#diplomacy

#diplomacy

Defence ministers of the E5 grouping France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom are meeting in the Polish city of Krakow this morning.

In an explosive post on X and an interview with Piers Morgan, Zelensky tore into Moscow for wasting time on long-winded historical lectures instead of ending the war. "I don't need historical sh*t to end this war and move to diplomacy. Because it's just a delay tactic," Zelensky fumed. The talks, involving Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, broke off with no breakthrough on sensitive territorial disputes.

Inside the Rosewood Hotel, one of the heavily guarded sites of the Munich Security Conference, diplomats and politicians, past and present, mix with think tankers and aides. There are so many blue-suited people with pins on their lapels, it becomes a kind of guessing game: is that who I think it was, or just some guy? Here, the Politico Pub and the adjacent courtyard-branded Politico Platz-is one of the downtime spaces for attendees.

The relationship with China, and my personal relationship with President Xi, is an extremely good one, and we both realize how important it is to keep it that way, Trump wrote in his post on Wednesday. The two leaders were understood to have discussed a planned trip by the US president to Beijing later this year, Trump said, adding that he was looking forward to it.

That is why, when Trump kept recycling the line "24 hours," many of us here knew it was unachievable and quietly scoffed at the idea. The agenda is crowded with the kinds of subjects that resist tidy headlines: ceasefire formulas that don't quite hold, humanitarian corridors that are still theoretical, and the ever-present question of prisoners of war & children. President Zelensky recently highlighted the possibility of an exchange, and that single word cut through the noise.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan warns that attacking Iran would be wrong and says Tehran is ready to return to negotiations. He urges a step-by-step diplomatic approach and cautions against escalation.

The upgrade places the EU on the same diplomatic footing as the United States, China and Russia and was announced during a visit to Hanoi by European Council President António Costa. "At a moment when the international rules-based order is under threat from multiple sides, we need to stand side by side as reliable and predictable partners," Costa said, adding that the partnership is about "developing spheres of shared prosperity."

As we wait for Zelenskyy, it's worth noting a cheeky social media post from Poland's outspoken foreign minister Radosaw Sikorski. He posted a video of his comments from a side event on Ukraine at Davos, in which he argued that you have to put pressure not on the victim of the aggression, but on the aggressor, and added this comment: The person to the left to whom I was giving side glances was Steve Witkoff. It is likely to be seen as a swipe at what central and eastern Europeans see as Witkoff's troubling willingness to accept Putin's explanations and his tendency to present both sides of the conflict as if they were equally responsible for the continuation of the war.

Senior officials at the top of Fifa and Uefa are "very concerned" about the potential impact of the United States interest in Greenland on the World Cup and wider game, sources say, as football federations try to tread their own difficult balance in traversing a diplomatic crisis.

Direct contact between senior officials from the United States and Iran has broken down, according to reports, as tension between the two countries rises. Communications between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and US Special Envoy Steve Wittkopf have been suspended, a senior Iranian official told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday. The report came amid President Donald Trump's threats to intervene as Iran clamps down on protests.

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Arabic on Monday, Araghchi said channels of communication with the US were open amid the ongoing unrest but stressed that his country was prepared for all options, claiming that Iran now has large and extensive military preparedness compared to last year's 12-day war. list of 3 itemsend of list His comments follow Trump's remarks on Sunday, amid nationwide protests in Iran sparked by economic woes that have intensified into broader calls for systemic change.

After acknowledging that maintaining this link currently requires great patience and diplomatic courage, in an implicit reference to the unpredictable and arbitrary behavior of U.S. President Donald Trump, Felipe VI stressed that it is an indispensable framework [] that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War and has fostered the flourishing of democracies, stability, growth, and the development of multilateralism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Richard Hermer, the government's most senior law officer and a close ally of Keir Starmer, said that in a complicated and dangerous world, leaders should be able to use statecraft to consider other factors when establishing whether to hold allies to account. In his first public comments since Britain's reaction to the US attack on Venezuela and threats toward Greenland, Hermer refrained from singling out the Trump administration,