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The SpaceX CEO misses the real ‘bloodthirsty warmongers’ in Moscow.

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...

Ukraine will not discuss limits to its armed forces or enforced neutrality at November meeting, president says. What we know on day 1,706 A trilateral meeting between Kyiv, Washington and Moscow will take place in November aiming to restart stalled Russia-Ukraine peace talks, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said . “We are ready to talk. If it’s a territorial issue, it must be addressed at a leadership level. Other issues fall within the remit of the technical groups. All this can therefore be discussed in November,” the Ukrainian president said on Sunday in an interview. Zelenskyy also renewed his push ⁠for a meeting between him and Vladimir Putin, believing that Putin is the only person ​in Russia who can make major decisions to end ​the war. Zelenskyy says that at the trilateral talks, Ukraine will not discuss limits to its armed forces, or enforced postwar neutrality . Kyiv has long sought entry into Nato despite the reticence of some members. Meanwhile, US warnings about imminent ⁠Russian ballistic missile strikes, critical to Ukraine’s air defences, have been fully restored , according to Zelenskyy. He told Ukraine’s ⁠TSN television channel that SpaceX’s ​Starshield satellite internet had been working at speeds of up to 420km/h since early on Saturday, after a meeting with the US special envoy Steve Witkoff in Oslo. Starshield was throttled earlier in October amid diplomatic pressure on Kyiv from Washington. The US has been trying to pressure Ukraine to suspend strikes on Russian oil refineries , which it says push energy prices higher. However, Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Kyiv will only stop the strikes if Moscow stops hitting Ukraine’s power infrastructure, or if the US allows Ukraine to use of Starshield ‌over Russia to detect launch places of its ballistic missiles, or if it supplies Ukraine with Patriot missiles. Zelenskyy on Sunday said Russia had launched nearly 2,300 drones targeting Ukrainian cities over the past week , renewing his call on western allies to speed up deliveries of interceptors. “This week alone, Russia has launched about 1,600 guided bombs, 48 missiles of various types, including ballistic missiles, and almost 2,300 strike drones at Ukraine,” he wrote in an online post. Russia’s defence ⁠ministry said on ⁠Sunday ​its drones had struck a ⁠cargo vessel bound for the Black Sea port of ⁠Chornomorsk in an overnight ​attack ‌and another cargo ‌vessel en route to the ‌port of Odesa during the day. The ministry said the vessels were being used to supply the Ukrainian army. Russian ‌forces also hit a logistics centre, a ​distribution centre and a logistics terminal in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv overnight. Reuters could not confirm the reports. A Ukrainian drone attack overnight on the Russian border city ⁠of Belgorod killed ⁠three people ​and injured 13, local authorities said on Sunday , while ⁠a separate drone strike later in the day killed another person. The overnight attack on Belgorod ​damaged 30 apartment buildings, regional governor ⁠Alexander Shuvayev said. The presidential election in Bulgaria on Sunday ended inconclusively, with the next head of state to be picked in a runoff. In a surprisingly strong performance, the candidate of the pro-western reformist opposition, Andrey Gyurov, will face the incumbent leftist president, Iliana Yotova. Iotova opposes military aid to Ukraine and favours dialogue with Russia, while Gyurov has often expressed firm support for Kyiv . The vote was held amid security concerns after a series of drone attacks on ships in the Black Sea . Continue reading...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earned his first millions in Moscow and should leverage those ties to negotiate with Vladimir Putin, says ex-aide.

It was a seismic political shift in the Balkan country where Vucic, who had been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and who denounced the student movement as a foreign-led attempt to unseat him, led with virtually absolute power for 14 years.

Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) on Sunday called Russian President Vladimir Putin a "murderer" and urged that the U.S. not make any deals with Russia. ABC News's "This Week" host Jonathan Karl asked Hinson, a Senate candidate and a staunch supporter of Ukraine, what she made of U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff's remark to Putin last...

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If the U.S. pulls back from NATO, that could dramatically increase the chances Vladimir Putin launches atomic attacks to reconquer territories once part of Soviet Russia.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin and former ambassador to the U.S., said on Sunday that upcoming talks between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia should include more of Europe.

On Bloomberg This Weekend, Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas calls for expanding Ukraine’s access to Starlink over Russia and increasing pressure on Vladimir Putin to create leverage for peace negotiations. Speaking with hosts David Gura and Christina Ruffini, Crenshaw also discusses President Donald Trump’s Russia policy, the US midterms and his concerns about social media’s influence on American politics as he prepares to leave Congress. (Source: Bloomberg)

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.

First lady Melania Trump "single-handedly" brokered a humanitarian ceasefire in Oleshky, Ukraine, her senior advisor says, as Russia extends the truce.

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...

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is mimicking his ally Vladimir Putin’s plan to extend his grip on power. He wants to swap the presidency for the prime minister’s job.

Kim Jong-un has opened the borders to both his key allies in Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, but for different reasons For more than a decade, local Chinese residents pilloried it as nothing more than an empty bridge that led to a North Korean vegetable patch on the other side. Fast forward 12 years and dozens of trucks are now traversing the bridge linking China to North Korea, boosting trade for the reclusive regime. But it has also triggered concern that it could intensify a struggle for influence over the North between Beijing and the region’s other major power, Russia. Continue reading...

‘Further shipments will continue at a steady pace from here on’

Former prisoner Ihor Shishko blasted US envoy Steve Witkoff's flattery of Putin as a humanitarian as "shameful and despicable."

The local unit of German grocer Metro said it committed 1 billion rubles ($12.4 million) to Russia’s war effort a month after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered it be put into temporary administration.

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 first tanker carrying Russian diesel to the United States under a new import agreement has set sail, the Kremlin said Friday, two weeks after President Donald Trump said he struck a deal with President Vladimir Putin despite Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

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.