Donald Trump says it’s up to Volodymyr Zelensky to end the war with Russia, and that he could do so “almost immediately” by agreeing not to join Nato and ceding Crimea to Moscow. The Ukrainian president and European leaders, including Keir Starmer, will use today’s talks at the White House to push for security guarantees for Kyiv. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis rallied in central Tel Aviv last night to demand the government brings back the hostages and ends the war in Gaza, in one of the biggest protests since October 7. The mass gathering followed a day of nationwide demonstrations and a general strike calling for the government to halt its military campaign. “Skibidi”, “tradwife”, and “delulu” are among the new TikTok-generation words making it into this year’s Cambridge Dictionary. A tradwife is an influencer celebrating traditional family values, delulu means “delusional”, while “skibidi” is defined as: “a word that can have different meanings such as ‘cool’ or ‘bad’, or can be used with no real meaning as a joke”.

The disturbing parallels with Vietnam

There is a precedent for Donald Trump’s “clumsy and cynical” attempts to end the war in Ukraine, says Max Hastings in The Times: America’s efforts to leave Vietnam half a century ago. Just as Volodymyr Zelensky was cut out of Trump’s talks with Putin in Anchorage on Friday, no South Vietnamese was invited to Lyndon Johnson’s talks with Hanoi in Paris, 1968. And when, in 1972, Henry Kissinger finally negotiated terms with the North Vietnamese, he told then-president Richard Nixon that while the deal could be sold as “peace”, it would allow Hanoi to seize the South after a decent interval. “If we settle it, say, this October,” he told Nixon, “by January ’74, no one will give a damn.” Nixon cracked out the Lafite Rothschild 1957, and two years later I was among the unhappy witnesses as Hanoi’s army swept south to Saigon.

Matthew Whitaker, US ambassador to Nato, told CNN last week that “no big chunks” of Ukraine would be “just given” to Russia that haven’t been “fought for or earned on the battlefield”. That remark should horrify every advocate of freedom, every opponent of “permitting brute force to determine outcomes”. In Vietnam, Nixon finally bullied the South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to accept the faulty peace deal at a meeting in which he shouted “Without aid, you’re finished! Understand?” That nasty conversation in the Oval Office has an unmistakable “contemporary resonance”. Without US aid, “Ukraine, too, is finished”. The gossip in Washington is that on the plane to Anchorage a triumphalist Putin and his cronies ate chicken Kyiv. “It will be a historic tragedy if Trump proves to have served it to them.”

🇷🇺🤐 One of the many ways we let down Ukraine is in our “grievous misuse of language”, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. Calling Putin a “president” grants him the legitimacy of a representative leader “presiding” over a parliament or congress. Putin isn’t a “president” any more than Kim Jong-un is. He is a “parasite” who has “engorged himself on the nation”, stealing an estimated £200bn, and gaining luxuries that would have stunned not just the Tsars, but even the likes of Saddam Hussein. So let’s stop calling him president. Instead, I suggest “criminal”, “tyrant” or “coward”.