One door for NATO membership of Ukraine is probably not entirely too. Trump wants to talk to XI and Putin about nuclear disarmament. All developments in the news blog.
US Vice President JD Vance promoted right-wing populist parties such as the AfD in the run-up to the Munich Security Conference. “I think that the will of the voters was unfortunately ignored by many of our European friends,” said Vance of the US newspaper “Wall Street Journal” in Paris. Read more here.
US Vice President JD Vance will meet with Friedrich Merz on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, but not with Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz. This is reported by “Politico”, citing German and American sources. A former US official said that a meeting with Scholz was not necessary because it would be “no longer long chancellor”. Read more about this here.
According to a high-ranking civil servant, the United States did not exclude a possible NATO member of Ukraine or a return to the borders of before 2014 in an interview with Russia. “At the moment this is still on the table,” said John Coale, the deputy Ukraine representative of President Donald Trump, to a question in a Reuters interview.
US Defense Minister Pete Hegseth had informed the military allies of Ukraine in Brussels on Wednesday that a return to the Ukrainian borders before 2014 was unrealistic and Kiev’s NATO membership was not part of a solution to terminate the war. The statements triggered the concern that the United States made concessions to the Russian President Vladimir Putin before the start of talks to end the war.
Yesterday Hegseth seemed to take a back and said at a press conference that “everything was on the table” during the negotiations on the Ukraine War. It was up to Trump to decide which concessions he wanted to do. Trump said in Washington that he does not believe that Russia will “allow” NATO membership to be “allow” NATO membership.
The program of US President Donald Trump for the mass severance payment of state employees has taken on an important hurdle. A Federal Supreme Court in Boston rejected a proposal to a preliminary stop of the program. The unions are not entitled to a complaint, it is said to be justified.
Trump wants to get rid of tens of thousands of civil servants with the program, which was significantly co-developed by Tech billionaire Elon Musk. Around 75,000 of the approximately two million employees of the authorities have agreed to accept the offer, according to the spokeswoman for the White House, Karoline Leavitt. The participation period has now expired, there are no plans to extend it. The program provides generous severance payments, but has not yet been financed.
Trump had only signed a decree on Tuesday that committed the federal authorities in the United States to cooperate with Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) and to significantly reduce their staff.
The aircraft, with which US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on the way to the security conference in Munich, has turned back shortly after the start. Flight data on Flightradar24 show that shortly after it flew over the open sea at the height of Boston, again and back to the US capital Washington. Rubio’s spokeswoman Tammy Bruce reports on a technical problem, the Foreign Minister is supposed to continue the trip to Europe in another machine. Apparently there had been cracks in a cockpit window.
