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Jeremy Bowen: No sign of a quick peace dividend for Trump in Ukraine

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The Russians and Americans are talking again, as European leaders and diplomats contemplate the hard choices forced on them by US President Donald Trump.

Without question, Trump’s diplomatic ultimatum to Ukraine and America’s Western European allies has cracked the transatlantic alliance, perhaps beyond repair.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky looks rattled by the abrupt change of attitude coming from the White House, though some of his many critics at home say he should have seen it coming. Well before he won re-election, Donald Trump made it clear that he was not going to continue Joe Biden’s policies.

As he arrived in Turkey on his latest trip, Zelensky deplored the fact that negotiations to end the war were happening “behind the back of key parties affected by the consequences of Russian aggression”.

But it feels like a long way from the air-conditioned room in Saudi Arabia where the Russian and American delegations faced each other across a broad and highly polished mahogany table, to the bitter cold of north-eastern Ukraine.

In dug-outs and military bases here in the snow-bound villages and forests on the border with Russia, Ukrainian soldiers are getting on with business as usual – fighting the war.

In an underground bunker at a base in the forest somewhere near Sumy, a Ukrainian officer told me he didn’t have much time to follow the news. As far as he was concerned, Donald Trump’s decision to talk to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was “just noise”.

The commander, who asked to be referred to only by his call sign “White” has more pressing matters to consider.

Ignoring the diplomatic bombshell that has rattled Western leaders, as well as his own president, is probably the right thing to do for a battlefield officer preparing to lead his men back into the fight. Soon they will cross back into Kursk, to rejoin the fight to keep the land Ukraine has seized from Russia.

As a condition of access to Ukrainian soldiers, we agreed not to disclose precise locations or identities, except to say they are in the borderlands around the town of Sumy, and all part of Ukraine’s continuing fight in Kursk.

Shelves piled with small drones, waiting to be sent to the front
Ukrainian drones destroyed a Russian armoured unit advancing in broad daylight across a snow-covered field this week

In a small room in a workshop tucked away in a village there was a formidable display of killing power on shelves made of planks from the sawmill propped up by wooden ammunition boxes.

On the shelves were hundreds of drones, all made in Ukraine. Each one costs around £300 ($380). The soldiers who were checking them before packing them into cardboard boxes to send them into the Kursk battlefields said that when they are armed – and flown by a skilled pilot – they could even destroy a tank.

One of them, called Andrew, was a drone pilot until his leg was blown off. He said he hadn’t thought too hard about what had been said far from here by the Americans – but none of them trusted President Vladimir Putin.

Their drones a few hours earlier had destroyed a Russian armoured unit advancing in broad daylight across a frozen snow-covered field. They showed us the video. Some of the vehicles they hit were flying the red banner of the Soviet Union instead of the Russian flag.

An apartment block with a huge hole caused by a Russian weapons
A three-storey gash caused by Russian drones has caused the evacuation of an apartment block

Sumy is busy enough during the day, with shops open and well-stocked. But once it gets dark the streets are almost deserted. Air raid alerts come frequently.

Anti-aircraft guns fire tracer into the sky for hours, aimed at the waves of Russian drones that cross the border near here to attack targets much deeper inside Ukraine – and sometimes in Sumy itself.

A big block of flats has a hole three storeys high ripped out of it. Eleven people were killed here in a Russian drone attack a fortnight or so ago. Since then, the block has been evacuated as engineers fear it is so badly damaged it might collapse.

It is part of a housing estate of identical monumental blocks built during the Soviet era. Residents still living next to the wrecked and unsafe building were going about their business, walking to the shops or their cars, swaddled against the intense cold.

Mykola, a man of 50, stopped to talk as he was walking home with his young son. He lives in the next block to the one the Russians destroyed.

I asked him what he thought of Donald Trump’s idea of peace in Ukraine.

“We need peace,” he said. “It’s necessary because there is no point in war. War doesn’t lead to anything. If you look at how much territory Russia has occupied so far, for the Russians to eventually get to Kyiv, they’ll have to keep fighting for 14 years. It’s only the people who are suffering. It needs to end.”

But no deal worth having, Mykola believed, would emerge from Putin and Trump sitting together without Zelensky and the Europeans.

Yuliia, a young woman in front of some residential buildings
Yuliia: ‘You can’t trust Putin’

Yuliia, 33, another neighbour, was out walking her Jack Russell. She was at home when the Russians attacked the block of flats next door.

“It all happened just past midnight, when we were about to go to bed. We heard a loud explosion, and we saw a massive red flash through our window. We saw this horror. It was very scary.

“Many people were outside. And I remember there was a woman hanging out – she was screaming for help – we couldn’t see her immediately but eventually she was saved from the debris.”

Peace is possible, she believes, “but they need to stop bombing us first. There can only be peace when they stop doing that. It needs to come from their side because they started this horror.

“Of course, you can’t trust Putin.”

Borys, a 70-year-old former Soviet army officer
Borys, a former Soviet officer, says there is no point in Ukraine surrendering

As the last rays of the sun disappeared, Borys, a spry and upright retired colonel of 70 who served 30 years in the Soviet army stopped on his way to his car. His son and grandson, he said, are both in uniform fighting for Ukraine.

“Peace is possible,” he said. “But I don’t really believe in it. I think that justice will prevail for Ukraine. You have to be cautious.

“While Putin is there, you cannot trust Russians. Because they believe in him as if he is a religion. You won’t change them. It needs time.”

So what’s the answer – keep fighting or a peace deal?

“Ukraine needs to think about peace. But we shouldn’t surrender. I don’t see any point. We will resist until we are stronger. Europe seems like they are ready to help us. There is just no point in surrendering.”

Donald Trump, a man who seems convinced that the principles of a real-estate deal can be applied to ending a war will discover that making peace is much more complicated than just getting a ceasefire and deciding how much land each side keeps.

President Putin has made very clear that he wants to break Ukraine’s sovereignty and destroy its ability to act as an independent nation.

Whether or not Ukraine’s President Zelensky has a seat at President Trump’s conference table, he won’t agree to that. Making a peace that lasts, if it’s possible, will be a long and slow process.

If Donald Trump wants a quick peace dividend, he should look elsewhere.

Map of north-eastern Ukraine

Taken From BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg151j5504o

American News

President Donald Trump is asking the US Supreme Court to review the $5m (£3.6m) civil case that found he defamed and sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll.

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He has repeatedly claimed that the judge who oversaw the civil trial, Lewis Kaplan, improperly allowed evidence to be presented that hurt how the jury viewed Trump.

A federal appeals court agreed with the jury’s verdict last year and said Kaplan did not make errors that would warrant a new trial.

A New York jury awarded Ms Carroll damages over her civil claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, and then branded the incident a hoax on social media. He denied the allegations.

The Supreme Court is now Trump’s last hope of overturning the unanimous jury’s verdict. Whether the top US court will take the case up is unclear.

A federal appeals court declined to rehear Trump’s challenge to it in June.

Trump’s comments about the jury’s findings in the case led a separate jury to order him to pay Ms Carroll $83m for defaming her. A panel of federal judges denied his appeal of that decision in September, and Trump has now taken the next step in trying to have it overturned by asking the full bench of judges at a federal appeals court to review the case.

In the petition to the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers argued Kaplan should not have let jurors see the 2005 Access Hollywood tape that showed the president saying he groped and kissed women.

“There were no eyewitnesses, no video evidence, and no police report or investigation,” they wrote about Ms Carroll’s allegations.

“Instead, Carroll waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, who she politically opposes, until after he became the 45th president, when she could maximize political injury to him and profit for herself.”

Roberta Kaplan, Ms Carroll’s attorney, told the BBC she had no comment on the Supreme Court appeal.

While Trump was found to have defamed and sexually abused Ms Carroll, the jury rejected her claim of rape as defined in New York’s penal code.

Ms Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 81, sued Trump for attacking her in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room in Manhattan. The defamation stemmed from Trump’s post on his Truth Social platform in 2022 denying her claim.

Trump has said Ms Carroll was “not my type” and that she lied.

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Four potential obstacles in House vote to end US shutdown

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A day after the US Senate passed a spending bill to end the longest-ever government shutdown, the budget fight now moves to the House of Representatives.

The lower chamber of Congress is expected to vote this week on the funding measure.

Unlike in the Senate, if House Republicans stay united, they don’t need any Democrats to pass the budget. But the margin for error is razor thin.

Here are four potential hold-ups for the budget, before it can clear Congress and land on the president’s desk for signing into law.

Will House Republicans budge on healthcare?

A key sticking point throughout the shutdown has been a desire on the part of Democrats to attach to the spending bill a renewal of tax credits that make health insurance less expensive for 24 million Americans.

Senate Republicans instead only agreed to grant Democrats a vote in December on whether to extend the subsidies – something they had already offered weeks ago.

And House Speaker Mike Johnson would not commit on Monday to allowing a vote in his chamber on the tax credits.

This entails a fair degree of political risk for Republicans, however. If they torpedo the subsidies, health coverage premiums could rocket, handing Democrats a ready-made campaign issue for next year’s midterm elections.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative Republican congresswoman from Georgia, has broken ranks with President Donald Trump to warn that her party must ensure health insurance premiums do not spike.

As the clock ticks down to the subsidies expiring by the end of December, Republicans are working out their plan.

They want income caps on who can receive the tax credits, and are proposing the tax dollars bypass insurance companies and go straight to individuals – although the details are unclear.

How intense will House Democratic opposition be?

Out of power in Washington, where Trump’s Republicans control the House and Senate, Democrats appeared finally to have some political wind in their sails after a handful of election wins last week in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City.

But those victories, like the shutdown fight, have accentuated strategic tensions between the pragmatic and progressive, or left-wing, factions of the party.

The Democratic left is furious at defectors who voted with Senate Republicans to pass the budget on Monday, seeing this as a capitulation to Trump.

From that wing of the party, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said giving up the fight was a “horrific mistake”. California Governor Gavin Newsom called it “surrender”.

Congressman Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, warned: “A deal that doesn’t reduce healthcare costs is a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them.”

However, centrist lawmakers like Jared Golden of Maine, who represents one of the most conservative districts in the nation held by any Democrat, may cross the aisle.

Golden, who recently announced he won’t run for re-election, is likely to vote for the package, his office indicated to Axios, a political outlet, on Monday.

Another moderate Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, could help get the Republicans’ spending plan over the line.

“It’s past time to put country over party and get our government working again for the American people,” he posted on social media on Sunday.

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Fight fake news and defeat climate deniers, Brazil’s Lula tells UN talks

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The world must “defeat” climate denialism and fight fake news, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has told the opening meeting of the UN climate talks.

In a rallying cry to COP30, President Lula again made thinly-veiled references to President Donald Trump who branded climate change “a con job” in September.

The two weeks of talks kicked off on Monday in the lush Brazilian city of Belém on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.

They take place against a fraught political backdrop and the US has sent no senior officials.

On Monday thousands of delegates poured into the COP venue in a heavily air-conditioned former aerodrome, some coming from accommodation in shipping containers and cruise ships moored on the riverside.

Members of the Guajajara indigenous group, in traditional dress, performed a welcome song and dance for assembled diplomats.

Addressing the conference, President Lula said “COP30 will be the COP of truth” in an era of “fake news and misrepresentation” and “rejection of scientific evidence”.

Without naming President Trump, President Lula continued, “they control the algorithms, sew hatred and spread fear”.

“It’s time to inflict a new defeat on the deniers,” he said.

Since President Trump took office in January, he has promised to invest heavily in fossil fuels, saying that this will secure greater economic prosperity for the US.

His administration has cancelled more than $13bn of funding for renewable energy and is taking steps to open up more areas of the US to oil and gas exploration.

That puts the country at odds with the majority of nations still committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in green energy.

This backdrop has put the COP talks in a difficult position as nations aim to make progress on tackling climate change without the participation of the world’s biggest economy.

Some delegates fear that the US could still decide to send officials to undermine the talks. Other environmental talks collapsed this year following US pressure, labelled “bully-boy tactics” by some participants.

Addressing officials in Belém, UN climate chief Simon Stiell initially struck an optimistic tone. He said significant progress had been made in the last decade to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases.

But then he took aim at “squabbling” between countries.

“Not one single nation among you can afford this, as climate disasters rip double-digits off GDP,” he said.

Brazil wants to use its presidency of the talks to secure progress on key promises made in previous years.

That includes moving away from the use of planet-warming fossil fuels, finance for developing countries on the frontline of climate change, and protecting nature.

President Lula’s centrepiece is a fund called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) that Brazil hopes will raise $125bn to protect tropical forests globally.

But fund-raising got off to a slow start, particularly after the UK decided at the last minute not to contribute public money.

Nations are yet to agree on the conference agenda.

Countries with competing interests are lobbying for new items to be added, including a plea from a coalition called Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) that includes Caribbean and Pacific countries at most risk from rising seas and rising global temperatures

The group called for the COP to discuss the long-held goal of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C.

But in recent weeks even the UN has said it accepts that overshooting this temperature is “inevitable”.

Last week UN General Secretary General António Guterres told leaders in Belém that the failure to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C was a “moral failure and deadly negligence”.

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