Meanwhile, Finland’s president Alexander Stubb and other top Finnish government officials insisted in a statement that Ukraine must be allowed to make its own decisions on how to end the war with Russia. “Matters concerning Ukraine are for Ukraine to decide, and decisions about Europe cannot be made without Europe’s involvement,” they said, in a statement reported by Rueters.
The key draft text issued by the Brazilian presidency has infuriated many nations - Prof Michael Jacobs, a political economist, argues it is a tactic. The text does not include either a roadmap to transitioning away from fossil fuels” wanted by a large group of developed and developing countries, nor a commitment to a tripling of adaptation finance - money from rich nations to protect poorer communities from climate impacts. Writing on LinkedIn he says: “By issuing a text that leans so far to one side - in this case, towards the Arab Group and Like-Minded Group (China, India and some other developing countries) - the presidency is seeking to provoke a public row in the plenary session. This will tell the Arab Group and LMDCs that they have to compromise. Brazil will then be able to pressure them to accept a text more acceptable to the Least Developed Countries group, Latins, islands and developed countries.”
Europe cannot supply enough TNT to defend either itself or Ukraine largely because its monopoly supplier of the explosive is contracted to send much of its production to the US which then exports it for use by Israel in Gaza, a Polish MP has claimed. Maciej Konieczny, a member of the leftwing Razem party said the Polish company Nitro-Chem, owned by the Polish Armaments Group, cannot keep up with demand partly because it has signed successive contracts to supply TNT to the US where it is used in bombs supplied to Israel. The Polish explosive is allegedly used by the US to produce various types of ammunition, including the 2,000lb MK-84 and 550lb BLU-109 penetrating bombs, both of which Israel is accused of using in Gaza. The US currently has no means of producing TNT domestically, and the severe shortage has prompted the US government to give permission for a factory to be built in Kentucky. “Polish TNT is exported entirely abroad and the bombs produced from it fall on the heads of innocent civilians in Gaza and Yemen,” Konieczny told the Guardian. “Meanwhile due to this diversion of the factory’s output, Poland has no ready means to produce its own necessary ammunition: our current reserves of TNT would only be enough for armed activities for a month in the event of a war. Nor do we have enough TNT to provide artillery shells for Ukraine. “A full explanation is needed as to whether Gaza is being put ahead of the defence of Europe, and whether this is a demand that is being made of the Polish government by America,” he said. Konieczny raised the issue in the Polish parliament on Friday. The Polish factory is estimated to produce between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes of TNT a year. But about half of its current output is destined for the US until at least 2029. It is not known precisely what proportion of exported Polish TNT is being used in Ukraine, Gaza or retained for use by the US army. There is no suggestion Nitro-Chem has broken any Polish law. An alternative source of 5,000 tonnes of TNT a year was Zorya in Ukraine, but the factory in Luhansk is now under Russian occupation. The US is not permitted to purchase TNT from China, and the environmental hazards involved in producing the explosive make building a TNT factory a formidable exercise. In April 2025, Nitro-Chem signed a fresh contract worth $310m with Paramount Enterprises Ltd, a private defence logistics company specialising in the transportation of munitions and explosives, to deliver 18,000 tonnes of TNT to the US between 2027 and 2029. The deal was signed in the presence of Poland’s deputy defence minister, Cezary Tomczyk. A report written by a collection of Palestinian NGOs claims that “without Polish-made TNT, the unprecedented scale and intensity of the aerial bombardment that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed living conditions in the Gaza Strip ( ... ) would not have been possible”. The report had been prepared by the People’s Embargo for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, Shadow World Investigations and the Movement Research Unit, which traced the flow of American weapons to Israel. The NGOs point out that between October 2023 and July 2024 the US transferred at least 14,000 MK-84s and 8,700 MK-82s to Israel. In May 2024 Biden paused the shipment of some larger bombs, but these restrictions were lifted by Donald Trump as soon as he entered office. General Dynamics, the fifth largest defence company in the world, has been producing the MK-80 series at its Garland Operations facility near Dallas, but the Garland facility was recently taken over by a US subsidiary of the Turkish defence company Repkon. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, accusing Israel of undertaking a genocide in Gaza. In a statement Nitro-Chem said “We emphasize that Nitro-Chem conducts its operations in accordance with applicable national and international law and all regulations relevant to the arms industry. The company remains under constant supervision of the relevant state institutions, and its activities are carried out in accordance with applicable procedures and international standards.”
The dispute between South Africa and the US over the Trump administration’s decision to boycott the G20 in Johannesburg has continued, with South Africa objecting to a US plan for a junior embassy official to take part in the closing ceremony meant to mark the handover to the next summit, which will take place in Florida. The two-day summit, which opens on Saturday, comes at a febrile moment in global politics. The US has proposed a deal to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which it agreed with Moscow without the involvement of Ukraine or the EU. Washington has also been accusing South Africa for months of racial discrimination against minority white Afrikaners, who ruled the country during apartheid, which South Africa has vehemently rejected. The country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, told a press conference on Thursday that the US had had a change of mind about participating in the G20 and that the two sides were discussing what form US involvement could take. He had said earlier in the day that countries should not be bullied and that their sovereignty should be respected. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, hit back: “The US is not participating in official talks at the G20 in South Africa. I saw the South African president running his mouth a little bit against the United States and the president of the United States earlier today, and that language is not appreciated by the president or his team. “The ambassador or the representative of the embassy in South Africa is simply there to recognise that the United States will be the host of the G20 [next year]. They are receiving that send-off at the end of that event. They are not there to participate in official talks, despite what the South African president is falsely claiming.” The US does not currently have an ambassador in Pretoria, with Marc Dillard the acting ambassador or chargé d’affaires. Many South Africans reacted furiously to what they perceived as a snub to their country. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri, said: “President will not be handing over to a junior embassy official.” Ramaphosa had previously said he would hand the G20 presidency to an “empty chair”, but that he would have preferred to give it directly to Donald Trump. The 2026 summit will take place at the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort in Florida, which is owned by the Trump Organization. Analysts said the US boycott of the G20 was more likely to harm than help its global standing. Marisa Lourenço, a political risk consultant based in Johannesburg, said: “China or India in the past might get criticised for certain actions … Now the US is really being seen as the unreasonable one, because it’s becoming clearer and clearer that what it’s doing to South Africa is just completely misguided.” The G20 was founded in 1999 after the Asian financial crisis. It was envisaged as a broader alternative to the G7 for the world’s largest economies and the EU to try to find common positions on global economic and financial issues. South Africa has taken great pride in being the first African country to preside over the G20, presenting itself as a champion of issues important to many countries on the continent. These include high levels of public debt and how to get the most benefit from the growing demand for “critical minerals” used in green technologies and found in many parts of the region. The country’s other priorities for its year leading the G20 are to increase financing for a “just energy transition” - moving away from fossil fuels while preserving economic livelihoods - and improve disaster resilience and responses. As part of his G20 presidency, Ramaphosa commissioned reports into Africa’s high debt levels and global inequality. The latter, produced by a panel independent experts led by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, cited data showing that the world’s wealthiest 1% had captured 41% of all wealth generated between 2000 and 2024, while the poorest 50% had received just 1%. The panel recommended the formation of an independent body to synthesise data and research on inequality and assess the effectiveness of policies to tackle it. Ramaphosa, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, also threw their weight behind the proposal in a Financial Times opinion piece on Thursday. Jayati Ghosh, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of the panel members, told reporters: “Wealth concentration is growing. Income inequality is also a result of that, but we found wealth inequality to be even possibly the biggest problem, because it generates also greater inequality of power.” Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAids and another panel member said the independent monitoring body, which the panel compared to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, could be formed without a G20 resolution or US involvement. “It doesn’t have to start with a consensus, it can start with those who want to take it forward,” said Byanyima, who will address G20 leaders on inequality on Saturday. Protests over violence against women have been timed across South Africa to coincide with the G20. At midday on Friday, thousands of people lay down for 15 minutes of silence in memory of the 15 women murdered on average every day in the country.
Unknown gunmen have abducted an unidentified number of students from a Catholic school in central Nigeria, the second mass abduction in the country in a week. The latest kidnapping, in Papiri community in Niger state, came against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s threat to intervene militarily to end a “Christian genocide”, which the Nigerian government has denied is happening. “The Niger state government has received with deep sadness the disturbing news of the kidnapping of pupils from St Mary’s School in Agwara local government area,” Abubakar Usman, the state government secretary, said in a statement. Niger, the biggest of the country’s 36 states, runs west from the capital, Abuja, to neighbouring Benin. The incident in the early hours of Friday is the third documented mass school abduction in the state in the last decade. In the last attack in Niger state, in May 2021, 135 pupils were abducted from an Islamic seminary, six of whom died while being held. On Monday, gunmen stormed a girls’ boarding school in neighbouring Kebbi state, abducting 25 schoolgirls and killing the vice-principal. According to local reports, security forces had relayed information about the plot and spent the night guarding the school but left the scene early. “The heavily armed security personnel spent time taking photographs with the students, only to abandon them 30 minutes before the attack,” the state governor said. Afterward, Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, ordered junior defence minister Bello Matawalle to relocate to the state to help with rescue efforts. No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but analysts and locals say gangs often target schools, travellers and remote villagers in kidnappings for ransom. Authorities say the gunmen are mostly former herders who have taken up arms against farming communities after clashes over strained resources. Africa’s most populous nation is beset by multiple overlapping insecurity crises across its central and northern states, of which kidnapping for ransom is just one facet. On Monday, the extremist group Islamic West Africa Province claimed responsibility for the death of a Nigerian general in north-eastern Borno state. Iswap also released footage of his death as well as WhatsApp chats about a failed rescue attempt. Earlier this week, gunmen abducted 38 worshippers from a church in Kwara state, Niger’s southern neighbour, after a brutal attack that left at least two dead, according to church officials. The attack was seen by millions of people due to a live stream of the service that was taking place. The kidnappers have since demanded a ransom of 100m naira (£52,662) a person, a possible indication that the kidnapping was financially motivated rather than ideological. Regardless of motive, the scale and frequency of the attacks and kidnappings has heightened pressure on the government as it endeavours to avoid an escalating diplomatic row with the Trump administration, which has designated Nigeria a country of particular concern (CPC), a designation given to nations where the government is deemed to have engaged in or tolerated severe violations of religious freedoms. US lawmakers such as Ted Cruz have helped spread claims of a “Christian genocide” being under way in Nigeria. Trump has since warned that US forces could go “guns-blazing” into Nigeria if the country fails to protect its Christian population. There has been a flurry of activity in US parliamentary halls and the Vatican as the situation has unfolded. “Terrorists, separatists, bandits and criminal militias in Nigeria are all over the country, with ongoing attacks often deliberately targeting Christian communities,” Jonathan Pratt, a senior official with the US Bureau of African Affairs told Congress on Thursday. Nigeria’s government has rejected claims of an anti-Christian genocide and says the victims of the attacks are from all faiths. On Wednesday, Tinubu announced he was cancelling planned trips to South Africa and Angola this weekend for the G20 and AU-EU summits respectively.
When relations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin soured this autumn, with the US president publicly accusing Moscow of blocking a path to a peace in Ukraine and announcing significant sanctions against Russia’s oil sector, one man saw an opening. Kirill Dmitriev, the US-savvy, Harvard-educated head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, boarded a plane to Florida late October, where he met Steve Witkoff, the property developer serving as Trump’s freelance envoy on Ukraine. The two men, neither of whom has any real diplomatic experience, began drafting a plan that would impose draconian terms on Ukraine and hand Moscow sweeping influence over the country’s political and military sovereignty. The scheme, which surfaced in media reports on Wednesday, has thrust Dmitriev back into the global spotlight – a position, several people who have met him over the years say, he has long craved. “Dmitriev is obsessed with being perceived as important,” said one source, who has known him since the Moscow business scene of the late 2000s. “He is ruthlessly ambitious,” the source added, describing him as “very thin on substance but exceptionally good at selling himself”. The source, like others, asked for anonymity so they could speak freely. “Fake it till you make it” was Dmitriev’s modus operandi, the source said. “And he has, objectively, made it very far.” It may come as a surprise to some that one of Moscow’s most aggressive champions was born in Soviet-era Ukraine. The son of prominent scientists, Dmitriev grew up and studied at Kyiv’s elite Lyceum No 145, a competitive maths and physics school where he made an impression on friends as a hard-working pupil who was obsessed with the US. “He was quite arrogant … but very systematic, and if he wanted to achieve something, he worked on that,” said Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same year as Dmitriev and is now a Ukrainian MP. At 15, Dmitriev was selected by his school for a trip to the US – an experience that, according to Ariev, solidified his fascination with the country. He later enrolled at Stanford University, followed by an MBA course at Harvard. In a 2000 New York Times story about Harvard’s business school, Dmitriev marvelled at the opportunities that came with his new course. “There’s a great sense of bonding with your teammates. You live together, go out at night to celebrate victories or drown sorrows,” Dmitriev says. He also foreshadowed his own ambition and knack for making connections: “I also go to New York for business development, to establish strategic alliances and meet with clients, four times a month.” After stints at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, his real business breakthrough came not in Moscow or New York but in Kyiv. From 2007 to 2011, he ran Icon Private Equity, a Ukrainian fund managing roughly $1bn, most of it belonging to the oligarch Victor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. Pinchuk introduced him to Vladimir Dmitriev (no relation), then head of the Russian state development corporation VEB, according to a well-connected source in Moscow who has direct knowledge of the events. Together, the two Dmitrievs persuaded the Kremlin to launch Russia’s foreign investment fund (RDIF) that would lure American, European and Gulf capital into Russia. The role – eventually overseeing $10bn – seemed to suit him perfectly, said a Russian business reporter who knew Dmitriev personally. The smooth-talking Dmitriev became a fixture in Davos, Riyadh and at global investor summits, gliding from panels on artificial intelligence to discreet bilateral meetings with sovereign funds. It was also around this time that Dmitriev’s personal connections to the Kremlin thickened. His wife, Natalia Popova, developed a close personal and professional relationship with Putin’s younger daughter, Katerina Tikhonova. Popova remains the deputy director of Innopraktika, Tikhonova’s research institute. An investigation by the Russian outlet the Insider also alleged close links between Dmitriev and Russia’s security services. “He grew extremely confident, even pompous,” said the source who knew Dmitriev at the time. Sanctions imposed on Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea made it harder for Dmitriev to sell Moscow abroad, but he sensed an opening with Trump’s first election in 2016. One former RDIF colleague said Dmitriev swiftly ordered the fund to release a statement the morning after Trump’s win signalling support for the incoming president. Robert Mueller’s report on Russian 2016 US election meddling found that Dmitriev tapped his UAE network, drawn from one of the RDIF’s principal investors, to build a back channel to Trump’s first administration. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dmitriev was placed under sanctions by Washington. But Trump’s return to power handed him another lifeline. Dmitriev quickly began signalling to the White House that there was money to be made in any eventual peace deal, touting the prospect of multibillion-dollar contracts in the Arctic and other areas of US-Russia cooperation – a potent pitch for a business-obsessed administration. He set out specifically to cultivate a relationship with Witkoff, Trump’s trusted friend and longtime business associate, leaning heavily on the property mogul’s enthusiasm for deal-making. Together, the two men helped arrange the release of the US schoolteacher Marc Fogel in a prisoner swap in February – a gesture they framed as an early step toward repairing relations between Washington and Moscow. But Dmitriev has not limited himself to Witkoff. Much of his public activity now appears focused on courting other prominent Maga figures and amplifying the US far right’s talking points. A fervent user of X, he posts daily about Europe’s migration “crisis,” accuses “globalists” of indoctrinating children with “pro-trans programmes” and regularly promotes conspiratorial rhetoric – once even adding a QAnon-style slogan popular with Trump’s most extreme base. Dmitriev’s Ukrainian background has not stood in the way of his rise. At 15, he told a local journalist during his trip to the US that Ukraine had a long and proud history of independence – and that rising nationalist sentiment would help “break the power of the communist system” – but he has since become one of the Kremlin’s most loyal advocates. “Dmitriev chose Putin’s side,” said Ariev, the Ukrainian MP, adding that most childhood friends had long since broken contact with him. Dmitriev’s closest school friend became a soldier in the Ukrainian army and was wounded in battle recently, Ariev added. The source who knew Dmitriev in Moscow in the 2010s said he almost never spoke about his place of birth. “He had no real interest in Ukraine. His attention was always on Moscow,” they said. Still, despite his fierce loyalty to Putin, Dmitriev’s meteoric rise has ruffled feathers within Russia’s ageing foreign policy establishment. One source close to the Kremlin said they had offered to help Dmitriev with outreach to the Americans and with drafting a potential pathway to end the war in Ukraine – assistance Dmitriev flatly declined. “He could really use some advice on foreign relations, because he himself admitted to me he isn’t an expert on this. But he decided to go at it alone,” the source said. Dmitriev’s relationship with Sergei Lavrov, the long-serving foreign minister, is also notoriously poor. The rift between them is now an open secret in Moscow and has occasionally burst into the open. Lavrov and Dmitriev clashed last February during peace talks in Riyadh with the US, when the foreign minister tried to exclude him by removing the chair set out for him, according to two people who separately described the episode. Dmitriev ultimately joined the meeting after a call with Putin. “Dmitriev has made enemies in Russia. But right now, he is untouchable because he is proving to be very useful for Putin,” said the source close to the Kremlin. Shaun Walker contributed reporting
Hundreds of English-language websites – from mainstream news outlets to fringe blogs – are linking to articles from a pro-Kremlin network flooding the internet with disinformation, according to a study released by a London-based thinktank. The study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that in more than 80% of citations it analysed, the websites treated the network as a credible source, legitimising its narratives and increasing its visibility. The disinformation operation – known as the Pravda network – was identified by the French government last year. The ISD cautioned that by linking to articles in the network, the websites were inadvertently increasing the likelihood of search engines and large language models (LLMs) surfacing the pages, even in cases where the linking sites were disputing the Pravda network as a source. Security experts have expressed fears in recent months that Russia is trying to seed chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini with pro-Russia narratives by feeding them large volumes of disinformation, a process called “LLM grooming”. The Pravda network has been around since 2014, but researchers tracking its output say the number of articles it churns out has surged this year. Up to 23,000 articles a day were published in May, up from approximately 6,000 daily articles in 2024. The network now appears to be aiming for a global audience, targeting countries across Asia and Africa as well as Europe. “The Pravda network has been expanding pretty rapidly over the past year,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who spoke to the UK parliament earlier this week on efforts to undermine democracy. “They are targeting a lot of different languages. They want to have a presence across a bunch of different countries.” It is unclear what led to this increase, but some disinformation experts believe it was an effort to push large amounts of pro-Russia content into the training datasets of AI models, which use massive amounts of data during their training and scrape content from the entire internet. Studies from earlier this year showed that popular chatbots at times repeated Russian disinformation in response to certain queries – suggesting, for example, that the US was building a bioweapon in Ukraine or the French were supplying mercenaries to Kyiv. Researchers at the ISD say that, whether or not LLMs have been poisoned, their findings indicate the Pravda network’s high-volume strategy is working. “More than any other Russia-aligned operation, the Pravda network is playing a numbers game,” said Joseph Bodnar, a senior researcher at the ISD. “They’ve saturated the internet ecosystem enough to get in front of real people who are doing research on Russia-related issues.” The ISD found that 40% of the Pravda network content picked up by mainstream websites appeared to be related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. A vast amount, however, concerned other topics: US domestic policy, for example, or the fortunes of Elon Musk. As well as surfacing on news websites, the Pravda articles have also appeared on social media. “This happened to a lot of different reputable sources and a lot less reputable sources too, like people from across the ideological spectrum. It really touched every part of the web that we could find,” said Bodnar. Jankowicz warned that the Pravda network’s increasing legitimacy might allow it to “usurp coverage” on Ukraine as media outlets increasingly shift their coverage elsewhere. “There’s a bit less news about Ukraine. And if they can get in there and fill that gap really soon, that means that the Russian viewpoint is the one that’s going to get out there quickly and be cited in large language models.”
For most of her life, Gorda was just an axolotl who lived in a museum in Mexico City – that is, until she became the star of the country’s favourite banknote. The note, which features a depiction of Gorda as the model for Mexico’s iconic species of salamander, went into circulation in 2021, dazzling the judges of the International Bank Notes Society, who declared it the Note of the Year. Four years later, the Bank of Mexico has released a report revealing that 12.9 million Mexicans are holding on to this note as if it were worth more than just its value of 50 pesos, or a little under $3. Indeed, millions of them are hoarding more than one. Only a minority said they would not contemplate spending the notes. Nonetheless, the survey found that roughly $150m worth of them were at least temporarily out of circulation at the time. Some of the first to be printed are even being traded for 100 times their intended value. All of this is specific to the axolotl banknote: only 12% of those holding on to it said they did the same for other notes. And the reason for most was simple: they liked the design. Perhaps it is because axolotls are a symbol of something uniquely Mexican. Axolotls – which are forever tadpoles, never losing their gills to become land dwellers like other salamanders – predate the Aztecs, let alone the Spanish, and once inhabited Lake Texcoco, under the ever-smoking volcano, Popocatépetl. When the Aztecs arrived in roughly AD1300, they built Tenochtitlan, the seat of their empire, on an island in the middle of the lake – a scene depicted on the flip side of the banknote, based on a mural of the ancient city by the artist Diego Rivera. The Aztecs sometimes snacked on axolotl – but also named them after their god of fire and lightning. After the Spanish conquered Tenochtitlan, the new rulers drained the lake, restricting axolotls to Xochimilco, on the southern edge of today’s capital – the only place the old waterways endured. Today, few axolotls survive in the wild. By 2014, their population in Xochimilco had collapsed to just 36 per square kilometre. Gorda is one of six specimens living in Axolotitlán, the Mexico City museum dedicated to Mexico’s cutest critter. She is now rather elderly, and rarely put on display in the museum. But the museum’s founder, Pamela Valencia, told El País that it had been worth wheeling her out for the photo shoot for the banknote’s design, if only to bring the public closer to an iconic species at risk of extinction. “We used to see souvenirs of jaguars and hummingbirds. Today we can see how the axolotl is becoming part of our culture, our everyday lives,” said Valencia. “We cannot save something if we don’t know it exists.”