Europe rallies behind Ukraine ahead of Trump-Putin talks

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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Valerie Sanderson, and in the early hours of Sunday, the 10th of August, these are our main stories.

President Zelensky has called for maximum coordination with European allies as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin prepare to hold a summit on the war in Ukraine without him.

Tens of thousands of people protest across Israel against the government's decision to expand its war in Gaza.

South Korea says North Korea has started to dismantle loudspeakers used to broadcast propaganda across the border.

Also in this podcast.

Well, it is a gorgeous day here in Atlanta and a great day to make history.

Jin Pao, the first female umpire to ever work a regular season major league baseball game.

For the first time in more than 150 years, a woman is umpiring an MLB game.

We start in Ukraine where the diplomatic flurry is intensifying ahead of a planned meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska next Friday.

President Zelensky has not been invited, and he's made it clear he won't surrender any territory to Russia.

Meanwhile, the US Vice President J.D.

Vance held talks on Saturday in the UK with the British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and several national security advisers from Europe, Ukraine and the US.

Separately, President Zelensky has been speaking to his European allies to shore up support for his position.

In his nightly address, Mr.

Zelensky said he'd spent Saturday coordinating with European allies.

The meeting was constructive.

All our messages were conveyed.

Our arguments are being heard.

The risks are being taken into account.

The path to peace for Ukraine must be determined together together and only together with Ukraine.

And all the partners share the same understanding of the need for a ceasefire for an end to the killings.

Only one actor stands against this, Putin.

His only card is the ability to kill and he's trying to sell the cessation of killings at the highest possible price.

Yuri Sak is a former advisor to Ukraine's defense minister.

He told the BBC the Ukrainian people have fought too hard to give in.

Of course we want peace and we will negotiate in good faith.

But our territory is defined by our basic law, our constitution.

Our president said it yesterday very clearly.

So, regardless of what is being discussed, you know, in any other part of the world without Ukraine's presence, it has to take into account our constitution.

It has to take into account the fact of illegal aggression and annexation of parts of Ukrainian territory.

And it's almost underplaying it when we call it territories.

These are territories which are already covered in Ukrainian blood.

And we believe that the US has the leverage.

Donald Trump personally has all the means that it needs to force Russia into a meaningful and just negotiating process.

And here are some views from the streets of Kyiv.

I'm against it.

Otherwise our struggle will have all been for nothing.

And we're just supposed to accept that Putin can take our territory.

He won't stop there, that's for sure.

I don't consider Putin to be someone worth negotiating with.

No negotiations with him are worth the time.

It won't lead to anything.

Ukraine should be present at the negotiations between Trump and Putin, as well as Europe.

Only then and under certain conditions might we finally expect to see some kind of lasting peace.

If we give up our territories, Putin will want more after a while.

I don't think we should do this.

But we'll see what they decide.

The BBC's defence correspondent, Jonathan Beale, who's also in the Ukrainian capital, explained why President Zelensky wasn't invited to the Alaska talks.

Well, I think a simple reason is that President Putin doesn't want him there.

I think Donald Trump was open to that idea.

He talked about a trilateral, and it's still possible that might happen.

But President Putin has always resisted calls to meet President Zelensky.

President Zelensky's been keen, but President Putin says certain conditions, which he hasn't set out, must be met before they meet.

So that's the obstacle.

Nevertheless, we know that Donald Trump has been very, very keen to meet President Putin since he entered office for the second time.

And he's talked about a summit with him.

He wants to do a deal on Ukraine, and that is the bigger prize for him.

So he's going ahead.

I think, you know, part of the reason there's meetings going on involving US officials, European officials,

and part of the reason Donald Trump has spoken to President Zelensky in the past is that he knows they're going to have to get Ukrainian support.

But ultimately, Donald Trump wants to do a deal, and he is more focused on that than he he probably is on the detail.

Well, he mentioned, didn't he, President Trump, a territory swap in a possible peace deal.

What could that entail, do you think?

Well, we don't know the detail yet.

But yes, he's talking about swapping territory, which he says will be to the benefit of both countries.

But it's hard to see how it's going to be to the benefit of Ukraine, because it is Russia that holds Ukraine territory.

Ukraine has a tiny sliver still of Kursk in the north, but it is a tiny sliver.

So it will be Ukraine that will be asked to give up some of its territory.

Now, President Putin might not get all that he wants.

Remember, he said he wants essentially the entire Donbass region, which is Luhansk and Donetsk.

He also wants Zaporizhia, and he also wants Kherson.

At the moment, he has got less of Kherson and Zaporizhia than he has the other two districts where the fighting has been fiercest.

But ultimately, as President Zelensky has made very clear today, that would not be acceptable within the constraints of the Ukrainian constitution, which does not allow the ceding of land to another foreign country.

There'd have to essentially be a national referendum on that.

So at the moment, any swap, it's hard to see how it would benefit Ukraine, and it certainly would more likely benefit Russia.

Maybe not everything Putin wants, but certainly more the territory that he's been fighting for.

Jonathan Beale in Ukraine.

Details of the latest proposals regarding Ukraine have been leaking because the US has been briefing European leaders about what's going on and they have been talking to journalists.

One of the fullest accounts is in the Wall Street Journal.

Owen Bennett-Jones spoke to one of the people who wrote that piece, Bojan Banchewski, the paper's chief European correspondent who's based in Berlin in Germany.

He was asked, what are the key elements of the proposals that President Putin put to the US envoy Steve Witkoff when they met in the Kremlin last week?

Number one, Putin asked for Ukraine to withdraw from the eastern region of Donetsk and pull these troops out and leave it to Russia.

And in return, he would freeze the fighting, introduce a ceasefire.

And then in the next phase of the agreement, the contact line across the entire front line, which is enormously long in Ukraine, would be frozen and would become de facto boundary between the two nations.

That is obviously hugely controversial now with President Zelensky because it involves giving up territory that Russia at the moment cannot take by force, but Russia doesn't seem to be offering any territory in return.

Looking at it in the round, basically the Russians are saying Ukraine has to give up territory it holds in this first phase and get nothing back, really, except a ceasefire, no security guarantees, none of the things that Ukraine's been talking about.

So it doesn't seem like the Ukrainians would be able to go along with it.

On the face of it, that is entirely correct.

However, the devil's in the details.

What is very, very interesting to me, as someone who's been kind of closely observing this for three years now, almost four years, essentially Putin crossed his own red line.

We must remember that until this offer was made, the absolute red line for Putin was that the four regions where there's fighting at the moment, and they're Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, all of them are part of the Russian Federation in his mind, because he had them written into the Russian constitution

right at the beginning of the war in 2022, and they are non-negotiable.

He was claiming this is Russian soil now, and there's no talk about it.

We will take it.

Now he's done a bit of a U-turn and he says, okay, give me the one region and we'll just freeze the front line in the rest of the region.

So he's literally crossing his own red line.

This is a big, big move for him.

It quite clearly indicates that the pressure of sanctions and tariffs and punitive measures from Donald Trump is working.

And the other thing, which is very, very important to remember, he did not ask from Vitkov that any deal should involve the so-called demilitarization of Ukraine, which has also been a red line so far, effectively meaning that he wants to curb and neuter the armed forces of Ukraine or denazification, which is a kind of a shorthand for regime change in Kiev.

These things were never demanded in the last meeting.

So it's a huge kind of shift in the Russian position in terms of their red lines.

And it's nothing to sneer at.

There is movement here and obviously not in a way that seems acceptable to the Ukrainians at the moment.

Boyan Panchewski from the Wall Street Journal.

As we record this podcast, the European leaders who held talks with President Zelensky on Saturday have insisted that any peace deal must be negotiated with Ukraine's full consent.

In a joint statement, the leaders of the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Finland, and the European Commission said they would uphold Ukrainian sovereignty.

They vowed to continue military, financial, and diplomatic backing for Kyiv, rejecting any change of borders by force.

The leaders said they supported President Trump's efforts to end the war in Ukraine and presented their own peace proposals to Washington ahead of Mr.

Trump's planned talks with President Putin next Friday.

In Israel, tens of thousands of people protested across the country against the government's decision to expand its war in Gaza.

Families of hostages held in the territory say the plan, which includes the occupation of Gaza City, will put their relatives at the mercy of Hamas.

Lishe Miran Lavi is the wife of one of the hostages, Omri Miran.

She spoke at the demonstration in Tel Aviv.

Now the government has decided to expand the world and push deeper into Gaza.

But my husband is still dead.

Every invasion, every bullet, every airstrike could cost him his life.

This isn't just a military decision.

It could be a death sentence for the people we love most.

I'm terrified.

I'm angry.

I won't stay silent.

Meanwhile, Arab and Muslim countries have joined widespread condemnation of Israel's latest plans.

Earlier, a senior Palestinian official told the BBC that Qatari and Egyptian mediators had submitted new proposals to revive the ceasefire talks.

Our correspondent, Emma Nader, sent us this report from Jerusalem.

Israel's plans have provoked outrage, and now there's an attempt to breathe new life into the collapsed ceasefire negotiations.

Mediators are said to have put forward new initiatives to their American counterparts, hoping to avert Israel's military assault on Gaza City that could have devastating consequences for civilians and Israeli hostages.

In Spain, the US Envoy Steve Witkoff met the Prime Minister of Qatar, a key mediator, but it remains unclear how long-standing gaps in the talks might be bridged.

Israel's plans to escalate the war have also prompted a growing coalescence of its critics, both in Europe and in the Middle East.

Turkey has called for an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

On a visit to Egypt, its foreign minister called for a united front of Muslim countries.

Hakan Fidan said his country categorically rejects the Israeli plan, which he said was a new phase in Israel's expansionist and genocidal policies.

He added that the Islamic world must act in solidarity against such a move.

In Gaza, people have reacted with distress and fear to Israel's plan to escalate the war.

Gaza's one million inhabitants are now faced with packing up homes and tents and the prospect of another forced displacement.

In Nusayret camp today, there was a deadly reminder of how desperate people's basic needs are.

Video footage shared by a local journalist shows Palestinians rushing to the site of an aid drop when a young boy is crushed to death by a falling crate.

Here in the UK, police have arrested more than 460 people at a rally outside Parliament in London in support of a banned pro-Palestinian group, Palestine Action.

Many of those taking part on Saturday held placards with the words, I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.

Those who are charged with specific offences could face up to 14 years in prison.

The organisation, Palestine Action, was prescribed under terrorism legislation after its supporters broke into a Royal Air Force base in June and sprayed paint on military aircraft.

Our correspondent Frankie McCamley was at the demonstration in Parliament Square in central London.

As each protester was walked or carried away by police from Parliament Square, the crowds chanted and clapped.

As Big Ben chimed, people pulled out their white pieces of card and black markers and wrote, I oppose genocide, I support Palestine action.

They then sat and waited patiently to be arrested.

If they ban Palestine action, next it's going to be what other groups next?

Until we're just no longer allowed to protest anything.

And that's

the opposite of democracy.

Because I believe in freedom of speech.

And what this government is trying to do is to keep the authoritarian

and it's extremely dangerous.

It took police hours to work through the crowds.

One man, after being arrested once, came back only to be re-arrested.

At times, it was tense, especially when opposition protesters voiced their opinions too.

Palestine Action was prescribed as a terror organisation last month by the Home Office, which said its decision was based on strong security advice following serious attacks.

That decision will be reviewed by the High Court in November.

Until then, protesters say they will continue to take action.

Frankie McCamley in Central London.

In Japan, people in the city of Nagasaki have marked the 80th anniversary of the moment the US dropped an atomic bomb on the 9th of August 1945.

Twin cathedral bells rang in unison for the first time since the bombing.

The BBC's Shyma Khalil was there.

At 11:02 Japan time, Nagasaki fell into silent prayers as the peace bell tolled, marking the moment the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city.

the second to hit the country.

Survivors and dignitaries gathered in a solemn memorial ceremony in the peace park, remembering the dead and cautioning the living.

80 years on

expected this world.

This fight must end now, immediately.

No more Hiroshima.

No more Nagasaki.

No more wars.

The atomic bomb, codenamed Fat Man, was was bigger and more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima three days before.

It wiped out whole communities in seconds, killing tens of thousands instantly.

With thousands more suffering from the effects of toxic radiation, Japan is the only nation to have experienced the devastating impact of nuclear warfare.

It hastened the country's surrender and the end of the Second World War.

But for people here, this is not just about the past.

Being in a place like this really makes me wish for a more peaceful world, especially with all the wars and crises that are going on right now.

It makes me realize that it wasn't all that long ago.

But still, as the days and years go by, more people might start to forget about the war, thinking of it as something from the distant past.

When I think about that, it makes me think all the more that it's something we must never forget.

Many leaders or politicians around the world say that possessing nuclear weapons is for deterrence or for peace, but I strongly believe that such things should never be tolerated.

Last year, a group representing survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.

Many expressing deep concerns about the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine and the proliferation of nuclear armament.

Eighty years ago, victims begged for water as their skin burned.

At the ceremony, water offerings were made in a show of respect to those who perished in nuclear fire.

Events ended with a song by school children, a message of peace from a city that rose from the ashes of nuclear war.

One of the survivors whose organization won the Nobel Peace Prize was Tarumi Tanaka.

He was 13 in 1945 and living in a house just over three kilometers from where the nuclear bomb exploded in Nagasaki.

He spoke to Sean Lei about the day his life and those of thousands of others changed forever, and you may find parts of the interview distressing.

So, on that day, August 9th,

I was a 13-year-old in the first year of the junior high school.

I was at home reading a book, and then all of a sudden, we heard this huge explosion sound as well.

And I knew that I could tell that there was a B-21 plane coming,

but I never imagined that they would be coming to attack.

However,

all of a sudden, after hearing the sound of a plane,

there was the explosion

and everything around me turned completely white.

This was extremely shocking for me.

I felt that then my life was really at risk.

So I rushed down from the second floor of our home where I was to the first floor.

There I was crouching down.

This is when the blast and the wind from the explosion came to us.

You went to search for other members of your family who were closer to the center of the explosion.

When you found them, what did you find there?

So initially, in the area between the hypocenter and where I was at the time, the bomb was dropped.

There were some mountains and hills in between.

However, I had two aunts and their families living much closer to the hypocenter.

So on the third day after the bomb was dropped, we started to go closer to see how they had fared.

It was beyond anything I had ever imagined.

An area of around three to four kilometers was a place with tens of hundreds of thousands of people had been living and working.

and this whole area was completely devastated into ruins.

There were so many dead bodies that were left neglected.

These people who were wounded horribly

were just lying as they were

without anything to be done for them.

But rather than continue to feel that shock, I somehow just had to close off my heart so that I felt no emotions and became completely numb.

And it was how we were able to continue to search for the bodies of our aunts and family.

We were able to first of all find where the family of one of my aunts had been,

but all of their bodies were burned, charred, completely black, and they had just been left lying there.

The family of another aunt, their house, had miraculously not burned.

My uncle was there and very seriously burned and almost dead.

My aunt had already passed away.

We found her body there, and then we had to cremate her ourselves in the field there as well.

Another uncle, who had not been injured at all at the time, didn't have any external injuries.

However, 10 days later, he passed away from the effect of acute radiation,

even though externally, physically, he seemed completely fine.

Within that very short time, because of the internal exposure to radiation, his life was taken away.

Tirumi Tanaka, survivor of the nuclear bomb attack on Nagasaki on the 9th of August in 1945, and campaigner against nuclear weapons.

South Korea's military says North Korea has begun dismantling loudspeakers used to broadcast propaganda over the border.

South Korea took down some of its own speakers earlier this week.

Our Asia-Pacific editor Mickey Bristol reports: Over the years, both countries have periodically blasted propaganda broadcasts towards the other side.

South Korea often played K-pop songs.

The North liked to transmit unsettling noises, such as howling animals.

But shortly after becoming president in Seoul in June, Lee Jim-myung ended the South's broadcasts.

North Korea followed suit.

Pyongyang has now copied South Korea's decision to take down at least some loudspeakers.

North Korea appears to be reacting positively to Mr.

Lee's desire to lessen tension between the two countries.

Mickey Bristow.

Still to come.

Take X dragon, 400 feet flashdown.

Braced for splashdown.

SpaceX copies 400 meters and crew are braced for splashdown.

Four astronauts have arrived safely back on Earth after spending nearly five months on board the International Space Station.

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To learn more, get involved, and help us spread the word about the importance of fire and carbon monoxide readiness, visit causeforalarm.org.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

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The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

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The floor store, your area flooring authority.

Officials in Sudan's war-scarred capital, Khartoum, say they're discovering new graves every day as volunteers exhume the dead so relatives can give them a proper burial.

For two years, the capital was the scene of fierce fighting between two rival military forces who killed thousands of civilians.

Our Africa regional editor Will Ross reports: A health ministry official says graves are being found all over Khartoum, including in front of homes, in schools, and mosques.

They're not deep because when the two rival armies were fighting for control of the city, people had to bury their loved ones close by and in a hurry.

Now proper burials can take place because the front lines have moved further west.

In Darfur, around a million people are trapped in El Fasha, being starved by the rapid support forces who want to capture the city from the army.

In Kordofan, civilians are in danger from military airstrikes, and the RSF have carried out massacres in villages.

And staying in Sudan, the conflict has affected other areas, including its archaeological sites.

As one journalist put it, catastrophic damage has been done to the country's past as well as to its present.

Tokami Abul Ghassim is a research assistant at the University of Cambridge here in England and director of the Jebel Bakal Excavation Project.

He spoke to Owen Bennett-Jones about the the site and the work that's taking place there.

The site of Jebel Barkal is Sudan's World Heritage Site.

It's characterized by numerous temples, palaces, and pyramids.

It was the capital of the Kingdom of Kush, who ruled Nubia and Egypt for over a century.

The war actually started in 2023, turning Karima city, where the Jebalbarkal Archaeological Site is located, into a strategic military location.

So the site itself was not really had this direct impact from the war.

Unlike the national museums in Khartoum, for example, it was extremely destroyed and looted.

You're continuing to do the archaeology despite the chaos and suffering around you.

Why are you doing that?

Sudan is a very rich country with archaeology, you know, temples, palaces, pyramids, and we want the world to know that.

And it's very important for us as a nation to be recognized by others with our culture, with our bridge civilizations and so on.

Also, Sudan was ignored for a long time during the war.

So the only way to be recognized for us, that's how we see it, is to do even more, to preserve what's left.

There's so much suffering in Sudan.

This war is causing so many problems for so many people.

Isn't addressing that a higher priority than preserving history?

Well, we're working in both.

We're doing community engagement.

We're hiring people in our projects.

So we're not just archaeologists who go there, earn money to do archaeology.

We hire people who live around the archaeological sites and we give them daily rates to support their families, which is very important because there's no job opportunities at the moment.

We're also involving, you know, in lots of aspects with the community and the organizations doing humanitarian stuff.

So it's not all just about archaeology.

And I think you were there in April, weren't you, last?

What was it like then?

We did an excavation at the site.

The situation was very bad.

Everything is very expensive.

So much people, there's no places to live.

And the day I arrived, actually, the RSF attacked dams and water electricity distribution centers.

So leaving the town without water and electricity until today, actually.

So people were drinking water directly from the Nile and processed water.

and spending a lot of money just to feed ourselves.

The kingdom of Kush, which you are studying, achieved greater stability and greater achievements in terms of putting up these incredible pyramids and other structures than Sudan is managing two and a half thousand years later.

We're always saying we better look back, you know, more than looking in front of us.

The thing has been done during the Kingdom of Kush, which consists of three major kingdoms, and they achieved more pyramids than anyone in the world.

To Kameh Abu Qasim.

And now to the U.S.

state of Georgia.

Well, it is a gorgeous day here in Atlanta and a great day to make history.

Jen Powell, the first female umpire to ever work a regular season major league baseball game.

After all her hard work in the minor leagues, today is the day.

Whereas you heard there, a woman Jen Powell umpired a major league baseball game for the first time since the competition started 150 years ago.

There have been female umpires in baseball before, but none have featured in the MLB's regular season.

Hannah Kieser is a sports reporter who specializes in baseball.

Major League Baseball is almost 30 years behind NBA.

There have been women refereeing basketball games for almost 30 years, 10 years even behind NFL, which we think of football as being the ultimate hyper-masculine space.

And they've had women refereeing for 10 years.

They even had a woman refereeing in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago.

I actually talked to Jen Powell back in 2021 when she was still umpiring in the minors.

Being a Major League umpire is just like a super exclusive club.

They only bring up new ones when umpires retire.

That's not to sort of excuse the systemic barriers she may have faced or sexism that came into play, but I think it's just a really slow process for any umpires to get called up.

Today, she's umpiring on the base pass.

So tomorrow will sort of be the bigger debut because she'll be actually calling balls and strikes behind home plates.

And that's the thing that as fans, we really notice an umpire, whether they're good at it.

There are online portals that are tracking how many calls umpires get right, so it'll be really interesting to see how she does calling balls and strikes.

Sports reporter Hannah Kieser.

And finally, four astronauts have arrived safely back on Earth after spending nearly five months on board the International Space Station.

Their 17-hour journey home in a SpaceX Dragon capsule involved slowing down from speeds of more than 16,000 miles an hour using Earth's atmosphere as a brake before parachuting down into the water off California's coast.

This was the commentary, Moments from Touchdown.

SpaceX copies 400 meters and crew are braced for splashdown.

Spacecraft is now about 200 meters above the ocean and has slowed down to about 30 kilometers per hour.

Again, it will continue to slow down until about 16 kilometers per hour.

Dragon Endurance spacecraft carrying crew 10 back home to Earth following their five-month mission moments away from splashdown.

SpaceX copy Splashdown.

And there is Dragon Endurance as it sits on top of the ocean off the coast of San Diego, California.

Mission accomplished.

And that's it from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.

If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.

Use the hashtag GlobalNewsPod.

This edition was mixed by Rob Fanner.

The producers were Liam McSheffrey and Judy Frankel.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Valerie Sanderson.

Until next time, bye-bye.

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