WASHINGTON: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday he could not predict what Donald Trump would do if he regains the US presidency in November, but the whole world, including Russian leader Vladimir Putin, was awaiting the outcome of the ballot.
Zelensky, speaking in Washington as world leaders gather for this week’s NATO summit, said he hoped Trump would not quit the 75-year-old NATO alliance and that America would keep supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s more than two-year-old invasion.
“I don’t know (him) very well,” Zelensky said of Trump, adding he had “good meetings” with him during Trump’s first presidency but said that was before Russia’s 2022 invasion.
“I can’t tell you what he will do, if he will be the president of the United States. I don’t know.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the US presidential election in November, has frequently criticized the size of US military support for Ukraine — some $60 billion since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — and called Zelensky “the greatest salesman ever.”
Two of his national security advisers have presented Trump with a plan to end US military aid to Ukraine unless it opened talks with Russia to end the conflict.
Trump’s dealings with Zelensky became the subject of his first impeachment as president by the US House of Representatives in 2019. He was accused of pressing Zelensky to help smear Joe Biden in return for aid, but was acquitted by the Senate in 2020.
On policy toward NATO, Trump has said he would “encourage” Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any alliance member that did not spend enough on defense and he would not defend them. The NATO charter obliges members to come to the defense of those who are attacked.
Zelensky urged US political leaders on Tuesday not to wait for the outcome of America’s November presidential election to move forcefully to aid his country, as he called for fewer restrictions on the use of US weaponry.
“Everyone is waiting for November. Americans are waiting for November, in Europe, Middle East, in the Pacific, the whole world is looking toward November and, truly speaking, Putin awaits November too,” Zelensky said.
“It is time to step out of the shadows, to make strong decisions ... to act and not to wait for November or any other month.”
Earlier on Tuesday, President Joe Biden pledged to forcefully defend Ukraine at the NATO summit.
But Biden, 81, is reeling from 12 days of withering questions about his fitness for office as some of his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill and campaign donors fear that he will lose the election after a halting debate performance on June 27.
Trump is leading Biden by 2.1 percentage points nationally, according to a polling average maintained by website FiveThirtyEight.
Asked about Putin’s views of Biden and Trump, Zelensky said cautiously: “Biden and Trump are very different. But they are supportive (of) democracy. And that’s why I think Putin will hate both of them.”
Zelensky’s choice of venue, the Ronald Reagan Institute, could be another sign of Ukraine’s effort to reach out to Republicans.
Andrew Weiss at the Carnegie Endowment think-tank said Kyiv has been trying to build “as many bridges to the Republican mainstream establishment as possible.”
“There’s a process underway in Kyiv of trying to think through the implications of a possible Trump return to the White House,” Weiss said.
Zelensky was introduced by top US Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, who lauded the Ukrainian leader and strongly supported greater assistance to Kyiv.
“They need the tools to defend themselves to impose costs on their aggressors and to negotiate from positions of strength,” McConnell said.
Ukraine’s Zelensky says can’t predict Trump’s actions if elected
https://arab.news/w9gdx
Ukraine’s Zelensky says can’t predict Trump’s actions if elected
- Ukrainian president hopes Donald Trump would not quit the 75-year-old NATO if he regains US presidency
- The presumptive Republican nominee has frequently criticized the size of US military support for Ukraine
Bosnia issues arrest warrant for ethnic Serb leader
According to the head of police in Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat statelet, an arrest warrant has now been issued by authorities
SARAJEVO: Bosnian authorities have issued an arrest warrant for ethnic Serb leader Milorad Dodik, a senior police officer said Wednesday, as part of an investigation into his alleged flouting of the country’s constitution.
The announcement comes a week after police said they were seeking to question Dodik, who remained defiant and called on federal police to ignore the order.
But according to the head of police in Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat statelet, an arrest warrant has now been issued by authorities.
It also includes orders to detain Republika Srpska Prime Minister Radovan Viskovic and Parliamentary Speaker Nenad Stevandic.
“We received an arrest warrant for these three individuals,” said Vahidin Munjic during an interview with local media.
“All police organs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, if they spot these individuals, are obligated to arrest them and hand them over to the state court.”
Tensions have soared in the divided Balkan country since Dodik was convicted last month for defying Christian Schmidt, the international envoy charged with overseeing the peace accords that ended Bosnia’s 1990s war.
Dodik, who is the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) statelet, remains unrepentant. He helped push through laws forbidding the federal police and judiciary from entering Bosnia’s Serb entity in retaliation.
The laws were later struck down by the constitutional court.
Since the end of Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war in the 1990s, the country has consisted of two autonomous halves — the Serb-dominated RS and a Muslim-Croat region.
The two entities have their own governments and parliaments and are linked by weak central institutions.
During a meeting in the RS capital on Wednesday, Dodik appeared to pay little attention to the latest news concerning the warrant.
“We will continue to implement the policies adopted by the parliament,” he said, referring to the RS’s legislator.
Bosnia’s divided politics and fragile, post-war institutions have faced increasing uncertainty due to the unfolding political crisis.
On Tuesday, the head of Bosnia’s federal police force Darko Culum — an ally of Dodik — announced that he was resigning from the post and would return to work for the interior ministry in the RS.
Days earlier, Dodik had called on ethnic Serbs working for Bosnia’s national institutions to quit and take up jobs in the RS.
Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic — a major backer of Dodik — also said he planned to raise the issue of the arrest warrant during a visit to Brussels this week.
“We could end up in a total disaster overnight. That’s why we must do everything to preserve peace and stability,” Vucic said during an interview with a Serbian broadcaster.
For years, Dodik has pursued a separatist agenda, repeatedly threatening to pull the Serb statelet out of Bosnia’s central institutions — including its army, judiciary and tax system — which has led to sanctions from the United States.
The RS leader had already pushed through two earlier laws that refused to recognize decisions made by Schmidt and Bosnia’s constitutional court.
That led to his conviction last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison and handed a six-year ban from office.
Judge denies Trump bid to toss Columbia student’s challenge to arrest
- Furman ordered the case moved to federal court in the state of New Jersey, where Khalil was held at the time his lawyers first challenged his arrest in New York
- Furman did not rule on Khalil’s bid to be released on bail from detention
NEW YORK: A US judge on Wednesday denied a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismiss detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to the legality of his arrest by immigration agents over his participation in pro-Palestinian protests but moved the case to New Jersey.
Manhattan-based US District Judge Jesse Furman agreed with the Justice Department that he did not have jurisdiction over the case.
Furman ordered the case moved to federal court in the state of New Jersey, where Khalil was held at the time his lawyers first challenged his arrest in New York. Furman did not rule on Khalil’s bid to be released on bail from detention.
Neither Khalil’s lawyers nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.
Khalil, 30, was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on March 8 outside his university residence in Manhattan. His lawyers have said he was targeted in retaliation for his role advocating for Palestinian rights, meaning the arrest violated free speech protections under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
The case has become a flashpoint for the Republican president’s pledge to deport some non-US citizens who took part in the protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that swept American college campuses including Columbia after the October 2023 attack against Israelis by Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Trump’s administration has said these protests included support for Hamas and antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers have said criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.
Khalil, who is of Palestinian descent, entered the United States on a student visa in 2022, married his American citizen wife in 2023, and secured lawful permanent residency — known as a green card — last year. Khalil became one of the most visible leaders of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protest movement while completing coursework for a master’s degree in public administration. He is due to graduate in May.
In ordering his removal, the administration has cited a little-used provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act allowing the deportation of any lawful permanent resident whose presence in the country the secretary of state has “reasonable grounds to believe” could harm US foreign policy.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 16 that taking part in “pro-Hamas events” runs counter to US foreign policy.
Khalil’s lawyers have said their client has no ties to Hamas, and have said he acted as a “mediator and negotiator” during the protests.
They also have said the administration is unlawfully targeting non-US citizens for removal based on protected speech, and asked Furman to immediately release Khalil.
Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, is eight months pregnant with their first child and has not been able to travel to Louisiana to visit him.
Because the provision of the 1952 law used to justify Khalil’s deportation has been invoked so infrequently, it has been tested just once before, legal experts said.
The late federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — Trump’s older sister — found the provision unconstitutional in the 1990s in a case involving a former Mexican official wanted on criminal charges in his home country.
Barry said noncitizens in the United States legally could not be removed at the sole discretion of the secretary of state without a meaningful opportunity to be heard.
The administration of former President Bill Clinton appealed that ruling and it was reversed on a technicality that did not address the law’s constitutionality.
Zelensky to speak with Trump on Wednesday, says US should monitor ceasefire
- Zelensky said Putin’s words were not enough and that Ukraine would provide a list of energy facilities it hopes the US and allies would help monitor
- “I believe that the main agent of this control should be the United States of America”
KYIV/HELSINKI: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would speak to President Donald Trump on Wednesday and urged the United States to monitor a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia which he said Russian President Vladimir Putin had already ignored.
Moscow and Kyiv accused each other on Wednesday of launching air attacks that damaged infrastructure just hours after their leaders agreed in principle to a limited ceasefire to halt attacks on energy infrastructure.
Zelensky, in a joint briefing in Helsinki with Finnish President Alexander Stubb, said Putin’s words were not enough and that Ukraine would provide a list of energy facilities it hopes the US and allies would help monitor.
“I really want there to be control. But I believe that the main agent of this control should be the United States of America,” he said, adding that Kyiv would be ready to commit to a ceasefire.
“If the Russians will not strike our facilities, then we will definitely not strike theirs,” Zelensky said.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Russia had suspended its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure after a Tuesday phone call between Putin and Trump and had shot down its own Ukraine-bound drones while they were in the air.
In the call, Putin agreed to stop attacking Ukrainian energy facilities temporarily but declined to endorse a full 30-day ceasefire that Trump hoped would be the first step toward a permanent peace deal.
However, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that Russian drones had damaged two hospitals in the northeastern Sumy region and railway infrastructure in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region.
Zelensky said the attack, which the air force said involved 145 drones, showed “Putin’s words are very different from reality” and called for sustained Western military aid to Ukraine.
Ukraine said it destroyed 72 drones while Russia said its air-defense units had downed 57 Ukrainian drones, but did not reveal how many were launched. Moscow said Ukraine hit an oil pumping station in southern Russia.
’STEP IN RIGHT DIRECTION’
Zelensky’s call with Trump would be the first known direct contact between the two since their White House clash last month threatened ties between Kyiv and its biggest military backer.
The Ukrainian leader said he would seek more details about Trump’s call with Putin, and that Ukraine was preparing for a new round of talks with US officials on technical elements of a partial ceasefire.
Stubb said Tuesday’s phone call between Trump and Putin was a step in the right direction but that Russia should face pressure if it did not unconditionally accept the ceasefire.
“If Russia refuses to agree, we need to increase our efforts to strengthen Ukraine and ratchet up pressure on Russia to convince it to come to the negotiating table.”
NASA astronauts return to Earth after drawn-out mission in space
- NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were in space for nine months due to the faulty Boeing Starliner craft
- Issues with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule
WASHINGTON: NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida’s coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.
Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles, turning a rare instance of NASA’s contingency planning – and the latest failures of Starliner – into a global and political spectacle.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner’s first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. But issues with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.
On Tuesday morning, Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth’s atmosphere, using its heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph (27,359 kph) to a soft 17 mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57 p.m. ET some 50 miles off Florida’s Gulf Coast under clear skies.
“What a ride,” NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down. “I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear.”
The astronauts will be flown on a NASA plane to their crew quarters at the space agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a few days of routine health checks before NASA flight surgeons say they can go home to their families.
“They will get some well-deserved time off, well-deserved time with their families,” NASA’s Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich told reporters after the splashdown. “It’s been a long time for them.”
Political spectacle
The mission captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams and alleged, without evidence, that former President Joe Biden “abandoned” them on the ISS for political reasons.
NASA acted on Trump’s demand by moving Crew-9’s replacement mission up sooner, the agency’s ISS chief Joel Montalbano said Tuesday. The agency had swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule for one that would be ready sooner and sped through its methodical safety review process to heed the president’s call.
Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that Wilmore and Williams will visit the Oval Office after they recover from their mission.
Wilmore earlier this month told reporters on a call from the ISS that he did not believe NASA’s decision to keep them on the ISS until Crew-10’s arrival had been affected by politics under the Biden administration.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, had echoed Trump’s call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year.
NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million.
Crew Dragon is the only US spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit. Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.
Stich said on Tuesday that Starliner might need to fly another uncrewed flight – which would be its third such mission and fourth test overall – before it routinely carries US astronauts.
Boeing, which congratulated the astronauts’ return on X, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
286 days in space
The ISS, about 254 miles in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that has been housed continuously by international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, a key platform of science diplomacy managed primarily by the US and Russia.
Swept up in NASA’s routine astronaut rotation schedule, Wilmore and Williams worked on roughly 150 science experiments aboard the station until their replacement crew launched last week.
The pair logged 286 days in space on the mission – longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.
Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson’s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
“We came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short,” Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month.
“That’s what your nation’s human spaceflight program’s all about,” he said. “Planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that.”
Supreme Court chief rebukes Trump over call for judge’s impeachment
- Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issues a rare public rebuke of a US president
- Impeachment of federal judges is exceedingly rare and the last time a judge was removed by Congress was in 2010
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump’s rumbling conflict with the judiciary burst into open confrontation on Tuesday as Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of a US president over his call for the impeachment of a federal judge.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a brief statement.
“The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Roberts’s extraordinary rebuke of the president came after Trump called for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the suspension over the weekend of deportation flights of alleged illegal migrants.
The White House has been sharply critical of district courts that have blocked some of the president’s executive actions.
However, this was the first time Trump has personally called for a judge’s impeachment since he took office in January, saying that Boasberg was a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.”
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” he said in a Truth Social post earlier Tuesday.
Hours later, Brandon Gill, a Republican lawmaker from Texas, announced on social media platform X that he had introduced articles of impeachment in the House against Boasberg, whom he described as a “radical activist judge.”
Following Roberts’s rare statement, Trump said in another post: “If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!”
Federal judges are nominated by the president for life and can only be removed by being impeached by the House of Representatives for “high crimes or misdemeanors” and convicted by the Senate.
Impeachment of federal judges is exceedingly rare and the last time a judge was removed by Congress was in 2010.
Trump, the first convicted felon to serve in the White House, has a history of attacking the judges who presided over his civil and criminal cases.
Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, described Roberts’s intervention as “extremely rare” and recalled that the chief justice made similar remarks after Trump criticized the rulings of federal judges during his first term.
Roberts was compelled to respond at the time by saying the federal bench “does not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges, or Clinton judges,” Tobias said.
Boasberg ordered a suspension on Saturday to the deportation flights taking alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador, where they were put in prison.
The White House invoked little-used wartime legislation known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as legal justification for the move.
However, no evidence has been made public to confirm the deportees were gang members or even in the country illegally.
Boasberg held a hearing on Monday on whether the White House had deliberately ignored his orders by carrying out the flights.
Justice Department lawyers told the judge the more than 200 Venezuelan migrants had already left the United States when he issued a written order barring their departure.
Boasberg no longer had jurisdiction once the planes had left US airspace, they claimed.
The Justice Department had previously filed a motion with an appeals court seeking to have the judge removed from the case for allegedly interfering with the president’s lawful “conduct of foreign policy.”
Trump, in his Truth Social post earlier Tuesday, said Boasberg “was not elected President.”
“I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY,” he wrote.
The Yale-educated Boasberg, 62, was appointed to the DC Superior Court by president George W. Bush, a Republican, and later named a district court judge by Obama, a Democrat.
The White House has repeatedly lashed out following court rulings it disagrees with, such as the rejection of Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.
Trump’s bid to amass power in the executive has increasingly raised fears he will openly defy the judiciary, triggering a constitutional crisis.
