Closing summary
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there has been no agreement between Ukraine and Russia on the key issues at the US-mediated talks in Geneva. “We can see that some groundwork has been done, but for now the positions differ, because the negotiations were not easy,” the Ukrainian president told reporters after the talks had finished, according to the AFP news agency.
The latest round of US-mediated peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Geneva on Wednesday ended without a major breakthrough, as fighting continues in a war that will enter its fifth year next week. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said no agreement had been reached on the thorniest questions at the negotiations in Switzerland, accusing Moscow of “trying to drag out” the process.
Ukraine has sanctioned the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko for providing military support to Russia and enabling “the killing of Ukrainians”, Zelenskyy has announced. Lukashenko, one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, has allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory as a launchpad for its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has demanded for evidence after five European countries accused Moscow of poisoning the outspoken Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a dart frog poison. The UK, France, Germany Sweden and the Netherlands said on Saturday that laboratory testing of samples from Navalny’s body had confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America and not found naturally in Russia.
Slovakia has threatened to cut emergency electricity supplies to Kyiv if it does not reopen a pipeline that brings Russian oil to Slovakia and Hungary. Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico, who is a close ally of Putin’s along with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, declared a state of emergency over oil supplies.
Four South African men who were lured into fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine landed at Johannesburg’s main airport on Wednesday, public broadcaster the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported. Police were waiting at OR Tambo International Airport, the SABC said. A police spokesperson declined comment, directing enquiries to the foreign affairs ministry.
Ukraine’s sports minister has condemned the decision to allow six Russians and four Belarusians to compete under their nation’s flags at next month’s Winter Paralympics as “disappointing and outrageous” and said Ukraine officials will not attend the opening ceremony or other official events as a result. “The flags of Russia and Belarus have no place at international sporting events that stand for fairness, integrity, and respect,” said Matvii Bidnyi in response to the International Paralympic Committee’s decision on Monday.
Russia and Cuba on Wednesday criticised the US energy blockade of the Caribbean island in a show of solidarity in Moscow, where Havana’s foreign minister was due to meet with president Vladimir Putin. Cuba’s top diplomat Bruno Rodriguez travelled to traditional ally Russia seeking help as his country reels from a severe fuel crisis – intensified by Washington’s de-facto oil blockade.
Slovakia has threatened to cut emergency electricity supplies to Kyiv if it does not reopen a pipeline that brings Russian oil to Slovakia and Hungary. Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico, who is a close ally of Putin’s along with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, declared a state of emergency over oil supplies.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was open to a social media ban for children. “If children today, at the age of 14, have up to five hours or more of screen time a day, if their entire socialisation takes place only through this medium, then we shouldn’t be surprised by personality deficits and problems in the social behaviour of young people,” he said in an interview with the podcast Machtwechsel.
Heavy snow and rain across Romania left 200,000 homes without electricity on Wednesday, energy minister Bogdan Ivan said, with traffic blocked on motorways and national roads and dozens of trains delayed. Public transport in the capital, Bucharest, was struggling under 40 cm (16 inches) of snow, Reuters reported. Fallen trees halted road and rail traffic, schools closed in several towns and 10 ambulances in six counties were snowed in, the national emergency response agency said.
France has launched wide-ranging investigations into human trafficking and financial fraud among contacts of the late convicted US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein following the release of a trove of files on his activities. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told France Info radio on Wednesday that the investigations will rely on publicly available material alongside complaints filed by child protection groups.
“The greatness of America,” wrote the 19th-century French diplomat, political philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, “lies not in her being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
For a brief moment at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last weekend, European leaders half-thought that their most heartfelt wish – the return of the old US, that believed in the EU ideal and backed a rules-based world order – had been granted.
The previous year on this same stage, US vice-president JD Vance had delivered a gut punch: a brutal ideological assault accusing Europe of abandoning “fundamental values”, and questioning whether the US and EU still had a common agenda.
This year, secretary of state Marco Rubio gave a speech so markedly different in tone that the sheer relief at hearing something other than abuse saw the audience – led by Germany’s defence and foreign ministers, plus 40-odd US officials – give him a standing ovation.
Rubio played a soothing tune. The US and Europe “belong together”, he said: if Americans came across as direct and urgent, it was because they know European and US destinies were forever intertwined. The US would “always be a child of Europe”.
