Kirill Dmitriev, a close Putin adviser, will focus on restoring economic ties between the US and Russia as the two sides attempt to forge a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, according to sources with knowledge of the appointment.

Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sanctioned sovereign wealth fund, has been an outspoken Trump supporter from within Russia’s political elite, saying his US presidential election victory “shows that ordinary Americans are tired of the unprecedented lies, incompetence, and malice of the Biden administration.” He added that Trump’s win “opens up new opportunities for resetting relations between Russia and the United States.”

Born in Soviet-era Ukraine and educated at Harvard and Stanford in the US, Dmitriev worked as consultant at US consultancy firm McKinsey and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.

The Kremlin’s inclusion of Dmitriev, indicates that a key focus of Russia’s negotiating strategy in likely to be on sanctions reduction, as well as on repairing battered economic ties with the West.

Dmitriev has been a prominent Russian contact point with both the first and current Trump administrations, consistently calling for closer US-Russian ties, and engaging in private back-channel talks with US officials.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitriev was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, which designated him a “close associate of Putin” and his family.

Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin – or so James Howells believes, after accidentally throwing the drive away in 2013.

And now, after years of battling the local authority in court to retrieve the hard drive, Howells has come up with a new plan: to simply buy the landfill.

“Am considering purchasing a landfill site. Funding secured,” he wrote Thursday on X, echoing comments by him that were widely reported in the UK media on Monday, though he didn’t say who was providing the funding.

Howells has tried almost everything to access the Docksway Landfill in Newport, a city 12 miles (19 kilometers) northeast of the Welsh capital, Cardiff, including offering Newport City Council more than $70 million in 2021 for permission to dig up the site.

His latest plan comes after a British High Court judge stopped his case from going to trial, issuing a judgment in January that dismissed his attempts to force the council to allow him to search the landfill.

Howells accidentally threw out that crucial hard drive in August 2013 when he was clearing out his house, thinking it was a blank drive that contained no data. He put it in a trash bag that he left in the hallway for his then-partner to take to the garbage dump, before he realised, as the value of the bitcoin rose, that he had disposed of the wrong one.

Since then, the value of the bitcoin Howells says is loaded onto the hard drive has skyrocketed from around $9 million to almost $800 million, as prices of cryptocurrency have soared in recent years.

Every bitcoin transaction requires a private key, a secret piece of data contained within each individual bitcoin wallet that mathematically proves the transaction has come from that wallet.

Howells’ hard drive contains “a record” of that private key, Judge Andrew Keyser wrote in his judgement issued in January.

“The position is no different in principle from what it would be if the record of the private key had been written on a piece of paper that had been put into the landfill,” Keyser added.

Without knowing the private key, Howells can’t access the bitcoin he mined all those years ago, when the cryptocurrency was little known beyond the tech world.

“The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,” a spokeswoman said at the time.

“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.”

A woman suspected of killing three members of the same family by poisoning a Christmas cake has been found dead in her prison cell in Brazil.

“Immediately, the staff provided first aid” and called the emergency medical service, “which, upon arriving at the scene, confirmed her death,” the criminal police said in a statement.

“Deise was alone in the cell. The circumstances will be investigated by the Civil Police and the General Institute of Expertise,” the statement added.

The cake poisoning, which killed three people and hospitalized three others, occurred on Christmas Eve in the city of Torres in Rio Grande do Sul.

Large amounts of arsenic were found in the bodies of the women who died, and arsenic at levels 2,700 times higher than the permitted limit was found in the flour used to make the cake, according to the police.

It felt like a speech, if delivered on X.com, laden surely with community notes.

US Vice President JD Vance, taking the stage in Munich, to eviscerate totalitarianism in Europe. But not in Moscow, especially after its savage invasion of Ukraine. Instead, in Ukraine’s allies in the European Union. The “enemy within”, as he called it, in Europe, is jailing opponents, and afraid of its own voters.

For the vast majority of the audience, both in Munich – and the rest of Europe – this is the tweet where the reader comments take a conspiratorial, Red-Bull-mother’s-basement-barefoot-at-3-a.m. turn, and you tune out. But while Munich had been hoping to hear greater detail on the Trump administrations publicly morphing peace plan for Ukraine, they were battered with a bizarre, post-truth litany of culture-war complaints and a bid to sow serious doubt about electoral integrity across Europe.

First up was the suggestion Romania’s recently annulled presidential vote was somehow a bid to deny voters their choice. To be clear, Romania annulled only the first round of a presidential vote last year in which a far-right pro-Russian candidate very narrowly won a place in a second-round spin-off, because courts agreed with evidence from Romania’s intelligence agencies that there had been significant interference from Russia. Vance was objecting to the rule of law in Romania, and pro-Russian sentiment and electoral interference being tackled.

It is really not clear who he was referring to when he said his European allies were censoring their opponents, or “putting them in jail – whether that’s the leader of the opposition, or a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news.” It sounded like Eastern Germany in the 1950s – a world geographically just a few hundred kilometers to the north, where these Soviet-era horrors are still living memories.

Vance said, “Old entrenched interests” were “hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.” To be clear, many in the room would have hailed from the brutal occupation of the former Soviet Union. They didn’t need to be lectured on how authoritarianism spouts falsehood to excuse the poor and cruel governance of the minority.

Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, quickly replied Vance’s words were “unacceptable.” He opposed “the impression that Vice President Vance has created that minorities are being suppressed or silenced in our democracy. We know not only against whom we are defending our country, but also for what.”

Vance then launched into a wide-ranging diatribe about freedom of speech being shackled in Europe. He cited a case of a man arrested for praying silently near an abortion clinic in the UK. New laws in Britain mean political activity is prohibited within 150 meters of abortion clinics to prevent women being harassed when seeking medical help – not quite the same thing. Abortion is less of a hot button issue in Europe than in the United States, and happens with much less controversy.

Vance’s complaints struck at the heart of a key difference in the role of free speech in Europe and the United States, a much fresher democracy. In Europe, free speech is paramount and enshrined in law, but so is responsibility for the safety of citizens. Some European legal systems suggest this means you cannot falsely shout there is a “fire” in a crowded theater and escape punishment if the resulting stampede causes injury simply because you had the right to shout “fire.” In the United States, the First Amendment means you can shout whatever you want. In the smartphone and post-9-11 era, Europe has prohibited some extremist activity online. It is still illegal to advocate for the Nazis in Germany, and it should not be controversial or mysterious why. The wildly rebellious press across Europe are a vibrant sign of its free speech. And the fringe parties Vance objected to being absent in Munich are growing in their popularity. Nobody is really being shut down.

Vance had clearly long prepared this tirade as a starting gun for the second Trump administration’s bid to refuel populism across Europe. The continent he spoke to is a little wiser now, after Trump’s first term with some populist experiments already ending in electoral disaster – like in the United Kingdom, where the Conservative Party has been ejected from power.

Vance spoke to a room acutely aware of the threat far-right populism poses to mainstream and moderate ideology, and the challenges of immigration that have swept across Europe that Vance railed against with barely veiled xenophobia.

But the real figure looming large across the room he feverishly addressed was Kremlin head Vladimir Putin. The sins the audience and Europe were accused of are, in reality, occurring in Russia. Putin was not mentioned. Ukraine was only mentioned fleetingly. The bad guys were the United States’ own allies. And the real threat to western democracy was itself.

It should not take an extensive grasp of history to know it is ugly to talk this way in Munich. Europe has been here before. As George Orwell said as the dust of the last big land war settled in 1949, the “final most essential command” of the Party was to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Vance asked for that, and made it sound like a virtue.

The Prince and Princess of Wales have publicly marked Valentine’s Day by sharing a sweetly romantic photograph of themselves.

In the photo, posted on their official social media channels Friday, William and Kate can be seen sitting on a blanket on grass, surrounded by trees.

They are holding hands and are both dressed in blue.

Kate appears to be laughing as William is turned toward her, kissing her cheek.

They captioned the image with a red heart emoji.

The photo appears to be a still from a video Kate shared in September to announce that she had completed her chemotherapy treatment for cancer.

Catherine Middleton met Prince William in 2001 at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, where they were both studying art history.

The following year, they shared living quarters, along with a few other students.

They were “very close friends” for about a year, according to Kate, before their relationship turned romantic.

It wasn’t always straightforward, though, and they briefly called it quits in March 2007.

The couple got engaged while on a trip to Kenya in October 2010, and tied the knot at Westminster Abbey in London on April 29, 2011.

They have three children together: Prince George, born in 2013, Princess Charlotte, born in 2015, and Prince Louis, born in 2018.

Last month, on Kate’s birthday, William praised “the most incredible wife and mother,” and commended her for the “remarkable” strength she has shown “over the last year” while undergoing treatment for cancer.

Fighters from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have torched swathes of the country’s largest refugee camp, firing indiscriminately at civilians, according to open-source data and an eyewitness account.

At least seven people have been killed and 40 injured in the attacks which began on Tuesday, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which operates one of the last remaining healthcare facilities in Zamzam camp, which hosts nearly half a million displaced people suffering from famine. Approximately 50% of Zamzam’s central market was burned in the attacks, according to a new Yale HRL report.

Once a refuge for civilians fleeing violence in North Darfur’s capital city of al-Fasher and neighboring towns, Zamzam has been under fire since December 1, according to Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) which monitors the conflict, and MSF. Indiscriminate artillery fire has killed and injured dozens of residents since, the medical relief group says.

The RSF and its rival, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), have been locked in a brutal civil war since April of 2023. Since then, the RSF has been campaigning to capture al-Fasher —the last remaining SAF stronghold in the region — 15km north of Zamzam. However, this is the first time that RSF fighters appear to have entered the camp.

‘I saw people fleeing, and I was among them’

Footage verified from social media illustrates the RSF’s advance; videos show armed fighters wearing the RSF’s hallmark tan camouflage and insignia capturing a militia outpost on the edge of the camp.

Then, less than half a kilometer south, fighters appear closer to the camp, perched atop pickup trucks with mounted belt-fed machine guns. The camera pans across the ground, littered with bullet casings, and briefly shows a plume of dark black smoke which appears to emanate from Zamzam’s central market.

The eyewitness described how the fighters set several shops ablaze before he fled the camp in terror.

“I saw people fleeing, and I was among them—some in their private vehicles and others on foot for hundreds of meters. Several stray bullets flew over our heads, and a victim fell right in front of me,” he recounted.

Dozens of children, women, and elderly people were killed and injured in the attacks, according to a statement released by Zamzam camp administrators on Thursday. The statement calls on the United Nations to deploy an international protection mission after “the [RSF] resorted to the scorched land policy, brutally targeting Zamzam.”

Satellite imagery shared by Maxar Technologies and footage posted on social media by North Darfur’s governor show the aftermath of large-scale burning throughout Zamzam’s central marketplace. Among the ash, remnants of the stands, chairs, and tables piled with charred vegetables can be seen.

Heat signatures recorded by NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System show that the fire ignited on Tuesday, causing damage that HRL says is “consistent with intentional razing” identified after nearby arson attacks perpetrated by the RSF.

“We categorically affirm that no violations have occurred, and our forces have never targeted civilians. Rather, our forces operated with military professionalism, swiftly defeating the armed elements, seizing their weapons stockpiles, forcing them to flee the camp, and thwarting their plan to use civilians as human shields.”

The attack, which unfolded over two days, was launched weeks after the RSF began targeting the camp with long-range artillery in early December, according to a Yale HRL report.

The RSF claims that the camp is a “military base, housing weapons and ammunition depots as well as operations command rooms,” in the context of the paramilitary group’s wider offensive to capture al-Fasher — the last remaining bastion for government forces in North Darfur, according to Liam Karr, Africa team lead at the Institute for the Study of War. But these attacks on Zamzam extend “beyond military objectives into ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Karr says.

Last month, former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the RSF of committing genocide in Sudan, and imposed sanctions on its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti.

The RSF called the Biden Administration’s sanctions “regrettable and unjust” in a statement posted to Telegram, claiming that they were “politically motivated and… without an independent and thorough investigation.”

In the midst of a raging malnutrition crisis

Zamzam has long been at the epicenter of the malnutrition crisis in Sudan. Last August, the World Food Program declared that the camp had been pushed into famine.

One mother, holding her crying two-year-old child, explained the challenge of finding fresh water: “When we need water, we need to pay. And we don’t have money, so we ask Allah to sustain us,” she says.

About 34% of children living in Zamzam camp suffer from acute malnutrition—more than twice the emergency threshold—according to an MSF survey conducted in the fall.

Since the famine declaration, malnutrition has persisted and spread to two additional camps in North Darfur and the Western Nuba Mountains and is predicted to reach five additional localities in the state before May.

Faced with continuing security threats, he says, “it’s simply too dangerous” to operate in certain areas of North Darfur. It is immediately unclear how this recent spate of violence will affect the malnutrition crisis in Zamzam.

“As the camp is surrounded [by RSF fighters], there is no possibility for the population to flee or for humanitarian aid to enter,” MSF’s Project Coordinator in North Darfur Marion Ramstein predicts. “People are left with nothing.”

Mounira Elsamra, Eyad Kourdi, and Thomas Bordeaux contributed to this report.

The split screen is horrifying. On one side, a White House whose policy is in turns strident, revisionist, and then – it seems, sometimes – in urgent need of clarification. On the other, Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky is outside, looking in, on peace talks, while hundreds die daily on frontlines where Moscow is winning, and children are frequently pulled from the rubble of Russian airstrikes.

As Ukraine’s brutal war nears its third year, the two visions risk becoming irreconcilable.

The White House’s contradictory positions will be partly to blame here. We have seen a startling week in which the US Secretary of Defence Peter Hegseth said Ukraine could not join NATO or get its pre-2014 borders back. He either broadcast a key plank of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s secret peace deal inadvertently or gave away a key part of Ukraine’s diplomatic negotiating hand to the shock of Europe.

Ukraine’s allies may have all known that, in reality, it would not join NATO soon, or get its borders back to when the east and Crimea were in its hands, but had kept that as a concession to make to Russia during, not before, negotiations.

It keeps coming.

US Vice President JD Vance told the Wall Street Journal, apparently, the US might send troops to Ukraine, in extremis – that it would use “tools of leverage” both military and economic. Did he really unveil the polar opposite of Hegseth’s comments in Brussels that no American soldiers would go to Ukraine? Why did he not mention Russia at all, when addressing European allies in Munich about largely fictional totalitarianism in western democracies? Also, did Trump misspeak when he said there would be “high-level people” from Russia, Ukraine, and the US in Munich for a key security conference – or did he mean Saudi Arabia?

Moscow and Kyiv didn’t seem to think anyone of that level is going to Munich for those kind of talks. Or are there secret talks happening that Trump cannot keep quiet?

During this short period of whiplash, by the worst battlefield estimates, up to 5,000 troops have been killed or injured on the frontlines in Ukraine. Romania and Moldova have complained of Russian drones interfering in their airspace. At least 13 civilians have died and 72 been injured in Russian attacks on Ukraine. A Russian drone has been fired at Chernobyl nuclear plant, Ukraine said Friday.

A war is happening – and Russia is winning it, at huge cost for Ukraine – while the White House seems to work out what it really thinks in public.

Behind these vacillating positions on NATO membership, Ukraine’s borders and and US troops in Ukraine, lies the darker truth that we simply do not know what Trump and Putin have spoken about, in what Trump has said was more than one call since he came to the White House.

Firstly, it is important to reflect on the precedent here: Trump has swept away three years of isolation of the Kremlin from the West without concessions. He got Marc Fogel released – in exchange, it seems, for Alexander Vinnik, accused of running a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange, gifting Moscow a moment of staggeringly warm rehabilitation for an American television audience. But there have been no concessions so far, in public, from Russia to Ukraine.

Instead, we had the bizarre revisionism of Trump suggesting Russia invaded because Ukraine was about to join NATO.

To repeat, three exhausting years in, Russia invaded Ukraine unprovoked in 2022 out of some strategic sense of concern it needed to project strength along its borders, and mistakenly thinking the invasion would take a matter of weeks, and be welcomed with open arms.

Ukraine wanted warmer relations with the European Union and dreamed of perhaps joining NATO one day, but in the same way Zelensky probably dreamed one day as a young boy of joining the Beatles. Neither was going to happen any time soon.

The revisionist notion that Russia acted to stop Ukraine’s NATO membership is a Kremlin talking point. And it is clear now Trump has spent more time talking to Putin than Zelensky. He even suggested that Zelensky’s time in office might soon end, as he needs to eventually hold elections, and his poll numbers are “not particularly great, to put it mildly”.

It’s hard to understate the impact of the world’s most powerful man suggesting a wartime commander lacks a current mandate and might soon need to step aside. Perhaps this is part of the private plan – it is certainly what Putin wants, as elections would undoubtedly be a mess and produce a mandate that was questioned. It is, above all, potentially catastrophic to Ukrainian morale – soldiers must agree to continue to risk their lives for a president whose key financial backer considers a lame duck.

This is where the two split screens collide.

Trump’s world is one where off-the-cuff statements can be massaged, and his telegenic cabinet overturn the paradigms of global security hourly, without major consequence. Their echo chamber just reassuringly feeds back the corrected version of policy. On the other side of the screen, Ukrainians die, lose territory, see apartment blocks reduced to rubble, consider desertion, and watch the backbone of their western support dissolve.

This is all a symphony of chaos to the Kremlin. They know what their objectives are, which, simply put, amount to whatever they can get. And that is a lot when the key adversary they actually fear, the United States, is so publicly unsure what it wants, why it wants it, and what its red lines are.

Peace talks have started, but the sands are not just shifting for Ukraine, they risk becoming quicksand.