In so-called normal times and under business-as-usual administrations the job of White House Press Secretary doesn’t lead to renown or infamy. Those terms — normal, business as usual — don’t apply to Donald Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office, and his press secretaries have become household names mostly for the wrong reasons.

Sean Spicer’s claim to fame is being a terrible liar and an even worse dancer. Sarah Huckabee Sanders distinguished herself by reducing the once-frequent White House press corps briefings to very occasional insult exchanges peppered by lies.  Her successor Stephanie Grisham, meanwhile, spends her time appearing on the One America News Network, Sinclair Broadcast Group stations, and Fox News instead of serving as a liaison between the press corps and the Oval Office.

More than 300 days have passed since the White House has held a news conference with reporters. In light of the recent saber-rattling between the U.S. military and Iran, that number is stunning. Times such as these require an official briefings from the White House and the military, who are charged with a duty to convey information to citizens via the press corps with clarity.

Such times also present tremendous opportunities to spin the administration’s actions in a persuasive light, leading citizens to have confidence in its actions. Indeed, Ari Fleischer used his position as George W. Bush’s press secretary to sell a war that has been dragging on now for 17 years.

On Friday, Fleischer appeared in Pasadena to talk about the upcoming “American Experience” profile “George W. Bush,” part of PBS’ day of press conferences at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. This is where Salon sat down with him for an interview that took place before the “American Experience” panel.

Right around the same time, 13 former White House press secretaries, military and foreign service officials published a letter on CNN calling for the restoration of regular press briefings.

“An informed press corps strengthens our ability to govern,” the letter states. “Yes, presidents are now able to communicate directly via the internet, social media and tweets. But most Americans will learn about the work of the White House in the reports they see, read, and hear in what we collectively call ‘the press.'”

The statement then observes that regular White House briefings generally lead to better and more responsible reporting, later adding, “In times of military conflict and international crisis, these briefings take on even more importance. Americans want to know the latest developments and seek the truth. On social media, wild rumors can fly, and our adversaries can manipulate disinformation to their advantage. This is now well documented.”

“For that reason, among many, the country needs trusted sources of information delivered on a timely and regular schedule. That is the fundamental responsibility of people who serve as spokesmen and women for presidents, cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking government officials.”

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley responded to the letter by calling its writers “D.C. establishment swamp creatures.”

Among those who signed are Victoria Clarke, who worked under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Scott McClellan, who worked under Bush as his press secretary.

Missing from that list are McClellan’s fellow Bush-era press secretaries Dana Perino and Fleischer. Perino is now a Fox News anchor, and Fleischer is a contributor at Fox News.

In this one-on-one conversation with Salon, Fleischer talked about his view of the press’ relationship with the White House in the current climate and was asked to reflect on his time as press secretary to the second President Bush, specifically with regard to conveying false information about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction that led us to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Please note that this interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

 I don’t know if you read the recent Twitter challenge from authors Don Winslow and Stephen King to Stephanie Grisham.

No, I haven’t.

 They stated that if she would hold a press briefing, they’ll give $200,000 to St. Jude’s Charity. This was a serious offer, speaking to the fact that there has not been a White House press briefing for more than 300 days.

Yeah.

You held that job and observed the traditional means of operating as an information bridge between the White House and the press corps. So what do you think about the fact that the last couple of press secretaries have been not only less approachable, but granting less access to official information coming out of the White House?

I’m a traditionalist, so it concerns me a lot and there’s a tremendous value to the briefing. There certainly was during the Bush era, and historically now, the advantage to a president is you have people reinforce his message and buttress what he says. The advantage to the country is it gives reporters a chance to ask more probing, longer follow-up questions.

But everything’s changed now in this era of hostility between President Trump and the press. And I’ve never seen such rancor and hostility in both directions. And so as much as I’m a traditionalist and see the benefits of the briefing, I don’t know that if they brought the briefing back in this current environment, it would serve the press, the public or the press secretary any good cause. I just think it would turn the room into nothing but a TV show that was full of nasty arguments both directions.

I’m not going to disagree with the partisan rancor in this country. That is abundantly clear. But I do not believe that what you’re saying about the animosity in terms of the press, particularly the actual people in that briefing room, is justified.

 I say that because there is a habit nowadays, as we’re consuming media, of conflating the people who are on the ground and in that room doing their job as journalists and asking questions, with punditry. You know this. You’re a pundit.  So I understand that you’re going to have a viewpoint on this topic that’s going to be a bit skewed. But I just want to say that when you’re blaming both sides, I need to disagree with that.

 The questions that are being asked are probing and they’re certainly pressing tough issues with the president. But I would also say that the reaction the president has had, and the press secretaries from Sean Spicer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and now what we seen of Stephanie Grisham, that is where the rancor has showed up. And you can call me biased on the behalf of those journalists, but when I’m watching the news, the rancor is really elevated from the [White House] side.

 Just one other factor I’ll mention – and I’ll come back to that.  But there’s another big factor here that’s changed things. And that’s the accessibility of the president himself versus President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton. No predecessor has been as open and accessible to the press as the president himself. And that is the primary job of the White House press corps, is to ask the president hard questions. So he’s doing it on virtually a daily basis, whether it’s a good day for him or a bad day —

As he’s getting on a helicopter with very loud rotors where he limits amount of time spent answering questions.

—that matters. I mean, if you’re, if you’re sitting there, they’re getting seven, eight, nine, 10 questions —

They’re getting in a couple of questions repeated seven, eight, nine, 10 times…And he’s not really answering those questions.

 I don’t think that’s the case.

 I’m just saying that there’s a difference between those formal briefings, which as you know, you have a controlled environment that you, as the press secretary, used to your advantage. Just in terms of being able to distill information accurately and effectively to the press.  What you did, and I’m not saying this was right, but you distilled the message to the press, and the press gave it credibility and repeated it. I’ll also say the press should have questioned you even more. I would say that to every press secretary.

 But the role that the press secretary plays carries a certain level of respect with the press. By saying Trump is more accessible, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the press is getting a better value in the information he’s sharing.

That’s on the press, not on the president. They have daily access and the press can get out of it whatever they seek. And I don’t think venue matters. They have access to the president, which is an improvement over prior White Houses for the press. So given the fact that the president is so accessible, I still wish as a traditionalist there were the briefing, but I’m realist enough to know that that rancor, that hostility would turn into a nasty red hot TV show where the few grandstanders in the room will spoil it for the lot of them, particularly print reporters who really do just want to get questions answered.

[CNN White House correspondent] Jim Acosta, for example. He acts like a pundit when he should be a correspondent. He states his opinion. He tells the White House what they should be concluding, and I think it’s that type of grandstanding along with the breakdown of the media in the modern era that has led to such polarizing media outlets. We used to have a much more dedicated, neutral fact-finding press corps and now, in both directions, the press takes stands for and against. And I think that’s a reality that’s going to live long after President Trump as well. There’s just been a breakdown on what the media represents that’s changed with this polarization. All of it in the Trump era leads me to think that as traditional as I am, and as constructive as the briefing can be, it makes little to no sense to fiddle with the Trump administration.

At the same time you have to also consider who is that in that room. You’re talking about the breakdown in the media. But there are people in that room who aren’t actually, and I am saying this politely, traditional media. They’re not even really media at all. The White House has invited propaganda machines into that room.

They’ve always been there.

So you’re saying this is normal, that you let in the likes of One America News, conspiracy bloggers ,and newsletter writers, you let those in during the Bush era?

 Oh yeah. I mean, my approach during the Bush era was the press secretary should not be the person who decides who was or who was not media. There were people who worked for me who made that decision based on logistics and Secret Service reviews. I don’t think it’s helpful for the press secretary to decide you are acceptable as a journalist. That’s a thin line on thin ice. So I had people in there who were far, far left pundits and then far, far right pundits. That’s the way it goes.  I’d spend most of my time taking questions from the front couple of rows, which is where the traditional mainstream outlets sit.

The difference now is that when Trump has appeared and asked questions, he’s gone to the “friendlier” outlets that aren’t actual news organizations. And that’s something as press secretary when you would brief Bush, my guess is, and you can clarify this, but I suspect you encouraged him to take questions from the traditional news outlets that carried the most weight.

He did, regularly. What really changed is the internet and social media has created profound changes in the way the media operates. And then breakdown of the media in terms of the polarization that the rest of the nation is going through as well.

When I was there, there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, it was the dawn of the social media internet era. Toward the end of the Bush years, Twitter existed and Facebook existed, but I remember thinking if we ever wanted to produce a White House video, we would have released it through government channels and I’d have been hammered for creating government propaganda.

Technology changed, and the Obama administration regularly released YouTube videos and it was widely accepted. It was measured then by how many clicks it got as a measure of whether it was popular, whether it was successful. Gone was the notion that this could be propaganda even though the only difference was who carried it: YouTube versus the government channel.

Technology has really changed everything for the media probably in many ways that are positive in many ways that are negative and we’re still flushing that out.

Let’s talk about that. A lot of your tweets and recent interviews have been quoted. You are getting on Fox News and saying a lot of things in the moment, that you’re having thrown back in your face and you’re being asked to defend yourself.

 I’m talking about everything that’s happening in Iran, the missile strikes in Iraq, and all the reaction around this new conflict in the Middle East. People have taken issue with your recent initial reaction of  “we’ll be greeted as liberators,” which is what you said in 2003.  After that, there were marches in the streets of Iran showing that not to be the case.

 Looking at this part of a 17-year war – one which you had role in starting – it’s curious to me that now, 17 years later that you wouldn’t look back and observe that maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, maybe we shouldn’t be increasing tensions with Iran.

Yeah, I’d do it the same way I always have. And that’s to say what I believe. It’s not complicated.

Not even in hindsight?

First off, you have to make the distinction between the military operation, the war itself, and then the occupation. The aftermath fact is from March of 2003 till roughly July, August of 2003, we were greeted as liberators. You could go to cafes and downtown Baghdad, sit outside and have meals. It was a peaceful city. People welcomed the Americans. Starting in the fall of 2003 predominantly, that’s when the occupation turned terrible. And that’s when we start to lose many more lives. And that’s when the tide turned.

So two things can be right at the same time. We were greeted as liberators, and then a guerrilla war became a highly successful guerrilla operation. And we didn’t handle the occupation, right? We handled the military invasion. We didn’t handle the occupation.

But I’m talking about the information that was dispensed to the press before the war.

I’ll get back to that. The other big thing was the issue of weapons of mass destruction. This is an entirely legitimate issue. Of course, I faithfully and accurately reported to the American people precisely what the CIA concluded. The CIA concluded the Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical, no if, ands, or buts.

And the UN investigators went in and didn’t find any conclusive evidence of WMDs.

 The CIA said that he had them. That was the CIA’s conclusion. And that was what the president relied on when he made the decision to go to war.

Now, tragically, that intelligence turned out to be wrong, and we all acknowledge that that’s what led to the creation of the war. They called the Robb-Silberman Commission, a bipartisan investigation into how and why it went wrong. Their conclusion was it was an intelligence failure. That’s the heart of it.

And to this day, I’m certain that if the CIA had said to President Bush, “We don’t know. We’re not sure if he has weapons of mass destruction or not,” there never would have been [a war].

And the tragedy is the information turned out to be wrong and we went to war based on a wrong conclusion by the CIA.

[Editor’s Note: Fleischer elaborated on this in a Twitter thread back in March 2019. The Washington Post Fact Checker column followed up with a closer examination of its veracity.]

Famously, you said that you didn’t support Trump in the election. But you do now. At what point do you look at the events that are either connected to Trump or that he’s precipitated in terms of tensions not just between party but also between the people of this country and say to yourself, “Enough is enough”?  Or, “You know what? Looking back, I might not have been correct in this initial assessment”? At what point do you maybe reassess and actually say in public, “Maybe I wasn’t correct?”  Do you apologize for anything?

In the primary, I voted for somebody else. I wanted to be for him in the general against Hillary Clinton. And as I watched it all unfold, I ultimately left my ballot blank at the presidential level and voted for him all the levels below president. And as I have watched President Trump, there are many times I have criticized him and there are many times that I have praised him. I’m not afraid to be independent and call it as I see it.

I regularly defended [Special Counsel Robert Mueller] because I know Bob Mueller. I know what a man of integrity is. I was one of few, if not the only person, on Fox News from start to finish to defend Bob and Bob Mueller’s honor and integrity and how he conducted that investigation. And I’ve never hesitated to criticize the president on Twitter or on Fox News.

. . . So I don’t hide what I think or say. And I think one of the highest duties you have having once worked at the White House is no longer to be a spokesperson for any one president or cause. That’s what I used to do with tremendous pride. Now the more important thing is to try to shine a light on what’s right, what’s wrong, what worked, what didn’t, and explain it.

And that’s what I’ve tried to do with President Trump. There are things that he’s done that . . . I don’t support his manner. His style is not mine. It’s not like that any of the people that I’ve worked for. It’s too truculent. It’s too offensive.

But I’ll also point out that many of the criticisms against him are too truculent and too offensive. He’s been called Adolf Hitler, he’s been called Mussolini. As soon as he was the president-elect, a movement [arose] that was based on the word “resistance,” which was the word used against the Nazis in France. . . . Talk about going beyond the norms. These are all actions beyond the norms.

But do you believe that he has been a normal president? You’ve worked for a man who I think people would say operated within the social contract of what we expect from a president.

He’s the president that the American people through the electoral college elected. And I see a lot of people who rejected that, who tried to overturn it in the electoral college, if they could have, who are now trying to overturn it through impeachment if they can. And I think that is equally, if not more so, violative of the norms that I believe are important to the traditions that George Bush represented and the people that I used to work for represented. So I think there’s way too much hostility in the system. But it’s on every side. It’s not just President Trump.

Just to clarify, what would you say those norms are?

To treat people you disagree with, with respect. When President Obama was reelected in 2012 I tweeted the next morning, congratulations to President Obama. He’s my president and he’s all our president. I think that’s the way we should all be. That’s how you show respect for the American people and the decisions made within our constitutional system. I didn’t vote for President Obama. I voted for Mitt Romney, but I recognized he’s my president. As soon as President Trump was elected, you had this massive movement on Twitter and social media saying, “not my president.”

That same thing happened with Obama.

But not by me. You’re asking me questions of me. That’s why I said to you, I instantly tweeted, he’s my president. I wanted to strike that civil tone that much more representative of the Bush family’s tone. So if you’re asking about my behavior, I can just tell you what I’ve done. And that’s represented by what I believe about President Bush. and how you treat people, and how you should be civil with people even if you disagree with them.

You’re a contributor to Fox News and a lot of people have pointed out that Fox is one of the less respectful, less civil, less considerate proponents of discourse right now, particularly in politics. So when you’re talking about respect and civility — obviously they employ you, so there’s only so much you can say — but what do you see that they’re contributing to this conversation?

Well, I think you have to make a distinction between opinion shows and news shows.

Viewers don’t make that distinction.

But I think there is a distinction between the opinion shows and the news shows, and the news shows are superb. I think Bret Baier’s show at six o’clock is one of the best, most fair shows in journalism, and their daytime shows as well. I wake up in the morning, I watch CNN in the morning, and I watch Fox in the afternoon because I like the balance. I want to hear what all parties are saying and I think you can make many of the same points you made about Fox, about CNN and certainly about MSNBC.

So that’s part of that polarization, the breakdown in the media that I was talking about. But I also suggest if you see the things that I say on Fox, it is very much an independent voice and a voice that reminds people about the importance of civility.

This is the point I was making to you about Bob Mueller and I could give you dozens of examples where I’ve said things that were critical of the president and said things that are supportive of the president. I don’t have to be polarizing.

The “American Experience” two-part biographical profile “George W. Bush” with Fleischer airs Monday, May 4, and Tuesday, May 5 at 9 p.m., on PBS member stations.

The post Why Ari Fleischer is against resurrecting the extinct White House press briefings appeared first on Salon.com.

In a throwaway comment this week, Donald Trump made clear that he does not regard the war in Ukraine as a conflict with fault on both sides. “Russia frankly has been fine on Ukraine,” the U.S. president said. “They have not been doing that much.”

To residents of Kyiv — who have endured weeks of intensifying bombardment — and Ukraine’s allies across Europe, the remark confirmed a growing impression that the U.S. is taking Russia leader Vladimir Putin’s side in the war.

“American negotiators have been trying to push Ukraine into surrender for already almost two years,” the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas told the European Parliament on Tuesday. The reason Ukraine hasn’t “surrendered on Putin’s terms” so far is because Europe has been providing so much support, she added. 

As they scratch their heads for explanations for Trump’s latest turn against Ukraine, some European officials and diplomats think it comes down to the president’s personal preferences, as much as his country’s political aims.

“I do think it’s a personal thing,” said former British Cabinet minister David Lidington, now distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a leading security think tank in London. “Trump is self-centered — his personal predilections for dictators and autocrats, his desire to give opportunities to U.S. businesses … are very important parts of his motivation.”

In private, EU officials agree. “Trump doesn’t like [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. He just doesn’t like him,” said one government official who has observed both men closely. “That makes it harder to get the U.S. to help on peace. Everything is a rational business deal with Trump, until it’s not.” 

A diplomat from an EU country — granted anonymity, like others in this report, to discuss sensitive matters — said the inconsistent Trump could change his mind again and reverse recent moves against Ukraine. The U.S. president has chopped and changed on many issues, “except one thing,” the diplomat said. “He seems to be supportive of the Russians.”

“He’s been critical of Ukraine, the EU, NATO, but hardly ever said anything critical about Putin. It is striking. We have to deal with an administration that seems to be more pro-Russian than anything else,” the diplomat said.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mounting losses

For Ukraine and its European allies, the idea that nothing can or will change Trump’s feelings about Zelenskyy is a bleak one. After four-and-a-half years of war, Kyiv is running low on funding, air defenses and — amid swelling support for Europe’s populist right — facing a potential loss of political support in the months ahead. 

Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met the Ukrainian president and the leaders of Norway and Finland for talks in Oslo on Tuesday, and will head to St. Petersburg to discuss peace proposals with the Russian leadership on Wednesday as the White House pushes hard for a ceasefire. One option Putin will be offered is a three-way leaders’ summit with Trump and Zelenskyy.

Previous efforts to get the Russian president to attend such a meeting have failed, however, and EU diplomats do not believe Putin is showing any genuine desire for a ceasefire. That is partly what makes Trump’s hostility toward Zelenskyy so problematic.

“There is a clear consensus across Europe that Putin does not want peace,” a second EU diplomat said. “He will need to be forced into peace.”

But instead of making demands of Putin, Trump has ratcheted up his pressure on Zelenskyy, even amid escalating Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities this month. Ukraine’s leader is feeling the strain, as he told his EU counterparts in private meetings in Brussels last week, according to the first diplomat.

In a succession of highly critical comments in recent days, Trump has said Zelenskyy “doesn’t care” and “doesn’t want to end this war;” and should be replaced as leader or as Ukraine’s negotiator. “President Putin would like to see a settlement,” Trump said. “President Zelenskyy could have solved this war, or he could have made a deal, many times.” 

The Oval Office beating

Trump’s animosity may date back to an incident during his first term in 2019, when he urged the Ukrainian leader to help with an investigation into Joe Biden, who eventually defeated Trump in the following presidential election, Lidington said. A succession of hostile encounters in the years since — including in the Oval Office in February 2025 — have reinforced the impression, he said. 

“It was clear that in the infamous meeting in the White House that Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance had planned that public beating-up of Zelenskyy and it struck me then that there was a strong personal element to this,” said Lidington.

“I think there’s another element, which is that if you look at the people Trump tries to court, it tends to be autocratic strongman — and it is ‘man’ — leaders,” Lidington said.

He recalled attending a dinner with world leaders in 2018 to mark the centenary of the end of World War I in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, were playing joint hosts “at the top table,” but Trump was not interested in making small talk with either of them, Lidington said.

“It was pretty obvious from the body language that Trump was impatient with them and one of the people he really wanted to talk to was [Turkish leader Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and other people who were a bit more in that strongman image that he likes to portray himself,” he observed.

‘Strange stories’

A senior official from a European country familiar with the Ukraine talks said Trump’s motives were partly political, partly about calculating what would be profitable and partly about personalities.

“They are currently in an election cycle and need someone to blame for rising prices,” the official said. “In general, Trump tends to like various types of people and leaders. He actually has a fondness for successful and cheerful people.”

In recent days, Zelenskyy has warned his country is suffering more civilian casualties because the U.S. has cut back on support, including Starlink and Starshield services that help Ukraine defend itself against Russian attacks and plan operations. “We still have no explanation for this, just different strange stories,” Zelenskyy told U.S. congressmen on Monday.  

This month, the advanced warnings of incoming Russian missile attacks from U.S. partners have failed to come through as normal. Ukraine is also running low on Patriot missile interceptors, he said. 

The Pentagon has not issued an official comment on the Ukrainian complaints. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said 328 civilians were killed and more than 2,000 wounded across Ukraine last month, an 85% increase compared to September 2025. The U.N. said that the first two weeks of October were among the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine in years, driven by increased missile and drone strikes.

The first EU diplomat quoted above said many European governments were irritated that Trump had cut them out of his conversations with Putin so far. “There is probably much more dialogue between the Americans and the Russians than we might know,” the diplomat said. 

Tuesday’s meeting with Witkoff in Norway raised the possibility that direct engagement with Putin might be back on the cards, for Zelenskyy at least. 

“Today was a good day for peace,” Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said after attending the talks in Oslo. “On a substantive and technical level we have actually made a lot of progress under the radar in the past week or so and now I feel that the process is back on track,” Stubb said.

The process is now going in the right direction again, he added. “Hopefully, we don’t do any backtracking.”

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

LONDON — U.K. fighter jets will be sent to aid Saudi Arabia in defending itself against attacks on critical energy and civilian infrastructure by the Houthis.

The Iranian-backed Islamist militia group, based in civil war-hit Yemen, has been launching ballistic missile strikes on Saudi Arabia for the past few weeks, successfully hitting three airports earlier this month.

The Ministry of Defence announced Tuesday that Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters will be deployed to the Gulf Kingdom — while stressing that they will be only used in a defensive capacity.

U.K. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said the “continuing attacks” on the U.K.’s ally are “absolutely despicable.”

“The targeting of the airport in Riyadh in particular shows the lengths the Houthis are going to escalate the situation in the region,” he added, referencing the attacks earlier this month that killed 14 people and injured hundreds more.

Streeting said that the fighter jets will be used to protect Saudi airspace from drones and missiles. The U.K. will also send an Atlas A400M aircraft, used to transport the equipment, as well as military advisers.

“This builds on the UK equipment and personnel we already have in the country to defend against Houthi air attacks,” Streeting said.

The MoD argued that there is a link between the conflict in the Persian Gulf and the situation domestically in the U.K., pointing to disrupted energy supplies and a subsequent rise in the cost of living.

Since Prime Minister Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street in July he has offered more support to Saudi Arabia. In September, he agreed to a request for air-to-air refueling of the country’s jets.

Pressed Tuesday on whether the U.K. risked being sucked into the Saudi war with the Houthis, Burnham’s official spokesperson told reporters: “I don’t accept that characterization. Our support for Saudi Arabia is considered proportionate and focused on helping them defend themselves against relentless Houthi attacks.”

They added: “Regional instability can have a serious impact at home in the U.K. We’re clear it’s in the U.K.’s economic and security interests that the Houthis do not succeed, and our approach is about defending our people, our interests, and our allies.”

America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously. 

This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally. 

The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. 

Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad. 

 

In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control. 

Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.

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Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.

Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.

As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP. 

The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres. 

The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.

The post Putin has Trump right where he wants him appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump said Monday he was open to a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, but said such a meeting would not focus on the war in Ukraine.

Trump told reporters at the White House that he would participate in a summit with both leaders if the purpose was to discuss denuclearization. The comments came after reports that Putin had proposed that the three leaders meet on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in China to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine.

“I would do it, not so much for Ukraine,” Trump said. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They have not been doing much. And the same thing with China. We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons, denuclearization. And anytime I can have a meeting on denuclearization.”

Trump made room for the possibility of other topics to be discussed in such a meeting but reiterated that it would be “based on denuclearization.”

“If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” he said. “I’m sure we would talk about other things like trade too but yeah I would do that.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that discussions were taking place over the possibility of a meeting, but there was no “clear understanding” yet about what the potential summit’s agenda would consist of.

The possibility of a high-level summit between the three leaders comes as Trump has waived sanctions on Russia and announced a diesel deal with Putin, while placing the blame for the four-year war on Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who earlier Monday briefed a bipartisan group of lawmakers about the conflict.

“To be honest, I think it is time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine, because what has happened?” Trump said to reporters. “Very little land has moved, but a million people, a tremendous number of people are dead.”

As the US-Iran war drags on, the damage is being felt regionally: Saudi Arabia experienced the worst attack in over a decade earlier this month, when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia struck an airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The strike killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300 others.

Saudi Arabia responded with missile attacks on Yemen, striking oil facilities, and the Houthis have launched more strikes of their own, targeting Saudi oil infrastructure. 

The dueling strikes are the latest development in a decade-plus of conflict between Saudi and the Houthis, a political and military group that controls part of northern Yemen, which had been on pause until earlier this year after a 2022 ceasefire. But the Iran war, and Houthi affiliation with Iran’s network of proxy groups, mean the current violence has far-reaching implications for the US, Israel, and the global energy economy. 

It also threatens more than just Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil industry: As Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist, explains, the attacks cut at the heart of the country’s project to evolve into a destination for foreign investment, travel, tourism, and more. On Monday, the country’s upcoming Future Investment Initiative was postponed until 2027.

Carlstrom, who is based in Riyadh, spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram how the attack has been received inside Saudi Arabia, why it comes at an especially bad time for the country, and how President Donald Trump might — or might not — get more involved. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Can you help us understand how the Houthis have such a presence in the country right now? Are they infiltrating the country? Are they already there?

They’re shooting from outside the country. They’re shooting from Yemen. The Houthis are a group that’s been around for a few decades. They were originally a local insurgency in Yemen that was fighting against the Yemeni government. They originate from the northern part of Yemen, but they were able to gain control of large parts of that country from 2014 onwards. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime dictator of Yemen, was overthrown during the Arab Spring and the Houthis were able to seize a large chunk of territory. 

They are effectively in control of most of the population centers in Yemen. They have received increasing support from Iran, which has provided them with weapons, with money, with know-how, and technical expertise. And they have used that to build an arsenal of drones and missiles, which they are using now to carry out attacks on Saudi Arabia.

And was there a particular reason they targeted the airport in Riyadh? Were they trying to send a message here?

If you listen to the messaging from the Houthis, they are trying to describe this as almost a like-for-like campaign, where you’ve had years in which the Saudi-led coalition, which invaded Yemen in 2015, has been imposing a blockade of Yemeni airspace, has been restricting flights in and out of that country. 

And so the Houthis describe this publicly as being a retaliation in kind, but I think they’ve also just figured out that attacks on airports are a very effective way to cause economic disruption in Saudi Arabia. You prevent not just people from flying in and out but also, as we’ve seen disruptions to shipping via the Strait of Hormuz, a lot of cargo that these countries depend on for daily needs are coming in by air instead. 

Carrying out these sorts of attacks, shutting down the airport in a capital city, is a very effective way for the Houthis to impose economic pain on the Saudis.

And I guess on some level it makes the country feel insecure. How is that making Saudi Arabia’s leader feel right now? What’s his response been?

It comes at a very difficult time for the Saudi leadership because they are supposed to be hosting a number of events this month where Saudi will be playing a role on the world stage. 

There’s something called the World Petroleum Congress that is taking place this week [October 11–15], which is normally a big event that draws executives from top oil and gas companies. Many of them canceled their participation because of the attacks on the airport. 

Then they are supposed to be hosting the [now-postponed] Future Investment Initiative, which is something often known outside Saudi Arabia as “Davos in the Desert.” It’s the sort of flagship investment conference that takes place here every year. It draws a who’s who of global finance. 

For a country that is trying to diversify its economy, a country that is trying to attract foreign investment and make itself into a hub for finance and travel and tourism, these sorts of attacks are very detrimental to those goals.

And this is coming as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the rest of the leadership in the country is really trying to establish Saudi Arabia as the premier economic hub in the region. The stakes are really high for him right now?

They are. And just about everything that they are trying to do is being disrupted by what’s happened over the past few weeks. 

If you look at travel, for example, the Public Investment Fund, which is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, last year launched a new airline, Riyadh Air, which they are hoping will eventually compete with Emirates or Qatar Airways, the really big carriers in the Gulf.  

That airline was just getting into regular operations this summer where they were growing their fleet, they were growing their network of destinations. And then suddenly this happens and their home base in Riyadh is shut down. They have moved some of their planes out of Riyadh to other airports to keep them safe from Houthi attacks. Obviously, it’s very disruptive for trying to build an air carrier. 

In Riyadh itself, the financial district — this sort of long-planned attempt to set up a banking hub that might rival the one in Dubai — had just started to get going over the past couple of years, when you had banks and other financial services firms moving in there. Everybody who works there has now been told to work remotely for the foreseeable future because there is a concern about possible Houthi attacks against skyscrapers and the financial district. 

Everything they are trying to do, from finance to travel to trade, all of it is being disrupted and threatened by what’s happening in Yemen.

What options does he have to reassure investors and the world really that he can protect the country and maybe especially his airport, where a bunch of the investment is focused?

The airport, I think, is going to be difficult to reassure people about. You can install additional air defenses there. You can move more batteries and more interceptors there, but at the end of the day, no air defense system is hermetic. There’s no 100 percent guarantee that you’re going to shoot down every incoming projectile. 

As long as there is this ongoing war between the Houthis and Yemen and the Saudis, I think people might have ongoing concerns about the airport. You have to resolve that underlying issue to give people confidence. 

Now, how do you try to resolve that? If you’re Saudi Arabia right now, you have two bad options. One is you keep fighting. You try to militarily defeat the Houthis or at least force them to accept a renewed ceasefire. 

The other option is you cut a deal. You try to offer the Houthis some concessions that might encourage them to go back to the ceasefire. That’s going to be very costly for Saudi Arabia. I’ve heard that the Houthis are demanding probably billions of dollars of financial concessions where they would want the Saudis to offer some money for reconstruction and to pay the salaries of Yemeni civil servants working in Houthi-controlled areas. 

If you are the Saudi leadership right now, neither one is really a good option.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a pretty strong relationship with the president of the United States, who’s very sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and Saudi investment. Has he appealed to President Trump for help here yet?

He has. He’s done so repeatedly over the past month or so, asking not just for support with the Saudi campaign in Yemen, but for America to carry out its own airstrikes in Yemen. And the response so far from Donald Trump has been to refuse that.

For the US to get involved in a bigger way, there are some practical constraints at the moment where a lot of American military assets are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz trying to keep that open, keep oil flowing through the Strait. And so the response from Trump has been disappointing for the Saudi Crown prince. The US is providing intelligence support. It’s helping on that front, but it is not directly getting involved in the war in Yemen.

LONDON — The British and Polish governments have criticized U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after he appeared to downplay the role fellow NATO members played in the Afghanistan war.

No.10 Downing Street joined Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski in pushing back at Hegseth, who told an audience at the University of Tennessee over the weekend that few NATO allies were “actually involved in kinetic operations.”

“I was a captain in Afghanistan and we would go to the headquarters in Kabul and there would be 50 flags at the headquarters,” Hegseth recalled. “It was a beautiful thing to see, 50 different countries contributing to the NATO alliance and the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] mission there.”

But he added: “Except there were maybe five that contributed. It was actually closer to one or two that by the end were actually involved in kinetic operations. In fact the patch ISAF, we joked it meant ‘I Saw Americans Fighting’.”

All of NATO’s then-28 members participated in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, after the alliance invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty – NATO’s collective defense clause – on September 12, 2001, a day after the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11.

It remains the only time the article has been invoked in alliance history.

Asked about his comments Monday, U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official spokesperson pointed out that “thousands of British and allied families made huge sacrifices to play their significant part in that war and uphold our values,” while “more than 450 British personnel never returned.”

“Their sacrifice and that of other NATO forces was made in the service of collective security and in response to an attack on our ally,” he continued.

“We are incredibly proud of our armed forces, and their service and sacrifice will never be forgotten. And it is wrong to diminish their role.”

Sikorski said in a social media post Sunday that Hegseth should repeat his comments “to the families of 44 Polish soldiers who died who died securing the tough Ghazni province.”

It’s not the first time fellow NATO members’ contribution to the Afghanistan war has been question by the U.S. government.

U.S. President Donald Trump triggered anger in London in January after he said non-American forces “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines” during the war.

BRUSSELS — NATO is beginning talks this month on the forces and weapons allies would need to defend against a Russian attack — and how they would pay for them.

The talks will set capability targets for 2029, requiring each of NATO’s 32 member countries to provide specific forces and equipment.

The deadline raises the stakes: European officials have warned that Russia could be ready to attack a NATO country by then.

At the same time, the Trump administration is weighing a sharp reduction in U.S. forces in Europe, which could leave the alliance short of troops and critical capabilities with fewer like refueling aircraft, long-range missiles and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets.

The negotiations will test how much each country is willing to spend, how much Europe can do without the U.S. and whether NATO’s military plans should make greater use of technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

“It’s going to be tough,” said one senior NATO diplomat, who, like others, was granted anonymity to speak freely on the sensitive issue. “Burden sharing, the U.S., how to combine the level of ambition with political priorities … it’s huge.”

NATO allies will begin discussing the broad mandate for the new targets — known as Political Guidance — in the coming days. It’s the first step in a five-part effort called the NATO Defence Planning Process.

“The ambition … is for this to be a transformation cycle and not one that’s just off the shelf,” said French Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and the alliance’s chief for future warfare.

POLITICO spoke to 15 current and former NATO officials and diplomats to get a sense of the five key debates likely to define the negotiations.

1. Deciding on ambition

The most significant issue will be deciding exactly how many troops and military capabilities allies want to provide — known as the level of ambition.

Historically, NATO allies have agreed that beyond the forces needed for major operations, they should have 18 spare brigades — each a unit of about 5,000 soldiers — to carry out smaller crisis-management missions outside alliance territory, like Afghanistan or Kosovo.

But U.S. pressure to hand off more security responsibility to European allies — dubbed NATO 3.0 — could put pressure on allies to reduce or even eliminate requirements for any smaller operations.

Discussions will also cover whether to speed up the process itself in future in response to the furious pace of battlefield innovation, from AI to ground robots. 

Allies are also likely to tackle how to provide conventional military support — like ground troops or aircraft — to nuclear-armed countries like the U.K. and U.S.

“Conventional support … capabilities are absolutely part of the NDPP process,” said Nassima Barrows, NATO’s nuclear policy director, “so that is one of the big messages that we underline as a part of the next [negotiations].”

2. Filling the American gap

Looming over the talks is the Pentagon’s upcoming review of American forces in Europe. Washington earlier this year already pulled assets like strategic bombers, fighter jets, drones, submarines and warships from the pool of forces NATO can draw on.

The review lands in December, midway through the NATO talks, prompting concerns it may delay negotiations. There are worries that the U.S. could pull out assets Europe needs, like heavy transport aircraft.

Washington’s drive to curb its military presence in Europe will set off a scramble among allies to replace its capabilities. That will open discussions on how to share the burden fairly, likely to be very difficult as national budgets are increasingly squeezed.

“Not so long ago, the whole NATO process was … you do the math on what NATO needs, and then when you realize you don’t have everything, the U.S. fills in the gaps,” said Camille Grand, head of the ASD defense lobby and a former senior NATO official. “This is no longer the case.”

One way to tackle that is to shift away from specific weapons requirements to assigning objectives to countries, such as having their forces eliminate Russian command outposts. That could create more flexibility for European allies to who can’t access U.S. weapons like Tomahawk cruise missiles.

“We don’t have to have thousands of Tomahawks … but we can have thousands cheaper, low-cost alternatives,” said Fabrice Pothier, a former NATO policy planning director who is now CEO of the Rasmussen Global consultancy.

3. Regional divides

The focus on Russia is likely to cause friction with allies worried about other threats.

On paper, NATO espouses a “360-degree” approach to security. In practice, the alliance’s focus has shifted eastward since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and northward in the past year as it set up an Arctic mission (largely in response to pressure from Donald Trump over Greenland).

Some allies would like to see more attention given to the alliance’s southern and southeastern flanks. Issues include Russian mercenary presence in Libya, the potential for weaponized migration and increased submarine activity, alongside drone attacks on vessels in the Black Sea.

“There is too much north,” said a second NATO diplomat. “We should reset.”

4. More drones or more tanks

The drone warfare dominating the frontlines in Ukraine is likely to force a debate on the balance between adding unmanned capabilities and continuing to build up conventional military equipment like tanks and artillery.

Most allies are making plans to increase their use of unmanned systems.

The U.K. this year announced a “hybrid fleet” that leans on autonomous vessels like Type 93 uncrewed underwater vehicles. France has earmarked roughly €8.4 billion for drones and loitering munitions while Germany is establishing its first dedicated drone regiment next year.

Europe’s difficulties in recruiting soldiers also feed into the debate, said Grand. “One thing that is driving everybody in the direction of more unmanned [systems] is we have aging societies — we have a manpower issue.”

Countries also have to figure out how to match Russia’s technological developments without breaking national defense budgets.

Vandier said Russia produces 9 million drones a year, a figure that requires a “pretty radical effort” from the alliance. He suggested one fix could be a subscription-style model for hardware updates to keep weapons systems from becoming obsolete.

5. Learning from Ukraine

Most NATO allies agree that Ukraine contributes to their security thanks to its large and battle-hardened military and its rapid technological developments in air, sea and ground drones, air defenses, missiles, and its advanced Delta battlefield management system.

That has some countries calling for closer military and industrial cooperation, even as others urge caution because the war in Ukraine is different from NATO’s doctrine, which calls for rapid-maneuver warfare, air superiority and standoff precision strikes.

“There are tremendous lessons from the conflict that we need to capture,” NATO’s top commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, told the European Parliament earlier this month. But “we do not want to fight that kind of war.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to waive new sanctions against Russia on Saturday, warning that easing economic pressure would only embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump signed an executive order Friday suspending sanctions and tariffs under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which he signed into law last month. The penalties were scheduled to take effect Sunday.

“A decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end,” Zelenskyy wrote Saturday.

Yesterday, the Russians carried out one of their largest attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector – more than 15 critical power generation and transmission facilities were targeted across different regions of Ukraine. Restoration work is ongoing, with all necessary services and all available resources of Ukrainian energy companies involved. I thank everyone working practically nonstop to restore power.

The most difficult situation was in Lutsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Shepetivka, Slavuta, and Netishyn. Energy facilities in the Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and other regions were also hit. The Russians have scaled up their anti-energy operation and are trying to stretch our reserves and repair capabilities as thin as possible. Between 7 p.m. yesterday and 7 a.m. today alone, more than 320 jet-powered and gasoline-powered “shaheds,” along with loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, were used against our energy sector, our cities, and our communities. And although our warriors are shooting down a significant number of them, the sheer scale and unrelenting pace of Russia’s strikes, specifically against our energy sector, are unfortunately having severe consequences.

It is important that our European partners have already prepared new support packages for Ukraine. I am grateful to them for this. And it is important that everyone in America also sees what is really happening. At a time when the Russians have carried out such a massive attack on our energy sector, a decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end. This Act could have helped enormously – and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters.

Russia is trying to cause a blackout in Ukraine – right before winter. Russia is trying to leave millions of our people without electricity and heating. Pressure is needed to stop this. A U.S. sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, financial rewards for Putin – all of this only encourages him to keep attacking. We must not give up ground. We must keep trying to end the war. To end it, not give Putin every reason to continue it indefinitely. I thank everyone who is truly fighting for peace and helping Ukraine!

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 17, 2026

“This Act could have helped enormously — and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters,” he added.

The White House said the waiver was in the national interest. The order suspends the new penalties but leaves existing sanctions against Russia in place.

Moscow, meanwhile, welcomed the decision. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy, called it an “important and truly historic moment,” suggesting it could open the door to renewed economic cooperation with Washington.

The move comes as Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine‘s energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Zelenskyy said Russian forces targeted more than 15 energy facilities in an overnight assault. Ukraine’s air force reported 332 drones and four cruise missiles launched during the attacks.

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Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., accused Trump of undermining bipartisan efforts to pressure Moscow.

“Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression,” Beyer said.

Trump just waived all of the sanctions on Russia provided for in the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, just as I and others warned he would.

Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.

Trump has proven he will twist this law and abuse the powers it conferred on him, and while he has let the tariff powers lie for the moment, the law as written also empowers Trump to weaponize new trade authorities against our allies and trading partners.

Congress must fix this flawed law to stop Trump from capitulating to Putin and ensure that it truly supports Ukraine.

— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) October 17, 2026

The Graham Act authorized new economic penalties, including tariffs targeting countries that purchase Russian energy, but also granted the president authority to waive them on national-interest grounds.

The post Zelenskyy: Trump is letting Putin off appeared first on Salon.com.

Starlink restrictions hampering Ukraine’s war effort are “a planned operation,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday.

The satellite service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX is still deactivated in Ukraine at speeds over 160 km/h, which prevents some of its drones to intercept high-speed Shahed drones used by Russia, Zelenskyy told reporters in a WhatsApp chat.

He added that Ukraine conducted a test by sending Starlink-equipped vehicules to European Union countries, at speeds over 180 km/h. “Starlink kept working … The conclusion is this: the restrictions are in effect in Ukraine, but they are not in effect in European Union countries. So, this is a planned operation,” Zelenskyy said.

The restrictions have revived questions on Ukraine’s reliance on the satellite system operated by a U.S. company amid escalating tensions between Kyiv and the White House. “This will cost many of us our lives,” an experienced Ukrainian officer told POLITICO and the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network earlier this week.

“We’re reaching out to everyone at the military level, at the Ministry of Defense level, and at the diplomatic level, including to SpaceX. Right now, no one is responding to our military or the Ministry of Defense,” Zelenskyy told reporters.

The European Union is under increasing pressure to provide Ukraine with an alternative to Starlink. But negotiations between Brussels and Kyiv over access to the bloc’s Govsatcom program — which gives participating governments secure communications capabilities— have been stalling. And IRIS², the EU’s in-house planned network to match Starlink, is only expected to come online in 2030.

“The Europeans are now raising the question of alternatives themselves. And they’re already working on them. They’re already making progress, and they’ll succeed in this area. I can already see that,” Zelenskyy said.

SpaceX did not immediately responded to a request for comment.

Earlier on Saturday, Zelenskyy accused Russia of looking to create a blackout across Ukraine, amid attacks on energy infrastructure and the waiver of U.S. sanctions on Moscow.

“Russia is trying to cause a blackout in Ukraine right before winter. Russia is trying to leave millions of our people without electricity and heating. Pressure is needed to stop this,” he said on Telegram.

“An American sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, monetary rewards for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin: all of this only encourages him to keep striking,” he added.

The Ukrainian leader’s comments come after Russia carried out strikes on the war-torn country’s energy sector, including power generation and transmission facilities, with more than 320 jet-powered Shahed drones, loitering munitions, cruise and ballistic missiles. Power was reportedly cut for about 1 million people.

They also come as U.S. President Donald Trump signed on Friday an executive order that waived key sanctions on Russia — a decision that Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, described as “an important and truly historic moment.” Trump’s move comes only a few days after he made a deal with Putin over supplying barrels of diesel, leaving European countries and Ukraine stunned.

“A decision was unfortunately made in America to completely ignore Lindsey Graham’s bill, which was supposed to introduce truly effective pressure on Russia to end this war,” Zelenskyy said. “This bill could have helped a great deal, and it still can! But the law needs to actually work, and every vote for it matters.”

This article was updated. Veronika Melkozerova contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Friday that as many as 20 million Ukrainians could be forced to flee to Europe if his country falls to Russia.

“Russia is killing us,” Zelenskyy told reporters at a press conference on Friday during a summit of European Union leaders, adding Ukrainians were being “pushed” out of their country. “They [Russia] don’t want to stop.”

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, millions of Ukrainians fled their homes in Europe’s fastest and largest refugee crisis since World War II. Today, over 4 million Ukrainians live in EU countries under temporary protection status, with the largest populations in Germany, Poland and Czechia, according to Eurostat. 

Zelenskyy’s stark warning comes as Ukraine heads into a brutal fifth wartime winter under Russian bombardment. Kyiv faces a budget shortfall of $30 to $35 million next year, according to projections from the International Monetary Fund — even accounting for a €90 billion loan Brussels agreed to provide last year. 

The Ukrainian president traveled to Brussels to meet with European leaders and shore up financial support for his embattled country. While the EU is Ukraine’s staunchest backer, the bloc’s list of priorities is stacked with rising energy costs, looming elections, geopolitical crises and an impasse over its €2 trillion budget. 

‘We Were Very Fortunate That Something Much, Much Worse Did Not Happen’

For years, but with increasing ferocity lately, the far-right has been directing its hatred toward Indian Americans and other immigrants of South Asian descent. Some Republican candidates have seized on this strain of bigotry, perhaps hoping a panic over demographic change will fuel voter turnout.

This week, this dark, very American story advanced to its inevitable next chapter, as a young man who police have described as unstable targeted a Hindu temple west of Chicago for a mass shooting.

However, when 19-year-old Alexandros Paporakis showed up at the temple in Aurora, Illinois, his gun jammed, police say.

He texted a colleague at Taco Bell, where he worked, about what he was up to. The colleague called the authorities.

“I think we were very fortunate that something much, much worse did not happen,” Palatine, Illinois’ police chief, Bill Nord, told press. “The seriousness of this alleged threat cannot be overstated,” he said later.

Police found tactical gear and hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the 19-year-old suspect’s home, as well as white nationalist material. They also found a manifesto titled “Why I Fought: A.K.A.: (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto).” The manifesto targeted South Asian, Jewish and Black people, per local reports.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was at the temple on Sunday when Paporakis turned up, he said, and on Thursday called on the feds to get involved.

“We know this type of hate is coursing thorough social media online, it’s exploded,” Krishnamoorthi told a local news station. “We can’t rely on luck, that’s why we have to condemn the hatred. We can’t stay silent, or worse, condone it or fan the flames.”

“Secondly,” he continued, “we have to redirect the FBI’s focus to domestic violent extremism and trying to uncover these plots.”

The FBI, under Trump, has largely abandoned efforts to track neo-Nazi extremists, in some cases repositioning resources toward targeting the president’s critics and political enemies.

Trump’s Long-Brewing Effort to Oust Ilhan Omar From America

The Trump administration effort to eject Muslim representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the country is the culmination of a years-long fixation.

• Way back in 2019, TPM reporter Christopher Mathias noted this week, attendees at Trump rallies were chanting “send her back” when the president mentioned Omar.
• That year, the Washington Post reported yesterday, a “political appointee in the first Trump administration” demanded that DHS scrub Omar’s immigration records for any indication of fraud. It ultimately did not find what it needed to to move forward with a case.
• In its second term, the Trump administration is increasingly attempting to make use of denaturalization, an extremely difficult outcome to achieve legally. That, however, is the goal with its latest investigation of Omar, per the Wall Street Journal.
• To successfully denaturalize someone, “the government needs to show that there was an omission or falsehood on the naturalization paperwork of such magnitude that it would have prevented the person from getting citizenship had the truth been shared with immigration authorities,” writes TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who has been covering the administration’s denaturalization efforts for us since 2024.
• The administration appears to specifically be looking into whether Omar’s father filed immigration paperwork claiming she was 17 when she was actually 18, a theory that has been pushed on the right for years, most prominently by a QAnon-supporting candidate who once challenged Omar in a primary campaign, Josh reports. A 17-year-old minor naturalizes with their parent when their parent obtains citizenship, while an 18-year-old adult must apply for citizenship independently.
• “I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn’t any fraud there,” one former official involved in the 2019 investigation told the Washington Post.

Tabs

• The White House is denying that Trump himself gave the order to restrict Ukraine’s access to Starlink, Bloomberg reports. But the order came “from inside the White House,” Reuters reports. “The officials said ‌leaders at the Defense Department received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed,” the Reuters report says.
• Meanwhile, Ukraine has run out of patriot missiles, CNN reports. The U.S. seems to be withholding them as Trump punishes the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, for criticizing his pre-midterms diesel deal with Russia. Patriot missiles, which are used as interceptors, are in extremely short supply more generally thanks in part to the war with Iran. As a result, Russian missiles are more easily striking Ukrainian targets.
• Hunter Walker profiles Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer who, thanks in part to a GOP Texas gerrymandering effort that appears increasingly to have been misguided, stands a real chance of flipping his district from red to blue.

Man of the Hour

It’s longtime Trump friend and now-former State Department Special Envoy for Arts and Culture Paolo Zampolli, who, Politico recently reported, has been in a bizarre, long-running, sprawling feud with his boss, cc-ing a dozen-plus people as they snap at each other over email. Among other issues, Zampolli blamed said boss, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for, he thought, being the source of a New York Times article that said Zampolli got his longtime girlfriend deported by ICE as part of a custody battle over their son. (Yes, it’s messy.) The girlfriend, in turn, threatened to reveal details she said she knew about Trump, Melania, and Jeffrey Epstein. (Messy.) Anyway, Trump — who, as Josh Marshall observes, suddenly seems to have no taste for drama — canned Zampolli yesterday

Are We at War?

No, says Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA).

“Right now we are defending U.S. assets there, so there is no war as we speak,” Wittman told HuffPost Thursday.

For a sizable chunk of its existence, the United States has been remarkably effective at manufacturing death at scale. In the years since World War II, as steel production slowed and agriculture became one big subsidy, untimely ends became one of the few things you could still expect the U.S. to make itself. 

The business of bomb-dropping boomed through economic downturns and outsourcing pushes. NAFTA and the Great Recession couldn’t put a dent in America’s output of explosive ordinance. The lack of a military draft or a requirement to declare war kicked the death factory into overdrive, with defense budgets growing every year. The death toll in Iraq reached one million in the same year that Lehman Brothers collapsed. As the U.S. economy teetered on the brink, President Barack Obama was sending multi-million dollar drones to strike Yemeni weddings. Outside of a few million protestors that no one felt the need to listen to, most Americans were fine with the whole business, but with one caveat: They didn’t want to see it.

Decades after the televised spectacle of the Vietnam War, after which the Pentagon restricted what media outlets could cover, multiple wars in the Middle East were presented as a bloodless spectacle on cable, with shock-and-awe filmed and broadcast on CNN from a safe remove. In the rare instances where Americans were forced to see the deaths of Iraqi civilians up close — such as the infamous 39-minute “Collateral Murder” footage which was released by Wikileaks in 2010 — it turned public opinion against the wars permanently. That revulsion was one small part of the establishment backlash that put Donald Trump in the White House. 

But something has shifted in the ensuing years. The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices. Whenever his public approval ratings have flagged, most notably when voters rejected his 2020 re-election bid, Trump has stoked his base with calls to violence.    

He eventually won that second term four years later, a sign from the universe that there would be no real consequences for reveling in violence. Since then, Trump has shown an extreme lack of care for the brutal — and sometimes deadly — effects of his policies. Worse still, many of his supporters seem to hunger for more bloodshed, celebrating each new instance of a Trump policy ending in death. 

Some of this was to be expected. Americans are remarkably skilled at compartmentalizing the bureaucratic ways U.S. actions lead to deaths globally. When Elon Musk’s inartful Department of Government Efficiency cuts to government funding and the Trump administration’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development started racking up a body count, the mood within the MAGA coalition was more indifferent than celebratory. But Trump and his messengers have a tendency to make everything more crude and less abstract.

That’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when administration officials shared footage of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. Where previous administrations were content to project strength around the globe through quasi-legal military actions for a small audience composed of other world leaders, Trump may as well have projected the operation on the side of one of his resorts. 

Given the appetites he has built up among his supporters, it shouldn’t have shocked us to see them cheer the strikes on alleged drug runners. Former conservative fighters against government overreach — the sort who once lamented the deaths of militant separatists like LaVoy Finicum and Vicki Weaver — praised Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they killed protesting citizens. Republicans who warned about government tyranny for years celebrated scenes of people being snatched off the street and into unmarked cars. Third-party deportations, intentionally cruel detentions and partnerships with black-box prisons, like the notorious CECOT in El Salvador, created the conditions where deportees will inevitably die. 

The only consistent thread in these examples is a desire to see people they don’t like get hurt or killed.

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But it’s not enough for the MAGA movement to witness death in the real world. The growing conservative media market is filled with examples of people — mostly non-white or non-Christian — meeting grisly ends. “Citizen: Vigilante,” a film starring Armie Hammer that was boosted by Elon Musk,  follows a landlord who kills his way through an unnamed European city after migrants attack a young girl. The Daily Wire’s bloody “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is set on the campus of a similarly anonymous liberal arts college, and it luxuriates in bloodlust. Blue-haired liberals get their throats slashed while gay men are thrown from buildings.

In that context, Pete Hegseth’s recent call for a public execution is hardly strange. The defense secretary floated the idea of broadcasting the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a former major in the Army, who was convicted in 2013 of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, four years before. In his court-martial proceedings, Hasan said he carried out the attack in response to U.S. killings in Afghanistan. He is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3. 

“We’ll make sure that people are able to . . . watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice, “because people need to understand that … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was initially supported by Trump. But on Thursday, following widespread outcry that spanned the globe, the president announced on Truth Social that he was calling off the broadcast. Still, he still half-supported the aborted snuff film, saying that it “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”

Trump’s supporters didn’t need to wonder if he was drawing a line at broadcasting a grisly death. Earlier this week, the president shared footage featuring the last moments of a man who was killed by a tiger in a U.K. zoo. He followed that up with an AI-generated video that struck a celebratory tone, showing Trump chasing away a tiger while remaining unharmed. 

On the other side of a computer screen, his MAGA base must have been laughing along.

The post MAGA just wants to watch people die appeared first on Salon.com.

BRUSSELS — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make a direct pitch to European leaders for more help on Friday, amid a crisis of faith among allies over Donald Trump’s latest steps favoring Russia. 

At the second day of an EU summit in Brussels, Zelenskyy joins European prime ministers and presidents as they discuss Ukraine’s need for more weapons and cash, with concern growing that Kyiv faces a shortfall of billions of euros next year. 

The reality of the threat to European security from the four-year-long war penetrated the summit bubble after air drones hit two ships in or near Romanian waters, prompting emergency talks with NATO.

“We all in Europe want this war to end,” Zelenskyy said on social media as he arrived in the Belgian capital on Thursday. “And for that, signals of strength are needed — more real pressure on Russia and more defense support for Ukraine.”

It is especially important, Zelenskyy said, to “act together to protect lives.” But unity among European leaders is in short supply at a meeting already riddled with tensions. 

EU governments are pitted against each other in their own fraught negotiations over how much money to commit to the 27-country bloc’s budget. With populists surging, discontent raging and elections scheduled in major power centers across the continent, under-pressure leaders are a long way from approaching a deal.

That’s the combustible mix of financial discussions the U.S. president waded into.

Trump’s decision to open up American markets to previously banned Russian diesel — intended to ease price pressures in the U.S. — risks tilting the balance of an expensive war in Russia’s favor, three European officials warned. Putin’s war chest can now swell from additional fossil fuel exports, while Ukraine struggles for cash. 

As they arrived for the first day of the marathon two-day gathering on Thursday, EU national leaders began informally discussing options for how to help redress the balance. That discussion should to be picked up again around the summit table on Friday.

Russian assets

One idea rapidly rising back up the agenda is the fraught question of whether, or how, to make use of some hundreds of billions of euros of frozen Russian financial assets held in European banks. 

The bulk of these rest with the Euroclear depository in Brussels. A previous attempt to grab the funds and send them directly to Kyiv was blocked by the Belgian government ― and other countries less prominently ― over concerns it would be exposed to legal action. 

But Sweden, Finland and Germany want to take another look at the assets. The European Commission is to come up with a new detailed assessment of Ukraine’s funding needs and an options paper on how to help, including the use of assets, according to officials from these countries. 

As the summit began, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he had been urging his counterparts to “do everything we can to help Ukraine get through the winter and continue to support it next year as well.” 

“We will also have to increase funding once again in order to provide Ukraine with truly long-term assistance,” he said. “I remain firmly convinced that we are not only defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but also the political order of Europe, which is truly under pressure from Russia in every respect.” 

A German official earlier suggested that of the available options to help Ukraine, including a loan and direct grants from national governments, using the assets was the most viable way forward and should be “discussed.”

A U.S. proposal to unfreeze some of the Russian assets and transfer them to a U.S.-controlled entity so Washington could use them as leverage in peace talks with Moscow also attracted strong criticism.

Merz told reporters that the assets had been frozen in Europe and “should remain frozen in Europe … That is our business, and we will decide on it.”

‘Try again’

Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told POLITICO as the summit began: “The best solution would be that we will have a solution on how to use frozen assets … We have to try again.” 

Sweden is also backing the move to re-examine options on using the assets to help Ukraine’s future funding needs. “Doing nothing is not an option,” Swedish EU Affairs Minister Jessica Rosencrantz told POLITICO. “The Commission is looking into different financial options, and we need to get them on the table quite soon,” she said. 

Leaders at this week’s summit should “be really honest that Ukraine needs increased financing” and that the EU “must really step up,” she added.

Zelenskyy met Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, the main opponent to a deal on assets, for talks on Thursday and thanked him for his country’s support so far.

Speaking to reporters after the first day of the summit, De Wever said the assets should be looked at as part of a future peace agreement. “Are there people on this planet who maybe dream of doing it differently this time and operationalizing those assets earlier for certain purposes? The answer to that question is: Yes there are,” he said. “Are they in this building? They are. Are there outside this building? Yes there are. Do I want to talk about it? No, I don’t.”

For Finland’s Orpo, Trump’s “terrible deal” with Putin on diesel, and the apparent U.S.-imposed limits on Starlink technology to help Ukraine counter Russian attacks, are hard to understand.

“My message to [Trump] is that we are allies,” Orpo said in an interview. “We are in NATO. And what is the biggest threat against NATO? It’s Russia — and that is why there is no logic. I don’t have answers. I have many questions.” He said Trump may be focusing on winning votes ahead of next month’s midterm elections in the U.S. but he should remember that his real allies lie in Europe and he should not “trust” Putin. 

Election anxiety

Finland holds its election next year at the same time as what could be a seismic contest in France. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen is leading the polls for the French presidency and wants to cut aid to Ukraine and slash the EU’s budget. 

French President Emmanuel Macron, who is constitutionally barred from standing next year, warned EU leaders that they must get a deal on the bloc’s next budget by December, otherwise it will be too late. 

But the 27 leaders remain split and show no signs of bridging the gap between “frugal” countries like Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, who want to limit the settlement, and others such as Italy and Romania, who are on the side of bigger pots of cash for regional development and farming. 

European Council President António Costa also sees the urgency. He believes a deal before the end of the year is not only necessary but achievable, according to two EU officials.

Costa, who is taking over the negotiations from Ireland in its role at the helm of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, believes failing to secure a deal by December would push the entire budget negotiating process beyond the electoral cycle. That would potentially delay a deal until October next year — perilously close to the new EU budget taking effect in January 2028. 

In an effort to make progress on the budget talks, EU leaders will return to Brussels for an extra summit next month.

Camille Gijs, Hanne Cokelaere and Gregorio Sorgi contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS ― António Costa is supposed to be the dealmaker who brings European leaders together. Increasingly, his efforts are going unrewarded.

At a summit of the bloc’s national leaders on Thursday, Costa — who, unlike most of the EU’s current big beasts, is a Socialist — suffered his most stinging criticism since taking the role of European Council president nearly two years ago. The ire centered on his handling of unrelated negotiations over curbing energy prices and the EU’s next seven-year budget.

Governments were looking for both debates to show signs of progress at the two-day gathering, which was scheduled to continue on Friday. What they got was, at best, stalemate ― at worst, mounting division. And a day of talking that dragged on for 14 hours with little to show for it.

The longer budget negotiations last, the “more difficulties we will have,” Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told POLITICO. “So we have to work to find a solution this year. I understand very well that it is difficult. A huge challenge.”

The stakes could barely be higher. The EU is desperate to ease the cost of living crisis and get a deal on the budget before national elections next year make finding an agreement much tougher. Disunity between the bloc’s 27 members looks even starker when Donald Trump makes moves to take Russia’s side in the Ukraine war, the economy is struggling to match the might of China and anti-EU nationalists get closer to power in Europe’s biggest capitals.

All 16 diplomats and officials who POLITICO spoke to for this article were granted anonymity to allow them to speak on a sensitive issue. They were all either in the summit room on Thursday or were immediately briefed by leaders who were. While most were critical of Costa, others spoke more positively.

Costa’s spokesperson declined to comment.

Bogged down

Costa, a former Portuguese prime minister, is appointed by leaders to chair their summits and corral them into agreement. As Brussels Playbook reported on Thursday, EU officials judge he’s entering a defining period of his presidency, racing against time to overcome huge divisions on the budget. He is widely expected to push for reappointment for a second two-and-a-half-year term next year, officials said.

Thursday’s summit was dominated by discussions unraveling on the second phase of the bloc’s carbon pricing regime, known as ETS2.

The showdown over the Emissions Trading System — both the current one, and the second iteration which is already legislated and will put a carbon price on heating and transport from 2028 — became so bogged down it forced Costa to cancel the summit’s planned press conference and delay further talks until after dinner, because they had become a “mess,” three EU diplomats told POLITICO.

With German Chancellor Friedrich Merz incensed by what Berlin saw as his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni’s intransigence, fiery negotiations pitted a coalition made up of Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, the Nordics and the Netherlands against a stubborn bloc of Italy with Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland (known as the Visegrád Four). Rome and the V4 group wanted the EU to postpone ETS2 because of the burden it would place on energy bills, according to five diplomats.

Leaders were fuming at Costa for allowing talks to go off the rails, two EU diplomats from different member countries said. While the pre-summit conclusions didn’t point to any rethink of ETS2, the countries tried to unpick the legislation in the summit room, leaving Costa flustered, one of them said.

Costa “wants to have conclusions ready from [pre-summit meetings of ambassadors] and not to open them during EUCO,” the diplomat said. “He is not a fan of drafting on the spot.”

Another said there was “huge frustration,” calling the tug-of-war over the wording of the energy policy “insane chaos.”

“They just went on with Italian drafts and disregarded texts that were handed in before by others, seemingly not understanding the political nuances of the whole ETS discussion,” they added.

Another accused Costa of “losing control of the room,” saying he had failed to keep track of proposed amendments and present them to EU leaders in time for the discussions. As a result, leaders were left debating without them, contributing to negotiations going on past midnight.

One diplomat and one EU official separately compared Costa with his immediate predecessors, Charles Michel ― who governments frequently criticized for a lack of dealmaking know-how ― and Donald Tusk, who enjoyed broad support throughout his term in office.

Costa performed “worse than Charles Michel” on Thursday, the diplomat said. The official said “there is frustration that things are not being dealt with a bit more Tusk-style.”

Honest broker

The annoyance went beyond the energy debate. While governments weren’t expecting a breakthrough on the EU budget on Thursday, they have started raising questions about Costa’s handling of that topic too.

Costa is determined to secure an agreement by the end of the year. In his job, the Council president must act as a honest broker and facilitate a deal among 27 governments.

Northern EU countries are worried he’s favoring southern countries, according to a further four EU diplomats.

One EU diplomat accused Costa of being two-faced and not acting as an honest broker in the budget negotiations.

Another diplomat, from a country that wants the budget to be smaller, said: “Costa personally and politically belongs to the other camp.”

“There is some skepticism on how he will take the process further from here,” they said. The so-called frugal countries are calling on Costa to propose further cuts ahead of a special EU summit on the budget that was confirmed Thursday for Nov. 26.

‘Superb deal maker’

Many governments still believe Costa may succeed over the long term. Even those who acknowledge that his honeymoon is over ― a period when he was roundly praised for being a safe pair of hands and avoiding diplomatic faux-pas ― retain faith in him.

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever defended Costa as “capable” and “shrewd” after the first day of the summit — praising the Council president for largely avoiding drafting on the day, unlike Michel.

Costa “avoids negotiation about the wording on the table which happened all the time under his predecessor and which annoyed the hell out of everybody because then you are here until three o’clock to discuss about syllables, commas and words that the next morning you cannot see the difference anymore,” De Wever said. “You don’t even know anymore what you are negotiating about.”

Other diplomats said the disarray wasn’t Costa’s fault, and blamed the leaders who tried to unpick the energy legislation, notably Meloni. “He did not want to reopen the conclusions, it was the V4 and Italy who did so,” one said. “I don’t see what he could have done differently.”

Another EU official defended the sheer difficulty of the task faced by the Council president. “Discussing drafting at leaders’ level is not the most straightforward thing in general.” On energy, the official said leaders wanted to have “proper consideration” of the different proposals by countries, which had “opposing interests.”

One of the diplomats more critical of his political leanings on the budget said Costa was “impeccable” in his behavior. “He’s a superb deal maker.”

The next few weeks will show how true that turns out to be.

Hanne Cokelaere, Camille Gijs, Sebastian Starcevic, Gerardo Fortuna and Hans von der Burchard contributed to this article.

BRUSSELS ― The EU should consider approving a three or four-year budget instead of trying to plan the bloc’s financial needs for seven years, the president of Cyprus told POLITICO.

“We’re discussing the budget in 2034 and now we’re in 2026,” Nikos Christodoulides said in an interview on the sidelines of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels.

A three or four-year budget might be “easier” for some member countries to swallow, he suggested. “Why not open the political discussion?”

“You don’t know what’s going to be the situation in 2030, 2031,” he added. “I mean, look what happened with Covid, with the Ukrainian war … It’s not possible to declare all your priorities today.”

The EU’s seven-year, roughly €2 trillion budget has to be agreed by all 27 member countries but has two deeply entrenched camps on either side: The so-called frugals, comprised of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and others who want a smaller budget, and the friends of cohesion, a loose grouping of 17 countries that do not want major cuts to agriculture and regional funds.

An EU official close to the budget negotiations said the idea of a shorter timeframe was weird.

EU law allows a budget of “at least five years,” though every budget has been seven years since 1993.

The odds of the budget being approved by the end of the year are increasingly slim, with an election in Spain in November, which polls indicate Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will lose to the center-right and far-right, potentially blowing out the timeline for consensus to 2027.

“Everybody used to understand that we need to finish … a political agreement by the end of the year,” Christodoulides said. “Now, with the situation in Spain, elections there,” that is less likely to happen.

Christodoulides also said he expected the budget to be cut by around a 10th compared to the budget proposed by the European Commission. Last week, the Irish government proposed an 8% cut compared to the Commission’s proposal.

“I think we may end up on 10% or 11%,” he said. “Double digits.”

Zoya Sheftalovich contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — There is “no logic” to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to take Russia’s side in the Ukraine war, and he should remember his true allies lie in Europe, Finland’s prime minister said Thursday. 

In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, Petteri Orpo summed up the shock and dismay among Ukraine’s allies after Trump announced a diesel deal with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, and reportedly imposed limits on Kyiv’s access to the military intelligence and technology needed to counter Russian attacks.

“My message to him [Trump] is that we are allies,” Orpo said on the sidelines of the European Council summit in Brussels. “We are in NATO. And what is the biggest threat against NATO? It’s Russia — and that is why there is no logic. I don’t have answers. I have many questions.” 

Trump alarmed European leaders and horrified Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week by announcing a deal to release Russian diesel onto the market, apparently in an attempt to lower fuel costs for American consumers. Ukraine’s allies fear the move will boost Russia’s revenue from fuel sales, giving it more money to spend on war. 

Trump also said Ukraine should stop hitting Russian fossil fuel facilities — as part of what he said was a ceasefire on energy infrastructure — and should replace Zelenskyy. 

Finland is an influential voice among Ukraine’s European allies: The country has the EU’s longest land border with Russia, at 1,300 km, and its president, Alexander Stubb — a talented sportsman — won Trump’s respect on the golf course, giving him leeway to try to influence White House policy.

Orpo said if he were in Trump’s position “I would not trust Putin.” Zelenskyy has said he fears Ukraine is losing the U.S. to Russia’s side in the war, warning the Americans and their president are on “the wrong side of history”. Orpo said he agreed: “I think he is, and they are.” 

Ukraine now faces grave danger, he said. “The sky is open for Russia, there are missiles. They need more military support, air defense,” Orpo said. “Also, the situation is dangerous because of the latest deal between Trump and Putin.”

Midterms move

One possible reason Trump turned against Ukraine with that diesel deal is the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3. “I think it is because of domestic reasons — elections are coming,” Orpo said. “But we need to get them back.” Nonetheless, he said the amount of Russian diesel that could be sold to the U.S. is too small to make much of a difference for American consumers. 

Whatever happens, EU leaders must equip Ukraine with weapons and cash, whether or not they can rely on the U.S., he said. “Today, we need to find a solution [on] how to support Ukraine, how to finance Ukraine in this winter, but also in next year,” Orpo said. “It’s crucial.”

Finland and Sweden are among the countries pushing the European Commission to reopen the fractious debate over how to use Russia’s financial assets currently frozen in European banks, especially in Belgium, which blocked a deal to raid the funds last year over legal concerns. 

“The best solution would be that we will have a solution on how to use frozen assets,” he said. “We have to try again,” Orpo said. 

Finland has asked the Commission “to continue work with Belgium, and the other member states, to find a solution.” He said he hoped to hear an update from the Commission during the summit. “It’s a better solution than using our own money.”

Budget blues

European leaders are arguing this week over their long-term budget, which Brussels officials want to finalize by the end of the year. Many diplomats do not expect a deal this year, and some leaders say they’re in no hurry. 

But others want the budget, worth around €2 trillion, signed off by December because they fear next year’s European elections — especially if far-right leader Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency — will derail negotiations. 

The longer budget negotiations last, the “more difficulties we will have,” Orpo said. “So we have to work to find a solution this year. I understand very well that it is difficult, a huge challenge, but I cannot see how it would be easier next year, because in France elections are coming, for example.”

Finland also has an election coming up in April 2027. Orpo’s center-right National Coalition Party is struggling in the polls. “This time has been very difficult,” he said. “But, finally, our economy is growing.”

Orpo’s Swedish sister party, the Moderates, mounted a late surge in last month’s election. Although that seems unlikely to keep them in office, Sweden’s Moderates still have a slim chance, even though many commentators had written them off long before the vote.

“They did excellent campaign work, and in the end of the day, people vote Moderates, not populist or socialist,” Orpo said. “I would like the same in Finland.”

BRUSSELS — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants EU leaders to look into the idea of developing bloc-wide strategic gas reserves amid concerns the continent faces a winter shortage, three diplomats and two EU officials told POLITICO.

Europe’s existing gas storage caverns — which are typically refilled over the course of the year by commercial actors — are running at record lows this year after high summer prices linked to the war in Iran undercut market incentives to restock, leaving the bloc underprepared for winter.

While it wasn’t immediately clear to diplomatic officials what form the reserve idea would take, one senior EU official described it as a long-term measure to cushion the bloc against future supply risks, as countries already do with oil and refined products. The Commission president’s comments came at a major summit of European leaders in Brussels on Thursday.

Documents detailing November plans to revamp the bloc’s gas security architecture, seen earlier this year by POLITICO, include plans to encourage better crisis management by companies. However, they stop short of explicitly endorsing strategic reserves that governments would have to fill to a set level to offset supply shortages, regardless of market conditions.

Countries that typically rely on commercial refilling have already been forced to change tack this year as the limits of the existing model became clear. The Netherlands has moved to subsidize energy purchases, costing it almost €1 billion, while Germany is exploring whether to develop its own strategic stockpile.

A separate Commission proposal to set up an EU-wide mechanism to carry out joint energy purchases was received without enthusiasm by EU leaders on Thursday, two diplomats said.

PARIS — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replied to French far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen’s pledge to cut financial aid with a message: Europe is benefitting from Ukraine.

“Ukraine will give back security. It’s security and experience, the price is not so high as people’s lives, that’s why I think that Madame Le Pen is not deeply [acquainted] with some details,” he told the Financial Times. “We give back and this is very important.”

Le Pen has repeatedly said, including to POLITICO, that she would stop financial aid to Ukraine if she’s elected as French president next year — but suggested France could keep training Ukraine’s military and provide non-financial assistance. Le Pen, the National Rally candidate, is currently leading the polls.

Zelenskyy stressed that European armed forces and defense industries, including France’s, were benefiting from Ukraine’s battlefield experience. “It’s win-win,” he said. `

He argued that Le Pen should keep supporting Ukraine because it’s helping the Franco-Italian air defense system SAMP/T, which is currently deployed in the war-torn country, be more efficient. “We made a lot of different changes together with French guys, because they saw how it worked and how it works now.”

“The French industry only wins with these technologies, cooperation, co-production,” he added. “I will not vote for her … because I’m Ukrainian,” he also joked.