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    Trump ‘surrendering to the Russians’ on Ukraine, top Democrat says

    A senior Democratic lawmaker accused Donald Trump of “surrendering to the Russians” on Sunday, as Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff said talks between the US and Russia over Ukraine was “the only way to end the carnage”.In an interview on ABC News’ This Week, Democratic senator Jack Reed, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, hit out at Trump’s recent verbal attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and increased alignment with Russia.“Essentially, this is President Trump surrendering to the Russians,” Reed said. “This is not a statesman or a diplomat. This is just someone who admires Putin, does not believe in the struggle of the Ukrainians and is committed to cozying up to an autocrat.”But senior administration officials sought to side-step accusations that Trump’s re-positioning of US policies on Ukraine, including a possible deal for Ukraine to repay US military and financial support with rare-earth materials, amounted to a capitulation to the Russian position on the war.Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the mideast who revealed this week that he had “spent a lot of time with President Putin”, during a recent trip to Moscow, “talking, developing a friendship, a relationship with him”, declined to blame Russia for starting war in Ukraine, calling Ukraine’s ambitions to join Nato “a threat to the Russians”.“The war didn’t need to happen – it was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians,” Witkoff said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.“There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining Nato”, he said. “That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians and so we have to deal with that fact.”Witkoff’s remarks come days after he, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Russian officials over re-establishing diplomatic relations and a Russia-Ukraine peace deal.Ukrainian officials said they were not invited to the meeting, and later said they would not accept a peace deal imposed on them. But Ukraine’s position later appeared to shift after Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”.On Sunday, Zelenskyy said he wanted Trump to be a close partner to Ukraine, not just a mediator between two superpowers, the US and Russia, and would be willing to step down, if it would secure lasting peace for his country.“If, to achieve peace, you really need me to give up my post, I’m ready. I can exchange it for Nato [membership]”, he said. “I don’t plan to stay in power for decades” he added. “But we won’t let Putin stay in power over Ukrainian territories either.”That came as President Putin appointed the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, as a special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation with western nations “including the United States of America”. Dmitriev, considered the most US-savvy member of Russia’s elite, was part of the Russian delegation that met with US counterparts in Riyadh.Nato membership for Ukraine has all-but been ruled out by the US negotiators. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, confirmed to Fox News Sunday that no US troops would be part of any future peace-keeping force in Ukraine and dodged the question over responsibility for starting the bloody three-year conflict.“Does all the finger-pointing and pearl clutching make peace more likely? That’s the enduring question the president is asking. He wants peace, and if that’s the case, you’ve got to stare down the Russians, and Vladimir Putin, and who they’ve chosen to negotiate and have earnest conversations about difficult things,” Hegseth told his former colleague Shannon Bream.“Standing here and saying, ‘You’re good, you’re bad; you’re a dictator, you’re not a dictator; you invaded, you didn’t’, it’s not useful, it’s not productive. So President Trump isn’t getting drawn into that in unnecessary ways and as a result, we’re closer to peace than ever before,” Hegseth added.The White House continued its pushback against claims that it has pivoted to Russia’s position on the war. “President Trump’s peace through strength America First diplomacy effectively deterred Russia in his first term, and this war would have never started if he had never left office,” said the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in an email to the Wall Street Journal.Leavitt said Trump was “actively pressing both sides to end this brutal conflict once and for all”. More

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    Trump Has the Same Idea in Mind for Ukraine and the Department of Justice

    I grew up a Reagan Republican in the middle of the Cold War, and I never thought I’d see the day when the president of the United States became the world’s most prominent and effective Russian propagandist.Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, when President Trump began a diplomatic offensive against the nation of Ukraine and the person of President Volodymyr Zelensky.This month, the administration couldn’t seem to get its message straight. First it seemed to want to offer unilateral concessions to the Russian government — including by taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table and recognizing Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine — only to walk back the concessions days (or hours) later.The cumulative effect was confusing. What was the administration’s position on Ukraine? Last week, however, the words and actions of the administration left us with no doubt — the United States is taking Russia’s side in the conflict.What other conclusion should we draw when Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, begins peace negotiations with Russia without Ukraine or any of our NATO allies at the table, dangling “historic economic and investment opportunities” for Russia if the conflict ends?What other conclusion should we draw when Trump demands ruinous economic concessions from Ukraine to compensate America for its prior aid? He’s demanding a higher share of gross domestic product from Ukraine than the victorious Allies demanded from Germany after World War I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s bullshit blitz has Europe on its knees | Stewart Lee

    Was it really only a month ago that the pole-dancer patron, fridge explorer, Brexit get-doer, model bus maker, sofa-strainer, wall-spaffer, current Daily Mail columnist and former British prime minister Boris Johnson eulogised the inauguration of Donald Trump in the Mail, recounting how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the hand of Trump: “I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.”I hope Johnson is pleased with the way things have worked out. Because now the foolish wokerati have been schooled beyond Johnson’s wettest dreams. It’s the Trump-Putin-bin Salman party! An adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster, and a man who sanctioned a chemical warfare hit, killing a British citizen on British soil, have met at the luxury Saudia Arabian hotel of another man, who, according to the US, reportedly approved the murder and subsequent dismemberment of a journalist, to discuss the similarly brutal dismemberment of Ukraine, without consulting either Ukraine itself or the countries most directly affected by the legitimisation of Putin’s territorial anxieties. Don’t worry, Poland! Stable genius Trump has got this covered, so break out the bone saws, pop the cork on the novichok and grab the girls by the pussy! There are 1970s Italian slasher films with less gruesome plotlines. Well said, Boris Johnson! That’s certainly stuck it to the wokerati!If only Johnson, and Trump’s other cheerleaders in the rightwing press and on the right of the house, could be brave enough to call out Trump for what he is. If only Johnson had the moral courage of Ed Davey from the Liberal Democrats. In what newly warped reality does that sentence even exist? But, on balance, the whitewashing of the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians is a small price to pay for the delight Trump has bought to the smiling faces of people who hate the transgender community, wild swimming enthusiasts and Guardian readers. Sniffing mineral rights in the air, like the smell of napalm in the morning, Trump has grabbed Ukraine by the pussy and he ain’t gonna let go. Trump is, unequivocally, the worst thing to happen to human civilisation since Hitler. And Ricky Gervais’s After Life.European politicians more rational and less self-serving than Johnson are trying to formulate the correct response to Trump’s rapid and reckless redrawing of the postwar world disorder in his own, and Russia’s, interests. The correct response is to shit your pants. On Tuesday, Trump even blamed Ukraine itself for being invaded, which is a bit like blaming E Jean Carroll herself for being sexually abused in a department store changing room. Couldn’t she have cut a pre-emptive deal before things escalated? Victims! Always blaming someone else. But Trump has put the idea that the invasion of Ukraine is Ukraine’s fault out there now, on the world stage, amplified by his collaborators in the tech bro media, and it will gradually calcify into one of those persistent alternative facts. By Wednesday he’d called Zelenskyy a dictator (and a mediocre comedian, which in my opinion is even worse).And it’s that kind of reshaping of reality that needs a coherent European response. Recently, the US vice-president, JD Vance, who has the exact same face-beard as the main male oppressor in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, came and told the Munich security conference that Scotland had made it illegal to pray silently in your own home. Many things are illegal in Scotland. Fruit, for example, and cushions, which are deemed too soft by the Scottish Cushion Committee. But not silent private prayer. Largely ignoring dead-in-the-water Ukraine, Vance also told Europe we had some kind of moral duty to allow unchecked, factually inaccurate bullshit to clog our infosphere via Trump’s tech bro acolytes’ social media platforms, his inflammatory comments about illegal Scottish prayer in the same speech proving exactly why such regulation is required. And I think he knows this.Predictably, Vancewas one of the three main early investors in Rumble, the social media site for all the people whose conspiratorial untruths and borderline criminality make them too toxic for other social media sites – Russell Brand, Alex Jones and Darth Vader etc – so he personally stood to profit from this sort of popularisation of inflammatory actionable crap. As did fellow Rumble original main investor Peter Thiel, the man behind Palantir, the big tech company Wriggling Wes Streeting is keen to hand all our NHS data to, revealing an interlocking and endless web of bad influence that only “cat woman” Carole Cadwalladr had the persistence of vision to apprehend, and she’s currently shunting off to a subscription Substack site, a crowdfunded Cassandra in an era busy eating its own brainstem.For a brief period around teatime on Monday, Keir Starmer, who once left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present” delusionally imagined he could be some kind of go-between twixt observable reality and Trump. But did West Yorkshire jangle-pop pioneers the Wedding Present radically retool their signature sound for 1991’s Seamonsters album just so Starmer could become a Neville Chamberlain for the cover-mounted fanzine flexidisc generation?We have staved off outright fascism throughout most of Europe pretty well for 80 years now, but outright fascism in Europe was never quite so well funded and promoted as it is now, since the US government and the social media platforms that do its bidding decided backing outright fascism was a good way to smash the EU. Think what Hitler could have achieved if he’d had Twitter, currently X, and Google at his disposal. He wouldn’t have needed the V2 rocket, Lord Haw-Haw and Hugo Boss. He could have razed half of Europe with a Hulk Hogan meme, some persuasive online misinformation and a dozen jauntily askew baseball caps.

    Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. He appears in a benefit show for Just Stop Oil at Walthamstow Trades Hall, London, on 8 April More

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    ‘Starmer’s big moment’: can PM persuade Trump not to give in to Putin?

    When Keir Starmer is advised on how to handle his crucial meeting with Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, he will be told by advisers from Downing Street and the Foreign Office to be very clear on his main points and, above all, to be brief.“Trump gets bored very easily,” said one well-placed Whitehall source with knowledge of the president’s attention span. “When he loses interest and thinks someone is being boring, he just tunes out. He doesn’t like [the French president, Emmanuel] Macron partly because Macron talks too much and tries to lecture him.”Starmer will also be advised to flatter Trump when he can, to say that everyone is so grateful that he has focused the world’s attention on the need for peace between Russia and Ukraine. But to flatter subtly. And not to lay it on too thick.View image in fullscreenOne – unconfirmed – story from Theresa May’s first visit to see Trump at the White House in 2017 is doing the rounds in Whitehall again before the Starmer trip, and is being used as a cautionary tale for the current prime minister.“When May first went to see Trump, she was told she had to congratulate him on lots of things,” said one source.“So she rushed over to him and congratulated him on his new cabinet appointments, saying: ‘You’ve appointed a great team, Donald.’“At which point he said: ‘Oh thank you so much, Theresa – who do you particularly like among them?’ Which left her a bit stumped, so she just said: ‘Oh, well, all of them, Donald.’”The lesson being that too much flattery can get you into trouble if you do not do your homework.Dealing with, and responding to, Trump in his self-appointed role as ultra-provocative would-be global peacemaker is requiring other leaders the world over to perform near-impossible balancing acts when framing their responses.View image in fullscreenMany of the US president’s statements on the Ukraine conflict, such as those suggesting that Ukraine was responsible for the Russian invasion and that its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a dictator, are regarded by European governments, including the British one, as patently ludicrous.Yet at the same time, no one can say so for fear of what the man who said those things will do next and what revenge he might wreak in return.Peter Ricketts, former UK ambassador to Paris, said that Starmer should himself tune out from Trump’s rhetoric. “He should focus not on what Trump says but what he does. He needs to get into Trump’s mind that a rushed deal with [Vladimir] Putin over the heads of Ukraine/Europe is bound to be a deal that serves Putin’s interests, and that Putin would be seen as strong and Trump weak.”Another senior UK source agreed, saying that Starmer needed to convey to Trump that the only thing that would stop him earning his place in history would be by getting a great peace that was not seen as a “fair deal”. “He needs to make Trump think that his success rests on not giving in to Putin, because if he does he will himself seem weak,” said the source.While cross-continental mud-slinging has intensified, UK political leaders have had a painfully difficult few days trying to adapt to Trump’s barrage of remarks, the latest of which was to say neither Starmer nor Macron – who will meet Trump at the White House on Monday – have done anything of note to sort out the war in Ukraine.Even Nigel Farage, who prides himself on his closeness to Trump and the Republicans, has had to equivocate and throw up a cloud of deliberate confusion around his own responses, so he can claim to be both distancing himself from the US president and validating his interventions at the same time.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to Sky News on Thursday about Trump’s statement that Zelenskyy was a dictator, Farage said: “Take everything Trump says truthfully, but not literally.”The Reform UK leader then tried to argue that Trump “doesn’t literally say Ukraine started the war”, and was instead focused on bringing peace. When, however, it was put to Farage that Trump had told Zelenskyy: “You should have never started it [the conflict],” Farage then replied: “OK, he did. If you’re happy.”With UK public opinion overwhelmingly critical of Trump’s comments on Zelenskyy and Ukraine – today’s Opinium poll for the Observer shows the Trump administration has a -40% approval rating on Ukraine compared with -2% for the previous Biden administration – the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, also felt the need to part company with Trump, tweeting on X that “President Zelenskyy is not a dictator”, though she backed him over the need for European nations to increase defence spending.About 61% of Tory voters disagree with the Trump administration on Ukraine, so for Badenoch not to express some reservations over the US president could have left her in big trouble in her own party.The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, looking for more seats and votes behind the “blue wall” have spotted an opportunity as the anti-Trump party. Calum Miller, their foreign affairs spokesman, said the Lib Dems had a duty to stand up for people in his constituency and others who flew Ukrainian flags in their villages and had taken in Ukrainian refugees.“It is our role to be their voice in parliament,” he said “to say that Trump is a narcissist who is not to be trusted.”Government sources suggested on Saturday nightthat Starmer would probably try to speak to Macron on Sunday before the French president flies to Washington, so as to agree the broad outlines of a European position.But another senior source said the last thing Starmer should do when he meets Trump is try to speak for the Europeans or represent a European position.“Trump has made clear what he thinks of European leaders [last]week. Starmer needs to be his own man, to say the UK was the first country to offer to send troops to Ukraine and do its bit.“If he does that, and succeeds in persuading Trump that it will look terrible to the world if he allows Putin just to get everything he wants, it could be a big moment for him.” More

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    Trump Appointees Fire Hundreds at U.S.A.I.D. Working on Urgent Aid

    Trump administration appointees running the main United States aid agency have in recent days fired hundreds of employees who help manage responses to urgent humanitarian crises around the world, according to two U.S. officials and four recent employees of the agency.The firings add to doubts raised about whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio is allowing employees for the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., to carry out lifesaving humanitarian assistance, as he had promised to do late last month during a blanket freeze of almost all foreign aid from the U.S. government.Trump appointees have fired or put on paid leave thousands of employees of U.S.A.I.D. A task force of young engineers working for Elon Musk, the billionaire tech businessman who is advising President Trump, has shut down many technical systems in the aid agency and barred employees from their email accounts. Mr. Musk has posted dark conspiracy theories about U.S.A.I.D. on social media, asserting with no evidence that it is a “criminal organization” and that it was “time for it to die.”The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically and did not have the recipients’ names in the “to” field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.The New York Times obtained a copy and confirmed those descriptions. The employees who agreed to speak for this story did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize the 15 days of pay they were scheduled to receive after being given a termination notice. The two U.S. officials feared retaliation.In addition, 36 people were fired from the Office of Transition Initiatives, a unit in the agency’s conflict prevention bureau that specializes in helping partner countries with political transitions and democratic initiatives, said the U.S. officials and recent agency employees.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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    US politics live: Donald Trump addresses Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland

    Donald Trump has wrapped up his address at CPAC, an approximately 75-minute tirade of repeated false claims ranging from voter fraud and stolen-election lies to foreign wars, among others.Opening up his speech, Trump assailed “the fraudsters, liars … globalists and deep-state bureaucrats” that he said “are being sent back”.He then went on to cite a series of polls in which he is leading. “Rasmussen just came out at 56% insider advantage, 56% RMG research … we have many polls in the mid-60s, one at 71%. We like that,” he said. However, he did not mention the latest Gallup poll, where he is six points under – 51% of Americans disapproved of his performance while 45% indicated their approval for him.Donald Trump then moved to attacking immigrants across the country, saying: “I couldn’t stand it! … We don’t have that problem any more.” On the contrary, on Friday, reports emerged of the White House reassigning the top official at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) after the agency’s level of arrests and deportations were slower than expected.He also read from a list of millions of people in the social security database that the agency has no death records for. However, that has been a known issue for more than a decade, and an inspector general report found that just 13 people over 112 years old were getting any payments as of 2013.On Israel’s war on Gaza, Trump claimed that Joe Biden got back “zero” hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. “Biden got none back, by the way, just so you understand, none, zero,” Trump claimed. In fact, 105 hostages were freed in the November 2023 ceasefire deal brokered by Biden’s administration.At one point, Trump, who has not ruled out using military action to take over Greenland and who has vowed to make Canada the 51st state, along with taking back the Panama Canal, said: “I don’t want to be a conquerer.”Despite his false claims, Trump supporters roared and cheered inside the CPAC auditorium at National Harbor, Maryland.“I have not yet begun to fight, and neither have you,” he said in his closing remarks. Before exiting the stage, Trump returned to his trademark dance, fist-pumping to Village People’s YMCA.Donald Trump has wrapped up his address at CPAC.Trump closed out his roughly 75-minute speech by dancing to YMCA in front of a cheering crowd of supporters.On Israel’s war on Gaza, Donald Trump claimed that Joe Biden got back “zero” hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.“Biden got none back, by the way, just so you understand, none, zero,” Trump claimed.In fact, 105 hostages were freed in the November 2023 ceasefire deal brokered by Biden’s administration.Donald Trump is now talking about ending the war between Ukraine and Russia, saying: “We’re getting our money back.”“The United States has given $350bn because we had a stupid, incompetent president and administration … Europe gave it in the form of a loan. They get their money back. We gave it in the form of nothing. So I want them to give us something for all of the money that we put up. And I’m going to try and get the war settled, and I’m going to try and get all that death ended. So we’re asking for rare earth and oil, anything we can get,” Trump said.From claiming Ukraine was responsible for the war to incorrect numbers about aid received from the US and Europe, Trump has in recent weeks made a number of inaccurate statements while praising the progress made in US-Russia talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.The Guardian has had a look at his claims:Donald Trump just read out from a list of millions of people in the social security database that the agency has no death records for.“Under our administration, there will be no tolerance for social security fraud. Will not allow anyone to cheat our seniors and those who will do that will be prosecuted by [attorney general] Pam Bondi and others,” he said.However, that has been a known issue for over a decade, and an inspector general report found that just 13 people over 112 years old were getting any payments as of 2013.The Guardian’s Robert Mackey contributed to this postDonald Trump is well under way with his speech at CPAC and the main room is absolutely packed.The energy in here is less political conference and more rock concert – every line gets massive applause, cheers or laughter.Trump workshopped nicknames for his predecessor Joe Biden, asking the crowd to cheer for “Crooked Joe” and then moments later to cheer for “Sleepy Joe”. He said “Crooked Joe” won.A group of rowdy, pardoned January 6 rioters created a scene near the media section in the back of the hall, shouting for Trump to acknowledge them and their cause, which still has not come up.Donald Trump is now praising his staunch ally, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world.“He’s doing a great job and he doesn’t need this … but … he’s a patriot,” Trump said.On Thursday, Musk hailed efforts by himself and Trump to cut the federal workforce by the hundreds of thousands.In a post on X today – which he owns – Musk, who leads the so-called “department of government efficiency”, said:
    All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
    Donald Trump has moved back to attacking immigrants across the country, saying: “I couldn’t stand it!” before adding: “Donald, don’t get angry.”“I couldn’t stand it, so I said, I’m going to run for president again, and now we don’t have that problem now. We don’t have that problem any more,” he claimed.On the contrary, on Friday, reports emerged of the White House reassigning the top official at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) after the agency’s level of arrests and deportations were slower than expected.Trump singled out in the crowd the 40-year-old son of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro – the country’s ex-president who tried a January 6-style insurrection and was just charged with plotting to poison his successor and the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula.“Say hello to your father. Thank you very much. Great family, great gentleman, and your great family,” Trump said to Eduardo Bolsonaro.Jair Bolsonaro could face between 38 and 43 years in jail if convicted. In addition to being accused of being involved in a coup, Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of being involved with an armed criminal association and the violent abolition of the rule of law.The Guardian’s Robert Mackey contributed to this postTrump went on to cite a series of polls in which he is leading.“Rasmussen just came out at 56% insider advantage, 56% RMG research … we have many polls in the mid-60s, one at 71%. We like that,” he said.However, he did not mention the latest Gallup poll, where he is six points under – 51% of Americans disapproved of his performance while 45% indicated their approval for him. More

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    Keir Starmer lays down Ukraine peace demand ahead of Trump talks

    Keir Starmer has raised the stakes before a crucial meeting in Washington with the US president, Donald Trump this week, by insisting that Ukraine must be “at the heart of any negotiations” on a peace deal with Russia.The prime minister made the remarks – which run directly contrary to comments by the US president last week – in a phone call on Saturdaywith Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he also said that “safeguarding Ukraine’s sovereignty was essential to deter future aggression from Russia”.Downing Street made clear that the prime minister would carry the same tough messages into his meeting with Trump in the White House on Thursday.Starmer is likely to tell the US president that the UK will raise its defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product, in line with Labour’s election manifesto commitment.The prime minister is also expected to extend an invitation to Trump from King Charles for a second state visit to the UK.But the meeting is also expected to represent the biggest test of Starmer’s diplomatic and negotiating skills in his prime ministership by far, as he tries to retain good relations with Trump while making clear the UK and Europe’s red lines on Ukraine and Russia.View image in fullscreenSources said Starmer may speak to Emmanuel Macron on Sunday before the French president’s talks with Trump on Monday. The aim would be to agree a broad European position on the Trump-led effort to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.Starmer also spoke yesterday to the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, and agreed that Europe must “step up” to ensure Ukraine’s security.Starmer’s meeting with Trump is being described in Westminster as possibly career-defining for the prime minister. Former UK foreign secretary William Hague said it was the most important first bilateral between a prime minister and a president since the start of the second world war.After a week of extraordinary anti-Zelenskyy and pro-Russian rhetoric from Trump and his team, the US president issued another dismissive assault on Zelenskyy’s leadership and relevance to a peace deal on Friday, saying: “I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you. When Zelenskyy said: ‘Oh, he wasn’t invited to a meeting,’ I mean, it wasn’t a priority because he did such a bad job in negotiating so far.”View image in fullscreenAs well as dismissing the democratically elected Zelenskyy as a dictator, the White House has been pressuring Ukraine’s president to sign a $500bn minerals deal in which he would give the US half of his country’s mineral resources. The Trump administration says this is “payback” for earlier US military assistance.Zelenskyy has so far refused to sign, arguing that the agreement lacks clear US security guarantees.Reuters reported that the US was also threatening to disconnect Ukraine from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system if Zelenskyy does not accept the Trump administration’s sweeping terms.Ukrainian officials characterised the threat as “blackmail”, saying to do so would have a catastrophic impact on the ability of frontline Ukrainian combat units to contain Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe news agency said the US envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, raised the possibility of a shut-off during talks on Thursday with Zelenskyy in Kyiv. An under-pressure Zelenskyy has signalled his willingness to accommodate Washington’s demand, but he has stressed he cannot “sell out” his country.Ukrainian officials are scrambling to find alternatives to Starlink in the event that Trump’s threat is carried out. Ukraine’s armed forces depend on the system to provide real-time video drone footage of the battlefield and to conduct accurate strikes against Russian targets.The Russian military uses Starlink too. Ukrainian commanders are now contemplating a nightmare scenario, in which Musk’s SpaceX company switches off Ukrainian access while continuing to offer it to the Russians – with the White House in effect helping Moscow to win the war.A senior Ukrainian official said his country’s armed forces need American satellite intelligence data. If intelligence sharing were to stop, Ukraine would struggle to continue its successful campaign of long-range strikes against targets deep inside Russia, he said.Asked if the US threat to turn off Starlink was blackmail, he replied: “Yes. If it happens, it’s going to be pretty bad. Of that we can be sure.” Frontline troops used the internet system continuously and it was fitted on advanced naval drones used to sink Russian ships in the Black Sea, he noted.Speaking on Friday, Trump rowed back on some of his earlier comments, which included a false claim that Zelenskyy was deeply unpopular, with a “4%” rating. Trump told Fox News that Russia did invade Ukraine but said Zelenskyy and the then US president Joe Biden should have averted it. “They shouldn’t have let him [Putin] attack,” he declared.Trump’s aggressive remarks have consolidated support for Zelenskyy among Ukrainians, with 63% now approving of him, according to the latest opinion poll before the third anniversary on Monday of Russia’s full-scale invasion.An Opinium poll for the Observer finds more than three times as many UK voters (56%) disapprove of the Trump’s administration handling of Ukraine as approve (17%).About 55% think it likely the UK will need to participate in a large military conflict over the next five years, compared with a fifth (20%) who think it unlikely. A majority (60%) of people believe the UK should increase defence spending. More

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    Steve Witkoff: from property developer to global spotlight as Trump’s tough-talking troubleshooter

    With the first phase of the ceasefire nearing its end, an American property developer has emerged as a key figure in determining whether Gaza attains a more enduring peace or slips back into war.Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s typically idiosyncratic pick as special Middle East envoy, has also found his way into the midst of talks with Russia over Ukraine’s future, sitting opposite Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, instead of the official special envoy for the region, Keith Kellogg.On both portfolios, Witkoff is technically outranked by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, but every national capital knows by now that in Trump’s world, power flows through personal connection to the president. Rubio is a former bitter rival turned loyalist, brought into the administration for expediency’s sake. Witkoff and Trump go back nearly 40 years.That is what gives the 67-year-old businessman his clout. America’s interlocutors know he is the genial emissary of a volatile leader capable of swinging from fulsome support to public vituperation in a heartbeat, depending in large part on who has Trump’s ear.Witkoff demonstrated his influence in getting the ceasefire off the ground. On 10 January, Witkoff believed a breakthrough was close, after more than seven months of meandering, inconsequential talks. That Friday evening, he called Benjamin Netanyahu’s office from Doha, where he had been meeting Arab officials, and told the prime minister’s aides that he would be flying to Israel the next day. The aides explained that it would be Saturday and Netanyahu did not do business on the Sabbath, but would gladly meet the American envoy a few hours later, once night had fallen. Witkoff was having none of it and, according to an account in Haaretz newspaper, told them “in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him”.View image in fullscreenThe Israeli leader abandoned his Sabbath observance and received Witkoff in his office, where the envoy told him to agree to the ceasefire he had been ducking for so long.“The president has been a great friend of Israel,” Witkoff told Netanyahu, according to the Wall Street Journal, “and now it’s time to be a friend back.”Netanyahu folded immediately, allowing Witkoff to return to Doha to finalise the deal. The prime minister knew the American envoy was speaking for the president, whom he dared not anger.The bond of trust between Trump and Witkoff dates back to a chance encounter and a ham and cheese sandwich in a New York deli nearly four decades ago.Witkoff was born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, the son of a women’s coat manufacturer. He qualified as a lawyer, and was working on an all-night property deal in 1986 in which Trump was involved.Witkoff had gone to the deli at 3am to get food for his team and Trump was there, hungry but without any cash in his pocket.“I ordered him a ham and Swiss,” Witkoff told a court in 2023, when he was testifying on his friend’s behalf in Trump’s trial for fraud. He did not run into Trump for another eight years, but the tycoon had remembered “the sandwich incident”, and a friendship grew.Trump persuaded Witkoff to graduate from property law to become a developer. Both men moved between New York and Florida, playing prodigious amounts of golf. Witkoff was with Trump on the latter’s West Palm Beach golf course in September, when a would-be assassin was arrested armed with a sniper rifle.Witkoff has also spoken emotionally about the solace he found talking to Trump when one of his sons, Andrew, died from an opioid overdose in 2011.Their long history has instilled a fierce personal loyalty in Witkoff, and in return he is treated almost as family by the president. It is a friendship that predates Trump’s embrace of Christian nationalism and the far right, so Witkoff does not bring the same ideological baggage to his diplomacy as other acolytes. His fealty is to Trump personally, not to Maga.His mostly pleasant and polite manner also stands out in the Trump crowd. Don Peebles, another developer who knows both men well, told the Journalthat Witkoff is “not the kind of negotiator that wants to see blood on the floor before getting the deal done”.After the primary race was over last year, Trump dispatched Witkoff to make peace with his defeated Republican rivals. And Witkoff worked on the Gaza ceasefire with his Biden administration counterpart, Brett McGurk, during the transition in a rare example of bipartisan cooperation.“Brett McGurk was great for the Biden administration,” he recalled. “We worked collaboratively. We were able to convince people that a hostage release was a good thing.”He credits Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with persuading him to take on the role of Middle East envoy, a job Kushner performed informally for the first Trump administration.Kushner, another property developer, claimed the job on the basis of his business connections with the Gulf monarchies, but Witkoff, a far warmer personality than his slightly robotic predecessor, has also developed relationships lower down the social scale, particularly with the hostages’ families.“I have a lot of empathy because I lost a child,” he said. “So I talk to these families who have lost children and they want their children’s bodies back as much as the families who have children who are alive.”Witkoff’s focus on the remaining 58 hostages (of which Israeli authorities believe 34 to be already dead) aligns him with majority Israeli opinion in seeking agreement on the second phase of the ceasefire, but on a collision course with Netanyahu and the far right.The next phase will involve the release of many more Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli prisons and the complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip. It would be a substantial step towards a lasting peace, which is why Netanyahu is set against it. The right wing of his coalition, which opposed the ceasefire in the first place, threatens to walk out if it moves forward to a second phase without Hamas first being obliterated and the strip opened up to Jewish settlement.View image in fullscreenWitkoff has been publicly insistent that the second phase must get under way, putting the priority of securing the release of the last hostages above anything else. “I think phase two is more difficult,” he said at a conference in Miami on Thursday. But he added: “Everybody is buying into this notion that releasing hostages is just a good thing. It just is something that’s important and ought to happen.”At the conference, organised by a Riyadh-based charitable institute, Witkoff said it was his contacts among the Saudi royals who got him involved in Russian talks.He explained it was the Saudis who “engineered” the release of an American prisoner held by Moscow, through their contacts to Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund.“They felt that there could be a compelling meeting in Russia that might lead to the release of Marc Fogel,” Witkoff said. “We got off the plane, not sure it was going to happen, but it did.”Fogel’s release on 12 February gave Trump an early public relations win, and was enough of a sweetener from Vladimir Putin, to secure a phone call with the new US president the same day that began US-Russian talks about Ukraine, in the absence of Ukrainian representation.Witkoff’s role cemented his standing in Trump’s mind as someone who could get results, leading to his current status as America’s chief troubleshooter. However, enduring peace in Ukraine and the Middle East will ultimately revolve around issues of justice and national sovereignty, terms which Witkoff avoids.When he went to see the devastation in Gaza for himself at the end of January, he said he could not imagine why any Palestinian would want to stay there. The coming weeks may not just test his sway as a Trump emissary, but also the limits of the real estate approach to diplomacy. More