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Trump's call with Putin is big win for Kremlin
“We cannot afford to be reactive,” said Alina Polyakova, President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), responding to the news of President Trump’s recent call with Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s conversation with Putin, which reportedly included discussions on reducing US commitments to NATO, has sent shockwaves through European security circles. Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent remarks suggesting that Europe must take more responsibility for its defense have further fueled uncertainty among US allies.
Polyakova cautioned that authoritarian regimes are watching closely, using AI-driven disinformation and cyber warfare to exploit divisions. “The transatlantic alliance is at a crossroads,” she warned. “This is a moment where democracies must assert their leadership, not retreat.”
With European elections looming and global security tensions rising, the debate over the US commitment to its allies will remain a central issue in Munich in 2025—and one that will shape the future of Western security.
This interview, conducted by Tony Maciulis, is part of the Global Stage series at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft.
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President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Orleans to attend the Super Bowl, on Feb. 9, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Trump to unveil steel tariffs, Paris AI summit begins, Ecuador faces runoff election, Maoist rebels killed, Baltics energized by Europe, Eagles soar over Chiefs
25: Donald Trump says he plans to announce a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports from all countries, including Mexico and Canada. It’s unclear when the tariffs will take effect, but the US president said Sunday that he would make a formal announcement on Monday.
80: Government and industry leaders from at least 80 countries are convening in Paris on Monday and Tuesday as the AI Action Summit gets underway inside the historic Grand Palais. This year’s summit, the third following similar gatherings in Bletchley Park (UK) and Seoul, Korea, is co-hosted by France’s President Emmanuel Macron and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi,and it will feature an open dialogue about AI regulation and innovation at a critical time for both geopolitics and the technology itself. US Vice President JD Vance is attending as he begins his first official trip abroad. GZERO’s Tony Maciulis will be reporting from the summit and bringing us an interview with Paris Peace Forum Director General Justin Vaïsse on Tuesday.
1: Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa was expected to prevail in Sunday’s election and avoid a runoff, but the race against his leftist opponent, Luisa Gonzalez, proved extremely close. Up less than 1% at the time of writing, and with nearly 80% of the ballot boxes counted, Noboa had 44.5% of the vote compared to Gonzalez's 44.1%. If neither candidate secures an outright majority, a runoff will be held on April 13.
31: Security forces battled Maoist rebels in the Bijapur district of Chattisgarh in central India on Sunday, killing 31 insurgents. The left-wing communists, part of the Naxalite movement, have been fighting with India’s government since 1967. Two Indian commandos were also killed in the clash.
3: The three Baltic countries have bid farewell to Russia’s power grid. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania completed their switch from the Russian to the European grid on Sunday. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the move — amid heightened security owing to suspected sabotage of underwater cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea — a new era of freedom for the region.
40-22: The Kansas City Chiefs were hoping for a historic hat-trick Super Bowl win last night in New Orleans, but it wasn’t to be. The Philadelphia Eagles dominated from the start, closing out the first half at 24-0, and finishing the game 40-22, with their quarterback, Jalen Hurts, winning MVP.
Putin's New Year's wishes, again and again!
This is the twenty-fifth time that Vladimir Putin has greeted the new year as ruler of Russia. To mark the occasion, he takes a look back at just how far he has come. Do you remember what was on the billboard charts when he first took power? #PUPPETREGIME
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning PUPPET REGIME series!
Putin's Home Shopping Nyetwork
As Ukraine continues to get aid from the US and EU, Russia's president Vladimir Putin is adopting some Trumpian tactics to bring in more cash of his own. #PUPPETREGIME
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning PUPPET REGIME series!
Ian Explains: Who does China and Russia want to win the US election, Biden or Trump?
What do America’s biggest adversaries have to gain–and lose–from the US presidential election in November? The 2024 Donald Trump vs Joe Biden rematch will be the first time in US history that candidates from both major parties have sat in the Oval Office. So Russia and China have a pretty good idea of what a second term from either candidate might look like, as well as a vested interest in manipulating the outcome in their favor, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.
From Russia’s perspective, the Kremlin has a long and documented history of influencing US elections for Trump. Intelligence agencies have confirmed Russia’s attempts to manipulate the 2016 and 2020 elections in his favor using social media bots, misinformation, bogus news sites, and hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails. But now, intelligence experts and government officials warn China is copying Russia’s playbook, spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation online to amplify support for President Trump and sow distrust among American voters.
Yet Trump regularly attacks China on the campaign trail. He’s accused Beijing of unfair trade practices and currency manipulation. During the pandemic he publicly called Covid-19 the “China flu” and his administration imposed billions of dollars in tariffs on Chinese imports.
Why would Beijing support a candidate so openly hostile to its interests? Watch Ian Explains to find out why both China and Russia are eager for a Trump win in 2024.
Watch the upcoming episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer online and at US public television (check local listings). Subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn notifications on to get alerts when new episodes are published.
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Prigozhin presumed dead
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Yevgeny Prigozhin, former head of Wagner Group and would-be putschist against Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and Russia, is no more. It was an unprecedented story, that coup attempt against Putin's regime. This was the man who, of course, had been built up and so loyal to Vladimir Putin with the most powerful paramilitary organization in the world, fighting a battle on the ground in Ukraine and fighting against the Minister of Defense and others, losing that battle and deciding to turn his forces against the Russian regime. First, in Rostov and capturing the seat of the Southern command, and then marching him probably on to Moscow, where at the final moment he backs down and agrees to a quote unquote deal with Putin. Putin, who went on national media and referred to Prigozhin as a traitor.
Let's be clear, the important information from all of this was not that there was a deal that was cut. The important information that NATO is paying very close attention to is that Putin didn't take Prigozhin out immediately. He contained the threat. He took his time and acted in a much more calculated way for Putin's own survival.
And given that we've never seen Putin tested like this, and given that for a dictator, it's important to have some air of unpredictability, that you might just launch those weapons, you might have your finger on the button, and that creates some deterrence. The fact is that when Putin was faced with a truly regime-ending threat, that what he did was very careful, very calculated, and ensured the best possible ability for Putin to keep on keeping on.
Now, as I said, back in June, Prigozhin was a dead man walking. Putin had good reason not to want to take him out at the point of his maximum leverage, not least because it would be very ugly in and around Moscow. It would lead to a lot of people getting killed that you wouldn't be able to contain or not show the Russian public. It quite probably would've showed that Putin himself had fled to St. Petersburg from Moscow, a message that certainly he didn't want to see go out.
And of course, Russia was also fighting what was at that point expected to be a very difficult and dangerous Ukrainian counteroffensive. And opening up a fight on two fronts and taking troops away from Ukraine also would've made that much harder for him. So now, Wagner has been contained. Their media company has been shut, many of their bank accounts were frozen, their contracts are being transferred, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive has mostly been shut down by the Russians.
And that of course makes it far, far safer and easier for Putin to go after the former Wagner chief. And so now Yevgeny Prigozhin and the military command structure of Wagner, that leadership dead in a plane crash. I'm fairly comfortable, even though there is no direct evidence at this point, we probably will never have any, saying that Putin gave that order personally. And hey, he actually had some time on his hands since he can't exactly travel to the BRICS Summit in South Africa.
And I'm also comfortable saying that there's no strong near-term threat to Putin. Let's remember that even when the Wagner forces were on their way to Moscow, that there were no defections from Russia's official military structure, no defections from oligarchs. And of course there was not major instability among the Russian people on the streets.
Yes, of course the Russian economy is doing a lot worse now than it was six months ago, a year ago. But Putin still runs that place, and as everyone in Russia can now clearly see, there remain very serious consequences for taking him on.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to y'all real soon.
The Georgian flag flies next to a destroyed building at a military base in Gori, Georgia, on Sept. 16, 2008.
Russia invaded Georgia too, and it never left
Georgia marks the 15th anniversary of the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian war this month. In 2008, a conflict between Russian-backed separatist forces in Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Georgian troops sparked a Russian invasion of the South Caucasus country. To this day, 20% of Georgia remains occupied by pro-Russian forces.
The war was just one piece of the struggle in a long, complicated chain of events leading to the first full-scale, conventional war in Europe since the end of the Cold War.
GZERO Daily spoke with Tinatin Japaridze, a Eurasian political risk analyst at Eurasia Group and a native Georgian, to see what the world has learned 15 years on. She discussed whether the war in Ukraine could have been prevented if the West had responded more effectively in 2008 to Russia’s unprovoked aggression against its southern neighbor.
When the war broke out in 2008, Japaridze ran the UN Bureau for Eastern Europe in New York City and hosted her own show on UN Radio. Though covering conflicts wasn’t her usual role, this one was a particularly thorny issue for a Georgian-born journalist who had spent her formative years in the Russian capital.
“The sheer fact of my once-adopted country, where I had created a home for myself as a child in Moscow, invading my Motherland and threatening to roll tanks into my hometown, Tbilisi, was unbearable,” she says.
GZERO: Has the discourse surrounding the controversial question of “who started it” been largely resolved?
Tinatin Japaridze: Quite the contrary. The discourse still dominates every August War discussion in Georgia today. Ultimately, the answer to this complex question depends on how far back in history we decide to go. The war did not begin on August 1, 7, or even the 8th, as the Kremlin and Russian state-run media have long claimed in an effort to shift the blame to Georgia for firing the first shot. Nor was the so-called “five-day war” over on Aug. 12, 15, or 22.
One thing is certain: Referring to Aug. 7 or Aug. 8 as the start of the war, as if these were mere dates that don’t convey drastically different narratives, is extremely problematic. Marking the war’s anniversary on Aug. 7 places the blame officially on Moscow for starting its full-scale military aggression against Georgia. Recognizing Aug. 8 as the start date, on the other hand, plays into the Russian political narrative, which insists that its forces only attacked Georgia in response to the Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia.
Endless spats over these dates and “who shot first” leave no room for an actual discussion about what happened and, more importantly, how to resolve the frozen conflict and reclaim the breakaway territories that remain occupied by Russia.
We also have to remember that the August War has deep roots that predate Russian tanks rolling into Georgia in 2008. Deterioration of relations between Moscow and Tbilisi can be traced back to the 2003 Rose Revolution that served as a major irritant for the Kremlin, propelling pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili to power the following year. Russia interpreted Georgia’s clear pivot to the West as a red flag that threatened to eventually position Tbilisi as an eastern anchor in a chain of NATO allies stretching from Warsaw to Ankara.
GZERO: When Russia launched its full-scale invasion against another neighbor 14 years later, Western media headlines were quick to draw parallels between 2008 and 2022. Do you agree with such comparisons?
Japaridze: There are undeniably some similarities in terms of the Kremlin’s “signature” plastered all over its incursions into sovereign lands that Moscow still considers to be in its own backyard, so to speak. But overstating parallels between Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine today leads to a deeper misunderstanding of both conflicts.
Most notably, Russian President Vladimir Putin does not view Ukraine as a truly sovereign country that can and should exist independently of Russia. We all recall his revisionist history lecture on the night of the full-scale invasion when the Russian leader reminded his compatriots that Ukraine as a country was “created by Russia,” and he hailed another Vladimir — Lenin — as its chief architect.
It became apparent within hours of Feb. 24, 2022, that unlike in 2008, where seizing Georgian nationhood was not necessarily Moscow’s objective, Ukraine was a different matter altogether for Putin. There are also economic, international, and domestic factors, which were not as pronounced in the Georgian case.
GZERO: The West has come together to support Ukraine in a remarkable way. Do you feel that there wasn’t enough done for Georgia back in 2008?
Japaridze: Few Western pundits, analysts, or even politicians would disagree that the international reaction was remarkably muted, with Russian authorities suffering few negative consequences in the aftermath of the 2008 war. Europe led calls for an immediate ceasefire that, in hindsight, favored Russian interests over those of a small and strategically less significant Georgia.
As for the White House, just a year later, it attempted to “reset” its relations with the same leadership in the Kremlin that had invaded a US ally. Is there a degree of deep-seated disappointment in Georgia to this day, given the limited Western response? Absolutely.
GZERO: What was the most challenging aspect of covering the war from the UN headquarters in the hot summer of 2008?
Japaridze: In the early hours, when information was scarcely available and the media coverage was still dominated by Russian disinformation, choosing sides was personally challenging, even though politically, my allegiance undeniably rested with Georgia. The intricacies of the Georgian conflict intertwined with my professional responsibilities – what was purely political on paper became deeply personal.
I met several times with UN permanent representatives to Georgia and Russia — Irakli Alasania and the late Vitaly Churkin, respectively — whom I interviewed and also conversed with off the record. But the most difficult and emotionally charged experience was attending UN Security Council meetings and hearing first-hand about atrocities committed by my adopted country in my native Georgia.
GZERO: What message would you, first and foremost, as a Georgian, like to share with readers?
Japaridze: Fifteen years ago, Moscow invaded the small South Caucasus country of Georgia, and it never left. To this day, 20% of the country remains under Russian occupation. In other words, the invasion persists. So while we all continue to do everything we possibly can — and then some — for Ukraine to ensure that Russia is stopped before it’s too late, my hope is that the world won’t entirely turn a blind eye on Moscow’s creeping occupation in Georgia.
It may no longer dominate the headlines, and Georgia has understandably been pulled out of the daily political agenda, but let us remember that history has shown us repeatedly that the worst atrocities occur when no one’s watching.
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A Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster with a Fregat upper stage and the lunar landing spacecraft Luna-25 blasts off from a launchpad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, on Aug. 11, 2023.
Fly me to the moon – or maybe not
Russia’s first lunar mission in 47 years made contact of the wrong kind this weekend when its Luna-25 spaceship crash-landed on the surface of the moon. According to the Russian space program Roscosmos, the craft, also called the Luna-Glob-Lander, “switched to an off-design orbit” before it met its demise.
Luna-25’s failure presents a serious setback for the Russian space program. The robotic craft was supposed to journey to the moon’s underexplored south pole and study the atmosphere for one year. It was also supposed to pave the way for future lunar exploration, including a possible joint mission with China, and restore Roscosmos' tattered reputation: It last landed a craft on the moon at the height of the Cold War.
What went wrong this time? Moon landings are notoriously tricky, but apparently, the Russians were also “having a lot of problems with quality control, corruption, with funding,” according to Victoria Samson, Washington director for Secure World Foundation, which advocates for the peaceful exploration of outer space.
To compound Russia’s chagrin, Roscosmos’ credibility will take a further hit if the Indian Space Research Organisation makes a successful landing of its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Wednesday. India launched a moon-bound rocket and rover back in July with the hope of becoming only the fourth country to do so after the US, China, and Russia. If it successfully lands on the south pole, the 1.4-billion-strong country will go a long way toward establishing itself as a major player in today’s space race.