Good morning.
Ever since Donald Trump won the US election in November, concerns about Ukraine’s fate have grown. Despite insisting on a number of occasions that he could end the war in one day, in the weeks since his inauguration there has been little clarity on Trump’s plans for the country.
On Wednesday night, however, his plans came into sharper focus when the president announced the US was initiating peace talks with Russia to end the nearly three-year war. The statement followed an unexpected 90-minute one-on-one conversation between Trump and Vladimir Putin. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was left out in the cold but nevertheless remained composed, emphasising what he called a “meaningful” discussion with the president – one that took place after Trump’s call with Putin – which, Zelenskyy said, would outline the next steps towards a “lasting and reliable peace”.
Blindsided European leaders – also excluded from the talks – were stunned by the extent of the concessions Trump had offered the Russian president. News of the call emerged shortly after the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, made contentious remarks about the future of Europe’s relationship with the US during a Nato meeting.
Ukraine’s allies have insisted that any negotiations concerning Ukraine must involve Ukraine. The shift marks a major victory for Russia, which, after three years of US foreign policy aimed at isolating and containing it, is now being brought to the table by Trump as an equal player.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Guardian senior international correspondent Luke Harding to understand just how significant this turning point is for Ukraine. That’s right after the headlines.
Five big stories
Middle East | The Israeli government has signalled it intends to stick to the hostage release schedule agreed in the ceasefire deal with Hamas, but warned that if the anticipated three surviving hostages were not released on Saturday it would go back to war in Gaza.
Germany | A 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a trade union demonstration in Munich, injuring at least 30 people, German police said.
Politics | Angela Rayner has insisted Labour’s flagship package of workers’ rights will be ringfenced from a bonfire of regulation being pursued by the government to reboot economic growth.
Environment The world’s wealthiest nations are “exporting extinction” by destroying 15 times more biodiversity internationally than within their own borders, research shows.
Reform | The Reform MP Rupert Lowe installed solar panels on his farm to save money on energy bills, despite his party pledging to tax solar energy and claiming renewables are more expensive, the Guardian can reveal.
In depth: ‘There is shock, resignation, and real trepidation about what comes next’
In the years after his 2020 election defeat, Trump reportedly held as many as seven conversations with Putin. Since his return to office, these communications have only intensified. But though Trump’s remarkably warm relationship with Putin was well known, news of their latest conversation still took many by surprise.
Trump agreed to what has been described as an “avalanche” of concessions: no Nato membership for Ukraine, territorial losses and no US security guarantees. Hegseth said in Brussels that “everything is on the table” to end the war. “This is before negotiations in Saudi Arabia have even formally started,” Luke notes. The conversation between the two leaders followed a prisoner swap with the Kremlin that secured the release of an American teacher.
The fear in Ukraine is that committing to a deal like this will repeat historical patterns, with Russia violating any agreement from the outset and attempting to seize more territory. “The third anniversary of the invasion is approaching, but Ukraine has been at war since 2014,” Luke says. “Over more than a decade of conflict, Russia annexed Crimea, covertly invaded eastern Ukraine, and killed thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians – all while a so-called peace process was in place, which Russia repeatedly violated.”
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Ukraine’s response
There is no doubt that Ukraine wants the violence and war to end – but, as Zelenskyy has made clear, peace must be “just”.
Luke describes a “foreboding” atmosphere in Ukraine. “There’s a sense that this could be Ukraine’s 1938 moment,” he says – referring to the Munich agreement, when France and Britain ceded the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler, paving the way for the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the start of the second world war.
“Ukrainians see Putin as a kind of 21st-century Hitler, and they don’t believe any agreement with him will hold unless it is backed by major and credible security guarantees – first and foremost, from America,” Luke adds. In other words, boots on the ground on the border. Zelenskyy told the Guardian earlier this week: “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.” This wariness and fear of betrayal is there because the prevailing belief in Ukraine, Luke says, is that Putin’s war aims remain as “maximalist” as ever.
In Ukraine “people are exhausted”, Luke adds. “Everyone knows someone who’s been killed, there’s grief everywhere and people want the war to end but at the same time they don’t want capitulation, because they understand that millions of Ukrainians living under Russian rule have been arrested, tortured, raped and persecuted.”
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Europe’s response
European leaders have made it clear that any future peace cannot be dictated by Moscow. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said that yielding to Russia in this way was “bad news for everyone”, including the US. Seven countries, including Britain, France and Germany, have demanded a seat at the table.
They want peace – but with conditions to ensure it is “sustainable and lasting”, Luke says. “There is shock, resignation, and real trepidation about what comes next,” in part because a deal negotiated largely between Moscow and Washington would probably leave Europe and Britain solely shouldering the cost and responsibility for its enforcement. “I was speaking to a senior European minister visiting London, and I asked: if the Americans stop military assistance to Ukraine, can the Europeans step up? He said, not immediately.”
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So what is next?
Putin has spent months carefully flattering Trump in anticipation of the call that took place this week, aiming for a Moscow-friendly outcome. “He is absolutely delighted with how this is unfolding. I don’t know exactly what he’ll ask for, but his demands will be enormous.” Pjotr Sauer’s analysis is helpful in further understanding the response inside Russia.
While territorial gains matter to Putin, his more immediate priorities are keeping Ukraine out of Nato, limiting the size of its military, and reducing the western presence in eastern and central Europe. There is also hope in Moscow that a peace deal could even lead to sanctions being lifted.
As the Munich security conference gets under way over the next few days, there will be intensive discussions about what comes next. Luke says: “I’ll be interested to see how robust the European pushback against Trump’s plan really is – because while this is about Ukraine, it’s also a major test for them. Are they going to roll over, or will they actually break with Trump? I think we’ll find out in the next few weeks.”
What else we’ve been reading
If Grenfell Tower is to be knocked down, what should a memorial for the 72 lives lost look like? Historian Neal Shasore looks to the past in this column for some answers. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters
Aditya Chakrabortty dug into what is behind the spike in right-to-buy applications, offering a sharp and compelling insight into the decades-old Thatcher policy that has induced a further drop in council housing. Nimo
As Daft Punk Is Playing at My House turns 20, Alexis Petridis ranks LCD Soundsystem’s top 20 songs. Justice for Oh Baby, which deserves better than 12th. Charlie
Emily Elena Dugdale and Hanisha Harjani’s troubling investigation into how Match Group, the corporate owner of a dozen dating apps, failed to protect users from known abusers on their platforms is a thorough and essential read. Nimo
After the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks bizarrely traded away their best player, Luka Dončić, for almost nothing and provoked a widespread fan revolt, Lee Escobedo has an interesting piece on what happens when a sports team burns its relationship with its fanbase. Charlie
Sport
Football | Liverpool and Everton have issued a joint statement to condemn racist abuse directed at Abdoulaye Doucouré after Wednesday’s Merseyside derby, and are working with Merseyside police to identify those responsible. Doucouré was part of an Everton team that scored a dramatic 98th-minute equaliser, and was later one of four people sent off after a brawl at the final whistle.
Formula One | A nightclub bouncer who was part of a plot to blackmail Michael Schumacher for £12m has been jailed after being convicted of conspiring with two other men to obtain private footage of the motor racing legend. Yilmaz Tozturkan, 53, was sentenced to three years in prison.
Football | Semi-automated offside technology is to be trialled in the FA Cup fifth round next month, the Guardian has learned, with a view to it being introduced in the Premier League before the end of the season. It is hoped the technology can reduce the time to confirm offside decisions in the event of a VAR intervention by more than 30 seconds.
The front pages
“‘Everything is on the table’ to end Ukraine war, US tells Nato allies” is the splash in Friday’s print edition of the Guardian. A hopeful note for Kyiv in the Times: “US may provide air cover to protect Ukraine peace”. Not so hopeful for the neighbourhood in the i: “1949 deal to protect Europe from war is history – Trump’s message to shocked world leaders”. “Quick fix is a dirty deal” – that’s the Metro with words from Kaja Kallas, the top EU diplomat. A UK angle in the Daily Telegraph: “2.5pc on defence won’t touch the sides”. The Financial Times leads with “Macron says Europe must muscle up on security after Trump ‘electroshock’” while the Mirror has “King’s trip to charm Trump”. “End the war but don’t let Putin win the peace” says the Express. “Reeves under pressure to ‘come clean’ on expenses” is the Daily Mail’s lead.
Something for the weekend
Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read, play and listen to right now
Music
John Glacier: Like a Ribbon | ★★★★★
In a genre characterised by flash, Glacier cuts a unique figure, her USP a kind of wilful obfuscation. She doesn’t reveal her real name nor her age. She first attracted attention with a SoundCloud page, filled with snippets of music she had given shrugging, prosaic titles: A Child Was Sad So I Made This in Front of Her to Make Her Laugh. More than one critic has compared the effect of her vocal style to overhearing someone’s scattered voice memos. On her debut album proper, even her most pugilistic lines are delivered in an oddly blank tone, as if she’s muttering them to herself, unaware that anyone’s listening. The album’s sound, meanwhile, ranges in style from booming electronics to shaky, lo-fi piano samples, but its cornerstone sound is an electric guitar, artlessly played. It’s the kind of idiosyncratic approach around which cult followings are built, and one is duly building around Glacier. You can see why: Like a Ribbon is entirely enthralling. John Glacier has constructed her own peculiar, alluring world: getting lost in it is a completely fascinating and engrossing experience. Alexis Petridis
TV
Clean Slate | ★★★★☆
Posthumous work can be tricky to assess, but Clean Slate, executive produced by the late great television icon Norman Lear, radiates his signature warmth and intelligence. Lear’s signatures of complicated family relationships, progressive politics and endless empathy are all over his final project, which is a testimony to his ability to make TV that was fun, funny and radical. Clean Slate is a multicamera sitcom without a laugh track; it follows Desiree Slate (Orange Is the New Black’s break-out star Laverne Cox), a glamorous art gallerist who finds herself single, broke and forced to leave New York to return to her childhood home in Alabama. Even when it lacks subtlety, the show’s characters and story are just so darn lovable it’s impossible to resist its cosy delights. Leila Latif
Film
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy | ★★☆☆☆
This is a fourquel in the same unhappy tradition as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The jokes have been dialled down to accommodate a contrived and unconvincingly mature “weepie” component but the film becomes sad in the wrong way. The actors are mostly going through the motions, there is so little chemistry between each of the two lead pairings they resemble a panda being forced to mate with a flamingo, and Renée Zellweger’s performance is starting to look eccentric. There are one or two nice touches, and naturally Hugh Grant gets giant laughs, returning as the ageing, golden-hearted cad Daniel Cleaver. So does Emma Thompson, back as the down-to-earth gynaecologist from the previous film. But Bridget herself looks marooned and oddly dazed. Fans might prefer to remember the previous three films. Peter Bradshaw
Book
The South by Tash Aw
The South takes place on a single farm in rural south Malaysia over a single summer in the 1990s, and shows Aw breaking into newly empathetic and impactful territory with his already considerable novelistic panache and artfulness. The book soaks us in bodily intimacy from the outset, opening with a description of two boys having sex for the first time in the orchard. Jay, who has longed for this for weeks, wants to draw out the moment, so that “whatever time they have together will feel like many hours, a whole day”, while Chuan seems to want “to accelerate each second and collapse time”. Now a much older Jay moves fluidly between first and third person to narrate what’s at once his own coming-of-age story and an expansive portrait of his unhappy parents and their social world. This is a story about people who are both waiting for life to begin and living with an intensity they will look back on for ever. Aw has moved beyond his previous novels to discover a different kind of writing here, emerging as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale. Lara Feigel
Today in Focus
Shon Faye on love and dating as a trans woman
For Valentine’s Day, Hannah Moore speaks to Shon Faye, author of Love in Exile, on her evolving understanding of love.
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Our planet is made up of millions of different organisms – many of which never get their 15 minutes of fame, despite being integral to Earth’s ecosystem.
It’s with this in mind that the Guardian is thrilled to launch its Invertebrate of the Year competition for 2025, which will give dues to some of the 1.3 million known invertebrate species, championing the innovators, grafters and overlooked friends of our planet.
The humble earthworm returns as 2024’s defending champion – but whether it is dethroned is entirely down to you …
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
