“The talks have not broken down, but they have not really yielded any results.” Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid explains what happened—and what didn’t—at the third round of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.
UEFA will “investigate allegations of discriminatory behaviour” after Real Madrid forward Vinicius Junior accused Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni of racially abusing him during a Champions League match in Lisbon.
Tuesday’s first leg of the knockout phase playoff tie was stopped for more than 10 minutes after Vinicius complained to French referee Francois Letexier about the alleged abuse following a confrontation between him and Prestianni.
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That came just moments after Brazil international Vinicius scored the only goal in a 1-0 win before picking up a yellow card after celebrating in front of the home crowd at the Estadio da Luz.
UEFA, the sport’s governing body in Europe, confirmed its investigation on Wednesday.
After arguing with Prestianni, Vinicius ran over to the referee and told him that he had been called “mono”, the Spanish word for monkey, by the Argentinian midfielder.
The 20-year-old Prestianni, who covered his mouth with his shirt as he appeared to say something to Vinicius, denies racially abusing the Real Madrid star.
Real’s England full-back Trent Alexander-Arnold said the incident had left a sour taste in the mouth.
“It’s disgusting. What’s happened tonight is a disgrace for football. It’s ruined the night for the team,” he said.
Real forward Kylian Mbappe called on Prestianni to be banned.
“We cannot accept there’s a player playing in Europe’s best competition and behaving like this,” the France captain told reporters.
“This guy doesn’t deserve to play in the Champions League again.”
Benfica coach Jose Mourinho hit out at Vinicius for inciting Benfica’s players and fans with his celebration.
“When you score a goal like that, you celebrate in a respectful way,” said the Portuguese.
British football anti-discrimination body Kick It Out criticised Mourinho’s reaction and accused him of “gaslighting”.
“When anyone reports discrimination in football, or anywhere, the first priority is that they are listened to and feel supported,” it said in a statement.
“Focusing on Vinicius Jr’s goal celebration or the history of the club, instead of acknowledging the report, is a form of gaslighting.
One week ahead of the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, United States-led peace talks in Geneva ended for the day earlier than scheduled on Wednesday.
The talks, which are being mediated by Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, are just the latest of a number of attempts to end the deadliest fighting in Europe since World War II – and none have reached a breakthrough.
During his presidential campaign in 2024, Trump claimed repeatedly that he would broker a ceasefire in Ukraine within “24 hours”. However, he has been unable to fulfil this promise.
Here is a timeline of the mediation efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, which has killed more than a million people, as it heads towards its fifth year.
The first ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine took place just four days after Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The meeting lasted about five hours, and featured high-level officials, but with diametrically opposing goals. Nothing came of their talks.
Then, the two sides held three rounds of direct talks in Belarus, ending on March 7, but, again, nothing was agreed.
On March 10, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia, Dmytro Kuleba and Sergey Lavrov, met for the first time since the war started, on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkiye.
A second meeting between senior leaders in Istanbul towards the end of the month failed to secure a ceasefire.
Then, the withdrawal of Russian forces in early April from parts of Ukraine revealed evidence of massacres committed against the Ukrainian civilian population in Bucha and Irpin near Kyiv, in northern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this would make negotiations much more difficult, but that it was necessary to persist with the dialogue. Russian President Vladimir Putin later declared the negotiations were at a “dead end” as a result of Ukraine’s allegations of war crimes.
In July 2022, the Black Sea Grain Initiative was signed by Ukraine and Russia with Turkiye and the United Nations in Istanbul. It was the most significant diplomatic breakthrough for the first year of the war.
The agreement aimed to prevent a global food crisis by designating a safe maritime humanitarian corridor through the Black Sea for cargoes of millions of tons of grain stuck in Ukrainian ports.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy presented a 10-point peace proposal at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Indonesia, within which he called for Russia’s withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory as well as measures to ensure radiation and nuclear safety, food security, and protection for Ukraine’s grain exports.
He also demanded energy security and the release of all Ukrainian prisoners and deportees, including war prisoners and children deported to Russia.
Russia rejected Zelenskyy’s peace proposal, reiterating that it would not give up any territory it had taken by force, which stood at about one-fifth of Ukraine by then.
China proposed a 12-point peace plan calling for a ceasefire and the end of “unilateral sanctions” that had been imposed by Western nations on Russia. Beijing urged both sides to resume talks on the basis that “the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld”.
The proposal was criticised by Western allies of Kyiv for not acknowledging “Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty”.
In June 2023, a high-level delegation of African leaders, led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and including the presidents of Senegal and Zambia, visited both Kyiv and St Petersburg to present a 10-point plan focusing on de-escalation and grain exports.
Analysts said it was driven largely by the war’s impact on African food security and fertiliser prices.
But Ukrainian President Zelenskyy rejected the call for “de-escalation”, arguing that a ceasefire without a Russian withdrawal would simply “freeze” the war.
The following month, President Putin pulled Russia out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
Saudi Arabia hosted representatives from 40 countries to discuss Zelenskyy’s “Peace Formula”, but no final agreement or joint statement was reached.
In a major surprise, Beijing sent its special envoy, Li Hui, to the talks. But Russia was not invited, and the Kremlin said the efforts would fail.
The June 2024 Summit on Peace in Ukraine, held at Switzerland’s Burgenstock resort, brought together more than 90 nations to discuss a framework for ending the conflict in Ukraine. The summit focused on nuclear safety, food security and prisoner exchanges, though Russia was not invited, and several nations, including India and Saudi Arabia, did not sign the final joint communique.
A month after beginning his second term as US president, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he held a long phone call with his Russian counterpart, Putin, in a bid to restart direct negotiations aimed at ending the war.
On February 18, delegations from Washington and the Kremlin, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, met in Saudi Arabia.
They laid the groundwork for future negotiations, but the talks raised significant concerns in Kyiv and Brussels, as both Ukraine and the European Union had been sidelined from the meeting.
Ten days later, on February 28, there came a saturation point at the White House.
In one of the most confrontational moments in modern diplomacy, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated President Zelenskyy in a televised meeting in the Oval Office.
Zelenskyy – called out for not wearing a suit and not expressing enough gratitude to the US – found himself cornered.
Trump envoy Steve Witkoff travelled to Moscow to meet Putin on August 6. It was his third trip to Moscow and came amid renewed Western threats of sanctions on Russian oil exports and US threats of “secondary” trade tariffs.
Trump said afterwards that the meeting was “highly productive” and that “everyone agrees this war must come to a close”. Nothing more concrete came out of this meeting, however.
Trump dropped his sanctions threat and met Putin in person on August 15, 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.
But no deal was reached.
Trump hosted Zelenskyy and other European leaders in Washington and said he would ask Putin to agree to a trilateral summit.
But nothing came out of this visit, either.
In November 2025, the Geneva talks became a flashpoint for Western unity, as the Trump administration’s controversial 28-point plan leaked to the press, reportedly involving a cap on Ukraine’s military and a freeze on NATO membership. It also suggested that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia.
Reportedly authored by US envoy Witkoff along with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, the draft sparked accusations that the US was drafting a “capitulation” for Ukraine.
No deal was reached after revisions were made to the draft proposal.
On December 14 and 15 last year, President Zelenskyy travelled to Berlin to meet US envoys Witkoff and Kushner, alongside a powerful group of European leaders, including Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and France’s President Emmanuel Macron.
Following this, US negotiators optimistically claimed that 90 percent of the issues between the two sides had been resolved.
Then, later in the month, Witkoff and Kushner hosted another session of talks in Miami, Florida in the US. But the issues around sovereignty over Ukraine’s Donbas region and the exact line of demarcation proved impossible to bridge.
And no deal was reached.
On January 23, high-level delegations from the US, Ukraine and Russia sat face to face to hold trilateral talks for the first time since the 2022 invasion.
Hosted at the Al Shati Palace in Abu Dhabi, talks were mediated by the United Arab Emirates.
Another round of talks was held on February 4, reaching an agreement on a major prisoner exchange but leaving key political and security issues unresolved.
The delegations agreed to exchange 314 prisoners of war – 157 each – the first such swap in five months.
Talks in Geneva are currently under way.
Japan’s Sanae Takaichi was formally reappointed as prime minister by Emperor Naruhito, ten days after her Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide victory in a snap election. Ministers who belonged to her cabinet were also reappointed to their positions.
Guatemala announced last week that it will begin phasing out its three-decade-old programme, under which Cuban doctors work in its country to fill the gap in the country’s healthcare system.
Communist-ruled Cuba, under heavy United States sanctions, has been earning billions of dollars each year by leasing thousands of members of its “white coat army” to countries around the world, especially in Latin America. Havana has used its medical missions worldwide as a tool for international diplomacy.
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So why are some countries withdrawing from the programme that helps the host countries?
Guatemala’s health ministry said in a statement that it would begin a “gradual termination” over this year.
“The phased withdrawal of the Cuban Medical Brigade stems from an analysis of the mission’s completion of its cycles,” the statement, originally in Spanish, said on February 13.
The statement added that the Cuban medical mission was meant to support Guatemala through the 1998 Hurricane Mitch, which devastated parts of Central America, overwhelmed local hospitals and left rural communities with almost no access to medical care.
“The Ministry of Health is developing a phased strategic replacement plan that includes hiring national personnel, strengthening incentives for hard-to-reach positions, strategic redistribution of human resources, and specialized technical support,” the statement said.
The Cuban mission in Guatemala comprises 412 medical workers, including 333 doctors.
The Central American country’s decision comes amid growing pressure from the United States, which wants to stop Cuban doctors from serving abroad.
The move aims to starve Cuba of much-needed revenue as a major share of the incomes earned by doctors goes to government coffers. Cuba has been facing severe power, food and medical shortages amid an oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration since January.
Guatemala is just one country which benefits from Cuban medical missions.
Over the past decades, Cuba has sent medical missions around the world, from Latin America to Africa and beyond. It began sending these missions shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution brought Fidel Castro to power.
Castro’s communist government reversed many of the pro-business policies of Fulgencio Batista, the dictator backed by the US. The revolution ruptured ties between the two countries, with the US spy agency CIA trying several times unsuccessfully to topple Castro’s government.
Guatemala has moved closer to the US since the election of Bernardo Arevalo as the president in January 2024. He has cooperated with US President Donald Trump’s administration. Last year, Guatemala agreed to ramp up the number of deportation flights it receives from the US. The US has deported thousands of immigrants without following due process to third countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador, which are headed by pro-Trump leaders.
In November 2018, shortly after Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro as president, Cuba announced its withdrawal from the country’s Cuba “Mais Medicos” (More Doctors) programme. Bolsonaro, who is known as Brazil’s Trump, had criticised the medical mission, deeming it “slave labour”. Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence after he was convicted in September 2025 of plotting to stage a coup in order to retain power after his defeat in the 2022 presidential election.
The US has deemed Cuba’s foreign medical missions a form of “forced labour” and human trafficking, without any evidence, and has a goal of restricting the Cuban government’s access to its largest source of foreign income.
US efforts to curb Cuba’s medical missions are not new. Just last year, Washington imposed visa restrictions aimed at discouraging foreign governments from entering into medical cooperation agreements with Cuba.
In February last year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the US would restrict visas targeting “forced labor linked to the Cuban labor export program”.
“This expanded policy applies to current or former Cuban government officials, and other individuals, including foreign government officials, who are believed to be responsible for, or involved in, the Cuban labor export program, particularly Cuba’s overseas medical missions,” a statement on the US State Department’s website said.
Rubio, who is of Cuban origin, has been a vocal critic of Havana, and has pushed US policies in Latin America, including the military operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3. Under Trump, Washington has pushed its focus on Latin America as part of its Western Hemisphere pivot, which seeks to restore Washington’s preeminence in the region.
Since Maduro’s abduction, the US focus has turned towards Cuba. Senior US officials, particularly Rubio, hinted that Havana could be the next target of Washington’s pressure campaign.
The US, in effect, cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba as part of a new oil blockade. Havana has faced sweeping US sanctions for decades, and Cuba has since 2000 increasingly relied on Venezuelan oil provided as part of a deal struck with Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
The blockade has caused a fuel shortage and, in turn, a severe energy crisis in Cuba. President Miguel Diaz-Canel has imposed harsh emergency restrictions as a response.
This has renewed US pressure on countries to phase out Cuban medical missions.
More than 24,000 Cuban doctors are working in 56 countries worldwide. This includes Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Mexico; Africa, including Angola, Mozambique, Algeria; and the Middle East, including Qatar.
There have been occasional deployments in other countries. For instance, Italy received Cuban doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic to help overwhelmed hospitals in some of its hardest-hit regions.
Cuban doctors are crucial for Caribbean countries. They fill a significant gap in medical care amid a lack of trained medical professionals.
Caribbean countries hit back in March 2025 against the US threats to restrict visas. “We could not get through the pandemic without the Cuban nurses and the Cuban doctors,” Barbados’s Prime Minister Mia Mottley said in a speech to the parliament.
“Out of the blue now, we have been called human traffickers because we hire technical people who we pay top dollar,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Keith Rowley said back then, adding that he was prepared to lose his US visa.
“If the Cubans are not there, we may not be able to run the service,” Saint Vincent and the Grenadines then-Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said. “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die.”
In August 2025, the US announced that it was revoking the visas of Brazilian, African and Caribbean officials over their ties to Cuba’s programme that sends doctors abroad.
It named Brazilian Ministry of Health officials, Mozart Julio Tabosa Sales and Alberto Kleiman, who had their visas revoked for working on Brazil’s Mais Medicos, or “More Doctors” programme, which was created in 2013.
Mikaela Shiffrin won Olympic slalom gold on Wednesday to end her eight-year Winter Games medal drought and bring some solace to the US ski team.
Shiffrin claimed the third Olympic title of her career, and her first since giant slalom gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, with a rapid combined time of 1min 39.10sec.
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The 30-year-old already had a lead of 0.82sec after a first run she said she “nailed” in glorious conditions, and that handy cushion enabled her to cruise to victory.
She finished a whopping 1.50sec ahead of world champion Camille Rast, who took the first medal of these games for the Swiss women’s ski team.
Sweden’s Anna Swenn Larsson rounded out the podium to claim the first Olympic medal of her career.
Shiffrin has banished memories of both her last Olympics in Beijing – where she failed to pick up a single medal from six races and did not even finish three – and her disappointing displays in the team combined and giant slalom in northern Italy.
She came to Cortina as a red-hot favourite to claim at least one gold due to her sensational form this season, which has taken her all-time record of World Cup wins to 108.
Shiffrin has already won the slalom title in the World Cup after coming out on top in seven of this season’s races, finishing just 0.14sec behind Rast in Kranjska Gora, the one time she did not win.
Gold is a happy ending to a difficult Olympics for both Shiffrin and the US ski team, whose games were dominated by Lindsey Vonn’s horror crash and leg break in the downhill race, which opened proceedings in Cortina.
Shiffrin’s victory is her second Olympic gold medal in the slalom and comes 12 years after she became the youngest winner of that Olympic event at the Sochi Games.
