Attention to the Unseen

  James O’Brien is joined by Sir Bill Browder, an anti-corruption campaigner who is the head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign, and chief executive of the finance company Hermitage Capital. Sir Bill Browder offers hope on Ukraine’s bleak situation following Donald Trump’s comments about Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The US president took aim at Zelenskyy after he accused Trump of “helping Putin to come out of isolation” by working with him. On Wednesday evening, Number Ten released a statement expressing…

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Julian Borger writes: All the effort Kyiv had expended in wooing the White House, combining flattery with bribery and a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, imploded in minutes when Volodymyr Zelenskyy broke the fundamental rule of the new global reality: he told the truth about Donald Trump. All America’s allies, the great majority of Republican leaders who have bowed to him, and a good number of his own cabinet, know full well that Trump is trapped in a disinformation bubble,…

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Maha Yahya writes: Iran, Israel, the United States, and the Arab Gulf countries have all spent decades trying to shape the region to their liking without addressing the root causes of conflict, and they have repeatedly failed. They have sought security over peace and ended up with neither. And yet their current plans are strikingly similar, at least in spirit, to past efforts. All these countries are committing again to visions of a new regional order in which reconstruction takes…

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NBC News reports: As the Trump administration begins preliminary talks with Russian officials about ending the war in Ukraine, intelligence from the United States and close allies shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wants to control all of Ukraine, according to four Western intelligence officials and two U.S. congressional officials. “We have zero intelligence that Putin is interested in a real peace deal right now,” one of the congressional officials said. Putin is sending representatives to Saudi Arabia for…

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Middle East Eye reports: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Turkey and European countries must be involved in negotiations and security guarantees to end the war with Russia, during a visit to Ankara on Tuesday. “Turkey, the UK and the European Union, along with the US, should be included in the talks, as well as in the security guarantees,” Zelensky said during a press briefing with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The negotiations must be fair, and this can only…

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The Guardian reports: Top US and Russian officials have agreed to continue planning an end to the Ukraine war and to pursue closer cooperation amid concerns in Kyiv and across Europe that Donald Trump could push for a settlement favouring Vladimir Putin. After the talks at Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, the most extensive negotiations between the two countries in three years, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the two sides had agreed to create a high-level team to…

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Middle East Eye reports: Egypt and Jordan believe they have successfully dissuaded US President Donald Trump from backing a forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and that the US has gotten behind an Egyptian post-war plan for the enclave, a senior Egyptian official told Middle East Eye. “This will be an Egyptian plan adopted and supported by the Arabs,” the official said. “That is what Trump has agreed to.” The Egyptian official, speaking to MEE on the condition of anonymity…

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Simon Tisdall writes: In Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, Alden Pyle, a CIA agent, reckons he has all the answers to conflict in colonial era Vietnam. Pyle’s ignorance, arrogance and dangerous scheming, intended to bring peace, result instead in the deaths of many innocents and ultimately his own. In today’s too-real, nonfiction world, Donald Trump is Pyle. Except he’s The Noisy American. He thinks he’s a great deal-maker. He never stops trumpeting his brilliance. Yet his North Korea “deal of the century”…

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Hoda Matar reports: In the small Syrian village of al-Hamidia, some 50 kilometers southwest of Damascus, most homes, like that of sheep herder Abu Mo’ath, are built from black basalt stone, a hallmark of the region’s volcanic terrain. The air carries a scent of lavender and sage across the secluded rural landscape. But over the past two months, life in the village has come to be defined by military occupation, with Israeli tanks and troops entrenching their presence on newly…

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Julia Davis reports: U.S. President Donald J. Trump stunned the world by offering unprecedented concessions to Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday—seemingly without getting anything in return. Before the formal peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin even started, Trump and members of his administration dismissed the idea that Ukraine could reclaim its territories that Russia currently occupies, slammed the door shut for Kyiv’s hope of NATO membership, and refused to acknowledge Ukraine as an equal member…

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Joshua Leifer writes: Daniella Weiss, the 79-year-old leader of the far-right settler organization Nachala, stepped out of her white Mitsubishi SUV and into the parking lot of the Sderot train station, a mere three kilometers from the Gaza Strip. It was Dec. 26, the second night of Hanukkah, and for weeks Nachala had been aggressively promoting a celebratory “procession to Gaza” and candle-lighting ceremony in a closed military zone by the border. The event was to be the next step…

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Jesse Rosenfeld reports: The circling drones buzz overhead as explosions echo. Bursts of gunfire between Israeli soldiers and fighters from the Palestinian refugee camp ring out. Israeli military jeeps patrol bulldozed roads outside the government hospital. Displaced camp resident, 29 year-old Noureddine Jarbou, sits in the courtyard watching the unending Israeli assault, his catheter bag attached to the side of his wheelchair. Paralyzed from the waist down during an Israeli raid on the camp three years ago and then taken…

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Middle East Eye reports: The architect of Israel’s so-called Generals’ Plan to depopulate northern Gaza has described the country’s war in the enclave as an “absolute failure”. The original plan, also known as the Eiland Plan after its creator Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, was seen by Palestinians and rights groups as part of a long-term project of ethnic cleansing that would result in the restablishment of Jewish settlements in…

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