Newshour Putin and Trump meet in Alaska
Also on the programme: we hear from an Indian soldier who saw the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the people trying to crack an unsolved code sitting right outside the CIA's headquarters.
(IMAGE: Trump and Putin meet in Anchorage, Alaska, 15 August CREDIT: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
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Reuters
25 minutes ago
- Reuters
Ukraine drone attack injures train station employee in Russia's Voronezh, governor says
Aug 17 (Reuters) - A railway employee was injured and a power line damaged by a Ukrainian drone attack at a station in Russia's Voronezh region, the regional governor said on Sunday. "According to preliminary information, a railway station track technician was injured in one of the municipalities," Alexander Gusev said of the overnight attack on the Telegram messaging app. "He has been hospitalised." Gusev said the attack caused train delays, but by Sunday morning trains were running back on schedule. The Russian defence ministry, which reports only how many drones its units destroy not how many Ukraine launches, said on the Telegram messaging app that nine drones were downed over the Voronezh region in Russia's southwest. In total, the ministry said, its defence systems destroyed 46 Ukrainian drones overnight, all of them in regions west of Moscow. Reuters could not independently verify the Russian reports. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Kyiv says that its strikes inside Russia are in answer to Moscow's continued attacks on Ukraine and are aimed at destroying infrastructure key to Russia's war efforts. The reports of the attacks came after a summit between the U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin yielded no agreement on ending Russia's war in Ukraine. Trump said on Saturday that Kyiv should make a deal with Moscow to end the war because "Russia is a very big power, and they're not."
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Mounting Russian deaths will not deter Putin
In June, a grim milestone passed. The Ministry of Defence said that one million Russians had been killed or wounded in Ukraine. The Guardian reported that fatalities alone are 'five times higher than the combined death toll from all Soviet and Russian wars' after 1945. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, stated that Russia had already lost '100,000 soldiers – dead – not injured' this year. Yet the unmentionable odour of death offends the Russian night. In Moscow, the milestone passed without official remark. The soaring butcher's bill has not, as some naively still hope, been matched by large-scale public unrest. Although, like the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Putin's war in Ukraine is an open wound slowly bleeding the country white, there is no comparable anti-war movement, mass protests, or anguished appeals from the mothers of soldiers. The wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan differ in their nature. Russia's modern digital dictatorship is not the Soviet Union of the 1980s 'collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions'. The Kremlin has effectively managed the impact of unprecedented losses by carrots and sticks or, as Russians put it, by gingerbread and whips. A fundamental difference with previous conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya is that Russia's war in Ukraine is being fought by volunteers, largely motivated by the prospect of life-changing amounts of money, and not by conscripts sent to fight against their will. In some regions, the gingerbread of signing on bonuses for new recruits now exceeds a year's salary. Generational wealth is promised for the families of the dead in return for their silence. This 'torrent of money' has transformed poorer regions, even if growing economic difficulties have seen bonuses being trimmed. The sugar rush of wartime spending on defence equipment has also increased real wages for many Russians, increasing living standards sharply. The Kremlin learned that its partial mobilisation of 300,000 mainly poor men in 2022 was a shocking and deeply unpopular experiment not to be repeated. With these troops now mostly dead, and the war presented as 'special' and faraway, Russians are much less interested in the fate of those who went to fight for the money. Conscripts are not sent to the front. Recruitment is spread across Russia's regions to prevent potent pockets of protest. To sweeten support for the conflict, the Kremlin relentlessly hammers a jingoistic narrative that Russia had no alternative to war, that it is fighting the collective West, and that Putin's 'special military operation' continues the Soviet struggle against Nazism. For example, volunteer recruitment went up after Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk region prompted a patriotic response. Relatives are encouraged to view the death of their relatives as a noble blood sacrifice for this national cause, and not – as they really are – casualties of Putin's elderly rubbish. To further the ideological struggle and develop the next generation of recruits, the state seeks to recapture Russia's young by deepening 'patriotic' education programmes, re-writing history, re-using military symbols from the past, and re-forming Soviet-style youth movements. As one Russian expert told me, from the start the Kremlin has been acutely aware of Bonapartism: a charismatic general converting military success into political power. Officers at the front have been sacked for questioning the wisdom of launching costly assaults in order to move Putin's drinks cabinet ten centimetres closer to Kyiv. As noted by one Russian sociologist, no senior military officer has been used as a propaganda figure nor attained any kind of personal popularity in society; 'state propaganda praises only private soldiers who have taken part in the war, preferably those who have died in the process'. This being Russia, the whip has been wielded enthusiastically. Early anti-war protests were quickly squished and opponents to the war driven into exile, imprisoned, or pressed into military service. The climate of fear is fuelled by public prosecutions severe sentences. For example, Olga Komleva, a journalist and associate of the late Alexey Navalny, himself killed by the state in prison, was recently sentenced to 12 years for her anti-war activities. Civil society, already a weakened force in Russia, has been further cowed by being declared as agents of foreign powers. The Committees of Soldiers' Mothers were beaten into submission many years ago and are not the force they were in the 1980s. In their place, the Kremlin has created loyal simulacra that slavishly support the government line. Veterans' organisations, including those originally formed to support those who fought in Afghanistan, have been co-opted for the cause. As a result of these carrots and sticks, Russians remain generally indifferent to the war but with – from the Kremlin's perspective – a sufficient minority of genuine supporters. The public are more concerned about their own financial situation, criminalisation of society, and the potential impact of returning veterans than about the number of dead. Self-interest and fear have nixed the anti-war movement. The number of new recruits being sent to Ukraine still exceed battlefield losses. Three years into the war, it is unwise to hope for a deus ex machina of large-scale public unrest, or strain to discern ironic points of light of potential anti-war opposition inside Russia. As Oleg Orlov, a veteran campaigner for civil liberties put it: 'The opposition is completely crushed, the remnants of any freedoms are liquidated, [and] the words 'liberalism' and 'democracy' are dangerous to pronounce publicly without adding a curse word'. Instead, the war should be brought home to Russians by cranking up economic pressure on the country, its foreign enablers and collaborators while assisting Ukraine to strike military targets within its borders.
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Zelenskyy knows he risks another Oval Office ambush - but has to be a willing participant in peace talks
There will be no red carpet or fly past, no round of applause when Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives in Washington DC on Monday. But the bitter memory of his last visit to the White House will feature prominently in the Ukrainian president's thoughts. In February, he was mocked for not wearing a suit and told he didn't "have the cards" by US President Donald Trump, before being walked off the premises early, like an unruly patron being thrown out of the bar. 3:10 Zelenskyy knows he is risking another ambush in the Oval Office but has to present himself as a willing participant in peace talks, out of fear of being painted as the obstacle to a resolution. There was initially measured optimism in Kyiv after Trump's summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, because it appeared that no deal had been cut between Washington and the Kremlin without Ukraine in the room, as had been feared. But that restrained positivity quickly evaporated with the release of a statement by Trump the morning after the night before. In the heady heights of a meeting with strongman Putin, he seemed to have abandoned the one key thing that European leaders had impressed upon him - that there had to be an unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine as an absolute starting point to a permanent resolution. Trump had apparently reached the conclusion that no ceasefire was required. "The best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine... is to go directly to a peace agreement," is how he put it on his Truth Social media account. 23:24 That sent shockwaves through Kyiv. Many there and elsewhere believe Russia has no intention of stopping the war yet, and will use its military advantage on the battlefield to pressure Ukraine in drawn-out negotiations to give up more territory. In the meantime, the slaughter of Ukrainians will continue. It is the most dramatic of 180s from Trump, who before the meeting and after lobbying from European leaders had said he would not be happy if Putin failed to agree to a ceasefire, and even promised "severe consequences". Yet now reports suggest Trump is giving credence to the Russian position - in a phone call to Zelenskyy he laid out Putin's proposal that Ukraine relinquishes even more territory, in return for an end to the war. The Ukrainian president will have, no doubt, been distressed to see the pictures of Putin being greeted like a king on an American military base in Alaska. It is in direct contrast to how he was hosted on US soil. In Trump's orbit everything is a personality contest, and where he has very obvious deference to Putin, he has disdain for Zelenskyy. That makes the Ukrainian's position very difficult.
