Kremlin plays down Trump's nuclear rhetoric as US envoy set to visit Moscow
Last week Trump ordered two nuclear submarines to "be positioned in the appropriate regions" in response to what he called "highly provocative" comments by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.Trump did not say whether they were nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed submarines.Medvedev - who in recent years has espoused increasingly extreme rhetoric online - had accused Trump of "playing the ultimatum game" with Russia after the US president set a new deadline for Vladimir Putin to end the war with Ukraine. Without referencing the Medvedev spat directly, Peskov said on Monday that while "in every country members of the leadership... have different points of view", Russian foreign policy was dictated by Putin alone. Medvedev did not react to Trump's response and has not been active on X since sending the offending post. Relations between the US and Russia improved significantly after Trump took office in January - although in recent months the US president has signalled he suspects Putin may not be truly committed to ending the war in Ukraine, which began when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.Now Trump has brought forward a deadline for Russia to reach a peace deal, threatening Moscow with severe tariffs targeting its oil and other exports if a ceasefire is not agreed by Friday 8 August. Still, Washington and Moscow remain in contact and Peskov welcomed Witkoff's trip later this week.
"We are always happy to see Mr Witkoff in Moscow... We consider such contact important, meaningful and useful," he said, adding that Witkoff and Putin may meet.Should a ceasefire not be reached by Friday, Trump has said he would impose sanctions and secondary tariffs on Moscow to discourage other countries from trading with it. But he has also admitted Russia - now the most sanctioned country in the world - was "pretty good at avoiding sanctions".Three rounds of talks between Russian and Ukraine since the spring have failed to bring an end to the conflict any closer. Only last week Putin reiterated that Russia's main goal in the war was to "eradicate the reasons for the crisis in Ukraine and ensure Russia's security". Moscow's maximalist military and political preconditions for peace - including Ukraine becoming a neutral state, dramatically reducing its military and abandoning its Nato aspirations - remain unacceptable to Kyiv and to its Western partners.
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Yvonne Miller was beside herself with grief when her 23-year-old son, Christopher B Kelly, died from gun violence in August 2020. She connected with the Trauma & Resilience Initiative, a Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, mental health non-profit, and executive director Karen Crawford Simms soon showed up at her door to help her process her trauma. Every week, Simms encouraged Miller to cherish the memories of her son and offered her a space to cry. At Simms's suggestion, Miller kept a diary in which she documented the ebb and flow of denial and anger. Through in-person and virtual sessions with Simms, Miller climbed her way out of the initial stages of grief. In 2023, she even created a weekly support group for mothers in the metropolitan area who have lost their children to gun violence, 'because nobody knows what we're going through', Miller said, 'except us'. But the neighbor-to-neighbor counseling, which helped Miller cope, is no more. 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In April, the Department of Justice's office of justice programs canceled 373 grants totaling about $500m. Some of that amount went toward violence reduction, according to a recent report from the non-profit Council on Criminal Justice. 'Arpa was really a gamechanger for the community violence intervention and prevention field,' said Nick Wilson, senior director for gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress, in Governing magazine. 'Arpa was really a chance for cities to really experiment and scale up existing programs, and especially for a lot of places, we saw new programs being started.' The sunset of Arpa funding and additional cuts come as gun violence killed 128 people a day in 2023 throughout the nation, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. While a decrease from the previous two years, the death toll is the third highest on record since 1968. As the Trauma & Resilience Initiative's board searches for grants, Simms is offering additional training to residents so that the non-profit's work will continue to live on despite its potential closure. Simms and her mental health specialist volunteers still offer support groups for children, teens and adults to process traumatic experiences. They also provide stress management support for individuals, families and providers who work with populations facing adversity. And they train community leaders on how to support immigrants and refugees if their families are torn apart or if they fear immigration raids. Starting in the fall, they hope to offer training to organizations and survivors of community trauma, including gun violence and natural disasters – if the initiative stays open. Simms is hopeful that the Trauma & Resilience Initiative will be saved if Congress passes a recently introduced House bill that would direct the US Department of Health and Human Services to fund community-based resilience and mental health programs. The Trauma & Resilience Initiative seeks to offer an alternative to policing and focuses on addressing the roots of violence in the Black community, often home to 'the individuals most impacted by gun violence', Simms said. To reduce overpolicing in their neighborhoods, Simms said that responders often call organizers who focus on averting violence instead of contacting law enforcement. 'Our goal is to de-escalate things for the communities that we work with and serve,' Simms said. 'From a brain perspective, law enforcement can be triggering. And so once your amygdala is activated, we think that it probably would make the situation worse, and we'd prefer to step away, or give you a minute.' The initiative's training aims to interrupt gun violence by helping community responders identify signs of distress and increase problem solving skills through roleplaying, visualization and writing exercises. 'Particularly when we're thinking about neighborhoods that have been impacted by structural inequality and community violence, we want to make sure that there are feelings of safety,' Simms said, 'that you're from the neighborhood, you are trusted by the neighborhood.' Simms's work and the city's efforts to prevent and intervene in gun violence may have helped reduce shootings in Champaign in recent years. The number of deaths by gunfire declined by more than 68% between 2021 and 2024, from 16 to five, respectively, according to Champaign police department data reported by WCIA. 'We want to improve our community's capacity to take care of its own,' Simms said. 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That eventually led Champaign county's mental health board to fund a community group that trained residents to provide neighbor-to-neighbor counseling. The community group then convinced Simms to found the Trauma & Resilience Initiative in 2019. In recent years, most of the non-profit's funding – $900,000 – came from Arpa funds, which allowed the organization to pay for Black therapists to receive trauma-informed certifications. 'If we're going to change the infrastructure,' Simms said, 'we have to change the workforce.' Over the years, the initiative's free programming grew from providing grief support for families who experienced gun violence to offering wraparound services by connecting clients with organizations that helped them find housing, jobs and healthcare. 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