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No headway in Middle East peace efforts as US and Iran refuse to yield

Hopes of a breakthrough in negotiations between Iran and the US faded further on Sunday, amid a deepening sense of deadlock in the nearly two-month-long conflict despite intense regional diplomatic activity. Washington and Tehran appear unwilling to moderate rhetoric or make concessions, and there are no negotiations scheduled that might bring the war to a definitive end. On Sunday, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, returned to Pakistan for a second consecutive day of talks with mediators after a brief trip to Oman for discussions there. Araghchi described his Pakistan trip on Saturday as “very fruitful” but signalled scepticism over Washington’s intentions. “Have yet to see if the US is truly serious about diplomacy,” he said on X. Araghchi was also due to meet the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as part of a trip that begins on Monday. Russia and Iran, both subject to tough western sanctions, have become increasingly close in recent years. On Saturday, Donald Trump announced that he had cancelled a visit to Pakistan by his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The two men were to take part in a second round of talks with Iran that had been tentatively scheduled for this weekend. Speaking in Florida, before being rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington after a gunman fired shots at his security detail, Trump said the visit involved too much travel and expense for what he considered an inadequate Iranian offer. The cancellation came after Iran said it would not be attending any direct talks while the US blockaded all shipping to or from the Islamic Republic. Trump later claimed that Tehran had offered a new proposal for agreement within minutes of his decision. “They gave us a paper that should have been better and – interestingly – immediately when I cancelled it, within 10 minutes, we got a new paper that was much better,” he told reporters, without elaborating. Pakistani officials have sought to rebuild momentum in the negotiations, briefing media that progress towards a possible “bridging agreement” to allow discussions to restart was being made. A round of talks in Islamabad earlier this month – in which a US delegation led by the vice-president, JD Vance, met Iranian delegates led by Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf – ended without any apparent progress towards a deal. The 21-hour session earlier exposed wide gaps on the future of the strait of Hormuz, Iran’s nuclear programme and Tehran’s longstanding support for militant movements around the Middle East. The talks collapsed after Iran would not agree to US demands to end nuclear enrichment and hand over its 440kg of highly enriched uranium. Last week, Trump announced an indefinite extension of his earlier two-week ceasefire with Iran and repeated his demand that Iran allow shipping free passage in the strait of Hormuz, which in normal times carries around a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas supplies. The closure of the strategic waterway through the Gulf has sent oil prices soaring around the world, threatening a global economic downturn. In an attempt to exert economic pressure, Trump ordered the US fleet assembled off its shores to blockade Iran, which is heavily dependent on the sale of oil to stave off total economic collapse. Analysts say Iranian leaders are aware the US president faces pressure himself from US voters unhappy at rising fuel prices, and may be forced into concessions earlier than Tehran. Midterm elections are due in the US in November. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), whose grip on decision-making in Tehran, experts believe has been reinforced during the conflict, said it had no intention of lifting its blockade. Iran wants to raise a toll on passage through the strait, forcing each passing tanker to pay $2m. This could lead to higher prices for years to come. The IRGC wrote on its official Telegram channel: “Controlling the strait of Hormuz and maintaining the shadow of its deterrent effects over America and the White House’s supporters in the region is the definitive strategy of Islamic Iran.” Iran’s military warned in a statement carried by state media that continued US “blockading, banditry and piracy” would lead to retaliation. Trump has ordered the military to “shoot and kill” Iranian vessels that could be placing mines. Though the US has sunk almost all of Iran’s conventional navy, small fast boats used by the IRGC still pose a significant threat. Last week three ships were fired on by Iranian forces. Analysts said Iran had held the upper hand since the abortive first round of talks in Islamabad. “Both the US and Iran put lists of respectively 15 and 10 maximalist demands on the table that transgressed known red lines of their interlocutors,” Hamidreza Azizi and Erwin van Veen wrote last week for the Dutch Clingendael Institute of International Relations. “But neither the military situation nor the military outlook at the time supported the idea that major concessions were on offer compared [with] prewar positions. If anything, the strategic stalemate that led to the ceasefire favoured Iran because the US cannot reopen the strait of Hormuz without a large-scale and risky ground operation.” Writing on Truth Social before the Washington dinner shooting, Trump said there was “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership. “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them,” he posted. “Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!” Analysts say that though there are deep divisions among Iranian leaders and factions, all are committed to presenting a unified front to the US. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said last week there were “no hardliners or moderates” in Tehran and that the country stood united behind its supreme leader. A further challenge is to maintain the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, which Tehran sees as essential to its participation in any talks. Israel struck southern Lebanon on Saturday, killing at least six people it said were Hezbollah militants, and several rockets and drones were launched at Israel from Lebanon. Fourteen people were killed and 37 wounded in strikes in the country’s south on Sunday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The conflict is one of the widest in geographic extent in the Middle East since the second world war, with violent attacks from Azerbaijan to Oman and even in the Indian Ocean. At least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran by joint US-Israeli strikes, according to local medical authorities. About 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, where Israel launched a relentless offensive after Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel in retaliation for the Israeli strike in Tehran which killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and launched the war. More than a dozen people have been killed in Gulf Arab states and 23 in Israel by Iran’s retaliatory attacks, including those launched by its proxies. Fifteen Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, 13 US service members in the region and six UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon have been killed.

Final steps taken before audacious plan to tow whale stranded in Germany to North Sea

Final preparations are reportedly under way for a millionaire funded plan to tow a sickly humpback whale into the North Sea. The 12-tonne whale, nicknamed Timmy, has been stranded on the Baltic Sea coastline for almost a month. A barge resembling a giant steel aquarium will attempt to transport Timmy 400km (248 miles) towards the North Sea, and then hopefully back to the Atlantic Ocean from where it is believed to have arrived. The mission known as Operation Cushion is scheduled to start on Tuesday. Rescue workers said the animal was positioned in the right direction in the water on Sunday. “[It] is interesting, it turned 90 degrees – and in the right direction. It seems to be preparing itself mentally and emotionally for departure,” the state’s environment minister, Till Backhaus, told Bild. The newspaper, along with local media outlets, has been running a live blog on the whale’s progress as well as a live stream from where it has been lying in shallow waters for several weeks. First spotted in the Baltic Sea last month, after it had possibly been chasing shoals of herring, it has now been lying in the mud off the island of Poel in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, for more than three weeks. The water contains far too little salt to sustain it. After experts, including leading marine biologists, said the whale was dying and a rescue operation was only going to stress the animal and would certainly not help it, a private initiative was launched, funded by two prominent millionaires, leaving local politicians in the shade. The initiative plans to lift the 30-metre long whale with air cushions, stretching a net beneath it to suspend it in a pontoon structure. The pontoon would then be towed into deeper waters by a tugboat. The whale’s plight has attracted hundreds of onlookers, including tourists from across Europe, who have travelled to Poel to watch the spectacle. Many are camping nearby in cars or caravans. Several people describing themselves as supporters have swum through the cold sea to within metres of the whale, in order to be close to it, before being hoisted out by water police. The rescue effort has involved the local fire brigade spraying the whale with water to keep it hydrated, and latterly, individuals who repeatedly pour buckets of water over its back. Hundreds of kilograms of zinc ointment have been reportedly applied to its back, using cloths to help treat the wounds on its blistered skin. Critics however, say the team that has effectively tasked itself with the latest rescue operation has little experience and accuse it of trying to politically manipulate the situation. Burkard Baschek, the director of the Oceanographic Museum in Stralsund, who was until recently the state government’s chief adviser on the whale until the decision was made that it should be left to die in peace, said he believes the rescue effort will be in vain. “A rescue attempt … is no longer worthwhile,” he told Die Zeit. “This has also been confirmed to us repeatedly by international colleagues.” Baschek said a report compiled by his colleagues still stood. It states that the whale’s lethargic behaviour clearly indicates serious health problems. A fishing net caught in its mouth is thought to be still there and impossible to remove. Its skin is covered in blister-like blemishes. If whales have been repeatedly stranded, as this one had been, Baschek said, the prognosis was “very poor”. Continuing to try to save it was wrong, he said, calling it “pure animal cruelty”. Backhaus, the environment minister, who says the whale has grown close to his heart, having previously said there was no hope for it, said he backs the new initiative’s attempts to try to save it. He denies claims he is supporting the initiative because the state faces what is expected to be a hotly contested election between his Social Democrats and the far-right AfD party in September and images of a dead whale in the bay could go down very badly for his party. Backhaus has been placed under extra police protection after receiving threats from members of the public who accused him and his team of giving up on the whale too soon. He told Die Zeit: “I won’t be blackmailed.” The same critics accused the museum’s scientists of wanting the whale dead so that it could secure its skeleton for its museum and “make millions”. The museum denies this. Baschek called in the police after receiving threats, including social media posts saying: “May the seagulls peck you to pieces” and “may you suffer just like the whale”. During an investigation into the team behind the latest attempts to rescue the whale, Die Zeit said it had uncovered a group of people representing far-right interests, esoteric methodology and conspiracy theories as well as holding links to the Querdenker anti-coronavirus lockdown movement. The group has claimed that together they can create an aura that reaches the whale and help to save it. They have flown in from as far afield as Peru and Hawaii to support the effort. A vet joining from Hawaii wrote on Instagram, before landing in Germany: “a big big fat F@CK YOU” to the scientists involved in the original efforts. “It’s as if the conspiracy theorists of the coronavirus pandemic have now taken over the role of the public health department in the [efforts to save the whale] in the Bay of Poel,” Die Zeit wrote. Financing the group are two extremely wealthy individuals: Karin Walter-Mommert, an equestrian expert, and Walter Gunz, a former co-founder of a German electronics retailer chain. The pair have expressed the desire to save the whale whatever the cost. Backhaus said the two had also assumed full legal responsibility for the rescue operation. “They have also made it clear that they claim extensive freedom of decision-making in this matter,” he said.

Orbán associates rush to move wealth out of Hungary after election defeat

Along the banks of the Danube, news that the Viktor Orbán era had come to an end set off an hours-long party. The joy echoed across Hungary as people traded hugs and high-fives. For some, however, the landslide loss set off a frantic scramble. Private jets allegedly laden with the spoils of those whose wealth swelled during Orbán’s 16 years in power have steadily been taking off from Vienna, while other individuals are racing to invest their assets abroad, sources have told the Guardian. Meanwhile, high-level figures close to Orbán have been looking into US visa options, hoping to find work at Maga-linked institutions. It is a glimpse of the upheaval that has gripped Hungary as it prepares to turn the page on Orbán’s rule. Since he took power in 2010, a small circle of associates aligned with the leader and his Fidesz party have amassed vast fortunes, partly due to their expanding control over the country’s economy and EU-funded contracts for public infrastructure. Since the election, the Guardian has learned of three members of this inner circle who have begun moving their assets abroad. The wealth is being moved to countries in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE – while others have their sights set on Australia and Singapore, two Fidesz sources said. Péter Magyar, whose opposition Tisza party won a landslide victory this month, has sounded the alarm, accusing those connected to Fidesz of racing to shield their wealth from accountability before his government takes power in early May. “Orbán-linked oligarchs are transferring tens of billions of forints to the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Uruguay and other distant countries,” Magyar alleged on social media on Saturday. He called on the chief prosecutor, the police chief and the head of the tax office to “detain the criminals” and “not to allow them to flee” to countries where extradition would be unlikely. Magyar said those expected to leave the country included the family of Lőrinc Mészáros, one of Orbán’s closest friends, whose trajectory from gas fitter to Hungary’s richest man was fuelled in part by public procurement contracts. Mészáros’s company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “I have also been informed that several oligarch families have already left the country,” Magyar added. “According to reports, several influential oligarch families have already withdrawn their children from school and are arranging trusted security personnel for their departure.” The race to move wealth abroad was first reported by independent journalists in Hungary, including the investigative outlet Vsquare, which said key figures connected to Orbán aimed to safeguard their assets before Magyar’s government could potentially freeze, seize or nationalise them, and the news site 444.hu, which in March claimed key figures were already transferring assets to Dubai. Their efforts could be stymied by the many bureaucrats and law enforcement officials who have partial knowledge of all that took place during Orbán’s time in power, Vsquare noted, “setting the stage for what could be a years-long efforts to recover allegedly stolen public wealth and arrest those who committed financial crimes”. Since the election, Magyar has repeatedly said his government will work to crack down on the corruption and cronyism that, in his view, characterised Fidesz’s years in power. “Our country has no time to waste. Hungary is in trouble in every respect. It has been plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined,” Magyar told reporters the day after the election. “We became the most impoverished and the most corrupt country in the EU.” The incoming leader has repeatedly alleged that potentially incriminating documents are being destroyed during Orbán’s last weeks in power. “We are receiving increasing reports of large-scale document destruction from various ministries, affiliated institutions, and companies close to Fidesz,” he wrote on social media earlier this month. The outgoing foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, whose ministry was among those accused of shredding confidential documents, described the accusations as “nonsense” and “outrageous” in a statement to the Hungarian online news outlet Telex. The ministry said it had “only discarded the previously printed, redundant paper versions of documents that had been stored electronically”. The foreign ministry and the office of Orbán, who has long rejected allegations of corruption and wrongdoing, did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian. The election result has sparked questions as to what comes next for Orbán, the strongman leader whose efforts to turn Hungary into, in his words, a “petri dish for illiberalism” have inspired Donald Trump’s administration and the global far right. On Saturday, Orbán said on social media that he would not take his seat in parliament but that he aimed to stay on as Fidesz’s leader in order to lead a process of “renewal”. The EU’s longest-serving leader is expected to head to the United States around the same time as the Fifa World Cup kicks off and will probably spend several weeks there, a Fidesz-linked source told the Guardian. The source said the trip had been planned long before the 12 April election. Where Orbán will travel to exactly is unknown, though his eldest daughter and son-in-law moved to New York last summer. The son-in-law, István Tiborcz, burst into public view in 2018 when the EU’s anti-fraud office, Olaf, said a two-year investigation into contracts to supply Hungarian towns with EU-funded street lamps had found “not only serious irregularities in most of the projects, but also a conflict of interest”. While Olaf does not publish its reports or reveal who is named in them, the Guardian understands that the irregularities related to contracts signed when Tiborcz was an owner of the company concerned. A representative for Tiborcz referred the Guardian to a July interview in which Tiborcz described the EU inquiry as politically motivated. The matter was also investigated by Hungarian prosecutors, led by an Orbán loyalist, who found no breach of law. Other high-level figures connected to Fidesz are applying for US work visas, hoping to use their expertise in institutions linked to the Republican party, a US government source in Washington and a source inside Fidesz said. “The connection is already there,” said the US source, adding that years of lobbying by Orbán and Fidesz had allowed Hungarian officials to cultivate an extensive network within the Maga movement. These connections were laid bare in the lead-up to the election when the US vice-president, JD Vance, turned up in Budapest to bolster Orbán’s lagging campaign. Days after the election, one of Hungary’s most prominent investigative journalists, Szabolcs Panyi, said sources had told him the US had long been seen as a plan B for many who were connected to Orbán, despite the questions that continue to swirl over Orbán and his government’s connections to Moscow. “As long as the Trump administration is in power, even the United States could become a safe haven for the top echelons of the Orbán regime,” Panyi said.

‘A sudden gap’: poorest to suffer from Trump’s drive to stop Cuba sending doctors to its neighbours

Novlyn Ebanks, 73, had been due to receive the eye surgery she needed free of charge at St Joseph’s hospital in Kingston. But after Jamaica’s unilateral decision in March to end the nearly 30-year agreement with Cuba to provide doctors, she was no longer able to schedule the procedure. The hospital’s ophthalmology centre was mainly staffed by Cuban doctors, many of whom had already left Jamaica. “I’m really disturbed and concerned,” said Ebanks, who will now have to seek private treatment at a cost that, she said, could reach 350,000 Jamaican dollars (about £1,600). In recent months, many people across Latin America and the Caribbean have suddenly found themselves without healthcare, as nearly a dozen countries acquiesce to pressure from the US to end medical agreements with the Cuban government. The US claims that the programme amounts to “forced labour” for doctors, who have most of their salaries withheld by the Cuban government. Cuba acknowledges the retention but denies any human rights violations, saying the allegation is merely a pretext for the White House’s efforts to economically strangle the island and force regime change, which include the now months-long blockade of oil shipments. Meanwhile, doctors, NGOs and researchers agree that the people who will be most affected by the sudden withdrawal of doctors – typically deployed to remote and historically underserved healthcare areas – will be the region’s poorest communities. “We did not get sufficient time to come up with or put in place a contingency,” said Damion Gordon, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. “It just happened suddenly, which created a sudden gap … and a crisis for those communities,” he added. US pressure to end the partnerships has included cancelling the visas of government officials – and even their family members – who have had any connection to the programme. Since Donald Trump began his second term, the governments of Jamaica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, and Paraguay have ended the medical agreements, either immediately or gradually. The lone point of resistance has been Mexico, where the president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has refused to end the programme, saying that the about 3,000 Cuban doctors are of “great help” as they work in remote areas where there is a shortage of personnel. “People in rural conditions are the ones who will suffer,” said John Kirk, professor emeritus of Latin American studies at Dalhousie University in Canada. The programme emerged in 1960, when a medical brigade was sent to Chile to help treat victims of an earthquake. Since then, more than 600,000 Cuban doctors, nurses and health technicians have been deployed to more than 160 countries. Cuba does not release precise data, but estimates suggest there are now more than 20,000 doctors across about 50 countries, with specialisms ranging from obstetrics and paediatrics to surgery and oncology. The largest deployment was in Venezuela, which began in 2004 and at its peak involved nearly 30,000 doctors. Now, with the US calling the shots since the capture of Nicolás Maduro, there have been reports of doctors leaving the country, although the mission has not officially ended and more than 10,000 Cuban health professionals are still believed to be on the ground. It was with the Venezuelan mission, known as “oil for doctors”, that the programme became one of Cuba’s main sources of revenue and a crucial buffer against the decades-long US economic embargo. “Now, Trump is determined to cut that off in his attempt to bring about regime change,” said Kirk, who estimates the programme generates about $5bn a year for Cuba. The money comes mainly from retaining about 80% of salaries, which the US says amounts to “21st-century slavery”. Reports by the UN and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have also gathered testimonies from former participants who say they worked under coercion, and the organisations have described the programme as a form of modern slavery. “I interviewed 270 Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians; none of them said they had been forced to work,” said Kirk. “It’s not slave labour,” said the Cuban doctor Yanili Magdariaga Menéndez, 41, who spent five years in Venezuela in the early 2010s. “I joined the programme because I realised that, in Cuba, I couldn’t give my family what I wanted to,” said Menéndez, who moved from the roughly $40 a month she earned on the island to about $1,000 abroad, even after the government’s deductions. Although she said she did not consider the share “entirely fair”, she added that she also “understood Cuba depends on it and uses it to fund free education and healthcare”. After Venezuela, she moved to Brazil, where the programme once had more than 11,000 professionals, but was ended in 2018 after being attacked by the then far-right, Trump-allied president, Jair Bolsonaro. Helen Yaffe, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and a host of the podcast Cuba Analysis, said the US allegation of human rights violations was “a pretext” and “absolute rubbish”. “How can they claim to care about human rights while blocking oil shipments to Cuba, which means that premature babies in incubators are left at risk during power cuts?” she said. Although the US is reportedly offering countries that agree to stop employing Cuban doctors support for “infrastructure modernisation”, Yaffe said Washington was “not replacing medics or even proposing to train domestic substitutes”. Although they did not respond to specific questions, a US state department spokesperson said: “We condemn forced labour and human trafficking involved in the Cuban regime’s labour export programme, especially its foreign medical missions. Cuba’s state-sponsored scheme deprives ordinary Cubans of medical care, and medical professionals of their human rights and fundamental freedoms. We urge other countries to treat Cuban doctors fairly as individuals and not as commodities to be traded by the regime.” The government of Cuba did not respond to requests for comment. In Guatemala, where the government has announced the “gradual withdrawal” of about 400 Cuban doctors by the end of the year, NGOs such as the Emergency Project already know they will have to fill the gap, which will disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. “To abandon a programme like that is to strip healthcare access from some of the most disenfranchised and underserved populations in our part of the world,” said the emergency physician Darren Cuthbert, the executive director of the NGO, noting that many countries in the region are still recovering from Trump’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In Jamaica, where a group of people held a march in the capital in gratitude to Cuban doctors, the health minister, Christopher Tufton, admitted their departure had created “gaps”. “Some of those gaps are challenging to fill because of the specialisation and the fact that we don’t have a local equivalent. So we have started by doubling up on the shifts … by local [doctors] to fill the void, particularly in eye care and oncology,” he said. But Tufton said he saw the moment as an opportunity to force the country to address its shortage of domestic medical staff, including through an ad campaign to encourage Jamaican doctors abroad to return. “I think we’re better off moving in that direction, where we can create less dependence [on foreign doctors] … We value what the Cubans have done and the relationship we have had. We do hope to see that kind of re-engagement under different circumstances,” he said. While still working out how she will pay for the eye surgery, Novlyn Ebanks already misses the Cuban doctors, whom she described as “very patient, humble and understanding”. “These are the people that we really need to have around us to take care of us,” she said.

Ukrainian action thriller billed as Saving Private Ryan for the drone age

It is being billed as Ukraine’s answer to Saving Private Ryan, updated for an age of drones. The war movie Killhouse is an action thriller which shows off the latest in battlefield technology. Released this week, it features cameos by figures well known in Ukraine, including the nation’s former military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. One missing person is Donald Trump. The film is conveniently set in 2024, when Washington and Kyiv were allies. Its director, Liubomyr Levytskyi, said he was inspired by a real life story, when a couple trying to rescue relatives came under Russian attack. The man was badly wounded. A Ukrainian military unit nearby sent in a drone with a piece of paper. It said: “Follow me.” The woman followed the drone, dodging mines and bullets. Russian soldiers threw her unconscious husband into a trench. Incredibly, he survived. “A friend of mine, a journalist, rang me and said: ‘Liubomyr, I’ve got this story – it’ll give you goosebumps.’” Levytskyi said. He added: “I was like: ‘Well, of course it will. I’ve seen so many of these stories already.’ It’s very hard to impress me with a story. Then I saw footage from the rescue operation. I couldn’t believe my eyes that this is real.” The director made a 30-minute documentary, Follow Me, which he said got wide attention. “I realised that this story really strikes a chord, and people get it. Drones in general, well, they’re something new. And I thought, right, this story needs to be made into a film.” The ensuing two-and-half hour film was shot last year in the Kyiv region. Levytskyi said he took artistic licence with the plot, adding a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by Russians. Scenes take place in the White House situation room, in occupied eastern Ukraine and a farmhouse in a deadly grey zone. There is a shootout and car chase in downtown Kyiv. The US journalist Audrey MacAlpine – who plays a version of herself – said filming had to stop on several occasions. “There were air raid alerts. We had to hide. It was a war within a war,” she said. The actor Denis Kapustin said some cast members would nap in a bomb shelter, waiting for the threat to pass. Of the blurring of fiction and reality, he said: “The movie is totally meta and postmodern.” Kapustin said Killhouse captures the complicated multi-level nature of war today. “It’s a race for technological superiority,” he added. Soldiers took part alongside professional actors, with pyrotechnics used to simulate explosions. After filming ended, Kapustin joined the real-life unit in which his character serves, the 3rd Assault Brigade, a part of the 3rd Army Corps. He is now a drone operator. In one scene, a group of Ukrainian special forces soldiers clear a building, shooting dead many Russians. Kapustin acknowledged that the war is fought at a distance across much of the frontline, but said street-to-street fighting takes place in shattered eastern towns such as Vovchansk. “It’s realistic. The plan is not to lose people,” he said. The reaction from Ukrainian audiences has been positive. “It’s interesting to see people from the news such as Budanov on screen,” Mariia Hlazunova, who worked for the Dovzhenko Centre, Ukraine’s film archive, said at this week’s Kyiv premiere. She added: “It’s like fiction mixed with fact. The film is super-patriotic, which is as it should be. There are a few cheesy moments. Overall it does a really good job.” Ukraine’s two main intelligence agencies, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU), were involved in the production. They provided US Humvee and MaxxPro vehicles as well as a Black Hawk helicopter. The drama showcases Ukraine’s latest homemade drones, such as a catapult-launched reconnaissance model known as Shark. The film’s makers say it is the first feature in cinema history to be use footage taken by real combat drones. They are preparing an English-language version for distributors in the US and are considering creating a four-episode version for streaming platforms such as Netflix. Killhouse was made without state support and had a $1.1m budget. Like Saving Private Ryan, the story has a moral question at its heart: is it worth sacrificing many lives to save one person, in this case a stolen child? According to Ukraine’s army media unit, Killhouse depicts “something the world often misses in the daily flood of frontline updates”. “Ukrainian soldiers are not just fighting to hold territory. They are crossing into grey zones to bring civilians home,” it said. Levytskyi suggested that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, badly underestimated Ukraine’s resilience and will to survive when he launched his 2022 full-scale invasion, thinking his armed forces could overwhelm Kyiv in a few days. More than four years later, the war continues. “The enemy is very afraid when Ukrainians are united. That is a fact,” the director said. Additional reporting by Jake Jacobs

US president cancels envoy trip to Pakistan for ceasefire talks – as it happened

Blog closing That’s where we’ll leave our live Middle East coverage for today. Thanks for following along and we’ll be back with another live blog later.

Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy signs agreement with Azerbaijan as death toll from Russian attacks rises to 10

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed deals on security and energy cooperation with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in Baku on Saturday, he said, as Kyiv seeks to leverage its experience in defending its airspace from Russia. After the latest wave of conflict in the Middle East that began with US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran in late February, multiple nations have sought Ukraine’s assistance and expertise in downing Iran’s long-range drones. Zelenskyy said the two countries had signed an agreement relating to military-industrial cooperation. Aliyev said military-industrial partnerships between the two countries had “wide-ranging perspectives” and that the two leaders had discussed joint defence production. He did not specify that he had signed any deals. Zelenskyy has also sought to reinvigorate peace talks with Russia, which were being mediated by the US until it became more focused on its campaign against Iran. The Ukrainian leader said he had discussed with Aliyev the possibility of having a meeting between Ukraine and Russia in Azerbaijan.“We are ready for the next talks [to be] in Azerbaijan if Russia will be ready for diplomacy,” he said. Ten people have been killed in Russian attacks on the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro and other regions. Regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said eight people were killed and 49 injured in Dnipro, a repeated target in more than four years of war with Russia. “For more than 20 frightening hours, the Russians attacked Dnipro in waves,” Hanzha wrote on Telegram. “They hit with missiles and drones. They hit deliberately. They hit residential areas.” Two more were killed in northern Ukraine. A Ukrainian drone attack on Sevastopol in Russian-annexed Crimea killed one man and wounded three other people, the city’s Moscow-installed governor said on Sunday. “43 UAVs (drones) were shot down in total. Unfortunately, there are fatalities,” Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on Telegram. He said a man born in 1983 was killed while inside a vehicle, and three people were hospitalised. The speaker of Russia’s parliament, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, arrived in North Korea on Saturday to attend an event to commemorate Pyongyang’s deployment of troops to help Moscow in the Ukraine conflict, the Tass news agency reported. Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s Duma, was welcomed by Jo Yong-won. North Korea has sent an estimated 14,000 troops to fight with Russian forces against Ukraine. More than 6,000 of them have been killed, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and western officials. A drone crashed in Romania on Saturday after Russian strikes in neighbouring Ukraine near a river separating the two countries, authorities said, adding that more than 200 people had been evacuated. Romania, a Nato member, has repeatedly seen its airspace violated and drone fragments fall on its territory since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But this was the first time that debris from Russian drones has caused material damage on its territory, according to local media. “A drone crashed in a populated area,” with a “possible explosive charge,” emergency services said in a statement. No casualties were reported, but an electricity pole and an outbuilding of a house were damaged, authorities said, adding that gas supplies in the area had been cut as a precautionary measure.

Macron says EU’s mutual defence clause ‘not just words’

Emmanuel Macron has spoken up for Europe’s ability to defend itself, saying a mutual assistance clause, enshrined in the EU treaty, was unambiguous and “not just words”. The French president said the pact had already been proved in action when several member states sent military aid to Cyprus after a drone attack against a British airbase on the island on 28 February. “On article 42, paragraph 7, it’s not just words,” the French leader said. “We know that for us, it ⁠is clear ‌and ‌there is no room ‌for interpretation or ‌ambiguity.” Macron, in Greece to renew a bilateral strategic defence agreement, described the clause as “stronger” than article 5, Nato’s collective defence clause, as he reiterated his long-held belief that Europe was better off boosting its own security than relying on an increasingly erratic US under Donald Trump. “I really believe this US approach will last,” he said. A day earlier, EU leaders, attending an informal council in Cyprus, said plans were being finessed on how the obscure clause would work in practice. Speaking on Friday, the European Council president, António Costa, said: “We are designing the handbook [on] how to use this mutual assistance clause.” Macron questioned the efficacy of the Nato article when asked about the military alliance and its founding principle under which members come to one another’s aid if they are attacked. “There is now a doubt on article 5, not put on the table by the Europeans but by the US president,” he told the audience during a discussion held with the Greek prime minister in the capital’s picturesque Roman-era agora. “It is clearly a de facto weakening of the Nato alliance … I am a strong believer in the European pillar of Nato and my view is that we should strengthen this European pillar.” His Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, appeared to agree, calling the decision to rush fighter jets and naval support to Cyprus “a gamechanger” for the bloc. Amid fears of the union’s easternmost member coming under sustained retaliatory attack in the first days of the US-Israeli war against Iran, France, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal scrambled to send assistance to the island. “What we did in Cyprus was a gamechanger,” said Mitsotakis, insisting that the time had come for the little-known defence pact to be taken seriously. “We have a mutual assistance clause in our treaties and this is our European responsibility. We never spoke about it because we thought that Nato would always do the job … we need to take this article much more seriously; we need to look at the Cypriot lesson, think about what could happen in another case, have exercises in terms of what it would mean if we were again to offer support to a European country under threat.” Doing so would be tantamount to a “political statement” that the EU did not only rely on Nato, and would be “also good for Nato”, he added. Infuriated by Nato’s failure to support the strikes against Iran, the US president has stepped up criticism of the transatlantic alliance, further raising concerns that support for article 5 from Washington can no longer be guaranteed. Macron, who is making his third official visit to Greece before he leaves office next year, said the strong alliance between the two nations should serve as a model for the rest of the EU. On Saturday an unprecedented nine accords were signed between the countries, foreseeing increased cooperation in areas including scientific research and nuclear technology. Macron vowed that France would stand by Greece if it ever came under attack from its neighbour and long-time regional rival, Turkey. In 2017, Macron, then newly elected, had used the dramatic setting of the ancient Pnyx beneath the Athens Acropolis to give a rousing policy speech on the future of Europe and the virtues of democracy. The tone, nine years later, could not have been more different. At a time of such geopolitical uncertainty, Europe, he said, had to “wake up” and claim its place as a geopolitical power as it faced opponents it had not faced before. “We should not underestimate that this is a unique moment where a US president, a Russian president and a Chinese president are dead against the Europeans,” he told the crowd. It now remained for a continent that had managed to end centuries of civil war – and deliver on prosperity – to “write the next chapter and become a geopolitical power”.