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Mass starvation looms if fertilisers can’t pass key waterway, UN warns – as it happened

We’re shutting this live coverage now but you can read a full report here, and below a recap of the latest key developments. Thanks for joining us. Donald Trump said Iran’s response to the US peace plan was a “stupid proposal” and “a piece of garbage” that he didn’t finish reading. He still believed a diplomatic solution was possible, he said, reiterating that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”. Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said his country’s “armed forces are ready to deliver a well-deserved response to any aggression” and adversaries “will be surprised”. Trump said the current ceasefire with Iran was “unbelievably weak” and “on massive life support”. Iran is ready to support Xi Jinping’s four-point plan for the Gulf region, Iran’s ambassador to China said, ahead of Trump’s visit to China this week for talks with Xi. EU has adopted sanctions on Israeli settlers, with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas declaring: “Extremisms and violence carry consequences.” Israel has already condemned the move. The UK sanctioned 12 individuals and entities linked to Iran, accusing them of involvement in hostile activity including plotting attacks and providing financial services to groups seeking to destabilise the UK and other countries. The Lebanese health ministry updated its death toll to 2,869 people killed in Israeli attacks that began on 2 March, Lebanese state-run media said. United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator Tom Fletcher called for a “genuine ceasefire” as Israel continues its relentless assault on Lebanon. Israeli lawmakers approved a bill setting up a special tribunal that would try and have the authority to sentence to death Palestinians convicted of taking part in the 2023 Hamas-led attack that triggered the war in Gaza. Two soldiers photographed desecrating a Christian statue in southern Lebanon were sentenced to military prison, the IDF said. The soldier who stuck a cigarette in the mouth of a statue of Mary received 21 days while the photographer got 14 days. Iranian authorities on Monday hanged a postgraduate student from a university in Tehran on charges of espionage, with the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan Online website accusing him of collaborating with the CIA and the Mossad. Erfan Shakourzadeh, 29, wrote a message before his execution rejecting the charges as fabricated, a rights group said. The United Arab Emirates has carried out military strikes on Iran, people familiar with the matter have told the Wall Street Journal, “casting the Gulf monarchy as an active combatant in a war in which it has been Iran’s biggest target”. The UK and France will host on Tuesday a multinational meeting of defence ministers to discuss plans to restore trade flows through the strait of Hormuz, the British defence ministry said. The meeting will involve 40 countries and comes one day after Iran threatened to strike British and French warships in the strait if they try to help reopen the strategic waterway. Trump’s rejection of Tehran’s response to the US’s peace proposal caused a jump in Brent crude by as much as 4% on Monday to $105.50 a barrel, before easing back slightly.

‘Difficult’ mission to repatriate Australian hantavirus cruise passengers en route to long Perth quarantine

Australians and New Zealanders who were aboard the deadly hantavirus-hit cruise ship have been taken to the Netherlands after a last minute change of plan on what the health minister called a “difficult” mission. Once back in Australia they will undergo the first three weeks of a 42-day quarantine at the Bullsbrook national resilience centre, just outside Perth. The flight crew that brings them back to the country will have to join them, Australia’s health minister, Mark Butler, said. But the six people who had been travelling aboard the MV Hondius will first spend up to two days in the Netherlands, instead of returning direct from Tenerife. They landed in the Netherlands on Tuesday morning, Australian time, on the first leg of a complex operation to repatriate them, Butler said. There they were greeted – at a safe distance – by Australian ambassador Greg Fench. They were taken to a quarantine hotel before a charter flight takes them to Australia later this week. “This is a difficult arrangement to make,” Butler told ABC News on Tuesday morning. “You’ve got to have crew that are willing to isolate at the end of the flight, you’ve got to have a flight that has some refuelling arrangements put in place between the Netherlands and Australia … And it’s important that we’ve put those quarantine arrangements in place, ready to go when they do land in Australia.” The government nevertheless expected the four Australians, one permanent resident and one New Zealand citizen to be back in Australia by the end of the week. As of late Monday night, it was understood none of them were displaying symptoms of the virus. “They’re only able to stay in the Netherlands for a maximum of 48 hours. So, over the next 24 to 48 hours, we expect them to start their flight back to Australia,” Butler said. Medical personnel will be on board the flight, which is expected to land at RAAF Base Pearce in Perth, according to government advice. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email The travellers will then be transported to quarantine facilities at the Bullsbrook national resilience centre, about where they will isolate for the first three weeks of a 42-day quarantine period. Flight crew will also quarantine at Bullsbrook. None of the passengers have displayed symptoms of hantavirus, and no other Australian citizens or permanent residents were known to be on board the ship. The World Health Organization has recommended but not mandated a 42-day quarantine for the travellers due to the long incubation period of hantavirus. The virus can cause flu-like symptoms leading to respiratory arrest and death in some cases. Butler said Australia’s measures were “probably the strongest quarantine response of any country that is taking passengers back from this cruise ship”. “Most countries are only requiring their returning citizens to go into some sort of centralised quarantine, like a hospital or a centre like the one we’re using in Western Australia, for two or three days, and then they’ll be released to home quarantine – obviously subject to monitoring arrangements,” he said. “We’ve decided to go with something stronger than that. We have these purpose-built facilities, including, obviously, over in Perth. We have staff from the critical care and trauma response centre that have experience in supporting people in those facilities, and advice towards the end of that three-week period about what should happen for the remainder of the 42 days.” Oceanwide Expeditions confirmed on Monday that all guests and some crew who had been on the ship had been either repatriated to their home countries or to the Netherlands. Twenty-five crew members remain on board, as does the body of a German guest who died on the ship on 2 May.

The big questions hanging over the Trump-Xi meeting in China

On 20 February, a White House official confirmed that US president Donald Trump would be travelling to Beijing the following month to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Top of the agenda: the US-China trade war. One week later, Trump approved joint strikes with Israel against Iran, starting a new war in the Middle East. Its ramifications have spread far beyond the region and caused alarm in Beijing. The presidential summit was postponed. Now the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Xi is expected to take place on 13-15 May in Beijing, and China’s agenda has shifted. Beijing is keen to make sure that the sky-high tariffs that Trump announced last year – which reached as high as 145% before the two sides agreed a truce in October – do not return. But now the more pressing concern is to find a way to reopen the strait of Hormuz, through which half of China’s crude oil passes. Although China has been more insulated from the energy shock than other Asian countries, thanks to its diversified energy mix and large stockpiles, the risk of a global recession – which the International Monetary Fund has warned is a possible outcome of the Iran war – is a bigger threat to China’s economy. About a fifth of China’s GDP comes from exports. If the rest of the world is no longer able to spend money on goods, China will suffer. “There is no country … whose national interests are advanced by the perpetuation of this conflict,” Ali Wyne, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, said in a briefing last week. While “China is much better prepared than many US allies and partners in Asia to weather a short-term disruption to commercial traffic through the strait of Hormuz … a longer-term disruption becomes more problematic”. The big question hanging over the Trump-Xi summit, then, is what will China do to help to resolve the conflict? It was reported last month that China had pushed Iran to the negotiating table with the US in a previous round of ceasefire talks. Last week, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing. According to the Chinese readout, Wang called for the “comprehensive cessation of hostilities” in the Middle East and said China “supports Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty and security”. The US is making it increasingly clear that it wants China’s help in striking a deal with Iran. The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has said the administration wanted to see Beijing “step up” pressure on Iran to reopen the waterway. That in itself may influence the dynamic of the meeting between the two strongman leaders. Trump “is in a situation where he is asking the Chinese president to help,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. That “puts him in a position that he’s not used to”. Influence over Iran may be useful leverage for Beijing in the two other main items on the agenda for the summit: trade and Taiwan. Despite the trade war, China’s trade surplus last year reached a record $1.2tn, with the biggest buyer being the US. The trade war involved so many tit-for-tat policies – from sky-high tariffs to the restriction of rare earth exports by Beijing – that it was almost like the two sides were “sumo wrestling”, said Yang. “The two sides have wrestled to a draw.” Yang, like many analysts, does not expect a major breakthrough on a trade deal. Instead, there could be a broadly worded statement that would “allow each side to claim it’s a productive meeting”. The likeliest outcome may be an extension of the truce that was agreed in South Korea in October. Da Wei, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University, said in a recent interview with the German Marshall Fund that such an outcome would be an uneasy compromise for Beijing. “We want stability and predictability. Of course the level of tariff is important, but predictability is more important,” he said. “We don’t want to just review it or postpone it for another year or several months. That would create uncertainty for the business environment.” But Da added that the bigger issue for the summit was the question of arms sales to Taiwan. Last year the US Congress approved an $11bn arms sale package to Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing claims as part of its territory. That has reportedly been stalled by the state department ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, but Beijing would like it axed completely. On Friday, after months of wrangling, Taiwan’s legislature approved a $25 billion special defence budget. The budget is around two-thirds of what the government had originally sought, meaning that it will cover US purchases but not domestic weapons production. A state department spokesperson said that further delays in funding domestic capabilities would be “a concession to the Chinese Communist Party”. Beijing knows some matters such as arms sales are subject to congressional oversight rather than being directly controllable by the president. But it may push for greater concessions from Trump on rhetoric. Even a subtle shift such as saying that the US “opposes” Taiwan independence rather than the current wording of “does not support” would be a win for Beijing as it seeks to remould the international outlook according to its worldview, in which Taiwan – a territory never ruled by the Chinese Communist party – is part of China. Wang said on a recent call with the US secretary of state Marco Rubio that Taiwan was “the biggest risk in China-US relations”. China’s foreign minister called on the US to “open up new space for China-US cooperation” over Taiwan. And Beijing sees in the Trump presidency a softer administration than those that came previously – including Trump’s first term in the White House. Trump has relaxed restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductors to China, shown little support for Taiwan, reportedly ordered the Pentagon to cut references to China being a threat from US defence strategy, and said he expected a “big, fat hug” from Xi in Beijing. China “very much appreciates the respect that President Trump has shown President Xi”, Yang said. Additional research by Yu-chen Li

French woman was told by doctors hantavirus symptoms were just anxiety

A French woman who tested positive for hantavirus after she was evacuated from a cruise ship reported symptoms to doctors onboard but was told it was probably just anxiety, the Spanish health minister has said. Javier Padilla Bernáldez said the woman, who had been travelling on the ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak, had been suffering flu-like symptoms but they appeared to be getting better and she did not have a fever. The World Health Organization later said the woman was in a “very critical” condition. The MV Hondius left the dock in the Canary Island of Tenerife on Monday evening, after 120 people from 23 nations were repatriated over 48 hours in an operation described by Spanish authorities as “complex” and “unprecedented”. Twenty-six crew and two health workers remained on the ship as it headed to Rotterdam. Despite the deaths of three people who had been onboard the ship, and eight other confirmed cases, doctors from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the Spanish foreign health service assessed the French woman and dismissed her symptoms as anxiety or stress, Padilla said. “They were not thinking that these symptoms were compatible with hantavirus. Why? Because what she was telling [them] was [that she had] an episode of coughing some days ago that had disappeared, and what she was having at that moment was kind of like stress or anxiety or nervousness. So it was not catalogued [as hantavirus],” Padilla said. Speaking as the ship left Tenerife, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, thanked Spain for coming to the aid of those on the vessel and added that the French passenger was now in a “very critical” condition. “Imagine if she stayed longer in the ship,” he said. There was “nothing to fear” for the people in the countries that received passengers, he continued, and hoped they would show “compassion and your solidarity to your citizens”. The French woman was one of five French passengers who disembarked from the MV Hondius in Tenerife on Sunday before being flown to a hospital in Paris. The French health minister, Stéphanie Rist, said the woman had started to feel very unwell on Sunday night and “tests came back positive”. Rist told France Inter radio: “Unfortunately, her symptoms worsened overnight.” She is being treated in a specialised infectious diseases unit of a hospital in Paris. Personnel in full-body protective gear and breathing masks began escorting the travellers from ship to shore in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Sunday. The WHO and the Spanish government had reassured the public on Saturday night that all 149 passengers and crew were asymptomatic of the infection, which causes flu-like symptoms and can lead to respiratory failure. Padilla defended the approach, saying there were likely to be some cases without severe symptoms and that was why all passengers and crew were recommended to isolate for 45 days since they were last exposed, which has been agreed as 6 May. In Spain, those evacuated from the ship have been taken to a military hospital, while 22 British people, one German and one Japanese person have been taken to Arrowe Park hospital in Merseyside for quarantining and tests. Each of the 23 countries that passengers and crew originated from are responsible for deciding their own measures. “I think that it cannot be said that you have disembarked them and now they are spreading the situation,” said Padilla. “What has happened with France, I think it’s a case of good practice in public health management of an epidemiological alert because if we were thinking that it was not a possibility that no one was able to develop a disease, we would not be quarantining the people.” He said that the woman’s condition had deteriorated between the ship and the plane. “It is not that the patient was feeling bad and she was saying: ‘OK, I’m not going to say anything because I want to be on the plane.’ It was like: ‘OK, we have measured your temperature, it was not fever, afterwards you have been on the plane, it has taken off, you have started feeling bad, we have measured your temperature and it was fever.’” An American passenger who was flown to Nebraska along with 16 others on Sunday evening also tested positive but had no symptoms. The US health department said one American national evacuated from the ship had tested positive for the Andes strain – the only hantavirus strain that is transmissible between humans – and another had “mild symptoms”. Both the WHO and the Spanish government said the positive was not strong enough to be conclusive and have not counted the US case in the official figures. Padilla said passengers could not have been tested onboard the vessel because there were no rapid PCR tests for hantavirus available. Any testing would have involved flying samples to Madrid to a specialist lab, a process that would have taken 24 hours. Those delays would have made it impossible to rescue those on board due to a forecast of extremely high winds from Monday evening, which were due to be “hell” on Tuesday, he said. Those high winds meant the ship was forced to dock on Monday afternoon for safety reasons. This was something the Spanish government had insisted would not happen, after the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, argued that docking the ship increased the possibility that rats carrying hantavirus would spread to the land, putting local people at risk. The cause of the ship’s outbreak is not yet known but it is thought to have been spread person to person and brought onboard the ship after a birdwatching trip in Argentina by a Dutch husband and wife who became the first fatalities. A spokesperson for Clavijo on Monday evening said that the president did not think enough precautions were taken to stop the spread of the virus but that he hoped “everything ends fine for the passengers and the operators”. No vaccines or specific treatments exist for hantavirus, which is endemic in Argentina, from where the ship departed in April. But health officials have said the risk for global public health is low and have played down comparisons with the Covid-19 pandemic. Health authorities in several countries have been tracking passengers who had already left the ship, plus anyone who may have come into contact with them. A flight that was intended to fly passengers back to Australia was abandoned because of timing problems. The six passengers who were due to travel on it – four Australians, one Briton resident in Australia and a New Zealand national – will instead return home via one of the Netherlands flights. The ship will then depart for the Netherlands with the 26 crew members on Monday evening.

Drug gang attacks ‘force hundreds of Indigenous families to flee’ in Mexico

Hundreds of Indigenous families have been forced to flee their homes in the mountains of central Mexico by intense attacks from a local criminal group, including drone bombings, an Indigenous rights organisation said on Monday. A gang known as Los Ardillos has been carrying out attacks in Guerrero state for years, but they started to intensify last week. Villages were subjected to eight hours of bombings on Saturday, the National Indigenous Congress said, forcing between 800 to 1,000 families to flee to other towns. “There is total anguish among the people,” said Carlos González García, a spokesperson for the congress, adding that at least four people had been killed. “The families are terrified, especially the women and children. It’s a level of violence that we’re not used to.” Videos shared on social media showed women and children sobbing as they cowered inside a local church. In other footage, intense gunfire and explosions can be heard echoing across farmland and forests as smoke rises in the background. “They were attacking us with drones and with .50 high calibre weapons, that’s why I left and took my twin sons with me,” a woman said in a Facebook video posted by another Indigenous rights group. “They killed the animals and now they’re setting fire to the hillsides.” A video shared with the Guardian from the village of Alcozacán showed gunfire and explosions continuing on Monday morning. The use of bomb-carrying drones and other powerful and sophisticated weaponry by Mexico’s drug cartels has become increasingly common. As violence has intensified, many poor and rural communities have been forced to flee their homes and seek safety elsewhere. A recent study from Mexico’s Ibero University found that the number of people forcibly displaced by violence had more than doubled between 2023 and 2024, from 12,600 to 28,900. There were nearly 400,000 displaced people in Mexico as of the end of 2024, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. “We’re working to protect the population,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, told a press conference on Monday when asked about the situation in Guerrero. “With the presence of the national guard and at the same time with attention to these displaced families, we can help them return to their place of origin.” According to González, the attacks are aimed largely at the armed community police forces established by villagers to protect themselves from the drug gangs. Los Ardillos were also trying to force villagers into growing opium poppies, he said. He accused the local government of being in cahoots with the criminal groups. There are three joint military, national guard and state police bases in the area, but according to González, they have done nothing to halt the violence in this remote part of Mexico. “It’s the obligation of the Mexican state to provide protection and to investigate any collusion between officials and criminal cartels, and dismantle them,” he said. “And to punish whoever needs to be punished. Because otherwise, this is going to keep growing and growing.” The Guerrero state government said on Sunday that it had registered only 90 people displaced by violence, and that federal and state forces had been deployed to the area for “security and surveillance operations”.

Trump says ceasefire with Iran on ‘life support’ after rejecting peace proposals

Donald Trump has said the ceasefire with Iran is on “life support” and that he is considering restarting US navy military escorts of ships through the strait of Hormuz in an attempt to end the Iranian blockade of the vital waterway. The US president dismissed Iran’s peace proposals as stupid, and denied he was under any domestic pressure to reach a deal. Referring to the ceasefire in force since 7 April, Trump said: “I would call it the weakest, right now, after reading that piece of garbage they sent us – I didn’t even finish reading it. “I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says: ‘Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living.’” Last week, the US sent Iran a set of conditions for easing the conflict, mostly related to preventing Tehran from being able to expand its nuclear programme. At the weekend, Iran sent counter-proposals that Trump dismissed out of hand. Trump called off Project Freedom, the plan to escort oil tankers through the strait, after little more than two days last week – ostensibly to give Iran time to respond to his peace proposals. The plan for the military escort had also met resistance from Saudi Arabia, which said it would not allow its airspace or bases to be used to support something it regarded as escalatory. Trump’s latest comments came after oil prices jumped again when Iran said there would be no further talks about ending the blockade of the strait of Hormuz unless he accepted its terms. Maj Gen Mohammad Ali Jafari, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said: “As long as the war on all fronts is not over, sanctions are not lifted, blocked funds are not released, war damages are not compensated and Iran’s sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz not recognised, there will be no other negotiations.” Esmail Baqaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, said Iran’s proposals were “reasonable, responsible and generous”. He claimed it was still possible for the two sides to reach agreement, and that nothing Iran had proposed was unreasonable. Mostafa Taheri, a member of the Iranian parliament’s industry commission, claimed the revenue from the proposed new transit fees for the strait of Hormuz would be worth $15bn (£11bn) annually, about a third of the revenue Iran currently receives from its oil sales, and enough to stabilise foreign exchange reserves. Oil prices rose to more than $105 a barrel as the deadlock continued, and unpalatable military options that are unlikely to change Iranian thinking once again go up the agenda. The impasse will cast a shadow over Trump’s summit with the Chinese president Xi, Jinping, which starts in Beijing on Thursday. China has deep economic ties to Iran, and Xi is unlikely to agree to any request from Trump to restrict oil purchases or arms sales between Beijing and Tehran. There has been expectations that the US president would like the Iran war off the agenda by the time he sat down for his most important summit of the year. Despite postponing the visit in late March, Trump appears nowhere close to an agreement withTehran. He is left re-examining military options to try to recover Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but Iranian officials said the stockpile was protected. The standoff means that individual shipping companies are still negotiating with either Iran or the US to bypass the blockades in the strait of Hormuz, but the overall number of tankers being allowed through remains minuscule. The greatest tension on Monday focused on a cargo of Emirati liquefied petroleum gas that was sailing under the Panamanian flag and departed from the port of Sharjah. Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, the state on the south side of the strait, held talks with Arsenio Dominguez, the secretary general of the International Maritime Organization, a UN agency, to try to reach agreement on a new regime for the important waterway, as well as urgent humanitarian measures to help crews who have been stuck on oil tankers for weeks. Almost 1,500 tankers and 20,000 seafarers are stranded in the Gulf, the IMO estimates. Dominguez said supplies – including water, food and fuel – would soon start running short. The Iranian plan dismissed by Trump largely focused on ending the US blockade in the strait, but leaving the issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme to a negotiation starting after 30 days of confidence building, a deferral that the US president and Israel reject. Tehran argues the previous use of US bases in the region to attack Iran means the “strait can no longer be treated as a normal and neutral waterway”. There are also signs that pressure continues to mount on the Iranian economy. Tehran city council said offices had been ordered to reduce electricity consumption by 30% during office hours and by 70% in non-office hours. The ruling applies to public and private offices. The head of the national society of internal medicine specialists said there was a serious decrease in the country’s medicine reserves. Estimates show the direct daily cost from Iran’s internet shutdowns is about $30m to $40m in lost sales, with the indirect damage about double that. The Iranian parliament has not been meeting in public during the war, but has started to hold online sessions as advised by the country’s supreme national security council. The Iranian reformist press said: “Inflation, reduced purchasing power and concerns about the supply of essential goods has put heavy pressure on public opinion.” On Tuesday, the UK and France will hold a meeting of as many as 40 defence ministers to discuss the contributions to a taskforce to protect free naval passage in the strait of Hormuz after any US-Iran agreement.

EU announces sanctions against violent Israel settlers

The EU has agreed sanctions on violent Israeli settlers, ending a years-long deadlock over the issue but still taking only a “baby step” according to one MEP. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said on Monday: “Violence and extremism carry consequences.” But there was still no consensus among the 27 member states on more hard-hitting trade sanctions. France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said the EU was “sanctioning the main Israeli organisations guilty of supporting the extremist and violent colonisation of the West Bank, as well as their leaders”. “These most serious and intolerable acts must cease without delay,” he wrote on social media. The full list of names has not been published following Monday’s agreement in principle but is understood not to include two extremist Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The pair were put under UK sanctions last June for their “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”. The deadlock was broken after Hungary’s new pro-EU government lifted its veto on the sanctions, which had been blocked by the previous prime minister, Viktor Orbán. The EU would also sanction leading Hamas figures, Kallas said. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said the EU had chosen in “an arbitrary and political manner, to impose sanctions on Israeli citizens and entities because of their political views and without any basis”. The measures against a small number of settlers fall short of what some member states wanted. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from illegal settlements. “We believe that the EU urgently needs to increase the pressure on Israel to halt its settlement policy and practices,” the two countries wrote in a joint paper. Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said putting tariffs on products from illegal settlements was “the most realistic proposal”. Banning products requires unanimity among the 27 member states, whereas tariffs can be imposed by a majority vote. Under the EU-Israel association agreement, goods from the occupied territories miss out on preferential terms but trade is not prohibited. Kallas, who is also a vice-president of the European Commission, said she could not issue a draft law to impose tariffs on goods from illegal settlements: “I raised this issue that member states wanted this proposal. I asked [for] this, but the proposal is not there. And I can’t draft it.” Barry Andrews, an Irish centrist MEP, who chairs the European parliament’s development committee, said EU foreign ministers had taken a “welcome (baby) step”. Writing on X he called for enforcement of labelling and banning of settler products, as well as ending research cooperation with Israel. He added: “Ultimately, only a review of the EU-Israel association agreement, with view to suspension, will have a major impact.” Amid surging violence in the West Bank and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, the EU is under renewed pressure to use its leverage to push Israel’s government to change course. Former senior EU diplomats and officials called last week for sanctions against all individuals and entities engaged in illegal settlements, including planners, lawyers, banks and other professionals involved in the proposed E1 settlement. The signatories say this illegal settlement of 3,400 illegal homes would cut the West Bank in two “and so wreck any prospects of a viable Palestinian state”. The declaration was signed by 452 former senior EU politicians, diplomats and officials, including two former prime ministers, Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium and Stefan Löfven of Sweden. Since the 7 October attacks by Hamas, Israeli settlers have pursued a growing campaign of violent intimidation against Palestinians in the West Bank with the aim of driving them from their land. According to UN figures, 230 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers last year.

Why is Putin now talking about the war in Ukraine ‘coming to an end’?

Vladimir Putin suggested that the war in Ukraine may be “coming to an end” on Saturday – comments that raise the question of why the Russian president might want a possible end to the war now, given how the fighting is evolving. Russia is losing battlefield momentum After Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, Moscow had been gradually taking Ukrainian territory. Though the Russian attacks were slow, grinding and costly in terms of casualties, they had created a sense that Ukraine was slowly but inevitably losing. But that has changed. Ukraine’s recapture of Kupiansk in December – claimed by Moscow to have been taken a month earlier – surprised even western military experts. An agreement that prevented the invaders from using the Starlink satellite internet service in February – and Russia’s own curtailing of Telegram, also widely used for communication – helped Ukraine reverse territorial losses in Zaporizhzhia region of about 100 sq miles. In April, according to the Institute for the Study of War, Russia lost control of 45 sq miles of Ukraine. It was the first time Russia had suffered a net loss of territory since August 2024 (the month of Ukraine’s surprise attack into Russia’s Kursk region), and comes after the invaders made negligible gains in February and March. A slow-motion victory for Moscow no longer looks certain. Russian casualties may exceed replacements Ukraine says that for the past five months it has killed or wounded more Russian soldiers than are being recruited. Though the figures are hard to verify, Ukraine bases its statistics on combat footage. It said its military had killed or wounded about 35,000 Russian soldiers a month in March and April, overwhelmingly from drone strikes. Russian recruitment levels, meanwhile, have dipped to about 800 to 1,000 a day in 2026 (24,000 to 30,000 a month), according to the economist Janis Kluge, based on an analysis of regional budget data. That would be in line with statements from the former president Dmitry Medvedev, head of Russia’s recruitment commission, who said “more than 80,000” had signed up in the first quarter. There is also no immediate sign that Putin has the appetite to launch a second public mobilisation, after the social unrest caused by the first in September 2022. Ukrainian refinery attacks expose Russia to a fall in oil prices Russia’s economy was faltering early in 2026, but the sudden hike in oil prices prompted by Donald Trump’s attack on Iran has prompted a recovery. Oil export earnings, critical for the Russian treasury, were $19bn (£14bn) in March, up from $9.8bn in February – the highest monthly figure since autumn 2023, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. However, recent long-range missile and drone attacks by Ukraine on Russian oil export terminals at Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic, two of 14 refineries or terminals Ukraine says it bombed in April, have slashed export volumes. Daily exports fell from 5.2m barrels a day to 3.5m, according to Sergey Vakulenko from the Carnegie Foundation. For now, the higher oil price was more than enough to offset estimated falls in Russian exports, Vakulenko concluded, but that could rapidly change if the US and Iran reach an agreement to reopen the strait of Hormuz and oil prices tumble. Ukraine is becoming a missile and drone superpower At first, after Ukraine was invaded, it was heavily reliant on western military equipment and training. Once, Kyiv placed heavy hopes on western F-16 fighters to try to achieve a breakthrough – and on US Patriot air defence systems to protect its skies. Gradually, it became clear that western stockpiles were running short, prompting Ukraine to invest more in its own knowhow and equipment. Success has been demonstrated by the deep strikes on Russian oil infrastructure – which include three drone attacks in the past fortnight on a refinery in Perm, 930 miles from the frontline. The arrival of cheap interceptors on the frontline in early spring has given Ukraine fresh hope it can knock out all but the faster Russian missiles as Patriot missile stocks become scarce. Ukraine said its interceptors, including Sting from Wild Hornets, shot down 33,000 drones during March, double the month before. It has begun to export the technology to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, all countries attacked by Iran in the spring. Russia even feared Ukraine could target its Red Square victory parade over the weekend, prompting Zelenskyy to issue a decree saying he would allow the event to proceed. Putin may hope to reignite dormant White House interest Russia’s main effort has, for some time, been diplomatic. Putin hopes that he can persuade Trump to force Zelenskyy into giving up the rest of Donetsk, to make up for stalling frontline progress. It was this offer that Putin made at the Alaska summit in August and, while the US considered it, Trump did not force it on Ukraine. Despite Putin’s comments at the weekend, and a suggestion that he could work with the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder as a mediator, there is no sign that Russia’s maximalist demands have eased. Last week, Yuri Ushakov, a key Kremlin aide, said peace talks could not start until Ukraine withdrew from all of Donetsk. Trump has been distracted by the Iran crisis, but Putin may be hoping to re-engage the White House with fresh language, if nothing else.