Nobel prize winner Ales Bialiatski and opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava among those freed after US talks with Alexander Lukashenko
The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, freed 123 prisoners on Saturday, including Nobel peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski and leading opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava, after the US lifted sanctions on Belarusian potash, a key export.
The announcement came after two days of talks with an envoy of the US president, Donald Trump, the latest diplomatic push since the Trump administration started talks with the autocratic leader.
Europe must realise its superior economic and military potential has to be mobilised, writes Bill Jones, while Robin Wilson addresses Belgium’s resistance to seizing Russian assets
I wholly support the plea to Europe by Timothy Garton Ash (Only Europe can save Ukraine from Putin and Trump – but will it?, 6 December). One aspect he did not mention was the strategic nuclear balance. Since the late 1940s, responsibility for deterrence has always lain with the Pentagon and has succeeded in keeping the peace, though at times a very fragile version of it.
The recent US statement on defence makes it clear that Europe is no longer seen as a priority by the Trump administration, the danger now being that doubt is crucially being raised as to the credibility of Nato’s deterrent. Without certainty of a reaction in kind, Russia, under its ambitious and risk-taking president, might be tempted to chance its arm in what almost looks like a ceding of Europe by the US into a Russian “sphere of influence”.
Six more oil supertankers added to sanctions list, as well as members of Maduro’s extended family, amid rising tensions following tanker seizure
Donald Trump has exerted more pressure on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, expanding sanctions and issuing fresh threats to strike land targets in Venezuela, as the South American dictator accused the US president of ushering in a new “era of criminal naval piracy” in the Caribbean.
Late on Thursday, the US imposed curbs on three nephews of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, as well as six crude oil supertankers and the shipping companies linked to them. The treasury department alleged the vessels “engaged in deceptive and unsafe shipping practices and continue to provide financial resources that fuel Maduro’s corrupt narco-terrorist regime”.
Ukrainian president says plan would not be fair without guarantees that Russia would not simply take over zone
The US wants Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the Donbas region, and Washington would then create a “free economic zone” in the parts Kyiv currently controls, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
Previously, the US had suggested Kyiv should hand over the parts of Donbas it still controlled to Russia, but the Ukrainian president said on Thursday that Washington had now suggested a compromise version in which Ukrainian troops would withdraw, but Russian troops would not advance into the territory.
Almost half of EU citizens regard Donald Trump as an enemy of Europe, a new survey across nine countries revealed last week. The poll, conducted for the French debate platform Le Grand Continent, found that across Europe, Trumpism is considered “a hostile force”.
The new US foreign policy doctrine published by the White House on Friday will have heightened these respondents’ worst fears. The 30-page National Security Strategy landed like a bombshell in Europe. And citizens may have been out in front of their political leaders in figuring out what Trump’s worldview could mean for Europeans.
Christmas tourists are noticing a growing military presence in Lapland, where Santa Park doubles as a bomb shelter
Billed as the official home town of Santa Claus, or joulupukki as he is known in Finland, the city of Rovaniemi offers every imaginable Father Christmas-related experience – from a visit to his “office” on the Arctic Circle to reindeer sleigh rides. He even has his own branch of the Finnish design house Marimekko.
But this Christmas season, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of tourists from around the world coming in search of Santa, Finnish Lapland’s snow-covered capital is becoming an increasingly popular destination for international military visitors.
Modi voiced words of respect, but he is resisting an anti-western, anti-Ukraine stance, despite the foreign policy contradictions
Dr Chietigj Bajpaee is senior fellow for south Asia at the thinktank Chatham House
The rhetoric and optics of the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s visit to India last week allude to the strength of the bilateral relationship: Narendra Modi greeted Putin at the airport with a hug, and the leaders shared a car journey (echoing the “limo diplomacy” when Putin and Donald Trump met in Alaska earlier this year). In his remarks, Modi referred to Putin as “my friend” and the India-Russia relationship as a “guiding star”, built on “mutual respect and deep trust” that had “stood the test of time”. This was Putin’s 10th visit to India since he assumed power 25 years ago, and his 20th meeting with Modi since the latter became prime minister in 2014.
However, there is a gap between the symbolism and the substance of this relationship. While Putin pledged “uninterrupted fuel supplies” to India, the country’a companies are buying less Russian oil in the face of US tariffs and sanctions. Russia and India concluded a string of memorandums of understanding in areas from migration and mobility to health and food security, maritime cooperation, fertilisers, customs, and academic and media collaboration. But the anticipated announcements on major defence deals did not happen. India has not concluded any major defence deals with Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This has been fuelled by delays in the delivery of several platforms and spare parts as Moscow has prioritised its own defence needs. This is a trend that predates the war in Ukraine as New Delhi has sought to diversify its defence imports and strengthen its domestic production.
The White House is aggressively seeking to weaken and dominate the United States’ traditional allies. European leaders must learn to fight back.
Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on television for an end-of-year Q&A with the German public.
But diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer Donald Trump’s structural threat to European security. The US president and his emissaries are trying to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unjust peace deal that suits American and Russian interests. In response, the summit helped ramp up support for the use of up to £100bn in frozen Russian assets as collateral for a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. European counter-proposals for a ceasefire will need to be given the kind of financial backing that provides Mr Zelenskyy with leverage at a critical moment.
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A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet.
Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border.
A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before it hit the ground, perhaps as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
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