World
Behind the Collision: Trump Jettisons Ukraine on His Way to a Larger Goal
After five weeks in which President Trump made clear his determination to scrap America’s traditional sources of power — its alliances among like-minded democracies — and return the country to an era of raw great-power negotiations, he left one question hanging: How far would he go in sacrificing Ukraine to his vision?
The remarkable shouting match that played out in front of the cameras early Friday afternoon from the Oval Office provided the answer.
As Mr. Trump admonished President Volodymyr Zelensky and warned him that “you don’t have the cards” to deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and as Vice President JD Vance dressed down the Ukrainian leader as being “disrespectful” and ungrateful, it was clear that the three-year wartime partnership between Washington and Kyiv was shattered.
Whether it can be repaired, and whether a deal to provide the United States revenue from Ukrainian minerals that was the ostensible reason for the visit can be pieced back together, remains to be seen.
But the larger truth is that the venomous exchanges — broadcast not only to an astounded audience of Americans and Europeans who had never seen such open attacks on each other, but to Mr. Putin and his Kremlin aides — made evident that Mr. Trump regards Ukraine as an obstacle to what he sees as a far more vital project.
What Mr. Trump really wants, one senior European official said this week before the blowup, is a normalization of the relationship with Russia. If that means rewriting the history of Moscow’s illegal invasion three years ago, dropping investigations of Russian war crimes or refusing to offer Ukraine long-lasting security guarantees, then Mr. Trump, in this assessment of his intentions, is willing to make that deal.
To anyone listening carefully, that goal was bubbling just beneath the surface as Mr. Zelensky headed to Washington for his disastrous visit.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio — once a defender of Ukraine and its territorial sovereignty, now a convert to the Trump power plays — made clear in an interview with Breitbart News that it was time to move beyond the war in the interest of establishing a triangular relationship between the United States, Russia and China.
“We’re going to have disagreements with the Russians, but we have to have a relationship with both,” Mr. Rubio said. He carefully avoided any wording that would suggest, as he often said as a senator, that Russia was the aggressor, or that there was risk that, if not punished for its attack on Ukraine, it might next target a NATO nation.
“These are big, powerful countries with nuclear stockpiles,” he said of Russia and China. “They can project power globally. I think we have lost the concept of maturity and sanity in diplomatic relations.”
Mr. Trump makes no secret of his view that the post-World War II system, created by Washington, ate away at American power.
Above all else, that system prized relationships with allies committed to democratic capitalism, even maintaining those alliances that came with a cost to American consumers. It was a system that sought to avoid power grabs by making the observance of international law, and respect for established international boundaries, a goal unto itself.
To Mr. Trump, such a system gave smaller and less powerful countries leverage over the United States, leaving Americans to pick up far too much of the tab for defending allies and promoting their prosperity.
While his predecessors — both Democrats and Republicans — insisted that alliances in Europe and Asia were America’s greatest force multiplier, keeping the peace and allowing trade to flourish, Mr. Trump viewed them as a bleeding wound. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he repeatedly asked why America should defend countries running trade surpluses with the United States.
In the five weeks since his second inauguration, Mr. Trump has begun exercising a plan to destroy that system. It explains his demand that Denmark cede control of Greenland to the United States, and that Panama return a canal that Americans built. When asked how he could seize sovereign territory in Gaza for redevelopment in his plan for a “Riviera of the Middle East,” he shot back, “Under the U.S. authority.”
But Ukraine was always a more complicated case. Only 26 months ago, Mr. Zelensky was feted in Washington as a warrior for democracy, invited to address a joint meeting of Congress and applauded by Democrats and Republicans alike for standing up to bald aggression by a murderous foe.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance had signaled for months that in their minds the American commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty was over. Three weeks ago, Mr. Trump told an interviewer that Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that had embraced its independence, built close ties to Western Europe and sought to join NATO, “may be Russian someday.”
To the shock of America’s allies, Mr. Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference two weeks ago and said nothing about assuring that any armistice or cease-fire would come with security guarantees for Ukraine, or about Russia paying any price for its invasion.
Instead, Mr. Vance seemed to embrace the rising far-right party in Germany and its counterparts throughout Europe. Gone was the Biden-era talk about sticking with Ukraine “as long as it takes” to deter any temptation by Russia to carry the war farther West.
Mr. Zelensky saw all this, of course — he was at Munich, too — but clearly he did not read the room the way his European supporters did. While President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain preceded him to the Oval Office with elaborate plans to placate Mr. Trump, and explain how Europe was stepping up its own military spending, Mr. Zelensky took the bait, especially when Mr. Vance began mocking Ukraine’s efforts to recruit troops.
He got combative, telling Mr. Trump that the oceans between America and Russia would not protect it forever. Mr. Trump raised his voice, and told the Ukrainian that he would be lucky just to get a cease-fire, suggesting that any terms — or no terms — would be better than his inevitable defeat.
“I want to see guarantees,” Mr. Zelensky retorted. And minutes later, he left the White House, his luncheon of rosemary roasted chicken and creme brulee uneaten, the minerals deal unsigned and his country’s future ability to fend off a renewed Russian push to topple Kyiv in doubt.
Almost immediately, the world retreated to its familiar corners.
Mr. Macron, siding with the Ukrainian leader, urged that the West thank the Ukrainians for being the forward defense of freedom. He was joined by the nervous Eastern Europeans, led by Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. But in private, several European diplomats said they thought the damage might be irreparable.
The Russians celebrated their good luck. Former President Dmitri A. Medvedev thanked Mr. Trump for “telling the truth” to Mr. Zelensky’s face. He urged him to suspend remaining American aid.
Mr. Rubio was among the first to congratulate the president for putting in his place a man the secretary of state used to applaud as a modern-day Churchill in a T-shirt.
“Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before,” Mr. Rubio wrote on social media. “Thank you for putting America First.”
Of course, it is far easier to repeat Mr. Trump’s favorite slogan, and to blow up an existing world order, than to create a new one. It took decades to assemble the post-World War II rules of global engagement, and for all its faults, the system succeeded at its primary objectives: avoiding great power war and encouraging economic interdependence.
Mr. Trump has never articulated at any length what he would replace those rules with, other than that he would use America’s military and economic power to strike deals — essentially an argument that keeping the peace is as simple as weaving together minerals agreements and trade pacts, maybe with a few real estate transactions thrown in.
There is little precedent to suggest that approach alone works, especially in dealing with authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China, who take a long view in dealing with democracies that they view as lacking the sustained will necessary to achieve difficult objectives.
But judging by Friday’s display in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump seems convinced that as long as he is at the helm, the world will order itself as he commands.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mark Schiefelbein has been based in Washington, D.C., with AP for about three years, and before that spent a decade in Beijing at AP’s China bureau.
Here’s what he had to say about this extraordinary photo.
Why this photo?
This was an event that had never happened before in the 250-year history of the United States and may never happen again: a night of mixed martial-arts cage match brawls on the South Lawn of the White House, with bloodied competitors battling it out in front of the president, vice president, and other leaders of the country. AP had other photographers ringside at the event focusing more on the fights themselves. So I felt my role was to capture the context of the evening — the location, the people in attendance, the environment.
How I made this photo
A small group of other photographers and I, the White House press pool, had been allowed to photograph part of the evening from a position in the stands directly opposite the White House. I was carrying four cameras with a variety of lenses from 12 mm to 300 mm. This let me capture everything from ultra-wide views of the “claw” structure built for the fights, to close-ups of leaders and celebrities in attendance. I had been following Diego Lopes with my longest lens as he moved around the ring celebrating his win over Steve Garcia. When I saw him start to climb onto the cage, I immediately realized there might be a possibility of a picture like this and zoomed out to capture more of the scene.
An octagon on the White House lawn for Trump’s 80th birthday and the nation’s 250th, in photos
Why this photo works
The White House is surely one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. The columns of the South Portico, the fighter standing with arms and legs spread wide in celebration, and the octagon padding of the UFC ring tell an entire story as your eyes move from top to bottom of the frame. With Lopes standing with his back to the camera, facing the White House, it becomes less a photo of him and more about the evening, the event, and the spectacle. It was fortunate that it was after nightfall, so things that might have been distracting, like the Marine Band and spectators seated behind the ring, are mostly in the dark. Only the key elements – the White House, Lopes, and the ring are lit up.
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For more extraordinary AP photography, click here.
World
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces potential leadership challenge from newly-elected Andy Burnham
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Andy Burnham has officially won his special election and regained a seat in Parliament, setting him up to challenge the deeply unpopular Keir Starmer as the leader of the Labour party and as prime minister.
Burnham, currently the mayor of Greater Manchester in northwest England, won a seat in Makerfield and came away with 55% of the vote in a field of more than a dozen candidates, according to The Associated Press. The runner-up was Rob Kenyon of Reform UK, a right-wing populist party, who received more than 9,000 fewer votes than Burnham.
Burnham last served as a member of Parliament in 2017 but strongly implied in his victory speech that he is returning with the intention to lead the United Kingdom.
“Everyone knows that politics isn’t working. Everyone can feel that the country isn’t where it should be. Tonight could, just could, be the turning point,” he said, according to the AP. “This result will bring about a country that works fairly for everywhere and for everybody.”
TRUMP ALLY NIGEL FARAGE DEALS MAJOR BLOW TO STARMER IN LOCAL UK ELECTIONS AS RESIGNATION CALLS MOUNT
Britain’s Labour party candidate Andy Burnham speaks to supporters after the Makerfield by-election in Ashton in Makerfield, England, on Friday, June 19, 2026. (Jon Super/AP)
This special election, called by-elections in Britain, was unusually significant because the area’s Labour MP, Josh Simons, intentionally resigned to allow Burnham to win the seat and pursue leadership.
The potentially outsized impact of this election was juxtaposed with the strange scene that unfolded when all the candidates gathered on Friday morning to hear the results. Burnham stood in between an independent candidate dressed in a fox costume and another candidate known as “Count Binface”.
As his name suggests, “Count Binface,” whose real name is Jonathan David Harvey, was wearing a trash can on his head and regularly runs in U.K. elections to advocate for increased voter turnout.
Starmer congratulated Burnham in a social media post on X, saying voters “chose Labour’s campaign of hope and optimism over division and hate.”
When asked about Burnham’s intentions to oust him as leader, Starmer said he will fight to remain prime minister, a position he has held for nearly two years.
“I’ve said repeatedly I’m not going to walk away from that,” Starmer told reporters.
Labour party candidate Andy Burnham, center, stands with other candidates on the podium at the Edge Wigan, awaiting the Makerfield by-election result announcement in Wigan, England, on Friday, June 19, 2026. (Jon Super/AP)
AS EPSTEIN-LINKED APPOINTMENT SPARKS BACKLASH, UK PM STARMER FACES PARTY REVOLT AMID RESIGNATION CALLS
Starmer led the Labour party to a landslide victory in July 2024 and ever since, his popularity has been eroding thanks to a persistently high cost of living, an anemic economy and a scandal over his willingness to accept gifts from wealthy donors.
Last September, Starmer was slammed for appointing Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador to the United States, when it was known as early as 2019 that Mandelson had a friendship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Following an enormous public backlash, Mandelson was quickly dismissed from his post.
With Starmer as leader, Labour is increasingly losing liberal-minded voters to the Green Party, while also facing stronger challenges by Reform UK, a Nigel Farage-led party that advocates against mass migration and in favor of tighter border controls. Farage, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, said he was disappointed by Burnham’s victory.
Burnham is expected to head to London to be sworn in as soon as Monday. Under the British parliamentary system, the governing party can hold leadership elections in the middle of the term. The winner of such a contest can become prime minister without there having to be a national election.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer awaits Switzerland’s Federal President Guy Parmelin on the sidelines of the G7 summit, in Evian-les-Bains, France, on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 (Isabel Infantes/Pool Reuters via AP)
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Under Labour rules, a lawmaker can challenge the leader if they win the backing of a fifth of their party’s members in the House of Commons. Burnham has enough lawmakers on board to trigger a leadership contest, according to a report from The New Statesman.
According to the AP, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Burnham and Starmer will “have a conversation about what comes next” in the next few days.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez have issued a blistering rebuke against deportation camps outside the European Union, setting their countries on a collision course with a growing political majority.
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During a summit on Friday, 19 leaders across the bloc signed a joint declaration calling to make “full use” of a new European law that enables the construction of so-called return hubs to host migrants whose asylum applications have been denied.
The coalition, led by Denmark and Italy, two fierce advocates of outsourcing, wants to “move forward with solutions based in third countries as soon as possible”.
But for Macron and Sánchez, this path runs counter to European values and risks squandering financial resources and undercutting relations with neighbouring Africa.
“I am not sure that this is our Europe. I don’t know if these are the fundamental principles on which our Europe was built,” Macron said at the end of the summit on Friday.
“And I don’t think it’s effective, either. The proof is that I have not seen anyone make it work so far,” he went on, underscoring his strong dissatisfaction. (Italy has set up migration centres on Albanian soil but has fallen short of expected targets.)
“I have a lot of respect for anyone who wants to do it. I disagree, both pragmatically and in principle. I think it has nothing to do with European politics.”
Macron said his country was in favour of tougher laws to curb irregular arrivals but drew a red line on the physical transfer of migrants to faraway countries where they have never set foot. That possibility, long considered taboo, is allowed under a revamped Return Regulation described as the “strictest-ever” migration law.
“There is a question, in fact, around these famous return hubs in third countries. France does not support this policy. We are in favour of a more effective return policy. But first of all, I have never seen a return hub in a third country operate,” Macron went on.
“I invite you to consider what it is (in practice): this means that people who do not want to return to their country of origin or who cannot get back to their country of origin will be pushed into a third country, which will accept them in return for money.”
Macron mocked the jargonistic term “innovative solutions” that proponents of migration offshoring often use in their public communication and challenged the notion that host countries would respect human rights in exchange for financial incentives.
“I am a big supporter of innovation in my country,” he said, saying he would later attend the Vivatech festival in Paris. “But I am always very careful when talking about innovation in values and human rights. Allow me to have that reservation.”
Meanwhile, Sánchez, a vocal critic of the measures, said the deportation camps would be an “absolutely inefficient” and “worthless” response to irregular migration.
“It’s a mirage, if you will, that it will simply waste economic resources, and Europe doesn’t have many,” the Spaniard said after the summit in Brussels.
“Secondly, it sends a wrong message to those countries of origin and transit with which we should be collaborating, cooperating and showing empathy towards.”
Macron echoed Sánchez’s reputational concerns and insisted he would not allow EU funds to be used in any capacity to build the deportation camps, which are “neither effective nor do they correspond with our principles”.
“Sometimes, we hear one or the other (country) advocate policies with the African continent, so good luck defending our credibility on these continents by explaining that we will use the money for investments to build return hubs on their continents,” he said.
“What world do we live in?”
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