Global News Podcast - Putin responds to Trump's ceasefire plan

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

President Putin gives his response to the US plan for a ceasefire in Ukraine. Also; the rise in measles cases, and the first bear to get brain surgery wakes up after hibernation.

You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Friday, the 14th of March. President Putin says he supports the American plan for a ceasefire in Ukraine in theory, but raises lots of questions about how it would work. President Trump said it was a promising statement, but not complete. Ukraine says the Russian leader is paving the way to reject the proposal.

Also in this podcast, we report on the measles outbreak in Texas amid a warning about rising cases in Europe and Central Asia. And... Everything of me as a preteen and teenager, first loves, first crushes, songs I wrote were going on there. They sent an email around saying that 20 was about to close. I lost several years of photos and writings and friendships. What happens when bits of the internet go missing? Two days after the American ceasefire proposals were accepted by Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has given his response.

And it was neither a yes nor a no. The Russian leader said he liked the idea in theory, but he had lots of questions. How will the 30 days be used? Would that allow Ukraine to continue the forced mobilisation for weapons to be supplied so those mobilised can be trained? Or will that not be done? And how are control and verification issues to be resolved? How will it be guaranteed to us that nothing of the kind will happen? I hope this is common sense. These are serious issues.

Who will issue the order to ceasefire, and what is the price of such orders? Vitaly Zhabchenko is Russia editor at BBC Monitoring. What did he make of it? I think it's a no disguised as a yes. The conditions that he put forward would be absolutely devastating for Ukraine to accept. No more weapons supplies, no more mobilisation of new fighters for the Ukrainian army, surrender rather than withdrawal of whatever Ukrainian forces are still in Russia's Kursk region. And also I think most importantly what he said about the root causes of this crisis.

If recent history is anything to go by for Vladimir Putin, the root cause of what he calls this crisis is the very existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state which is free to pursue its own policy at home and abroad. What I think we saw Vladimir Putin do today is push out this ball that America and Ukraine said was in Russia's court. I think he has pushed it out back into their court. Yeah, I mean, so what do the Russians think will happen next? President Putin is supposed to be meeting Donald Trump's envoy, Steve Wittkopf.

There's also talk of a phone call. How do they see it playing out from here? Well, we have to remember that Vladimir Putin can be really inflexible in negotiations. He's made Steve Witkoff wait the whole day for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. That I think is a way of putting extra pressure. I think it's fair to say that Russia is playing for time and its rhetoric and its actions, they do suggest that Russia's appetites are absolutely undiminished when it comes to Ukraine and Wendlandt Yerepovitch says he likes the idea of a ceasefire but it's the but that is the stumbling block.

And that's because his forces appear to have the upper hand at the moment and he wants to take as much territory as he can. There's that and also I think he will be thinking that Donald Trump is more of an ally rather than an adversary and Donald Trump's rhetoric, really critical of Ukraine recently, that suggests that he might be inclined to blame Zelensky should he reject the offer of a ceasefire. We'll just have to wait and see. But so far I've seen no suggestion or sign from Russia that it realistically is preparing

to cease hostilities in Ukraine for any period of time. Vitaly Shevchenko, Russia editor at BBC Monitoring. Well, if the Russians do intend to play for time, it may not go down too well with the Americans. President Trump wants an immediate ceasefire. But his initial response to Vladimir Putin's words was broadly positive. It was a very promising statement,

because other people are saying different things, and you don't know if they have anything to really, if they have any meaning or I don't know. I think some of them were making statements. I don't think they have anything to do with it. No, he put out a very promising statement, but it wasn't complete. And yeah, I'd love to meet with him or talk to him. But we have to get it over with fast. You know, every day people are being killed. It's not like, as we sit here, two people will be killed. Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office, where he was meeting the NATO chief Mark Rutter. Our North America editor, Sarah Smith, was at the White House

and told us more about the US president's hopes for a deal. Yeah, he seemed remarkably optimistic about that. He said he thinks that they're very close to getting agreement with Russia and that he's getting very good signals from Moscow where of course his presidential envoy Steve Wicoff is there having discussions with the Russians, very serious discussions, Donald Trump called them and he even said that he himself would actually love to meet with or

talk with Vladimir Putin about this. But there was a kind of hint of a threat there as well saying that it would be very disappointing for the world if Russia doesn't agree to this ceasefire because of course this process cannot move forward unless Russia along with Ukraine both agree to this and 30-day ceasefire to allow them to move into the next phase of negotiations but yeah Donald Trump seemed to think that there wouldn't be too much problem and getting Vladimir Putin to agree to this despite some of the things that Putin has been saying today that would suggest that he's not entirely sold on this idea. And then really interestingly, President Trump also started talking about what might come next, what a peace deal would look like

if they were to start negotiating that. He said there's no point in trying to agree the ceasefire if it doesn't look as though there's a peace deal within reach afterwards. And he was even talking about how they've already been discussing what piece of land will belong to whom, there was a power station he said, we don't know which one, that they were negotiating over who would end up with that in their territory. So these conversations are obviously considerably more advanced than we realised about what a final settlement might look like and presumably feed into the optimism that we were seeing from him in the Oval Office today.

Our North America editor Sarah Smith. Well, President Trump may be optimistic about Vladimir Putin's intentions, but there's a very different view in Ukraine itself. President Zelensky accused the Russian leader of manipulating the situation and called for more sanctions. Now what we've all heard from Russia is Putin's very predictable, very manipulative words in response to the idea of a ceasefire. In practice, he is preparing a rejection. Putin, of course, is afraid to tell President Trump directly that he wants to continue this war, that he wants to kill Ukrainians.

President Zelensky's view is shared by many of his front-line soldiers and medics, as Jonathan Beale reports from eastern Ukraine. There may be talk of a ceasefire, but here in eastern Ukraine, it's in a parallel universe. So it's just multiple shrapnel in different areas of the body. It's still wave after wave of wounded soldiers, these being transported in a special medical bus to a hospital, dozens at a time. And few of the soldiers on board believe there'll be a pause in the fighting any time soon. The Russians storm our positions pretty much every day, says Vova. I doubt there will be

a truce. Maxim, another injured soldier, says he's already lost a lot of his friends. I'd like to believe that all will be good, he says, but you can't trust Russia. Never. Sometimes they have to do this evacuation several times a day. 22-year-old Sophia, a medic with Ukraine's volunteer army, is preparing for the next one. She doesn't believe President Putin will stop. I mean, if they wanted peace, they would have stopped this war. The person cannot change overnight, oh, I want peace now, you know, wake up and I want peace,

I'm a peaceful person today. It doesn't change like that. Ukraine may be hoping for peace, but it's still preparing for war. In a rest from the fighting, these troops are still honing their battle skills. They'll be back on the front line within days. Their hope is that America's back on their side, resuming military support and putting forward a proposal for a ceasefire. And any prevarication by President Putin on ending the war could bolster support for Ukraine. Jonathan Beale in eastern Ukraine.

Some other news now and two years ago troops from southern Africa were sent to the eastern democratic republic of Congo to try to help in the long running fight against the Rwandan backed rebel group M23. Now the South African bloc SADC says it will pull out its forces. At least 19 soldiers from South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania were killed when the M23 rebels captured the city of Goma in January. I heard more about the withdrawal from Shingai Nyokka in Zimbabwe where Sadeq has been meeting. It didn't come as a complete surprise given the current circumstances. This mission was

deployed in 2023 for a year and that mandate was renewed last December. And for many months, it looked as if it was working. The troops held the front line to prevent the fall of the key city of Goma. But then that all changed in January, when that front line came under attack from the M23 rebels and Goma fell a few days later. And this mission, as you mentioned, has suffered casualties, and that also resulted in backlashes back home. But I think what tipped the scales was a meeting of defense chiefs of those three contributing countries, which described the situation as untenable. And as we speak, hundreds of troops are essentially trapped in rebel-controlled

areas. And so in this emergency summit hosted by Zimbabwe today and the third emergency summit there was a decision announced to terminate the mission but also to begin a phased withdrawal of the troops. Yeah how much of a blow is this for the government in Kinshasa after all the rebels have threatened to go all the way to the capital, some more than a thousand kilometres away from where they are now. It's a significant blow and I think the major issue is that for all of these 18 months or so, however many months that was, Kinshasa had SADC on its side.

It had a very strong mandate to support the DRC forces, but now they've essentially been defeated. And some analyst I spoke to earlier said that now SADC will probably be forced to adopt a more neutral position, working with other regional groupings. The military support has been withdrawn. It's a blow, but the SADC had also pledged to deploy more forces, thousands more troops and more equipment to help in the fight. But now they've been forced into a rather embarrassing retreat and so that definitely puts President Felix Chisekedi on the back foot. And briefly, could anyone else fill the gap? Well, there've been talks about the US possibly filling the gap. It's all talks at the moment.

A Congolese government official told the BBC that they wanted to bring the US on board to supply them with critical minerals. But also they said that they might talk about security, but there's nothing concrete right now. And so the burden has fallen back on the UN, which has had a mission there for years. And South Africa also contributes about a thousand or so troops. But I think really the focus now was on trying to negotiate a peace deal.

And the fact that SADC has withdrawn might actually help a president or might force and pressure a President Felix Chisekedi to to make more concessions when it comes to peace. Chinggai Nyokka in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, and in the past few hours we've heard reports that around 20 Burundian soldiers who've also been supporting the Congolese forces have been killed in clashes with the M23 rebels. Measles, a childhood disease that was once in retreat, is now on the rise across Europe and Central Asia. Cases almost doubled last year to more than 127,000, the highest for 27 years. The World Health Organization warned there could be no health security without high vaccination rates. The anti-vax movement has been on the rise since Covid. Not least in America, where a measles outbreak that began in rural Texas

has now spread to many other states. Infections can cause severe complications and damage the immune system. NPR correspondent Samantha Larnard sent us this report. The end result is a single dose vial of the live attenuated virus measles vaccine. Millions of children over the world will have an even safer and healthier life. The measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccines were developed in the 1960s, and by 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eliminated from the United States. Cases related to the ongoing

measles outbreak in Texas started being reported in late January. Dr. Ron Cook is the health authority for the city of Lubbock. There's a high number of individuals that are not vaccinated. Where it started, I don't know that answer yet, but somebody came down with measles because it's so infectious that individual spread it to lots of different people. Despite early cases being in mostly remote counties, the outbreak has sparked health concerns across the state and the country, especially as cases continue to rise and with at least two deaths among unvaccinated measles positive people in the region. We're strictly doing the measles testing. They can

drive up or walk up and we'll take a swab sample from their nose or their mouth and then that sample gets packed up and it gets sent down to Austin where they tested at their lab. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. For years before he was nominated, Kennedy was critical of the MMR vaccine, two doses of which is 97% effective at preventing measles. Kennedy's initial response to the Texas outbreak during President Donald Trump's first cabinet meeting drew criticism of its own. There have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country.

Last year there were 16. So it's not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year. Three months into the new year, case numbers are approaching the total for 2024. The Texas outbreak also saw the country's first confirmed measles death since 2015. Kennedy says that vaccination is a personal choice and, in an interview with Fox Nation, referred to other methods of staying healthy to prevent contracting measles. You know, measles at one point was killing about 10,000 people a year in our country.

Those deaths were eliminated through nutrition and sanitation. Public health officials and medical professionals continue to stress vaccination as the best way to avoid contracting the measles. Catherine Wells is the director of the Public Health Department in the city of Lubbock. She says that coordinating care and outreach in such a widespread area can be difficult. So there has to be a lot of communication between us and the other health department because it's their case and they're doing investigation and identifying where that person's been, but then we're working on the health care side, whether or not there was any health care exposures, and then making sure that we're notifying anybody that might have been unvaccinated and exposed to that individual with measles.

In late February, Wells said the number of identified cases was the quote, tip of the iceberg. And since then, the cases here in Texas have increased by more than 100. Samantha Larned reporting from Texas. And still to come on the Global News podcast. His recovery has been amazing, just what we were hoping for. He had a really nice period of sleep. He's come out. He's in all the things he should be doing, eating grass, exploring the place, being really quite lively.

And we haven't seen any of those medical symptoms that we were seeing before. A bear who had pioneering brain surgery to cure seizures emerges from hibernation in good health at a wildlife park in England. China says Taiwan is part of its territory and over the past few years it's been ramping up military pressure on the island. The Taiwanese government has become increasingly worried about the threat of Chinese espionage on its military. Now the president has pledged new measures including reinstating a military court. Our Asia-Pacific editor Celia Hatton told Valerie Sanderson about the plans.

Taiwan's leader William Lai pointed out that there were 64 people prosecuted for spying on behalf of China last year. That's up three times from in 2021. So we've seen this huge rise in the number of cases that the courts are dealing with. But these are really sensitive cases because they handle classified information. they're dealing with possible military secrets. So William Lai would like to bring a military court system back into place. Now this has led to some concerns inside Taiwan because the military court system was disbanded almost a decade ago or more than a decade ago in 2013 after a young soldier who'd been conscripted into Taiwan's military, he was caught carrying a mobile phone onto a base and he was punished by the military

court in order to do really strenuous exercises in the hot sun. He died of heat stroke and that led to the military court being disbanded because there were concerns that it just wasn't transparent enough. It was sort of ruling laws unto its own. So this is a new thing to go back and reinstate this military court. But William Lai says they really have no choice. They need to deal with the rising threat of espionage. Well, give us the background to this and China ramping up pressure on Taiwan. Well, it's all known as gray zone tactics.

It's this idea that China isn't actually declaring war on Taiwan. It's not actually going to go out and invade tomorrow, but it's just chipping away at Taiwan's military and economic diplomatic reserves bit by bit. So when it comes to the military, China is ramping up its military exercises in the air and in the Taiwan Strait, actually all around Taiwan. It is practicing encircling it. And so it's getting people used to the idea that China's military is close by, but it's

also forcing Taiwan's military to spend a lot of its time and energy trying to counter these constant live fire exercises that are taking place just outside its shores. And has there been any reaction to this announcement by the Taiwanese president from people in Taiwan itself? People are a little worried about the reintroduction of the military court, but I think there is a real recognition inside Taiwan that something needs to be done. I should say that William Lai announced a whole slew of measures today. The military court idea is just part of a broader plan. But they also say that they're

going to start reviewing visitor and residency applications to Taiwan by Chinese people. So this is part of a wider recognition that something needs to be done. Celia Hatton. That may be said that nothing on the internet ever truly disappears. But in fact, a lot of our modern online history is going missing. If businesses don't pay to keep servers and archives going, then hyperlinks can cease pointing to their targeted files or pages, meaning content can go forever. the phenomenon of link rot. Hi, I'm Olivia and I grew up in the south of Spain. There was this Spanish thing called 20.

I refused to get Facebook for a couple of years. So everything of me as a preteen and teenager, first loves, first crushes, songs I wrote were going on there. And then when I went to university, I guess that they sent an email around saying that 20 was about to close and that you had to download everything. But it wasn't my Gmail that I was actually checking, it was a Hotmail account. I lost several years of photos and writings and friendships. We think of the internet as a kind of a place, a place where you can go and see things that

are stored there. The material in that place is kept on servers, on physical hard drives all around the world. But companies go out of business, or they shut down a particular service or division, or they just migrate to a new website and they don't do it very well. And all that leads to what's called link rot. A 404 message or a file not found.

Aaron Smith is director of data labs at Pew Research Center. What we found is from all of the almost 1 million URLs that we looked at from 2013 to 2023, a quarter of those pages no longer resolved to a functioning website. We found that about half of reference sections on Wikipedia pages had at least one link that was no longer functional. And when we looked at this in the context of social media, we found that about one in five tweets are no longer available even a few months after they're posted. The thing is, though, for many of those dead links, there's still a copy of the original page preserved on the Internet Archive and a few other similar sites. My name is Anusha Hussain and I'm a historian of computing and the internet.

of computing and the internet. In the 2000s, everyone was producing content that was saved on web pages, and those could be snapped up by the Wayback Machine. And now I think more user-generated content is happening behind wall gardens or on social media platforms that aren't as easy to access. Journalism is a job that over the last few decades has become ever more online.

You listening right now might be the last person to ever hear this. And that's the story of a lot of now-defunct online news sites, such as Gawker, MTV News, The All. It doesn't have to be this way, though. My name is Katie Baker. I am currently a senior staff writer at The Ringer and was previously a staff writer at The Ringer's predecessor which was called Grantland. Grantland was a well-respected US long-form sports and culture site for the four years that it existed before

the owner ESPN pulled the plug. But the thing is ESPN are still paying to keep Grantland's archive online. ESPN have chosen to pay that small amount to keep Grantland up but it's not normally that way. Businesses typically operate for profit, and there's little incentive to pay to maintain archives of these sites, even if the owners are still in business. But at the same time, companies really don't like it when someone else makes a copy of their intellectual property.

And that's where the Internet Archive and its way back machine come back into the picture. Publishers and record labels have brought an existentially threatening lawsuit against the Internet Archive or two lawsuits that could erase that archive at the stroke of a pen and moreover salt the earth so that nobody ever tries to do what they've done before. That's writer and activist Corey Doctorow. He's a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University and co-founder of the Open Rights Group. You know, in the early days of the internet, I was very excited about it. The internet was weird and it was diverse and it was pluralistic.

The people who were, you know, setting up early websites and creating online services, they were capitalists. What won was not capitalism but monopolism. Corey Doctorow ending that report by Frey Lindsay. Donna Teller-Vasace is to step down from her role as creative director at the Italian fashion house that bears her surname. She took over in 1997 after the murder of her brother Gianni. She said it had been the greatest honor of her life to carry on his legacy. I heard more from our culture correspondent Charlotte Gallagher. She took over a very difficult time for her personally and also a very difficult time for Versace. So the brand was co-founded by her brother Gianni in the 1970s. Donna Teller had no formal fashion training. She was his muse essentially. So a lot of the early Versace

designs were inspired by her, but she'd never designed a dress. She didn't know how to cut patterns for example. And she was essentially forced into the role of creative director when her brother was shot dead. And many people were thinking, it's not going to work. How is she going to do it? But she made such a success with it really because she had this vision and also she was able to attract A-list celebrities to the brand. So one of the most famous moments would have been Jennifer Lopez at the Grammys in 2000. She was wearing that sheer jungle print dress that was split to the navel and that went right across the world. And because she was able to target those celebrities and they were really interested in the brand, that then started a bit of a movement of Versace and it started appearing on red carpets again.

So it was partly to do with her vision and also partly the fact that she was able to work with celebrities. She's designed for Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and then also Michelle Obama. So she's worn a Versace dress at a White House event. So she's really straddled the kind of two worlds of celebrity and then also these huge public figures. So it's thrived under her. Now she's going. What's going to happen? So it's going to be taken over by a fairly new designer, Dario Vitale from Miu Miu, and that is owned by Prada. It's known for more simplistic designs, maybe appealing to a younger audience, whereas Versace appeals to the very rich jet setters that would be going to places like Samaritz and Barbados, places like that,

whereas Miu Miu is a much more of a simple design. I think it's going to be like Samaritz and Barbados, places like that, whereas Muma is a much more of a simple design. I think it's going to be really interesting. It depends whether they lean into the heritage of Versace, you know, the gold safety pins, the Medusa logo, as I said, the very show-stopping Borghans, or they go in a totally different direction. There are rumors that Prada could buy Versace as well, and they could essentially take it off the hands

and it could be owned by Prada. But Donna Teller is still going to have a bit of a role there. She's going to be a global ambassador essentially but it won't be the same I think without the Versace family being in control. Our culture correspondent, Charlotte Gallagher. A brown bear which underwent pioneering brain surgery at a wildlife park in England last October has emerged from hibernation in good health. Three-year-old Bocci had been suffering

from seizures before becoming the first of his kind to have the operation. He's recovering well and being given mild painkillers to treat his sore head. Frances Reed has the details. Bocci the brown bear had already lived a tumultuous life. After being rejected by his mother at a wild animal reserve, he was adopted by the Wildwood Trust near Canterbury in Kent. There he learned how to be a bear and a bit like Aunt Lucy in the Paddington books, two adult bears, Fluff and Scruff, took him in and befriended him. But he started having seizures and after an MRI scan it was revealed that he had hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid on the brain. He underwent life-saving bear

surgery in October with surgeons taking six hours to perform the brain. He underwent life-saving bear surgery in October with surgeons taking six hours to perform the operation. They fitted a stent between his brain and his abdomen so the fluid could pass naturally. But his keepers were concerned that he might not wake again after hibernation. Thankfully he has. Becky Copeland is from the Wildwood Trust. His recovery has been amazing, just what we were hoping for. He had a really nice period of sleep. He's come out, he's done all the things he should be doing, eating grass, exploring the

place, been really quite lively and we haven't seen any of those medical symptoms that we were seeing before. Bear experts say hibernation is healing for his recovery, but now the task is getting him back up to a good size. He lost 30 kilos during his slumber. Francis Reid reporting. Now before we go, can I quickly remind you we're thinking of doing a Q&A special about space weather, things like solar flares and their impact on Earth. We'll also look at how best to see eclipses and meteor showers. So if you have a question, please email globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. Thank you.

And that is all from us for now, but the Global News podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Chris Kousaris and produced by Stephanie Tillotson. Our editors Karen Martin, I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye.