Trump and Zelensky traded blows in an escalating feud
President Trump yesterday called Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator” who took money from the U.S. to go to war with Russia. In a social media post littered with falsehoods, Trump didn’t mention President Vladimir Putin, or that Russia seized some Ukrainian territory in 2014 before its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Trump also suggested that the future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem.
“This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”
The feud began after White House and Kremlin officials in Saudi Arabia began peace talks that excluded Ukraine. After that meeting on Tuesday, Trump suggested that Ukraine had started the war. Afterward, Zelensky said Trump had been “caught in a web of disinformation.”
E.U.: Leaders met yesterday for a second emergency meeting seeking to recalibrate relations with the U.S. as Trump moved closer to Russia.
Arab leaders are working on a proposal for Gaza’s future
Envoys from five Arab countries are set to meet in Saudi Arabia tomorrow to begin fleshing out a vision for Gaza. They’re expected to meet again at a bigger summit on March 4 in Cairo.
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates hope that countries in the region will help fund and oversee Gaza’s reconstruction, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state, according to diplomats and officials. But Israeli leaders oppose postwar plans that would pave the way to Palestinian sovereignty.
What’s next: Egypt will likely propose a committee of Palestinian technocrats and community leaders, all unaffiliated with Hamas, who could run Gaza after the war, according to two Arab diplomats and two Western officials.
Hostages: Israelis are waiting anxiously for the expected release tomorrow of the bodies of four captives held by Hamas.
Israel: A military prosecutor charged five reservist soldiers with abuse of a Palestinian detainee.
Trump Media sued a judge in Brazil
President Trump’s media company sued a Brazilian Supreme Court justice yesterday, accusing him of illegally censoring right-wing voices on social media. Hours earlier, the judge had received an indictment that would force him to decide whether to order the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president.
Context: Bolsonaro was indicted on Tuesday on charges that he plotted a coup after losing the 2022 election, including by participating in plans to assassinate the justice. Bolsonaro had called on Trump to take action against the justice in an interview with The Times last month.
MORE TOP NEWS
Cambodia’s national museum is facing a problem: About 300 stolen artifacts have been returned over the past six years, and space is getting a little cramped.
Expansion and renovations are challenges, but so is designing galleries for sacred objects. Some Cambodian visitors don’t see the pieces as cultural curiosities or works of art, but as divinities that hold their ancestors’ souls. For them, this is more of a temple than a museum.
Lives lived: Gil Won-ok, one of the last survivors of sexual slavery for Japan’s World War II troops, and who campaigned for justice, died at 96.
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TECH
Small tech, massive implications
Microsoft announced yesterday that it created a new state of matter in its quest to build a quantum computer — a machine that could accelerate the development of everything from batteries to medicines to A.I. It used the new matter to construct a tiny chip that could have exponentially more processing power than a superconductor.
The tech could leapfrog methods used by competitors like Google. The milestone, Microsoft says, pushes the company closer to the finish line in a technological race that could be even bigger than A.I. But some academics are skeptical. Read why here.
