Russia open to peace with Ukraine but ‘our goals' must be achieved, says Kremlin
Meanwhile, Moscow continues to intensify its long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities, with more drones launched in a single night than during some entire months in 2024, and analysts say the barrages are likely to escalate.
Mr Peskov told state TV reporter Pavel Zarubin: '(Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin has repeatedly spoken of his desire to bring the Ukrainian settlement to a peaceful conclusion as soon as possible. This is a long process, it requires effort, and it is not easy.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly rejected accusations from Kyiv of stalling peace talks (Pavel Bednyakov, Pool/AP)
'The main thing for us is to achieve our goals. Our goals are clear.'
The Kremlin has insisted any peace deal should see Ukraine withdraw from the four regions that Russia illegally annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured. It also wants Ukraine to renounce its bid to join Nato and accept strict limits on its armed forces, demands Kyiv and its Western allies have rejected.
In his nightly address on Saturday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said his officials had proposed a new round of peace talks this week.
Russian state media reported on Sunday that no date had yet been set for the negotiations but that Istanbul would likely remain the host city.
Mr Trump threatened Russia on July 14 with steep tariffs and announced a rejuvenated pipeline for American weapons to reach Ukraine, hardening his stance towards Moscow after months of frustration following unsuccessful negotiations aimed at ending the war.
US president Donald Trump has recently hardened his stance towards Moscow (Alex Brandon/AP)
The direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations in Istanbul resulted in several rounds of prisoner exchanges, but little else.
Mr Trump said he would implement 'severe tariffs' unless a peace deal is reached within 50 days. He provided few details on how they would be implemented, but suggested they would target Russia's trading partners in an effort to isolate Moscow in the global economy.
In addition, Mr Trump said European allies would buy 'billions and billions' of dollars of US military equipment to be transferred to Ukraine, replenishing the besieged country's supplies of weapons. Included in the plan are Patriot air defence systems, a top priority for Ukraine as it fends off Russian drones and missiles.
Doubts were recently raised about Mr Trump's commitment to supply Ukraine when the Pentagon paused shipments over concerns that US stockpiles were running low.
Elsewhere, Ukraine's air force said it shot down 18 of 57 Shahed-type and decoy drones launched by Russia overnight into Sunday, with seven more disappearing from radar.
Two women were injured in Zaporizhzhia, a southern Ukrainian region partly occupied by Russia, when a drone struck their house, according to the regional military administration.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said his officials had proposed a new round of peace talks this week (Vadym Sarakhan/AP)
Two more civilians were injured in Izium, north-eastern Ukraine, after a drone hit a residential building, local Ukrainian officials said.
Later on Sunday, drones struck a leafy square in the centre of Sumy, wounding a woman and her seven-year-old son, officials said.
The strike also damaged a power line, leaving some 100 households without electricity, according to Serhii Krivosheienko of the municipal military administration.
Meanwhile, Russia's defence ministry said its forces had shot down 93 Ukrainian drones targeting Russian territory overnight, including at least 15 that appeared to be headed for Moscow.
At least 13 more drones were downed on the approach to the capital on Sunday, according to mayor Sergei Sobyanin.
He said one drone had struck a residential building in Zelenograd, on the outskirts of Moscow, damaging an apartment but causing no casualties.
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Sky News
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Trump in Scotland: Escaping Epstein?
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The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
I don't identify with my country's values anymore. Is this ‘citizenship insecurity'?
It starts with a quiz from a law firm: did your grandparents leave before or after 1951? Do you have their passports or marriage certificate? If I answer correctly, I will get another email from a lawyer who specializes in citizenship claims. If I do not, my file may be quietly marked as a long shot. The stakes are high: if successful, I could ultimately obtain an EU citizenship for myself and then perhaps for other members of my family. Like many other Americans, I began this process in a moment of disillusionment. Since the 2024 election, I have been living with what I have come to call 'citizenship insecurity', a new category of instability that millions of us are now grappling with. It is the unsettling sense that a US passport, once a symbol of safety and mobility, is no longer something we identify with. I am not living in fear of Ice raids; I am privileged enough to be a US citizen. I am not applying for another passport out of immediate danger or fear. Instead, it is about estrangement: I no longer recognize my country's values. Since the US's inception, Americans have told ourselves a story about who we are and what we represent. We knew we were not perfect, but we thought America at least pretended to try to stand up for democracy and human rights. Much of that story has been tossed aside in the last decade, along with the dismantlement of our social contracts. 'Citizenship insecurity' captures the depth of that unraveling, not necessarily imminent danger but no longer recognizing America, or trusting its values. 'My anxiety is through the roof right now, but I think it would be worse if I were not a citizen,' says Juan M Hincapie-Castillo, a researcher at the University of North Carolina and a recently naturalized American who first came to this country as an international student. He is experiencing citizenship insecurity to the max. 'I am still brown, queer, and have an accent. I have tattoos that I cover every time I travel and go through TSA,' he says. 'I keep hearing stories of legal residents and citizens being detained.' The instability Hincapie-Castillo experiences is a more targeted and virulent form than what I am experiencing. Right now, just being queer or brown – or even simply having tattoos, given the outsized role those have played in the recent roundups of alleged immigrant gang members – can seem to make a person more vulnerable to being singled out. Just this month, Hincapie-Castillo's medical research on pain management treatments was defunded by the Trump administration. He studies trigeminal neuralgia, a facial nerve condition that is so cruel it is sometimes referred to as a 'suicide disease'. His work had been funded for five years by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), but the grant was terminated after only one year. The stated reason for termination: a new NIH policy declaring that research programs connected to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are 'antithetical to scientific inquiry'. (Some demographics' pain no longer counts to those in power, apparently.) Indeed, this is another part of citizenship insecurity today: the economic pressures on scholars as federal funding has been haphazardly cut in the sciences and other disciplines. A number of these academics are internationally born, which adds an additional layer of uncertainty. 'The fear is always there,' he says of his current life. 'I carry my US passport now everywhere I go, just in case.' Of course, the woes of American citizens experiencing insecurity like Hincapie-Castillo do not even compare to the threat against non-citizens: it is as if many of us are nesting dolls of uncertainty. By 1 June, 51,302 people were in Ice detention. As of 13 July , the number had ticked up to 56,816. The Ice site has not shared numbers for deportations in 2025 publicly yet. The current head of Ice apparently told an Arizona Mirror reporter that our deportation system needs to be more like 'Amazon Prime, but with human beings'. He meant that as a good thing. And yet, the fear American citizens who are in far less outright peril also feel is still real. Recently, Donald Trump threatened to withdraw the actor Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship. Petulant as his threat was, it nonetheless showed that the president would like to denaturalize even native-born people who he reviles. The threat to birthright citizenship speaks to that same issue. Citizenship insecurity is about grappling with what it means to be American when so many of our supposed ideals have vanished – not just from policy, but from political discourse itself. This is not the first time Americans have lived alongside wars or policies they did not support. For decades, many of us have witnessed enormous political endeavors we did not approve of, from the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam. This included the 'forever wars', which were attacks on much we valued about our country, all at once, but it also included phenomena that presage and accompany those wars: torture, military occupation and Islamophobia at home. As a journalist focused on income inequality and economic insecurity, I did not buy into the 'American dream' mythos. Editing big stories about economic inequality in this country day in, day out, I have been shown over and over that the notion of pulling yourself by your bootstraps is a fantasy. I have interviewed people who did everything 'right' – saving money, pursuing higher education, working 40 hours a week – and still live from paycheck to paycheck, unable to buy a home or to even recognize a clear life trajectory. Nonetheless, a small part of myself held on to an idea of America as a beacon of sorts, as it had been for my immigrant grandparents. My grandfather left a town that has been controlled by different countries in eastern Europe for the US in 1929, returned to marry my grandmother, and together they came back again in the early 1930s. But most of our family did not make it out. They died there: Jews caught in a hideous historical fulcrum, crushed by the machinery of genocide and occupation. As a result, my grandparents loathed talking about the past and what happened there, preferring to pass it over in silence. What would they think of the choice that I and others were hoping to make now? America had offered them a chance to own their own store and for their children to go to college; my mother even made it to the Ivy League on scholarship. It was not a country I ever wanted to have an opportunity to leave or thought I or my family might need one. That has changed – for me and others. Nadia Kaneva, for example, is a media and communications professor at the University of Denver who has spent years studying how nations brand themselves. Born in Bulgaria and only recently naturalized as an American, Kaneva is feeling citizenship insecurity in real time. As a scholar, she has long understood how a country that is no longer desirable to emigrate to affects and is affected by foreign investment, tourism and brain drain. In the US, symbolic security has started to erode and other countries are jumping on the opportunities. A few European universities, for instance, have announced programs to recruit American researchers to Europe, especially if they are, say, public health scholars or environmental studies specialists or sociologists concentrating on gender. Kazim Ali, a co-founder of Nightboat Books and the author of the book Resident Alien, feels that the challenge to his and others' identities as Americans is 'existential as well as direct'. He emigrated here with his parents, who were Muslims born in India ('So India doesn't feel like home, either, at the moment,' he says). Would he ever consider leaving? To this, he quotes the Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi, who once said of her condition of exile and return: 'I don't want to trade one nostalgia for another.' It is not only longtime citizens who are rethinking what it means to be American. Even those newly eligible for citizenship – people who once looked forward to formally pledging allegiance – are now pausing. Those people 'have told me they are now torn', says Michele Wucker, a risk governance expert who also has written extensively about citizenship. 'The actions of this administration do not align with the country they thought we were. And now they question the logic of becoming a citizen out of fear of how Maga believes we should treat non-citizens.' 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Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies professor at Rutgers University and author of Branding the Nation: the Global Business of National Identity, comes from Canada. She has been thinking of returning home 'incessantly' since January. 'There is a cabal of Canadians in the US where that's a central topic right now,' she says. In conversations in a Facebook group for her fellow expats living in the US, trying to get their kids into Canadian universities has become a far more insistent theme as of late. 'Canadian American parents getting their kids to apply to Canadian rather than American universities was once a tuition move,' says Aronczyk. Now, she says it's also political as well. Aronczyk, like many of the people I spoke to, is quick to acknowledge her relative privilege. We know we are lucky, even, in being able to consider second citizenships. But that is precisely the point: when even the relatively economically secure feel as if the ground shifts beneath them, it signals just how deep and wide this instability runs. As an expert on national branding, Aronczyk notes that the US's image has sharply deteriorated in the past six months. Since the start of Trump's second administration, global perceptions of America 'have gone negative, by almost every measure'. A national brand is defined as much by people with American passports as people watching our country from the outside: students, tourists and investors, she points out. In June, I started my regular correspondence with a law firm representing people seeking European citizenship. Each time I wrote and heard back from them, I recalled my beloved grandfather. In one old photo, he wore his cavalry uniform, adorned with sparking buttons. I remember that handsome expression from my childhood in the 1970s when he was already an old man, still attractive and bewildered. Whether that was due to his feeling caught in the gears of history or not it was hard to say. What I do know was he was eager to be the sort of American who took his kids to movie palaces and had college money tucked away for their grandchildren, no matter that he and grandma worked six days a week in a shoe store to be able to do so. In his old age, he got to watch Star Trek with his feet up as the two ate strawberry ice-cream. Occasionally, once retired, my grandmother would even attend outdoor classical concerts and free Shakespeare plays with her friends. This, to them, was the American dream. It still strikes me as uncanny, to even be considering giving myself and my family the possibility to go elsewhere if the worst happens here. After all, this country was my grandparents' refuge. But I imagine they would understand, and even approve. They knew all too well the cost of having the wrong citizenship at the wrong time.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
A Columbia genocide scholar says she may leave over university's new definition of antisemitism
For years, Marianne Hirsch, a prominent genocide scholar at Columbia University, has used Hannah Arendt's book about the trial of a Nazi war criminal, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,' to spark discussion among her students about the Holocaust and its lingering traumas. But after Columbia's recent adoption of a new definition of antisemitism, which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech, Hirsch fears she may face official sanction for even mentioning the landmark text by Arendt, a philosopher who criticized Israel's founding. For the first time since she started teaching five decades ago, Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether. 'A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,' she told The Associated Press. 'I just don't see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.' Hirsch is not alone. At universities across the country, academics have raised alarm about growing efforts to define antisemitism on terms pushed by the Trump administration, often under the threat of federal funding cuts. Promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the definition lists 11 examples of antisemitic conduct, such as applying 'double standards' to Israel, comparing the country's policies to Nazism or describing its existence as 'a racist endeavor.' Ahead of a $220 million settlement with the Trump administration announced Wednesday, Columbia agreed to incorporate the IHRA definition and its examples into its disciplinary process. It has been endorsed in some form by Harvard, Yale and dozens of other universities. While supporters say the semantic shift is necessary to combat evolving forms of Jewish hate, civil liberties groups warn it will further suppress pro-Palestinian speech already under attack by President Donald Trump. For Hirsch, the restrictions on drawing comparisons to the Holocaust and questioning Israel's founding amount to 'clear censorship,' which she fears will chill discussions in the classroom and open her and other faculty up to spurious lawsuits. 'We learn by making analogies,' Hirsch said. 'Now the university is saying that's off-limits. How can you have a university course where ideas are not up for discussion or interpretation?' A spokesperson for Columbia didn't respond to an emailed request for comment. The 'weaponization' of an educational framework When he first drafted the IHRA definition of antisemitism two decades ago, Kenneth Stern said he 'never imagined it would one day serve as a hate speech code.' At the time, Stern was working as the lead antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee. The definition and its examples were meant to serve as a broad framework to help European countries track bias against Jews, he said. In recent years, Stern has spoken forcefully against what he sees as its 'weaponization' against pro-Palestinian activists, including anti-Zionist Jews. ' People who believe they're combating hate are seduced by simple solutions to complicated issues,' he said. 'But when used in this context, it's really actually harming our ability to think about antisemitism.' Stern said he delivered that warning to Columbia's leaders last fall after being invited to address them by Claire Shipman, then a co-chair of the board of trustees and the university's current interim president. The conversation seemed productive, Stern said. But in March, shortly after the Trump administration said it would withhold $400 million in federal funding to Columbia over concerns about antisemitism, the university announced it would adopt the IHRA definition for 'training and educational' purposes. Then last week, days before announcing a deal with the Trump administration to restore that funding, Shipman said the university would extend the IHRA definition for disciplinary purposes, deploying its examples when assessing 'discriminatory intent.' 'The formal incorporation of this definition will strengthen our response to and our community's understanding of modern antisemitism,' Shipman wrote. Stern, who now serves as director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, called the move 'appalling," predicting it would spur a new wave of litigation against the university while further curtailing pro-Palestinian speech. Already, the university's disciplinary body has faced backlash for investigating students who criticized Israel in op-eds and other venues, often at the behest of pro-Israel groups. 'With this new edict on IHRA, you're going to have more outside groups looking at what professors are teaching, what's in the syllabus, filing complaints and applying public pressure to get people fired,' he said. 'That will undoubtedly harm the university.' Calls to 'self-terminate' Beyond adopting the IHRA definition, Columbia has also agreed to place its Middle East studies department under new supervision, overhaul its rules for protests and coordinate antisemitism trainings with groups like the Anti-Defamation League. Earlier this week, the university suspended or expelled nearly 80 students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Kenneth Marcus, chair of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said Columbia's actions were an overdue step to protect Jewish students from harassment. He dismissed faculty concerns about the IHRA definition, which he said would 'provide clarity, transparency and standardization' to the university's effort to root out antisemitism. 'There are undoubtedly some Columbia professors who will feel they cannot continue teaching under the new regime,' Marcus said. 'To the extent that they self-terminate, it may be sad for them personally, but it may not be so bad for the students at Columbia University.' But Hirsch, the Columbia professor, said she was committed to continuing her long-standing study of genocides and their aftermath. Part of that work, she said, will involve talking to students about Israel's "ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide' in Gaza, where more than 58,000 Palestinians have died, over half of them women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. 'With this capitulation to Trump, it may now be impossible to do that inside Columbia,' Hirsch said. 'If that's the case, I'll continue my work outside the university's gates.'
