Trump says Putin ‘not looking to stop' war in Ukraine following ‘disappointing' phone call
Speaking on Thursday, 3 July, Trump stated that his conversation with Putin made no progress towards ending the conflict.
Trump claimed the conflict is ' Biden 's war' and asserted it would not have happened if he had been president.
Hours after the call, Russia launched drone and missile attacks on Kyiv, injuring 23 people.
Watch the video in full above.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
15 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Europe is scrambling to form a united front and regain relevance in the Iran crisis
Exposed as divided and marginalised during the Iran crisis, European nations are scrambling to retrieve a place at the Middle East negotiating table, fearing an impulsive Donald Trump has diminishing interest in stabilising Iran or the wider region now he believes he has achieved his key objective of wiping out Tehran's nuclear programme. On Tuesday the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, was the latest senior European figure to phone the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, offering to be a facilitator and urging Tehran not to leave the crisis in a dangerous limbo by keeping UN weapons inspectors out of Iran. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has even broken a three-year silence to speak to Vladimir Putin about the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, including how a deal could be struck between Iran and the US on a restricted civil nuclear programme. Macron has been involved in Iranian diplomacy for a decade and came close to engineering a rapprochement between Trump and the then Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, at the UN general assembly in 2018. But Iran, faced with what it regards as craven European support for Israeli and American airstrikes that killed more than 930 people and injured as many as 5,000, is not placing much faith in the continent's ability to influence the White House. For Europe, this signals a slow slide into irrelevance. The three major European powers known as the E3 – France, Germany and the UK – were once key fixtures in Iran's diplomacy and played a central role in brokering the Iran nuclear deal, which they signed alongside the EU, the US, China, Russia and Iran in 2015. Europe had little input in the US's recent negotiating strategy with Iran, led by Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and was given just over an hour's official warning before the Israeli and US attacks. The one meeting that the E3 foreign minsters held during the crisis with Iranian diplomats in Geneva on 20 June proved a failure and was followed by the US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. France claimed it helped Israel repel Iranian drones. Trump crowed afterwards that 'Iran doesn't want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this one.' From the Iranian perspective, Europe has long been a disappointing negotiating partner, repeatedly failing to show any independence from the US. When Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear deal in 2018, the E3 condemned the move in a joint statement issued by its then-leaders, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Macron. But it did nothing effective to pursue an independent strategy to lift European sanctions on Iran as it had promised. The fear that European firms trading with Iran would be put under US sanctions was too great. The view from Tehran, it was felt, was that Europe's timidity left it with no choice but to follow the policy of nuclear brinkmanship, including gradually increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium. At the start of Trump's second term, the E3 plus Kallas tried again to insert themselves into the process by holding three low-key meetings with Iranian negotiators. But Araghchi was always angling to speak to Washington, telling the Guardian of his discussions with the Europeans: 'Perhaps we are talking to the wrong people.' After Trump indicated he was willing to speak to Iran bilaterally and showed some flexibility about Tehran's right to enrich uranium, Iran cast Europe aside. Iran believes Europe played a role either through naivety or complicity in opening the door for the Israeli attack by tabling a motion of censure at the board of the UN nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Such motions have been passed before at the IAEA and usually led to Iran retaliating by increasing its stocks of enriched uranium. But the 12 June motion was different – for the first time in 20 years the board found Iran in breach of its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Europe had to take that step to use its right as a signatory to the 2015 deal to reimpose sanctions on Iran before expiry of the deal on 15 October. Because of the way the deal was negotiated, neither Russia nor China can veto Europe reimposing sanctions. America is no longer party to the deal so this power to reintroduce UN sanctions is Europe's diplomatic re-entry point into the Iranian file. European diplomats insist that the IAEA censure motion was necessary, and that they had no option owing to Iran's mounting stocks of highly enriched uranium that had no possible purpose in a civilian nuclear programme. Europe also still hoped the talks between the US and Iran, mediated by Oman, would bear fruit, and had not foreseen the US giving Israel the green light to attack. Since the Israeli strikes, European unity has frayed further. Britain has largely opted for opacity, but it was obvious from what ministers did not say that the government's legal advice was that the Israeli attack could not be justified as an act of self-defence under the UN charter. France openly asserted that the attack was unlawful. By contrast, Germany endorsed all that Israel has done. At the G7 summit in mid-June, the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said: 'This is the dirty work that Israel is doing, for all of us.' Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, told parliament that 'Israel has the right to defend itself and protect its people. Let me say clearly that, if Israel and the US have now managed to set back the Iranian nuclear programme, it will make Israel and its neighbourhood more secure.' Asked by the newspaper Die Zeit if he believed Israel's actions were lawful, he said Germany did not have the same quality intelligence sources as the US and Israel, but he had to trust their belief that Iran was close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. 'They told us that, from their perspective, this is necessary – and we must accept that.' Such remarks have left Iranian diplomats spitting about European double standards over the sanctity of international law. By contrast, Enrique Mora, the EU's point person on Iran from 2015 to early 2025, has written a scathing piece in which he says Israel has killed nuclear diplomacy and Iran's nuclear knowledge cannot be destroyed. He wrote: 'If Iran now chooses the militarisation of its nuclear capabilities, if it now decides to move toward a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic: no one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025, may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear programme was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.' There are different strategies Europe can pursue. It can, like Germany, show Iran there is no daylight between the E3 and Israel and assert that Iran can only have a civil nuclear programme that excludes domestic enrichment of uranium. It can press ahead with the reimposition of sanctions and hope that Iran buckles. Alternatively, it can champion a compromise that Tehran can wear. In a recent statement, the European Council on Foreign Relations said 'maximalist demands on Iran – including negotiating over missiles now viewed by Tehran as its main deterrence umbrella – will likely push the country to use every means still available to reach nuclear breakout. A more viable endgame would involve a return of wide-scale inspections by international monitors and an immediate, substantial roll-back of Iranian uranium enrichment. The goal should be Iran pursuing this enrichment through a regional consortium backed by the United States.' That is broadly closer to the French position. Europe will never hold sway like Israel or the US, but it has one last chance to help create something durable, and prevent the Iranian crisis becoming a nuclear proliferation crisis for the whole region.
The Guardian
20 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Who's really to blame for Labour's troubles – Rachel Reeves or the invisible PM?
She is not the first chancellor to cry in public, and may not be the last. But Rachel Reeves is the first whose tears have moved markets. No sooner had the realisation dawned that she was silently weeping – over a personal sorrow she won't be pushed into revealing, she insisted later, not a political one – as she sat beside Keir Starmer at Wednesday's prime minister's questions, than the pound was dropping and the cost of borrowing rising. The bond traders who forced out Liz Truss's hapless chancellor still clearly rate her judgment and want her to stay, even if (perhaps especially if) some Labour MPs don't. Yet it is an extraordinary thing to live with the knowledge that a moment's uncontrolled emotion can drive up the cost of a nation's mortgages, just as a misjudged stroke of the budget pen can destroy lives. The most striking thing about her tears, however, was Starmer's failure to notice. Intent on the Tory benches opposite, the prime minister simply ploughed on, not realising that his closest political ally was dissolving beside him. Though within hours, a clearly mortified Starmer had thrown a metaphorical arm around her, and Reeves herself was back out talking up her beloved fiscal rules as if nothing had happened. But it's the kind of image that sticks: her distress and his oblivion, an unfortunately convenient metaphor for all the times he has seemed oddly detached from his own government. Quite aside from whatever private grief she is now carrying, Reeves has for years been shouldering an exhausting load. From the start, she and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, did an unusual amount of the heavy lifting on behalf of their oddly apolitical leader – and in government the stakes have only risen. McSweeney, a natural fixer now jammed faintly awkwardly into a strategist's role, was once credited with near-mythical influence over Starmer, but for months is said to have been struggling at times to get the boss's ear. Reeves, meanwhile, has ended up by default running much of the domestic agenda, while Starmer focuses on foreign policy crises and a handful of big issues that passionately exercise him. Since even close aides and ministers complain of never really knowing what he wants, the result is a Treasury-brained government that tends to start with the numbers and work back to what's possible, rather than setting a political goal and figuring out how to reach it. Perhaps that makes sense to the City, but not to Labour MPs frogmarched through a series of politically toxic decisions with no obvious rationale except that the money's got to come from somewhere. To many of them, Starmer appears at best like a kind of political weekend dad: largely absent from everyday life and reluctant to get involved in political battles, but swooping in at the last minute to issue orders. Complaints of Downing Street dysfunction have been a staple under at least the last four prime ministers, but there's a weakness at the core of this No 10 that is putting the rest of government under undue strain, like a runner trying to push on through an injury who ends up pulling every other muscle in the process. On the left, there is growing talk of trying to force a 'reset' in spring, if next year's Scottish and Welsh elections go as badly as they assume: force Reeves out, let radicalism in, fight Reform's emotive rightwing fire with a form of leftwing populism perhaps loosely resembling what the Democrats' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani are doing in the US. It's exactly what the markets fear, judging by their reaction to Reeves' temporary wobble. But even Labour MPs who'd never go that far are growing restless for change. Just raise taxes, cries this week's New Statesman magazine, echoing a widespread view that the fiscal straitjacket imposed by Reeves is killing the government. I argued for the same thing in the Guardian back in March, and haven't changed my mind. But the political cost of doing so is arguably higher now than it would have been then, when tax rises could plausibly still have been framed as an emergency response to Donald Trump pulling the plug on Europe's defence and forcing Britain to rearm, rather than as an admission that the government can no longer get its spending plans past its own backbenchers. In their understandable frustration, however, some fail to ask why Reeves holds the iron grip she does; why Treasury thinking isn't more often challenged by No 10. If this government's mistakes often have her fingerprints somewhere on them, then so do many of its successes. Last week, I was at a housing conference, surrounded by people still euphoric at getting everything they asked for in last month's spending review: unprecedented billions poured into genuinely affordable and social housing – with emphasis thankfully for once on the social – with a 10-year settlement from the Treasury, creating the long-term certainty they need to make it happen. Angela Rayner fought like a tiger for it, but Reeves made the money happen, and the result will change lives. Children who would have grown up in grim, frightening temporary accommodation will have safe, permanent homes. Vulnerable people will escape the clutches of unscrupulous landlords and first-time buyers will climb ladders otherwise out of reach. It's everything a Labour government exists to do, but as with so many unseen good things happening – on green energy, say, or transport – the money didn't fall from the sky and won't be there in future if an ageing and chronically unfit population carries on consuming welfare spending or health spending (the next big battleground, judging by the detail of Wes Streeting's 10-year plan) at current rates. To a frustrated Treasury, this week's rebellion was evidence that Labour MPs don't live in the real world, where hard choices must be faced for good things to happen. But, to the rebels, it's evidence that the Treasury doesn't live in their real world, where vulnerable people struggle with deep-rooted health problems only aggravated by being pushed into poverty, and the Greens as much as Reform are threatening to eat them for breakfast over it. There is some truth in both arguments. But that's precisely why it is ultimately a prime minister's job, and nobody else's, to draw all the threads of the government together: to balance political yin against economic yang, such that neither dominates or bends the project out of shape. Chancellors come and, eventually, even the best go. But sometimes it's only then that you can really tell whether the problem was ever really the chancellor. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
20 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Trump: I'll spare undocumented farm workers if bosses can vouch for them
Donald Trump said he will spare undocumented farm workers from deportation if their bosses can vouch for them. The US president floated the idea for the exemptions, which could also apply to hotel and restaurant workers, during a visit to Iowa. Legislation is already being drafted for the carve-out how to deal with undocumented agricultural workers with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. 'You know, they've had people working for them for years. And we're going to do something … we're going to sort of put the farmers in charge,' he said on Thursday night. 'If a farmer has been with one of these people that worked so hard – they bend over all day, we don't have too many people that can do that, but they work very hard, and they know him very well, and some of the farmers are literally, you know, they cry when they see this happen. 'If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people, in some way, Kristi, I think we're going to have to just say that's going to be good, right?' Mr Trump was repeating remarks he made earlier in the week. Underpinning the proposed exemptions is a dispute within the administration, with Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, pushing for concessions for farmers and their workers, while immigration hardliner and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller strongly opposes any concessions. At one point, raids on farms, meatpacking plants and restaurants were paused. But they were resumed again after immigration hawks, including Mr Miller and Ms Noem, leaned on the president. Mr Trump's remarks this week suggest that he could be leaning towards backing his agriculture secretary after all. According to the Centre for Migration Studies, there are around 283,000 undocumented farm workers in the US, with nearly half being employed in California; other estimates put the figure even higher. More than 80 per cent come from Mexico, with the remainder hailing from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Agriculture industry hit by deportation drive The Trump deportation drive has wrought havoc on the agriculture industry. Fearful of being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as many as 70 per cent of farm workers in some parts of the country have been staying away. This has led to crops rotting in fields and labour shortages at meat-packing facilities. 'We do not have enough workforce in the United States to do manual work, to do those jobs that other people are not qualified to do and do not want to do,' Alexandra Sossa, chief executive of Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project, told Newsweek. 'For example, we are running into a problem where we do not have enough farm workers to grow the food we eat every day.' According to Farmonaut, an agriculture technology company, the stricter immigration polices are creating a labour shortage, which is putting up food prices. There is similar pressure on the hospitality industry, with hotels and restaurants heavily dependent on immigrant labour. Even Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago has imported foreign workers, with Department of Labour statistics showing that it applied for 136 H-2B visas for non-agricultural workers in 2023. Trump urged to fix long-term labour issues 'We are encouraged that the president recognises the valuable contributions farmworkers play in America's food security,' John Walt Boatright, director of Government Affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation told The Telegraph 'Farmers support a secure border and safe communities, and they also understand that without a stable workforce, it's not possible to get food from the farm to the tables of America's families.' 'We have not seen specifics on President Trump's plans, but we urge him and Congress to address long-term agriculture labour issues by revising overreaching regulations, modernising current guestworker programmes to allow for year-round access to employees, and fixing outdated wage rate calculations that put help out of reach for many farmers.' While the administration is willing to make concessions for these key groups of workers, there will be no let-up in ICE's activities. Within days of the announcement of an 'Alligator Alcatraz' to house deportees in Florida, Alaska, albeit tongue in cheek, suggested its large bear population could do a similar job in the frozen north. The state has the option of bidding for a slice of the $5 billion earmarked in the Big Beautiful Bill for the construction and renovation of ICE's detention facilities.
