Category World News

Diplomatic efforts intensify with Trump impatient for a deal.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that the United States is pushing for Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the Donetsk region to establish a “free economic zone” in the Kyiv-held parts of eastern Ukraine that Moscow wants to control.

Zelenskyy confirmed on Thursday that his country had presented the US with a 20-point set of counter-proposals for peace amid discussions on security guarantees with top US officials, making it clear that any territorial concessions would have to be put to a referendum in Ukraine.

“They see it as Ukrainian troops withdrawing from the Donetsk region, and the compromise is supposedly that Russian troops will not enter this part of … region. They do not know who will govern this territory,” said the Ukrainian president.

He said that Russia had referred to the proposed buffer area as a “demilitarised zone” and that the US team was describing it as an “economic free zone”.

“I believe that the people of Ukraine will answer this question. Whether through elections or a referendum, there must be a position from the people of Ukraine,” he said.

Zelenskyy is under mounting US pressure to secure a deal with Russia, with reports that US President Donald Trump wants an agreement by Christmas. The general peace plan includes the 20-point framework and separate documents on security guarantees and on rebuilding Ukraine.

The full details of the framework, which revises a US draft seen as heavily weighted in Russia’s favour, have not been released. Zelenskyy said the main issues of contention were control of the Donetsk region in the Donbas, and future governance of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is currently under Russian control.

Zelenskyy pushed back against the idea of a unilateral withdrawal of troops from the Donetsk, where Ukraine controls one-fifth of the territory. “Why doesn’t the other side of the war pull back the same distance in the other direction?” he said, adding there were “a great many questions” still unresolved.

After talks on Thursday with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and special envoy Steve Witkoff, the Ukrainian president said that security guarantees were “among the most critical elements for all subsequent steps.

The document on security guarantees would, he said, have to provide “concrete answers” on actions that would be taken if “Russia decides to launch its aggression again”.

Today, we have had a constructive and in-depth discussion with the American team on one of the three documents we are currently working on – the one on security guarantees. The U.S. was represented by Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio, Secretary Pete Hegseth @SecWar, @SteveWitkoff,… pic.twitter.com/gztUJHBOqn

‘Conflict is at our door’

On Thursday, NATO chief Mark Rutte warned that Russia could be ready to use military force against the alliance within five years, urging members to “rapidly increase defence spending and production”.

“Conflict is at our door,” he said in a speech in Berlin. “We are Russia’s next target. I fear that too many are quietly complacent. Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe that time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now.”

In other developments, Ukraine’s allies in the so-called Coalition of the Willing discussed progress on mobilising frozen Russian sovereign assets during a virtual meeting on Thursday, according to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office.

The European Commission is pushing to tap some 200 billion euros ($232bn) of Russian central bank assets immobilised in the bloc after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to provide Kyiv with much-needed funding.

The sanctions freezing the Russian funds currently require unanimous renewal twice a year, leaving them vulnerable to a veto from Hungary, the EU country closest to Russia.

But a majority of ambassadors from the European Union’s 27 nations agreed on Thursday on a way of keeping Russian funds frozen as long as required without the need for renewal every six months.

The idea, which still needs formal approval by the finance ministers meeting on Friday, is not a done deal. Belgium, which, as the home of Euroclear – the organisation holding most of the funds, fears legal or financial retribution from Moscow.

Trump has largely sought to sideline European nations from the peace process, preferring to deal directly with Moscow and Kyiv in shuttle diplomacy led by special envoy Witkoff and, lately, his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who met Rutte in Berlin, said further talks with the Americans were planned this weekend, and an international meeting on Ukraine could happen at the start of next week.

Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Audrey MacAlpine said Merz and Rutte “agreed that Ukraine was closer to a ceasefire than has ever been”.

“They also agreed that any territorial concessions to be made by Ukraine must be approved by Kyiv, and that in any peace negotiations moving forward, that European leaders must be involved,” she said.

The White House said Trump would send a representative to talks in Europe this weekend if there was a real chance of signing a peace agreement.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the US president was “extremely frustrated with both sides” and “sick of meetings just for the sake of meeting”.

Russia claims to hold ‘strategic initiative’

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to portray himself as negotiating from a position of strength, claimed on Thursday in a call with military leaders that Russian armed forces were “fully holding the strategic initiative” on the battlefield.

In 2022, Russia claimed to formally annex the Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, despite not having full control over them. Putin has said that Moscow is ready to fight on to seize the land it claims if Kyiv does not give it up.

Lieutenant General Sergei Medvedev told Putin on Thursday that troops had taken the city of Siversk in the Donetsk region, where fighting has been fierce in recent months.

The claim was denied by the Ukrainian military’s Operation Task Force East unit, which said Russia was “trying to infiltrate Siversk in small groups, taking advantage of unfavourable weather conditions, but most of these units are being destroyed on the approaches”.

The task force also said Ukrainian forces were holding the northern districts of Pokrovsk, a key former logistics hub in Donetsk that Russian commanders said came under Moscow’s control last month.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian long-range drones hit a Russian oil rig in the Caspian Sea belonging to Russian oil company Lukoil, according to a report by The Associated Press, citing an anonymous official in the Security Service of Ukraine.

The rig reportedly took four hits, halting the extraction of oil and gas from more than 20 wells, according to the official. Russian officials and Lukoil made no immediate comment.

Ukraine also launched one of its biggest drone attacks of the war overnight, halting flights in and out of all four Moscow airports for seven hours.

Zelenskyy told the Coalition of the Willing meeting that a ceasefire was needed for elections to be held in Ukraine. The leader, whose term expired last year, is facing renewed pressure from Trump to hold a vote.

Warner Bros Discovery’s future is in the spotlight amid a hostile bid by Paramount-Skydance to take over the storied media conglomerate that owns CBS, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and major movie studios, days after it agreed to a deal with streaming giant Netflix.

Paramount put in a $108bn bid, compared to Netflix’s $82.7bn. Netflix’s move came with widespread antitrust concern, with progressives like Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren saying it would limit access for consumers and filmmakers in Hollywood. The White House also said it would watch the deal with heavy scrutiny.

Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros Discovery, however, was undercut by a slew of conflicts of interest and connections to the administration of United States President Donald Trump, and accompanying concerns about freedom of expression.

Those come in addition to recent changes at CBS News, where a conservative opinion writer has been brought in as the top boss, and there is pressure on coverage critical of Trump, including by late-night show hosts.

Kushner conflict

One of the sources of funds for Paramount’s bid is Jared Kushner’s investment firm Affinity Partners, alongside financing from both Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and served in an advisory role during the first Trump administration.

“If you were teaching a class at business school on conflicts of interest, this would be Exhibit A,” Nell Minow, chair of Portland, Maine-based ValueEdge Advisors, told the Reuters news agency.

Trump on Monday told reporters that neither Paramount nor Netflix “are friends of mine” and that he had not spoken to Kushner about the deal.

However, just last week, Trump told reporters that he would be involved in the decision about whether the Warner Bros-Netflix merger was to go through.

“I’ll be involved in that decision,” Trump told reporters as he arrived at the Kennedy Center for its annual awards show.

The Kushner connection is far from the only conflict looming over the hostile takeover. Paramount is now owned and led by David Ellison, son of billionaire Larry Ellison, the Oracle cofounder and a close ally of the president.

Pressing the press

In the weeks before Paramount’s merger with Skydance, its CBS News network settled a lawsuit brought by Trump over an interview with then Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, which he claimed had been doctored.

The network described the allegations as baseless, but settled anyway for $16m. On the heels of that decision, Bill Owens, the executive producer of the show 60 Minutes that had been at the heart of Trump’s attacks, resigned. National Public Radio, citing two CBS staffers, said that Owens had “lost independence from corporate”.

Days later, late-night host Stephen Colbert, also on CBS, called the settlement a “bribe”, and soon after the company announced that The Late Show, which he has hosted since 2015, would be cancelled in 2026.

Although the show was losing money, the timing of the decision to cut it was widely viewed as political.

Paramount’s merger with Skydance was approved a few weeks later. Since then, CBS News – which the president has long accused of being unfair to him – has made decisions that, critics say, are increasingly aligned with Trump’s preferences.

Among them was the appointment of ombudsman Ken Weinstein, tasked with overseeing fairness and adjudicating bias allegations. His appointment itself has been viewed as partisan. Weinstein was once a nominee to be the ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term and has no media background.

In October, Paramount purchased The Free Press, a right-leaning publication, for $150m and installed its founder, Bari Weiss, as CBS’s editor-in-chief even though she had no prior TV experience.

“They hired an opinion columnist, Bari Weiss, to run a news network, paying enough for her services, [money they could have used] to retain plenty of the journalists they laid off. Not because running a successful Substack somehow qualifies her to manage a broadcast news giant, but because her politics are aligned with their own and, to a large degree, Trump’s,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

Since her appointment, prominent anchors and producers have resigned. Claudia Milne, who oversaw standards and practices, and John Dickerson, co-anchor of the CBS Evening News, who has been with the network since 2009, both said they were leaving, as did the show’s other anchor, Maurice DuBois.

On Wednesday, CBS News announced that Tony Dokoupil would anchor the flagship evening news programme. Dokoupil has been serving as a co-anchor for CBS Mornings and joined the network in 2016.

In August, Margaret Brennan, moderator for another prominent CBS show, Face the Nation, a Sunday public affairs programme, interviewed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The interview was edited, a standard practice given time constraints. The administration complained, and the network changed its policy.

But that directive wasn’t the case for 60 Minutes. In October, longtime CBS News talent Norah O’Donnell asked the president about his pardoning of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. In 2023, Zhao had pleaded guilty to money laundering but now had business dealings connected with the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.

The network opted not to run that part of the segment, which Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer pointed out was comparable to the very same allegation Trump made against the Harris interview of being “doctored”.

The network also cut the president’s remarks about the settlement.

“Actually, 60 Minutes paid me a lotta money. And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you, and I’m sure you’re not,” Trump said as seen in a transcript of the full 73-minute interview that was published online.

The network complied with the president’s request. It did not air that part of the interview.

The president continues pressuring the network, while simultaneously praising the new management’s apparent friendliness.

After 60 Minutes aired an interview with outgoing Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has recently become more critical of the president – Trump erupted on social media.

“My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor; it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!” he wrote on Truth Social.

‘Political manoeuvring’

Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros Discovery includes CNN, another major news network.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that David Ellison, on a trip to the White House, told the president that Paramount would make “sweeping changes” to CNN, a frequent focus of Trump’s anger, if the merger were to go through.

On Wednesday, Trump weighed in on the possible sale, saying, “I think CNN should be sold.”

On CNBC, David Ellison floated the idea of merging the networks and their respective newsgathering operations.

“We want to build a scaled news service that is basically, fundamentally, in the trust business, that is in the truth business, and that speaks to the 70 percent of Americans that are in the middle,” Ellison told the network’s David Faber.

But media experts are wary of such a move.

“It’s fair to say that a Netflix purchase of Warner Brothers would raise legitimate antitrust questions. However, the alleged political manoeuvring by Paramount to bring CNN and CBS under the same corporate roof – with implicit pledges to make both outlets’ news coverage more friendly to this administration – is even more concerning,” Rodney Benson, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, told Al Jazeera.

“This would constitute a dramatic increase in the concentration of news media under the control of a single owner with close ties to the party in power. It’s a choice between two bad options, but as currently structured, a Paramount purchase would be objectively worse for American democracy and freedom of the press.”

The Guardian also reported that Larry Ellison even floated cutting anchors critical of the president, including Erin Burnett, who hosts a primetime show on the cable network. The elder Ellison is not directly involved with Paramount-Skydance.

“Throwing out the credibility of CNN and other WBD [Warner Bros Discovery] holdings might benefit the Ellisons in their efforts to curry favour with Trump, but it’s not going to benefit anyone else, including shareholders, in the long run,” Stern added.

Neither Paramount-Skydance nor Warner Bros responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

If Netflix ends up as the buyer instead, CNN would not face similar concerns. The focus would shift to the merger’s potential impact on the film and TV production industry, particularly fears that it could limit competition.