Steve Witkoff’s flattery of the Russian leader could be just the start of a mendacious stratagem from a US president who says Moscow ‘has been fine on Ukraine’
They say the first casualty of war is truth. For the Trump administration, the road to peace with Russia now encompasses some extraordinary lies.
Steve Witkoff delivered one as he sat down with Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Wednesday, aiming to close the deal on Russia’s land grab in Ukraine with the White House’s strategy of maximum pressure on Kyiv and saccharine flattery of the Kremlin.
2026 saw Asian politics dominated by young and Gen Z voters. Nepal held its first election – since protests sparked by Gen Z anger forced out the previous Prime Minister – seeing Belendra Shah becoming PM and the world’s youngest … Read more
Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka spent a week in jail after defying restrictions on protests in Delhi amid government crackdown
An Indian court has ordered the release of two leaders of India’s Cockroach movement who were jailed last week amid a mounting state crackdown on youth-led protests.
The two leaders of the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) movement, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, had spent a week in Delhi’s Tihar jail after being arrested by Delhi police last week.
Measures would remove some penalties for those helping women access abortion but are ‘small-scale step’, say campaigners
Poland’s lower house of parliament has approved two bills aimed at loosening a near-total ban on abortions, in what campaigners have described as a “small-scale step” ahead of protests calling on the government to fulfil its promises to overhaul the country’s laws.
The new measures, which are likely to be vetoed by Poland’s nationalist president, would remove some of the criminal penalties for those who help women to access abortion care and allow terminations in cases of foetal abnormalities.
European Commission calls accommodation website’s approach to fraudulent listings and phishing scams as ‘absolutely substandard’
EU regulators have opened an investigation into Booking.com, alleging that the accommodation website has not done enough to protect consumers from fake listings and scams.
The European Commission, which regulates the world’s biggest tech companies operating in the EU, said Booking.com may have breached the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) with its “absolutely substandard” approach to tackling fraudulent listings and phishing scams, where criminals impersonate a third party to trick people to hand over money.
Leaders criticised for spreading misleading information as France prepares for further protests this weekend
Emmanuel Macron has accused Donald Trump and other foreign leaders of making “stupid comments” about France’s street unrest for political gain, as the country prepared for more protests this weekend.
Speaking during a visit to Qatar, the French president did not name names but said “manipulation of information” after Saturday’s riots had led to “comments that are as unacceptable as they are stupid, from many people, including foreign leaders”.
Nationalist leaders are framing unrest as consequence of failed liberal governance and open borders
Europe’s far-right leaders have jumped on the violence that rocked numerous cities last weekend, framing it as the inevitable consequence of failed liberal governance and open-border policies and insisting only they can restore law and order.
Months away from key elections in Spain, France and Italy, authoritarian nationalists are eager to weaponise the wave of street unrest, originating in peaceful protests over the cost of living and deteriorating public services but hijacked by violent rioters.
As US support ebbs away, looming European elections and growing financial strains across the continent could fracture the precious coalition that has kept Ukraine afloat
Europe woke up last Friday to another belligerent outburst from Donald Trump – this time berating Ukraine’s wartime leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy again. Just a few days after his diesel deal with the Kremlin, the US president said Zelenskyy was more difficult to deal with than Vladimir Putin and blamed Ukraine’s leader for rocketing oil prices – without any reference to the impact of his own war on Iran.
The contrast in Europe was obvious. When Zelenskyy walked into the multi-coloured summit room of the European Council headquarters in Brussels that Friday morning, the EU’s 27 leaders burst into applause, getting to their feet to offer big hugs and brisk handshakes. European Council president António Costa told Zelenskyy and the media: “This is no time to withdraw the support to Ukraine,” calling instead for increased pressure on Russia. Zelenskyy was thankful, pointedly saying he was happy to have “huge support” from “real leaders”.
Yield on 10-year government bonds passes 5% amid failure to pass budget and fallout from violent street protests
France’s borrowing costs have climbed above 5% for the first time in 24 years as political concerns and the government’s failure to agree a much-delayed budget spook the financial markets.
With some civic buildings still smouldering from recent riots, a fresh bout of selling pushed up the yield – or interest rate – on bonds issued by the second largest economy in the eurozone.
Russia frees Stephen Hubbard after US request while Steve Witkoff praises Putin, wanted by ICC as war criminal, as a ‘humanitarian’
Vladimir Putin ordered the release of an American man from a Russian jail as he met Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg on Wednesday for fresh talks on ending the war in Ukraine, amid increasingly close relations between Moscow and Washington.
Trump had previously asked Putin to free Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old former teacher who had spent more than four years in Russian jails on charges of fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine.
Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst answered your questions about the recent protests in France, the role of the French police, foreign influence and the upcoming presidential election.
Michael Wolfcarius asks: I cannot understand why the Guardian is selecting dots instead of joining them. France may have developed into the big story for many reasons, many of which have yet to be discussed, but it is not the only place where seemingly small incidents grew into massive protests, some also quite violent; Spain, Italy, Serbia and Albania come to mind. The crystallising reason may be different but the conditions leading up to it are quite similar. Can you put all these events into perspective, context and relation? There are obviously underlying currents making it difficult for people to refrain from making themselves ‘heard’.
Rokhaya: I agree that these movements deserve to be considered together, while at the same time, recognising their different specific national contexts. Housing in Spain, living costs and public services in Italy and France, and corruption in Serbia and Albania are bringing people onto the streets. These concerns touch the foundations of a decent life and people’s ability to shape their future.
What connects them, in my view, is the widening gap between what people need and what political institutions seem willing to deliver. These incidents that have led to protests are not “small .” Serbia’s movement began after a deadly railway-station canopy collapse, which became a focus for anger over corruption and accountability. My reading is that these protests express a crisis of political responsiveness.
Alexander: I think people in all these places – Albania, Spain, France – feel that the political systems that exist aren’t capable of dealing with the sheer scale and nature of the crises facing us, and they’re responding to a sense of ‘loss of control’ (the Brexit campaign really did strike upon a brilliant slogan) over where their societies are headed. There is a general social sense that has flipped from “this is broken, but things can and will get better”, which gives people a stake in the institutions around them, to “this is broken and things can and will get worse”.
The impact of the arrival of AI has been understated. Not just on labour markets, or on the environment, but ontologically. The investment pitch of the most powerful companies in the world, the ones amassing trillion dollar valuations, isn’t just that X-subset of jobs are replaceable, it’s that human beings themselves are replaceable. That the things we do fundamentally don’t matter, and that their goal is to bring this into being. I think that feeling is there even if we don’t immediately put our finger on it in those terms.
In France, it was the piles of wheelie bins stacked up against school entrances that first hinted at the scale of student anger over crumbling classrooms and teacher shortages. In Spain, it was a tent camp that steadily grew in the heart of the capital as residents railed against soaring housing costs.
Similar scenes have since sprung up in Belgium, Italy and Portugal, and clashes have convulsed Albania’s capital of Tirana, hinting at an autumn of protests across Europe.
Shot by Sofia’s mother Eleanor this documentary shows something of the strain of shooting a period piece, but is a far cry from the tumultuous portrait of her husband in Hearts of Darkness
It is 20 years since the release of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst; it is a supportively unjudging, unironised study of the queen’s early years before the 1789 revolution, lavishly and accurately costumed, shot on location at Versailles and based on the Antonia Fraser biography – but also subversively and amusingly using pop tracks from the 70s and 80s on the soundtrack. It got a storm of booing from French critics, reportedly annoyed at the way their history had been reduced to a music video and fashion shoot with no French actors involved. Or hardly any.
In fact, for all the lack of political grit, the film was interesting and accomplished, and deservedly has a fanbase – and it is to that constituency that this making-of documentary from the director’s mother Eleanor Coppola is really addressed. It is basically a sweet family home movie on digital video which shows something of the strain and the longueurs of shooting a demanding period picture, but tactfully not seeing anything really explosive or bad-tempered. It is very far from Eleanor Coppola’s sensational behind-the-scenes film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse about the tumultuous creation of Apocalypse Now, directed by her husband Francis Ford Coppola.
Student activists seem set to defeat Aleksandar Vučić at the ballot box this Sunday. The EU should never have written off Serbian democracy
History may not be about to repeat itself in Serbia, but it is beginning to rhyme. Just over a quarter of a century ago, Serbian citizens turned out to vote in large numbers to inflict a historic defeat on the then strongman in Belgrade, Slobodan Milošević, who was seeking re-election as president. He lost despite his extensive control over the media, the judiciary and the security forces. When he was reluctant to leave office, Serbs poured on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, finally forcing him to go.
On Sunday, a new generation could have the decisive voice in an equally fateful election, this time for the national parliament. Today’s strongman, Aleksandar Vučić, recently resigned as president to fight the election with the aim of swapping the locus of power from the presidency to the prime minister’s office.
As glaciers melt and permafrost thaws, Longyearbyen, on the remote Arctic islands of Svalbard, faces climate-induced problems from tap water to housebuilding to landslides
On a rugged mountain plateau of snow-dusted rocks, in the remote archipelago of Svalbard, a glaciologist, Andy Hodson, points out the “ears” of ice, white against the rock, that gave Foxfonna glacier its name, after the arctic fox.
The small glacier, on a mountain 8 miles (15km) outside the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen, is a popular summer hike for tourists who come here seeking the Arctic experience.
Unorthodox campaign is challenging the ruling party’s 14-year reign with a bold democratic experiment
On a cool autumn evening, a team of Serbian student volunteers went canvassing in the housing estates of Krnjača, a Belgrade suburb. They were equipped with lanyards emblazoned with the word “victory”, a stock list of questions and a mobile app that mapped visited homes and the level of support in each.
The volunteers were part of a mass student movement, Student List, that has rocked Serbia with two years of constant protests. On Sunday, the group will represent the most serious challenge Aleksandar Vučić has faced in his 12 increasingly authoritarian years in power, by putting forward their own candidates in parliamentary elections.
Advance warnings of missile attacks were seemingly suspended last week by the White House, but Ukraine’s president says: ‘Now it works’
The US has resumed sharing intelligence with Kyiv about Russian missile strikes, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday after a meeting with the US envoy Steve Witkoff in Norway.
He said Ukraine was again receiving advance warnings of ballistic missile attacks, which were seemingly suspended last week by the White House. “Now it works. It’s great,” he said, adding that the US move would save lives.
Mounting anxiety as Russia’s war on Ukraine reaches Nato’s borders with targeting of vessels transporting agricultural cargo
Nato is deploying additional military assets to the Black Sea amid the recent deadly escalation of Russian attacks on merchant shipping, as five more vessels were attacked on Tuesday.
Russia’s military said it struck three cargo vessels in Ukraine’s port of Reni and two other cargo vessels en route to Odesa.
A handful of Republicans have spoken out against Donald Trump’s softening stance on Russia, threatening to pull financial support for his agenda over his “embarrassing” handling of the Ukraine war.
Don Bacon, an outgoing congressman in Nebraska, condemned Trump’s actions – which include a stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel and the pausing of sanctions on Moscow – as “absolutely disgraceful” and accused the US president of cozying up to a “war criminal” in Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart.
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