A draft deal between the United States and Ukraine over rare earth minerals and other natural resources is “not the one President Zelensky would accept,” according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

The US is trying to gain access to Ukraine’s critical minerals and other resources as part of wider negotiations aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. In return, Ukraine has been pushing for security guarantees, with Kyiv not only keen to see the return of lost territory but protection against a possible future Russian invasion.

Ukraine was not invited to talks between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia and this week Zelensky and US President Donald Trump have been locked in an escalating war of words.

Trump falsely accused Zelensky of starting the Ukraine war while the Ukrainian leader hit back, saying the US president live in a “disinformation space.”

Ukrainians are still trying to negotiate amendments because the current draft “does not foresee any American obligations while Ukraine is expected to provide everything,” the source said.

The source spoke after an official in the Ukrainian Presidential Administration told Ukrainian state broadcaster Suspline that there would be no signing of the agreement on rare earth metals Saturday.

Work had continued on the document “all night” but was held up by the issue of “security guarantees,” Suspline reported.

The continued Ukrainian resistance to signing the deal in its current form comes after days of intense pressure from the Trump administration, whose National Security Advisor Mike Waltz even highlighted the case of an aluminium mine that could meet all the US’s annual needs if refurbished with American investment.

Also on Saturday Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, posted that he had spoken with US Sectetary of State Marco Rubio “to continue the results-oriented Ukraine-US dialogue.

“Ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale aggression, I underscored Ukraine’s strong will to achieve a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace—one that will strengthen Ukraine and the US.”

The US official said Kellogg’s visit had led to “very good meetings sealing this for the President of the United States.”

Frontline footage posted by Ukrainian drone operators and Russian troops show men who have clearly suffered leg injuries, some still bandaged, using crutches in combat areas, in several instances targeted by Ukrainian drones as they use the walking aids to try to flee.

“The Russians are recycling the wounded back into the fight,” one Western official said, referring to videos of “troops on crutches being pushed back into the line.”

One drone video from January, posted by the Ukraine’s 59th brigade active around the embattled strategic city of Pokrovsk, shows a Russian soldier using a crutch under each arm to try and reach cover. He is moving slowly, despite likely being able to hear the Ukrainian drone above him and realising he is at risk.

The drone then drops a mortar round on him.

“What the hell are you doing with me, why? I had surgery yesterday, damn it!”, he says. Turning to the camera, he adds: “I… am addressing all residents of Russia and I want to show everyone what is happening to one of our worthy soldiers in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

Inside the vehicle he shows his badly wounded leg, where a large injury has recently been operated on, he says. He also holds up his wounded hand. “I don’t have a finger; they also sewed it up yesterday. I can only move using crutches.”

He says he has a painful 8-hour drive on bad roads ahead of him to return to the frontline city of Luhansk, and turns the camera to other passengers, who also show their wounds. “There’s a tube in my stomach,” the other man says. It is unclear when the video was filmed.

Another video posted by Russian military bloggers apparently last month shows a Russian unit, apparently from the 20th Army, in a forest, wearing body armour and fatigues. The man filming says: “This is how we’re going on a combat mission. This is so f**king completely f**ked up!”

The cameraman adds: “Now they’ll also give them machine guns and body armour and send them off! How is this even f**king happening?”

One soldier says: “I fought five times, two severe injuries and a severe brain injury.” He says the hospital declared him fit for unarmed service only. “Now they hang the guns on me and take me to the front line without any problems. The 20th Army is f**king awesome like this,” he says, putting up his thumbs.

Another soldier says, watching wounded colleagues shuffle by: “They are taking the boys with crutches to receive the weapons, f**king hell!” The unit is apparently headed to Makiivka, for future deployment to combat, the soldiers say.

A Ukrainian defense intelligence official said they had noticed the trend in wounded Russian soldiers appearing in “active combat areas” over the last six months. He attributed the use of the wounded as a bid by commanders to hide losses and their inability to get troops in and out of combat areas when needed.

“I’ve been in the hospital for a month,” he said, “and they don’t extract the shrapnel for anyone. They just put on some ointment and that’s it. When the wound heals slightly, they discharge you.”

He said he recuperated near Moscow in a unit of amputees, or those immobile or on crutches, who were entitled to a month vacation when healthy again.

“But they are not allowed to leave the unit,” he said. “This is what they call ‘a recovering regiment’. They spend a month there and they are throwing them back to war.”

He described the policy as a “one way ticket,” perhaps designed to reduce compensation payouts for families. “They pay 3 million rubles for some injury. They’re sending cripples back to the front… to avoid paying money. If the person is missing, the family doesn’t get paid money. For the proof, a body is needed, and if there’s no body, that’s it, sorry, goodbye.”

Among the documents, a medical report detailing significant head and body injuries on one Russian who had been sent back to fight.

President Donald Trump spent the first month of his second term on an extraordinary mission — dismantling the global system the United States spent the past 80 years building.

It was always theoretically possible that the West could lose its resonance as World War II and the Cold War became increasingly distant memories. But no one expected to see a US president wielding the ax.

When Trump won last year’s election, there was a sense among some western diplomats in Washington that their governments knew how to handle a president who in his first term often made foreign policy by tweet. But the shock that drove European leaders to an emergency meeting in Paris this week suggests they underestimated just how destructive Trump’s second term would be.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth meanwhile told Europeans that they now need to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent” casting immediate doubt on security alliance NATO’s foundational creed of mutual self-defense.

America’s repudiation of its traditional foreign policy is being driven by both Trump’s particular obsessions and wider geopolitical changes. The United States remains the world’s strongest power — but it no longer has the might that can force others — like China — to live by its rules. Indeed, it now has a president who has no intention of observing any economic, trade, and diplomatic rules at all and is threatening to annex Canada.

Not only that, but the new administration is actively seeking to destabilize friendly democracies and fuel a global movement of rightwing populism. Vance’s speech warned that European governments threatened their own security more than China or Russia because of their policies on free speech and immigration. He also met the leader of the AfD, a far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi roots and sought to boost far-right parties elsewhere who are challenging governments in France and Britain for example. Trump would rather deal with fellow travelers in a Make Europe Great Again (MEGA) movement than centrist leaders now in office.

So, what can Europe do now that America — the country that rebuilt the continent from the ashes of World War II — seems to be becoming an openly hostile power?

French President Emmanuel Macron, acting on the experience of his dealings with Trump during their first terms, has been warning for years that Europe needed to realize that America had become an unreliable partner. With doubts about the US military commitment to its allies, other members of NATO now have no choice but to hike shriveled military spending.

This will be painful since many of Europe’s governments are already struggling to balance the books and are under extreme pressure to maintain their popular welfare states. And getting all members of the European Union to agree on a more independent path will be treacherous. Some nations in Moscow’s old neighborhood – like Poland and the Baltic states – understand the Russian threat all too well, but some smaller, Western European countries perceive the danger to be more distant. And the EU now includes some leaders who’d love to help Trump do Putin’s work for him in dividing the western alliance — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for instance.

In only 31 days in office, Trump has already changed the world.

What to watch for next week

Barring a big surprise, the big international story will be Ukraine.

We may learn more about the prospects of a peace deal to end the war and how it would be implemented when Macron visits the White House on Monday and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer follows him on Thursday.

The visits will be critical to showing whether there is any scope for US-European cooperation on the war — after the continent was shut out of US talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia this week. Both Britain and France say they’re ready to send troops to Ukraine to monitor any eventual peace — but it’s hard to fathom that such an operation could take place without US air, intelligence, and logistical support. Is Trump prepared to do this and risk angering Moscow, which has already ruled out the idea of foreign troops in Ukraine?

Look out also next week to see if either leader shows up in the Oval Office with an offer to raise their own defense spending — to impress their host.

Macron plans to use his visit to try to insert some steel in Trump’s spine following his latest round of genuflecting to Putin and will appeal to the US President’s highly advanced sense of his own power. “I’m going to say to Trump, ‘Deep down you can’t be weak in the face of Putin, it’s not you, it’s not your trademark’,” Macron said Thursday.

The UK isn’t in the European Union anymore, but it’s been in lockstep with Macron and other leaders from the bloc this week. Starmer is seeking to restore the UK’s former role its traditional role as a bridge between its great friend the United States and Europe.

There’s just one problem. Trump doesn’t cross bridges. He burns them.

Pope Francis, who has been hospitalized for more than a week, remains in “critical” condition and developed an “asthmatic respiratory crisis” earlier on Saturday, the Vatican said in a statement.

“This morning Pope Francis presented with an asthmatic respiratory crisis of prolonged magnitude, which also required the application of oxygen at high flows,” the Vatican wrote about the ailing pontiff who is being treated for pneumonia.

While Francis “continues to be alert and spent the day in an armchair” he is “in more pain than yesterday,” it added.

He also received blood transfusions today to treat anemia, according to the statement.

Earlier on Saturday, the Vatican said he would remain in hospitalized following his pneumonia diagnosis and will not deliver the weekly Angelus prayer – for only the third time in his almost 12-year-long papacy.

The pope’s condition had seemed more promising earlier in the week, with the Vatican describing him as responding “positively” to medical treatment for pneumonia on Thursday.

“Is the pope out of danger? No. Both doors are open. Is he at risk of immediate death? No. The therapy needs time to work,” said Sergio Alfieri, a surgeon who has previously operated on the pope, to reporters on Friday.

The pontiff was admitted to clinic in the Italian capital on February 14, and initially underwent tests for a respiratory tract infection. He was subsequently diagnosed with pneumonia in both lungs after a later CT scan.

Francis, who is from Argentina, has a vulnerability to respiratory infections. As a young man, he suffered a severe bout of pneumonia that led to the removal of part of one lung.

In 2021, doctors also surgically removed part of his colon in relation to diverticulitis, which can cause inflammation or infection of the colon. He was hospitalized with bronchitis in 2023, and in recent months has had two falls where he bruised his chin and hurt his arm which was put into a sling.

‘An extraordinary man’

This is the third-longest time Francis has spent in hospital since his election as pope.

His doctors have advised “complete rest” for the pope. Even so, he has continued to do some work, including on the first two days of hospitalization holding his daily phone call to Rev. Gabriel Romanelli and his assistant, Father Yusuf Asad, in Gaza City, northern Gaza. They have been in frequent contact since Israel launched its bombing campaign and siege on the enclave, following the October 7 Hamas-led attacks.

“We joked as always. He hasn’t lost his proverbial sense of humor,” the prime minister said in a statement.

Outside the capital, worshipers have gathered in candle-lit churches – from Argentina to the Vatican – to pray for Francis’ steady recovery.

“We always put him in our intentions,” Rodomina Valdez, a 45-year-old Argentinian in the Metropolitan Cathedral, in the capital Buenos Aires, told Reuters on Wednesday. “But what we can do is put him in our prayers and offer fasting or in any case, some penance.”

Just outside St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, a German tourist, Klaus, said he hoped the pope “will have many strong years left in him.” And back at the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic, in Rome, letters and drawings made by children in the oncology department showed colorful illustrations and messages wishing him well.

“I hope he gets well soon and that he can get back to his role,” Gaetano Bavagnini, a Rome resident, said. “He is an extraordinary man and an extraordinary pope.”

One person has died and several are wounded following a knife attack at a town market in eastern France, in what French authorities have described as an act of terror.

“Horror has just gripped our city. A man attacked passers-by at the covered canal market with a knife, several municipal police officers who intervened to neutralize him were also injured,” Mulhouse town mayor Michèle Lutz said in a statement Saturday on Facebook.

The suspect has been arrested and is currently in police custody, according to a press release by the office of France’s national anti-terror prosecutor.

The attacker had targeted several municipal police officers, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” as well as a passerby, the prosecutor’s office said. A civilian has died, and three officers are injured.

French President Emmanuel Macron expressed condolences to the victim’s family, adding that France’s national anti-terror prosecutor is looking into the case.

Macron also described the attack as “no doubt, an Islamic terrorist act, given the terrorist’s words.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

A rocket-propelled grenade believed to be more than 25 years old killed two cousins, a girl and a boy both 2 years old, when it blew up Saturday near their homes in rural northwestern Cambodia, officials said.

The accident happened in Siem Reap province’s Svay Leu district, where there had been heavy fighting in the 1980s and 1990s between Cambodian government soldiers and rebel guerrillas from the communist Khmer Rouge. The group had been ousted from power in 1979.

Muo Lisa and her male cousin, Thum Yen, lived in neighboring homes in the remote village of Kranhuong. Their parents were doing farm work when the two toddlers apparently came across the unexploded ordnance and it detonated. Experts from the Cambodian Mine Action Center determined afterwards from fragments that it was a rocket-propelled grenade.

Old unexploded munitions are especially dangerous because their explosive contents become volatile as they deteriorate.

“Their parents went to settle on land that was a former battlefield, and they were not aware that there were any land mines or unexploded ordnance buried near their homes,” CMAC Director-General Heng Ratana said. “It’s a pity because they were too young and they should not have died like this.”

Some 4 million-6 million land mines and other unexploded munitions are estimated to have littered Cambodia’s countryside during decades of conflict that began in 1970 and ended in 1998.

Since the end of the fighting in Cambodia, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and about 45,000 injured by leftover war explosives. The number of casualties has declined over time; last year there were 49 deaths.

“The war is completely over and there is fully peace for more than 25 years, but the blood of the Khmer (Cambodian) people continues to flow because of the remnants of land mines and ammunition,” Heng Ratana said on his Facebook page.

Cambodian deminers are among the world’s most experienced, and several thousand have been sent in the past decade under U.N. auspices to work in Africa and the Middle East.

Cambodia’s demining efforts drew attention earlier this month, when U.S. financial assistance for it in eight provinces was suspended due to President Donald Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Heng Ratana said Thursday he had been informed that Washington had issued a waiver allowing the aid — $6.36 million covering March 2022 to November 2025 — to resume flowing.

Editor’s Note: This article contains details that readers may find distressing.

Five years ago, a 13-year-old girl, the daughter of poor wage laborers from one of India’s most marginalized communities, was allegedly sexually abused by one of her neighbors in the village where she lived.

Her alleged abuser filmed it and police are investigating whether he used the images to blackmail and manipulate the girl into being raped and sexually abused by dozens of other men and boys over the next five years.

Police say the allegations only came to light after the girl, now 18, spoke to a counselor visiting her college in Kerala state and detailed the years of horrific abuse.

Charges have not yet been filed and the 58 men remain in detention. None of the accused has spoken publicly about the allegations. Under Indian rape laws, the girl has not been identified.

Violence against women is rampant in India due to entrenched sexism and patriarchy, despite laws being amended to include more severe punishments for abusers.

In August the rape and murder of a trainee medic in the eastern city of Kolkata sparked a nationwide doctors’ strike that brought tens of thousands into the streets to demand change.

The Kerala case has not sparked similar outrage.

Experts and activists say that’s because the victim is from the Dalit community at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, a 3,000-year-old social and religious hierarchy that categorizes people at birth and defines their place in society.

Dalits traditionally carry out occupations viewed as ritually “unclean” by Hindu scripture, such as manual scavenging, waste picking and street sweeping.

They are often banned from visiting temples and forced to live apart from higher-caste communities, often in squalor and farther from access to services.

Despite legislation banning discrimination based on caste, activists say the stigma leaves India’s more than 260 million Dalits vulnerable to abuse and less able to seek redress for crimes committed against them.

“When it’s Dalit women, in general the outrage is less across the country,” said Cynthia Stephen, a Dalit rights activist and social policy researcher.

There is a sense that “this girl is not ‘one of us,’” she said.

Manipulated, kidnapped and abused

At least three of her abusers promised to marry her, according to police. One threatened to kill her if she reported the abuse.

Some of the men acted alone, police said. But others are accused of gang rape. “It’s not that all the cases are connected. But in one case, there might be four or five accused,” said Begum, from Kerala Police.

Many of the men contacted the young girl on her father’s phone, through social media apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp, late at night after he went to sleep, police said.

The alleged abuse took place in private and public spaces, in homes and in cars, at bus stops and in fields. Some of the cases allegedly involved men who were strangers, living in towns dozens of miles away.

Some of the cases involve allegations of human trafficking, because the men forced the girl to travel outside her village, police said.

The allegations have sent shock waves through the girl’s village in the green hills of Kerala, where many work as wage laborers in low-paid jobs like construction and farming.

Police say the girl’s parents worked long hours and did not know about the alleged abuse of their daughter.

When the allegations emerged in January, some women in the community were sympathetic toward the accused and angry at the survivor, according to local media outlet The News Minute.

The women criticized the girl’s clothing and lifestyle and blamed her mother for not watching over her more closely, The News Minute reported.

One mother, whose son was among the accused, said he was innocent. She said he had known the girl since she was a baby and “had raised the girl in his arms,” according to the outlet.

‘Monsters in her own backyard’

More than half of Dalits in Kerala live in designated areas called “colonies,” known for cramped and harsh living conditions, after years of being denied land ownership under historical laws.

Madhumita Pandey, a professor in criminology and gender justice at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom, said the tight-knit nature of communities such as these colonies could explain why the alleged abuse of the teenage girl was not reported until recently.

“They could sometimes be your friend, uncle or neighbor,” she said.

It can be harder to report abuse when “the so-called monsters are in our own backyard,” she said.

Official statistics support her point: the alleged perpetrator is known to the victim in more than 98% of reported rape cases in Kerala, according to government data.

There were 4,241 reported cases of rape against women from oppressed castes in India, including Dalit women, in 2022, the most recent year for which data exists, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. That’s equivalent to more than 10 rapes per day.

There were more than 31,500 rapes reported overall in 2022, according to the NCRB.

However, given the difficulties in reporting such crimes, especially for the Dalit community, the true figure is likely higher.

Furthermore, in close communities, and especially in Dalit communities, women and girls also risk isolating themselves or being seen as bringing dishonor upon their families if they report abuse, Pandey said.

In at least 16 of the cases from the alleged Kerala village abuse, the accused men are from more privileged castes, according to police. If found guilty, these men could face harsher punishments under Indian laws designed to protect disadvantaged castes.

A 2020 report by the NGO Equality Now found that sexual violence is used by dominant castes to oppress Dalit women and girls, who are often denied justice because of a “prevalent culture of impunity, particularly when the perpetrators are from a dominant caste.”

Even when Dalit women report sexual abuse, they face an uphill battle to justice.

The Equality Now report followed 40 cases of rape against Dalit women and girls, and the seven cases that resulted in convictions involved either rape and murder together or were committed against girls under the age of 6.

N Rajeev, the head of the Child Welfare Committee in Pathanamthitta, the Kerala district where the girl is from, said an increase in reported child sexual abuse cases was in part thanks to campaigns in schools that help children identify and disclose abuse. The number of reported child sexual abuse cases in the state has surged to 4,663 in 2023, more than four times the 1,002 reported in 2013, according to government data.

The Dalit girl is now living in a shelter where she is receiving counseling and support, Begum, the police officer, said. The girl’s mother is also being given counseling and has the option to stay in a women’s shelter if she feels unsafe in the neighborhood. Begum said police have dedicated “maximum manpower” to the case.

The case will likely take years to go through the courts.

Across India, rape has one of the lowest conviction rates of major crimes, with 27% of cases resulting in convictions in 2022, according to the NCRB.

While child sexual abuse continues to be a “a grim reality” in Kerala, the fact that the Dalit girl was able to report the case is a step in the right direction, Stephen said.

“Otherwise, this would have just gone on unreported for years on end, then she would have nobody to help her.”