued a “reset” policy with Russia, aiming to improve relations, but tensions resurfaced after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. In response, Obama imposed sanctions on Russia and expelled diplomats.Russia launched an aggressive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, according to a later Senate intelligence committee report, which found extensive evidence of contacts between the Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians.Trump vehemently denied collusion even as his administration imposed sanctions on Russia. At a joint press conference in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies. He has remained unwilling to criticise Putin, even after Russia invaded Ukraine and after the opposition activist Alexei Navalny died in prison.The Putin-isation of the Republican party should perhaps not be overstated. Older senators such as Mitch McConnell, who is retiring at the next election, Thom Tillis and Roger Wicker remain staunchly supportive of Ukraine.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “I push back against the idea that Republicans have become entranced with Putin because there’s not evidence for that. There is evidence that Republicans have become tired of the fight in Ukraine. These things are not the same.”However, the balance appears to be shifting as the cold war fades into memory. About 41% of Republicans view Russia as either “friendly” or an “ally”, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released earlier this month. And just 27% of Republicans agree with the statement that Trump is too close to Moscow, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey.View image in fullscreenAdam Smith, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ armed services committee, told the Guardian of the “Make American great again” movement: “They have definitely shown a sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s autocratic, ‘traditional’ values, which are very troubling if you care about the problems of bigotry and discrimination. There is growing sympathy and the wing of the Republican party that’s against that is getting weaker while the other wing is getting stronger.”He added: “They believe that they’re going to promote ‘traditional values’ and they see Putin as an ideological ally in that. I still think it is a minority within the Republican party but Trump’s the president. He’s the leader of that party and they’re adhering to him. Trump has an enormous amount of sympathy for that worldview and more and more of them are drifting in that direction.”Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “The Republican party during the cold war was anti-communist and from their standpoint, once communism disappeared, their major motive for opposing Russia did as well.“The fact that Russia is a rightwing autocracy doesn’t particularly trouble them. To the extent that Putin has refashioned himself as a traditionalist culture warrior, he’s actually making an affirmative appeal to what the Republican party has become.” More