https://www.axios.com/2025/03/02/trump-zelensky-showdown-russia-reaction
Moscow is welcoming the apparent shift in U.S. relations with Ukraine following last week's tense Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump and Vice President Vance.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/02/russia-ukraine-trump-zelensky-clash/
“The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television on Sunday. “This largely aligns with our vision.”
Moscow’s vision, which has focused on a push to reclaim influence over much or all of the former Soviet Union and defeat liberal democracy, has made Russia a pariah to the West. The United States has given hundreds of billions of dollars in arms and aid to Ukraine since Russia’s unprovoked invasion in 2022. Washington led allies in imposing new sanctions on Moscow; the International Criminal Court issued a warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin on charges of war crimes.
The Oval Office blowup last week, in which Vice President JD Vance accused Zelensky of insufficient gratitude for U.S. support and Trump warned that his refusal to compromise with Putin was “gambling with World War III,” has been seen here as a “gift” to the Kremlin.
The White House is reportedly dropping Russia from its list of threats to cybersecurity and is instead honing in on China, part of the Trump administration’s apparent broader effort to curry favor with the Kremlin and push for a peace deal that would end the country’s ongoing war in Ukraine.
According to The Guardian, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has received a new list of directives that largely omit Russia as a threat to monitor. Part of the Department of Homeland Security, CISA monitors cyber threats made to the United States.
These directives were listed out in a memo, which singled out China and the protection of local systems as priorities, according to the newspaper. The document, however, failed to mention Russia—despite the country previously being a seminal focus at the agency.
The former head of Kazakhstan’s intelligence service, Alnur Mussayev, recently claimed in a Facebook post that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987, when the 40-year-old real-estate mogul first visited Moscow.
Mussayev isn’t the only ex-KGB officer to have made such an assertion. Several years ago, Yuri Shvets, a former KGB major now resident in Washington, D.C., served as one of the key sources for Craig Unger’s best-selling book, “American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery.”
Just after Mussayev made his claim, another ex-KGB officer living in France, Sergei Zhyrnov, categorically endorsed the allegations in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist. According to Zhyrnov, Trump would have been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room. Zhyrnov said that Trump’s every move would have been recorded and documented, and that he could have been either caught in a “honey trap” (“All foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB — one hundred percent,” he said) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.
Does he want deals with Russia and China to carve up the planet? He should tell Americans.
The ongoing International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) cases against Israel reveal a problem more fundamental than the mistreatment of Israel. The cases illustrate the dangers of expanding the definition and role of international law beyond its severe limitations to reduce the sovereignty of nations. Ireland’s ICJ intervention highlights the destructiveness of reinventing international law into a utopian solution for the world’s ills.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/404721
Israel's political echelon decided this morning (Sunday) to halt the transfer of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip after the first phase of the ceasefire concluded overnight.
The decision to halt the transfer of humanitarian aid comes in the wake of the Prime Minister's Office's announcement last night that Israel is prepared to extend the ceasefire in accordance with the outline proposed by US President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff.
"With the conclusion of the first stage of the hostages deal and in light of Hamas's refusal to accept the Witkoff framework for the continuation of the talks, to which Israel has agreed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, the entry of all goods and supplies to the Gaza Strip will be halted," the Prime Minister's Office stated,
"Israel will not allow a ceasefire without the release of our hostages. If Hamas persists in its refusal, there will be additional consequences."
https://www.newsweek.com/europe-defense-spending-military-nato-donald-trump-2037104
There were no U.S. forces taking part in NATO's biggest exercises this year. This may have always been the plan, but European nations going it alone on Ukraine's doorstep took on a fresh significance as U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration rewrote Washington's relationship with the continent.
Decades of sidelining defense spending after the end of the Cold War has allowed European countries to maintain prized social welfare systems, but has also left them with yawning capability gaps on defense and a deep reliance on the U.S. that has become increasingly unpalatable to the White House. There is no shying away from this from European officials, nor a desire to—there is a universal acceptance, privately and publicly, that the continent has been lamentably lax.
Despite alarm bells ringing for years, and even more loudly since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the continent's leaders have still struggled to summon the political clout to significantly boost military spending. For most Western European members, the threat is geographically too far away—it is hard to make a convincing case to budget more for militaries when that could mean cuts to sectors such as health care, or further tax increases in what are already some of the world's most heavily taxed countries.
The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Donald Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce – or fabricate – evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aide.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce34v17dw53o
But most difficult for Mauricette and Roland was the much-awaited testimony of Marie-France L., Le Scouarnec's ex-wife.
It has been alleged that she was at the centre of the omerta that reigned in the Le Scouarnec family, as she was repeatedly made aware of her husband's obsession with children but did nothing to stop it.
Many lawyers and plaintiffs now believe she could have spared hundreds of children from being abused. Le Scouarnec's brother - who was also heard this week - openly wondered whether she had been too enamoured by the lifestyle provided by her husband's salary to speak out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/01/trump-minerals-ukraine/
It was in the 19th century that the United States started grabbing territory to exploit natural resources. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 enabled the seizure of unclaimed islands rich in the sought-after fertilizer. Ultimately, the United States annexed nearly 100 of these islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, according to historian Daniel Immerwahr (and some of them were reconfigured to host airfields and military bases in the post-guano years).
President Donald Trump apparently likes the strategy. His gambit to take control of Ukraine’s deposits of lithium, graphite, cobalt, rare metals and so forth — after calling for buying Greenland and taking over Canada, in part to nab their vast troves of critical minerals — suggests that he is fashioning a 19th-century strategy to work in the 21st.
