Closing summary
The Kremlin has confirmed that Russian president Vladimir Putin would talk to US president Donald Trump by phone on Tuesday. Asked about the planned call, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: “Yes, that’s how it is. Such a conversation is planned for Tuesday,” Reuters reported.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has met with defence minister Rustem Umerov and new chief of the general staff, Andrii Hnatov to discuss “the frontline situation and engagements with partners on security guarantees for Ukraine.” Zelenskyy said he told Umerov to build a team that could discuss “all the details of the security system Ukraine needs, as well as the implementation of decisions made at the military-political level,” starting from the army heads meeting in London on Thursday.
The bodies of seven people were recovered in a search and rescue operation off Cyprus on Monday after a boat thought to be carrying migrants sank, Cyprus’s state broadcaster said.
North Macedonia has declared a seven-day period of mourning after a fire in a nightclub that left at least 59 dead and scores injured, as authorities detained 15 people for questioning and the interior minister said a preliminary inspection revealed the club was operating without a proper licence. Interior minister Panche Toshkovski said the venue in the eastern town of Kočani where the pre-dawn blaze occurred appeared to be operating illegally.
Canada is more likely to become the 28th European Union (EU) state than the 51st American state, according to a former European trade commissioner. Pascal Lamy told Andrew Marr on LBC, a UK radio station, today that Canada – as well as New Zealand and Australia – could join the EU in the future. Pascal said: “I think so. I’ve always thought that if you look at this planet, a few countries could, without any big issue, join the European Union. Canada, Australia, New Zealand would probably be part of that.”
The UK has said that more than 30 countries could be involved in the “coalition of the willing” plan to provide military support to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal. The prime minister’s spokesperson reported Keir Starmer saying, after the virtual summit that he hosted on Saturday, that different countries would be offering different capabilities.
Three German citizens have recently been denied entry to the United States and placed in detention, leading Berlin to question if there has been a possible “change in American immigration policy,” AFP reported. Tourists from several western countries have reportedly been detained by US immigration authorities in the past few weeks, apparently caught up in president Donald Trump’s tough crackdown on immigration.
Calls were mounting in Serbia on Monday for an independent investigation into reports that security forces used a prohibited sonic weapon on crowds at a huge peaceful anti-corruption rally last weekend, even though authorities vehemently denied it. Serbian rights groups and opposition officials allege that such a weapon that emits a targeted beam to temporarily incapacitate people was used at the protest Saturday, even though it is banned in Serbia. They said they will file charges with international and domestic courts against those who ordered the attack.
Former Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen backed the idea of including the British and French nuclear weapons in a broader “European nuclear umbrella,” he said in an interview with the Danish newspaper Berlingske. Speaking to the paper in Taiwan, he also said that Nato allies should ramp up their defensive spending commitments and double the current target of 2% to 4% GDP to “send a pretty clear signal to Trump … that we are serious about defending Europe.”
Mark Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, has arrived in Paris on his first stop of a visit to France and the UK as he seeks to bolster European alliances to deal with Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada’s sovereignty and economy. Speaking at a press conference alongside French president Emmanuel Macron, Carney said Canada was “the most European of non-European countries, determined like you, to maintain the most positive possible relations with the United States”.
Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavský said he would ask EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels today to consider if the EU should offer its support to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty after it US terminated its funding for the station. On Friday, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday targeting Voice of America’s parent US Agency for Global Media in his latest sweeping cuts to the federal government.
Italy’s government has profoundly undermined the rule of law with changes to the judiciary and showed “heavy intolerance to media criticism”, in an emblematic example of Europe’s deepening “democratic recession”, a coalition of civil liberties groups has said. A report by the Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) said Italy was one of five “dismantlers” – along with Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia – that “intentionally undermine the rule of law in nearly all aspects”.
Calls were mounting in Serbia on Monday for an independent investigation into reports that security forces used a prohibited sonic weapon on crowds at a huge peaceful anti-corruption rally last weekend, even though authorities vehemently denied it.
Serbian rights groups and opposition officials allege that such a weapon that emits a targeted beam to temporarily incapacitate people was used at the protest Saturday, even though it is banned in Serbia. They said they will file charges with international and domestic courts against those who ordered the attack.
Serbia’s authoritarian and pro-Russian President Aleksandar Vucic again on Monday denied that the crowd-control device was deployed, calling it a “wicked lie” aimed at “destroying Serbia.”
He said he will soon invite the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and also Russia’s Federal Security Service, FSB, to investigate the claims.
“It is important for history to see how they lied,” he said, referring to those who claim the sonic weapon was used.
Serbian officials have indirectly admitted that the police had about two years ago added the crowd control weapon to their arsenal, but insist that it was not used during Saturday’s rally.
