European officials fear that Washington is attempting to place pressure on Kyiv after trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi

Tests found that three times the recreational dose of MDMA was found in Sandrine Josso’s body

Comes as dozens of residential buildings, a church, a kindergarten and a high school were damaged in Odesa

Whether at home or abroad, the pattern of ducking difficult arguments and calling it pragmatism is the same

There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host country are tricky, as Britain’s are with China, the dignifying protocols of statecraft make a beleaguered politician feel valued.

Next comes the phase where missions overseas feel dangerous because plotters can organise more openly against absent leaders.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Whether he’s targeting Greenland, tariffs or Iran, Trump’s agenda is to distract – because a Europe that is always reacting is never planning

When Donald Trump reassured the world that he would not, after all, use force to acquire Greenland – after days of threatening as much – he was doing what he does best: turning geopolitics into a spectacle. Whether Trump ever truly believed the US should acquire a vast Arctic territory belonging to a Nato ally is secondary to the fact that, once again, he ensured that Europe and the rest of the world were focused on his agenda.

Trump is not a politician who responds to events – he seeks to make them. Not because he is deeply invested in policy detail, but because he understands a defining feature of contemporary politics: attention is power. In an era of information overload, there is no scarcity of data or analysis; what is lacking is attention. And whoever controls that controls the debate.

Unable to get near Ukraine’s main port, Moscow is pounding the city from afar with missiles and drones

Outside the Kadorr apartment complex in Ukraine’s Black Sea city of Odesa, about 500 metres from the seafront, residents and rescue workers mill around in freezing temperatures.

Above an office on the 25th floor, a block of wall has been blown out by a Russian drone. Below, rubble and glass have been moved quickly into piles as owners survey cars crushed by the falling masonry.

Zelensky says there was no 'military justification' in Russia’s targeting civilians on a passenger train

Drone strike on Ukrainian passenger train kills five and Poland urges Musk to cut Russia’s Starlink access. What we know on day 1,435

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused nearly 2 million military casualties – killed, wounded or missing – between the two countries, according to a study published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinktank. Moscow’s forces have borne the brunt of the losses, with as many as 325,000 killed out of an estimated total of 1.2 million casualties since the war began nearly four years ago. Ukrainian forces have also suffered major losses – between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, of which between 100,000 and 140,000 were killed – from February 2022 to December 2025. “Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach two million total casualties by the spring of 2026,” the thinktank said. UN monitors say civilian casualties have reached almost 15,000 verified deaths since 2022 but that the actual total “is likely considerably higher”.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told NBC in February 2025 that his country had lost nearly 46,000 troops since 2022, with tens of thousands missing or taken prisoner, numbers which analysts consider an underestimate. Russian losses remain a closely guarded state secret, with the last official figures from the Ministry of Defence released in September 2022 putting the toll at 5,937, according to Agence France-Presse. The BBC’s Russian service and the Mediazona outlet, which rely on publicly available data such as death notices, have identified more than 163,000 Russian soldiers killed in four years of war, while acknowledging that the actual number is likely higher.

A Russian drone strike on a passenger train in north-eastern Ukraine has killed five people in an attack denounced as terrorism by Zelenskyy. Prosecutors said fragments of five bodies had been found at the scene of the strike on the train, which occurred on Tuesday near a village in the Kharkiv region. In a post on Telegram, Zelenskyy said the train was carrying more than 200 passengers, including 18 in the carriage that was hit. “Each such Russian strike undermines diplomacy, which is still ongoing, and hits, in particular, the efforts of partners who are helping to end this war,” he wrote.

The train bombing was part of a wave of Russian drone and missile attacks that left 10 dead across the country and dozens wounded, with the injured including two children and a pregnant woman. Three were killed and 32 wounded in a drone strike on Odesa that also inflicted “enormous” damage on a power facility, according to the private energy firm DTEK. The energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, said 710,000 residents of Kyiv remained without electricity and heating in the aftermath of Russian attacks – conditions which could turn deadly in the freezing winter cold. Other casualties occurred in the regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Poland’s foreign minister has urged Elon Musk to cut Russia’s access to the Starlink satellite internet service, which the tech billionaire owns. Radosław Sikorski – who is also the country’s deputy prime minister – spoke out after the US-based Institute for the Study of War said that the Russian army uses Starlink satellites to guide its drone attacks deep into Ukraine. He posted on X: “Hey, big man, @elonmusk, why don’t you stop the Russians from using Starlinks to target Ukrainian cities. Making money on war crimes may damage your brand”. Musk denied in 2024 that Starlink terminals had been sold to Russia; according to Ukrainian intelligence services, the Russian army has obtained terminals through third countries rather than any official contract with Musk.

Joël Guerriau sentenced to four years in prison after spiking lawmaker’s champagne with ecstasy

A former French senator has been found guilty of drugging a fellow politician in order to sexually assault her, in a case that has shaken French politics.

Joël Guerriau, 68, was sentenced on Tuesday evening to four years in prison of which 18 months must be behind bars. He has appealed against the verdict, which means he will not immediately serve his sentence and instead will face a fresh trial at a later date.

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