Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described today’s talks with Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz as “productive”, and said they had made a “small progress towards peace”. He said that Ukraine-Europe plans for a peace deal should be ready by tomorrow evening to share with the US.
The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has said Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party is “not a danger” to France, and he would not support a united front of parties against Le Pen at the next election. In his new book, written at a “small plywood table” in prison where he recently served 20 days of a sentence for criminal conspiracy, Sarkozy said many of his former supporters were now potential Le Pen voters, and he appeared to include the RN in his vision of a broad French right. The path to rebuilding that right, he wrote, “might be long but I’m certain it can only happen through a spirit of gathering together in the broadest sense possible, with no exclusions and no opprobrium”. Sarkozy’s comments in The Diary of a Prisoner come as Le Pen’s party appeals to traditional right voters in an attempt to broaden its base ahead of the 2027 presidential race. The comments were in stark contrast to Sarkozy’s stance against the far right when he won the presidency in 2007, and his call in 2022 for voters to back the centrist Emmanuel Macron against Le Pen “in the interests of France” at the last presidential election. In the book, to be published on Wednesday, Sarkozy details the time he spent in jail before being released last month, pending an appeal against his conviction over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Sarkozy, who is the first president in the history of modern France to have gone to jail, said he called Le Pen to thank her for her “courageous and unambiguous” support of him after he was convicted. He said the current “judicial context” was something he and Le Pen had in common. He found it “particularly shocking” that Le Pen had been barred from running for office, including the 2027 presidency, after she was found guilty of embezzlement of European parliament funds on a vast scale earlier this year. Le Pen will face an appeal trial next month, which will determine whether or not she can run for president in 2027 or whether her party president, Jordan Bardella, will replace her. Sarkozy said Le Pen had asked him, if there was a snap election, whether he would associate himself with the historical “republican front” of parties uniting to hold back Le Pen’s party. “My answer was unambiguous: ‘No, and what’s more, I’d be open about it and take a public position on the subject when the time came,” Sarkozy wrote. He added that one of Le Pen’s closest allies and MPs, Sébastien Chenu, had written him letters of support each week in prison, which were “sensitive, personal and human”. Charles Kushner, the US ambassador to France, also asked to visit him in prison, Sarkozy said. Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, once served a US jail sentence for illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion, among other charges. He received a presidential pardon from Trump in 2020. Reuters reported that, although Kushner was granted permission to see Sarkozy behind bars, the two men did not meet until after his release. A state department spokesperson told Reuters that Kushner had “wanted to visit former president Sarkozy out of personal compassion and respect to Sarkozy as a former French head of state and someone who has been a good friend to the United States”.
Health officials have identified a new variant of mpox in England after a person who recently travelled to Asia was tested for the virus. Genome sequencing showed that the virus was a “recombinant” form containing elements of two types of mpox currently in circulation: the more severe clade 1, and the less virulent clade 2, which sparked the 2022 global mpox outbreak. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)) said on Monday it was continuing to “assess the significance of the strain”. While most mpox infections are mild, officials urged people who are eligible to get vaccinated to protect themselves. “It’s normal for viruses to evolve, and further analysis will help us understand more about how mpox is changing,” said Dr Katy Sinka, the head of sexually transmitted infections at UKHSA. Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, is a viral infection related to smallpox. It can be passed on through close physical contact with mpox blisters or scabs, through touching contaminated material such as clothing, bedding or towels, or through infected people’s coughs and sneezes. It can also be caught from infected animals such as rats, mice and squirrels. Symptoms can take three weeks to appear and include a high temperature, a headache, muscle pain and exhaustion. A rash typically appears within days of the first symptoms. The UKHSA said the recombinant variant was “not unexpected” as both clades are circulating, adding that its emergence highlighted the potential for the virus to continue evolving and the importance of ongoing genomic surveillance. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a year-long public health emergency during the mpox outbreak in 2022. A second public emergency was declared in 2024 when another mpox epidemic broke out, largely affecting the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That emergency was declared over in September this year. Figures for 2025, which run to the end of October, show that the WHO recorded nearly 48,000 confirmed mpox cases worldwide, including 201 deaths, in 94 countries. The UK has an mpox vaccination programme in place for eligible groups, including those who have multiple sexual partners, participate in group sex or visit sex-on-premises venues. Trudie Lang, professor of global health research at the University of Oxford, said: “If further cases of this strain appear in the UK, and anywhere in the world, it will be important to understand the route of transmission, the presentation and severity of disease, so we can assess whether this strain is more or less dangerous than previous ones.”
White supremacist ideology and false claims that South Africa’s Afrikaner minority is being racially persecuted pose a threat to the country’s sovereignty and national security, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has warned. Since taking office for his second US presidential term in January, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that South Africa’s government is seizing land and encouraging violence against white farmers. “Some in our society still adhere to notions of racial superiority and seek to maintain racial privilege,” Ramaphosa said on Monday at a conference of his African National Congress (ANC) party, which is the largest in South Africa’s governing coalition and has led every national government since the first post-apartheid democratic elections in 1994. He continued: “The vehement opposition by some groups to our policies of transformation and redress conveniently align with wider notions of white supremacy and white victimhood, fed by false claims of the persecution of white Afrikaners in our country. The propaganda of these false claims has real implications for our sovereignty, international relations and national security.” Trump and the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk have promoted the false claim that there is a “white genocide” in South Africa, bringing what was previously a niche, far-right conspiracy theory to a far wider audience. Without naming either man, Ramaphosa said in his speech: “It is essential that we counter this narrative and defeat this agenda … This is a campaign that needs to be launched not only in our country, but globally as well, particularly to address the notions that some globally are perpetrating about what is happening in South Africa.” The US boycotted last month’s G20 leaders summit in Johannesburg and argued that a consensus could not be reached in its absence. The meeting, led by South Africa, produced a final communique that cited the importance of tackling issues such as gender inequality and climate breakdown, positions that have become anathema to Trump’s agenda. The 2026 summit will take place at the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort in Florida, which is owned by the Trump Organization. The US has invited Poland instead of South Africa to the first meetings of its G20 presidency later this month. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, justified the decision, claiming: “The South African government’s appetite for racism and tolerance for violence against its Afrikaner citizens have become embedded as core domestic policies.” The US has said it will take just 7,500 people as refugees this year, most of them white South Africans, while closing its refugee programme to people fleeing war and persecution. Afrikaners, who make up about 4% of South Africa’s population, or about 2.5 million people, are descendants of Dutch colonisers and French Huguenot refugees who came to South Africa in the late 17th century. They led the apartheid regime from 1948, which violently repressed the black majority, while keeping white people safe and wealthy. White people remain many times wealthier than black South Africans and in 2017 owned 72% of private agricultural land, according to a government land audit. While there have been horrific, high-profile murders of white farmers and their families in recent decades, there is no evidence that they are systematically targeted because of their race or that they suffer disproportionately from South Africa’s high violent crime rate.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has met the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London amid heavy pressure from the Trump administration for Ukraine to cede territory it holds to bring the war to an end quickly. The talks on Monday followed several days of negotiations between US and Ukrainian officials, which ended on Saturday without an apparent breakthrough and were characterised by the Ukrainian president as “constructive, although not easy”. The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, held a bilateral meeting with Zelenskyy in Downing Street, after the two men earlier met with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz. For its part, the Élysée Palace, echoing Starmer, said France planned more work to provide Ukraine with robust security guarantees, a key concern for Kyiv. The meeting took place as European leaders scrambled to show solidarity with Ukraine as the White House’s efforts to push through a peace deal enter a key phase. Starmer insisted that he “won’t be putting pressure” on Zelenskyy to accept a peace settlement, while Merz expressed “scepticism” over the US proposal. After the Downing Street meeting, Zelenskyy was due to meet senior Nato officials and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, in Brussels. Earlier, an official in Kyiv familiar with the talks told AFP that territory remained the most problematic issue. “[Vladimir] Putin does not want to enter into an agreement without territory. So they are looking for any options to ensure that Ukraine cedes territory,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. “The Americans are pressuring, like ‘faster, faster, faster,’” the source added, saying that Ukraine “cannot agree to everything without working out the details”. The latest contacts follow widespread concern over the Trump administration’s framework for a peace proposal, seen by many critics as favouring positions held by Russia. Trump doubled down on that position on Sunday night, suggesting Zelenskyy “hasn’t yet read the [US] proposal” and claiming without evidence that “his people love it”. “And I have to say I’m a little bit disappointed that President Zelenskyy hasn’t yet read the proposal. That was as of a few hours ago.” “Russia, I guess, would rather have the whole country, when you think of it, but Russia is, I believe, fine with it,” Trump said before taking part in the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington. Starmer, Macron and Merz took a more supportive stance toward Kyiv in comments before their Monday meeting, which lasted about two hours. Starmer said the push for peace was at a “critical stage” and stressed the need for “a just and lasting ceasefire”. Merz, meanwhile, said he was “sceptical” about some details in documents released by the US. “We have to talk about it. That’s why we are here,” he said. “The coming days … could be a decisive time for all of us.” Trump’s claim that his plan enjoys Ukrainian public support is contradicted by recent polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which suggests a majority of Ukrainians remain opposed to territorial concessions. Kyiv’s senior negotiator, Rustem Umerov, said Zelenskyy would be briefed about his team’s dialogue with US officials and receive all documents related to the peace plan on Monday. Off the back of the Trump-backed Gaza ceasefire, the US has been working to push through a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. US officials claim they are in the final stage of reaching an agreement but there is little sign that either Ukraine or Russia is willing to sign the framework deal drawn up by Trump’s negotiating team. The British foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, is, meanwhile, expected in Washington on Monday, where she will meet her US counterpart, Marco Rubio. “The UK and US will reaffirm their commitment to reaching a peace deal in Ukraine,” the Foreign Office in London said, announcing Cooper’s visit. The European talks on Ukraine follow the publication of a new US national security strategy that alarmed European leaders and was welcomed by Russia. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the document, which spells out the administration’s core foreign policy interests, was largely in line with Moscow’s vision. The document released on Friday by the White House said the US wanted to improve its relationship with Russia after years of Moscow being treated as a global pariah and that ending the war was a core US interest to “re-establish strategic stability with Russia”. The document also said Nato must not be “a perpetually expanding alliance”, echoing another of Russia’s complaints. It was scathing about the migration and free speech policies of longstanding US allies in Europe, suggesting they face the “prospect of civilisational erasure” because of migration. Washington’s initial plan to bring an end to the almost four-year war involved Ukraine surrendering land that Russia had not been able to win on the battlefield in return for security promises that fell short of Kyiv’s aspirations to join Nato. Despite efforts from Trump and his team to push through a deal, progress in the talks has been slow, with disputes over security guarantees for Kyiv and the status of Russian-occupied territory still unresolved. Starmer has stressed repeatedly that Ukraine must determine its own future, and said a European peacekeeping force would play a “vital role” in guaranteeing the country’s security. The Russian president has not publicly expressed approval for the White House plan, and last week said aspects of Trump’s proposal were unworkable. The US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Putin at the Kremlin last week but failed to achieve an obvious breakthrough. “The American representatives know the basic Ukrainian positions,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Sunday. Trump has had a turbulent relationship with Zelenskyy since re-entering the White House, and has urged the Ukrainians repeatedly to cede land to Russia to bring an end to a conflict he says has cost far too many lives. AFP and Associated Press contributed reporting to this article
The president of the European Council of national leaders, António Costa, has warned Donald Trump’s administration against interfering in Europe’s affairs, as analysts said the US national security strategy represented a seismic shift in transatlantic relations. Released on Friday, the policy paper claims Europe faces “civilisational erasure” because of migration and a censorious EU “undermining political liberty and sovereignty”. Confirming not just the Trump administration’s hostility to Europe but its ambition to weaken the bloc, it says the US will “cultivate resistance” in the bloc to “correct its current trajectory”. Costa said the signal that Washington would back Europe’s nationalist parties was unacceptable. Speaking on Monday, he said there were longstanding differences with Trump on issues such as the climate crisis, but that the new strategy went “beyond that … What we cannot accept is the threat to interfere in European politics,” he said. “Allies do not threaten to interfere in the domestic political choices of their allies,” the former Portuguese prime minister said. “The US cannot replace Europe in what its vision is of free expression … Europe must be sovereign.” The strategy document was welcomed at the weekend by the Kremlin, which said it “corresponds in many ways to our vision”, while EU-US relations were strained further by a $120m (£90m) fine imposed by the EU on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Musk said on Sunday the bloc should be “abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries”. The US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, said the “unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative” EU was undermining US security. Analysts said the document codified a US strategy first outlined by JD Vance at this year’s Munich Security Conference in a speech that accused EU leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running from voters’ true beliefs. “It transposes that doctrine into an officially backed state line,” said Nicolai von Ondarza, the head of European research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “It really represents a fundamental shift in transatlantic relations.” Von Ondarza said that in particular, “open US backing for regime change” in Europe meant that it was “really no longer possible for EU and national European leaders to deny that US strategy towards its European allies has radically changed”. Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia, Eurasia programme at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said political meddling in Europe to back far-right nationalists was now “a core part of America’s national strategy”. Bergmann added: “This isn’t just a speech from a novice vice-president weeks into a new term. It is US policy, and they will try to implement it.” Moreover, he said, it could work: “In a fragmented political landscape, a 1-2% shift can change elections.” EU leaders “will have to confront the fact that the Trump administration is coming for them politically”, Bergmann said. “Do they just accept that Trump is funding their political downfall? Or does this begin to cause an incredible amount of friction?” Mujtaba Rahman, of the Eurasia Group risk consultancy, agreed. “The US is now officially committed, alongside Moscow, to interfering in European electoral politics to promote nationalist and anti-EU parties of the far right,” he said. He said that if the document was US policy, the first election Washington would try to influence would be Hungary’s parliamentary ballot in April next year, in which the nationalist, Moscow-friendly incumbent Viktor Orbán faces a stiff challenge. Minna Ålander of the Center for European Policy Analysis said the policy document was “actually useful. It codifies in policy, in black and white, what has been evident all year long: Trump and his people are openly hostile to Europe.” Europe’s leaders “cannot ignore or explain the fact away any more”, Ålander said. “Any hope for things to go back to the old normal looks increasingly ludicrous. Europe needs to finally seize the initiative and stop wasting time trying to manage Trump.” Nathalie Tocci, the director of Italy’s Instituto Affari Internazionale, said Europeans had “lulled themselves into the belief” that Trump was “unpredictable and inconsistent, but ultimately manageable. This is reassuring, but wrong.” The Trump administration had “a clear and consistent vision for Europe: one that prioritises US-Russia ties and seeks to divide and conquer the continent, with much of the dirty work carried out by nationalist, far-right European forces,” she said. Those forces “share the nationalist and socially conservative views championed by Maga and are also working to divide Europe and hollow out the European project”, Tocci said, arguing that flattering Trump “will not save the transatlantic relationship”. Germany’s spy chief, Sinan Selen, said on Monday he “would not draw from such a strategy document the conclusion that we should break with America”, and Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, stressed that Trump remained erratic and the document may not ultimately amount to much. However, she said, the US clearly wanted to “redefine what Europe means, to Europeans”. The aim was to somehow establish that it is “us who are the aberration, that we have somehow forgotten our true values and heritage, and that European greatness therefore needs to be restored – with the help of ‘patriotic’ parties”, Puglierin said. She said Europeans needed “to see the relationship much more pragmatically. Realise that endless flattery of Trump, promising to spend 5% of GDP on defence, or offering him breakfast with a king … is just not going to cut it.” Von Ondarza said appeasement “has not worked on trade, it hasn’t worked on security, and it won’t prevent the US supporting Europe’s far right”. “The bloc needs to articulate a strong strategy of its own.” A summit later this month would be a “decisive test of Europe’s ability to say no” to the US, he said.
If ubiquity and handshakes were the only measures of success, Ahmed al-Sharaa would be diplomat of the year. Since he formally became president of Syria on 29 January 2025, the former leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – a jihadist group with an al-Qaida lineage – has made a total of 21 public international trips to 13 countries. These include a visit to the UN general assembly, the climate change conference in Brazil, and numerous Arab summits. In the latest sign of the goodwill directed towards Syria’s rebirth, envoys from all 15 members of the UN security council were in Damascus last week to mark the anniversary of the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The display of unity was a remarkable moment: since 2011 no issue has divided the security council more bitterly than Syria. The visit was also an acknowledgment of the role Syria and its diaspora can play in bringing stability to the Middle East. But ultimately the test will be whether Sharaa is able to translate this curiosity and goodwill into something tangible for the Syrian people in terms of lifted sanctions, internal stability and freedom from external meddling, whether by Israel, Iran or Sharaa’s potential ideological partner Turkey. On the investment front, overseas pledges are rolling in. Saudi Arabia has promised investments worth more than $6bn (£4.5bn). Qatar is helping to revive the oil and gas industry and the final set of US sanctions is likely to be lifted in a vote before Christmas. But such is the chaos, Syria’s central bank admits it does not know the country’s true GDP. The influx of Gulf investment is dependent on Sharaa continuing on a path of internal reconciliation and trust-building, far removed from the extremist threat. At the same time he has to show his still-reeling country is not being used as a base from which either Islamists in the south can threaten Israel or from which Kurds in the north will threaten Turkey. In this task he has gained the unlikely support of Donald Trump, who has promised to visit Damascus soon. Sharaa has already met Trump three times, including a critical meeting in November in the White House, becoming the first Syrian president to visit the Oval Office since 1948. “He comes from a very tough place, and he’s a tough guy. I like him,” Trump gushed when they met. With his usual stream of consciousness, Trump continued: “We’ll do everything we can to make Syria successful, because that’s part of the Middle East. We have peace now in the Middle East – the first time that anyone can remember that ever happening.” Trump also obligingly brushed aside Sharaa’s controversial history. “We’ve all had rough pasts,” he said, as if property contract disputes in New York were on a par with Sharaa’s military turf war in Raqqa with the leader of Islamic State (Isis), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in which Sharaa lost 1,200 fighters. Perhaps the most striking of Sharaa’s many meetings was on stage in New York in September when he was interviewed by Gen David Petraeus, the former CIA director and retired army general who commanded US forces in Iraq while Sharaa was imprisoned there with other members of al-Qaida. Petraeus showed concern for the Syrian leader’s personal wellbeing, asking whether he was getting enough sleep. He added his former prisoner had “many fans” and that he was one of them. Sharaa said with a smile when asked about their shared past: “At a time, we were in combat and now we move to discourse.” “We cannot judge the past based on the rules of today and cannot judge today based on the rules of the past,” the Syrian president said. That willingness to reject the rules of the past is reflected in the remarkable joint intelligence operations Syria’s interior ministry conducted alongside the US last month, locating 15 Isis weapons caches in southern Syria. The concern is that external pressures are hampering Sharaa in his daunting task of keeping the country unified. In the south, Israel remains convinced Islamists are preparing terrorist attacks, while in the north, Turkey is impatient to see the strong Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) either disarmed or fully integrated into the Syrian army. In both instances the White House is urging the external actors to be patient. In the case of Israel the fear in Damascus is it is intent on weakening Syria to the point it fragments, with a Druze-dominated rump state in the south. In total Syria has been hit by nearly 1,000 Israeli airstrikes, including on the capital, and faced more than 600 ground incursions. Syria has been in no military position to do anything other than protest. There are now signs that Trump is losing patience with what he regards as a counterproductive land grab that prevents Syria from restoring its sovereignty. The US president warned Israel not to overstep the mark, saying on Truth Social: “It is very important that Israel maintain a strong and true dialogue with Syria, and that nothing takes place that will interfere with Syria’s evolution into a prosperous state.” Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, sensing Trump’s displeasure, said a security agreement with Syria was possible so long as Sharaa established a demilitarised buffer zone stretching from Damascus to Mount Hermon. But Trump may argue that by weakening Sharaa, Israel is only fuelling the instability in which extremism thrives. In Syria’s north, Sharaa’s efforts to integrate the Syrian Kurd fighters mainly in the SDF into a Syrian national army, once due to be completed by December, have stalled. For years Turkish policy has been driven by animosity toward the mainly Kurdish SDF, which it equates with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a group that it sees as a terrorist group operating inside Turkey. The SDF claims to have about 70,000 men and women in its ranks and has received years of US training as part of the American-led coalition’s ongoing efforts to stamp out all remnants of Isis. It controls 25% of Syria’s territory. The SDF fears that disarmament could leave its fighters vulnerable to attacks from Islamist groups aligned with Sharaa. The SDF agreed in March to integrate with the Syrian military but only so long as its forces enjoyed a degree of autonomy. But since then Turkey has intensified talks about a possible peace deal with the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned on İmralı Island In a recent interview with Al-Monitor, the Syrian Kurdish leader Aldar Khalil argued the solution to the issue of SDF integration lay inside Turkey. Khalil said: “With every step that Turkey takes to resolve the Kurdish issue inside Turkey, our potential to become allies can only grow. Moreover, if there is a solution to the Kurdish problem in Turkey, then Turkey’s efforts to prevent Sharaa from granting the Kurds their rights will cease as well. I believe what happens in Turkey will determine what happens here.” What is clear is that after being a playground for external actors ranging from Russia and the US to Iran and Turkey, Syria still faces a perilous path back to sovereignty.