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Trump calls Iran’s response to peace plan ‘totally unacceptable’ as ceasefire frays

Donald Trump has rejected an Iranian response to a US peace proposal as “totally unacceptable”, on a day the month-old ceasefire showed signs of fraying as drone strikes were reported around the region and Benjamin Netanyahu warned the war was “not over”. The Iranian counter-proposal was passed to Washington through Pakistani mediators. The semi-official Tasnim news agency, citing an informed source, said on Sunday night that Iran’s proposed text for negotiations underlined the necessity of lifting US sanctions, ending the US naval blockade of the strait of Hormuz after the signing of initial understanding, and an immediate end to the war with guarantees against any renewed attack on the country. The US had presented a peace proposal a week ago, which was reported to consist of a one-page, 14-point memorandum of understanding that would reopen the strait of Hormuz while setting a framework for further talks on Iran’s nuclear programme. The US parameters for nuclear talks reportedly included a moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment for up to 20 years; the transfer overseas, possibly to the US, of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which could be used to make nuclear warheads; and the dismantling of Iranian nuclear facilities. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranian counter-proposal suggested a shorter moratorium, the export of part of the HEU stockpile and the dilution of the rest, and refusal to accept the dismantling of facilities. Trump responded shortly afterwards by saying: “I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘representatives’. I don’t like it – totally unacceptable.” Earlier in the day Trump had posted a long statement on his online platform, Truth Social, alleging Iran “has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years”, adding that Tehran “will be laughing no longer”. Trump was expected to talk to Netanyahu on Sunday. The Israeli prime minister had earlier warned the war would continue as long as Iran had a stockpile of HEU. “It’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material – enriched uranium – that has to be taken out of Iran. There’s still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled,” he told the CBS programme 60 Minutes, according an excerpt published before its broadcast. Asked how the HEU should be removed, Netanyahu said: “You go in and you take it out,” adding that the best way would be to enter Iran to secure the fissile material as part of an agreement. He said Donald Trump had told him he wants “to go in there”. In a separate interview, Trump appeared to take a more relaxed view of the HEU stockpile, which the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, says is buried deep under mountains in central Iran. The US president suggested that for the time being, satellite surveillance was sufficient to guarantee no one had access to it. Trump said on the Full Measure programme: “We’ll get that at some point … We have it surveilled. I did a thing called Space Force, and they are watching that … If anybody got near the place, we will know about it – and we’ll blow them up.” As he has on numerous occasions since a ceasefire was declared a month ago, Trump said US attacks on Iran could be resumed. He said the US could “go in for two more weeks and do every single target. We have certain targets that we wanted, and we’ve done probably 70% of them, but we have other targets that we could conceivably hit. “But even if we didn’t do that, you know, that would just be final touches,” he added. The president is under heavy pressure to maintain the ceasefire, and potentially make a peace deal, before a scheduled visit this week to China, which is pushing for an end to hostilities and the opening of the strait. Two critical issues that will be at the heart of any future nuclear talks between the US and Iran are the disposal of Iran’s 440kg of HEU enriched to 60% purity – close to weapons grade – and the suspension of uranium enrichment. In an interview on Iranian state media late on Saturday, a military spokesperson said the country’s forces were at “full readiness” to protect the stockpile. “We considered it possible that they might intend to steal it through infiltration operations or heliborne operations,” Brig Gen Akrami Nia said. Trump is reported to have been presented with military options for seizing the HEU, but the operation would have required a large number of troops and would have taken weeks. Iran was responding on Sunday to a US memorandum that was itself a response to an earlier Iranian proposal. That also envisaged the lifting of parallel US and Iranian blockades on the strait, which have been driving up oil prices and stifling the global economy, with an emphasis on the lifting of sanctions and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The announcement of a new response from Tehran came on a day when the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire, which came into effect on 8 April, showed new signs of strain. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait reported drone incursions in their airspace on Sunday, and a drone attack started a small fire on a ship on the coast of Qatar. Another drone strike was reported at a camp used by an Iranian Kurdish rebel group near Erbil in north-eastern Iraq. Qatar’s defence ministry did not give details of the vessel targeted on Sunday, other than that it had come from Abu Dhabi. The UAE defence ministry said it had shot down the drones which entered its airspace, and which it said were Iranian. Qatar denounced the strike on a ship in its territorial waters as a “serious escalation”. The country’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, told Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, that using the strait as a means of exerting pressure would only deepen the crisis, and that freedom of maritime navigation should not be compromised. Kuwait’s defence ministry spokesperson said its forces had dealt with drones which entered the country’s airspace early on Sunday, “in accordance with established procedures”, without attributing responsibility for the incursion. Meanwhile, Iran’s deputy foreign minister warned against a planned French-British effort that aims to support maritime security in the strait after hostilities are over. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, responded by saying it would not be a military deployment but an international mission to secure shipping when conditions allow. The UK and France will on Tuesday host a multinational meeting of defence ministers on military plans to restore trade flows through the strait, the British government said. “The defence secretary, John Healey, will co-chair a meeting of over 40 nations, alongside his French counterpart, minister Catherine Vautrin, for the multinational mission’s first defence ministers’ meeting,” a ministry statement said Sunday. Hours earlier, Iran warned London and Paris against sending warships to the region. Tensions have flared under the truce as the US and Iran have sought to assert their control of the Hormuz strait. On 4 May, Donald Trump launched what he called Project Freedom, which was supposed to provide a route out of the Gulf for the hundreds of ships trapped by the war. Iran, which closed the strait after the initial US-Israeli attack on 28 February, responded with attacks on US naval vessels, commercial vessels and oil facilities in the UAE, a close ally of the US and Israel. Trump called off Project Freedom after 36 hours and the passage of just two US-flagged ships. Saudi Arabia had refused permission for US forces to use its bases and airspace for the operation. Tehran has insisted that all ships passing through the strait coordinate with its armed forces and pay a $2m (£1.5m) toll. On Sunday, Iranian state media reported that a Panama-flagged vessel bound for Brazil had been allowed to sail through the strait. Trump has said that the current ceasefire includes Lebanon, and has told Israel to stop the bombing of Hezbollah targets there. Israel has reduced the intensity of its campaign but has continued to carry out strikes. Lebanon’s health ministry reported that 36 people had been killed and 74 wounded by Israeli strikes on Saturday. Among the casualties were several paramedics wounded in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said, meanwhile, that it had intercepted Hezbollah drones approaching its troops in the area.

Nobel laureate’s smuggled memoir details beatings and neglect in Iranian prisons

In an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran, the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has described the “torture” of solitary confinement, and her systematic medical neglect by the prison system. The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon to be published memoir that gives a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi, who is in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments. “There is no hardship worse than illness combined with imprisonment,” she wrote. “Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail.” After those words were written and she was rearrested, Mohammadi’s health hit another crisis point this year, with her weight dropping by more than 20kg. She was found unconscious in her cell after an apparent heart attack in March. For weeks, requests by her family and doctors for her to receive proper medical treatment from her team of surgeons were denied. On Sunday, she was released on bail to receive treatment from her medical team in Tehran. She remains in a critical condition. Her family have said her continuing detention and the refusal of proper medical care constitute a “slow execution”. Mohammadi wrote of how her stretches in prison have caused significant damage to her health. She has suffered a pulmonary embolism, seizures, multiple infections, chest pain and other life-threatening medical events in prison, and describes the agonising wait for often inadequate medical care. The writings were smuggled out by fellow prisoners and visitors during Mohammadi’s time in Iran’s notorious Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons, at considerable risk to their own safety. They had to be rewritten several times over the past decade, after pages or notebooks were discovered and destroyed by prison guards. The memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, will be published in September. It covers Mohammadi’s early life, the way her parents helped inspire her political convictions, her path into activism, and the many years she spent in prison for public protest. Mohammadi has been arrested 14 times for her activism on advancing women’s rights in Iran, improving the conditions of prisoners and ending the regime’s use of the death penalty. She has been sentenced to 44 years in prison and 154 lashes across a number of convictions. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel peace prize while in prison in 2023, during the Women, Life, Freedom protests. In December 2024, she was released on a temporary sentence suspension after a series of health events, but was violently rearrested a year later and sentenced to years’ more prison time in February.

Dozens of people from cruise ship struck by hantavirus leave Tenerife

Dozens of passengers and crew from countries around the world have been evacuated from a cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak. British people were among those taken off the ship as part of a two-day operation that began on Sunday in Tenerife. They were put on chartered flights back to the UK, where they will enter hospital quarantine in Merseyside. At about 9pm on Sunday, a plane carrying 22 UK citizens landed in Manchester, it was reported. Spanish passengers wearing blue plastic ponchos and hair coverings had already been taken off the vessel by medical teams in hazmat suits after being screened for the infection. They were then taken by coach to Tenerife airport. The ship arrived in the Canary Islands in the early hours of Sunday carrying 146 people, after three people died of the virus and eight more became ill. No one else onboard the vessel had symptoms, but passengers and crew had been confined to their cabins for days to help halt the spread of the virus, which is transmitted only through very close contact. They were each being screened for hantavirus, which can cause flu-like symptoms leading to respiratory arrest and death in some cases. The 19 passengers and three crew from the UK were to be flown into quarantine at Arrowe Park hospital in Wirral. None of the British passengers are showing any symptoms, according to the head of the NHS trust managing the quarantine. They will get regular welfare checks over the next 72 hours in self-contained flats at Arrowe Park before self-isolating for 45 days at home. Separate flights have been arranged for those from elsewhere to repatriate passengers and crew to their home countries. The Spanish government and the World Health Organization (WHO) have said the passengers and crew will not come into contact with people in Tenerife. Fourteen Spanish citizens landed at Madrid airport on Sunday evening, the government confirmed. Flights carrying passengers from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Canada, Turkey, France, Ireland and the US followed. Authorities said a Dutch refuelling plane would pick up any passengers who had not yet been evacuated on Monday. The last scheduled flight would be to Australia with six people, departing on Monday afternoon. The government of the Philippines, the country with the most people on board, confirmed that of the 38 Filipino crew, 24 were stewards and hotel staff. The latter were being transferred to the Netherlands on two flights from Tenerife and will begin their quarantine in the Netherlands. A spokesperson said the remaining 14 staff were deck and engine operatives, part of the essential crew remaining on board to bring the ship to port in Rotterdam. Those who have been evacuated were being asked to isolate for 42 days from their point of potential exposure, which for most of the passengers would be many days ago. The MV Hondius is anchored slightly offshore of the southern commercial port of Granadilla. Passengers have been taken to the dock in groups of five to 10 by a small boat only when planes were on the asphalt ready to receive them, the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, said. Flights to some countries were yet to be arranged as authorities scrambled to get planes in place on Sunday. Winds off the coast of the island were expected to pick up from Monday, meaning any people whose flights had not been arranged may be stuck onboard. Authorities have sought to make clear that the virus, though serious, would not result in another pandemic. However, the director general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was asked at a press conference in Tenerife on Saturday night whether allowing passengers to travel all over the world and relying on them to self-isolate with no oversight could cause further outbreaks. “Based on our assessment, what you have said is not going to happen,” he said. At the port Javier Padilla Bernáldez, Spain’s health secretary, said PCR diagnostic testing was not being carried out on the ship and instead those onboard were having their temperatures taken and had filled out a health survey designed to identify hantavirus symptoms. He said the UK and US had asked for further testing onboard the MV Hondius, which had been refused, but the countries had been told they could test passengers on the plane as soon as it left the airport. Countries are carrying out their own health checks, which for some, such as the UK and Spain, involve PCR testing. He said the European Commission and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control were “trying to achieve a certain degree of coordination, and not a high variation among the different countries”. “But every country has its own confidences,” he said. The polar cruise ship arrived at the Canary Islands after spending days stranded off the coast of Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. Local authorities would not allow the ship to dock amid fears of a wider outbreak overwhelming the healthcare system of the small island nation. Fears of a new pandemic were unfounded, the WHO said, because hantaviruses did not spread as quickly as Covid-19 and treatment was highly effective if the virus was caught quickly enough. However, a broad incubation period, lasting between a few days and eight weeks, means infected people might have the opportunity to pass on the virus before any symptoms become apparent. For this reason, the WHO is putting together an international coordinated response, particularly in tracing those who left the vessel since the onset of the outbreak more than a month ago. Several countries have come together to solve the logistical challenge of tracing people who have been in close and prolonged contact with 29 people who disembarked on 24 April in the remote southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena. Two British people are self-isolating in the UK because they could have been exposed to the virus before getting off about a month ago. Neither has symptoms. A specialist army team and medical personnel were parachuted on to the British overseas territory of Tristan da Cunha with medical aid and equipment after a British national disembarked on to the island, where they live, with a suspected case of hantavirus.

Russia breaches three-day ceasefire with Ukraine, says Zelenskyy

Russia has been conducting assault operations on the Ukrainian frontline in breach of a three-day ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday. “The Russians are continuing assault activity in sectors key for them,” Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said in his evening address. “On the frontline, the Russian army is not complying with the ceasefire and is not even really trying to.” The US-mediated ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine appeared under serious strain on its second day on Sunday, with both sides accusing the other of violating the deal through weekend attacks. The three-day pause, announced on Friday by Trump, is part of a broader US-led push for peace that has so far failed to end the more than four-year-old war despite months of shuttle diplomacy. Zelenskyy’s comments came after Vladimir Putin said he thinks the Ukraine war is winding down, hours after he had vowed to defeat Ukraine at Moscow’s most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years and even as two of his senior aides played down the notion of a quick end to the conflict. “I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin said of Europe’s deadliest conflict since the second world war. He said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe and that his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder – a choice unlikely to be accepted in Ukraine and the EU. However, two top Kremlin representatives played down any idea of a quick end to the war. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said this weekend that reaching a peace agreement on Ukraine would take a long time. “It is clear that the American side is in a hurry, but the issue of a Ukrainian settlement is too complex, and reaching a peace agreement is a very long road with many complicated details,” Peskov said. The Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said negotiations would “probably resume”, but it was unclear when. Ushakov told Russian media on Thursday that Moscow saw no basis for a new round of trilateral talks with Ukraine and the US until Ukrainian forces withdrew from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine – a condition Kyiv has rejected. This week the European Council president, António Costa, said he believed there was potential for the EU to negotiate with Russia and to discuss the future of the security architecture of Europe. Ukrainian officials said on Sunday there had been Russian drone strikes and nearly 150 battlefield clashes over the past 24 hours, despite a US-brokered three-day ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow announced on the eve of the Moscow parade. Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that Russia had shot down 57 Ukrainian drones. On Saturday Moscow was blanketed in heavy security, with internet services switched off across the city, as Ukraine continued to rattle Russia with long-range drone and missile strikes – forcing parade organisers to strip the event of its usual pageantry. The customary display of missiles and armoured vehicles, a fixture of the parade since Putin introduced military hardware in 2017, was absent entirely. The Kremlin took measures to protect the parade – which celebrated the allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war – after recent long-range Ukrainian drone strikes on a range of targets. In Ukraine, one person was killed and three people were wounded in Russian strikes on the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, its governor, Ivan Fedorov, said on Sunday morning. The governor of the north-eastern Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, said eight people, including two children, were wounded in drone attacks on the regional capital and nearby settlements. Seven people, including a child, have been wounded in the southern Kherson region by Russian drone and artillery strikes since early Saturday, according to the regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin. Oleksandr Hanzha, the regional governor of Dnipropetrovsk, said a child was wounded and infrastructure damaged in Russian attacks on the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region. With no victory in sight and no timeline for an end to the war, the mood in Russia is souring. On the battlefield, the picture is similarly grinding. Russian troops are near a standstill, with neither side appearing close to a breakthrough. Advances have slowed in recent months, both armies showing signs of exhaustion and sustaining heavy casualties while continuing to strike each other’s energy infrastructure. Putin, who has led Russia as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, faces a wave of anxiety in Moscow about the war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, left swathes of Ukraine in ruins and drained Russia’s economy. Russia’s relations with Europe are worse than at any time since the depths of the cold war. Russian forces have so far been unable to take the whole of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv’s forces have been pushed back to a line of fortress cities. Russian advances have slowed this year, though Moscow controls just under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory. On Saturday, Putin criticised western support for Kyiv. “They [the west] started ratcheting up the confrontation with Russia, which continues to this day,” he said. “I think it [the war] is heading to an end but it’s still a serious matter. They spent months waiting for Russia to suffer a crushing defeat, for its statehood to collapse. It didn’t work out. And then they got stuck in that groove and now they can’t get out of it.” Putin said he was ready to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a third country once all conditions for a potential peace agreement were settled – holding to his usual position on a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart. “This should be the final point, not the negotiations themselves,” he said. Asked if he was willing to engage in talks with the Europeans, Putin said: “For me personally, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr Schröder, is preferable.” Many in Ukraine and Europe will be sceptical of involving Schröder given his background as a close friend of Putin and history of ties to Russian business and projects, such as the Nord Stream gas pipelines. In 2022, after the war broke out, Zelenskyy called Schröder “disgusting” for meeting Putin and speaking in the Russian leader’s favour. Zelenskyy observed Saturday as Europe Day, which is celebrated as a foundational day of the EU. He said Ukraine was an “inseparable part of the European family”. With Reuters and Agence France-Presse

Hungary’s new PM apologises to those wronged under Orbán in first speech

Moments after he was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar apologised to those who had been maligned by the state during Viktor Orbán’s time in power as questions continue to swirl over what lies ahead for the country as it launches into a new era. Magyar used his first speech as prime minister on Saturday to address the many in Hungary who had paid a personal price for speaking up about the steady erosion of rights under Orbán and his Fidesz party. “I apologise to all those civilians, teachers, journalists, health workers and public figures who have been stigmatised, harassed, or treated as enemies for daring to speak out, for daring to stand up for the vulnerable, for criticising, or for simply expressing a different opinion,” he said. “I apologise.” It was a poignant nod to how Orbán, arguably the world’s most successful populist leader, had targeted civil society groups and media outlets critical of his government for years, launching investigations, smear campaigns and bogging them down in bureaucracy. Those who went against the former leader at times ended up in court. The liberal mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, and a Roma organiser in Pécs were charged for organising Pride marches – a first in the EU. One of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists was charged with espionage. In the wake of Magyar and his Tisza party’s landslide victory last month, the espionage charges – described by the Committee to Protect Journalists as baseless – were dropped. Magyar used his platform on Saturday to strike a very different tone, calling on Hungarians to come together and pledging to build a country that would be more free, humane and hopeful than under Orbán’s populist nationalist movement. “What connects us will be stronger than what divides us,” he said. “Hungary will be home for every Hungarian, and everyone can feel like they have a place in the Hungarian nation. Family, friends and communities will be able to speak to each other again.” Veronika Kövesdi, a researcher at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University, told the news site Telex it was the kind of speech that could help Hungary heal as it seeks to turn the page on the wounds left by the past 16 years under Orbán. “It’s a very special act ... There are material things that people want to see this government do, but there are also emotional expectations,” she said. “We’re talking about healing, a shift in public sentiment, or the way we talk to each other. Society wants this.” She described it as an act of reconciliation, “but he highlights that making peace with something doesn’t mean that we will forget it”. Magyar’s message of unity stood in sharp contrast to Orbán, who skipped Saturday’s ceremony, breaking with decades of tradition by not shaking his successor’s hand. Instead he reaffirmed his rhetoric on Sunday, echoing the language that had led critics to accuse him of seeking to rally support by scaremongering. “The new guys must understand one thing very clearly. If you do not fight for Hungary in Brussels, the Brusselians will walk all over you,” he wrote on social media. “Giving up our patriotic position and surrendering national sovereignty for money or political approval would be a historic mistake. Foreign elites must not be allowed to decide our future for us!” As Magyar prepares to push through his cabinet nominations this week, questions linger as to what kind of leader he will be. As he crisscrossed the country in the run-up to the election, he promised to crack down on corruption and restore democratic institutions, vowing to dismantle Orbán’s system “brick by brick”. Beyond that, however, the details of what his government will do are vague. Magyar ran a tight campaign, carefully staying on-message as he sought to avoid providing fodder for the estimated 80% of Hungary’s media controlled by Fidesz loyalists. Analysts were quick to point out that his ability to rally crowds and tendency to dodge hardline questioning from journalists – along with his background as a top member of Fidesz until recently – was reminiscent of another leader. “In a way, Magyar is like Orbán 20 years ago without all the baggage, the corruption and the mistakes made in power,” Andrzej Sadecki, the lead analyst at the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), told Agence France-Presse. Many of those who voted for Magyar were swift to acknowledge the similarities, describing their votes for Tisza as a gamble born out of hope that he would prove to be fundamentally different from the other former Fidesz members. “Magyar is not a saint, but Fidesz needs to go,” Anita, 33, said last month as she walked her dog in a park in Kecskemét, a small city about 50 miles south of Budapest. A recent poll suggested that more than 70% of Hungarians who voted for Magyar wanted his government to do more to address the climate crisis and to protect LGBTQ+ rights, hinting at the conflicting pressures he faces. The pressures are made worse by the fact that left-of-centre and liberal parties are absent from parliament for the first time since 1990. Even so, some of the country’s most prominent liberals, such as Budapest’s mayor, seemed willing to give Magyar the benefit of the doubt. “It’s been a long time since I saw so many happy, liberated people in Budapest,” Karácsony wrote on social media on Saturday. “It’s a great start.”

First plane carrying passengers evacuated from hantavirus-hit cruise ship leaves Tenerife – Europe live

Some passengers who left the MV Hondius cruise ship at the centre of a deadly outbreak of hantavirus have departed Tenerife by plane and arrived in the Spanish capital of Madrid. 14 Spanish nationals – 13 passengers and one crew member – were the first to disembark and have reportedly arrived in Madrid, where they face mandatory quarantine at a military hospital. The evacuation of most of the ship’s passengers and crew would continue until a final repatriation flight to Australia on Monday, according to Spanish health minister Monica García, who confirmed earlier that all passengers on board were asymptomatic. Five French passengers will be repatriated today, and will be hospitalised for 72 hours for monitoring, after which they will quarantine at home for 45 days, France’s foreign ministry said. A flight to the Netherlands transporting citizens of Germany, Belgium, Greece and some of the crew from the ship, along with flights to the UK, Canada, Turkey, France, Ireland and the US, are also expected today. MV Hondius arrived in the Canary Islands this morning carrying 146 people, after three people died of the virus and eight more became ill. You can read all the latest developments in our wrap up here. In other news, Russia accused Kyiv of breaking a US brokered ceasefire on Sunday, while Ukrainian officials said one person had been killed and others injured by Russian drone and artillery strikes in the past 24 hours. Germany is reviving efforts to buy Tomahawk cruise missiles from the US, the Financial Times reported, amid concerns there are no European ground-launched long-range systems immediately available. Thanks for following along. We are closing the blog now. But you can keep up with the rest of our Europe coverage here.

‘Amazon of America’: film paints vision of a post-coup Brazil giving up rainforest

The year is 2025 and far-right coup plotters have annihilated Brazil’s democracy, assassinating the president, closing the national congress and surrendering the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists being taken on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle realm. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved out of the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil. The scenes are taken from Vitória Régia (Amazon Water Lily), a new short film that imagines what might have happened had Jair Bolsonaro’s plot to seize power after the 2022 election been successful. In real life, the coup conspiracy flopped after rightwing insurrectionists rampaged through Brasília in a bungling attempt to overturn the result. Bolsonaro and his accomplices were tried and jailed. The alternative reality presented to viewers in Vitória Régia offers a nightmarish snapshot of a future that Brazil may have escaped by the skin of its teeth – but that some fear could still lie ahead. After the “green and yellow dagger revolution” wipes out Bolsonaro’s rivals, the military takes power, censoring the media, purging ideological “deviants” and transferring control of the Amazon to Washington in exchange for it having supported the coup. Brazilian reporters such as the film’s lead character, Carol (played by the award-winning actor Alice Braga) are barred from entering the rainforest region without a visa, and a news blackout is imposed to stop details of the environmental calamity leaking out. Communications are cut and Indigenous leaders disappear. Harold Goldman, the boss of an oil firm called Amazon X, celebrates Washington’s dominion over the rainforest’s natural resources, boasting to the cameras: “Olá amigos! Today marks a new chapter in the historic relationship between the United States of America and the beautiful nation of Brazil.” The director, Denis Kamioka, known as Cisma, said the film was shot in March 2025, nearly a year before Donald Trump ordered Nicolás Maduro’s abduction as part of a plan to “take back” Venezuela’s oil. “It was frightening the extent to which reality and fiction became mixed up … We were constantly competing with reality,” he said. Braga, who threw herself into Indigenous and environmental activism after first visiting the Amazon a decade ago, said: “It was crazy. We were making a fiction film … but then the US ended up taking this political stance with Trump … and the film became almost a documentary.” The 21-minute movie was made with the collaboration of two Indigenous networks, Coiab and Apib, to highlight the threats facing Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and champion their centuries-long quest to defend their traditional lands. Ywyzar Tentehar, 23, an Indigenous actor who plays a key character, said she hoped the project would draw attention to an ongoing onslaught she first witnessed while growing up in Buritizal, a village in the eastern Amazon where the Guajajara people live. “Today my territory is demarcated but loggers, ranchers and land-grabbers continue to invade … and nothing is done,” Tentehar said. The Amazon’s already fragile future once again looks in peril as Bolsonaro’s politician son Flávio is poised to challenge the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for the presidency this year. During Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-23 administration, his anti-environmental and Indigenous policies prompted soaring deforestation and a gold rush into Indigenous lands. Activists fear such rampant destruction may return if another Bolsonaro wins power. Others fret over the future of South America’s largest democracy if a rightwing president pardons those who were jailed for their role in the failed 2022-23 coup. In another real-life echo of the film, Flávio Bolsonaro was recently accused of offering the US access to Brazil’s rare-earth reserves – some of the world’s largest – in exchange for help in October’s election. Braga said: “I’m really worried. I really hope people properly study the candidates rather than taking the same journey that led us to Bolsonaro’s election a few years ago … not just the presidential candidates but the ones for congress too.” Pedro Inoue, a graphic designer and activist who is one of the film’s creators, said the film, partly inspired by a counterintuitively hope-filled climate disaster novel called The Ministry of the Future, was not all doom and gloom. Its pop aesthetic and stirring soundtrack were designed to counter despair with an upbeat message about the power of Indigenous resistance, he said. “They are the past, the present and the future. They are the ones who have the answers about dealing with the end of the world because they’ve been dealing with it for more than 500 years.” Kamioka hoped Vitória Régia, which is named for the lily-shaped symbol used by Indigenous dissidents in the film, would serve as “an alert about what could happen when it comes to sovereignty, Indigenous resistance and democracy itself”. He said: “This isn’t a film about a distant future. That’s the scariest part. It’s about something that’s happening right now.”