Connect with us

Europe

The stark divide between what Putin said and what he meant

Published

on



CNN
 — 

There is often a gulf between what Russian President Vladimir Putin says and what he actually means.

Asked about the US-backed proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, Putin gave a long and convoluted answer during his Thursday news conference. Some sentences were made-for-TV, with short quotes that sounded very favorable – when seen out of context – to the Trump administration’s plan, which Ukraine has already agreed to.

Early on in his answer, Putin said “we agree with the proposal” – a quote that made headlines across the world. But he went on to make it clear that Moscow will not agree to an actual deal any time soon.

In his full response, Putin effectively shut down the idea – demanding concessions from Kyiv, raising numerous questions and repeating the maximalist demands that Russia has held since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Trump himself commented positively on Putin’s reaction to the ceasefire proposal, saying in an upbeat tone that it was “promising… but it wasn’t complete.”

But a closer look at what Putin said makes it clear that Russia is stalling and remains entrenched in its long-held positions:

“We agree with the proposal to cease hostilities but we have to bear in mind that this ceasefire must be aimed at a long-lasting peace and it must look at the root causes of the crisis.” – Putin

It’s not the first time Putin has urged eliminating what he calls the “root causes” of the war, and the Kremlin has previously claimed the current democratically elected Ukrainian government is part of those.

One of the Kremlin’s rationales for the war was that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s election was illegitimate.

Putin would instead like to see a pro-Russian leader installed in Ukraine. (In recent weeks, Trump has echoed the Kremlin’s calls for Zelensky to be replaced, going as far as claiming that the Ukrainian president is a dictator.)

The “root causes” also refer to the Kremlin’s claims that Russia is threatened by NATO expansion after the Cold War. That reflects Putin’s desire to see the military alliance withdraw from former Communist states that were part of the Soviet sphere of influence, such as Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.

A resident walks at the site of a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Odesa, Ukraine on March 8.

In the past, he has falsely claimed that NATO made a commitment not to expand eastwards after the fall of the USSR. In fact, NATO has always had an open-door policy.

Putin has repeatedly used NATO as an excuse for his invasion of Ukraine and demanded that Kyiv is blocked from joining the alliance and accept permanent neutrality.

“To Putin, the ‘root cause’ of the conflict is Ukraine’s desire to be an independent country and choose its own path in domestic and foreign policy,” said Brian Taylor, a political science professor at Syracuse University. “Further, he pointed to ‘nuances’ and proceeded to ask at least 16 questions about the details of any ceasefire agreement.”

“Who will give orders to cease hostilities and what will be the price? Who will determine who violated it where and how over a 2,000- kilometer (1,200-mile) stretch (of the frontline)? And who will blame this violation on whom later? These are all questions that require painstaking research from both sides.” – Putin

The Russian president questioning how a ceasefire would be implemented effectively restates his opposition to European proposals to put peacekeeping forces on the ground in Ukraine in the event of a deal.

The Kremlin has previously said it would be unacceptable for troops from NATO countries to be present in Ukraine, even under national flags. On Thursday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson went further, saying Moscow would consider “any” foreign military presence in Ukraine “unacceptable.”

The Druzhba hotel was badly damaged after a Russian missile attack on March 12 in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.

Putin then called for “painstaking research from both sides” suggests that he intends to drag out negotiations for a long time.

His stalling could be a tactic to buy time for Russia’s advancement in the Kursk region, where Ukraine still occupies some territory. Russian forces have made swift moves this week to reclaim ground in Kursk, which could remove one of Kyiv’s only bargaining chips as peace talks progress.

“Regarding Ukraine’s readiness to cease hostilities –- you know, the American-Ukrainian meeting in Saudi Arabia may outwardly look like a decision made by the Ukrainian side under American pressure. But in fact, I am absolutely convinced that the Ukrainian side should have asked the Americans for this in the most insistent manner, based on the situation that is developing on the ground.” – Putin

Here, Putin is arguing that Ukraine – not the United States – is actually the side pressing for a ceasefire.

The Trump administration, however, has repeatedly emphasized its desire for a quick resolution to the war and publicly said Ukraine doesn’t hold any cards in the peace negotiations. “I think we’re going to be in very good shape to get it done. We want to get it over with,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday night after Putin made his comments.

Putin reiterated at several times during his Thursday news conference the Kremlin’s argument that a temporary 30-day ceasefire would benefit Ukraine, potentially allowing the country to regroup and have more weapons delivered. (Russia would also benefit from regrouping.)

Firefighters work at the site of a Russian drone strike in Odesa, Ukraine on March 11.

That may be an attempt to further the idea that Zelensky doesn’t want to achieve long-term peace – a narrative Russia is pushing despite invading Ukraine unprovoked in 2014 and launching a full-scale invasion in 2022.

“It seems to me that it would be very good for the Ukrainian side to achieve a truce for at least 30 days and we are all for it, but there are nuances.” – Putin

Saying Russia is “all for it” but then calling for drawn-out negotiations and a discussion of “nuances” is a good reflection of Putin’s position on a ceasefire:

Did the Russian leader want to sound favorable to Trump, expressing solidarity with his position? Yes.

Did Russia actually shift on any of its previous demands? It doesn’t appear so.

“Putin’s answer seems carefully crafted to sound like a ‘yes’ to Trump but be a ‘no’ in practice, unless Ukraine is forced to submit to Russia’s demands,” Syracuse’s Taylor said.



Source link

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Europe

Man convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder facing trial for sexual assault

Published

on



CNN
 — 

Rudy Guede, the only person definitively convicted of the brutal 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, will be back in court this fall facing charges of sexual assault and violence against a former girlfriend.

Guede, a 38-year-old Ivory Coast native who has lived in Italy since the age of five, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for Kercher’s murder in October 2008. His sentence was reduced on appeal before he was released early for good behavior in 2021.

The case sparked a media frenzy, spawning more than two dozen books and three films.

More than 100,000 photos, thousands of chats and audio messages between Guede and the unnamed victim are among the evidence to be considered in the trial, according to the investigating magistrate Rita Cialoni, who ordered Guede to stand trial in a preliminary hearing in Viterbo on Friday.

The two began dating while Guede was still in prison and ended their relationship in 2023 when the woman pressed charges against him, according to Italian media.

American student Amanda Knox, who was Kercher’s roommate at the time she was killed, and Knox’s then-boyfriend Italian Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted in tandem for their alleged role in Kercher’s murder in 2009, but were fully exonerated by Italy’s Supreme Court in 2015 following a topsy-turvy legal battle.

A reproduction made 06 November 2007 of an undated picture shows British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia.

Knox, remains convicted of slander for accusing her former nightclub boss Patrick Lumumba of Kercher’s murder in 2007.

Guede’s new indictment and trial stems from 2023 accusations of sexual assault, mistreatment and stalking, by a 25-year-old woman Guede dated from Viterbo, where Guede worked first on work release from prison and then after his release. His first hearing will be held November 4 in Viterbo.

His lawyer Carlo Mezzetti told CNN his client was innocent and feared he would not get a fair trial given his previous conviction.



Source link

Continue Reading

Europe

Trump announces new tariffs of 30% on Mexico and the European Union

Published

on



CNN
 — 

President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened duties of 30% on products from Mexico and the European Union, two of America’s biggest trading partners, in an ongoing tariff campaign that’s upended global trade since he retook office in January.

“The United States of America has agreed to continue working with the European Union, despite having one of our largest Trade Deficits with you. Nevertheless, we have decided to move forward, but only with more balanced and fair TRADE,” Trump wrote in the letter to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, which he posted to Truth Social.

Trump has imposed a slate of tariffs on US trading partners this year – then paused, modified, raised or lowered them, in a chaotic barrage of policy actions that’s left everyone from major nations to individual Americans trying to figure out how to plan for the future even as economic uncertainty grows.

The EU and Mexico join a growing list of countries whose imports will face updated duties on August 1, since Trump began posting tariff letters on Monday with rates of up to 40%.

In his letters to the EU and Mexico, Trump said that all imports were subject to the 30% tariff, excluding “Sectoral Tariffs,” such as the 25% auto tariff.

Von der Leyen said in a statement that the EU remains “ready to continue working towards an agreement” by the August 1 deadline.

But, she said, a 30% tariff on EU exports would hurt supply chains, businesses and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU “will take all necessary steps to safeguard EU interests, including the adoption of proportionate countermeasures if required,” von der Leyen wrote.

Products from Mexico, meanwhile, have mostly been able to enter the country duty-free, granted they were compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) Trump negotiated in his first term. In his letter addressed to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump said that tariff barriers were imposed to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States, which he has previously used to justify earlier tariffs on Mexico as well.

“Mexico has been helping me secure the border, BUT, what Mexico has done, is not enough,” Trump wrote.

Mexico’s economy minister Marcelo Ebrard posted on X that a Mexican delegation told United States officials during a Friday meeting that plans to establish a new tariff rate would be “unfair treatment and that we did not agree.” But the United States and Mexico are negotiating to find an “alternative to protect businesses and jobs on both sides of the border.”

In the tariff letters, which were dated on Friday, Trump said that any retaliation of tariffs charged on US imports would be met with pushback from the United States. Trump said that “whatever the number you choose to raise (tariffs) by, will be added onto the 30% that we charge.”

He blamed both tariff and non-tariff trade barriers as additional reasons for imposing tariffs on the EU and Mexico.

Tractor-trailers wait in line at the Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge port of entry, on the US-Mexico border in Juarez, Mexico, on April 3.

The Trump administration has taken particular issue with value-added and digital services taxes, which are prominent in several EU member countries.

Digital service taxes are levied on the gross revenue that online firms collect from offering services to users. Countries with these taxes would be able to tax all the revenue large companies that operate online collect — even if the business is unprofitable. That can include what they collect from selling data, advertising as well as payments they receive for subscriptions, software and other kinds of online services users pay for.

Trump and members of his administration said on multiple occasions that the EU was not negotiating in good faith. And two months ago, Trump was so enraged by the lack of progress in trade talks that he was prepared to slap a 50% tariff on goods from the EU come June 1. “I’m not looking for a deal,” he said at the time.

A 30% tariff on the EU is more than the 20% “reciprocal” tariff which goods from there faced before Trump paused them in mid-April.

After Trump made the threat in May, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Fox News interview that the “EU proposals have not been of the same quality that we’ve seen from our other important trading partners.”

The letters to the EU and Mexico come after Trump threatened 35% tariffs on some Canadian goods on Thursday.

This story has been updated with additional content.



Source link

Continue Reading

Europe

Giant 13-inch shoes found in ancient Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall

Published

on



CNN
 — 

An ancient Roman mystery is afoot in the rolling hills of northern Britain.

Archaeologists have unearthed a stash of unusually large shoes at the ruins of a first-century military fort along Hadrian’s Wall, a 73-mile (117-kilometer) stone barrier that famously shielded the Roman Empire’s northwestern perimeter from foreign invaders. The discovery is raising new questions about the lives and origins of the fort’s inhabitants.

The giant leather soles were found at Magna Fort in May among 34 pieces of footwear, including work boots and baby-sized shoes, that are helping to paint a picture of the 4,000 men, women and children who once lived in and around the English site just south of the Scottish border.

Eight of the shoes are over 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) in length — a US men’s size 13.5 or greater based on Nike’s size chart — making them larger than average by today’s standard and sparking suspicions that unusually tall troops may have guarded this particular fortress at the empire’s edge.

By contrast, the average ancient shoe found at a neighboring Roman fort was closer to a US men’s size 8, according to a news release about the discovery.

“When the first large shoe started to come out of the ground, we were looking for many explanations, like maybe it’s their winter shoes, or people were stuffing them, wearing extra socks,” recalled Rachel Frame, a senior archaeologist leading the excavation. “But as we found more of them and different styles, it does seem to be that these (were) just people with really large feet.”

As digging continues at Magna Fort, Frame said she hopes further investigation could answer who exactly wore these giant shoes. A basic sketch of the site’s past is just starting to come together.

When the Magna Fort was in use, multiple different Roman military troops and their families moved into the site every few years after it was built around AD 85, archaeologists suspect.

Inscriptions on the fort’s walls and altars recount settlements of Hamian archers from what is now Syria, Dalmatian mountain soldiers from Croatia and Serbia, and Batavians from the Netherlands, but the length of time each group stayed at the stronghold remains unknown.

Likely following orders from the Roman army, the troops would often leave the fort for distant regions and in their haste, ditch shoes, clothing and other belongings in the surrounding trenches, Frame explained.

Additionally, new occupants requiring more space would have built larger structures on top of the existing fort, packing rubble and clay between the walls and trapping any belongings left by the previous tenants, Frame said.

“As archaeologists, we like trash,” said Dr. Elizabeth Greene, an associate professor of classics at the University of Western Ontario. “You get those habitational layers where things were just left behind, maybe forgotten about, and that tells us more about the space.” Greene has studied thousands of shoes collected from the nearby Vindolanda Roman Fort, which has been excavated since the 1970s and is among the most well-studied of the Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall.

The recently discovered Magna shoes share some similarities with those in the Vindolanda Fort collection, said Greene, who was not involved in the Magna excavation process, but has viewed the artifacts.

For one, the soles of the shoes from both sites are made from thick layers of cowhide leather held together with iron hobnails, she explained. While only a couple of the shoes discovered at Magna have some of the upper portions still intact, the Vindolanda Fort shoe styles include closed military boots and open work boots, as well as sneaker-like shoes reaching just below the ankle and sandals with leather fasteners.

It’s likely that the leather soles of the Magna shoes survived thousands of years in the ground thanks to ancient tanning techniques that used crushed up vegetative matter to create a water and heat resistant coating, Greene said. Testing is still underway to confirm this hypothesis.

Only two of the 34 shoes discovered at Magna Fort have the upper portions attached.

The length of the extra-large Magna shoes suggests the original owners may have been exceptionally tall, Greene said. At Vindolanda, only 16 out of the 3,704 shoes collected measured over 11.8 inches (30 centimeters).

Ancient Roman military manuals often described the ideal recruit as being only 5 feet, 8 inches or 5 feet, 9 inches in height, according to Rob Collins, a professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University in England. But the soldiers stationed around Hadrian’s Wall came from all around the far-reaching empire, bringing a wide diversity of physical traits to their settlements, he said.

Still, why Magna specifically might have needed troops of towering stature remains unclear.

To piece together the shoe owners’ identities, researchers will examine the Magna shoes for any signs of wear, Frame said. Any foot impressions left in the shoes could be used to model the feet of the original wearers.

Linking the shoes to real human remains, however, could prove difficult. For one, the Romans near Hadrian’s Wall generally cremated their dead, using a headstone to mark the graves, Collins said. Any bones that remain around the settlements are likely from enemy, illegal or accidental burials.

So far, the few bones that have been found at the Magna site were too soft and crumbly to provide insight, Frame said, but the team continues to search for new burial spots. Pottery and other artifacts found around the site may also help with dating and matching the timelines of the known occupants, she said.

But the researchers worry they could be running out of time.

Excavation of Magna Fort began in 2023.

The 2,000-year-old leather found at both the Vindolanda and Magna sites is preserved by the anaerobic, or low-oxygen, conditions of the soil, Frame said.

The 34 shoes found at the Magna fort, however, are in worse condition than those retrieved from Vindolanda decades ago — a problem Frame attributes to the changing climate.

“The more our climate changes, the more we get heat waves and droughts, or months’ worth of rain in one weekend type (of) scenarios, the more that influences the underground soil conditions and introduces more oxygen into these environments,” Frame explained.

In oxygen-rich soil, microbes thrive, contributing to decay, and acidic pH levels erode natural materials like leather.

Frame said the rapid weather changes only make their excavation of Magna more urgent.

“I’m not saying I don’t get excited about the shiny objects and precious treasures, but for me, archaeology is about the story of everybody else … the stories of the people whose lives weren’t written down, who weren’t kings or emperors or famous heroes,” she said. “These personal objects really put the real human people back into the picture.”



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending