World
What Ukraine Has Lost
Few countries since World War II have experienced this level of devastation. But it’s been impossible for anybody to see more than glimpses of it. It’s too vast. Every battle, every bombing, every missile strike, every house burned down, has left its mark across multiple front lines, back and forth over more than two years.
This is the first comprehensive picture of where the Ukraine war has been fought and the totality of the destruction. Using detailed analysis of years of satellite data, we developed a record of each town, each street, each building that has been blown apart.
The scale is hard to comprehend. More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over. Parts of Ukraine hundreds of miles apart look like Dresden or London after World War II, or Gaza after half a year of bombardment.
To produce these estimates, The New York Times worked with two leading remote sensing scientists, Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, to analyze data from radar satellites that can detect small changes in the built environment.
The remains of around 1,000 munitions gathered from Russian bombardment of the city of Kharkiv. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
More than 900 schools, hospitals, churches and other institutions have been damaged or destroyed, the analysis shows, even though these sites are explicitly protected under the Geneva Conventions.
Source: Damage data by Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek based on InSAR data from Copernicus Sentinel-1, building footprints by OpenStreetMap. Satellite images by Maxar Technologies via Google, June 2023
The New York Times
These estimates are conservative. They don’t include Crimea or parts of western Ukraine where accurate data was unavailable. The true scope of destruction is likely to be even greater — and it keeps growing. In mid-May, the Russians bombed some towns in northeastern Ukraine so ferociously that one resident said they were erasing streets.
Ukrainian forces have caused major damage, too, by bombing frontline Russian positions and attacking Russian-held territory like Crimea and Donetsk City. While it is not always possible to determine which side is responsible, the devastation recorded in Russian-held areas pales in comparison to what is seen on the Ukrainian side.
The Kremlin referred questions about this article to Russia’s Defense Ministry, which did not respond.
A school in the village of Vilkhivka, occupied for weeks by Russian forces. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
A destroyed operating room in a hospital in Huliaipole.
Diego Ibarra Sánchez for The New York Times
Few places have been as devastated as Marinka, a small town in eastern Ukraine.
Comprehensive School No. 1, where so many young Ukrainians learned to write their first letters, has been blown apart. The Orthodox Cathedral, where couples were married, has been toppled. The chestnut-lined streets where generations strolled, the milk plant and cereal factory where people worked, the Museum of Local Lore, the Marinka Region Administration Building, go-to shops and cafes — all landmarks for generations — have been reduced to faceless ruins.
The damage runs into the billions, but the true cost is much higher. Marinka was a community. Marinka was living history. Marinka was a wellspring for families for nearly 200 years. Its erasure has left people feeling lost.
“If I shut my eyes, I can see everything from my old life,” said Iryna Hrushkovksa, 34, who was born and raised in Marinka. “I can see the front gate. I can walk through the front door. I can step into our beautiful kitchen and look into the cupboards.”
“But if I open my eyes,” she said, “it’s all gone.”
People’s Museum of History of Konstantynivka
Before everyone fled, when a strong wind came from the west, the people in Marinka used to do something slightly provocative: They would tie a yellow and blue Ukrainian flag to a helium balloon and float it across the nearby frontline to land somewhere in Russia-controlled territory.
“True Ukrainians lived here,” said Ms. Hrushkovska’s mother, Hanna Horban. “They worked in the fields and factories, they created their future and the future of their children. They lived under a Ukrainian sky, free and our sky.”
Reminiscing about her old town makes her eyes well up. Sometimes, she says, she sees Marinka in her dreams.
It’s the same for many others. A young Ukrainian woman in Berlin recently opened a photo exhibition on Marinka. Videos have surfaced on social media featuring photos of pre-war Marinka with sad music playing in the background. Some of Marinka’s displaced people have chosen to hang together, in another town, Pavlograd, a hundred miles away.
In many ways, the story of this one town — its closeness, its vulnerability and its ruin — is the story of this war and perhaps all wars.
The Horbans settled down in Marinka at least three generations ago. By the early 1970s, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, they had built their own house at 102B Blagodatna Street. It was large, by Soviet standards: around 1,200 square feet, with three bedrooms and bright red tiles leading to the front door. In the yard, they raised ducks, chickens, two cows and two pigs; they grew all kinds of vegetables, from potatoes to peas; and they plucked apples, cherries, peaches and apricots from their own trees.
“In the 1990s,” Ms. Hrushkovska said, “we survived off this.”
Marinka started out as a farming hamlet, founded in 1843 by adventurous peasants and Cossacks from the Eurasian steppe. Legend has it that it took its name from the founder’s wife, a friendly Mariia.
By the early 20th century, this entire swath of eastern Ukraine transformed. Iron and coal were discovered, in a region soon to be called the Donbas, and the city of Donetsk became an industrial hub. Marinka, about 15 miles away, shifted from a quiet farming town to a busy suburb.
By the mid-1960s, it had a coal mine, a milk factory, a tire factory, a bread factory and soon a museum, a public sauna and two public swimming pools.
Photos from 1917 and 1970, courtesy of the People’s Museum of History of Konstantynivka; 2015, Celestino Arce/NurPhoto, via Getty Images; 2022, Tyler Hicks/The New York Times; 2022, Laura Boushnak for The New York Times; 2023, Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times.
In the spring, the back lanes smelled of fresh flowers. In the summer, kids swam in the Osykova River. In the fall, workers piled into trucks heading for the collective farms and harvested immense amounts of wheat, afterwards swigging vodka straight from the bottle and dancing in the stubbly fields. The best restaurant in town was Kolos, known for its “Donbas cutlet,” a cut of high-quality pork, breaded and cooked with a hunk of butter.
“Marinka was blooming,” said Ms. Horban, who was also born here.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Marinka sank into disorder. State-owned enterprises shut down and Ms. Horban’s husband, Vova, a veterinarian, lost his job and had to dig coal for a living, at age 40.
Things stabilized by 2010, and bolstered by trade with Russia, Donetsk developed into one of Ukraine’s swankier cities. Marinka prospered by extension and grew to around 10,000 people.
In the spring of 2014, everything changed, again.
“All of a sudden strange men appeared with weapons and started stealing cars,” said Svitlana Moskalevska, another longtime resident.
That was just the beginning. Violent protests broke out. Then shooting in the streets. The Russians were backing an insurgency in Donetsk. It was confusing. And terrifying.
By mid-2014 — after thousands were killed, including dozens in Marinka — Donetsk had become the capital of a new Russian puppet state, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. For several months, Marinka was occupied as well.
The Ukrainian Army eventually cleared Marinka, but it wasn’t strong enough to take back Donetsk. So the front line between Ukraine and Russia cut right through Marinka, less than a mile from the Horbans’ home.
People shut themselves in at night and drew their curtains, fearful of being shelled. Basic services collapsed. Marinka used to get treated water from Donetsk but the Russians cut off the pipes, leaving it no choice but to hook up to the Osykova River.
“It was disgusting,” said Olha Herus, Ms. Horban’s cousin. “Fish came out of the faucet, sometimes even little frogs.”
On Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of the first places it attacked was Marinka. This time, the Russians bombed the town with aircraft and heavy artillery, causing far greater damage than in 2014.
Pre-war Wikimedia Commons via Ліонкінг. April 2022, Serhii Nuzhnenko, Reuters. June 2022, by Gleb Garanich, Reuters. January 2023, by Leonid ХВ Ragozin via social media.
Ms. Hrushkovska and her daughter, Varvara, evacuated a few days later. Some older residents, like Ms. Herus’s mother, Tetiana, refused to leave. She told everyone that she had become an “expert” at identifying the different types of munitions flying around — artillery, mortars, tank rounds, hand grenades, airplane bombs. She assured her family that she always knew when to seek shelter in the vegetable cellar. But at a deep level, it seems she simply didn’t want to leave.
“You have to understand,” Ms. Herus explained. “In Ukraine, people don’t like to move from one region to another. This is the mentality. We like living in one house for three to four generations.”
On April 25, 2022, Ms. Herus’s mom called and uttered two words no one could recall her using before: “I’m scared.”
An hour later she was killed.
The White Angels, a volunteer paramedic group, evacuated Marinka’s last residents in November 2022.
Source: Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, June 2022
The New York Times
The Devastation Grows
In the early months of the war, the Russians quickly captured several cities in eastern Ukraine. They almost captured Kyiv. Since then, the conflict has largely settled into a war of attrition, which favors the Russians with vastly more men and ammunition. The spikes on the following map show the heavy damage since the initial Russian invasion.
The Ukrainian military lost Marinka in December 2023.
They had been fighting for the city since 2014. Hundreds if not thousands of men from both sides died for it. At the very end, a small group of Ukrainian soldiers were holed up on the western edge of town in a warren of tunnels and pulverized basements. The rest was Russian territory.
When the Ukrainians peeked their heads out, they were stunned.
“I saw a picture of Hiroshima, and Marinka is absolutely the same,” said one Ukrainian soldier, Henadiy. “Nothing remains.” Following military protocol, he provided only his given name.
Another soldier, who asked to be identified by his call sign, Karakurt, described cars with the paint scorched off, houses cut down to their jagged foundations and long, empty roads that sparkled with glass and smelled of dust, smoke and gunpowder.
“Whatever could burn, burned,” he said.
Since the beginning of the war, satellites have flagged more than 210,000 buildings in Ukraine as damaged. About half of them are in the Donbas.
Source: Damage data by Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek based on InSAR data from Copernicus Sentinel-1. Building footprints by OpenStreetMap and Microsoft Bing. Front lines of the first day of the month between March 2022 and January 2024 by the Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project
The New York Times.
The scars of war
Ukraine is determined to rebuild. The hope, however distant, is that with international cooperation Ukraine will seize Russian assets and force Russia to foot the bill for the reconstruction of entire cities like Marinka.
But a long war may still stretch ahead. In recent months, the Russians have had the upper hand, destroying more communities as their army seems to stagger inexorably forward. Ten million Ukrainians have fled from their homes — one in four people.
Last spring, a few dozen people from Marinka gathered at a school in Pavlograd, which is considered reasonably safe. The children wore crisply ironed embroidered shirts called vyshyvankas. In a large room with big windows, they performed dances and sang patriotic songs that were beamed by video to displaced Marinka people around the world. Adults stood along the wall, tears dripping down their faces.
Children whose families fled Marinka celebrating Ukrainian folk traditions in Pavlograd.
Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
“You know the simplest way to make a person cry?” Ms. Hrushkovska asked. “Make them remember their city and their home.”
She and her daughter, Vavara, 13, are now squeezed into a small, two-room apartment in Pavlograd.
“My old kitchen was bigger than this whole place,” she joked.
Then she broke into tears.
Varvara Hrushkovska, right, and her friend Hanna Kovalenko, whose families fled Marinka, in Pavlograd. Next to them is Varvara’s grandmother Hanna Horban.
Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
Ms. Hrushkovska grew up in Marinka. She was married in Marinka. She raised Vavara in Marinka. Her grandparents died in Marinka. She knows she can never go back to Marinka. She senses that for the rest of her days, she will suffer from something that has no cure: everlasting homesickness.
She is considering moving abroad with her daughter.
“No matter how unpatriotic it may sound, there’s not much future for her in Ukraine,” Ms. Hrushkovska said.
“It’s not that we want to leave,” she quickly added. But with Marinka gone, she said, “we don’t know where else to go.”
Artem Hoch, 4, and his brother Danylo, 14, at their new home in Pavlograd.
Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
Sources
The analysis of damage to built areas across Ukraine was conducted in collaboration with Corey Scher, PhD candidate, City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek, Associate Professor of Geography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS) at Oregon State University using 10,866 Sentinel-1 images from Copernicus.
Additional data sources include East View Geospatial (settlement boundaries); Microsoft Bing and OpenStreetMap (building footprints); Global Human Settlement Layer (built area); Planet Labs and Maxar Technologies (satellite imagery); and Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (historical front lines).
The archival photograph of a street scene in Marinka from the top of the story is from kumar.dn.ua. The soldiers walking through a field is by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times, and the drone photo of devastated Marinka is by Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times. Satellite image by Planet Labs.
Additional work
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn, Evelina Riabenko and Olha Kotiuzhanska contributed reporting. Helmuth Rosales, Zachary Levitt, Jeremy White, Jaime Tanner, Agnes Chang and Martín González Gómez contributed additional work.
Methodology
To document urban areas of Ukraine that were damaged during the war, we worked with remote sensing scientists to analyze changes in satellite radar data from before the war until December 2023.
A detailed technical methodology is available from the scientists, Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek.
The analysis relies on open source data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 program known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. These images are captured in each specific area once every 12 days.
The researchers compared images taken in every part of Ukraine before the war to images taken during the war — about 50 terabytes of imagery in total. They identified specific kinds of changes that could indicate damaged structures.
Researchers took measures to exclude other kinds changes picked up in the environment — such as seasonal changes in tree and snow cover, and human activity like mining or traffic. They excluded changes not in built areas, as defined by the 2020 Global Human Settlement Layer provided by the European Space Agency.
To spot check the data, The Times used high resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs, comparing the data to imagery from hundreds of settlements across Ukraine. Crimea, Sevastopol and oblasts west of Vinnytsia were excluded from the analysis because of human activities like construction and environmental conditions — such as weather, soil and vegetation — that made it more difficult to accurately distinguish structural damage.
To estimate that about 210,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine, The Times compared the damaged areas to data on more than 17 million building footprints from OpenStreetMap and Microsoft Global ML Building Footprints. To roughly estimate the number of churches, hospitals, schools and other protected sites that have been damaged, The Times compared the damaged areas with known building categorizations from OpenStreetMap. The true totals of protected buildings are higher, as the categorization of many buildings is unknown.
The overall picture shown here is intentionally conservative. The full extent of the destruction is likely to be worse than what the analysis can confirm.
World
Hamas used sexual violence ‘deliberately and systematically’ on Oct 7, commission report finds
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WARNING: This article includes graphic and disturbing accounts from the October 7 massacre in Israel.
Hamas and its Palestinian collaborators used sexual and gender-based violence “deliberately and systematically” as an inherent part of a wider strategy of the 2023 massacres in southern Israel, according to a report released Tuesday by the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes Against Women and Children.
The Israeli nonprofit said its investigation documented evidence of abuse at multiple sites during the Oct. 7 terror invasion, including the Nova Music Festival, kibbutzim near the Gaza border, Israel Defense Forces bases, among hostages in captivity and in the condition of recovered bodies showing signs consistent with sexual violence.
According to the report, investigators identified at least 13 recurring forms of abuse, including rape, sexual torture, shootings directed at victims’ genital areas and abuse carried out after death.
ISRAEL’S QUEST FOR JUSTICE EXPOSES HAMAS’ SYSTEMATIC SEXUAL VIOLENCE CAMPAIGN DURING OCTOBER 7 MASSACRE
A Hamas terrorist is seen walking around a residential neighborhood in southern Israel in undated bodycam footage released by the Israel Defense Forces. The footage was shown to foreign correspondents on Oct. 16, 2023, as part of a 40-minute reel compiled from the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. (Israel Defense Forces/AP)
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission and a principal co-author of the report, told Fox News Digital that the greatest challenge in compiling the findings was the team’s repeated exposure to graphic material and the trauma associated with reviewing it on a regular basis.
“We had to not only collect materials, but also review and analyze it alongside forensic experts while witnessing human suffering at its worst,” Elkayam-Levy said. “What motivated us was the denial, the hesitation and the questioning. We wanted to ensure that the world knows what happened to the victims.
“For us, it is a final act of justice for the victims,” she added.
The report also detailed cases in which sexual violence was inflicted in front of or involving family members, including one incident in which relatives were allegedly forced to carry out acts on each other.
FREED HOSTAGE ROM BRASLAVSKI DETAILS ABUSE, STARVATION DURING 738 DAYS IN GAZA CAPTIVITY
People visit the site of the Nova music festival in Re’im, southern Israel, where revelers were killed in a cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The visit took place on Jan. 14, 2024, marking 100 days since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas. (Leo Correa/AP)
It further accused Hamas and allied perpetrators of using videos, digital platforms and social media as tools to magnify psychological harm, spread fear and publicize the attacks, including by distributing sexualized material.
Elkayam-Levy said she hopes the findings will not remain confined to academics, human rights organizations or activists, but will also be studied by counterterrorism and national security experts to better understand and confront such atrocities.
“We cannot prevent what we do not fully understand,” Elkayam-Levy said. “No single prosecution could ever capture the full magnitude of these crimes in the way this report does. It is therefore critical that policymakers, decision-makers, members of Congress and senators find ways to formally recognize these findings and hold hearings so we can begin addressing this issue. We want the findings of this report to receive formal institutional recognition.”
The report, Elkayam-Levy noted, underscores that victims of the Oct. 7 atrocities came from 52 countries, highlighting the global scope and impact of the attack.
Witness testimony cited in the report included an account of a woman being sexually assaulted before being beheaded. Another witness described seeing a woman dragged from a vehicle, pinned against a wall, repeatedly raped and then stabbed, with the assault allegedly continuing after her death.
In another case, a witness described discovering the body of a man whose genitals had been severed, lying beside the body of a woman holding them, in what the report described as an apparent effort to degrade and humiliate the victims.
A Hamas terrorist is seen walking around a residential neighborhood in southern Israel in undated bodycam footage released by the Israel Defense Forces amid the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces/AP)
JEWISH DEM LAWMAKER PANS NY TIMES, SUGGESTS PAPER ON ‘HAMAS’ PAYROLL’ FOR PALESTINIAN PRISONER DOG RAPE REPORT
Investigators said some female victims were found naked or partially unclothed, with evidence of severe mutilation and objects including grenades, nails and household tools inserted into their bodies. The report also cited gunshot wounds, cuts and burn injuries concentrated on intimate areas.
The report said some female bodies brought to morgues showed broken pelvises or legs, bloodied underwear and additional trauma to the abdomen or groin.
Former hostages, both women and men, have also testified to rape, sexual torture and other forms of abuse during abduction or captivity, according to the report. It said some female captives reported sexual assaults while receiving treatment in Gaza hospitals for injuries sustained during the attacks.
A bloodied handprint stains a wall inside a house in the Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border after a Hamas attack days earlier. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Male hostages likewise described sexual abuse while in captivity, including assaults in showers and incidents carried out under armed threat while victims were naked, the report said. One former hostage recounted being sexually assaulted when a captor forcibly rubbed his genitals against the victim’s anus.
Last month, former hostage Rom Braslavski recounted the abuse he said he endured during captivity in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
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“They would hit me with whatever they had on hand. I underwent severe torture, bondage and sexual abuse. Everything they could do to me, they did. My body is still covered in scars. After four months of torture, I was clinically dead, rolling my eyes and passing out. They decided to stop the violence and brought doctors to treat me with injections and gave me food again,” he said.
The report said sexual and gender-based violence was “widespread and systematic” and constituted an “integral component” of both the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent treatment of captives, while calling the prosecution of such crimes an “urgent” priority to be pursued through international accountability mechanisms.
A soldier of the Military Rabbinate unit opens a container holding bodies killed during the Hamas attack on Israel’s southern border as identification continues at the Shura army base in Ramle, Israel, on Oct. 24, 2023. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Among its recommendations, the commission called for targeted sanctions against individuals and entities accused of carrying out or materially supporting the Oct. 7 attack and its aftermath. It also urged action against what it described as denial, minimization or politicization of the sexual crimes committed during the massacre and in captivity.
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“The Commission further recommends that Israel adopt a comprehensive gender strategy within its prosecutorial framework and establish a specialized chamber or panel of judges dedicated to the prosecution of sexual and gender-based crimes committed on October 7th and during captivity,” the report said.
Elkayam-Levy said the report has received widespread international attention, including front-page coverage in U.S. and global media outlets. “We feel the discussion has shifted from questioning whether these crimes occurred to examining their consequences,” she said. “There is now a substantial legal evidentiary foundation preserved in a secure archive that cannot be denied.”
The Spanish government is seeking to contain a scandal linked to EU pandemic funds, categorically denying that it used European money to pay pensions, as member states prepare for tough budget talks amid deep divisions over how funding should be allocated.
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An official in Madrid with direct knowledge of how EU funds are structured told Euronews that a technical matter is being instrumentalised in a way that is “simply false”, accusing the opposition of playing politics over what it describes as an accounting issue.
A Spanish budget watchdog reported earlier this month that the government of Pedro Sánchez used budget credits linked to the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), an economic plan partly funded through common debt designed to revitalise the bloc’s economy after Covid, to partly finance Spanish pensions in November 2024.
Madrid insists it did not breach the rules.
The European Commission asked Madrid for clarification after initial newspaper reports, according to a person familiar with the matter. It did not issue a follow-up request once Madrid provided an explanation, and Spanish authorities consider the issue closed.
However, the political scandal lingers, even as Madrid insists that “not a single euro” of EU money has been misused, amid backlash in so-called frugal countries. Spain and Italy were the biggest beneficiaries of the €750 billion recovery fund approved in summer 2020 after difficult talks.
In Madrid, the opposition People’s Party has demanded that Sánchez appear before Congress to explain the matter. The issue is also making waves in the European Parliament, with strong reactions from conservative lawmakers.
“If these allegations are confirmed, we are facing a serious abuse of European taxpayers’ money,” wrote Tomáš Zdechovský (Czechia/EPP), an influential centre-right member of the European Parliament’s budgetary committee, on X. “Europe cannot tolerate any misuse of recovery funds.”
“Is €10 billion in EU funds, intended for recovery after the pandemic, quietly being used to help pay Spanish pensions? It would confirm our worst fears about these funds,” said Dirk Gotink (The Netherlands/EPP).
Madrid sources insist the issue is being overblown for political purposes.
A government official pointed to the country’s economic performance and pushed back against the frugal-versus-south narrative, which often presents the wealthier north subsidising the weaker south. “Spain is the fastest growing economy in Europe, Germany is not paying our pensions,” said a second Madrid official.
The incident does, however, underscore the additional complications the country is facing due to its inability to approve a budget in a fragmented parliament. After failing to deliver a fresh budget for 2025, Madrid was forced to roll over a plan approved in 2023.
A fight over the EU’s financial future
The timing of the controversy is particularly sensitive.
Brussels is preparing to launch negotiations on the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the EU’s seven-year budget for 2028–2034, and a central question will be what to do with the roughly €750 billion in joint debt accumulated through the recovery plan.
That programme was the largest and most politically consequential collective borrowing exercise in EU history. Whether it is ultimately seen as a success or a cautionary tale will inevitably shape how member states approach future proposals for shared financing.
Spain, the second-largest recipient of the initiative’s funding with a total of around €60 billion already received, has been among the most vocal advocates for an ambitious European budget and a permanent mechanism to pool financing needs.
Spanish Finance Minister Carlos Cuerpo has argued that pooling national debt at the EU level could generate annual savings of up to €25 billion.
Cuerpo, who is now Sánchez’s number two in government, echoed remarks made by France, Mario Draghi and a number of European intellectuals calling for a more efficient borrowing mechanism that would allow the EU to tap into the European Commission’s triple-A rating and lower financing costs for all 27 member states.
While the European Commission’s current budget proposal does not include new borrowing, contentious debate lies ahead over how to finance the repayment of existing recovery debt. Frugal northern countries like the Netherlands and Germany favour strict repayment schedules, even if that means cuts to other spending programmes.
On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reiterated his country’s opposition, even if the German central bank has been more nuanced about the benefits and risks of pooling debt.
Southern member states, including France and Greece, are pushing to roll over the debt accumulated during the pandemic, with President Emmanuel Macron describing calls for early repayments as “idiotic”. Paris is an advocate of a European safe-asset mechanism.
A European official supportive of the plan said the Spanish controversy is being weaponised not so much against Madrid, but against proposals put forward by southern countries ahead of the budget talks.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is used to kill rollover proposal,” the diplomat said.
The issue of the next European budget will feature in an EU summit scheduled in June.
The United States and China will discuss guardrails on artificial intelligence, including establishing a protocol for keeping powerful A.I. models out of the hands of nonstate actors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday.
Mr. Bessent, who was speaking from Beijing in an interview with CNBC, did not give more details, including when these discussions would take place. But Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and President Trump had been expected to discuss A.I. during their summit in the Chinese capital.
If these talks happen, it would be the first time the two countries formally take up the issue during Mr. Trump’s second term. The capabilities and usage of A.I. have grown rapidly, and so have concerns that this technology could be weaponized by hackers and terrorists, or spiral out of human control.
“The two A.I. superpowers are going to start talking,” Mr. Bessent said. “We’re going to set up a protocol in terms of, how do we go forward with best practices for A.I. to make sure nonstate actors don’t get ahold of these models.”
Still, Mr. Bessent made clear that the fierce competition between the United States and China for supremacy in A.I. — which has been a major hurdle to cooperation on safety — remained front of mind for U.S. policymakers. Officials and experts in both countries have argued that they cannot slow technological development and risk losing out to their rivals.
Mr. Bessent said that the United States was willing to cooperate with China on A.I. safety because “the Chinese are substantially behind us” in terms of the technology’s development.
“I do not think we would be having the same discussions if they were this far ahead of us. So we’re going to put in U.S. best practices, U.S. values, on this, and then roll those out to the world,” Mr. Bessent said.
Experts have suggested that China’s A.I. models may be a few months behind the leading U.S. models.
Another hurdle to the United States and China working together on A.I. safety is that they have generally focused on different potential threats.
American experts have generally highlighted existential risks, such as the possibility of artificial general intelligence, or super-intelligence that exceeds that of humans. Chinese researchers and officials have more often highlighted risks related to social stability and information control, such as the possibility of chatbots producing content that challenges China’s leadership and policies.
Still, researchers in both countries have highlighted some shared risks, such as the possibility of A.I. being used to develop new biological weapons.
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