After French Riots, Curfews & Calm .. is a new Storm Brewing ? Plus Ukraine & Israel

It’s been a week of American flattery in the court of Vladimir Putin. St Petersburg’s Constantine Palace was the setting for the toasting of Russia’s President by President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, after the release of 74 year old US teacher Stephen Hubbard who’d been held for four years accused by the Kremlin of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine, but widely seen as a pawn of hostage diplomacy. Freshly released, Steve Witkoff told Mr Hubbard that Putin sent his blessings, and then blessed Putin himself calling him a “humanitarian”, just as Russia was launching another mass aerial attack on Kyiv. The hostage deal appeared to be one result of the US lifting sanctions on Russian diesel, and, there was also an apparent commitment by Moscow to renew trilateral peace talks with Kyiv and Washington. Critics allege that the Trump administration has disregarded a just peace over the lure of business deals dangled by the Kremlin, and that Witkoff’s in Wonderland, accused of falling down a rabbit hole of Russian propaganda. 

And it’s been an intense and bitter week of final rallies in Israel ahead of the first election since the October 7th attacks and the global fallout that followed.  Prime ministerial candidates have been described as shouting rather than debating on issues of responsibility for the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran to the escalating settler violence in the West Bank, now on the verge of lockdown after an attack today. Voters head to the polls with a government increasingly isolated on the world stage. A last minute endorsement came Benjamin Netanyahu’s way from President Trump, who behind the public warmth is said to have harboured deep private frustration with Israel’s longest serving leader, previously calling him quote “a conman, who everyone’s sick of” according to New York Times insiders Maggie Haberman and Johnathan Swann, though this was dismissed by the US President as untrue. And Netanyahu claimed this week successive US presidents before Trump had tried and failed to get him out of office … for the past three decades.

 

Produced by Gavin Lee, Théophile Vareille, Juliette Laffont, Alessandro Xenos.