EU says US ‘still our biggest ally’ despite release of policy paper supporting Europe’s far-right – Europe live

Overnight Russian missile and drone strikes left parts of Ukraine without power on Saturday morning, Ukraine’s energy ministry said on Telegram. The strikes hit energy infrastructure in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Lviv, Odesa, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv regions, according to the ministry. Crews were working on Saturday to restore power in the Odesa, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv regions are without power as of this morning, with hourly outage schedules and capacity limitation schedules for industrial consumers and businesses in effect.

Harbadus attacks Andvaria: cyber war game tests Nato defences against Russia

Russia and China were barely mentioned, but they were the threats in everyone’s minds in Tallinn this week, where Nato hosted its largest ever cyber war game. The goal of the war game, conducted 130 miles from the Russian border in Estonia, was to test the alliance’s readiness for a rolling enemy assault on civilian and military digital infrastructure. It involved hundreds of multinational troops, representing 29 Nato nations and seven allies, including Ukraine, hunkered down in CyberRange14, a facility established by the Estonian ministry of defence in the wake of a crippling Russian cyber attack in 2007, where Nato has run preparedness exercises since 2014. Those involved looked drained as the seven-day cyberbattle ended. They had endured simulated sudden power blackouts, jammed satellites, blocked ports and public chaos. Their combat fatigues stayed spotless as they fought malware, not missiles. But even against a fictitious enemy, cyberwar was “very stressful” and “quite exhausting”, they said. War doesn’t come much foggier than in the cyber realm, which, alongside space, is rapidly becoming as critical as land, sea and air to the security of Nato and its allies. The players had to focus on responding to mysterious complex computer collapses in their own countries while also sharing fixes globally with more than 1,000 other military and civilian personnel engaged from Tokyo to Texas. It was, said one participant, like “juggling a football, solving a Rubik’s cube and talking with your neighbour” all at the same time. The event was set using storylines premised on Nato’s northern defence forces responding to threats to an ally, Andvaria, from its belligerent neighbour, Harbadus. The struggle was over an imaginary island called Icebergen in the north Atlantic, but the theatre of war was international because Harbadus supported its hostile aims by weaving a complex web of global cyber-mischief. As the game reached its denouement, the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, accused Moscow of “increasingly reckless behaviour … such as violating our airspace, conducting cyberattacks”. Russia increased cyber-attacks against Nato states by 25% in the year to June, according to analysis by Microsoft, whose widely installed software affords it considerable insight into digital threats. Most of these were intended to allow espionage but Russia has also been targeting vulnerable small businesses to create bridgeheads for larger attacks. Meanwhile, Nato has attributed attacks against allies and Ukraine to Russia’s GRU military intelligence, and has accused China of “malign hybrid and cyber operations”. Last weekend the chair of the alliance’s military committee, Adm Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, said it was considering “being more aggressive or being proactive instead of reactive” to Russian hybrid warfare. In Tallinn, where rows of monitors and big screens are clustered around large racks of neon-flashing microprocessors, the scenarios started small but quickly snowballed. The Swedes began by dealing with an injection of malware into an unclassified email system used in their military’s base in Lithuania; soon they were unable to support logistics to the forward operating position. Worse was to follow for them and many other players. “Other allies had similar, parallel attacks,” said Maj Tobias Malm, from Sweden. “[Next] we had the satellite system.” Next, the storyliners – whose task it is to monitor the process and introduce new challenges for the participants as the game unfolds – triggered a multistage attack on a satellite internet provider, the kind offered by Elon Musk’s Starlink. That knocked out communications between space and Earth, with cascading crippling effects on intelligence and surveillance, power-grid monitoring, military and civilian GPS, banking and military coordination. When it began, some participants detected unusual behaviour on the network, while others picked up intelligence – but no single country had the full picture. They started seeing anomalies on the dashboard controlling satellites, connections going on and off, and events spiralling, said Ezio Cerrato, a deputy exercise director. “They completely lose control … right to the point of the wiping of the system,” he said. “It shows how a problem in space can quickly affect every domain on Earth.” In another scenario the enemy uploaded malware into fuel management systems, forcing the war gamers to scramble to ration remaining supplies and disconnect networks to cauterise the digital wound. Resisting the human urge to narrowly focus on the cyber-attack in front of each country was part of the challenge. It was vital for the participants to rapidly communicate with allies, raise warnings and share fixes. “There is no boundary in cyberspace,” said the exercise director, Commander Brian Caplan, a US naval officer. “Adversaries can go into one nation and pivot into another nation. Something that affects one nation can have a second- or third-order effect in other nations. So it’s really important that these nations are communicating, building that trust, that relationship.” Nato also revealed it was experimenting with an AI-powered chatbot to help human cyberwarriors cope with the sheer complexity of cyberwar. It is being built using an OpenAI model to provide commanders with a rapid way to understand what is happening in a rapidly developing scenario and even suggests steps they could take. It was not yet in use, even in the war games, but had shown “very strong potential to support decision-making, for situational awareness and command and control”, said Alberto Domingo, the cyberspace technical director at Nato’s strategy and military command. He stressed it was undergoing careful checks on the accuracy of its outputs. As the exercise continued, big screens displayed rolling feeds styled as online news headlines about the shifting crisis, with alarming headlines detailing the mayhem the fictitious enemy was sowing. “Fake train schedules cause chaos,” read one headline. Multiple states of emergency were declared in regions hit by power blackouts. A tranche of classified Nato documents had been “dumped”, while allied military rotations had been disrupted by power grid outages in Denmark. Then a leak revealed a plan for a secret naval base, destabilising the picture further. The participants were faced with a challenge wholly unfamiliar to their predecessors a generation earlier: what happens when a conflict involves the spread of fake news on social media? Military lawyers were on hand to advise on the legality of what Nato and its allies could do in response to cyber-attacks, which are often launched not directly by hostile militaries but by shadow proxies and target civilian, not solely military, assets. “How do you cross those streams?” said US air force’s Maj Tyler Smith, one of the lawyers involved. “We are working through those problems now … [to see] can we put agreements in place beforehand and … not have to do things on the go?” But after a week of wrestling with the waves of cyber-aggression, a crucial question remained: was Nato winning? The answer was yes, but with bumps along the way, one official said. Another offered a little more reassurance, for now at least: “I see people surviving at the end of the day.”

Ukraine war briefing: Progress depends on Russia taking peace talks seriously, say Washington and Kyiv

Ukrainian and US officials will hold a third straight day of talks in Miami on Saturday, with Washington saying the two sides agree that “real progress” would depend on Russia’s willingness to end the war. Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have been meeting top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov and Andrii Hnatov, the chief of staff of Kyiv’s armed forces. “Both parties agreed that real progress toward any agreement depends on Russia’s readiness to show serious commitment to long-term peace, including steps toward de-escalation and cessation of killings,” said a summary of the talks. The US and Ukrainian officials “also agreed on the framework of security arrangements and discussed necessary deterrence capabilities to sustain a lasting peace”. The talks in Florida come after Witkoff and Kushner met Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Tuesday to discuss a US plan to end the conflict but the Russian president rejected parts of the proposal and threatened that Russia was “ready” for war if Europe started it. Emmanuel Macron has said there is “no mistrust” between Europe and the US, a day after a report claimed the French president had warned privately there was a risk Washington could betray Ukraine, reports Oliver Holmes. “Unity between Americans and Europeans on the Ukrainian issue is essential,” Macron said during a visit to China on Friday. “And I say it again and again, we need to work together.” The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said they held “very constructive” talks with the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, on Friday over an EU plan to use Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine, which Belgium has so far refused to endorse. The EC, along with most European governments, prefers a “reparations loan” using Russian state assets immobilised in the European Union due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We agreed that time is of the essence given the current geopolitical situation,” von der Leyen said after the meeting in Brussels. Moscow’s ambassador to Germany, meanwhile, warned that the plan to use frozen Russian assets would have “far-reaching consequences” for the EU. “Any operation with sovereign Russian assets without Russia’s consent constitutes theft,” Sergey Nechaev claimed. A railway hub near Kyiv was hit during a large-scale Russian drone and missile attack that damaged the depot and railway carriages, Ukraine’s state railway company said on Saturday. No casualties were reported from the overnight attack in the town of Fastiv. Ukrzaliznytsia said it was forced to cancel several suburban trains near the capital and the city of Chernihiv in north-eastern Ukraine. Emergency services reported a fire, while also citing an attack on infrastructure in the Chernihiv region. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones targeted Russia’s Ryazan and Voronezh regions overnight, causing damage but no casualties, local governors said. Pavel Malkov said the Ryazan attack sparked a fire on the roof of a multi-storey residential building. Russian drones struck a house in central Ukraine overnight to Friday, killing a 12-year-old boy, officials said, while long-range Ukrainian strikes reportedly targeted a Russian port and an oil refinery. In Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, the Russian drone attack destroyed a house where the boy was killed and two women injured, said the regional military administration head, Vladyslav Haivanenko. In Russia, Ukrainian drones attacked a port in the Krasnodar region on the border with Ukraine, sparking a fire at the Temryuk seaport and damaging port infrastructure, officials said. Ukrainian drones also aimed deeper inside Russia, attacking the city of Syzran on the Volga river, said the mayor, Sergei Volodchenkov, without providing more details. Unconfirmed media reports said Ukrainian drones hit an oil refinery in Syzran. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said a Ukrainian drone struck and damaged a high-rise building in Grozny, capital of Russia’s southern Chechnya region, and vowed to retaliate within a week. The drone had caused no casualties, he said on Friday. Vladimir Putin has told the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, that Russia is ready to continue “uninterrupted” shipments of oil to India, signalling a defiant stance to the US as the two leaders met in Delhi and affirmed that their ties were “resilient to external pressure”. The statement, made on Friday after the annual India-Russia summit, appeared to be directed at western countries – particularly the US – that have attempted to pressure New Delhi into scaling back its ties to Moscow, reports Hannah Ellis-Petersen.

Swedish navy encountering Russian submarines ‘almost weekly’ – and more could be on the way

The Swedish navy encounters Russian submarines in the Baltic Sea on an “almost weekly” basis, its chief of operations has said, and is preparing for a further increase in the event of ceasefire or armistice in the Ukraine war. Capt Marko Petkovic said Moscow was “continuously reinforcing” its presence in the region, and sightings of its vessels were a regular part of life for the Swedish navy. Its “very common”, he said, adding that the number of sightings had increased in recent years. The Baltic Sea region is facing an increasing range of threats, including suspected hybrid attacks from drones, alleged sabotage of underwater infrastructure and a steady flow of ageing oil tankers in the form of shadow fleet ships carrying crude oil from Russia. Last month, the British defence secretary said that a Russian spy ship had entered British waters and shone lasers at military pilots, warning that the UK faced a “new era of threat” from hostile countries. Sweden recently hosted a major Nato anti-submarine warfare exercise, Playbook Merlin 25, featuring nine countries, including Sweden, Germany, France and the US, in which hundreds of personnel practised their submarine-hunting skills in the unique conditions of the Baltic to prepare for possible underwater attack. The hilly underwater landscape of the Baltic near Sweden makes it difficult to detect submarines because they can hide. Petkovic said Russia was increasing its capabilities and was producing one Kilo-class submarine a year in St Petersburg and the Kaliningrad enclave, positioned between Poland and Lithuania. He said it was undergoing a “deliberate and constant modernisation programme” of its ships. “Once a ceasefire or armistice is eventually in place in Ukraine, you can only assess, and we do assess that Russia will reinforce its capabilities in this region,” said Petkovic. “So with that said, the [Swedish] navy needs to continuously grow and focus on the overall picture.” He said Russia’s shadow fleet of civilian-flagged oil tankers was also a concern and did not rule out the potential for such ships to be used to launch drones. “The shadow fleet in itself is not a military problem, but the shadow fleet could affect our nations from a military perspective,” Petkovic said. The varying challenges of underwater conditions – including shorter visibility than above water, salinity and temperature – mean that underwater infrastructure was especially vulnerable in the Baltics, he said. This was especially the case for Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia and Lithuania, he said, which were “fully dependent on the sea lines for communication, for our sustainment of our societies”. However, he believes that increased Nato vigilance is having an impact. He said that since Operation Baltic Sentry was established in January, “we haven’t seen any cable incidents in this region at all”. He added: “First of all it shows that the alliance works, cohesion. And we are closing ranks against one particular threat. The Baltic Sentry has proven that point. Regardless of whether any of the incidents have been state-sponsored or if it’s been bad seamanship, or anything in between, it has raised awareness amongst the merchant fleet that they should be a bit more cautious when travelling our regional waters.”

Bombed Chornobyl shelter no longer blocks radiation and needs major repair – IAEA

The protective shield over the Chornobyl disaster nuclear reactor in Ukraine, which was hit by a drone in February, can no longer perform its main function of blocking radiation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has announced. In February a drone strike blew a hole in the “new safe confinement”, which was painstakingly built at a cost of €1.5bn ($1.75bn) next to the destroyed reactor and then hauled into place on tracks, with the work completed in 2019 by a Europe-led initiative. The IAEA said an inspection last week of the steel confinement structure found the drone impact had degraded the structure. The 1986 Chornobyl explosion – which happened when Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule as part of the Soviet Union – sent radiation across Europe. In the scramble to contain the meltdown, the Soviets built over the reactor a concrete “sarcophagus” with only a 30-year lifespan. The new confinement was built to contain radiation during the decades-long final removal of the sarcophagus, ruined reactor building underneath it and the melted-down nuclear fuel itself. The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said an inspection mission “confirmed that the [protective structure] had lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability, but also found that there was no permanent damage to its load-bearing structures or monitoring systems”. Grossi said some repairs had been carried out “but comprehensive restoration remains essential to prevent further degradation and ensure long-term nuclear safety”. The UN reported on 14 February that Ukrainian authorities said a drone with a high explosive warhead struck the plant, caused a fire and damaged the protective cladding around the reactor. Ukrainian authorities said the drone was Russian. Moscow denied it had attacked the plant. Radiation levels remained normal and stable and there was no reports of radiation leaks, the UN said in February. Russia occupied the plant and the surrounding area for more than a month in the first weeks of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine as its forces initially tried to advance on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The IAEA had conducted the inspection at the same time as a country-wide survey of damage to electricity substations from the war between Ukraine and Russia. With Reuters

‘We have to end the melancholy’: the French leftwing MP intent on resisting the far right

At a busy market in Sevran, a low-income suburb north of Paris, the local MP, Clémentine Autain, was shaking hands and posing for selfies, arguing that only a left alliance could stave off the threat of a French far-right president being elected in less than 18 months. “The French far right is high in the polls and riding an international Trumpian wave,” said Autain, 52. “Without the left uniting behind a radical project, we can’t beat them.” Autain, a regular face on TV whose Seine-Saint-Denis constituency in the suburbs of Paris is a leftwing stronghold, has announced she will run to be the presidential candidate for the left in a cross-party primary race next year. Polling shows that Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration, far-right National Rally is the closest it has ever been to winning the presidency. Whether its candidate in spring 2027 is Le Pen (which depends on a January appeal trial after her conviction for embezzling European parliament funds) or her protege Jordan Bardella, the party is gaining ground amid voters’ disillusionment with politics and anger at inequality, taxation and cuts to public services. Autain said one elderly person had recently told her: “What this country needs is a French Donald Trump.” But Autain’s conviction that the different parties on the French left – from radical left to centre – can overcome their policy disputes and personality clashes, take part in a joint primary race and unite behind one single presidential candidate in 2027 is seen by some critics as a remote dream. Autain is known for her staunch leftwing policy, from higher taxes on billionaires to better funding for public services. She was one of a handful of MPs who were excluded last year from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftwing party La France Insoumise after they questioned strategy and founded a new movement, L’Après (After), which now sits in parliament with the Greens. She is also known for her unusual life story. At the age of 10, Autain sang Abba covers in a children’s pop group, and her memoir about the neglect she suffered from her alcoholic film star mother, Dominique Laffin, has been adapted into a hard-hitting film that opened in French cinemas this week. Less well known is that Autain’s maternal grandfather, André Laffin, who died before she was born, was a far-right figure and one of the co-founders with Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, of a short-lived party in the early 1960s. “My mother took the opposite political view to her father – she was steeped in 1968 as a feminist resolutely in search of freedom,” Autain said. “I didn’t know this grandfather who died before I was born, so I don’t have any feelings for him. But it’s clear his influence is unconsciously at play in my political project. It’s as if I intimately feel the reactionary attitude and authoritarianism of the far right and have an urgent need to fight them.” Last June, the French left succeeded in putting aside its differences in record time to form a united front in Macron’s sudden snap parliament election. Voters rallied and Le Pen’s party was held back from taking parliament. But the hung parliament was split between three groups: the left, the far right and the centre. Now Autain and several figures on the left want that alliance to reunite in a primary race to back one presidential candidate next year. The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, will run in the primary against Autain, as will the northern MP François Ruffin. And, underlining fears about the far right, the Socialist party will also take part. But two key figures with presidential ambitions have refused: the veteran leftist Mélenchon, 74, who has run for president three times and believes his party is well placed for 2027, and the centre-left essayist and member of the European parliament Raphaël Glucksmann. Both could announce their bids early next year. “We have to end the melancholy of the left,” Autain said, noting that the French left had failed to get through to the final round of the last two presidential elections when Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, twice beat Le Pen, with a shrinking margin. She feels that a united left candidate is the only way to make the final round. “The melancholy on the left is a form of nostalgia mixed with a spirit of defeat – an internalised sense that we’re all doomed so everybody might as well retreat to their own camp, rather than getting out there to form an alliance.” For Autain, the personal is political. In cinemas this week the feature film Dites-lui que je l’aime (Tell Her That I Love Her) explores Autain’s experience growing up with her mother, who was found dead in the bath when she was 12. Autain appears in the film playing her adult self. Scenes reproducing her childhood show her left alone at night or trying to stop her mother smashing up a hotel bar because the bartender had stopped serving. “It’s about how children construct themselves when they have a mother who’s unable to look after them,” she said. “It takes time to gain understanding, to see parents as people with their own suffering, stories and weaknesses … Everyone has something to settle with their parents – how to forgive and how to accept them. It’s universal.” Autain said she “obsessively” created a life very different to her mother’s. She didn’t taste red wine until she was 30. “I still don’t drink beer because of the smell,” she said. “My mother drank beer in the mornings: we’d go from bar to bar and I had to wait beside her while she drank, so that smell of beer, I just can’t do it.” Long before the #MeToo movement, Autain spoke publicly about surviving rape. In 1995, as a 22-year-old history student on her way to a lecture on the outskirts of Paris, she was grabbed at knifepoint in the street. She gave evidence and the serial rapist, who had attacked up to 30 women, was convicted. A few years into her political career, she went public. “It was important to me to speak out so others could also speak out,” she said. “I found it brutal as a rape victim, to see that women who spoke on TV about rape were pixelated … as if there was shame.” Surviving rape led her to found a feminist organisation. She then built a career in leftwing politics and edited the magazine Regards. She said polling showed that most French people backed the left’s ideas – investment in hospitals, fairer taxation of the very rich and multinationals – even if they didn’t vote left. “It’s that gap we have to bridge,” she said. For Autain, tax justice is crucial. “We’re in a country that is passionate about equality,” she said. She and the MP Éva Sas were the first in parliament to table the “Zucman tax”, under which a 2% levy would be imposed on wealth above €100m (£88m). It was voted down by the senate but has stirred a national debate that continues. Autain believes the French left must distance itself from the pro-business shift of the last Socialist president, François Hollande. “To win back people on the left, and the French people, we have to have a project that’s frank and offers a profound transformation which breaks with the misguided ways of social democracy in the second half of the 20th century,” she said. “And it must be able to unite because the splitting in three of the French political landscape [between left, centre and far right] is a major change.”

Zootopia 2 bucks trend for Hollywood releases in China as it breaks records for foreign animation

A comedy about animal cops investigating a reptilian mystery has become the highest-grossing foreign animated film ever in China, bucking the trend of declining interest in overseas productions that has resulted in Hollywood films struggling in the Chinese box office. Zootopia 2 (called Zootropolis 2 in some European countries), a hotly anticipated and widely marketed sequel to 2016’s Zootopia, was released in China last week. In its first seven days, it made about 2bn yuan (£213m) in ticket sales, making it one of the best-performing films of the year. On its fourth day of release, it broke the single-day earnings record for an imported film, surpassing the previous record-holder, Avengers: Endgame. The Walt Disney production has a track record in China: the original Zootopia reportedly took 1.5bn yuan in the Chinese box office, making it the country’s highest-grossing animated Hollywood film at the time – a title now taken by its sequel. The American film has performed better in Chinese theatres than in North American ones in its first week. Hollywood once saw China as a huge potential market for boosting box office sales. But in recent years Chinese cinemagoers have chosen domestic productions rather than overseas films. So the success of a foreign movie – the imports of which are strictly controlled in China – has surprised some observers. Chinese cinemagoers and critics say the film’s feelgood energy overrides other factors, especially in a challenging economic and geopolitical environment. “I am grateful that Disney is still willing to present stories like this in such a divided era,” wrote one user on Douban, a Chinese review website. “If this film had been released 10 years ago, I would have said Disney was merely serving another plate of exquisite, old-fashioned dessert. But precisely because it was born into today’s world, I sincerely hope to see more films like this.” Walt Disney’s chief creative officer, Jared Bush, who wrote and co-directed Zootopia 2, has said that the success of the 2016 original took the company by surprise. “We didn’t know that it was going to turn into this phenomenon [in China],” he told the LA Times. Bush said that Chinese regulators had allowed Zootopia to be screened in cinemas for six weeks, rather than the standard four. Shanghai Disneyland resort is home to the world’s only Zootopia-themed land, and last year Disney partnered with the airline China Eastern to make a Zootopia-themed plane. Yu Yaqin, an independent film critic based in Beijing, said the prolonged marketing campaigns in China around the release of the original Zootopia film in 2016 meant that children were very familiar with the characters, which had helped created hype for the sequel. Rance Pow, the chief executive of Artisan Gateway, a film and cinema advisory firm, said that Zootopia 2’s success “demonstrates Chinese moviegoers’ continuing interest in films that resonate, regardless of origin, and the potential of import films to play an important role in the renewed growth of China’s theatrical industry in general”. He added that a new character created for the sequel, Gary De’Snake, a blue-scaled pit viper voiced by Ke Huy Quan, was particularly popular with Chinese audiences. According to the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the year of the snake. Nonetheless, Zootopia 2’s success bucks the trend for US releases in China. In 2024, 41 Hollywood films were screened in Chinese cinemas, grossing 5.8bn yuan, while domestic productions made 31.7bn yuan. In 2025, 48 Hollywood films have been granted entry into Chinese cinemas. This year’s releases have so far grossed about 5.7bn yuan, with about 40% of that income coming from Zootopia 2. In April, amid a spiralling US-China trade war, the China Film Administration said it was reducing the number of US films that would be granted licences for China. However, the exact details of the restriction were unclear, and this year China has allowed more Hollywood movies into its cinemas than last year. The government has pushed a patriotic trend in blockbuster releases, with many of the most popular films being so-called “wolf warrior” epics such as The Battle at Lake Changjin, a 2021 Communist party-sponsored film that depicts Chinese soldiers battling Americans in the Korean war. China’s biggest success of recent years is Ne Zha 2, a Chinese animation that soared to stratospheric heights earlier this year, earning a total of 15.4bn yuan at the Chinese box office, dwarfing the success of the Zootopia franchise. “Ne Zha 2 is domestically made and Chinese consumers feel closer to domestic movies compared to any other films, not just Hollywood,” Yu said. Yu cautioned that Ne Zha 2’s success was so extraordinary that it should not be taken as a barometer of Chinese cinema in general. She added: “Just because Chinese domestic movies are on the rise, that doesn’t mean there is no need for Hollywood movies. It just means the competition is more fierce.” Additional research by Lillian Yang

‘No mistrust’ between Europe and US over Ukraine, Macron says

Emmanuel Macron has said there is “no mistrust” between Europe and the US, a day after a report claimed the French president had warned privately there was a risk Washington could betray Ukraine. “Unity between Americans and Europeans on the Ukrainian issue is essential. And I say it again and again, we need to work together,” Macron told reporters during a visit to China on Friday. On Friday evening, Donald Trump’s advisers and Ukrainian officials said they would meet for a third day of talks after making progress around the table in Florida on creating a security framework for postwar Ukraine. Earlier, Macron said: “We welcome and support the peace efforts being made by the United States of America. The United States of America needs Europeans to lead these peace efforts.” The German magazine Der Spiegel on Thursday cited a leaked summary of a confidential call between several European leaders in which Macron and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, voiced fundamental doubts about US efforts to negotiate between Ukraine and Russia. The transcript quoted Macron as warning Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that “there is a chance that the US will betray Ukraine on territory, without clarity on security guarantees”. The alleged leak risked angering Donald Trump, whom European leaders have been at pains to flatter, knowing he is the key player in any mediation efforts with Moscow. It also came as European leaders rushed to salvage a sorely needed financing plan for cash-strapped Ukraine. Merz held emergency talks on Friday with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever. When asked about the Spiegel report on Friday, Macron responded: “I deny everything.” Der Spiegel said it had obtained the English summary of Monday’s call, featuring what it said were direct quotations from heads of government. In the transcript, Macron described the current tense phase of the negotiations as harbouring “a big danger” for Zelenskyy. Merz reportedly added that he needed to be “very careful”. “They are playing games with both you and us,” Merz was reported as telling Zelenskyy – a remark believed to refer to a diplomatic mission to Moscow this week by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Washington presented a 28-point proposal last month to halt the war in Ukraine, drafted without input from Ukraine’s European allies and criticised as too close a reflection of Moscow’s maximalist demands. US and Ukrainian negotiators have since held talks before Witkoff and Kushner headed to Moscow on Tuesday. The pair spent five hours in talks with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin and Witkoff then met Ukraine’s national security council chief, Rustem Umerov, in Miami on Thursday. Moscow and Kyiv have continued to fight, seeking stronger negotiating positions. Russian drones struck a house in central Ukraine on Thursday night, killing a 12-year-old boy, officials said, while long-range Ukrainian strikes reportedly targeted a Russian port and oil refinery. Merz will dine in private on Friday with von der Leyen and De Wever, who has expressed opposition to a scheme to fund Ukraine that involves the unprecedented use of frozen Russian assets. With Russia’s attacks intensifying, Kyiv is running out of money. The EU has pledged to keep Ukraine afloat next year and intends to raise €90bn (£80bn) to meet about two-thirds of its needs for 2026 and 2027. Von der Leyen has proposed two main options to raise the funds. The bloc could either borrow against its shared budget on the international markets, she said this week, or issue a loan secured by immobilised Russian assets – mainly held in Belgium – that Kyiv would repay from Russia’s postwar reparations. De Wever, however, told an event in Brussels this week that he was against seizing frozen Russian assets. It was “a nice idea, stealing from the bad guy to give to the good guy”, he said. “But stealing the frozen assets of another country has never been done. “Even during the second world war, we did not confiscate Germany’s money.” In an op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper on Thursday, Merz told his fellow EU leaders that the decisions they made over the coming days would “decide the question of European independence”. Moscow’s ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechaev, said in a statement: “Any operation with sovereign Russian assets without Russia’s consent constitutes theft. It is also clear that the theft of Russian state funds will have far-reaching consequences.”