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Putin says Russia not seeking war with Europe but is ‘ready’ to fight amid peace talks – as it happened

Vladimir Putin accused European powers of preventing peace in Ukraine and threatened that Russia was ready for war as Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived for talks at the Kremlin on Tuesday evening. It’s been over three hours and those talks appear to have not yet concluded. Moments before the closed-door meeting with Witkoff and Kushner, Putin made a series of hawkish remarks to reporters in which he accused European governments of sabotaging the peace process and said that “European demands” on ending the war in Ukraine were “not acceptable to Russia”. “Europe is preventing the US administration from achieving peace on Ukraine,” Putin said, adding: “Russia does not intend to fight Europe, but if Europe starts, we are ready right now.” Putin did not clarify which European demands he found unacceptable. “They are on the side of war,” Putin said of European powers. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said he was “awaiting signals” from the US delegation after its meeting with Putin. During a trip to Dublin, Zelenskyy said the speed of the peace talks and the United States’ interest in finding a solution was cause for optimism, but he feared the US could lose interest in the peace efforts. If somebody from our allies is tired, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s the goal of Russia to withdraw the interest of America from this situation.” On Putin’s comments (see above), Zelenskyy said it’s difficult to comment on his words, but noted that Putin probably doesn’t want to end the war as he has failed to meet his goals in Ukraine. “Now he is thinking how to find new reasons not to [end] this war,” he said. Zelenskyy also said he counts on “pressure from the US” and others to advance the peace talks further.

Family of victim in Trump drug boat killings files first formal complaint

A family in Colombia filed a petition on Tuesday with the Washington DC-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the Colombian citizen Alejandro Carranza Medina was illegally killed in a US airstrike on 15 September. The petition marks the first formal complaint over the airstrikes by the Trump administration against suspected drug boats, attacks that the White House says are justified under a novel interpretation of law. The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, is designed to “promote and protect human rights in the Western Hemisphere”. The US is a member, and in March the Trump administration’s state department wrote: “The United States is pleased to be a strong supporter of the IACHR and is committed to continuing support for the Commission’s work and its independence. Preserving the IACHR’s autonomy is a pillar of our human rights policy in the region.” The complaint was filed by Pittsburgh-based human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik. “On September 15, 2025, the United States military bombed the boat of Alejandro Andres Carranza Medina,” the filing says, “which Mr Carranza was sailing in the Caribbean off the coast of Colombia. Mr Carranza was killed in the process of this bombing.” Kovalik identified Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, as the perpetrator, based on Hegseth’s own statements. “From numerous news reports, we know that Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense, was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like those of Alejandro Carranza Medina and the murder of all those on such boats. Secretary Hegseth has admitted that he gave such orders despite the fact that he did not know the identity of those being targeted for these bombings and extra-judicial killings,” the filing goes on. The complaint adds: “US President Donald Trump has ratified the conduct of Secretary Hegseth described herein.” A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, did not respond directly to questions about the complaint or about Carranza Medina’s death, but wrote in an email that the media were “now running cover for foreign terrorists smuggling deadly narcotics intended to murder Americans”. Carranza, 42, appears to have been killed in the second strike of the Trump administration’s bombing campaign, on 15 September. The administration has publicly disclosed 21 strikes on alleged drug boats. Carranza’s family says he was a fisher who would often set out in search of marlin and tuna. On the day of the strike, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that “This morning, on my Orders, US Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility”. Trump attached video marked “unclassified” of a small boat floating in the water before it was struck. Although Trump said the crew was “from Venezuela”, the Colombian government soon identified them as Colombian. Kovalik said: “We think this is a viable way to challenge the killing of Alejandro. We are going to seek redress for the family. We want the US to be ordered to stop doing these boat attacks. It may be a first step but we think it it’s a good first step.”

British military instructor arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of spying for Russia

Ukrainian authorities have arrested a British military instructor accused of spying for Russia and plotting assassinations. Ross David Cutmore, 40, from Dunfermline, was allegedly recruited by Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, to “carry out targeted killings on the territory of Ukraine” between 2024 and 2025. The Kyiv prosecutor’s office said: “In May 2025, he passed on the coordinates of the locations of Ukrainian units, photographs of the training facility and information about military personnel that could be used to identify them. “In addition, analysis of his correspondence confirmed that he had carried out other tasks for the benefit of the Russian special services.” Cutmore was previously deployed to the Middle East with the British army, and arrived in Ukraine early last year to assist its military and later its border guard. According to the Times, he is the main suspect in the investigation. He was allegedly recruited by Russian intelligence officers in Odesa, southern Ukraine, and was paid $6,000 if he gave confidential information regarding the location of Ukrainian military units around the city. If found guilty, Cutmore faces up to 12 years in prison. FSB officers reportedly approached Cutmore after he was believed to have posted “adverts offering his services” in different online pro-Russian social media groups. According to Ukraine’s internal intelligence agency, Cutmore was sent instructions to make an explosive device, and the coordinates of a cache from which he took a pistol. According to Ukrainian media, Cutmore is suspected of providing weapons to kill the Ukrainian activists Demyan Hanul and Iryna Farion, as well as the MP Andriy Parubiy, who were all murdered by assassins. Since Russia’s full invasion in 2022, thousands of people have enlisted in Ukraine’s armed forces after the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urged foreign war veterans to join and help the country. A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said: “We are providing consular assistance to a British man who is detained in Ukraine. We remain in close contact with the Ukrainian authorities.”

Global heating and other human activity are making Asia’s floods more lethal

Families stranded on their rooftops. Homes buried by fast-flowing mud. Jagged brown craters scarring lush green hillsides. The scenes are the result of a series of cyclones and storms in a heavy monsoon season that have struck Asia with torrential rains, gutting essential infrastructure and reshaping landscapes. The violent weather has killed at least 1,200 people in the past week and forced a million to flee without knowing whether their homes will still be standing when they go back. The fallout marks a grim escalation in deadly weather across the region that has been aggravated by the blanket of carbon pollution heating the planet. A review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that south and south-east Asia will suffer more intense rain as temperatures rise, with a “large increase” in flood frequency striking monsoon regions. Roxy Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and coauthor of the latest IPCC report, said the cyclones’ behaviour had changed more than their number this season. “They are wetter and more destructive because the background climate has shifted,” he said. “Water, not wind, is now the main driver of disaster.” Natural weather patterns including a La Niña cycle and a negative Indian Ocean dipole have helped to create conditions for the storms to form. Scientists have not determined the extent to which planet-heating pollution contributed to the death toll, which continues to rise with floodwaters, but they have long established that warmer air holds more moisture – about 7% per degree Celsius. The extra water, together with the increase in energy from hotter oceans, leads to the formation of storms that pack far more punch. “Across south and south-east Asia, storms this season have been carrying extraordinary amounts of moisture,” said Koll. “A warmer ocean and atmosphere are loading these systems with water, so even moderate cyclones now unleash rainfall that overwhelms rivers, destabilises slopes and triggers cascading disasters. “Landslides and flash floods then strike the most vulnerable, the communities living along these fragile environments.” The rains have loosened soils and levelled slopes in hilly regions that have wiped out villages and rendered roads and railways unusable. The floods have also hampered rescue efforts by disrupting electricity supplies and phone networks. In Indonesia, where freshly cut logs have washed up in flooded parts of the country that also suffer from deforestation, the damage is thought to have been compounded by the felling of trees that could have soaked up water and stabilised the soil. The attorney general’s office is leading a task force to check if illegal activities contributed to the disaster, according to local media. Reuters also reported that the environment ministry planned to query logging, mining and palm plantation companies about their activities. Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich and a co-author of the latest IPCC report, said other human factors may have amplified the extent of the floods, but that did not contradict the role of climate change in worsening rainfall. “We have a very clear signal of increases in heavy precipitation with increasing warming, both on a global scale and in Asia,” she said. “The influence of human-induced climate change on the intensification of heavy precipitation is well established, and this is a key element in the reported floodings.” The sliver of good news in the longer term is that the human cost of floods and storms has dropped sharply around the world as governments have set up early warning systems and got used to shepherding people out of danger before a disaster strikes. Even in middle-income countries that have made great progress in turning death tolls into displacement figures, however, experts say response systems are still patchy. “The picture in south-east Asia shows that you still need even better early warning systems, even better shelter for people to go to in times of flooding … [and] even more nature-based solutions – the planting of trees and mangroves in those places particularly at risk of flooding to keep people safer,” said Alexander Matheou, the director of the Asia-Pacific region for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. People also need “better social protection systems in disasters so they can immediately get cash and the food, medicine, and shelter they need when a disaster strikes”, he said.

Trump frees ex-Honduran president from prison as country awaits knife-edge election result

A former president of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking has walked free from a US prison after receiving a pardon from Donald Trump, as the country’s presidential election remained on a knife edge with the US-backed candidate leading by 515 votes. Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”, was released from a West Virginia prison after Trump’s intervention, Hernández’s wife confirmed on Tuesday. It came as Trump steps up his “war on drugs” with airstrikes on alleged traffickers in the Caribbean, and a massive US naval force off the coast of Venezuela. The pardon was issued amid extraordinary levels of US interference in the Honduran election. Trump threw his support behind Hernández’s ally Nasry “Tito” Asfura, saying Washington’s support for the country was conditional on an Asfura victory. On Tuesday, Trump again intervened, alleging without evidence that electoral officials were “trying to change” the result of Sunday’s vote and said: “If they do, there will be hell to pay!” The virtual vote count had been slow and unstable before it was interrupted at about midday on Monday. The electoral council said a technical problem was to blame and insisted the manual count was continuing. When the release of results was suspended, Asfura was on 39.91%, closely followed by Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal party on 39.89%. Rixi Moncada, the candidate for the leftwing ruling party, was trailing in a distant third place with 19.16% of the vote. As election officials pleaded for patience, Hernández’s wife, Ana García de Hernández, disclosed that the former president had been released from a US prison. “God is faithful and never fails! Yesterday, Monday 1 December 2025, we lived a day we will never forget. After almost four years of pain, waiting and difficult trials, my husband, Juan Orlando Hernández, became a free man AGAIN, thanks to the presidential pardon granted by President Donald Trump,” she wrote. Axios reported that in a letter to Trump in October, Hernández had claimed that he had been “targeted by the Biden-Harris administration not for any wrongdoing, but for political reasons.” US authorities had investigated Hernández for years before he was indicted; his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was arrested in 2018 and convicted in 2019, during Trump’s first term. Manhattan prosecutors accused the former president of allegedly receiving $1m from the former Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in 2013 for his first presidential campaign, and alleged that, under Hernández’s government, Honduras served as a crucial transit point for cocaine coming from South American countries including Colombia and Venezuela. Hernández had been held at the federal Hazelton prison in West Virginia and is now in a “safe place”, according to his wife. Trump’s pardon has baffled many observers, who have questioned why the US president has used his antinarcotics campaign to justify overthrowing Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, while simultaneously freeing a man convicted of such crimes. In Honduras, the pardon has been viewed as yet another attempt by the US president to interfere in the election. Honduras’s deputy foreign minister, Gerardo Torres Zelaya, posted that the US “got involved in our elections” and “freed the worst narco and criminal in our history”. During the campaign, Moncada accused Trump of “interventionism” and of “imperial, direct foreign interference” in the electoral process. She served as finance minister under the current president, Xiomara Castro, who could not run again because presidential mandates are limited to a single term. Before the election, Trump had claimed Moncada was a communist and that her victory would hand the country to “Maduro and his narco-terrorists”. Nasralla, an experienced politician and TV host who served as Castro’s vice-president before breaking away to launch his own presidential attempt, was labelled by Trump as a “borderline communist” who was running only to split the vote between Moncada and Asfura. Gustavo Irías, a co-founder and executive director of Honduras’s Centre of Study for Democracy, said Trump’s “interference definitely influenced the outcome” of the elections. “Those messages from Trump validated a political party that was practically unable to win because of its long history of links to drug trafficking and corruption – and that suffered a massive defeat in 2021,” he said, referring to Castro’s wide victory over Asfura in the last presidential election. A similar strategy was adopted by the US president in October during Argentina’s midterm elections, when Trump announced a $40bn bailout conditional on the victory of the far-right president Javier Milei’s party. “So people went to vote here under pressure, under fear,” Irías said. The electoral council has up to 30 days to announce the result. For many, the suspension of the vote counts has revived traumatic memories of the 2017 election, when Hernández ran for a second term, after a court struck down a constitutional ban on re-election. Early results showed Nasralla ahead, but after a “blackout” – marked by violent protests in which dozens were killed – Hernández emerged ahead and, a week after the election, was recognised by the US as the winner. Now, after a campaign in which virtually all the candidates alleged electoral fraud, all three contenders have voiced concern over the delay.“Let’s not keep the country waiting on edge,” said Asfura. Irías said that official results could take weeks to be finalised and that, given everything unfolding in this election, “we are going to see a continuation of governments with low legitimacy”. “I hope the system does not return with completely different figures from those with which the count was halted, as happened in 2017, because that could open up a new and very serious crisis,” he added.

Pope Leo urges Trump not to try to overthrow Venezuelan president with military force

Pope Leo has urged Donald Trump not to attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, using military force, and to instead seek dialogue. Trump’s administration has been considering its options as it steps up its campaign against Maduro, who it accuses of links to the illegal drug trade. The country’s authoritarian leader has denied the accusations. The US has gathered its biggest military presence in the Caribbean since the 1989 invasion of Panama, and launched 21 strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing at least 83 people. Trump reportedly gave Maduro an ultimatum to immediately relinquish power during a recent call, but the Venezuelan leader declined, demanding a “global amnesty” for himself and allies. Speaking to reporters onboard the papal flight as he returned from his first overseas trip as pope to Turkey and Lebanon, Leo said the Catholic church was “trying to find a way to calm the situation” because “in these situations it is the people who suffer, not the authorities”. “On the one hand, it seems there has been a telephone conversation between the two presidents,” he added. “On the other hand, there is this danger, this possibility, that there could be an action, an operation, including an invasion of Venezuelan territory.” Leo said that if the US wanted to bring about change in Venezuela then it should not use military force, but instead “seek dialogue, including economic pressure”. The Chicago-born pontiff was elected in May after the death of Pope Francis. During the flight, he also criticised anti-migrant activists who stoke “fears” of Islam and said cooperation between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon should be an example for Europe and the US. The main purpose of his six-day trip, during which he met a host of religious and political leaders, was to urge peace amid heightened tensions in the Middle East. At the start of the visit, he said a world war was being fought “piecemeal” and was endangering the future of humanity. Leo also spoke publicly for the first time about what it was like to have been picked to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. He said that during the secret conclave he began to realise that he might be chosen. “I resigned myself to the fact when I saw how things were going – I said, ‘This could be a reality’,” Leo, 70, added. “I took a deep breath. I said, ‘Here we go, Lord, you’re in charge and you lead the way’.” He also discussed plans for future foreign trips, and said Africa could be next, including Algeria.

UK government delays decision on China’s super-embassy until January

The government has delayed its decision on whether to approve China’s super-embassy in London until January, when Keir Starmer is expected to visit Beijing. Ministers are expected to greenlight the controversial plans after formal submissions by the Home Office and Foreign Office raised no objections on security grounds. The Guardian reported last month that the security services had signalled to ministers that they could handle the security risks of the embassy, which would be China’s biggest diplomatic outpost in the world. A government spokesperson said on Tuesday that consolidating China’s seven existing diplomatic sites in London into a single embassy “clearly brings security advantages”. The Chinese government has agreed to combine all its diplomatic premises in London into the Royal Mint Court site, which spans 20,000 sq metres near Tower Bridge in London. The final decision on whether to grant planning permission has been delayed to 20 January, around the time when the prime minister is planning to travel to China for bilateral talks. It is the third time ministers have deferred the decision. Starmer would be the first prime minister to visit Beijing since Theresa May in 2018. In a speech on Monday night, he argued that the government could not continue to blow “hot and cold” on China and needed to strike a balance. “We had the golden age, which then flipped to an ice age. We reject that binary choice,” he said, describing China as a “nation of immense scale, ambition and ingenuity” and “a defining force in technology, in trade and global governance”. “Our response will not be driven by fear, nor softened by illusion. It will be grounded in strength, clarity and sober realism,” Starmer said. In a letter sent to concerned parties and released by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said their departments had “carefully considered the breadth of considerations” related to the proposed embassy. They said they had worked with police and others to ensure national security issues had been addressed and recognised “the importance of countries having functioning diplomatic premises in each other’s capitals, whilst maintaining the critical need to uphold and defend our national security”. The plan has met fierce opposition from some local residents and campaigners who are concerned about Beijing’s human rights record in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region. Several protests have taken place near the site in recent months. A government spokesperson said: “An independent planning decision will be made by the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government in due course.” “The Home Office and Foreign Office provided views on particular security implications of this build in January and have been clear throughout that a decision should not be taken until we had confirmed that those considerations had been completed or resolved, which we have now done. “Should the planning decision for a new embassy in the London borough of Tower Hamlets be approved, the new embassy will replace seven different sites which currently comprise China’s diplomatic footprint in London which clearly brings security advantages.” China bought the Royal Mint Court site for £255m in 2018, but its plans to build an embassy there stalled after Tower Hamlets council refused planning permission in 2022. The Conservative government declined to intervene but Labour took the matter out of the council’s hands by calling it in soon after taking power last summer.