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More than 200 settlements in Sumy region under evacuation orders after Russia takes control of two villages. Ukrainian officials issued evacuation orders on Saturday for 11 more villages in the northern Sumy region after continued Russian gains led to fears that Moscow could be gearing up for a fresh ground offensive. Russia advanced deeper into Ukrainian territory on Saturday, taking control of two more villages in Sumy and killing two people in a missile and drone barrage. More than 200 settlements in the region were already under evacuation orders. The attacks came as Ukrainian diplomats continue to discuss participating in...

Donald Trump is losing patience with Vladimir Putin’s stalling tactics over the Ukraine ceasefire, the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, said after spending nine hours with the US president – including winning a golf competition with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday. Stubb, who also spent two days with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, last week in Helsinki suggested in a Guardian interview a plan for a deadline of 20 April, by which time Putin should be required to comply with a full ceasefire. Stubb pointed out that a third golf partner on Saturday, the Republican senator Lindsey...

Ukraine’s opposition leaders have confirmed they have held discussions with members of Donald Trump’s entourage, but denied on Thursday they were part of a reported White House plot to remove Volodymyr Zelenskyy from power. The former president Petro Poroshenko said he had held talks with US representatives but added that he opposed Trump’s demands for wartime elections. Poroshenko, who lost to Zelenskyy in the 2019 presidential vote, said a poll should only be held once martial law ends. Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister, said she also opposes elections while fighting continues. She said her team was “talking with all...

People attending recent mandatory immigration check-ins or court appearances have been escorted out in federal custody after the Trump administration allegedly tricked, lied to, or otherwise deceived them as part of its mass deportation campaign. Amid a blitz of immigration-related policy changes over the last few weeks, Donald Trump and his subordinates have greenlit the ability of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to conduct potential civil enforcement operations at courthouses, including in immigration courts. They have also reportedly set daily arrest quotas between at least 1,200 and 1,500 and gotten angry when agents have not consistently met those targets...

North Korean troops sent to fight alongside Russia in its war against Ukraine have not been seen in battle for several weeks, raising speculation that they have been withdrawn after suffering heavy losses, according to South Korea’s spy agency. The National Intelligence Service in Seoul this week confirmed media reports that North Korean troops had been pulled from the frontline around the middle of January. North Korea began sending an estimated 11,000 troops to the Russian Kursk region in late 2024, soon after the North’s ruler, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, agreed a mutual defence pact designed...

From “problematic” to “a couple of kinks in that Slinky” to “a bit of a stretch”, reaction from Republicans who weighed in on Donald Trump’s proposal to “own” Gaza was mixed on Wednesday, while some senior party leaders gave their blessing. Some of the strongest criticism came from Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who posted his opposition to the president’s plan on X on Wednesday morning. “The pursuit for peace should be that of the Israelis and the Palestinians. I thought we voted for America First,” Paul wrote. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure...

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era. Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics. Trumpism has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious...

There was 6 January 2021, and a violent coup attempt by a president desperately trying to cling to power. Then there was 24 July 2024, and a president explaining why he was giving up the most powerful job in the world. Joe Biden’s address on Wednesday night was a moving piece of political theatre, the start of a farewell tour by “a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings” who entered politics in 1972 and made it all the way to the Oval Office. For diehard Democrats it was a case of: if you have tears, prepare to shed them...

The defense rested in Donald Trump’s criminal trial on Tuesday, without the former president himself testifying. Trump had previously railed about being silenced and falsely claimed he was not allowed to testify, but ultimately elected of his own volition not to take the stand in his own defense. Trump’s decision came without fanfare. The move was not surprising – defendants in criminal cases rarely testify, because they would be subject to cross-examination, during which they could easily say something that harms their defense – but followed several instances of Trump claiming he was not allowed to do so. The judge,...

Last week’s announcement that AstraZeneca would no longer market its Covid vaccine brings an end to one of the century’s most remarkable medical stories. Created within a year of the arrival of the pandemic, the AZ vaccine was cheap, easily stored and transported, and helped stave off humanitarian crises in Asia and Latin America, where many countries could not afford the more expensive mRNA vaccines that were being snapped up by rich western nations. It is estimated that it saved 6.3 million lives in 2021 alone. Yet from the start the vaccine – created by research teams led by Professor...

When Hemil Mangukiya left his small village in the Indian state of Gujarat last December, he told his family he was off to Russia to make a better living than was possible at home in India. Lured by a recruitment video he had seen on YouTube, the 23-year-old had thought he was going for a secure security job far from the war in Ukraine. But in strained phone calls home from Russia, he told his family he was instead sent to a month-long military training camp and then taken to the frontlines, where he was made to dig trenches, carry...

“Are we having a talkshow or a serious conversation?” Vladimir Putin asked Tucker Carlson at the start of their interview on Thursday. By the end of the two-hour conversation, the answer was clear: neither. Instead, viewers got a lesson in Russian history, going all the way back to Prince Rurik – a Scandinavian who came and dished out a good kicking in the region in 862 – and taking in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, the circa-1300 threat of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia going to war with Poland in the mid-1600s. -snip- “So that you don’t...

US unilateralism has wrecked the chances of peace in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, told a crisis Brics meeting on Gaza as he attempted to woo leaders of the global south. The virtual meeting of 11 nations, convened by South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, came as Arab foreign ministers toured capitals to drum up support for a fresh UN security council resolution mandating Israel to introduce a full ceasefire and end what they say are breaches of international humanitarian law. ...Putin told the Brics meeting that the US was undermining the chances of peace by trying to...

In his Wall Street Journal column (“Why Hamas Atrocities Lead the Left to Hate Israel More,” Oct. 20) Shany Mor wrote that "many would think that an atrocity like Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel would lead opponents of the Jewish state to temper their attacks."... No British institution has demonstrated this pathology more than The Guardian, which, since Hamas’ Oct. 7 ISIS-style massacre of more than 1,400 Jews — which included rape, and murdering scores children and even babies in cold blood, and which forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens of those border communities from their homes —...

Donald Trump “demanded” an apology from Forbes magazine after it dropped him from its list of the 400 wealthiest people in the US for the second time in three years. “I hereby demand a full apology from the failing Forbes magazine,” the former president wrote on Wednesday on Truth Social, the reportedly struggling social media platform he set up after being expelled from mainstream platforms over the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Forbes released its Trump-free list last week, saying the his net worth was down $600m from a year before. Trump has been on the list since the...

We lack water, electricity, fuel, and our besieged services are staggering under the massive numbers of injured. No one is safe ... The bombardment of Gaza is now constant. My nine-year-old asked me if he would go to heaven or hell Mahmoud Shalabi We lack water, electricity, fuel, and our besieged services are staggering under the massive numbers of injured. No one is safe Here in Gaza, what is happening under Israeli military bombardment has never been seen before. Homes are being destroyed without residents being warned. Israeli missiles are hitting high-rise buildings, mosques, streets – and we are asking...

The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians. On 7October, the National SecurityCouncil spokesperson Adrienne Watson stated that the US “unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians”. Every one of us must stand up and denounce the killing of every civilian, Israeli or Palestinian or otherwise. But Watson’s use of the word “unprovoked” is doing a lot of work here.... What exactly counts as a provocation? Not, apparently, the large number of settlers, more than 800 by one media...

At least six Russian regions have scrapped 9 May Victory Day parades that mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany amid fears over Ukrainian strikes, with a region 400 miles from the border being the latest to cancel. The governor of Saratov announced the parade there would not go ahead because of “safety concerns”, adding to a string of cancellations that are a glaring admission of the country’s military vulnerability more than 14 months into the war. Earlier, heads of Belgorod, Kursk, Voronezh, Oryol, and Pskov region, as well as the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, similarly cancelled their annual military parades....

With even nationalist pro-war bloggers criticising Putin’s actions in Ukraine, his desperation and paranoia are growing. May is traditionally a month for public celebration in Russia, with massive public processions on 1 May for Labour Day and military parades on 9 May for Victory Day, a holiday commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Not so in 2023. Russia’s biggest trade union cancelled its traditional Labour Day demonstrations because of the “heightened risk of terrorist activity”, while regions near the Ukrainian border called off Victory Day parades so as to “not provoke” the Ukrainian army. The Russian government has warned...

Russian missiles have struck warehouses reportedly storing ammunition at a railway depot in the Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad, in an apparent effort to slow Kyiv’s preparations for its much anticipated counteroffensive expected to start shortly. Video posted on social media showed secondary detonations amid a significant blaze at the site of the strike, which came amid overnight missile launches against a number of Ukrainian cities by Russian strategic bombers. ... The size of the fire in Pavlohrad suggests Russia may have hit an important arms depot and comes after Ukraine’s recent attack on an oil storage facility in Sevastopol, Crimea....