The Week 1530

Trump’s plan for Ukraine: “a gutless sellout”? It appears that Volodymyr Zelensky has been “browbeaten into submission”, said The Daily Telegraph. In a conciliatory message on X/Twitter this week, Ukraine’s president announced that he was ready to work “constructively” under Donald Trump’s “strong leadership” to secure a lasting peace in his country, and to sign a deal giving America access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth. It must have been hard for Zelensky to write those words after the abusive treatment he received at the White House last week (see page 18), but he had little alternative. Hours earlier, the Trump administration had declared that it was suspending the delivery of all military aid to Ukraine, with immediate effect. The pause would last, it said, until Zelensky demonstrated to Washington that he…

After more than 700 years, a rare Bible has returned to the city where it was created. The Sarum Master Bible was donated to Salisbury Cathedral late last year after a fundraising drive enabled its acquisition, and the lavishly illustrated manuscript has now gone on display for the first time in its history (until 20 March). The Bible, written in Latin on vellum, was illuminated by the Sarum Master, who is considered one of the finest artists of the 13th century. A carpenter managed to get his local council to fill in a large pothole near his home in Cambridgeshire, by sticking a pair of fake legs upside down in the puddle it had formed. James Coxall, 41, fashioned his “pothole person” using a pair of his daughter’s old jeans,…

With the suspension of US military aid, Zelensky is facing his “nightmare scenario”, said Harriet Barber in The Daily Telegraph. If the freeze becomes permanent, many experts give Ukraine’s exhausted army just six months until its front collapses (propped up until then by a shipment of arms rushed through by the Biden administration in its final weeks). While Europe has provided an almost equal amount of military aid as the US (about £51bn) over the three-year conflict, “the cream” of supplies has come from across the Atlantic, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian – notably “Patriot air defence systems and their missiles”. When these run out, cities and strategic locations across Ukraine will suddenly be “at risk” – and Kyiv could struggle to keep Putin’s forces at bay. Ukrainians have…

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. In the past week, Keir Starmer has suddenly found himself “leading Europe’s efforts to bolster Ukraine”, following the US’s shameful abandonment of its ally. “For a Prime Minister with no previous experience of defence, foreign policy or geopolitics, he’s proving to be a remarkably quick learner” – deftly walking the tightrope of standing steadfast behind Kyiv while “trying to stay in Trump’s good books”. It was Starmer who reportedly encouraged the Ukrainian president to apologise to Trump this week after their bust-up in the Oval Office, said Tony Diver in The Daily Telegraph. And it was Starmer who pulled together Europe’s “coalition of the willing”. Coming off the back of his triumphant White House trip, said Esther…

Controversy of the week Starmer’s foreign aid cut “The sad fact is this,” said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph: “foreign aid is a luxury that Britain can no longer afford.” When Keir Starmer announced last week that the aid budget would be slashed, from 0.5% of the UK’s national income to 0.3% – in order to boost defence spending to 2.5% of GDP – there were predictable outbursts. Anneliese Dodds, the minister for international development, resigned. Jeremy Corbyn, the SNP and the Greens were all very cross. But polls suggest that about two-thirds of Britons recognise that, “right now, defence of the realm simply has to come first”. We “can no longer complacently rely, as we have for decades, on the US to protect us”. And for a nation…

Britons are nowadays spurning traditional funerals in favour of more personalised send-offs. According to the insurance firm SunLife, 15% of funerals now feature “unusual” requests. One funeral director said he’d led a Wild West-themed funeral; another had been asked to dress as Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf; a third said he’d arranged a “floral tribute in the form of Fruit Pastilles” for a deceased sweet lover. With all their menus and graphics, modern car touchscreens risk being as distracting to drivers as mobile phones, the car magazine Auto Express has warned. It looked at ten popular systems, and found that even something fairly simple such as “tune to Radio 4” took more than 19 seconds in some cars.…