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

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      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

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      in Elections

      U.S. Pressing Tough Demands in Revised Deal for Ukraine’s Minerals

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      The Trump administration wants revenues from Ukraine’s natural resources, according to a draft obtained by The New York Times, with no security guarantee in exchange.Ukraine on Saturday was seriously considering a revised American proposal for its vast natural resources that contains virtually the same provisions that Kyiv previously rejected as too onerous, according to a draft document of the new proposal.Some of the terms appear even tougher than in a previous draft.Though Ukraine had not finalized the deal as of Saturday afternoon, its assent to the terms would represent a capitulation to American demands after a week of intense pressure from President Trump. The American president views access to Ukraine’s vast mineral wealth as necessary repayment for the billions the United States has provided Kyiv for its war against Russia.The deal could strip Ukraine of funds that are now mostly invested in the country’s military and defense industry, and that could help rebuild the country once the war is over.The terms of the new proposal, which is dated Feb. 21 and was reviewed by The New York Times, call for Ukraine to relinquish half of its revenues from natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as earnings from ports and other infrastructure.A similar demand was made in a previous version of the deal, dated Feb. 14 and reviewed by The Times. Four current and former Ukrainian officials and a Ukrainian businessman who had the terms of the new proposal described to them confirmed that the demand remained unchanged.Ukraine had been floating the prospect of a partnership with the United States on its valuable natural resources as a way to persuade Mr. Trump to provide additional support for its war effort as well as guarantees against future Russian aggression if a peace deal is struck.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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      in Elections

      Trump Really Can’t Get Enough of Himself

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      Like last Saturday, Times Opinion is using today’s newsletter to stay on top of President Trump’s moves, putting a spotlight on where Americans can’t afford to turn away from.Where America Stands: Trump smeared the founding fathers in Week 5 by declaring himself “king” — of the United States? The world? His narcissism knows no bounds — as he grasped for godlike power to pronounce congestion pricing “dead” in Manhattan. Calling himself “king” denigrates every American who has fought and died for democracy, but Trump sees those heroes as “losers” anyway. Of course, he doesn’t have a king’s power, but his efforts to remake America pay no heed to the rule of law.What Mattered Most This Week: Ukraine. Trump sent mixed messages, which he sees as core to his deal making, but make no mistake about his pro-Putin posture. Trump accused Ukraine of launching the war and called its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a dictator — both lies — while squeezing Kyiv for an earth minerals deal and a cease-fire in the war with Russia. Now, it’s worth keeping in mind, Trump is not alone in disliking Zelensky; the Biden White House deeply mistrusted him too. But Trump approaches Ukraine with a dangerous moral relativism: He doesn’t care about good and evil, as he showed Friday when he said he was “tired” of hearing about Putin’s war crimes. Trump cares about strength and leverage. “He has no cards,” he said of Zelensky. Trump sees the world as his casino and all that matters is your cards.Worth reading: My colleagues Bret Stephens and M. Gessen went deep on Ukraine, Putin, Trump and Europe in this round table, and the Times Opinion editorial board weighed in today on Ukraine. Susan Glasser of The New Yorker has a good piece on Trump’s “Putinization of America,” and The Wall Street Journal had strong reporting about the implications for NATO.The Most Important Long Game in Washington: Elon Musk. He and his youthful goon squad are running amok across federal agencies, with more layoffs hitting disaster relief programs, the Interior Department and the I.R.S. Americans want competence from their government, not chaos; Musk may enjoy breaking things, but the laws of political gravity suggest Republicans will pay the price.Worth reading: A Politico story about Republican lawmakers’ panic over the DOGE firing spree even as they cheer it in public; a Washington Post story along similar lines but about executive officials; and this Journal story about how X is effectively cashing in on Musk’s position. My colleague Zeynep Tufekci had a great column Friday on the digital clues to what Musk is up to.The Most Important Development Below the Radar: The Trump administration’s intervention on behalf of Andrew Tate. Trump’s moral relativism goes into overdrive when it comes to defending male predators.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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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Germany’s election: a chance to reset for a new era | Editorial

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      When Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, chose in November to force this weekend’s snap election, it felt like awkward timing. In the United States, Donald Trump had just won a decisive victory and was promising to move fast and break things. With a political storm brewing, was this the right time for the EU’s most important member state to embark on a period of prolonged introspection?Three tumultuous months later, with German democracy itself in the crosshairs of a hostile Trump administration, Sunday’s poll feels more like a valuable opportunity for an emergency reset. Any federal election carries huge significance beyond Germany’s borders. This poll is distinguished by being the first of a new era – one in which the transatlantic alliance that underpinned Europe’s postwar security can no longer be relied upon. Its outcome will be fundamental to shaping the EU’s response to that new reality, as existential decisions are made over defence spending and protecting Ukraine.With the centre-right coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union comfortably ahead in the polls, the strong likelihood is that Mr Scholz, a Social Democrat, will be replaced as chancellor by Friedrich Merz. Mr Merz has emphasised the need to stand up to bullying from Mr Trump over Ukraine and potential trade tariffs. Increasingly hawkish on Russia and the need to protect the EU’s eastern flank, he would be likely to take a more expansive approach on the European stage than Mr Scholz, whose inward focus exasperated the French president, Emmanuel Macron.Mr Scholz had his reasons for that. However alarming the international outlook, for many voters Germany’s urgent priorities remain narrowly domestic. A spate of fatal attacks involving migrant suspects has been ruthlessly exploited by the far‑right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, driving immigration to the top of the political agenda.All mainstream parties remain committed to the traditional firewall excluding the AfD from power (though Mr Merz relied on its votes to pass a recent opposition motion on stricter migration rules). But polls suggest it will achieve a comfortable second place on Sunday – a deeply disturbing position of strength for an ethno-nationalist party officially classified as suspected extremist. The party’s growing popularity among under-35 voters, and particularly among young men, is ominous.The rise of the far right has been accelerated by prolonged economic stagnation. Post-pandemic, Germany’s business model has been crushed by an end to the era of cheap Russian energy, higher interest rates and falling demand for its exports. Since Covid, almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs have been lost, in a country that prided itself on being Europe’s industrial powerhouse. A historic reluctance to borrow to invest – constitutionally enshrined in the 2008 debt brake – has become a liability, stymieing Mr Scholz’s attempts to respond.A suddenly isolated Europe needs a confident and prospering Germany at its heart. In a fragmented political landscape, it will almost certainly fall to another broad coalition government, led by Mr Merz, to try to deliver this. The AfD will, meanwhile, position itself as a Trumpian alternative-in-waiting, talked up by the likes of Elon Musk and the US vice‑president, JD Vance. Rarely has it been so important that the politics of moderation and consensus should succeed. In the post‑reunification era, the stakes both inside and outside Germany have never felt higher. More

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      in US Politics

      No matter how distasteful we find Trump and Vance over Europe, they speak a blunt truth | Simon Jenkins

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      It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard. He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.Yes, these men are mendacious and hypocritical. Trump claims that Zelenskyy “refuses to have elections” and that he is “very low in the polls” despite recent polling showing that he still has a majority of Ukrainian support. As for the threat to free speech “from within”, the Associated Press is banned from White House briefings for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, and Trump’s friend Elon Musk thinks CBS’s “lying” journalists “deserve a long prison sentence”.Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?If the rest of the world has screwed up – while the US has stayed free and rich for two and a half centuries – that is the world’s problem. Americans have spent a fortune these past 50 years trying to improve life on Earth and, frankly, it has failed. To hell with diplomatic etiquette.As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone.Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing. It was just another device to make the US pay for Europe’s defence. Not any more. The US, says the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, “is no longer the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. Bang goes plausible nuclear deterrence.In reality, these talking points are not new, though they have not previously been expressed so brutally by an administration. In various guises, they have lurked beneath the surface of US isolationism for more than a century. To win an election, Woodrow Wilson swore that the first world war was “one with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us”. Franklin Roosevelt promised the same of the second. He promised American mothers “again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”. Neither kept his word.US public opinion can be patriotic when a war is on, as during Vietnam. But otherwise it has been persistently anti-interventionist. Kennedy might have pleaded global sacrifice and to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”. But that was largely fine words for foreign consumption.What Trump/Vance are now saying to western Europe is get serious. The cold war is over. You know Russia has no desire to occupy western Europe. This proclaimed threat is a fantasy got up by what a wise president, Dwight Eisenhower, called the US’s military-industrial complex, long practised at extracting profit from fear. If Keir Starmer really wants “to give priority to defence”, he can slash his own health and welfare budgets to pay for it. But is he really that threatened, or does it merely sound good?Joe Biden was meticulous in the degree of help he extended to Kyiv. Now is the inevitable moment of extrication, but it will require a very difficult ceasefire to precede it. Without a substantial guarantee from Washington, it is hard to see anything other than eventual defeat for Kyiv. Ukraine could yet prove a rerun of the US in South Vietnam.With a minimum of delicacy, Trump/Vance have decided to expose the mix of platitude, bluff and profiteering that underpinned much of the cold war. Nato’s victory in 1989 suggested the need for a shift to a more nuanced multipolar world, one that was never properly defined.Trump/Vance are right that a realignment is badly needed. They have chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it. We can be as rude to them as we like, but they will have US democracy on their side.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is tearing up the transatlantic alliance. Can Starmer’s US visit change the weather?

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      In November 1940, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Franklin Roosevelt expressing relief both at the US president’s re-election and the victory of his anti-appeasement policy. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must now avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us safely to anchor,” he wrote.As Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron prepare to meet a very different US president, things are once again afoot that will live long in the memory – but this time the lights seem to be going out on a ship adrift in a sea of chaos.In his Arsenal of Democracy speech, Roosevelt spurned those who asked to “throw the US weight on the scale in favour of a dictated peace”. He also saw past Nazi Germany’s “parade of pious purpose” to observe “in the background the concentration camps and ‘servants of God’ in chains”.View image in fullscreenDonald Trump, by contrast, glories in the prospect of a US-dictated peace and in Russia he sees no gulags.Starmer’s nightmare is that the transatlantic alliance forged in the second world war is crumbling before his eyes. The inconceivable has become not just possible, but probable, or as Macron put it on Wednesday: “Do not think that the unthinkable cannot happen, including the worst.”If the central tenets of the postwar order are disintegrating, one of the casualties is likely to be Britain’s self-appointed role as the US’s bridge to Europe. There is a macabre circularity that France and the UK feel it necessary to plead with Trump to recall the US’s history as the generous country that kept the flame of freedom alive in Europe.Margaret MacMillan, a professor of international history at Oxford, fears Trump will not listen to their case. “Never underestimate the importance of individuals in history, especially if they wield a great deal of power, and Donald Trump has got his hands on the levers of the most powerful country in the world. He is not controllable by anyone … He does not have a clear set of policies, but a set of likes and dislikes. Decisions are based on emotion and whim and last moment ideas,” she said.“Even great powers need allies – and yet he is turning on his allies.”Europe was braced psychologically for Trump to refuse further military aid to Ukraine on the basis the US had dispensed enough, and the killing had become a senseless stalemate. But it was never foreseen that in turning off the tap he would parrot Russian propaganda, baselessly accusing Ukraine’s leadership of starting the war, and falsely describing Volodymr Zelenskyy as a “dictator”.View image in fullscreenSuch language risks in effect Trump’s America swapping sides in the war. How does Europe react?The necessary first response, out of self-respect, was to reject the US president’s framing of the war, as did the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, when he described Trump’s words as “an unprecedented distortion of reality and extremely dangerous”.The second step has been to appeal to those with sense in the US that their leader is taking them down a disastrous path. But Trump long ago cleansed the current Republican party of politicians that challenged his rule. Republicans have discovered challenging Trump was not a profitable career path.Trump’s chief consideration in assembling his foreign policy team has been loyalty, not talent. It leaves foreign diplomats with few pressure points to exploit.H R McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, insisted there were still ways to talk Trump around. “He is reflexively contrarian – if you go to him and say everybody agrees on this Mr President, he will do the opposite just to spite you. The technique I would use is to say: ‘This is what Vladimir Putin wants you to say, and this is why he wants you to say it.’ I would show to him what is happening in Russian markets and say: ‘You have just given this psychological gift to the Russians who are celebrating.’“The Europeans need to come out with a clear message: ‘Whatever you do, do not give Putin what he wants upfront.’ What does he want upfront? Sanctions relief. Keep him backed into the damned corner.”Kim Darroch, the former UK ambassador to Washington, suggested Macron and Starmer force Trump to focus on the details, such as how he intends to apply pressure on Putin – something that is absent from his current discourse.View image in fullscreenAlexander Stubb, the Finnish president, suggested Trump simply did not understand what might be at stake for the US. He said: “We have to convince the US that Ukraine’s future is a decisive question not only for Ukraine, but also for European security, the international system and the US’s status as a great power. Our duty is to make clear what the consequences would be if Putin gets what he wants.”Macron and Starmer know Europe’s hand badly needs strengthening, especially since it became clear that Europe was not only going to be sidelined in talks between Russia and the US, but would still be expected to police any settlement – without any help from the Americans.In Paris, first with the major European leaders in person, and then by video with the smaller EU countries, Macron tried to adopt the role of convener in chief. In the words of the former French defence official Camille Grand, the aim was to show Europe “deserved to be at the table but not on the menu”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt was a first attempt to show that if indeed the US expects Europe to provide a peacekeeping/reassurance force inside Ukraine, it could respond so long as preconditions were met – including US logistical support.But with little time to prepare, the Paris meeting did not go well. Scholz, facing federal elections this weekend, left early describing discussion of troops as premature, and insisting nothing could be done without US support. Giorgia Meloni arrived late, and was suspicious that the US was being undermined. Smaller nations were nervous of an electoral backlash.Only Starmer, after four hours of talks with British defence officials, went public with a firm if imprecise offer of troops – contingent on a US “backstop” since without its air, logistics and communications support, the operation would not be safe. It was a bold move by the normally cautious Starmer, but he was nervous of the corrosive impact Trump’s remarks would have on Ukrainian troop morale. Macron characterised it as a “dissuasion” force, saying “if there is no such dissuasion, Russia will not keep its word”.Western officials added that the purpose of the US backstop would be to make sure a European landforce would not be challenged by Russia – which would require air support and efforts to make the Black Sea safe international waters.The landforce would not need to be as high as 30,000, since the US backstop – probably US aircraft based in Romania and Lask airbase in Poland – would be ready to respond if the ceasefire was about to be breached.The European landforce would provide confidence to Ukrainians, undertaking protection tasks, and in the process encouraging Ukrainians abroad to return to their homeland.So the kernel of the talks in Washington will be persuasive and probing. Trump will be asked to drop his objection to a US backstop, and to lay out clearly how and on what terms he expects Putin permanently to end the war.But Trump’s vicious dismissal of the “minor comic” Zelenskyy and the US refusal to describe Russia as the aggressor in planned UN and G7 statements do not bode well for a ceasefire – let alone a peace treaty.Such comments show how Trump’s apparent personal grudge against Zelenskyy has become hard policy, and reflect his framing of the conflict in which Ukraine is not the victim, but the aggressor – and so does not deserve a seat at the negotiating table.As Richard Haass, the director of the Council on Foreign Relations, said from the US perspective: “The phase in which Vladimir Putin is treated as a pariah is over.”Opposition to Russian aggression has been the centrepiece of UK foreign policy since Ernest Bevin was the foreign secretary. As recently as 2023, the Strategic Defence Review described Russia as the most acute threat to the UK’s security. And last September, the directors of MI6 and the CIA issued a rare joint statement warning that Russian intelligence was waging a campaign of sabotage across Europe and “[using] technology to spread lies and disinformation to drive wedges between us”.Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, warned in 2010 that the UK would be in danger of sliding into irrelevance “if we have neither the strong transatlantic relationship or a strong role in Europe”.Powell urged the UK to stay close to US presidents, even when things get tough because they will remember it and reward the UK by letting its officials give counsel to the world’s only superpower. The necessary price for such influence was discretion and domestic accusations of being the US’s poodle.Fifteen years later that strategy is under intolerable strain.Brexit has happened and if Trump continues on its current path towards Russia, the UK faces the unenviable choice of distancing itself from its most important postwar partner – or renouncing all that it has ever believed about Russia. More

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      in US Politics

      Stop criticising Trump and sign $500bn mineral deal, US official advises Kyiv

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      White House officials have told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US, saying a failure to do so would be unacceptable.The US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told Fox News that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should “tone down” his criticism of the US and take a “hard look” at the deal. It proposes giving Washington $500bn worth of natural resources, including oil and gas.Waltz said Kyiv was wrong to push back against the US president’s approach to peace talks with Moscow, given everything the US had done for Ukraine. He denied accusations the US had snubbed Ukraine and America’s European allies by excluding them from talks earlier this week with Russia. This was routine “shuttle diplomacy”, he said.“Some of the rhetoric coming out of Kyiv … and insults to president Trump were unacceptable,” Waltz later told reporters at the White House.“President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with president Zelenskyy, the fact that he hasn’t come to the table, that he hasn’t been willing to take this opportunity that we have offered.”On Wednesday, Trump called Zelenskyy “a dictator” who refused to hold elections and blamed Ukraine for the war. Zelenskyy, for his part, said Trump was living in a Kremlin “disinformation bubble” and that he wished Trump’s team were “more truthful”.The US’s rapid dumping of Zelenskyy as an ally was underlined when Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, cancelled a press conference in Kyiv. Journalists were summoned to the presidential palace to ask questions after his meeting with Zelenskyy but were stood down.Later Zelenskyy said he had a “good discussion” with Kellogg. It covered the battlefield situation, how to return Ukrainian prisoners of war, and “effective security guarantees”. He said he was grateful to the US for its assistance and bipartisan support, adding: “It’s important for us – and for the entire free world – that American strength is felt.”Kellogg is seen as the most pro-Ukrainian of Trump’s entourage. He did not take part in a meeting earlier this week between the US and Russia in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. One Ukrainian official said Kellogg had been sidelined from the peace talks, adding that Zelenskyy was in an “engaged” frame of mind and “highly motivated”.The envoy is due to leave Kyiv on Friday after a three-day trip. It was unclear if he would take up Zelenskyy’s proposal that they visit the frontline and talk to senior commanders, who are fending off a superior and advancing Russian force in the war-torn east.Ukrainians are sceptical any deal with Moscow will stick and believe Vladimir Putin’s original war goals – to conquer as much territory as possible – are unchanged. The US vice-president, JD Vance, said on Thursday that talks with Russia were making progress. “I really believe we are on the cusp of peace in Europe for the first time in three years,” he said, adding that Trump was determined to stop the war.Vance told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland: “I think with president Trump, what makes him such an effective negotiator, and I have seen this in private, is that he does not take anything off the table … Everything is on the table. And of course that makes the heads explode in America because they say: ‘Why are you talking to Russia?’”There were further signs that the Trump administration now considers Ukraine an adversary, and is working against it on a diplomatic level.According to Reuters, the US was refusing to co-sponsor a draft UN resolution to mark the third anniversary on Monday of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. The resolution condemns Russian aggression and reaffirms Ukraine’s sovereignty and pre-2014 international borders, before Russia annexed Crimea and started a covert military takeover of the eastern Donbas region.This is the first time since the war started that the US has failed to back the resolution. About 50 countries are likely to support it, including the UK and most EU governments, it is understood.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House was blocking a similar statement from the G7 group of countries blaming Russia for the conflict, the Financial Times reported. It said US envoys had objected to the phrase “Russian aggression” and had not signed off on a plan to allow Zelenskyy to address G7 leaders by video.Meanwhile, the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the White House could be willing to lift sanctions on Russia, or increase them, depending on Moscow’s readiness to negotiate. Bessent visited Kyiv this week, presenting Zelenskyy with the demand for minerals and saying it was “payback” for previous US military assistance.Bessent said he had received assurances Ukraine would sign the deal. On Wednesday, however, Zelenskyy said the US had provided $69.2bn in assistance under the Biden administration – far less than the figure the new White House is demanding. He said an agreement depended on the US giving security guarantees for a postwar settlement.European leaders have offered support to Ukraine, including Britain’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron. Zelenskyy said he spoke on Thursday to Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. “We deeply appreciate Denmark’s clear stance on a true peace – the peace we all strive for, that must be securely guaranteed,” he wrote on social media.The Kremlin has reacted with jubilation to Trump’s unprecedented attacks on Ukraine and to his false claim Zelenskyy has a 4% popularity rating. The actual figure is 57%, according to the latest opinion polls. “The rhetoric of Zelenskyy and many representatives of the Kyiv regime leaves much to be desired,” Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said.Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and now deputy chair of Russia’s security council, said he was stunned at how quickly Trump’s stance on Ukraine had evolved. “‘A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Medvedev posted on X.He added in English: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud. Trump is 200 percent right.” More