Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to propose fully reoccupying the Gaza Strip when he meets his security cabinet, Israeli media say.

“The die has been cast. We’re going for the full conquest of the Gaza Strip – and defeating Hamas,” local journalists quote a senior official saying.

Responding to reports that the army chief and other military leaders oppose the plan, the unnamed official said: “If that doesn’t work for the chief of staff, he should resign.”

The families of hostages fear such plans could endanger their loved ones, with 20 out of 50 believed to be alive in Gaza, while polls suggest three in four Israelis instead favour a ceasefire deal to return them.

Many of Israel’s close allies would also condemn such a move as they push for an end to the war and action to alleviate a humanitarian crisis.

Within Israel, hundreds of retired Israeli security officials, including former heads of intelligence agencies, issued a joint letter to US President Donald Trump on Monday, calling for him to pressure Netanyahu to end the war.

One of the signatories, ex-domestic intelligence agency chief Ami Ayalon, told the BBC that further military action would be futile.

“From the military point of view, [Hamas] is totally destroyed. On the other hand, as an ideology it is getting more and more power among the Palestinian people, within the Arab street around us, and also in the world of Islam.

“So the only way to defeat Hamas’s ideology is to present a better future.”

The latest developments come after indirect talks with Hamas on a ceasefire and hostage deal broke down and Palestinian armed groups released three videos of two Israeli hostages looking weak and emaciated.

The footage of Rom Blaslavski and Evyatar David, both kidnapped from the Nova festival on 7 October 2023, has shocked and appalled Israelis. David is shown digging what he says is his own grave in an underground tunnel.

There has been some speculation that the latest media announcements are a pressure tactic to try to force Hamas into a new deal.

Israel’s military says it already has operational control of 75% of Gaza. But under the proposed plan it would occupy the entire territory – moving into areas where more than two million Palestinians are now concentrated.

It is unclear what that would mean for civilians and for the operations of the UN and other aid groups. About 90% of Gaza’s 2.1m people have been displaced, some repeatedly, and are living in overcrowded and dire conditions. Humanitarian groups and UN officials say many are starving, accusing Israel of impeding the distribution of crucial aid.

The Israeli military has previously held back from some areas, including parts of central Gaza, because of an assumption that there are living hostages held there. Last year, six Israeli hostages were executed by their captors after ground forces moved in.

There has not been a formal response but officials from the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, denounced the Israeli proposal, calling on the international community to intervene to prevent any new military occupation.

Palestinians point out that far-right Israeli ministers have been openly advocating for the full occupation and annexation of Gaza and ultimately want to build new Jewish settlements there.

In 2005, Israel dismantled settlements in the Gaza Strip and withdrew its forces from there.

But alongside Egypt, it maintained a tight control of access to the territory.

The new occupation idea comes amid growing international moves to revive the two-state solution – the long-time international formula to resolve the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict. It envisages an independent Palestinian state being created alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Last week, the UK and Canada joined France in announcing conditional plans for recognising a Palestinian state.

The Israeli PM is now expected to meet with key ministers and military leaders to decide next steps in Gaza. Israeli army radio says they are due to discuss initial army plans to surround the central refugee camps and carry out air strikes and ground raids.

Netanyahu said he would convene a full security cabinet meeting this week.

Israeli media commentators have voiced scepticism and drawn attention to the practical military, political and diplomatic challenges. Writing in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Nahum Barnea says: “Netanyahu has never taken a gamble on this scale before.”

He notes that the Israeli PM has repeated his vow to achieve all of his war goals.

“But after 22 months of bloody fighting, it is hard to take those kinds of promises seriously. It seems that Netanyahu has just one objective in the war in Gaza, to prolong the war.”

Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza in response to Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken to Gaza as hostages.

At least 61,020 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since then, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

Dozens of people are feared trapped after a massive cloudburst triggered flash floods in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Rescue teams, including army personnel, have reached Dharali village in Uttarkashi district, which is believed to have borne the brunt of the floods.

Videos shared online show a giant wave of water gushing through the area, submerging buildings along the path. A tourist spot, Dharali is populated with hotels, resorts and restaurants.

A cloudburst is an extreme, sudden downpour of rain over a small area in a short period of time, often leading to flash floods.

It took place at around 13:30 India time [08:00 GMT] when a large amount of water came down, swelling the Kheerganga river and sending tonnes of muddy waters gushing downwards on the hilly terrain, covering roads, buildings and shops in Dharali.

Eyewitnesses from a nearby village who shot the dramatic footage of the muddy water coursing through the streets said the sudden surge did not give people any chance to run away.

They said they believe some people to be trapped under the debris.

The ancient Kalpkedar temple is also covered under the slush and is believe to have been damaged, they added.

“I have been informed about a cloudburst incident in Dharali of Uttarkashi. We are working to rescue the people,” Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami told local media.

Prashant Arya, the senior-most official of Uttarkashi, said communication had been erratic because of poor connectivity in the area.

“As it’s a populated area with lots of restaurants and hotels, we’ve dispatched rescue teams to the site,” he said.

Dharali is located 2km from Harsil which is a popular tourist destination and also has a huge Indian army base. A camp of the paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Force is located the area.

Reports say personnel from the army and Indo-Tibetan Border Police have reached the site of the disaster but rescue is expected to be slow because the area is continuing to receive heavy rains.

At 08:15 on August 6, 1945, as a nuclear bomb was falling like a stone through the skies over Hiroshima, Lee Jung-soon was on her way to elementary school.

The now-88-year-old waves her hands as if trying to push the memory away.

“My father was about to leave for work, but he suddenly came running back and told us to evacuate immediately,” she recalls. “They say the streets were filled with the dead – but I was so shocked all I remember is crying. I just cried and cried.”

Victims’ bodies “melted away so only their eyes were visible”, Ms Lee says, as a blast equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT enveloped a city of 420,000 people. What remained in the aftermath were corpses too mangled to be identified.

“The atomic bomb… it’s such a terrifying weapon.”

It’s been 80 years since the United States detonated ‘Little Boy’, humanity’s first-ever atomic bomb, over the centre of Hiroshima, instantly killing some 70,000 people. Tens of thousands more would die in the coming months from radiation sickness, burns and dehydration.

The devastation wrought by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which brought a decisive end to both World War Two and Japanese imperial rule across large swaths of Asia – has been well-documented over the past eight decades.

Less well-known is the fact that about 20% of the immediate victims were Koreans.

Korea had been a Japanese colony for 35 years when the bomb was dropped. An estimated 140,000 Koreans were living in Hiroshima at the time – many having moved there due to forced labour mobilisation, or to survive under colonial exploitation.

Those who survived the atom bomb, along with their descendants, continue to live in the long shadow of that day – wrestling with disfigurement, pain, and a decades-long fight for justice that remains unresolved.

“No-one takes responsibility,” says Shim Jin-tae, an 83-year-old survivor. “Not the country that dropped the bomb. Not the country that failed to protect us. America never apologised. Japan pretends not to know. Korea is no better. They just pass the blame – and we’re left alone.”

Mr Shim now lives in Hapcheon, South Korea: a small county which, having become the home of dozens of survivors like he and Ms Lee, has been dubbed “Korea’s Hiroshima”.

For Ms Lee, the shock of that day has not faded – it etched itself into her body as illness. She now lives with skin cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and angina, a condition stemming from poor blood flow to the heart, which typically manifests as chest pain.

But what weighs more heavily is that the pain didn’t stop with her. Her son Ho-chang, who supports her, was diagnosed with kidney failure and is undergoing dialysis while awaiting a transplant.

“I believe it’s due to radiation exposure, but who can prove it?” Ho-chang Lee says. “It’s hard to verify scientifically – you’d need genetic testing, which is exhausting and expensive.”

The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) told the BBC that it had gathered genetic data between 2020 and 2024 and would continue further studies until 2029. It would “consider expanding the definition of victims” to second- and- third-generation survivors only “if the results are statistically significant”, it said.

Of the 140,000 Koreans in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, many were from Hapcheon.

Surrounded by mountains with little farmland, it was a difficult place to live. Crops were seized by the Japanese occupiers, droughts ravaged the land, and thousands of people left the rural country for Japan during the war. Some were forcibly conscripted; others were lured by the promise that “you could eat three meals a day and send your kids to school.”

But in Japan, Koreans were second-class citizens – often given the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. Mr Shim says his father worked in a munitions factory as a forced labourer, while his mother hammered nails into wooden ammunition crates.

In the aftermath of the bomb, this distribution of labour translated into dangerous and often fatal work for Koreans in Hiroshima.

“Korean workers had to clean up the dead,” Mr Shim, who is the director of the Hapcheon branch of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, tells BBC Korean. “At first they used stretchers, but there were too many bodies. Eventually, they used dustpans to gather corpses and burned them in schoolyards.

“It was mostly Koreans who did this. Most of the post-war clean-up and munitions work was done by us.”

According to a study by the Gyeonggi Welfare Foundation, some survivors were forced to clear rubble and recover bodies. While Japanese evacuees fled to relatives, Koreans without local ties remained in the city, exposed to the radioactive fallout – and with limited access to medical care.

A combination of these conditions – poor treatment, hazardous work and structural discrimination – all contributed to a disproportionately high death toll among Koreans.

According to the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, the Korean fatality rate was 57.1%, compared to the overall rate of about 33.7%.

About 70,000 Koreans were exposed to the bomb. By year’s end, some 40,000 had died.

After the bombings, which led to Japan’s surrender and Korea’s subsequent liberation, about 23,000 Korean survivors returned home. But they were not welcomed. Branded as disfigured or cursed, they faced prejudice even in their homeland.

“Hapcheon already had a leper colony,” Mr Shim explains. “And because of that image, people thought the bomb survivors had skin diseases too.”

Such stigma made survivors stay silent about their plight, he adds, suggesting that “survival came before pride”.

Ms Lee says she saw this “with her own eyes”.

“People who were badly burned or extremely poor were treated terribly,” she recalls. “In our village, some people had their backs and faces so badly scarred that only their eyes were visible. They were rejected from marriage and shunned.”

With stigma came poverty, and hardship. Then came illnesses with no clear cause: skin diseases, heart conditions, kidney failure, cancer. The symptoms were everywhere – but no-one could explain them.

Over time, the focus shifted to the second and third generations.

Han Jeong-sun, a second-generation survivor, suffers from avascular necrosis in her hips, and can’t walk without dragging herself. Her first son was born with cerebral palsy.

“My son has never walked a single step in his life,” she says. “And my in-laws treated me horribly. They said, ‘You gave birth to a crippled child and you’re crippled too—are you here to ruin our family?’

“That time was absolute hell.”

For decades, not even the Korean government took active interest in its own victims, as a war with the North and economic struggles were treated as higher priorities.

It wasn’t until 2019 – more than 70 years after the bombing – that MOHW released its first fact-finding report. That survey was mostly based on questionnaires.

In response to BBC inquiries, the ministry explained that prior to 2019, “There was no legal basis for funding or official investigations”.

But two separate studies had found that second-generation victims were more vulnerable to illness. One, from 2005, showed that second-generation victims were far more likely than the general population to suffer depression, heart disease and anaemia, while another from 2013 found their disability registration rate was nearly double the national average.

Against this backdrop, Ms Han is incredulous that authorities keep asking for proof to recognise her and her son as victims of Hiroshima.

“My illness is the proof. My son’s disability is the proof. This pain passes down generations, and it’s visible,” she says. “But they won’t recognise it. So what are we supposed to do – just die without ever being acknowledged?”

It was only last month, on 12 July, that Hiroshima officials visited Hapcheon for the first time to lay flowers at a memorial. While former PM Yukio Hatoyama and other private figures had come before, this was the first official visit by current Japanese officials.

“Now in 2025 Japan talks about peace. But peace without apology is meaningless,” says Junko Ichiba, a long-time Japanese peace activist who has spent most of her life advocating for Korean Hiroshima victims.

She points out that the visiting officials gave no mention or apology for how Japan treated Korean people before and during World War Two.

Although multiple former Japanese leaders have offered their apologies and remorse, many South Koreans regard these sentiments as insincere or insufficient without formal acknowledgement.

Ms Ichiba notes that Japanese textbooks still omit the history of Korea’s colonial past – as well as its atomic bomb victims – saying that “this invisibility only deepens the injustice”.

This adds to what many view as a broader lack of accountability for Japan’s colonial legacy.

Heo Jeong-gu, director of the Red Cross’s support division, said, “These issues… must be addressed while survivors are still alive. For the second and third generations, we must gather evidence and testimonies before it’s too late.”

For survivors like Mr Shim it’s not just about being compensated – it’s about being acknowledged.

“Memory matters more than compensation,” he says. “Our bodies remember what we went through… If we forget, it’ll happen again. And someday, there’ll be no one left to tell the story.”

A school bullying incident in southern China has sparked a series of protests and calls for more justice for the 14-year-old victim.

A video of the girl being slapped, kicked and forced to kneel by three other minors went viral in the Jiangyou city in Sichuan province last week.

The police said the three suspects are all female, aged 13, 14 and 15 – and two of them had been sent to “specialised schools for corrective education”.

As news of the incident spread on social media, many felt the punishment was too light – especially after claims that the girl had been bullied for some time and that her mother, who is reportedly deaf, had pleaded with the authorities for more justice for her daughter.

In a series of videos, shot by the perpetrators, the victim can be heard saying she would call the police after being repeatedly hit with a stick. Then one of the girls attacking her said they were not afraid. Another said she had been to the police station more than 10 times, and claimed she was set free in less than 20 minutes.

These comments have resonated with those who fear not enough is being done to punish bullying in China.

The incident has prompted a wave of public anger online and protests erupted outside the local government offices in Jiangyou.

More than 1,000 people gathered in the street on 4 August and stayed until past midnight, according to local shop owners.

One of them told the BBC that “things got bloody” after police used batons and electric prods to control the crowd.

Several videos posted online appear to verify his account. Officers can be seen dragging protesters along the street and hitting them with batons. A witness also said he saw a few water bottles being thrown at the police.

“People just wanted justice,” he said. “People were upset about the [lack of] punishment.”

The witnesses who spoke to the BBC were unwilling to give their names as the police have reportedly urged local people not to talk about the incident.

In a call to the local Public Security Bureau, the BBC was told that there were “limitations on foreign press asking questions”.

Protests in China are not uncommon, but they are quickly shut down and censored on state-run media and the internet.

The demonstrations in Jiangyou have forced the police to issue a second statement to clarify rumours that the assailants were the daughters of a lawyer and a police inspector. These claims are false, police said.

“Two of the parents are unemployed, two are working outside the province, one is a local salesperson, and one is a local delivery driver,” the statement said.

The police have punished two people for spreading fake information online saying their posts have “seriously disrupted public order and caused bad social impact”.

A lawyer based in Shanghai said in an online post that this incident has highlighted an ongoing legal dilemma for Chinese officials.

“The penalty for causing minor injuries is too mild, while the physical and mental trauma suffered by victims is overlooked by the law, which leads to a significant imbalance in the protection of their rights,” he wrote on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.

His credentials have been verified by the BBC, but he is unwilling to be named.

Bullying has become a highly sensitive topic in China in recent years, and student deaths over alleged bullying have triggered protests in the past.

In January this year, the death of a teenage boy sparked violent protests in a city in north-west China. Objects were hurled at police during demonstrations in Pucheng in Shaanxi province. Authorities said the teenager fell to his death in an accident at his school dormitory, but there were allegations on social media of a cover-up.

Last year a Chinese court handed down lengthy sentences to two teenagers who murdered a classmate in Hebei province with a shovel. The 13-year-olds buried the victim in an abandoned vegetable greenhouse.

The victim was bullied by his classmates, his family and lawyer had alleged, while the court said that he had “experienced conflict” with the convicted teens.

Texas Republicans have voted to track down and arrest dozens of Democratic legislators who have fled the state to block passage of a plan to re-draw electoral boundaries to favour Republicans.

After the vote, Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered state troopers “to locate, arrest, and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.

Abbott has also threatened to charge the absent Democrats with bribery if they raised public money to cover the daily fine they incur for boycotting the chamber.

The redrawn Congressional map would create five more Republican-leaning seats in the US House of Representatives in Washington DC, where Republicans hold a slim majority.

At least two-thirds of the 150-member state legislative body in Texas must be present to proceed with the vote. The quorum became unreachable after more than 50 Democratic lawmakers left the state.

Most of the Democrats fled to Illinois where the state’s Governor JB Pritzker said he was “going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them” amid arrest threats from Abbott.

The Democrats said they planned to stay away from Texas for two weeks until the end of a special legislative session.

Monday’s vote was mostly symbolic as the warrants only apply within Texas state lines.

The move empowers the chamber’s sergeant-at-arms and state troopers to arrest the absent lawmakers and deliver them to the state Capitol building in Austin.

They would not face any civil or criminal charges as a result of the warrant.

Texas Democratic legislator Ron Reynolds told BBC News from Chicago on Monday that the arrest threat was “nothing more than a scare tactic”.

Members of the Texas House incur a $500 (£377) for each day they fail to show up.

Governor Abbott has warned that those who refused to return to vote could face charges.

“It would be bribery if any lawmaker took money to perform or to refuse to perform an act in the legislature,” Abbott told Fox News on Monday.

“And the reports are these legislators have both sought money and offered money to skip the vote, to leave the legislature, to take a legislative act. That would be bribery.”

After legislators voted to issue warrants against the Democrats, Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety “to locate, arrest, and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.

He added that his order would remain in effect “until all missing Democrat House members are accounted for and brought to the Texas Capitol”.

Texas Republican legislator Brian Harrison slammed Democrats for their argument that the constituencies were being redrawn along racial lines.

“Preposterous, cynical, dishonest, complete nonsense,” Harrison told BBC News.

He added “these Democrats need to be arrested” and that they “need to have all kinds of other punishments”.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, also threatened to have the absent Democrats arrested.

Paxton, who is running for the US Senate, wrote on X that the state should “use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law”.

Texas Republicans currently hold 25 out of the state’s 38 congressional seats.

They hope the new maps could increase that number to 30 – all in constituencies that President Donald Trump won last November by at least 10 points.

Ahead of next year’s midterm elections, the Texas redistricting could help pad the slender Republican majority in the US House of Representatives – the lower chamber of Congress.

In states where they handle the redistricting process, such as Illinois, New Mexico and Nevada, Democrats have already manipulated electoral boundaries for partisan gain just as Republicans have, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

But other Democratic-controlled states – such as New York, California, Colorado and Washington – assign redistricting to non-partisan, independent commissions, rather than state legislatures.

Some Democratic leaders in other states have suggested they may redraw their own legislative maps to counter the proposed losses of seats in Texas.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she was exploring a constitutional amendment to move up the timeline to redraw legislative lines in her state.

States typically undergo redistricting every 10 years, when voting maps are redrawn to account for population changes.

The most recent US Census was in 2020. Redrawing district lines in the middle of a decade is unusual.

Has the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin gone off the rails? A popular Russian newspaper thinks so. It turned to trains to illustrate the current state of US-Russian ties.

“A head-on collision seems unavoidable,” declared tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets recently.

“The Trump locomotive and the Putin locomotive are speeding towards each other.

“And neither is about to turn off or stop and reverse.”

For the ‘Putin locomotive’, it’s full steam ahead, with the so-called ‘Special Military Operation’: Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Kremlin leader has shown no desire to end hostilities and declare a long-term ceasefire.

Meanwhile, the ‘Trump locomotive’ has been accelerating efforts to pressure Moscow into ending the fighting: announcing deadlines, ultimatums, threats of additional sanctions against Russia and hefty tariffs on Russia’s trading partners, like India and China.

Add to all of that the two US nuclear submarines which President Trump claims he’s repositioned closer to Russia.

When you switch from talking about locomotives to nuclear subs, you know things are serious.

But does that mean the White House is really on a “collision course” with the Kremlin over Ukraine?

Or is a visit to Moscow this week by Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, a sign that for all the posturing, a deal between Russia and America to end the fighting is still possible?

In the early weeks of the second Trump presidency, Moscow and Washington appeared well on track to reboot their bilateral relations.

No hint of a head-on collision. Far from it. At times it seemed as if Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were in the same carriage, moving in the same direction. In February the United States sided with Russia at the United Nations, opposing a European-drafted resolution that had condemned Russia’s “aggression” in Ukraine.

In a telephone call that month the two presidents talked about visiting each other’s countries. It felt like a Putin-Trump summit could happen any day.

Meanwhile the Trump administration was exerting pressure on Kyiv, not on Moscow, and picking fights with traditional US allies, such as Canada and Denmark. In speeches and TV interviews, American officials were fiercely critical of Nato and of European leaders.

All of this was music to the Kremlin’s ears.

“America now has more in common with Russia than Washington does with Brussels or with Kyiv,” political scientist Konstantin Blokhin from the Russian Academy of Sciences Centre for Security Studies told the Izvestia newspaper in March.

The following month the same newspaper was crowing:

“The Trumpists are revolutionaries. They are wreckers of the system. They can only be supported in this. The unity of the West is no more. Geo-politically it is no longer an alliance. Trumpism has destroyed the Transatlantic consensus confidently and quickly.”

Meanwhile Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, had become a regular visitor to Russia. He made four trips here in just over two months, spending hours in talks with Vladimir Putin. After one meeting, the Kremlin leader presented him with a portrait of Donald Trump to take back to the White House.

President Trump was said to be “clearly touched” by the gesture.

But President Trump was looking for more than just a painting from Moscow. He wanted President Putin to sign up to an unconditional comprehensive ceasefire in Ukraine.

Confident that Russia holds the initiative now on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin has been reluctant to stop fighting, despite his claim that Moscow is committed to a diplomatic solution.

Which is why Donald Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the Kremlin.

In recent weeks he has condemned Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukrainian cities as “disgusting”, “disgraceful” and accused President Putin of talking “a lot of bullshit” on Ukraine.

Last month, Donald Trump announced a 50-day ultimatum to President Putin to end the war, threatening sanctions and tariffs. He subsequently reduced that to ten days. The deadline is due to expire at the end of this week. So far, there is no sign that Vladimir Putin will yield to pressure from Washington.

Then again, how much pressure does Vladimir Putin really feel under?

“Because Donald Trump has changed so many deadlines and he’s twisted one way or another, I don’t think Putin takes him seriously,” believes Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at The New School, a university in New York City.

“Putin’s going to fight for as long as he can, or, unless Ukraine says, ‘We’re tired, we are willing to accept your conditions.’

“I think Putin sits there in the Kremlin and thinks that he’s fulfilling the dreams of the Russian tsars, and then the general secretaries such as Joseph Stalin, in showing the West that Russia should not be treated with disrespect.”

From the picture I’ve painted so far it may look as if a head-on collision between the Putin and Trump locomotives is inevitable.

Not necessarily.

Donald Trump sees himself as a great dealmaker and, from the look of things, he hasn’t given up trying to secure one with Vladimir Putin.

Steve Witkoff is due back in Russia this week for talks with the Kremlin leader. We don’t know what kind of an offer he may bring with him. But some commentators in Moscow predict there will be more carrot than stick. It did not go unnoticed that on Sunday President Trump said Russia “seem to be pretty good at avoiding sanctions”.

On Monday, Ivan Loshkarev, associate professor of political theory at MGIMO University, Moscow, told Izvestia that to facilitate dialogue, Mr Witkoff may present “advantageous offers of cooperation [to Russia] that would open up after a deal on Ukraine”.

Might that be enough to persuade the Kremlin to make peace after three-and-a-half years of war?

There’s no guarantee.

After all, so far in Ukraine Vladimir Putin hasn’t budged from his maximalist demands on territory, Ukraine’s neutrality and the future size of the Ukrainian army.

Donald Trump wants a deal. Vladimir Putin wants victory.