Viral Showbiz Pinay (2025)

15/08/2025

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

American comedian and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel is officially an Italian citizen — and it’s all his grandmother’s fault.

“She used to repeat to me, ‘You have the brain of a hamster!’” Kimmel reminisced while hosting an Italian Republic Day event in Los Angeles in June, speaking to an audience of Italian-Americans who probably add butter to their cacio e pepe. Apparently, that perfect example of motherly love was enough to convince him to apply for an Italian passport — that and U.S. President Donald Trump, of course.

Kimmel later confirmed to comedian Sarah Silverman that his decision came in response to Donny the Menace’s reelection. Desperate to find a way out of a country helmed by a strong authoritarian and a hard-right government harboring anti-immigration tendencies and nationalist views, he chose one where the political situation is … exactly the same — except Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a woman and not an octogenarian.

And so it was through the miracle of ius sanguinis — citizenship by bloodline — that Kimmel’s nonna paved the way for his transatlantic transformation. One small stack of bureaucratic paperwork later, Jimmy is now Giacomo.

Speaking of ius sanguinis and comedians, Rosie O’Donnell is hoping to follow in Giacomo’s footsteps, having applied for Irish citizenship through descent after moving there in January. The Donald seems seriously bothered by the decision, threatening to revoke her U.S. passport in response — you know, like any mature, level-headed statesman.

Kimmel and O’Donnell aren’t the only celebrities making the jump either: Comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, actress Portia de Rossi, recently confirmed they, too, found a safe haven on the other side of the pond — in the U.K. “Everything is just better … people are polite,” DeGeneres said of the country where political figures like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson increase the civility of the national political discourse every day.

Given all these unsolicited VIP arrivals, the EU will soon need to create a new role: the Commissioner for Debunking EU Stereotypes for U.S. Migrants.

The Irish will be asked to scientifically prove there are no pots of gold hidden in the woods, and that there’s more to Irish cuisine than potatoes. While Italians will have to explain that no, no one calls it “marinara sauce,” and no, “pasta alfredo” is not a thing. Never has been. Never will be. (And that’s a lot to ask of a country that just got over the trauma of “House of Gucci.” Please, let us heal.)

But after all the trade wars and more-or-less terrible deals of the last few months, we can all rejoice in knowing that TV stars are the one U.S. export tariffs will never touch — whether Europe wants them or not.

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by Evert Friberg

Jimmy goes to Italy: Hollywood crashes Europe’s party

Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column. American comedian and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel is officially an Italian citizen — and i...

14/08/2025

A majority of Americans don’t have faith in President Donald Trump’s decision-making ability related to the Russia-Ukraine war ahead of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a poll released Thursday.

Nearly 60 percent of people said in a Pew Research Center poll they are either “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that Trump can make “wise decisions” about the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.

Democrats expressed significantly less confidence in the president’s decision-making skills than Republicans in the poll taken in early August. But Trump has also lost trust with Republicans, with 73 percent telling Pew they are somewhat or very confident in Trump’s ability to handle the war, compared to 81 percent in July 2024.

The White House has attempted to temper expectations ahead of the Friday summit in Alaska, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt referring to the meeting as a “listening exercise.” Still, Trump has said he expects Putin to take the meeting seriously, threatening “very severe consequences” for Moscow if the Russian leader doesn’t agree to take steps to end the war.

Trump spoke with European leaders — including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — on Wednesday, telling them that Ukraine would be a part of any discussions about possible territorial concessions after he previously suggested that any truce would include “land swapping.”

Americans are evenly split on whether the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine defend itself in the war, with Democrats far more likely to express support for U.S. assistance for Ukraine. But less than 1-in-3 Americans see the war as a major threat to U.S. interests, a sharp drop from 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor country.

Americans are less likely now than they were in March to say Trump is favoring Russia too much in the war, though. The change comes as Trump has shifted his public positioning on the war in recent months, striking an increasingly critical tone.

The poll was conducted online and by telephone Aug. 4-10, with a random sample of 3,554 adults. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.

More than half of Americans lack faith in Trump on Russia-Ukraine war, poll finds

Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay

A majority of Americans don’t have faith in President Donald Trump’s decision-making ability related to the Russia-Ukraine war ahead of his ...

14/08/2025

Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet on Friday to discuss how to achieve peace in Ukraine, a goal that most analysts believe is currently out of reach. But there’s another area where the two leaders could reach a ground-breaking agreement that would actually be in both countries’ interests and give both leaders bragging rights for tackling a global threat: nuclear arms control.

The threat of a new nuclear arms race has been growing. The last remaining agreement limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals — the New START Treaty — is set to expire next February. When that happens, for the first time in over half a century, U.S. and Russian strategic weapons could be entirely unconstrained, and both countries’ militaries will plan their future nuclear posture based on worst-case estimates of each other’s arsenals.

In this context, the Trump-Putin meeting presents a rare, well-timed opportunity to act — not only for humanity’s sake, but also for the hard-headed strategic security interests of both Russia and the United States. To do this, Trump and Putin need not negotiate all the details of a new treaty overnight. But even in just one meeting, they could begin the process of restoring predictability and restraint around nuclear weapons, signaling to their bureaucracies and to the world that the era of managed competition that we’ve lived in for the last 50 years need not give way to an uncontrolled new arms race.

Both leaders have already hinted they are open to this. Trump recently remarked that it would be “a problem for the world” if New START were to expire without a follow-on framework. Putin, too, has specifically mentionedNew START’s forthcoming expiration as an issue to be addressed with Washington. But time is short, and the longer both sides wait, the harder the task will become.

And here’s the key thing: No one else can do it. Only Trump and Putin, who together control over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, need to decide this. It’s entirely a bilateral issue where the decision needs to be made at the top. (No need to get signoff from the Europeans or arm twist the Ukrainians.)

There are six areas where the two leaders could reach an agreement in principle that would set the stage for renewed strategic stability talks between the two nuclear superpowers.

First, they could reaffirm the January 2022 statement made by the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and affirmed their “foremost responsibilities” to avoid any military confrontation with other nuclear-armed states and reduce strategic risks. In today’s environment, reiterating this principle (even without explicit reference to the previous statement, as it was done under the Biden administration) would be a modest but vital act of leadership.

Second, Trump and Putin could publicly declare their intent not to exceed New START limits even after the treaty expires. This voluntary cap would prevent a near-term arms race, reassure allies and competitors alike, and buy time for diplomats and military officials to assess possible frameworks for the future.

Third, they could jointly affirm that neither country sees a need to resume explosive nuclear testing. While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has not entered into force, partly because Washington and Moscow need to ratify it, the norm against testing has held for decades (apart from North Korea). Breaking that norm now, whether through rhetoric or real-world action, would severely destabilize the global non-proliferation regime.

Fourth, they could agree to a freeze on non-strategic or so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons, smaller devices designed for battlefield use, without prejudice to future negotiations. That would go some way toward addressing long-standing concerns in Washington and send a message of mutual restraint. Both sides could commit not to increase the quantity of these systems, even in the absence of formal counting rules and exact numbers. While arms control agreements to date have largely focused on strategic nuclear systems, nuclear capabilities intended for battlefield use cannot be ignored, especially at a time when their perceived utility is beginning to increase again.

Fifth, since the 2019 collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned U.S. and Russian ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, there have been no binding limits on these systems. These are weapons that either country might station closer to the other’s territory, such as the U.S. placing them in Europe or Russia installing them in Cuba. Russia’s announcementlast week that its self-imposed moratorium on INF-class missile deployments is no longer in effect has further heightened concerns about a new arms race in this category. In this post-INF environment, both leaders could jointly state that neither country intends to deploy intermediate-range missiles in a way that threatens the other’s territory. Such a political assurance would help avoid a destabilizing cycle of deployments in Europe and Asia.

A further step in this area could be a reciprocal commitment not to build excessive numbers of such systems, particularly those that could be rapidly moved or redeployed in a crisis. Over time, this dialogue could broaden into joint work on managing the challenges posed by other long-range precision strike capabilities – including dual-capable cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, and other systems capable of striking strategic targets without crossing the nuclear threshold. These weapons, while technically “non-nuclear,” can have strategic effects and blur the line between conventional and nuclear deterrence, making it all the more important to limit ambiguity and address them early.

Finally, both leaders could acknowledge that missile defense must not spiral out of control. With the U.S. accelerating its “Golden Dome” project and Russia expanding its arsenal of advanced delivery systems without any restraints, Trump and Putin could state their shared understanding that mutual vulnerability remains essential for strategic stability — and that no system can guarantee invulnerability.

Instructions from the two presidents to resume substantive work on these issues would give Washington and Moscow the task of thinking harder — and thinking together — about how to manage a way forward. Several key changes since the last serious attempt at such talks during Trump’s first term — including more capable and assertive third powers, new nuclear and conventional capabilities, advances in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, and the growing role of outer space in security competition — make that task even harder.

Beyond bilateral steps, Trump and Putin could also vow to work with other nuclear-armed leaders to reduce the risks of miscommunication, misperception or miscalculation leading to nuclear use. Trump and Putin could help persuade the other seven nuclear-armed leaders today that it is in their interests to modernize the controls that exist and put new ones in place where they do not. These tools, such as crisis communication networks, missile pre-launch notification regimes and more, would also help generate a deeper level of mutual understanding that will be an important enabling step to bringing in other players into arms control efforts.

The Trump–Putin meeting may be focused on Ukraine, but it could be historically significant on the nuclear issue. The ultimate responsibility to deal with the existential threat nuclear weapons pose to the United States, Russia and the entire planet lies with the heads of state themselves. The lesson of the past 60 years is that even adversaries can agree on the need for limits. Nixon and Brezhnev knew it. Reagan and Gorbachev knew it. Clinton and Yeltsin knew it. Obama and Medvedev knew it.

The question today is not whether Trump and Putin can replicate those breakthroughs, but whether they can summon the political will to at least put a floor under today’s strategic freefall and create the conditions for the next era of restraint. Without restraint, there may not be a return to the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons deployed during the Cold War, but the absence of ceilings on each side’s future capabilities will force military planners to assume the worst and prepare accordingly. That’s the logic that drives arms races.

Trump and Putin have five months to solve that problem. Alaska could be the start.

Here’s the big deal Trump and Putin could actually reach in Alaska

Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay

Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet on Friday to discuss how to achieve peace in Ukraine, a goal that most analysts believe is c...

14/08/2025

DUBLIN — Former EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, the early front-runner to become Ireland’s next president, on Thursday withdrew from the race citing health concerns.

McGuinness, 66, made her surprise announcement a week after her previously undisclosed hospitalization for an unspecified illness.

While not all potential candidates have declared for an election that must be held by November, McGuinness had been rated the most likely winner in all opinion polling and political betting markets.

“My priority now is my health. Given that the election is in a short couple of months, I do not believe that I have the strength to give the campaign my all,” McGuinness said in a statement issued by her political party, Fine Gael.

Her withdrawal means the centrist Fine Gael party, a part of four coalition governments since 2011, must scramble to find a new candidate. Potential replacements include former MEP Seán Kelly, former Justice Minister and MEP Frances Fitzgerald, and former Business Minister Heather Humphreys.

“This has come as an awful shock to us all,” said Fine Gael leader Simon Harris, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, trade and defense.

Ireland’s presidency is a largely ceremonial role separate from government. It comes with a seven-year term, a stately home in Dublin’s vast Phoenix Park, and a platform to pontificate on the state of the nation. The two-term incumbent, Michael D. Higgins of the opposition Labour Party, is constitutionally prohibited from running again.

McGuinness’ withdrawal leaves only one credible candidate in the field: socialist Galway lawmaker Catherine Connolly. The other principal government coalition party, Fianna Fáil, and the main opposition Sinn Féin party are expected to pick candidates in September.

Other potential candidates include retired mixed-martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, Riverdance star Michael Flatley, and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Gareth Sheridan. None of them has nailed down the required minimum level of support from within Ireland’s political system to be listed on the eventual ballot.

A candidate must win backing from at least 20 members of parliament or four local councils to become an official candidate.

Mairead McGuinness quits Irish presidential race

Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay

DUBLIN — Former EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, the early front-runner to become Ireland’s next president, on Thursday withdrew from th...

14/08/2025

LONDON — The spate of heatwaves that left Europe sweaty and irate has by now largely passed. But a debate in Britain that could become a political wedge issue over air-conditioning is only just getting started.

Advocates for wider A.C. installation argue that increasing its adoption could raise living standards and productivity for a Labour government keen to make gains with frustrated voters and, perhaps counterintuitively, even advance the transition to net zero — while a failure to do so may mean it becomes politically damaging in the future.

Parties taking up the cause may too find their own dividends, as polling indicates growing public support for A.C., which may increase as Britain gets hotter. Support for the wider implementation of the cooling units has already reached 43 percent, according to polling by More in Common.

But politicians and policy wonks getting hot and bothered about beating the heat face reams of red tape to make A.C. go mainstream.

After four straight years of record-high temperatures in the U.K., proponents say they have become frustrated with a regulatory regime that actively discourages A.C. in a country where temperatures reach 30C multiple times a year.

They are calling on local and national government to relax planning rules, modify a key energy subsidy and reform energy efficiency rules so it can be more easily and widely installed.

Tory MP Jack Rankin said it was “ridiculous that in a country facing record heat, it’s still so hard to install air con at home,” blaming “enviro-loons” and “outdated nanny state rules.”

Supporters say that a Britain with more A.C. is a Britain that builds more and higher-quality housing, eases the transition to net zero and, crucially, enjoys more economic growth. Health, too, could benefit: Quality of life demonstrably deteriorates when temperatures go high, and extreme heat can cause as many deaths annually as mass shootings in the U.S.

David Lawrence, the co-founder of British Progress, which authored a report on A.C., said the U.K. is “still more a cold country than a hot country, but in some parts of the year, and in some parts of the country, we are an extremely hot country,” and it would only become more so.

The politics of it all

A pro A.C. mindset appears as though it should have a natural home on the right of the political spectrum. A.C. has long been seen as a luxury that you might find in a hotel room on holiday, or an American trapping that guzzles inordinate amounts of energy: Something that favors personal comfort over net zero goals.

There is some evidence that substantiates this: Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho has backed a campaign by the think tank Britain Remade to ditch a “poverty mindset” that inhibits A.C. uptake; her onetime deputy Andrew Bowie MP criticized building regulations in London that all but ban A.C. installation in new-build homes; and Reform supremo Zia Yusuf has criticized a “war” on A.C. “by the political class” which will “kill British people” at the “altar of net zero.”

The issue has already made it to the political frontlines in France, with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party proposing legislation to mandate the installation of A.C. units in public institutions — to criticism from the country’s prime minister and energy secretary.

But many of the arguments for A.C. come from those frustrated by the state’s inability to build infrastructure for the future, rather than ideological opposition to net zero.

While proliferation of A.C. worldwide will drive growth in electricity demand, the Center for British Progress has highlighted that peak demand for the technology, in summer, comes at a time when there is a glut of solar generation, and could help stimulate demand for renewable energy.

Britain Remade’s Sam Dumitriu said that in addition to arguments surrounding quality of life, there was “such a strong environmental case” for A.C. and that its consumers “don’t think about climate, but by installing [air-to-air heat pumps] they’re using half as much energy as they previously were, and they have a better product.”

Voices beyond the right and a bubble of researchers are already beginning to develop policies for air conditioning.

Green party leadership frontrunner Zack Polanski said it is “inefficient and shortsighted” to install heat pumps that don’t both heat and cool, while the Liberal Democrats this week called on the government to install a new law forcing care homes to install A.C. as part of a campaign to “heatproof the NHS.”

Sadiq and Ed

The trialing of a new state-of-the-art Piccadilly line train — complete with A.C. — should have been an easy win for Sadiq Khan, especially given that temperatures on underground trains frequently surpass 30C — the legal limit for transporting cattle.

But it’s also a reminder that London’s building regulations (and national ones) emphasize that housebuilders must exhaust “passive” cooling options. These include “dual aspect” rules requiring windows to be on different walls of a flat to increase airflow, before “active” ones like A.C. can be installed in domestic settings.

The result is not just that A.C. is difficult and expensive to install, but also that it takes up valuable floor space in a city whose housing is in many cases insurmountably expensive.

Meanwhile, a gas-boiler replacement scheme by the government, awarding £7.5k to those looking to replace their boilers with heat pumps, currently excludes air-to-air pumps, which both heat and cool homes, in favor of air-to-water units, which almost exclusively heat.

The government, however, indicated in July that it was considering expanding the replacement subsidy to include air-to-air heat pumps, popular in European countries including France, Italy, and Norway.

Tory MP Bradley Thomas, currently a parliamentary private secretary to Coutinho, said “the government is pushing, on the one hand, a very electricity-intensive technology in the form of air-source heat pumps, but at the same time precluding people from making an upgrade that could also cool their home and get a financial subsidy in the process.”

Energy efficiency ratings, which some say don’t properly factor in the capacity of heat pumps, are also the subject of criticism.

Campaigners are increasingly frustrated not just with the government, but with backbenchers who they believe are too scared to criticize the government and push for progress on the issue. They single out the Labour Growth Group, a key backbench caucus in the parliamentary Labour party.

One campaigner, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said of the Growth Group that “there’s very little heft there… they’re like: ‘Let’s just build things.’ But it’s not a matter of just shouting ‘let’s build things.’ I think courage is certainly an element that they’re missing.”

Boomer mentality

Politicians could find the heat on them if they do not engage with the issue, especially as climate change furthers extreme weather patterns and younger voters show themselves to be more concerned by it than their older compatriots.

Polling by More in Common indicates that 43 percent of the public support installing air conditioning in new buildings, where 34 percent do not because the units would contribute to climate change. Given that it is still relatively recent policy issue, these are not inconsiderable numbers.

However, the number rises to 50 and 51 percent in Greater London and the East of England respectively, while voters that backed Reform nationally in 2024 support installing more A.C. by 51 percent.

There is also a pronounced age difference in sentiment on heatwaves. U.K. adults aged 50-64 and over 65 surveyed by YouGov in June indicated that they hoped a heatwave did happen this summer by 44 percent and 41 percent respectively, while just 27 percent aged 18-24 agreed.

Among young people, 65 percent hoped it would not, perhaps due to them seeing heatwaves as totemic of climate change. This especially affects quality of life in newly built homes, in which young people are more likely to live, whereas older voters may have a hazy nostalgia for summer heat.

Yet while older people are the most adversely impacted by the effects of extreme heat, they are less exercised about the need for A.C., and despite being the group likeliest to write to MPs, may not raise the issue with lawmakers.

Dumitriu said that improving the uptake of A.C. is “one of those really low-hanging fruits in policy — I hope that we’re going to see some movement around it.”

Boiling Britain: How air conditioning could become a political priority in the UK

Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay

LONDON — The spate of heatwaves that left Europe sweaty and irate has by now largely passed. But a debate in Britain that could become a pol...

13/08/2025

European leaders can now breathe a little easier after receiving assurances from U.S. President Trump that he’s not going to realize their worst nightmares and sell out Ukraine at a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

But only a little easier. With the fate of Ukraine being discussed by men as manipulative as Putin and as mercurial as Trump, there’s every danger things could take an unexpected turn when the two actually meet in Alaska.

Trump’s talk of land swaps in the past few days triggered terror on the European side that the U.S. was going to carve up Ukraine in a peace deal with Moscow, conducted over their heads.

A brisk whirl of diplomacy on Wednesday seemed to allay those fears — for now. The Europeans came out of a call convinced that Trump understood a ceasefire had to precede any discussion of land, and that Ukraine would need a place at the negotiating table.

Some Europeans even detected signs that the Americans, in a U-turn, were warming to a role in offering post-war security guarantees to Ukraine.

Trump knows Europe’s positions and “largely shares them,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in a statement after the call, echoing equally bullish statements from French President Emmanuel Macron and European Council President António Costa.

Latvia’s Prime Minister Evika Siliņa, whose country borders Russia, struck a similarly sanguine tone.

“We are all on the same page” with regard to a final peace deal, she told POLITICO.

“President Trump is an excellent and unique negotiator, so I believe he aims for the best possible outcomes of the talks,” added Siliņa, who was on a previous call of EU leaders with Vice President JD Vance.

That is, of course, what they have to say. Predicting what will actually happen is another matter.

One person familiar with Wednesday’s meeting sounded a note of caution. While “overall there was a positive atmosphere,” they told POLITICO, “Trump, as always, talked a lot about what he would do, but in a way that no one could say what exactly he was going to do.”

Trump’s views on Russia and on Putin, whom he once hailed as a “genius,” do seem to be hardening. Angling for a Nobel Peace Prize, he is promising “severe consequences” if Putin does not seem serious in Alaska about ending the war, presumably meaning that the U.S. will ramp up secondary sanctions on countries that trade with Russia.

But the Europeans are fully aware it is not so long since Trump publicly humiliated Zelenskyy, pushed Ukraine to pay for the costs of the war via a minerals deal and mused about the merits of big economic development deals with Putin. They will be very wary of Putin and Trump shifting the conversation to lucrative contracts for energy and rare earth minerals, and away from topics such as reparations and abducted children.

Has Vance changed his tune?

Even Vance, known as an arch-critic of Ukraine after his tirade against Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, had changed his views, according to a European official.

Another European official quipped: “People were pretty impressed by Vance, who is looking for solutions while being clear that Putin is the bad guy here.”

Holidaying in the U.K., Vance spent Saturday at the country retreat of U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, where he met Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, and Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskyy’s office.

Did that swing Vance? If so, only up to a point. On Sunday, he struck a pretty traditional line on Fox News: “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” he said. “Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars to this particular conflict. But if the Europeans want to step up and actually buy the weapons from American producers, we’re OK with that, but we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like the U.S. is more interested in providing post-war security guarantees.

The attraction of being peacemakers, however, seems to be building traction in the administration. Vance later noted, at an air base in Britain on Wednesday, that Trump “said very simply that we are going to make it our mission as an administration to bring peace to Europe once again.”

Played by Putin

Jan Techau, head of Germany for Eurasia Group, a think tank, also cautioned that Trump entered the meeting with the Europeans with different objectives from them.

For Trump, the key is that he should not come out of the Alaska summit looking like a “loser.” That implication — that he could be outsmarted by Putin — makes him simmer with anger on his Truth Social account.

Techau said Trump and his administration were motivated to engage with the Europeans on Wednesday by a desire to understand Putin’s tactics and not to appear as having been “played” by him in Alaska.

“He [Trump] can’t completely read Putin. He understands that Putin has a different agenda than what he first thought. In this sense the Europeans are helpful to gain insight and to back him if everything goes down the drain,” the analyst added.

Fundamentally, there are also strong concerns that Putin may have no genuine desire to strike a deal. His fundamental goal — still unachieved — is to destroy a democratic, independent Ukrainian state.

There are “no huge expectations for Friday,” said one of the EU officials, while Techau argued that Putin could use the meeting to float a “meaningless” gesture such as suspending bombing in a particular Ukrainian region in an attempt to sway Trump into believing he wanted peace.

The European side is particularly worried that Trump could strike a deal with Putin that falls short of their demands — for example by calling on Ukraine to give up more territory or demanding that EU countries roll back sanctions against Russia as a precursor to a deal.

Kyiv and its European allies could reject a flawed deal. But if they do, Trump could then throw up his hands, declare that he has done his best and blame the Europeans for standing in the way of peace, Techau warned.

“This would be convenient for Trump. He can say the real enemies of peace are elsewhere: It’s the Ukrainians and the Europeans who stand in the way,” he said.

Indeed, Trump has yet to align with all of Europe’s demands for a final peace deal.

And perhaps most alarmingly, he is still continuing to echo narratives about the war in Ukraine that are sympathetic to Russia.

Before his call with EU leaders, Trump quoted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — Europe’s most outspoken opponent of Ukraine.

The Hungarian leader reportedly said that winning wars was what Russia does best.

Trump called that a “very interesting insight.”

Felicia Schwartz, Nette Nöstlinger in Berlin, Victor Goury-Laffont in Paris, Veronika Melkozerova in Kyiv, Esther Webber in London and Jacopo Barigazzi in Brussels contributed reporting.

EU leaders sound upbeat after Ukraine call with Trump. They could be in for a rude awakening.

Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay

European leaders can now breathe a little easier after receiving assurances from U.S. President Trump that he’s not going to realize their w...

Viral Showbiz Pinay

15/08/2025

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