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      Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.

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      Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what at the time seemed like safe harbor in the United States.Of course, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.His reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement those three heads of state struck — with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic States it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later securing domination over six Eastern and Central European countries and part of Germany — remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and security. In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary, and prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.On X, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)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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      Ukrainians Blindsided by Deal’s Breakdown and by Trump’s Actions

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      Some said they felt the U.S. president was disrespectful and that they were proud of their leader for standing up to him.Liudmyla Shestakova has lost a lot to this war — her son, and his wife, who died together on the front lines. But she’s a realist, like many in this mining region in central Ukraine. And ever since President Trump suggested it, she has thought that her country should sign a proposed deal that would give America some profits from mining in Ukraine.Ms. Shestakova, 65, who works with an environmental group called Flora in the city of Kropyvnytskyi, had hoped a deal between the U.S. and Ukraine on critical minerals could bring much-needed investment to the region.But on Friday night, Ms. Shestakova, like many people in Ukraine, was shocked and blindsided at how the deal fell apart and how she felt that President Trump treated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, almost like a serf who didn’t bow and kiss the ring quite enough.“With a trustworthy partner, this could have been a beneficial deal for everyone,” said Ms. Shestakova, who once ran Flora and now sits on its supervisory board. “But with a partner like Trump, it could actually be dangerous.”Across Ukraine, people said they were upset Friday night. They also said they wouldn’t stop fighting, even if America walked away.“It will be hard, but we will survive,” said Iryna Tsilyk, 42, a poet and film director in the capital, Kyiv, whose husband serves in the army. “Today, I was not ashamed of my president and my country. I am not sure that the Americans can say the same.”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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      Former Defense Secretaries Call Trump’s Firing of Military Leaders ‘Reckless’

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      Five former defense secretaries condemned President Trump’s firing last week of senior military leaders as “reckless” and urged Congress not to confirm their successors.In an extraordinary letter to lawmakers on Thursday, the five men — including one who served under Mr. Trump during his first term — asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”The letter is signed by defense secretaries who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents since 1994: William J. Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Lloyd J. Austin III and Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary.In a purge of the military’s senior ranks last Friday, Mr. Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a four-star fighter pilot who was only the second African American to be the Joint Chiefs chairman, saying he would be replaced by a little-known, retired three-star Air Force general, Dan Caine. In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of Naval Operations, and Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.“Mr. Trump’s dismissals raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power,” they said in the letter. “Talented Americans may be far less likely to choose a life of military service if they believe they will be held to a political standard.”Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the firings are within the president’s right to choose who he wants in these positions.The five former defense secretaries urged Congress to “hold Mr. Trump to account for these reckless actions and to exercise fully its constitutional oversight responsibilities.” More

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      Oil Companies Wanted Trump to Lower Costs. Tariffs Are Raising Them.

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      President Trump’s promise during last year’s election to make it far easier to drill for oil and gas thrilled energy executives who believed his policies would lower their costs and help them make a lot more money.Those hopes are now fading. Thanks to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the oil and gas industry is contending with rising prices for essential materials like steel pipes used to line new wells.That has not yet translated into a meaningful change in U.S. drilling activity or production expectations, but companies have begun revising budgets to reflect higher materials costs. Decisions made today about which wells to drill will affect production many months from now.Oil refineries are separately bracing for a tariff on Canadian oil, which some of them need to produce gasoline, diesel and other fuels.At the same time, consumers have grown jittery about the economy and the price of oil has fallen about 10 percent since just before Mr. Trump took office, to around $70 a barrel. Oil companies tend to drill less when prices fall.The combination could complicate Mr. Trump’s stated desire to juice U.S. oil and natural gas production, which are already at or near record highs.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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      PCE Report Showed Inflation Eased Slightly in January

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      But consumer spending unexpectedly slowed, complicating the central bank’s plans for interest rates.Getting inflation under control since the worst surge in decades has been a bumpy process in recent months. New data on Friday showed a little progress, but also an unexpected pullback in consumer spending, complicating the path forward for the Federal Reserve as it debates when to restart interest rate cuts.The central bank’s preferred inflation measure, released on Friday, climbed 2.5 percent in January from a year earlier, slightly lower than the previous reading of 2.6 percent but still well above the central bank’s 2 percent target. On a monthly basis, prices increased 0.3 percent, in line with December’s pace.The “core” personal consumption expenditures price index, which strips out volatile food and energy costs and is closely watched as a gauge for underlying inflation, rose another 0.3 percent in January. Compared to the same time last year, it is up 2.6 percent, data from the Commerce Department showed. In December, it rose at an annual pace of 2.8 percent.The inflation figures were in line with what economists had expected and underscored the Fed’s decision to proceed cautiously with interest rate cuts after making adjustments in the second half of last year. The interest rate set by the Fed stands at 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent.Spending fell 0.2 percent in January, led by a drop in spending on cars and other goods. Economists had expected a 0.2 percent increase overall, following a 0.8 percent increase in December. Once adjusted for inflation, spending dropped by 0.5 percentage points, which is the sharpest monthly drop in almost four years.Thomas Ryan, an economist at Capital Economics, attributed the decline in part to “unseasonably severe winter weather,” but warned that the Fed’s job will become “trickier if January’s sharp decline in consumption was a sign of consumer strength buckling.”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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      How Consumers Can Protect Themselves With the CFPB on Pause

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      Rules on bank and credit card fees, medical debt and payment apps are in limbo. One thing you can do is carefully check your financial statements, one expert says.With the government seemingly stepping back from regulatory duties, consumers may have to act as their own financial watchdogs.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the independent federal agency created after the 2008 financial crisis to shield people from fraud and abuse by lenders and financial firms, has been muzzled, at least temporarily.“Everything is on pause right now,” said Delicia Hand, senior director of digital marketplace with Consumer Reports. “So it’s back on consumers to be extra diligent.” Ms. Hand previously spent nearly a decade in a variety of roles at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including overseeing complaints and consumer education, before departing in 2022.In early February, the Trump administration ordered the consumer bureau to mostly cease operations. It closed its Washington headquarters, fired some employees and put most of the rest of the staff on administrative leave, and opted not to seek funding for its activities. Several lawsuits are challenging the administration’s actions. On Feb. 14, a federal judge in Washington ordered the bureau to halt firing workers and not to delete data, pending a hearing scheduled for Monday.The administration, however, has already dialed back enforcement — dropping, for instance, a suit accusing an online lender of promoting free loans that actually carried high interest rates. On Thursday, the bureau dismissed a lawsuit that it had brought in January accusing Capital One of cheating customers out of some $2 billion in interest.It’s a stark change for an agency that had been energetic in adopting rules and filing lawsuits aimed at aiding consumers. Under the Biden administration, the bureau moved to reduce or eliminate various fees charged by banks and other financial firms and to remove unpaid medical debt from credit reports, and it fined a major credit reporting bureau for misleading consumers about credit freezes.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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      Inflation Is Rising. What Will That Mean for Trump’s Tariffs?

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      Consumer sentiment has turned south as high prices weigh on households. Could that crimp big pieces of the president’s economic agenda, including tariffs?Stubbornly high inflation is beginning to weigh on households, with sentiment souring fast, economists note.Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesRising prices hit a trade war President Trump isn’t backing off his tariff threats, despite the potential risk to the U.S. economy and financial markets.That puts additional focus on the latest Personal Consumption Expenditures report, the Fed’s favored inflation measure. It’s due for release at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.The question is whether lingering inflation also will have big implications for the Trump agenda, with some economists predicting that tariffs will raise inflation and lower growth, even if the target countries don’t retaliate. Friday’s report is expected to show only slight relief for consumers.Economists worry about a hot P.C.E. reading, which could push the central bank to keep borrowing costs higher well into the second half of the year, even as consumer confidence and the mood in the C-suites increasingly turn south and the economy shows signs of slowing.A recession is seen as unlikely, but there are other concerns. Recent data shows a growing affordability crunch with egg prices spiking (more on that below), home sales plummeting and jobless claims climbing. Watch next week’s jobs report for more, including which parts of the country could be hardest hit by Elon Musk-led cuts to the federal government. (Alaska is among them.)“With 3 million federal employees potentially worrying about their jobs and 6 million federal contractors worrying about their jobs, the risks are rising that households may begin to hold back purchases of cars, computers, washers, dryers, vacation travel plans, etc.,” Torsten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, wrote in a research note on Thursday. Sentiment, he added, is “bad.”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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      Office Closures and Relocations Part of Trump’s Plan for Large-Scale Layoffs

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      The newly released requirements for agencies to move forward with mass cuts to the federal work force have employees even more on edge.The Trump administration has moved into its next push and most aggressive yet to drastically overhaul the federal bureaucracy, demanding that agencies produce plans for large work force cuts that involve closing offices and relocating employees outside the Washington region.Agencies have been instructed to turn in a detailed list of divisions that should be consolidated or cut entirely by March 13, according to a recent memo from the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget, as part of a “reduction in force” process ordered by President Trump and orchestrated in large part by Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become a top adviser.By April 14, agencies must deliver new organizational charts and all proposals for relocating offices in the Washington region to areas of the country where the cost of living is lower, according to the memo. Agencies were instructed to be prepared to roll out this part of the plan by the end of September.For government agencies to fulfill these requirements would be an ambitious undertaking under any circumstances. But to accomplish this in accordance with the law in such a short time frame is most likely impossible, experts say.“No agency can do a genuine strategic plan in the next two weeks,” said Donald F. Kettl, professor emeritus and the former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “They need to figure out what they want to do and how best to do it, before they take a chain saw to government and cut indiscriminately.”The government is expected to follow specific rules when conducting these reductions in force. For one, employees need 60 days’ notice, said Kevin Owen, an employment lawyer with Gilbert Employment Law. (The recent White House guidance said that agencies can request an exception to provide just 30 days’ notice.)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