TV News LIES

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a "Meet the Press" interview aired Sunday that he would "never accept" decisions made by the U.S. and Russia about Ukraine's future, even as the two nations appear poised to engage in peace talks this week.

The big picture: President Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, confirmed Sunday on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" that he and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz will travel to Saudi Arabia to "hopefully make some really good progress" on the Russia-Ukraine peace process.

• Zelensky had said hours before that Ukraine was not invited to participate in any peace talks, a notion which Witkoff pushed back against to Fox News' Maria Bartiromo.
• "Ukraine is part of the talks," Witkoff said, adding, "I don't think this is about excluding anybody."

Zoom out: European allies had also expressed concern Ukraine wouldn't get an equal say in peace talks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked NATO allies by declaring key bargaining chips off the table.

• Hegesth's comments sparked concerns over what concessions the White House might be preemptively offering the Kremlin. President Trump himself contended that NATO membership isn't "practical" for Ukraine and that it's "unlikely" the nation gets "all of its land back."
• In his "Meet the Press" interview, Zelensky warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin "will wage war against NATO" and is only waiting for the military alliance to weaken, perhaps if the U.S. "will think to take its military from Europe."
• Vice President JD Vance warned that Europe had to be ready to defend itself in a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week.

NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct U.S. assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine.

The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve some 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year.

The U.S. absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the Trump administration’s commitment to common defense and demands for increased European military spending.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced his intention to negotiate with Russia directly. And U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at his first meeting with NATO colleagues in Brussels on Wednesday that European nations should dramatically increase their defense spending and shoulder the “overwhelming share” of funding for Ukraine.

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Israel and Hamas completed the sixth exchange of hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday with just over two weeks remaining in their fragile Gaza ceasefire’s initial phase, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Israel to begin a Mideast tour.

Israelis expressed relief as the three hostages — Argentinian-Israeli Iair Horn, 46; American-Israeli Sagui Dekel Chen, 36; and Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, 29 — seemed in better condition than the emaciated ones freed a week ago.

Troufanov was informed of his father’s death in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the 16-month war. Chen was meeting his youngest daughter for the first time. Horn’s brother, Eitan, remains in captivity.

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Mykola Vashchuk may be thousands of miles from Kyiv, his home town, but life has never been busier.

He runs pierogi food businesses here in Cleveland and back in Ukraine, works part-time for a local charity, while studying for a law degree at Cleveland State University. His wife works at a daycare and the couple is raising two sons. He and his family have built a new life on the shores of Lake Erie, having fled Ukraine after a Russian bomb blew out two windows of their Kyiv apartment in December 2022.

“There was no electricity, no water, so we decided to come to the US,” he says.

You could give Donald Trump that Nobel peace prize right now. For a few days, he succeeded in uniting Palestinians and Israelis, though not quite in the way favoured by the judging panel in Norway. Instead, he had both sides holding their breath, hoping he was not about to destroy the closest thing to hope they have known in 16 months.

I am referring to the deal done nearly four weeks ago which has allowed for a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the phased release of hostages held by Hamas and prisoners held by Israel. It was always perilously fragile, but this week it looked to be on the brink of collapse. First cahttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/14/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-7-octoberme a Hamas threat to postpone the next release of three hostages, due tomorrow, in response to alleged Israeli violations of the ceasefire. Then Trump weighed in, saying that he no longer liked the deal brokered by the Biden administration anyway, that he’d had enough of hostages freed “in dribs and drabs” and wanted all of them out in one go, by noon Saturday. Otherwise, he said, “all hell is going to break out”.

An intense Israeli military raid had already sent Qusay Farahat fleeing his home in the occupied West Bank, but the offensive has since expanded, threatening a relative's house where he sought shelter.

The raid, which according to Israel aims to dismantle "terrorist infrastructure", has targeted Palestinian refugee camps in the northern West Bank including Jenin where 22-year-old Farhat is from.

But since it began on January 21, the deadly Israeli offensive has gradually encroached upon more cities and towns.