Free Republic

A senior official who dismantled the US government’s Russian disinformation unit is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin, The Telegraph can reveal. Darren Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views. He has been noted for his focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda. Mr Beattie, the acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal “thank you” message from Vladimir Putin.

Russian state TV aired a video of Vladimir Putin warning Donald Trump to stop trying to dictate the terms of a ceasefire with Ukraine. Putin stressed that he plans to finish what he started three years ago and warned that Trump should not push him into a US blueprint for stopping the war.

The formula used by the Trump administration to levy reciprocal tariffs contains a serious math error that over-inflates the impact by about a factor of four, economists at the American Enterprise Institute said. Why it matters: The conservative think tank says the error led to tariff rates massively higher than they should have been to achieve the goals the administration sought.

Ukraine reports strikes just hours after Russian leader agreed to suspend attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in a call with US president. Vladimir Putin rejected Donald Trump’s proposal for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine after a “frank” phone call on Tuesday between the two presidents. Instead, the Russian leader agreed to a 30-day pause in attacks on energy plants and infrastructure and to hold further talks on stopping hostilities in the Black Sea.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has torn into Vice President JD Vance's claim that a Franco-British peacekeeping force would be just "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years". Speaking to GB News from today's mass farmer protest in Westminster, Farage said the Vice President was "wrong, wrong, wrong" as he hailed how Britain "did our bit" alongside the US in Afghanistan. He told the People's Channel: "JD Vance is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. For 20 years in Afghanistan, pro-rata, our size against America's, we spent the same amount of money, we...