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      Hold your breath and look to Germany: its election could decide the fate of Europe – and the UK | Martin Kettle

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      Even in less stressed times, Britain always pays too much attention to the US and too little to Germany. In today’s torrid circumstances, that imbalance is perhaps excusable. After all, Donald Trump, it now turns out, really means it. He is more interested in US plunder and profit from places like Gaza, Ukraine and Greenland than in upholding a just peace or good order.Even so, the inattention towards Germany needs to end. Britain’s politicians, like German politicians, are rewiring their worldviews amid a political gale. But Germany, though no longer a great power, is nevertheless a great nation. Indeed, it may be more than ever the essential European nation now, after the Trump administration’s very public trashing of the entire Atlantic alliance seemed to leave Europe to its own devices.The German general election, this coming Sunday, is an event with consequences. Primarily, of course, those consequences will be felt in Germany itself, with its extended economic stagnation, its anxieties about migration and borders, its traditional fears about borrowing, its nervousness about military commitments, and its sudden lurching anxiety that the US is ready to allow Russia to threaten the lands on its eastern frontier.Germany’s inherent importance, though, means the election will also help determine whether Europe – not just the EU – is able to cope with Trump’s second term. Will that Europe be able to deliver the defence and security to protect not merely Ukraine, a daunting enough task, but the Baltic republics, Poland and the other former Soviet satellite states too? Can it reform its faltering economic model? These are reverberations that Britain cannot avoid, even if it wants to.Needless to say, the German election has received only a fraction of the attention that this country’s political class lavishes on a US election. Equally predictably, much of that very limited amount of attention is absorbed by a fixation – one that is shared to a degree by the German media – with the populist anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. As a result, however, the likely victor on Sunday, the centre-right CDU-CSU coalition under the probable next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has barely been scrutinised at all.This contest is occurring against a backdrop of economic failure, not success. The German economy shrank in 2023 and again in 2024. It seems likely to stay in recession again this year. It adds up to the longest period of economic stagnation since the fall of Hitler in 1945. Whoever emerges as chancellor after Sunday will face choices very similar to those confronting Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.The reasons for Germany’s decline are not hard to understand. Germany’s dependence on Russian energy meant prices soared after the invasion of Ukraine. Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government, in power since 2021, has scaled back that dependence – renewables now produce 60% of German energy – but not eliminated it. German car exports have become more expensive, while China has surged ahead in the production of cheaper electric vehicles. A tariff war with the US now looms.All this has provided a system shock to a country still strongly conditioned by its craving for postwar stability. “We have used up our old success, and not invested in new things,” the commentator Theo Koll told the UK in a Changing Europe podcast this week. “We have for a long time lived in a kind of ‘Gore-Tex republic’ … we wanted it nice and cosy inside and all the unpleasant things had to be outside.”The rise of the AfD, amid the perception that irregular migration is out of control, is the single most visible sign that the old political era has ended. It has been quickened by violent killings where migrants are suspects during the election campaign in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and, last week, Munich. The latest Politico poll of polls puts the AfD on 21%, double what it secured in the previous federal election in 2021, running second to the CDU-CSU on 29%, but ahead of Scholz’s SPD on 16% and the Greens on 13%.By that token, though, a victory for Merz’s CDU-CSU on 23 February would be genuinely significant. It would be significant even though 29% would be a decline from the 42% that the parties took under Angela Merkel in 2013. It would show, in Europe’s heartland, that the line can be held against populism of the right. This is not a trivial lesson, especially after the debacle of the French assembly election last year.It would also be a vote of confidence, albeit a relatively weak one, for one of Europe’s few remaining big parties of the centre right. Once-powerful parties like the French Gaullists can only look on with frustration and envy – to say nothing of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. Not least, it would also be a rebuke to those like Elon Musk and JD Vance who have actively promoted the AfD from abroad.Yet it would also pose two big questions. The first, and more immediate, would be the coalition that Merz would construct and the content of its programme. Everything here depends on which parties qualify for the Bundestag and on how many seats each wins. Merz has repeatedly ruled out governing with the AfD, so his main coalition partner could be Scholz’s diminished SPD or, less likely in view of Merz’s commitment to growth, the Greens.If the polls are right, however, whatever Merz comes up with is likely to be a weak coalition. This would give him relatively little leeway to drive reforms of the kind he advocates – familiar themes to UK readers, like benefit cuts, ending business red tape and raising defence spending. He is, though, open to loosening the constitutionally enshrined “debt brake”, which is blocking much-needed public investment. It is likely to take until Easter before we know the full coalition picture.The other, intimately related, question would be about Germany’s borders. Merz triggered huge protests when the AfD backed his bill allowing Germany to turn asylum seekers and other migrants back at the border. This prompted a rare rebuke from Merkel, that Merz had abandoned a historically resonant firewall against far-right support. Yet border controls matter for any state that seeks to ensure the security, including the social welfare, of its citizens, and Germany is not the only country where voters are demanding greater effectiveness.Sunday’s election is a critical European moment, and would be even if Trump did not exist. The key question is not, at least at this stage, about the rise of the extreme right. It is about the continuing viability of the centre right, or the adaptability of what Merkel, from early in her career as party leader, dubbed “the new social capitalism”. The current recession has put this vision to an unforgiving test. Merz will be judged by the outcome, if he wins power. It is a moment that matters for Germany – but also for us.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump signs executive order targeting ‘benefits for illegal aliens’

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      Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at ending federal benefits for people in the country illegally, his latest in a blizzard of moves to crack down on immigration.The White House said the order seeks to end “all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens” but it was not clear which benefits will be targeted. People in the country illegally generally do not qualify except for emergency medical care. Children are entitled to a free K-12 public education regardless of immigration status under a 1982 supreme court ruling.The order notes that a 1996 welfare overhaul denies most public benefits to people in the country illegally but says that law has been gradually undermined. “Over the last 4 years, in particular, the prior administration repeatedly undercut the goals of that law, resulting in the improper expenditure of significant taxpayer resources.”Trump’s words appear directed at former president Joe Biden’s extensive use of parole authority to allow people into the country temporarily, including more than 900,000 through an online appointment app called CBP One used at border crossings with Mexico, and more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who flew to the US at their own expense with a financial sponsor. Trump immediately ended both programs.Biden also granted parole to nearly 300,000 people from Ukraine and Afghanistan.People granted parole for at least a year are considered “qualified non-citizens”, making them eligible for some income-based benefits, but only after five years. They include Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid, according to the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Some states have shortened the five-year wait.Trump’s order appears to have other targets, some already subjects of earlier edicts and Justice Department lawsuits. It directs all departments and agencies to identify federal benefit spending that is inconsistent with the 1996 welfare law. It also seeks to ensure that state and local governments are not using federal funds for policies that support “sanctuary” policies or encourage illegal immigration.Trump signed 10 executive orders on immigration on his first day in office. They included ending automatic citizenship for people born in the United States and asylum at the southern border. The birthright citizenship order has been temporarily halted in court.In another order on Wednesday, Trump instructed the heads of every agency to undertake a review of all regulations, working with members of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency. Any regulations that are deemed inconsistent with the administration’s policies will be rescinded or modified, the order said.The action aims to bolster Musk’s sweeping government-slashing effort, which is facing numerous court challenges over its lawfulness.Trump also targeted a number of advisory committees and agencies for elimination, part of his broader campaign to assert control over independent executive agencies.Among the agencies set to be disbanded are the United States Institute for Peace, which promotes conflict resolution around the world; the Inter-American Foundation, which funds community development programs in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the US African Development Foundation, which invests in community development efforts in Africa.With Associated Press and Reuters More

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      US deportees moved from Panama City to Darién jungle region, lawyer says

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      A group of immigrants deported from the US to Panama last week have been moved from a hotel in the capital to the Darién jungle region in the south of the country, according to a lawyer representing an immigrant family.Susana Sabalza, a Panamanian immigration lawyer, said a family she represents was transferred to Metetí, a town in the Darién, along with other deported people. La Estrella de Panamá, a local daily, reported on Wednesday that 170 of the 299 people who had been in the hotel had been moved to the Darién.Panama’s government did not respond to a request for comment.The 299 immigrants had been staying at a hotel in Panama City under the protection of local authorities and with the financial support of the United States through the UN-related International Organization for Migration and the UN refugee agency, according to the Panamanian government.Immigrants in the hotel were not allowed to leave, and at least one person tried to kill themselves, while another broke his leg trying to escape, according to media reports.Panama’s migration service said on Wednesday that a Chinese woman had escaped from the hotel. It asked her to return and accused unspecified people outside the hotel of aiding his escape.On Wednesday afternoon there were still migrants on the hotel. One family came to a window and gestured to a journalist outside they had no phone. Police later came to move reporters away from the hotel.The group includes people from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, according to Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, who has agreed with the US to receive non-Panamanian deportees. The deportation of non-Panamanian immigrants to Panama is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to ramp up deportations of people living in the US illegally.One of the challenges to Trump’s plan is that some people come from countries that refuse to accept US deportation flights, due to strained diplomatic relations or other reasons. The arrangement with Panama allows the US to deport people of these nationalities and makes it Panama’s responsibility to organize their onward repatriation. Human rights groups have warned that immigrants risk mistreatment and may be endangered if they are ultimately returned to violent or war-torn countries of origin, such as Afghanistan.Sabalza said she had not been able to see her clients while they were held at the hotel in Panama City and she is seeking permission to visit them at their new location. She declined to identify their nationality, but said they were a Muslim family who “could be decapitated” if they returned home.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSabalza said the family would be requesting asylum in Panama or “any country that will receive them other than their own”.Mulino said previously the immigrants would be moved to a shelter in the Darién region, which includes the dense and lawless jungle separating Central America from South America that has in recent years become a corridor for hundreds of thousands of people aiming to reach the United States. Panama’s security minister said on Tuesday that more than half of the people deported from the United States in recent days had accepted voluntary repatriations to their home countries.With reporting by Reuters More

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      Trump blindsides Senate Republicans by endorsing rival House budget plan

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      Donald Trump has derailed Senate Republicans’ budget strategy by endorsing a competing House option, leaving GOP leaders scrambling to save their agenda just weeks before a potential government shutdown.The president’s surprise intervention came just hours after Senate Republicans moved to advance their own two-track proposal, as he declared instead that he wants “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL” through the House’s reconciliation process.“Unlike the Lindsey Graham version of the very important Legislation currently being discussed, the House Resolution implements my FULL America First Agenda,” Trump posted on Truth Social.The announcement forces Senate Republicans to reconsider their carefully planned schedule of votes this week on a slimmer package that was meant to cover defense, border security and energy provisions.While the Senate majority leader, John Thune, admitted being blindsided, he told reporters his side was still full steam ahead on a Thursday vote for its version of a bill.“If the House can produce one big, beautiful bill, we’re prepared to work with them to get that across the finish line,” Thune said. “But we believe that the president also likes optionality.”The House proposal Trump is backing would add $4.5tn to the deficit through tax cuts while demanding enormous cuts to federal benefits programs. Under the plan’s strict rules, Republicans must either slash $2tn from mandatory programs (which could include Medicare, Medicaid and food assistance) or scale back their proposed tax breaks by an equal amount.The timing is already tight, as Congress is barreling down a 14 March deadline to pass the bill that would avoid a shutdown forcing hundreds of thousands of federal employees to go without pay. Although Republicans control both chambers, the majorities are so thin they will need Democratic votes to pass any funding measure.In the Senate, where Republicans hold 53 seats, at least 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, working with a slim 218-215 majority, faces similar math problems and internal drama.Johnson immediately claimed victory over Trump’s endorsement of the House plan, saying on X that House Republicans are “working to deliver President Trump’s FULL agenda – not just a small part of it”.But his proposal faces resistance from Republicans worried about proposed entitlement cuts – cuts Trump himself rejected on Tuesday on Fox News, saying: “Medicare, Medicaid – none of that stuff is going to be touched.”“If a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it,” the freshman Republican congressman Rob Bresnahan said on X.The White House dispatched the vice-president, JD Vance, to meet Senate Republicans on Wednesday afternoon, attempting to smooth tensions as both chambers grapple with how to advance Trump’s agenda. But it’s clear that some senators will be hard to convince.“I’m not sure [the House budget could] pass the House or that it could pass the Senate,” the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson told reporters.The House remains in recess until next week, leaving Senate Republicans alone on Capitol Hill to plot their next move. More

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      The US and Europe are at a crossroads. A new world order is emerging

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      Over the past week, the foundations of US-European relations shifted dramatically.In a series of highly controversial interventions, Donald Trump’s administration outlined a new US approach to Europe. It revolves around negotiating a rapid end to the war between Ukraine and Russia, handing Europe the lead responsibility for its own defense, and forging a new transatlantic alliance of populist forces on the right. After 25 years of working on transatlantic relations, I am aware of the tendency of crisis moments like this to fade and relationships to trend back toward historical norms. But this time is different.At the Munich Security Conference, Trump officials hurled a series of rhetorical bombs at their European counterparts. As the electricity crackled through the cramped rooms of Munich’s Bayerischer Hof hotel over the weekend, the historic stakes were clear. Would Europe manage, after years of talk, to pull together and defend itself or would it simply be a pawn in the US and Russia’s larger game? Would Ukraine avoid being overrun by the Russian army and emerge with its sovereignty intact? For the rest of the world, what would it mean for the west to truly fracture, Russia to be rehabilitated, and the war in Ukraine to end?The reverberations began last Wednesday when the US president announced that he and Vladimir Putin had made a plan to negotiate an end to the war. Europe and Ukraine were frightened to the bone that the future of their security would be decided without them.Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, said at Nato headquarters in Brussels that Europe would need to provide for Ukraine’s defenses once the war was over – and with only limited support from the United States. Europeans fear they are woefully unprepared for this task. In a reversal of official US policy, Hegseth added that Ukraine would not join Nato. Ironically, it was the Republican George W Bush who had first insisted that it would in 2008 – over the objections of his German and French counterparts, who thought doing so would provoke Russia.When the US vice-president, JD Vance, strode on to the Munich stage, the throng in the Bayerischer Hof thus waited with bated breath. What, exactly, was Trump’s plan for Ukraine? What they got instead will go down as one of the most controversial speeches an American political leader has ever given in Europe.With little discussion of Ukraine’s future, Vance launched into a harangue that alleged that Europe was repressing free speech and undermining democracy by holding back rightwing nationalist movements like the Alternative für Deutschland. This dropped like molten lead. Here was a vision of democracy sharply at odds with his audience’s.Vance clearly aimed to shock. Whether he aimed to insult is unclear, but in the end he did both.Afterward, European leaders hastily rewrote their own remarks to attack Vance’s and call for European unity in the face of American betrayal. Some were more realistic than others about what they might achieve.On the realistic side was Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, who spoke publicly in many forums about the need to turn a possible Yalta moment, in which Russia and the US remake European security without Europe’s input, into a Helsinki moment, in which the principles for a future peace and detente are put in place.Others, however, still in a state of shock, continued to call for Europe to push back against the US, go its own way, and win the war for Ukraine on its own. Talking points like these worked well three years ago, but their unrealistic nature today risks undermining Europe’s ability to pull together and ensure its vital interests are protected.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Asia’s two giants – China and India – watched this remaking of the west with optimism. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, took a tranquil, almost beneficent tone in his remarks as he surveyed the chasms that had emerged. China, after all, has itself long sought to provoke such divides. India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, was perhaps more circumspect, but still optimistic. For these countries, the crackup of the west is only another sign that the rest of this century will be theirs.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has since met in Saudi Arabia with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to prepare the way for Putin and Trump’s next discussion on the future of Ukraine – and by extension Europe. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has convened European heads of state in the hope of forging the consensus they will need to protect their world in this moment of crisis. This will be very hard.Years as an observer and participant in the making of Europe’s relations with the US leave me innately wary of ever judging a single crisis to mark a definitive shift. The structural features of the transatlantic relationship are deep and often guide us away from crises toward a median line – whether over Iraq, Libya or Iran. The challenges to negotiating an end to this war are moreover enormous and history could cleave in more directions than one as the process unfolds.The United States is not decoupling from Europe, but this past week must be viewed as the opening salvo in a major US effort to renegotiate the terms of its bond with Europe. How far the Trump administration will get cannot be known, but this foundational relationship of US statecraft, which was born in the moment of the US’s rise to global superpower status, will change in fundamental ways. With it, the future of modern democracy, itself born of Europe and sustained by the transatlantic bond for decades, is in play. A new world order is emerging.

      Christopher Chivvis is senior fellow and director of the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as the US national intelligence officer for Europe from 2018 to 2021 More

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      Trump’s Gaza takeover won’t happen. But it has already changed the face of Israeli politics | Yair Wallach

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      When President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Hamas last week to release all hostages by noon on 15 February, warning that otherwise “all hell [will] break loose”, the Israeli right was ecstatic. Here was a chance to finally move ahead with the complete occupation and annihilation of the Gaza Strip. The families of Israeli hostages were petrified about the prospect of the ceasefire collapsing, yet members of the ruling coalition called to kill the deal. “We have international support, give the order!” demanded the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.But the order never came. Hamas abided by the agreement and freed three hostages; Israel then released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Trump shrugged and said that it was Israel’s decision. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, who visited Israel on Sunday, signalled that the direction of travel is not towards resuming hostility. Instead, the parties must now move to “substantive” negotiations over the second phase of the ceasefire, he said, leading to peace.In the whirlwind of the last four weeks, it is difficult to make sense of Trump’s approach to the Gaza Strip. On the one hand, the president is widely credited for pushing the parties to a ceasefire agreement, raising hopes among Israelis who want to see a return of the hostages and an end to the war. On the other, Trump embraced the hard-right Israeli vision of ethnically cleansing Gaza, through a forced “relocation” of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents, establishing a US real estate development that would turn the Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.Some suspect this is merely a negotiation ploy that he hopes will pressure Arab states to take responsibility over Gaza, and to force Hamas into relinquishing control and influence. Even if this were the case, Trump’s rhetoric has already damaged international law. For the first time in many decades, the US has publicly proposed the forced displacement of millions of people as a geopolitical solution. As the genocide scholar Dirk Moses recently observed, this may mark the end of the postwar order, which defined such “transfers” of populations as war crimes that were banned by the Geneva conventions. While episodes of forced mass displacement have taken place in the second half of the 20th century, such as those in Yugoslavia or in Syria, these were never endorsed or championed by the White House.The legitimisation of ethnic cleansing could have a lasting impact in Palestine, Israel and beyond. Palestine’s history is instructive: in 1937, the Palestine Royal Commission administered by Britain proposed the forced displacement of over 200,000 Palestinians from the Galilee as part of its partition plan. Mainstream Zionist leaders had long ruled out transfers on this scale as unrealistic. But British backing for this idea gave it legitimacy. David Ben-Gurion, then the leader of the Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine, wrote in his diary: “This is a possibility we did not dream of; that we could not dream of in our wildest imagination.”Ben-Gurion understood that the details of the partition plan mattered far less than the principle of forced mass displacement. In the aftermath of the second world war, “population exchanges” were explicitly or tacitly accepted by the great powers as a necessary evil. Eleven years after the royal commission, Ben-Gurion oversaw the permanent expulsion and dispossession of two-thirds of Palestinians, in the Nakba of 1948.We can already see the effect of Trump’s rhetoric on Israeli society. Since October 2023, rightwing ministers and political activists have been calling for a euphemistic “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, and yet Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had sought to keep a safe distance from such ideas. The idea of forced displacement was broadly considered so beyond the pale that mainstream pollsters did not even pose the question in their Israeli public opinion surveys.Yet shortly after his return from Washington DC, a gleeful Netanyahu lauded Trump’s “revolutionary vision for the day after Hamas”. “We see eye-to-eye with the US administration on … all our war goals”, he told the Knesset. The political commentator and radio host Amit Segal, who has been accused of serving as Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, quoted the Psalms verse: “We were like them that dream.” The verse refers to the return of Jews to Zion; now it was being used to celebrate the looming expulsion of Palestinians from the country.Strikingly, most centrist Israeli parties welcomed the plan. The former defence minister Benny Gantz commended Trump for his “creative, original and interesting thinking”. An opinion poll found that no less than 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the plan in principle; 52% thought it was feasible. Only 3% of Israeli Jews rejected the plan as “unacceptable and immoral”.Yet even if many Israelis favourably view the fantasy plan of a depopulated Gaza, there’s no appetite for the total war that would be required to materialise that plan. Opinion polls showed that Israelis are resolutely opposed to an immediate return to hostilities. After 16 months of war, there is widespread fatigue. The malnourished condition of the hostages that returned most recently, and the reports of torture they faced, was deeply alarming. Two-thirds of Israelis believe the ceasefire agreement should be upheld, and the safe return of the hostages should take priority.We can expect further ultimatums and confusion for the foreseeable future. Even if an immediate return to war has been averted, the risk of one is greater than ever. Trump has let the genie of mass expulsion out of the bottle. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would require carnage and atrocities even beyond the horrifying scale of the last 17 months. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan are unlikely to survive, and the reverberations would be felt throughout the region. This is a scenario that would not only mean the likely death of the hostages, but an increasingly theocratic Jewish republic premised upon destruction and conquest. If Israel heads down this route, it will not only be destroying Palestinians in Gaza, but condemning itself to an ever escalating war.

      Yair Wallach is a reader in Israeli studies and head of the Centre for Jewish Studies at Soas University of London

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      Ukraine will never accept Russia’s ultimatums, Volodymyr Zelenskyy says

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      Ukraine reacted with gloom and dismay on Tuesday to the meeting between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying he would never accept Russia’s ultimatums.The high-stakes negotiations between the two delegations got under way in Riyadh just hours after Russia attacked Ukraine with dozens of drones. At least two people were killed and 26 injured in strikes across the country.One drone hit the top floor of a high-rise residential building in the central city of Dolynska, in the Kirovohrad region. A mother and her two children were injured and taken to hospital. “A difficult night,” said the local governor, Andriy Raikovych.Soon after the talks concluded in Riyadh, air raid sirens wailed across the capital, Kyiv. Millions of Ukrainians were told by text message to seek shelter because of a threat from Russian ballistic missiles.Speaking in Ankara after a meeting with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would not accept the results of talks on how to end the war with Russia that were held “behind Ukraine’s back”.“It feels like the US is now discussing the ultimatum that Putin set at the start of the full-scale war,” Zelenskyy told reporters. He added: “Once again, decisions about Ukraine are being made without Ukraine. I wonder why they believe Ukraine would accept all these ultimatums now if we refused them at the most difficult moment?”Zelenskyy also said he would seek the return of occupied eastern and southern towns and villages via diplomatic means, emphasising: “They will be Ukrainian. There can be no compromise.”Reuters reported that Zelenskyy has postponed a visit to Saudi Arabia planned for Wednesday to avoid giving the US-Russia talks “legitimacy”.It was absurd for Moscow to talk about peace while killing Ukrainians, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskyy’s office. The latest salvo of 176 drones fired at Ukraine represented Russia’s actual “negotiating position”, he posted.Without criticising the Trump administration directly, he said the high-level US-Russia talks had not been properly prepared, adding that they were merely a forum for more Russian “ultimatums”.“Encouragement rather than coercion, a voluntary and bizarre renunciation of strength in favour of disheartening and unmotivated appeasement of the aggressor,” Podolyak wrote, summing up Kyiv’s negative reaction.There is widespread scepticism that Russia would abide by any ceasefire deal unless it was underpinned by security guarantees – from the US and other western powers. Podolyak said there was no point in having a “fake peace” that would lead to “an inevitable continuation of the war”.Ukrainians have bitter memories of two deals signed with Russia in the Belarus capital, Minsk, after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and began a covert invasion of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russia repeatedly violated both ceasefires.There are fears that a quick deal between Washington and Moscow would amount to Minsk 3 – another agreement that Russia would swiftly break. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Zelenskyy said Russia was ready to expand its invasion and “wage war” against Nato.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore immediately, there were concerns that a Trump-Putin deal would demand that Ukraine hold elections immediately after a ceasefire came into force, and before any final agreement was reached. The goal, Ukrainian commentators suggested, would be to replace Zelenskyy with a weaker leader, or even a pro-Russian candidate.Ukraine is not obliged to hold elections under martial law. Few Ukrainians think they are practical at a time when Russia’s invasion has forced millions of citizens to flee abroad and when soldiers are fighting and dying on the frontline. European embassies in Kyiv agree.The White House excluded Kyiv and European nations from its direct talks with Russia, the first bilateral contact between the two sides since before Moscow’s 2022 invasion.Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said he did not expect a truce with Russia any time soon, telling the BBC: “Peace is not even visible on the horizon.” Kuleba said it was in Ukraine’s interest to resist US pressure for a speedy solution and to instead engage with Trump over a sustained period.Kuleba said: “Peace isn’t visible for one simple reason: because Putin still believes that he can outwit everyone, that time is on his side, fate is on his side, the west has wavered, America is retreating, Europe is not able to take the field instead of America, or … is not ready to put on the captain’s armband.”He added: “The key question now is, actually, where is Putin in this scheme? In my opinion, he believes that he will win. Victory for him is all of Ukraine. He didn’t come for some piece of land. He came for Ukraine.” More

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      To the CEOs who’ve joined Trump’s fight against diversity, I say this: you’re making a big mistake | Stefan Stern

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      The mask has slipped and the gloves are off. A company which in 2022 boasted that it had exceeded its target, “spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers”, is now ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.That company is Meta (formerly known as Facebook), whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced DEI dismantling shortly before he had a prominent seat at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Perhaps from that privileged spot he was able to imbibe some of the “masculine energy” he says he wants to see at work.Meta is not alone in signalling a shift from its previous position. Amazon, McDonald’s, Accenture, Google, General Motors, Pepsi, Walmart and Boeing are among the corporate giants who are downplaying or removing altogether references to DEI and public commitments to it. The consultancy Deloitte used to declare that “diversity, equity and inclusion are core to our values”. But, the FT reports, the page those words appeared on has been wiped from its website.It is possible these decisions were taken partly on legal advice. Zuckerberg seems to have pre-empted the attorney general, Trump’s Florida favourite Pam Bondi, as she recently declared that there should be an end to what she called “illegal DEI” and “accessibility” discrimination. You can imagine that in-house counsel had anticipated legal trouble and so were moved to suggest caution on DEI issues. Zuckerberg is not merely being cautious, however. He has moved Maxine Williams, former chief diversity officer, to a role concerned with “accessibility and engagement”. Whether that restructuring will be enough to satisfy the Maga overlords remains to be seen.Some of the changes at other companies may be merely symbolic or presentational. And not everyone is backing down. The investment bank Goldman Sachs stated: “We strongly believe that organisations benefit from diverse perspectives” – although this belief has not stopped them from removing one of their former requirements for diversity in their clients. Goldman Sachs is still “committed to operating our programmes and policies in compliance with the law”, it says. Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, dared anti-DEI activists to challenge his bank’s pro-diversity stance. (But he is taking a hard line on forcing people to return to the office, despite remote working being key for modern diverse workforces.)All the same, the overriding effect of seeing that array of (newly) admiring CEOs lining up in Washington to salute the incoming chief was to recall the timeless Marxist dictum (Groucho, not Karl): “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”View image in fullscreenMaybe the pressure has finally got to some of these top bosses. A recent article from senior partners at McKinsey noted that “CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats”.But perhaps part of the problem is feeding already narcissistic CEOs the sort of grandiose advice offered by the blue-chip consultants in their article. Likening the boss to an “elite athlete”, the authors argue that CEOs need to use their time purposefully (like LeBron James, the basketball star), “perfect the art of recovery” (like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo), keep learning (like the golfer Bryson DeChambeau), embrace data and analytics (like a Formula One grand prix driver) and be adaptable and resilient (like the gymnast Simone Biles and … Muhammad Ali).The end product sounds like a remarkable person indeed: “This is how leaders can … build their resilience muscle, and become … ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.” Yep, nobody I know, either.In fact, bosses risk being cut off from the everyday concerns of their staff. An academic study into this phenomenon looking back decades, published in the American Journal of Sociology and called The Great Separation, draws on evidence from a dozen countries. The highest earners inhabit the same narrow terrain, and have limited contact with lower earners, the researchers found. This can affect how elites engage with the rest of society, and how in turn lower earners see them. This “great separation” may have had an impact on “the key social and political challenges of our time”, the study says. Brexit, Trump, populism and the rise of the new right may all be symptoms.Can the media do anything to help? The new media business Semafor has just launched a weekly newsletter called The CEO Signal, available (for free!) to bosses running companies with annual turnover of at least $500m (£400m). Its editor, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, says there is a need for such a specially targeted publication: “There’s a place here in the market for something that’s much more tightly focused to the people at the very top of the org chart – who are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time,” he told the Press Gazette.“And there’s nobody in any organisation who faces the same list of challenges as the CEO does,” he added. “It’s a cliche to say that it’s lonely at the top, but there is something to that.” The venerable Harvard Business Review is also about to launch a new service specifically for the “C-suite” – that is, for people whose job title begins with the word “chief”.How these new publications will help to mitigate some of the problems highlighted by the “great separation” study is not immediately clear. I am, however, reminded of what Laura Empson, a professor at Bayes Business School in London, has observed: that if a leader complains it is lonely at the top then they “are not doing it right”.Rather than an ever-narrowing elite of CEOs becoming more and more detached from their workforce, we would do better to try to reconnect. Companies and workplaces should be vibrant and cohesive communities of people.The ghastly alternative could be seen at the White House last week, when Elon Musk cavorted around the Oval Office firing off wild and unsubstantiated accusations against public officials, while Trump looked on calmly. Musk confidently asserted, without offering any evidence, that some officials at the now gutted USAid had been taking “kickbacks”. This is not model CEO behaviour. And this is not the leadership we need.

      Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition
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