TV News LIES

• European leaders have indicated they will press ahead with further sanctions against Russia – whether or not the US does likewise – if talks in Turkey on Thursday do not produce a ceasefire. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Europe would impose new sanctions if Moscow did not agree to the 30-day ceasefire. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warned Russia on Tuesday that it would face fresh European sanctions if there was no “real progress” this week towards peace in Ukraine, as he urged Putin to meet Zelenskyy. The European Union has already imposed 16 rounds of sanctions on Russia since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

• It remained unclear on Tuesday evening whether Vladimir Putin would accept Voldoymyr Zelenskyy’s challenge for the two presidents to meet in person. Zelenskyy is travelling to Ankara, the Turkish capital, to meet with its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and has said he will go to Istanbul if Putin shows up, writes Shaun Walker. “If Putin does not arrive and plays games, it is the final point that he does not want to end the war.”

• The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said in Copenhagen on Tuesday: “I think it’s a good move if they sit down … But I don’t think he dares, Putin.” If Putin does not attend, and Zelenskyy does not either, talks are still expected to be held at a lower level between Ukrainian and Russian delegations.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have signed a $142bn arms deal touted by the White House as the “largest defence sales agreement in history” in the first stop of Donald Trump’s four-day diplomatic tour to the Gulf states aimed at securing big deals and spotlighting the benefits of Trump’s transactional foreign policy.

During the trip, the White House also confirmed that Trump would meet with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander whose forces helped overthrow Bashar al-Assad in 2024. The informal meeting will be the first face-to-face meeting between a US president and a Syrian leader since 2000, when Bill Clinton met with the late leader Hafez al-Assad in Geneva.

Speaking at an investment forum on Tuesday, Trump said that he planned to lift sanctions on Syria after holding talks with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said.

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Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff didn’t mince his words. In a meeting late on Sunday with former hostages and relatives of those still held in Gaza, he told them Israel is drawing out a war the US wants to end, local media reported.

On the eve of the release of Edan Alexander, the last living American being held by Hamas, Witkoff spelt out the gulf between his boss and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We want to bring the hostages home, but Israel is not willing to end the war. Israel is prolonging it – despite the fact that we don’t see where else we can go and that an agreement must be reached,” Witkoff told the meeting, according to Channel 12 Television, quoting sources who were present.

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Donald Trump’s social media post insisting Ukraine must immediately start peace talks with Russia has set back, and possibly jeopardised, Europe’s carefully laid plans to persuade the US to impose sanctions on Moscow for refusing the US president’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire, European diplomats have said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy had no choice but to accept Vladimir Putin’s invitation to talks in Istanbul on Thursday for fear of offending Trump, diplomats said. Putin made the offer in a bid not to alienate the US president, and avoid the growing European pressure on Trump to impose harsher sanctions. Western diplomats say they have no reason to believe that Trump acted in collusion with the Russian leader.

The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Poland had for the first time gone together to Kyiv at the weekend to underline the call for a 30-day ceasefire that they said should start on Monday.

The aim of the visit by Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Donald Tusk was to put pressure on Trump to admit that Putin was stalling, and that the US had no political option but to put swingeing economic sanctions on Russia.

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