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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is warning that President Trump’s efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine by “coddling” Russian President Vladimir Putin and limiting assistance to Kyiv is “certain to fail.” McConnell, who had been largely quiet on the issue of the war after Ukraine lost full access to the satellite-based Starshield network,...

Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told state-affiliated media on Sunday that preparations are underway for a trilateral summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A foreign affairs expert’s bleak assessment of the state of global security Are we on the brink of a new world war? This bleak subject is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of our military and intelligence services. It’s an urgent theme, then, for the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman to explore in his latest survey of global diplomacy. Rachman draws his title from the expression, sometimes attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – the idea being that conflict doesn’t much care whether we like to think about it or not: it will come knocking on our doors regardless. Clearly, humanity is in a particularly unsafe spot right now, but seeing our security issues laid out like this, catalogued and mapped and analysed, they seem almost overwhelming. To summarise: the most powerful, nuclear-armed states – the US, China and Russia – are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing “strongmen”, each of whom is playing with the nationalist “Great Again” politics epitomised by Trump. Democracy is being rolled back around the world, and even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right. The so-called rules-based international order and its institutions – the UN, the WTO, Nato – are being deliberately undermined by the aforementioned strongmen, and are as weak now as they have ever been. Continue reading...

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The first Russian diesel tanker headed to New York carries 40,000 tons, but a retired general says that only covers a couple hours of U.S. demand.

President Donald Trump blames Ukraine for continuing its defensive war against Russia. He does so even as Ukraine has agreed to ceasefires proposed by Trump but rejected or broken systematically by Russia. Trump pretends that Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s energy network are intended to increase American gas prices rather than, as they are, to drain […]

We’ve heard much about the end of the west. At the proposed summit between Trump, Putin and Xi, those fears could crystallise In the final two years of a US presidency, when Congress has been lost, approval ratings have sunk like a stone and their party has started to think about who’s coming next, the person occupying the Oval Office can feel their power draining away. Domestic legislation, particularly in an era where bipartisan cooperation is almost nonexistent, grinds to a halt. But as the days tick by until the end, and as presidents begin to think about their legacy, there is one part of the job where they still have power: the rest of the world. In the final weeks of his presidency in 1992 George HW Bush sent 28,000 American troops to Somalia to help end a famine. For Bill Clinton, it was a quixotic attempt to bring peace to the Middle East by ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Barack Obama restored diplomatic ties with Cuba, making a historic visit to Havana, as well as a final, successful push on the Iran nuclear deal. Continue reading...

The woman who watched French rioters destroy her livelihood. Inside the annual conference where men learn how to get laid. And more. It’s Friday, October 23. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kara Kennedy attends SlutCon, where “flirt girls” teach awkward men how to get laid. A Parisian bakery owner shares a harrowing first-person account of watching rioters loot her store. And much more. But first: the method to Trump’s foreign policy madness. Anyone hoping to keep up with U.S. foreign policy this week had their work cut out for them. The week began with news that Russian president Vladimir Putin had proposed a summit to discuss Ukraine. The participants? Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping—but not Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump reportedly did not reject the proposal. Then we learned that Elon Musk had green-lit a slowdown of a military-grade Starlink that Ukraine uses for many of its drones. If this all sounds backward to you, you’re not alone. “Confused is how many people today feel about U.S. foreign policy,” Niall Ferguson writes in our lead story today. “For some people,” he continues, “the only possible explanation for all of this is that President Donald Trump is simply a crazed man-child emperor.” Those people would be wrong, he says. “To understand Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and particularly his counterintuitive approach to the war in Ukraine, you have to understand the debt he . . . owes to a 20th-century president: Richard Nixon.” Read Niall’s column to understand how the 47th president’s strategy borrows a page from the 37th’s—and the one key difference that may determine whether Trump ultimately succeeds. Still, Trump’s apparent courting of Putin is hard for many to stomach. That’s especially true when you consider the case of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was imprisoned by Russia for 491 days on trumped-up espionage charges. Evan has written a new book about his time in prison, and today he talks to Tanya Lukyanova about his experience, his thoughts on ongoing hostage diplomacy, and what Putin still gets wrong about him. Click below to watch the interview. —The Editors EDITORS’ PICKS The biggest story this week was the rioting in France, and for the past five days, we’ve brought you a series of stories to help make sense of the violence. With unrest threatening to resume this weekend, don’t miss Douglas Murray, Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, and Nora Bussigny on the essential questions raised by the riots: Who is behind them, what is at stake, and can French culture and the Republic endure their aftermath? In case you missed it, we recently brought a new columnist aboard. Ross Douthat is writing for The Free Press every Thursday, and this week, he took on a topic he knows better than almost anyone: the so-called religious revival in the West. Despite the cultural cachet enjoyed by today’s Catholics, he wrote, “the form of Christianity that’s most adapted to late-modern America” isn’t Catholicism—“it’s evangelical Protestantism.” In his latest column, he revealed why the sect of Christianity most often criticized by the left has more to teach us about ourselves than we might think. In the early 20th century, Portsmouth, Ohio, was a bustling metropolis, home to an NFL team and booming manufacturing plants. Then, in the 1990s, the town was hollowed out by deindustrialization and devastated by the opioid crisis, swiftly becoming the “pill mill” capital of America. Today, it’s been overrun by addicts seeking treatment, leading to the emergence of a new cottage industry: substance abuse recovery. But when Frannie Block went to Portsmouth, she found something troubling: an industry that locals say is rife with exploitation, abuse, and fraud. Her latest investigation takes us to a forgotten corner of America, where the cure to the opioid crisis may have become worse than the disease. It’s a…

The upcoming midterm elections will be a report card on Trump and the Republicans. The diesel deal with Putin provided no price relief at the pumps and made no sense.

A tanker loaded with diesel fuel set sail Friday from Russia for the United States, the first shipment since President Donald Trump agreed a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to release more fuel into the global market.

The Kremlin said Friday that the first tanker carrying Russian diesel to the U.S. under the new import agreement has set sail, just two weeks after President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin finalized the deal.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe leads an agency that’s at war with Russia, even as Trump makes nice with Putin.

Economic incentives don’t persuade the Russian leader. Here’s what could.

A tanker carrying 40,000 metric tons of Russian diesel is heading towards New York, ship-tracking data showed on Friday, following an agreement reached ‌this month between Moscow and President Donald Trump.

The US president is portraying Zelenskyy as the villain as he strives for Russia’s approval If Donald Trump could, he would fly to Munich to sign away Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, and return to wave the document as “peace in our time”, hoping to claim at least the second Fifa peace prize. Whatever the complicated motives of Neville Chamberlain, his well-grounded fear after the carnage of a world war of another apocalypse and his wishful thinking that Hitler would be satiated after carving up Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain had not sent his son-in-law and former golf partner and real estate partner in advance to cut back-end deals with the Nazis to profit for his family and cronies. Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man , Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth . He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of the Court of History podcast Continue reading...

Trump waived most new Russia sanctions from the Graham Act, drawing sharp Republican criticism over whether Vladimir Putin believes the threats.

On Thursday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “Deadline,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said President Donald Trump “is in the thrall of” Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Host Nicolle Wallace said, “In light of Mr. Wycoff describing Vladimir Putin as a quote, humanitarian, this The post Sen. Coons: ‘Trump Is in the Thrall of Putin; He’s Putin’s Puppet’ appeared first on Breitbart .

Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union and fifth-generation farmer in Polk County, Iowa, says both diesel prices and tariffs have been devastating for farmers. Lehman says farmers have not felt that an Iowa voice has been standing up for them in Washington and says that while farmers need relief, temporary measures do not address the underlying causes of their financial strain. Lehman says agriculture has a monopoly problem that leaves farmers especially vulnerable when fertilizer supplies are disrupted. Lehman says he finds President Donald Trump's deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to lower diesel costs disturbing. He speaks with Kailey Leinz and Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg’s "Balance of Power." (Source: Bloomberg)

Evelyn Farkas, McCain Institute executive director and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, says it's a moral problem for the US that Starlink speeds were slowed while Ukrainians were trying to intercept missiles and drones targeting civilians. Farkas says Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to signal openness to negotiations while maintaining his maximalist claims and continuing attacks on Ukrainians. Farkas says Putin is trying to get European countries to stop supporting Ukraine and says a diesel deal with President Donald Trump came out of a call between the two leaders. She speaks with Kailey Leinz and Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg’s "Balance of Power." (Source: Bloomberg)

President Donald Trump is signaling a full-on embrace of Vladimir Putin and Russia – and of big-power relations – as he faces adverse midterm results and a potential lame-duck presidency.

In a push to close deals, Trump has pivoted toward Putin.

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John Hardie, the deputy director of the FDD’s Russia program, joined Brittany Lewis on “Forbes Newsroom” to discuss the current state of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Washington Post reports White House holds up Patriot interceptor transfers to Ukraine while Russian missiles keep falling on Ukrainian cities.

The UK pushed back against the description of Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” given by US President Donald Trump’s Ukraine war envoy, saying it rejected that characterization of the Russian leader.