World Briefing: February 15, 2025
Saudi Arabia has confirmed its “readiness” to host the first summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the second administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Commenting on the Russia Ukraine war, the official Saudi Gazette (see below) said the kingdom has hosted “multiple meetings aimed at fostering dialogue and easing tensions.” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday at the Munich Security Conference that he’s about to embark on a whistle stop tour of the Middle East and Turkey, with stops in the UAE, Saudi Arabia. He said that the UAE stop would include negotiations over a prisoner swap but at that no point he’d meet with the Russian side
Ukraine would have a “very, very difficult” time surviving without U.S. military support to fend off Russia’s invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview broadcast the night before he is scheduled to address the Munich Security Conference. "Probably it will be very, very, very difficult. And of course, you know in all the difficult situations, you have a chance,” he told NBC News. “But we will have low chance -- low chance to survive without support of the United States." Zelensky also said Ukraine has increased its war production but not enough to make up for what it would lose if it did not have U.S. backing - RFE/RL
Hamas released three Israeli hostages on Saturday in the sixth swap underpinning a fragile truce that came close to collapse this week. In exchange, Israel is expected to free 369 Palestinian detainees. The three hostages are Israeli-American Sagui Dekel-Chen, Israeli-Russian Alexander Troufanov and Israeli-Argentinian Iair Horn, who have been held by Gaza militants since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the devastating war. They were released in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where they were handed over to Red Cross officials amid a strong presence of fighters from Hamas's armed wing, Al Qassam Brigades. Hamas agreed last month to hand over 33 Israeli hostages, including women, children and older men, in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, in the course of a six-week truce during which Israeli forces would pull back from some of their positions in Gaza. - The National
Sudan has agreed to allow Russia to establish a naval base on its Red Sea coast, Sudan’s Foreign Minister Ali Youssef said on Wednesday. The deal would give Moscow sway over one of global commerce’s most valuable trade routes. While the agreement was discussed under former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the new military government had put the matter under review. However, having met with the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Youssef said that the deal had been signed. “The matter is very simple… We have agreed on everything,” The BBC reported him saying. The planned base — Russia’s first in Africa — could provide Moscow with an alternative to its naval base in Syria’s Tartus, after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s Moscow-backed regime weakened its presence in the Mediterranean. The base comes amid intensifying competition for influence around the Horn of Africa: The US and China have bases in Djibouti, while the US recently stepped up its bid for a military base in Somaliland. However, Russia’s plans could be hampered by the ongoing civil war in Sudan, where the rebel Rapid Support Forces still control swaths of the country - Semafor
US Vice President JD Vance vented at European leaders Friday, telling them that the biggest threat to their security was “from within,” rather than China and Russia. Vance used his first major speech as vice president to lambast European politicians, claiming they are suppressing free speech, losing control of immigration and refusing to work with hard-right parties in government. The audience at the Munich Security Conference was expecting to hear about the Trump administration’s plans to end the war in Ukraine, but instead were treated to a bombastic rejection of liberal orthodoxies that have prevailed in Western Europe since the Second World War, in a speech that downplayed the threats to the continent posed by Russia and China - CNN
JD Vance met AfD party leader Alice Weidel during a visit to Munich on Friday, nine days before Germany's election - but pointedly failed to meet with Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz. News of the meeting came after top German officials pushed back hard against Vance's complaints about the state of democracy in Europe, with the defence minister calling it “unacceptable” to draw a parallel with authoritarian governments - Euronews
OpenAI’s board rejected an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid from an Elon Musk-led consortium to buy the company. In a letter to Musk’s attorney Friday, the ChatGPT maker said that the offer was “not in the best interests” of the company, The Wall Street Journal reported. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly dismissed Musk’s bid earlier this week. Musk, who helped to co-found OpenAI with Altman in 2015, has argued that Altman’s efforts to restructure the company into a for-profit enterprise betray its founding mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. (Musk’s own AI company xAI is run for profit.) - Semafor
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said Friday that “the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latestattempt to disrupt his competition.”
Pope Francis, who was taken to hospital on Friday for treatment of bronchitis, is suffering from a respiratory infection but is in a stable condition, the Vatican said. "The Holy Father ... has undergone specialist examinations and has started hospital drug therapy," said a statement, issued about eight hours after the pope was taken to Rome's Gemelli hospital. “The initial tests showed a respiratory tract infection," it said. "His clinical condition is fair; he has a slight fever." - Reuters
Around 1,000 U.S. federal workers were told they were losing their jobs at the Energy Department, and the Internal Revenue Service is preparing to lay off thousands of employees beginning as soon as next week as the Trump administration escalates its effort to slash the size of the federal work force. The job cuts followed an advisory from the government’s human resources division telling agencies to terminate most of an estimated 200,000 new workers still on probation - NYT
The White House on Friday said it will bar the Associated Press from future events in the Oval Office and Air Force One, over the AP's refusal to obey President Trump's executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. White House deputy chief of staff and cabinet secretary Taylor Budowich posted a statement on X confirming the White House's decision. "The Associated Press continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America. This decision is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press' commitment to misinformation," he wrote. "While their right to irresponsible and dishonest reporting is protected by the First Amendment, it does not ensure their privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One," he added. "In the future, that space will now be opened up to the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.” An AP reporter who was scheduled to travel with the president on Air Force One today, was reportedly told she would not do so, per a White House decision. The AP executive editor Julie Pace has been putting out a statement each day the outlet has been barred from the Oval Office this week. On Thursday she said, "The decision by the White House to block an AP reporter from an open press conference with President Trump and Prime Minister Modi is a deeply troubling escalation of the administration's continued efforts to punish The Associated Press for its editorial decisions. It is a plain violation of the First Amendment, and we urge the Trump administration in the strongest terms to stop this practice. This is now the third day AP reporters have been barred from covering the president — first as a member of the pool, and now from a formal press conference — an incredible disservice to the billions of people who rely on The Associated Press for nonpartisan news." AP said it would continue to refer to the region by the original name it's had for over 400 years "while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen." - Axios
Iran faces unplanned blackouts and forced closures: Government offices, banks, and schools have been closed as the authorities struggle to meet the rising demand for electricity. Unplanned blackouts have disrupted everyday life across more than half of the country - RFE/RL
The Colombian diplomatic mission in Washington offered a gesture of friendship to the United States Congress on Friday, Valentine’s Day. It sent flowers to the offices of American legislators as a reminder of the friendship and the importance of the sector for trade between the two countries. Bogota recently found itself in the cross hairs of the Donald Trump White House when it refused to accept plane loads of alleged illegal migrants from Colombia.
As Donald Trump takes office for the second time, he's pursuing an even more ambitious slate of emergency maneuvers, with potentially wide-ranging implications for people, businesses, the environment and the economy — and very few checks and balances. These include not only the energy emergency, but a cartel emergency and another emergency on the southern border that underpin his efforts to place tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada and to push again for the construction of a border wall. Elizabeth Goitein directs the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program — her team is the one that tallied up the 150 emergency powers. She says not every serious problem is an "emergency." The word typically means something unexpected and requiring immediate action. But the National Emergencies Act is missing something important. “There's no definition of national emergency in the law," she says. And as a result, "courts have been very reluctant, in the absence of any definition of national emergency, to question a president's determination that an emergency exists." - NPR
