Category World News

On Tuesday, top US and Russian diplomats met in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to discuss ways to end the conflict in Ukraine and reestablish damaged diplomatic ties between the two countries.

The discussions marked Washington and Moscow’s first high-level communication since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when their bilateral ties had reached their lowest point.

What can we expect from the Riyadh talks next, and what are the key lessons learned?

US and Russian establishment of negotiating teams to put an end to the conflict

Russia and the United States have come to terms with creating a high-level team to work together to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, which was reportedly a new cold war between Moscow and US and its NATO allies in Europe.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was accompanied by Moscow’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and special Middle Eastern envoy Steve Witkoff, were present.

Rubio explained to the AP news agency that both Russia and the US would form high-level teams under the direction of supporting Ukraine’s peace talks.

Rubio added that ending the conflict in Ukraine could give the US and Russia “hopefully” the opportunity to work together on issues of mutual interest, which “hopefully will benefit the world and also improve our relations over the long term.”

Due to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s resignation as president of Ukraine, both parties have pledged to keep the talks moving forward. According to Zellenskyy, who lost nearly 20% of its territory to Russia, he would not accept any agreement being made with it.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke in Russian during the week-long meeting. Trump’s overture to Putin has upended Washington’s policy on Ukraine, ending three years of policy focused on isolating Moscow.

After the talks in Riyadh, which were the first high-level discussions since the then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Lavrov in 2022 in Geneva, Trump said on Tuesday that he was “much more confident” in the Ukraine peace deal.

“Russia wants to do something”, Trump said in Florida. He dismissed Kyiv’s concern about being excluded from the meeting and said the two countries should have spoken sooner.

“I think I have the power to end this war”, he said.

Washington and Moscow to mend their relationship

The two parties came to an end to their diplomatic and economic ties after the Ukraine war broke out nearly three years ago during the talks held at Riyadh’s Diriyah Palace.

According to Lavrov, the two parties agreed to expedite the appointment of new ambassadors, adding that senior diplomats from the two nations would meet soon to discuss issues like “lowering artificial barriers to the work of the US and Russian embassies and other missions.”

Both nations have fired their diplomats, and Russia has been subjected to numerous economic sanctions by the US and its Western allies. Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the diplomatic rift between the US and Russia grew.

Rubio remarked that putting an end to the conflict cannot occur “unless there is at least some normalcy in the way our diplomatic missions operate in Moscow and Washington, DC.”

The US and its allies imposed at least 21, 692 sanctions on Russia since the 2022 invasion. As the Biden administration tried to isolate Russia globally, many US businesses resigned.

In 2022, Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by about 2.1 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Moscow is already anticipating US companies’ return.

According to state-owned Russian news agency TASS on Wednesday, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Moscow wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, expects “a number of American companies to return to the Russian market in the second quarter of 2025.”

These American businesses lost $324 billion as a result, Dmitriev claimed to Reuters.

Europe and Ukraine did not discuss the table.

Representatives from Ukraine and NATO allies did not attend the table of talks, with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy rejecting any concessions made to Russia on Wednesday.

Both Rubio as well as Lavrov, however, have said “concessions” have to be made by “all sides” to bring an end to the conflict.

Zelenskyy flew to Ankara to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the day after US diplomats were in face-to-face meetings with their Russian counterparts.

“The Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia came as a surprise to us, just as it did to many others. To be honest, I don’t really care. Our partners should take some time to reflect on us, Zelenskyy said on Tuesday at a press conference.

Referring to Ukraine’s concerns about being left out of the talks, Trump said on Tuesday: “Well, you’ve been there for three years, you should have ended it”.

Trump’s demand for Ukraine to hold elections made him question Zelenskyy’s leadership legitimacy. Without providing any proof, the US president claimed Zelenskyy’s approval rating was only 4 percent.

At a news conference in Kyiv on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said that Trump was “living in a disinformation space” created by Russia.

Russian leaders in Europe have also expressed their concerns as a result of Trump’s outreach to Moscow, which they perceive as their greatest security threat.

Rubio stated on Tuesday that “we will engage and consult with Ukraine, our partners in Europe, and others.” But ultimately, the Russian side will be indispensable to this effort”.

In the event of a peace deal, Ukraine and other European countries have demanded security from Russian aggression. Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, who arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday, said, “We understand the need for security guarantees”.

The Trump administration claims that the US has other priorities, such as border security, and that Europe should take the lead in providing security guarantees to Ukraine.

Trump also wants defense spending to equal 5% of GDP in Europe. At least 2 percent of their GDP is pledged by NATO member states in 2014. This is higher than that. Now, only 23 of the 32 members have upheld this pledge.

Diplomatic coup for Russia

Russia has a chance to benefit from the diplomatic dialogue, which would include a price cap on Russian oil exports. Trump has also backed Moscow’s return to the G7 – the club of wealthy nations.

On Wednesday, the Ukrainian leader claimed that the US had helped put an end to Moscow’s isolation around the world.

“This isn’t positive for Ukraine. At a news conference on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said, in contrast to Trump, that they are bringing Putin out of isolation, and that the Russians are content because the discussion centers on them.

At the talks, Russia did not offer concessions, and deemed the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine “completely unacceptable”.

Last week, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Ukraine’s accession into NATO is “unrealistic”.

Lavrov, who praised Trump, said on Wednesday that “he is the first, and thus far, in my opinion, the only Western leader to publicly and vocally assert that one of the previous administration’s impudent line was to join NATO.”

No date set for a Trump-Putin summit

Rubio claimed that Washington and Moscow were unable to choose a Trump and Putin date after the meeting with reporters. According to Walz, the meeting might take place in the near future.

According to Russian media reports, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said on Wednesday that Trump and Putin could meet this month.

Trump made the suggestion that he might meet Putin before the end of this month during a press conference held on Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Not just one campus is punishing student protesters harshly, but also the University of Chicago.

At the University of Minnesota, seven students face up to two-and-a-half years of suspension and $5, 000 in alleged damages, months after being arrested during an October protest.

After a 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok personality was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last year, the students had renamed the campus building “Halimy Hall.”

In January, 11 students at New York University were issued one-year suspensions after they staged a nonviolent sit-in at a library last December.

Two tenured faculty members have also been designated “personae non gratae” by the university for joining the sit-in, which prevents them from using certain school buildings.

Following last year’s encampments, universities have rushed to pass stricter regulations for campus protests, including time limits on demonstrations and restrictions on the use of tents.

Rifqa Falaneh, a fellow at Palestine Legal, an advocacy group defending pro-Palestine speech, says the cumulative effect has been a silencing of the protests.

According to Falaneh, “There are so many people who claim the protests have stopped,” but I would say students are reacting to the administration’s policies.

“We’re seeing so many new policies put in place, and so many different limitations on speaking on campuses,” said one researcher.

However, the highest levels of government have been putting pressure on universities to halt campus protests.

In January, President Donald Trump, a Republican, was sworn in for a second term. Less than two weeks later, on January 29, he signed an executive order denouncing an “unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence” on US campuses.

In an accompanying fact sheet, Trump pledged to take “immediate action” to “investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities”, including by cancelling student visas.

“Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you”, Trump said, addressing the foreign students involved in the protests. I’ll also immediately revoke all Hamas sympathisers’ student visas on college campuses, which have experienced unprecedented radicalism.

In order to assist students in the confusing mess of university policies and procedures that have recently been implemented, Palestine Legal has begun to train lawyers who volunteer.

Falaneh points out that Trump’s policies have already been muted due to the high stakes and severe punishments, with few campus demonstrations erupting against his immigration crackdown or his attacks on the US educational system.

The Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center was instructed by US President Donald Trump in an executive memorandum on January 29. Trump asserted before the signing that the 30, 000 beds needed to “eradicate the scourge of migrant crime” and that the US did not “trust” them and that they would not seek to repatriate them if deported.

This came amid an onslaught of anti-migrant executive orders, including the Laken Riley Act, requiring the Department of Homeland Security to detain non-US nationals arrested, but not necessarily found guilty, for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting, thereby denying many migrants access to due process.

These policies are extreme, and they do not apply to Trump or the US, despite their apparent depiction of the current authoritarian era. Nor are they without historical precedent.

The US, the UK, and Australia have been conducting extensive research into offshore detention and the expansion of domestic immigration. Tracing how these policies have evolved together, circulated across all three countries, coming in and out of favour, reveals how the roots of this current authoritarian moment in world politics go deeper than any one state, party, or political perspective. Instead, their roots are in racist, carceral violence that is perpetuated across nation-state lines.

With the establishment of a detention facility in Fort Allen, Puerto Rico and the introduction of “interdiction” laws to stop mostly Haitian asylum seekers from entering the US at sea, the US experimented with offshore detention started in the 1980s. In the 1990s, these policies were expanded with the naval base situated on Guantánamo Bay, used to detain 36, 000 Haitian and 20, 000 Cuban people seeking asylum between 1991 and 1996.

The Australian government introduced the so-called Pacific Solution in 2001, which included Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru into a sophisticated offshore detention structure. The Pacific Solution continues to exist today and was widely accepted by British governments as a model to follow. However, these centers became tarred by reports of human rights violations and extensive evidence of abuse and cruelty.

In order to create a plan to deport people seeking asylum in Rwanda, the previous Conservative cabinet drew directly from Australia’s offshore policy. Although Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the 2024 election, he has also looked to Italy’s offshoring in Albania as a potential model.

Even when political upheavals demand a shift away from incarcerating people offshore, the offshore infrastructure and related deterrent logic persist in all of these nations. Thus, when the Pacific Solution’s initial iteration was ended in 2007, physical spaces and the legal framework of offshoring remained intact, enabling a policy that could be easily revived and strengthened with the Pacific Solution 2.0 in 2012.

The Australian government never terminated their corporate contracts when the Nauru detention center was evacuated in 2023, allowing the facility to be repopulated with people seeking asylum only months later.

Detainees are excluded from regular rights and protections by law and, as a result, are largely protected from the support of community and advocacy networks. The growing criminalization of migrants reflects this on a national level.

By creating new migration-related crimes, mandating the detention and deportation of noncitizens with criminal convictions, and removing avenues for appeal or representation, states have constructed an increasingly illegalised population without rights. In addition, they debate migration and criminality in public discourse.

This makes politicians and one another in a political conflict by promoting deterrence through ever-expanding detention as the only practical option, especially during election campaigns.

This is clearly demonstrated by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in the US. Passed in the run-up to a presidential election, IIRIRA expanded the definition of “aggravated felon” and the scope of deportable noncitizens (including retroactively). The Act significantly increased detention and deportation rates, as well as the militarisation of the US-Mexico border, and established a close collaboration between immigration enforcement and local police.

Today, Trump’s executive orders, and claims of defending against an “invasion” by “criminal illegal aliens”, are an intensification of this existing system and its racialised logics of deterrence.

This system of criminalizing and incarcerating people who are seeking a dignified life ricochets between its onshore and offshore incarnations within and between nations. Parties across political divides use tough on migration narratives to discredit their ability to govern the country and distract from failures in housing, employment, housing, and other areas of the country. This criminalization also increases during election cycles when borders turn into spectacles of political strength.

The past 12 months have been no exception, with elections in the UK and the US and now an impending election in Australia. Each of these elections has pivoted around a gross expansion of policy proposals for offshoring detention, the deportation of large swaths of people, and the undermining, if not death, of our international protection regime.

The goalposts of what is deemed acceptable continue to orient themselves toward the right, leading to policies that place more restrictions on rights and promise to harm.

Another failure is also obscured by this cruelty-seeking display, which is the profound lack of political leadership in immigration. Research consistently demonstrates how these policies continue to harm those who are already socially excluded but instead instead deter people from arriving.

The international immigration detention systems are fundamental to preventing harm and abandonment, not to mention rogue individuals or businesses that are the result of inadvertent byproducts. Harm and abandonment are “by design”. They are essential components of coercive detention and deportation systems, which are supported by political and financial gains from this harm.

Yet, the violences and injustices of detention are constantly resisted. Around the world, protests, strikes, riots, and jailbreaks by detained people have been met with solidarity by civil rights campaigners, grassroots activists, faith groups, community organisers, lawyers, families and friends.

Conditions, abuses, judgements, and laws have been challenged, raids resisted, bonds posted, sanctuary policies passed, border enforcement agencies defunded, and local networks built to shut down detention sites and support people at risk of detention.

Following the announcement of its closure in 2017, when Papua New Guinea declared it unconstitutional, men incarcerated in the Manus Island detention center staged a 23-day demonstration to demonstrate this unity and resistance. The men peacefully fought for freedom in place of re-incarceration in new locations, drawing on their ties to local Manusian communities and Australian advocates, while exposing their plight to a global audience and exposing the security forces’ increasing level of intimidation and preventing their access to food, water, and electricity.

The fact that those held in offshore locations have their own documentation demonstrates an authoritarian mindset in immigration policy that will affect both citizens and non-citizens. As Behrouz Boochani, poet, journalist, and former prisoner of Australia’s immigration detention centre in Manus, describes in his book Freedom, Only Freedom: “The refugees have identified and exposed the face of an emerging twenty-first-century dictatorship and fascism, a dictatorship and fascism that will one day creep into Australian society and into people’s homes like a cancer”.

Under Trump 1.0, grassroots coalitions between people who have lived through detention and abolitionist organizers formed the foundation of resistance, and they will do so once more. The most powerful opposition and alternative to our current authoritarian situation are those who bear the brunt of the carceral state’s attacks, not the corporate liberalism of mainstream “left-wing” parties.

This is Donald Trump’s latest lie: He is a student of history.

A stooped US president shared this cryptic message with his gullible followers a few days ago, and by extension, a world that was already exhausted following his startling return to the Oval Office.

Trump wrote on X that “he who saves his country does not break any law.”

The quote’s provenance is unclear. But it resembles one attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, by way of actor Rod Steiger who portrayed the messianic, self-appointed emperor of the French in the 1970 film, Waterloo.

I believe that co-president Elon Musk or some other sycophant whispered the offensive saying into his tin ear because Trump doesn’t read books and likely avoids watching movies where he hasn’t made a forgettable cameo.

Napoleon’s admonition would, of course, be attractive to a strutting autocrat like Trump who is convinced that by divine right and intervention he, as president, is immune from prosecution and the law’s restraints.

Still, Trump ought to have reached for French King Louis XIV’s infamous declaration – “L’État, c’est moi” (The state, it is me) – better to describe his naked effort to erase even the, by now, performative features of America’s atrophied “democracy”.

Trump has made it clear with his horde of obscene words and deeds that he never intended to abide by the oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the US Constitution or to support Congress and the courts, two other equal branches of government that he treats with mockery and contempt.

Trump is more powerful than the president and is governing as he always wanted to, without fear and without fear of the negative effects that might follow. He is also more powerful than the president.

If polls of opinion are accurate, the majority of Americans would rather abandon the sagging remnants of the “democratic experiment” in the false hope that Trump will bring their angry, ailing home from actual and imagined foreign and domestic enemies.

Why do so many Americans continue to throw their lot, with a missionary fervor, behind a blustering charlatan who views the egalitarian ideals that gave rise to a republic as annoyant, anachronistic nuisances?

I think that the majority of Americans are no longer democratic because of that.

The pervasive patriotic symbols – the billowing-in-the-breeze stars and stripes, the hand-on-heart pledge of allegiance, the sometimes-soaring renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner – can no longer sustain the stubborn myth of America that the gilded few serve at the behest and in the interests of the less fortunate many.

By my count there were at least four precipitating events that, combined, exposed finally this calculated pantomime and made, perhaps, Trump’s emergence as America’s defining political, if not cultural, force inevitable by prompting millions of Americans, including a good share of thoughtful citizens, to sour on the supposed profits and promise of democracy.

The fabrications that President George W. Bush and other evangelical figures, including the entire US establishment in the White House, Congress, and a lot of a war-giddy press, made clear the lie at the heart of America’s phantom democracy.

A horrific invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused a sovereign nation to be disfigured and thousands of innocent people to die because of the fiction that Saddam Hussein had stocked and was about to unleash weapons of mass destruction.

The gilded few reacted to the demonstrations of dissention by the educated many as an act of quislings who preferred to coddle a tyrant rather than confront him.

The so-called “checks and balances” designed, in theory, to thwart Bush’s catastrophic misadventure were, instead, marshalled to quash defiance – big and small – and empower a rogue regime bent on “regime change” elsewhere.

Bush and a number of unrepentant co-architects who were the catalyst for the most notorious geopolitical crisis of the twenty-first century have prospered or are retiring comfortably.

Meanwhile, the scores of Americans in uniform who did the invading, fighting, maiming, killing and dying have been largely forgotten.

Once again, the many were disposed of or destroyed – in mind, body, and spirit – to satisfy the imperial aims of the few.

In the wake of a devastating hurricane that hit New Orleans in 2005, the tension between the governed and the governors widened even more.

A city was completely submerged in the hurricane Katrina’s terrifying force, as were the levies intended to keep it safe.

Homes and the livelihoods of largely underprivileged people who sought refuge on rooftops were destroyed by the flooding. There were more than 1, 400 deaths. Amid the epochal destruction, the living were obliged to fend for themselves in desperate search of shelter, food, and water.

President Bush praised his flailing government’s incompetent response as he hovered far above the apocalyptic scenes in a helicopter – an indelible image of a smug, out-of-touch commander-in-chief who had left forlorn Americans stranded, in more ways than one.

By way of instructive contrast, Bush rushed in 2008 to the rescue of the profit-by-any-means-necessary bankers on Wall Street and beyond who engineered, in effect, a nationwide Ponzi scheme that triggered the near-collapse of America’s greed-fuelled economy built on a sandy foundation known as the sub-prime-mortgage (racket) crisis.

Americans paid in full to stop the metastasizing contagion that threatened the entire, decrepit house of cards when the enormous bill was due.

During the “Great Recession,” which lasted for two years, besieged taxpayers pumped in $ 7.7 trillion in “emergency loans” to stop a number of teetering banks from foreclosure while attempting to fend off predatory creditors and make poor ends meet.

Bush, a member of the gilded few for the long run, stated that whatever the many were expected to bear or assume, his job was to protect his dear friends and enablers.

That shining, eloquent avatar of the resurgent Democratic Party, Barack Obama, capitalised on his humble roots to convince working- and middle-class Americans from coast to beleaguered coast that, unlike his craven, silver-spooned predecessor, he was the “everyman” they were yearning for.

Alas, Obama understood that like Bush, his principal task was to ingratiate, not alienate, the prosperous powers-that-be who made him president.

Obama’s trite, self-serving clarion call, “Yes, we can”, was a cynical ruse meant to dupe Americans into believing that he was an ardent ally of the “we” and not the mendacious magnates.

The practised facade dropped when it became apparent that the Obama administration refused to pursue seriously, let alone charge, any of the criminals-in-custom-tailored-suits responsible for the systemic fraud that produced such loss, heartache, and suffering among working- and middle-class Americans.

Obama’s shameful failure was proof of America’s two-tiered “justice system” that condemned the destitute and insulated the rich.

It’s only mildly surprising that milked and manipulated Americans have sought salvation from a demagogue who provides simple, instant solutions to difficult, ornery issues in this contemptuous setting.

Disappointment is sure to follow.

The Maasai face eviction from their land in East Africa’s Serengeti National Park to make way for world-class hunting and tourism. Joseph Oleshangay, a lawyer for human rights, advocates for his nation’s heritage’s continued preservation.

Joseph, who represents Maasai communities in court, also maintains his traditions among the cattle at his rural home close to the Ngorongoro Crater. Joseph fights in court where he leads the fight against the evictions by living his life and gathering evidence from recently depopulated villages.