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What will happen now that Trump has turned on Putin?

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24 hours ago

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CNN
 — 

President Donald Trump seems to have learned the lesson painfully gleaned by all his 21st-century predecessors: You can’t reset US relations with Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s path from idolizing the Russian leader to berating him has been a melodrama of personalized geopolitics. But what happens next is far more important.

The president’s epiphany offers new possibilities for Ukraine, Putin’s critics in Congress and America’s browbeaten allies. But it also comes with risk — most notably of a test of wills between alpha males Trump and Putin, who control the world’s two top nuclear arsenals.

Trump always tries to up the ante with foreign friends and foes with rhetoric and tariffs. But now he’s up against a ruthless adversary who raises the stakes not with bluster, but with human lives, as intensifying drone blitzes on Kyiv — a clear message to the White House — show.

Such is Trump’s transactional nature that it’s fair to ask how long his hostility toward his erstwhile friend in the Kremlin will last. And even though he’s talking about helping Ukraine defend itself, it’s hard to see his transformation extending to match the tens of billions of dollars in military and financial aid sent to Kyiv by the US Congress during the Biden administration.

However, the president told NBC News on Thursday that he has secured a deal through NATO to send new Patriot anti-missile missiles to Kyiv that it badly needs to repel Russian attacks on civilian targets.

“We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, a hundred percent,” the president said. “We’re going to be sending Patriots to NATO and then NATO will distribute that,” he added. The exact parameters of the deal were not immediately clear, and CNN has reached out to the alliance.

Trump seems to have reached a pivot point. He’s shifted from unfathomably blaming the victim of the war, Ukraine, to accusing the aggressor, Russia, of needlessly prolonging it.

The question is, how does this change US policy on the war and on Russia, as well as Trump’s own attempts to exert US leadership and the domestic politics around Ukraine?

Trump’s declaration that he was fed up with Putin’s “bullsh*t” this week was a startling twist, albeit one characteristic of his sometimes-profane brand of statesmanship.

No one tried harder than Trump to persuade Putin to end the war in Ukraine, which started with an illegal invasion in 2022. He’s spent years praising the Russian leader’s smarts and strength.

Police officers examine debris on a street after a night of Russian strikes in Kyiv on July 10.

But even as Trump turned on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after returning to office — including in a notorious Oval Office blow-up — Putin spurned all of the US president’s exceedingly generous terms for a ceasefire and an eventual peace agreement.

Putin’s motives are an important consideration here.

From a Western perspective, the Russian leader may be guilty of an extraordinary self-inflicted political gaffe. He could have had a US-backed peace deal that Ukraine’s allies in Europe feared would reward his aggression, that locked in the territorial gains of the invasion, and that would have set in stone that Ukraine would never have a path to NATO membership.

But imposing Western logic on Putin’s calculations has always been a mistake. (This was a factor in the Obama administration’s misreading of the Russian leader ahead of his first escapade in Ukraine — the annexation of Crimea in 2014.)

Putin made clear before the invasion that he sees the conflict as righting a historic wrong — both over Russia’s age-old claims to Ukraine and his wider grievances that date back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he watched with dismay from his post as a KGB lieutenant colonel in communist East Germany. Putin talks of the “root causes” of the war. This is code for a number of Russian grievances that include the existence of a democratic government in Kyiv. It sometimes refers to Moscow’s claims that it is threatened by NATO expansion after the Cold War and to its desire to see alliance troops withdrawn from former communist states once in the Soviet Union’s orbit, such as Poland and Romania.

From this perspective, Putin may not have intended ever to end the war, and the calculations of Trump and his aides that he could be persuaded to do a “deal” — the central assumption of the president’s entire worldview — was misguided. And after hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, the war may be existential to Putin for his political survival.

Countless US and European observers have tried to convince Trump of this view for years. In a way, it’s stunning that Trump took so long to reach this point. The president said this week of Putin, “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

Ukraine hawks hoping for a newly robust US policy on the war may want to temper their enthusiasm. Trump’s frustration with Putin does seem genuine this time. But several times in recent months, he’s criticized the Russian leader only to later caveat his anger.

But if the president has finally concluded that he can’t cajole Putin into peace talks, is he willing to try to coerce him into them?

“I think Trump gets it now,” Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations told John Vause on CNN International. “He’s got to put more pressure on Russia if he’s going to get a deal with Ukraine.”

Such pressure might include an increase in US arms and ammunition to Ukraine as European states who feared Trump might walk away from Kyiv also pledge to increase their aid. The difference if Washington is truly committed could be enormous and could confound Putin’s clear belief that he can outlast the West and can ultimately win the war.

The White House could also fully embrace a bipartisan bill imposing tough new sanctions on Russia — as well as China and India, which are bulk buyers of its oil.

Trump has spoken in recent days about the terrible human toll inflicted on Ukrainians and the courage of their armed forces. But his willingness to stand with Zelensky’s government in the long haul may depend on whether he’s simply mad at Putin because he’s deprived Trump of a deal that would bolster his own aspirations to be a peacemaker and win a Nobel Prize, or whether he’s taking a strategic position on the war itself.

At times, Trump seemed to view the war in Ukraine as an unnecessary impediment to a better relationship between the US and Russia. He sounded a lot like former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and a far more skeptical Joe Biden at the start of their presidencies.

“Getting along with Russia is a good thing,” Trump said in April. “I think I could have a very good relationship with Russia and with President Putin, and if I did, that would be a great thing.”

A rescue worker walks on a parking of car repair service destroyed by a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on June 18.

Given Trump’s transactional nature, some analysts have speculated that if his hopes of a Ukraine peace deal faltered, he might simply compartmentalize the war and try to deal with Russia on other issues — especially economics and business. That would permit Putin to continue the conflict without US interference.

Trump might have had this in mind before the recent G7 summit when he showed up in Canada complaining that Putin wasn’t invited. Still, a partial thaw would not require Trump to get over what he seems to view as a personal slight from the Russian leader. And even though such a scenario would allow Russia to shed its pariah status and partially reenter world politics, it’s not clear its possibilities would pierce Putin’s siege mentality.

Russia’s next moves could also influence Trump’s strategy.

There were some signs coming out of a meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Malaysia on Thursday that US hopes of engaging Russia on the war are not dead. Rubio said he expressed Trump’s “disappointment and frustration” but also that Russia had come up with “a new and different approach.”

Does Putin now think he’s gone too far and needs to get Trump back on side, perhaps by handing the US president a symbolic “win”? Or is this just classic Russian obfuscation in prolonging a hopeless process of talking while its troops fight?

One thing to look for will be whether Trump’s chastening rebuff from Putin changes his approach to diplomacy more generally. The president has long boasted that his “great relationship” with the Russian leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping would yield victories for the United States that no other president could land. But as with North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un in Trump’s first term, the president’s supposed magnetism has produced very little of substance.

The geopolitical backdrop to the Ukraine issue has also shifted in recent weeks. Trump’s recent strikes on Iran might not have “obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites, as he claims. But they were a demonstration of American military might and a success for the commander in chief who ordered them. For all his threats to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States, Trump is clearly established as the world’s most powerful leader, whose daily moves send shockwaves around the globe. Could this shift the dynamics between him and Putin? Does Trump now view the Russian leader less as a strongman to be lionized than as the leader of an inferior power?

One big risk of a period of tension between the White House and the Kremlin would be if Trump and Putin get locked into a cycle of escalation — potentially to defend the enormous credibility that they have both invested in the relationship.

There’s no evidence to suggest that Trump wants to get into a showdown with Putin. Parts of his MAGA base see ideological synergies with Putin: his criticism of “wokeness” and what they see as a decline of Western cultural values. Another GOP faction wants to turn away from Europe in order to devote US military resources to a building showdown with China.

Nothing in Putin’s behavior suggests that he wants a faceoff with Trump or the United States. But the Russian leader has frequently rattled nuclear sabers during the Ukraine conflict, apparently to scare Western populations. Trump’s frequently expressed horror about the cataclysmic results of any nuclear conflict means this is a card the Russian leader might play if tensions really escalate.

Ultimately, Trump might still return to this strategic assumption that has long haunted US policy towards Ukraine. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” This was not another Ukraine-skeptical Trump quote. It was his nemesis, Obama, in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016.

But if nothing else, Trump’s spat with Putin might serve one purpose — dispelling his blind spot over the Russian leader’s true nature.



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Scotland faces up to its drug crisis by offering the UK’s first supervised injection facility

Published

11 hours ago

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July 11, 2025

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CNN
 — 

In a quiet corner of Glasgow’s East End, a radical public health experiment is underway. For the first time in the United Kingdom, people who inject illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine can do so under medical supervision – in a safe environment and indoors.

No arrests. No judgment. No questions about where the drugs came from – only how to make their use less deadly.

The facility, known as the Thistle, opened in January amid mounting political and public health pressure to confront Scotland’s deepening drug crisis. With the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe, Scottish health officials say, there have long been calls for a more pragmatic, compassionate response.

Funded by the devolved Scottish government and modelled on more than 100 similar sites across Europe and North America, the pilot safe drug consumption facility marks a significant departure from the UK’s traditionally punitive approach to illegal drug use.

Dorothy Bain, who heads Scotland’s prosecution service and advises the government, told a UK parliamentary committee in May that “it would not be in the public interest to prosecute users of the Glasgow safer drug consumption facility for possession of drugs for personal use.”

She added that the approach would be kept under review to ensure it “is not causing difficulties, raising the risk of further criminality or having an unlawful impact on the community.”

Supporters describe it as a long-overdue shift toward harm reduction. Critics warn it risks becoming a place where damaging addiction is maintained, not treated.

Located in a low-slung clinical building near the city center, the Thistle is a space where individuals bring their own drugs, prepare them on site, and inject under the watchful eyes of trained staff.

The service provides no substances, nor does it allow drug sharing between users. What it offers instead is clean equipment, medical oversight, and a protected environment for a population who might otherwise use in alleyways, public toilets or dumpster sheds, with the associated risks for themselves and the wider community.

“We’ve had almost 2,500 injections inside the facility,” Dr. Saket Priyadarshi, the clinical lead of the Thistle, told a CNN team who visited the facility in early June. “That’s 2,500 less injections in the community, in parks, alleyways, car parks.”

sakat intw.jpg

Dr. Saket Priyadarshi tells CNN about types of drug use at the Thistle

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All users must register before receiving support, providing only their initials and date of birth. Staff ask what drugs they plan to use and how. Then, they observe – not intervene – ready to act in the event of an emergency.

“We’ve had to manage over 30 medical emergencies inside the facility,” Priyadarshi said. “Some of them were severe overdoses that most likely would have ended in fatalities if we hadn’t been able to respond to them immediately here.”

Nurses work with patients to reduce harm wherever possible, advising on injection technique, equipment, and vein placement.

“We’ll spend a bit of time with them. Just (to) try and get the vein finder working,” said Lynn MacDonald, the service manager at the facility, referring to a handheld device that uses infrared light to illuminate veins beneath the skin.

“People have often learnt technique from other people who are using it and it’s not particularly good,” she told CNN. With equipment such as vein finders, she said, the staff at the Thistle are able to highlight “better” sites of injection to “reduce harm and make the injection safer.”

Service manager Lynn MacDonald demonstrates how to use the vein finder.

The Scottish government told CNN that the service has already delivered results in terms of public health.

“Through the ability of staff to respond quickly in the event of an overdose, the Thistle service has already saved lives,” Scottish health secretary Neil Gray said. The service, he said, is “helping to protect people against blood-borne viruses and taking used needles off the street.”

The Thistle bears little resemblance to a medical clinic. There are no fluorescent white lights, no clinical uniforms, and no sterile white rooms. Even the language has been reimagined: users aren’t brought into “interview rooms,” but welcomed into “chat rooms.”

The space itself is soft and deliberate, – furnished with books, jigsaws, warm lighting and a café-style area where people can sit, drink tea, shower, or have their clothes washed.

“The whole service is just designed to that ethos of treating people with a bit of dignity, a bit of respect, bringing them in, making them feel welcome,” Macdonald told CNN. “We want them to leave knowing somebody cares about them and we’re looking forward to seeing them safe and well again.”

For Margaret Montgomery, whose son Mark began using heroin at 17, the existence of the Thistle offers a degree of solace that once felt impossible.

Margaret Montgomery says her son struggled with drug addiction for 30 years.

Now in his fifties, Mark is no longer using – but it took years, and distance, to get there.

“My son went into treatment and it’s like six weeks, three months, six months. That’s not enough time. There’s no aftercare,” Montgomery told CNN.

She added that she’d asked her son whether he would have used the Thistle “all those years ago.”

“He said, ‘yes, I probably would have used it because of the other facilities that they’re offering in there.’” Mark declined to speak with CNN himself but was happy for his mother to recount his experience.

What the Thistle represents, for Montgomery, is not approval – but reprieve. “Nobody wants to think their children are taking drugs anywhere,” she said. “There must be parents that are sat out there and they’re going, ‘well thank god he’s going in there and he’s doing that in there, not in a bin shed.’”

Her support is unflinching – and practical. She is the chairperson of a family support group that was consulted about the Thistle.

“I think the Thistle’s the best thing that’s happened in Glasgow,” she told CNN.

‘Ethical and moral question’

Others see the facility not as an act of compassion, but as a quiet surrender.

Annemarie Ward, who has been in recovery for 27 years, believes that without a clear route to abstinence, harm reduction risks becoming a form of institutionalized maintenance.

“Have we given up trying to help people? Are we just trying to maintain people’s addictions now?” she told CNN.

Ward, who is from Glasgow, is the chief executive of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery UK (Favor UK), and a campaigning voice for better access and treatment choices for those seeking help with addiction.

For Ward, the danger lies not in what the Thistle does, but in what it omits: a vision of freedom from dependency. Without that, she argues, the ethics of such facilities become blurred.

Discarded paraphernalia used by drug users is pictured in Glasgow in December 2020.

“If our whole system is focused on maintaining people’s addiction and not giving them the opportunity to exit that system,” she said, “I think there’s an ethical and moral question that we need to ask.”

The Thistle is “just prolonging the agony of addiction,” she said. “If you know anybody who’s suffered in that way or loved anybody that’s suffered that way you would see how inhumane this actually is.”

But Glasgow City Council says that the facility is one strand of a broader strategy.

The council says that the Thistle does not divert “from other essential alcohol and drug services in the city,” adding that the local authority “also invests heavily in treatment and care and recovery services.”

“Comparing these interventions is not helpful,” the council said in a statement. “All services are equally important – and needed – to allow us to support people who most need them.”

The idea itself is not new.

The world’s first safer drug consumption room opened in Switzerland in 1986 -– a clinical counterpoint to street-level chaos. Since then, the model has spread across Europe, from Portugal and the Netherlands to Germany, Denmark and Spain, and beyond to Canada and New York City.

The Thistle, the UK’s first iteration, operates 365 days a year, and shares its premises with addiction services and social care teams.

The

As of June, 71.9% of drugs injected inside were cocaine, with heroin making up a further 20%. The users are overwhelmingly male. Most have been injecting for years; all are at risk.

Still, resistance remains. CNN spoke to several people in the area who were concerned about the facility’s opening and said it had encouraged more drug users to come to the area in the six months since opening.

Others, however, told CNN that they had noticed there were fewer needles and less discarded drug paraphernalia on the ground since the clinic opened.

Chief Inspector Max Shaw, of Police Scotland, told CNN that the force was “aware of long-standing issues in the area” and was “committed to reducing the harm associated with problematic substance use and addiction.” He added that officers would continue to work with local communities to address concerns.

For the nurses, doctors and support staff who work in the building, the mission remains immediate: delivering potentially life-saving support to those in need.



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German tourist found alive 12 days after she was lost in the Australian Outback

Published

14 hours ago

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July 11, 2025

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Melbourne, Australia
AP
 — 

German tourist Carolina Wilga was found alive in Australia’s remote Outback on Friday, 12 days after she went missing and a day after her abandoned van was discovered, police said.

The last known sighting of the 26-year-old backpacker, and the last day family and friends heard from her, was June 29. She was seen at a general store in the wheat farming town of Beacon, 320 kilometers (200 miles) northeast of the Western Australia state capital Perth. Beacon had a population of 123 during the 2021 census.

A member of the public found Wilga wandering on a forest trail late Friday, Western Australia Police Force Insp. Martin Glynn said.

She was in a “fragile” state but had no serious injuries and was flown to a hospital in Perth for treatment, Glynn told reporters.

“I think once we do hear her story, it will be a remarkable story,” Glynn said, adding it was a “great result” for the backpacker’s family and those involved in the search.

“You know, she’s obviously coped in some amazing conditions,” he said. “There’s a very hostile environment out there, both from flora and fauna. It’s a really, really challenging environment to cope in.”

Carolina Wilga in an undated image posted to social media by police.

The reserve where Wilga was lost covers more than 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres). The Thursday-Friday overnight temperature was 2.6 degrees Celsius (36.7 Fahrenheit) in the area with no rain.

The crew of a police helicopter spotted her van Thursday in wilderness in the Karroun Hill Nature Reserve, 36 kilometers (22 miles) north of Beacon, Glynn said.

“Very difficult country. Huge area. So it’s a miracle they’ve actually spotted the car, to be honest,” Glynn told reporters before she was found.

Ground searchers on Friday scoured a heavily wooded radius of 300 meters (1,000 feet) beyond the van. Police assume Wilga’s van, a 1995 Mitsubishi Delica Star Wagon, became stuck in mud on the day she left Beacon, Glynn said.

The van, which has solar panels and reserves of drinking water, had recovery boards under its rear wheels that are used to give vehicles traction when they are stuck.

Police believed Wilga became lost and was not the victim of crime.

Australian serial killer Ivan Milat, who died in prison in 2019, notoriously kidnapped and murdered seven backpackers from 1989 to 1992, including three Germans, two Britons and two Australians.



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Ukrainian doctor drives a child’s heart through Russian attack to perform a life-saving transplant

Published

16 hours ago

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July 11, 2025

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CNN
 — 

Kyiv was burning as Dr. Borys Todurov sped through the city in an ambulance, undeterred by the deep thuds of explosions and the terrifying sounds of Russian drones flying overhead.

He was determined to deliver his precious cargo: a human heart.

Todurov’s patient – a child – was seriously ill in a hospital. He had hours to act.

The child has been living with a heart disease for several years, but her condition deteriorated earlier this week and Todurov knew a new heart was her only chance.

So when one became available from a child donor on the opposite side of the city, he didn’t wait for the Russians to stop attacking.

Russia has ramped up its aerial attacks against Ukraine in recent weeks. It fired more than 400 drones and 18 missiles, including eight ballistic and six cruise missiles overnight into Thursday.

As the Ukrainian authorities called on people to hide in bomb shelters and basements, Todurov and his staff made the 10-mile drive from the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in western Kyiv to the city’s Heart Institute on the eastern bank of the river while missiles and drones were flying around.

While the Ukrainian Air Force managed to shoot down or disable the vast majority of the drones and missiles, two people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack on Thursday.

Thursday’s mass attack on Kyiv was just the latest in a deadly string of Russian assaults. Just the day before, Moscow launched more than 700 drones – a new record – against Ukraine on a single night.

Todurov, the director of the Heart Institute, and his team worked non-stop throughout the two nights of attacks.

After performing a heart surgery at the institute on Wednesday, he traveled across the city to Okhmatdyt where he removed the heart from the body of the donor.

He then personally escorted the organ across the city.

Crossing the Dnipro by a bridge is extremely dangerous during an attack on Kyiv, because vehicles are exposed and Ukrainian air defences target Russian drones and missiles when they are above the river to minimise the impact from falling debris.

A video taken during the frantic drive shows a large fire burning near the road as Todurov drives on. “We’re carrying a heart,” he says calmly.

The Russian attack on the capital was still underway when Todurov got into the operating theater at the Heart Institute, heading a large medical team and transplanting the heart into the body of his patient.

In a stunning moment captured on camera and shared with CNN, the new heart is seen beating inside the patient’s chest, just hours after it was driven through Kyiv as Russian drones and missiles rained down on the city.

“The heart is working, and the pressure is stable. We hope that … (the patient) will recover and live a long and full life,” the doctor said.

The Ukrainian Transplant Coordination Centre said in a statement that the donor was a four-year-old girl who was declared brain-dead by a medical council after suffering serious injuries.

The girl’s mother, herself a medical worker, agreed to have her daughter’s organs donated.

And so, just as Todurov was transplanting the girl’s heart into his patient’s body at the Heart Institute, her kidneys were being transplanted to a 14-year-old boy and her liver to a 16-year-old girl, the center said. The two other patients were at the Okhmatdyt hospital, so no transport was required to get the organs to them.

The coordination center said that two of the three recipients were in critical condition and had they not received the transplants, they would have just days or weeks to live.

“May the little donor rest in peace. Our condolences to her family and gratitude for their difficult but important decision,” the center said.



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