Trump's envoy meets Putin as Ukraine ceasefire deadline looms

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

Hello, I'm Nick Miles and at 13 Hours GMT on Wednesday the 6th of August, these are our main stories.

The U.S.

Special Envoy has met President Putin in Moscow as Washington's latest demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine draws closer.

Survivors of Hiroshima remember 80 years after the atomic bomb destroyed the city.

WhatsApp says it has shut down almost 7 million accounts linked to scammers.

Also in this podcast.

I got fired on the spot in front of everybody because I couldn't fit in the minuscule white trousers they'd give me to wear for the show.

After a fashion brand is deemed to have made its female models look too thin, we look at the pressure across the industry.

The clock is ticking, counting down the hours until the Friday deadline set by President Trump for Russia to declare a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Moscow faces the prospect of more sanctions and steep tariffs if it doesn't comply.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has been stressing once again what he wants to happen.

It is very important that Moscow has begun to heed to the pressure from the world, from the United States of America, from the threat of tougher sanctions for the war.

Indeed, one of the key sanctions tracks is against Russian oil.

For Russia to agree to peace, it must run out of money for the war.

We are working towards this, and I am grateful to everyone in the world who supports us.

The US envoy Steve Witkoff is in Moscow for talks.

Pictures show him being greeted by a smiling President Putin, and they went on to have a three-hour long meeting.

Our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, says it's the fifth time they've met this year, but on this occasion, there's a difference.

Well, something has changed, and that is the tone of the general conversation between Moscow and Washington.

When you look at the previous visits that Steve Witkoff made to Russia, and he came here four times in just over two months, at that time, the United States was putting all the pressure on Kiev, not on Moscow.

It was criticising the government of President Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin.

But in recent weeks, President Trump has grown increasingly and publicly frustrated with and irritated by the Kremlin's unwillingness to sign up to a comprehensive, unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine.

And that has brought us to where we are now, with Donald Trump having imposed an ultimatum to Russia to end the fighting.

It began with a 50-day ultimatum, that was reduced to a 10- to 12-day ultimatum, and then a 10-day ultimatum.

And that runs out at the end of this week.

So this visit, these talks between Mr.

Witkoff and President Putin are taking place just a couple of days before Donald Trump's latest deadline expires.

Now, what could potentially be on the table from America in terms of these secondary sanctions we're hearing?

So, these are sanctions that would be put on importers of Russian oil like China and India.

Do you think that could really hurt Moscow?

If that actually happened, if Donald Trump goes through with this threat to impose hefty tariffs on countries like India and China that buy Russian oil, then there's no doubt that would hurt the Russian economy, which is still heavily reliant on exporting its energy.

But it's a big if.

And certainly in the last few days, a number of Russian commentators in the newspapers here have suggested that, well, Donald Trump isn't going to go through with this because,

in their words, it would also damage the American economy too.

So that's that's a big question.

Also, Donald Trump himself has publicly said, well, you know, the Russians are very good at getting around sanctions.

Having said that, there's no doubt that Russia would like to avoid this scenario of secondary sanctions and additional sanctions on Russia.

So that is why I think Steve Witkoff is here.

Washington says that it was Moscow that requested the meeting.

The Russians haven't confirmed that.

But it'll be interesting to see whether some kind of deal, some kind of agreement will be reached.

We don't know what's in Steve Witkoff's briefcase.

We don't know what kind of a deal or proposal he may have brought from Donald Trump.

And we don't know whether Vladimir Putin will be in a mood to consider it.

So if Moscow is, as Steve suggested, dug into the conflict, despite what America does, where does that leave Kyiv?

Vitaly Shevchenko is from BBC Monitoring.

When it comes to key politicians in Kiev, they've been going out of their way to praise Donald Trump and thank him for his efforts, basically massaging his ego.

Voldomir Zelensky, for example, the two presidents yesterday had a telephone conversation.

And in his tweet, following that conversation, Voldyma Zelensky thanked America four times for its efforts to end this war.

However, when you look at what

commentators in Ukraine are saying, I have to say, Nick, that their expectations are close to zero, basically.

Their view of Steve Witkoff is that he is naive and inexperienced, and

there have been so many rounds of talks that resulted in nothing.

One radio station,

Radio NV in Kiev, recalled that back in March, Steve Witkoff was all smiles, all happy, coming from Moscow with a portrait of Donald Trump.

That was,

in the view of that radio station,

the most tangible result of their talks.

So yesterday, this radio station asked, so is he going to bring back a portrait of Melania Trump?

Is that what we're going to have now?

Vitaly Shevchenko.

It is 80 years since the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the densely populated city of Hiroshima in Japan.

It was the first time time such a weapon had been used and it hastened the end of the Second World War.

But around 140,000 people were killed by the immediate blast and thousands more died later from radiation sickness.

On Wednesday, ceremonies were held at the city's Peace Memorial Park with a minute of silence at 8.15 a.m.

local time to mark the precise moment the bomb was dropped.

Howard Kakita was seven years old at the time, living less than a kilometre from the epicenter.

It was a Monday morning, about halfway to school.

We saw a bunch of children coming back towards our directions, our students.

And they told us that the school was canceled because there were still some enemy aircraft in the neighborhood.

So happily, my brother and I, we ran home, changed into our play clothes.

I went into a bathhouse, which is a separate structure apart from the house.

That's when the bomb exploded.

I didn't notice the flash nor hear the boom.

I was knocked out instantaneously.

I have no recollection of the

blast taking place.

People in the outskirts, you know, they saw a definite flash followed by tremendous boom that destroyed, collapsed all the buildings in the neighborhood.

However, I was knocked out.

And when I came to

a number of minutes later, and I'm not sure how long I was out, the structure that I was in was on top of me, and I could smell smoke.

However, I wasn't seriously injured, so I was able to dig myself out and I went into the courtyard of our home where I located my brother.

He had a slight radiation burn on his forehead.

My grandfather

was

with the help of other men

trying to dig my grandmother, who was in the kitchen.

She was buried under the structure there.

And she was standing next to a window when the blast took place and the showers of glass from the window embedded in her body and she was bleeding pretty badly

when they dug her out.

And all four of us survived.

although 50% of the people in our neighborhood died.

However, my maternal grandparents, who lived about

two or three miles from the hypocenter, my grandmother's body was never found.

She just disappeared.

Grandfather was seriously injured.

He died a month later from the head injuries.

The scar runs deep.

The physical scars, I'm sure you've seen, but the mental one stick with you forever.

I was 87-year-old Howard Kakita, with the the brutal destructive power of that attack convinced the man known as the father of the atomic bomb, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, to campaign for nuclear cooperation between the great powers to secure a more peaceful world.

And today's commemorations have reignited that debate.

Yeah, a human chain of protesters gathered there across the park from the formal services calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

And in a speech, the mayor of Hiroshima warned of an accelerating military build-up around the world.

Charles Oppenheimer, the physicist's grandson, runs an organization called the Oppenheimer Project.

Nick Robinson has been speaking to him about the lessons of the past and the risks we face now.

My grandfather was very focused following the war on pathways to reduce what he saw coming, which was a possible arms race, which him and many, many scientists thought would end in an inevitable destruction of humanity.

They forecast the entire arms race and saw a way to prevent it.

Now we're going into an era where there's tri-parties, particularly U.S., China, and Russia, that have a lot of tension.

And that's even a much more dangerous and unstable situation.

So I think it's really critical to keep understanding that the threat of nuclear weapons have never left us.

It's by far the most dangerous thing in the world, even though people forget about this 24 by 7 armed ticking time bomb that could destroy the world in an unstoppable chain reaction.

And you have argued, and you have argued to Donald Trump, that those three great powers, the United States, Russia, and China, need to cooperate to reduce this threat.

It doesn't require negotiating a perfect peace before you discuss nuclear weapons.

It's the most important thing, and no matter how many tensions there are, example, between U.S.

and Russia with a conflict in Ukraine.

You still must speak about the threats of nuclear weapons.

And same thing with China.

There's a huge amount of tensions around trade.

Well, you still need to talk about the thing that we have mutual interests in, which is the reduction of a threat of a total nuclear war.

And it's something that Trump has advocated for several times, saying that he thinks he can encourage dialogue on reducing weapons threat.

And so I really try to support that idea, even though it's a radical sounding idea in the midst of tension that we could have an increase in peace around this one specific issue.

What about the danger beyond the great powers?

We saw a confrontation between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India.

We've, of course, seen what happened in Iran.

Isn't the worry that it is beyond the United States, Russia, and China that the threat may lie?

There has been proliferation of nuclear weapons, but only up to nine nations.

And there's Israel's a particular danger to the world of being a nuclear armed state, undeclared, not a member of the non-proliferation treaty.

Pakistan and North Korea are similar outside of the norms.

They are dangerous, but it's not, for example, Iran had the potential to someday, probably six months or 12 months at the fastest, have a single nuclear weapon.

That's not the same danger of having thousands of weapons pointed at each other on an automatic system that's unstoppable.

That's what we think about when we think about nuclear war, something that's so destructive it literally destroys the world.

That is not the same thing as one nuclear weapon, which is horrible as it is in an act of terror, would not automatically destroy the world.

To be clear, you believe that Israel's undeclared possession of nuclear weapons poses a threat to the world, do you, Mr.

Oppenheimer?

Absolutely.

They've used it to attack other countries, the power of their weapons without admitting it, including Iran killing negotiators around

and their families and their children around nuclear weapons stuff.

Unbelievably dangerous country.

And so no country should have it, but especially those that are outside of the norms.

The U.S., China, and Russia have agreed in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to remove their weapons.

Let me end with the words of your grandfather.

He said,

after the use of nuclear weapons on August the 6th,

the peoples of the world must unite.

Feels that we're a long way away from that, doesn't it?

We are a long way from that, but at the same time, we've survived, and I think that would give him

some hope there, that if we've made it this far, we can make it further.

Charles Oppenheimer.

And just a note about Mr.

Oppenheimer's discussion of Israel.

It is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, although Israel neither confirms nor denies this.

WhatsApp is the world's most popular messaging service with over 3 billion users every month.

So it is perhaps not surprising that there are a huge number of scammers using the app, too.

The platform's parent company, Meta, says it shut down almost 7 million scamming accounts in the first half of this year alone, most of them in Southeast Asia.

Meta says it's also rolling out new anti-scam measures.

Our cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy, took me through the kind of scams that appear to users on the platform.

And as, you know, my job as cyber correspondent, I'm very familiar with these kind of scams.

So I've often sat in them and watched them, not sort of being duped by them.

And what you often find is that the conversation is very lively amongst these people.

And I've often wondered whether or not any of them are actually real, and how many of them are sort of people like me who are watching.

Because it seems to be they're all sharing screenshots of how much money they've made through various cryptocurrency schemes.

And the idea is that you get lured in and they try and get you to sign up to their scheme.

And it can start with a message on a dating app.

You know, in some cases, you start a romantic relationship, which eventually turns into this type of thing.

But often these scams, they end up, the kind of the

point in which money is exchanged is in these encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram.

Because of course, that's really hard for places like Meta and other companies to see what's going on because these are end-to-end encrypted, which means that only the people inside those chats have access to the content.

So these accounts have been shut down, but this is a highly organized, very lucrative organisation.

There are things called fraud factories working out of parts of Southeast Asia, maybe along the border with Myanmar.

There's a lot of money in this.

Don't want to just open new accounts?

Absolutely.

Well, Meta obviously is celebrating this as a big win, and no doubt it is a lot of accounts, nearly 7 million.

But it is a, in the words of WICH, which is a consumer group here in the UK, it's a drop in the ocean, really, in terms of

the problem here, because billions is being made.

And we know now that some of these, as you say, these operations are like

scam centers essentially.

And in some cases, it's forced labor.

They get people in Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, in these compounds.

They take their passports away and they say, right, you're going to scam Westerners.

This is your task.

You've got to hit certain

dollar amounts.

Otherwise, you don't get the certain perks of living in the way that they do.

So this is happening at a huge scale.

And this is only really the start of some sort of action being taken place.

Joe Tidy.

Still to come on this edition of the Global News Podcast.

In and amongst it all was just this little green book, a real treasure, which we pulled out, had a look at and realised, oh wow, this is a true first edition first impression of The Hobbit.

The pristine first edition found in a house clearance goes up for auction.

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The United Nations has said that it is deeply alarmed by reports that Israel plans to occupy the entire Gaza Strip.

The Assistant Secretary General Miroslav Jenka said that there is no military solution to the conflict with Hamas, and he described in vivid detail the scope of suffering on the ground in Gaza, saying Palestinians were living in squalid, inhumane conditions on a daily basis.

And yet, the basic functions of life go on.

More than 100 babies are born in Gaza every day, on average, according to humanitarian groups.

Charlene Rodriguez has been speaking to Huda, a young woman who gave birth last week.

I delivered my first baby a week ago, and giving birth to my baby girl after enduring days of hunger,

and relentless loss feels like both a gift and a heavy responsibility.

She is a miracle in this time.

It's like a light in a land covered by darkness here in Gaza.

And also, she is a burden I carry with love because I now hold the duty not only myself, but also the life of my baby girl.

I see her tiny, innocent hands and wonder how I will shield her from a world that nearly broke me.

What is the baby's name?

Her name is Eileen.

It means softness with purpose, purpose and it means gentle strength.

It means the quiet that refuses to be broken.

I'm going to ask the annoying questions.

Does she feed well and does she sleep well?

Definitely not.

When I cry, it's not out of weakness.

There is no steady electricity, no safe shelter, no properly enough food.

When the chilling begins, my entire body tends to cover hers, to be her shield, and somehow in all of this, I am supposed to be soft and smiling.

Are you breastfeeding, Lean, or is there a need for formula?

And is it easy to find?

It's not easy to find it at all.

And if you find it, I will find it in a very, very, very high prices.

So I depend on the breastfeeding naturally to not buy this formula in this price.

Okay, Okay, I bought one to be with me as an aid, but also I depend on the breastfeeding and so tiring to depend on this

only.

How much is a bottle of formula?

From 35 to 40 dollars one can of formula.

In the early days, there's a relentless amount of washing to do.

Clothes, bottles.

How are you managing with an acute shortage of water?

There is no water as we had before the war.

So I use

napkins on the diapers to clean it.

The water here coming

every three days or every four days.

So we fill all the tanks, all the bottles.

And in these days, we manage all our housework, all our

washing, also washing our clothes, washing whatever we want.

want.

That was Huda, one of Gaza's new mothers, speaking to Charlene Rodriguez.

Two years ago, a group of migrants left China searching for what they hoped would be a better life.

Many traveled thousands of kilometers across the ocean to Ecuador and from there began an even more treacherous journey north over land, sometimes trekking through jungles towards the US-Mexico border.

Most of the migrants made it to America and have settled there, some more so than others.

Sean Yuan was in touch with several of them during their trip.

He's now been to California to hear how US politics is shaping their lives.

I'm going to Monterey Park.

It's a suburb of Los Angeles in California.

It is the place where the biggest concentration of Chinese immigrants and it's also the place where most Chinese immigrants who came to the US a few years ago first came to and then from that point on they would disperse to other parts of California or New York.

Those are the two main destinations for migrants.

I didn't put in a lot of thought into making this a home.

It's just a mini cargo van with the back seats folded down.

I met James, which is not his real name, next to his cargo van in Palm Springs in Southern California, where he now delivers food and sleeps in the back of the van.

I bought three sleeping bags, laid two down as a mattress, and one to cover.

Very easy, no modification.

Been sleeping in it every night for 10 months now.

I'm still young.

There's a guy I know, 60 years old, with diabetes, taking insulin.

He was also sleeping in his car doing deliveries.

Life can be tough here, but James still believes he's made the right choice.

I'm lucky.

At around 30, after enduring a lot, I got here.

I feel extra grateful.

If there's a god or higher power, I thank them.

But not everyone feels that way.

Kevin, also not his real name, is a man in his 30s from southeastern China who arrived in the US two years ago with high hopes.

He is now a cook at a Chinese restaurant in San Gabriel Valley, another suburb of Los Angeles with a large population of Chinese diaspora.

In a park where he and his friends gather for a picnic over a weekend, he told me that he felt let down.

I used to think America was this country where if you're smart, honest, and hardworking, you live a good life, that you can build a beautiful future.

But now, with figures like Musk and Trump leading the way, they seem to represent the values of most Americans.

Do I feel settled?

I really can't answer that, because Trump's actions in LA are making us feel everything so uncertain.

Rioting was sparked after the Trump administration sent immigration agents to detain unauthorized migrants in the city.

President Trump says the move was necessary for law and order.

President Trump's continuous push to deport undocumented immigrants have sparked protests across the U.S.

Arrests conducted by the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency across Southern California have also introduced a sense of anxiety and fear among the Chinese immigrant community.

Even though the administration says its raids have mostly targeted people with criminal records, critics say innocent people have been caught up in the drive.

Many Chinese migrants are worried that they might be be next.

In his 50s, Pan, also from China, shares that sense of uncertainty.

Starting a business, building a life,

I'm not worried about that.

My top priority is to bring my family here.

Before, there was a bit of a worry about not being able to stay.

But now that worry has grown bigger because of Trump's policies.

But there's not much I can do now if that's where the politics is heading.

I spoke with half a dozen Chinese migrants who had come to the US in recent years.

Even though many of them remain hopeful of a better future in America, Donald Trump's attitude towards both immigration and China is casting a long shadow of doubt over their American dreams.

Sean Yuan reporting.

Now to the ethics of fashion.

Two adverts by fashion brand Zara have been banned by the UK regulator for featuring models who it says appeared unhealthily thin.

The advertising standards authority said shadows made one model appear gaunt, while the pose and low-cut design of a shirt in another image showed the model's protruding collarbones.

Stephanie Prentice told me more.

Well Nick, this is the latest move in the UK, which has actually banned two other adverts this year, but does have some of the loosest rules in regulated countries at least around models weight and height.

Now the UK government did consider formal legislation which would regulate the use of what it called very thin models, but for now, it's all mostly self-regulating.

So, these banned adverts, they're by the Spanish brand Zara, and they feature two different models on their app and website, which the UK advertising regulator says breach its rules, which are based on whether the model appears unhealthily thin as they see it, or the ad promotes unrealistic body images.

Now, it's obviously very difficult to discuss what sort of body is unrealistic or not.

Some people are naturally very thin, thinness itself is subjective, but I did speak to a couple of British models before we came on air about the pressures around weight in the industry.

In the peak of my career, I was being told to lose weight quite regularly.

I remember at one point I was eating kind of one or two pieces of sushi for lunch every day, and I had a casting for London Fashion Week show, booked the job the next day I turned up, and then I got fired on the spot in front of everybody because I couldn't fit in the minuscule white trousers they'd give give me to wear for the show.

I've always been naturally slim and slender, but I'm also six foot one.

My hips, for example, are going to be a certain measurement, and I can't change that.

And there can be significant pressure to be thin, and that being thin equates to success.

So, Nick, the obvious argument being that a move away from very thin models being used in ads eases pressure on the models themselves and anyone seeing them or being influenced by them, that we must add, Zara has removed both of the images, but says the models in question had valid health certificates.

And this has happened in other countries as well.

Yes, some countries have taken a firmer stance, and rules are around things like body mass index, so BMI, that's that calculation of your health based on your height and weight.

France created a national law back in 2015, so all professional models need a health certificate with a healthy BMI.

And there's a law around retouched images as well.

And there's heavy penalties.

Agencies and advertisers that don't comply face hefty fines and even up to six months in prison.

Israel is also very strict in similar sort of ways.

Spain and Italy have specific rules around who can walk in fashion weeks, and other countries like Denmark have guidelines that they do take seriously and even include things like annual psychological evaluations.

Stephanie Prentiss.

Now, once upon a time, a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies at Oxford University was marking some exams when he got rather bored.

His name was J.R.R.

Tolkien and what he did next led him to writing the much-loved novel The Hobbit, the prequel to the mighty Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Here's Tolkien himself explaining how it happened.

Well, I remember the beginning.

I wrote it as a relief from a

school certificate.

One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it.

And I wrote on it, in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

As names always generate a story story in my mind, eventually I thought I'd better find out what hobbits were like.

And he did.

The first edition of the novel was published in 1937, and a copy recently surfaced in Bristol, in the west of England.

Discovered by chance, it's in pristine condition and is currently being auctioned.

Bidding closes this evening, Wednesday, here in London.

We've been speaking to Caitlin Riley, who identified the copy.

She's the rare book specialist at Auctioneum, the auction house which is organising the sale.

It came up in a house clearance property just outside Bristol.

My colleague was sending me photographs of the bookshelves, lots of standard books, the kind of thing that I see all the time, and which sadly we can't help with.

And in and amongst it all was just this little green book, a real treasure, which we pulled out, had a look at, and realised, oh, wow, this is a true first edition first impression of The Hobbit, of which only 1,500 were printed.

Clearly, you can imagine many of those haven't survived the test of time, but this one came up and has in beautiful condition.

You just don't see them come to market completely appearing unread.

And when you realised what you were holding in your hands, did your hands suddenly go a bit shaky?

Just a little bit, yeah.

I think my head went quite fuzzy, to be quite honest.

I couldn't quite think straight for a minute.

It was just such an amazing moment.

I really feel like I've got the golden ticket, you know, Willy Wonka.

It's just a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be selling something like this.

Whose career high point I didn't think I'd ever hit, to be quite honest.

Yeah, because it's rare, I think, isn't it, for them not to have some kind of scribbling over it because they were given to kids and a lot of kids scribbled over them.

Yeah, and I mean, it's so, like I said, of the 1500, they were originally issued in dust wrappers.

They estimate something like 50 to have survived in the dust wrapper.

So we already know that the quality of the book wasn't really made to last because a 1937 dust wrapper, really, we should see that surviving most of the time.

But for so few to have survived, we just know that the quality of the paper and the book just wasn't really there because they didn't think then, the publishers, they didn't think that it was going to be something that was going to be very popular.

It was so far out for the literature of the time.

But, you know, as we well know, it took off and became something amazing.

That little clip of J.R.

Tolkien talking about scribbling the beginning on an exam paper.

I wonder if that exam paper exists and whether it's worth, well, what it's worth.

Hopefully I'll find it at a property on the outskirts of Bristol.

Caitlin Riley was speaking to James Kumrasami.

And as we record this podcast, the bidding is currently at $30,000.

And that's all from us for now.

But there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.

If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can 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 Global Newspod.

This edition was mixed by Daniela Varela Hernandez, and the producers were Rebecca Wood and Peter Goffin.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Nick Miles.

And until next time, goodbye.

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