Global News Podcast - Trump gives Russia 50 days to make peace in Ukraine

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

The US says it will sanction Moscow's trade partners if a ceasefire in Ukraine is not reached. Also: review finds BBC Gaza documentary breached guidelines, and WHO endorses twice-yearly HIV prevention injection.

This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil and in the early hours of Tuesday the 15th of July these are our main stories. President Trump has given Moscow 50 days to reach a peace deal with Ukraine or Russia's trade partners will face 100% tariffs. Israel says it's carried out strikes in southern Syria to protect the minority Druze community who've been involved in deadly clashes. The founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, says it will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge AI data centres.

Also in this podcast, we hear how Donald Trump crashed the final of the Football Club World Cup. It's unfortunate he did stay there because it's not really his moment. Really you need someone to come and sort of usher him off. But you know, you can always overrule the person that's ushering you off. And we start with the war in Ukraine. As the US President Donald Trump grows increasingly frustrated with Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end that war, he has threatened to impose punishing sanctions on Russia if it doesn't agree to a peace deal within 50 days.

At the same time, the US President pledged that his country would send billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine paid for by other NATO members. Speaking in the Oval Office alongside the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutter, Mr Trump said the tariffs, if there was no deal in 50 days, would be 100 percent on Russia and its trading partners. And he confirmed that the patriot air defence systems Ukraine has been so desperately seeking will be part of the weaponry supplied to Kiev He said he hoped these measures would bring an end to the war We want to see it end and I'm disappointed in President Putin because I thought we would have had a deal two months ago

But it doesn't seem to get there So based on that we're going to be doing secondary tariffs if we don't have a deal in 50 days it's very simple. And they'll be at 100 percent. And that's the way it is. It can be more simple, but it's just the way it is. I hope we don't have to do it. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said he'd spoken to Mr. Trump to thank him for

his support. So will the moves announced by the U.S. president convince Mr. Putin to change course and step back from Ukraine? A question for our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg. There's no guarantee of that at all because changing course and stepping back are things we don't see Vladimir Putin doing very much at all. I mean let's try to get inside Vladimir Putin's mind for a minute. He may well be thinking that Russia's economy has survived more than three years of sanctions, thousands and thousands of sanctions, so he may not be worried so

much by this threat of tariffs. This is a man who's persuaded himself that this war is existential for Russia. The other thing to say is, it's clear that Donald Trump is disillusioned with Vladimir Putin, but it works the other way around. Russia is disillusioned with Donald Trump. One of Russia's most popular newspapers today wrote this, that Donald Trump has delusions of grandeur and a very big mouth. Steve Rosenberg with The View from Moscow. Well, our diplomatic correspondent, Paul Adams, gave us his take on how big a shift this is, given President Trump's past pursuit of warmer ties with Russia and reluctance to supply Ukraine with weapons?

It does feel like a bit of a turning point. Yes, I mean, let's be clear. This is the first time that Donald Trump has green-lighted a fresh supply of US weaponry. Now even though it's obviously going to be paid for by America's NATO allies, this is still a significant move for a president who has been very, very reluctant to part with US weapons and to keep funneling them to Ukraine. And it isn't just the Patriot missiles, although those are incredibly important. And we don't know how many systems the Americans are going to greenlight, but it could be quite

a significant number. But also, as the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutter has said, sitting next to Donald Trump, it will include a lot of other weaponry too. This is a big, big deal, which the Ukrainians will hope, and their European allies will hope will blunt Russia's advances along the long Eastern Front in Ukraine and also help to protect more of Ukrainian cities and factories and power plants and civilians from these almost nightly and massive drone and missile attacks.

But the president is also talking about secondary tariffs on Russia. We know he likes tariffs. Just explain how they would work and how big a blow or not that would be on Russia. We know he likes tariffs. Just explain how they would work and how big a blow or not that would be to Russia. Well, you know, the world is somewhat familiar with Donald Trump and his tariffs and they come and they go and deadlines come and go and change. And so I think we need to be just a tiny bit sceptical about this latest deadline. But in theory, what Donald Trump is saying is that if Vladimir Putin does not agree to some kind of significant ceasefire within the

next 50 days, then Moscow's trading partners, one thinks particularly of China and India, although he didn't say so in his statement, that those trading partners who continue to buy large quantities of Russian oil and gas will face additional sanctions in terms of tariffs. So, you know, it is a threat. It's not as great as the threat that the members of Congress have been mulling over for some time, which was a bill that would impose 500% tariffs on Russia's trading partners. But it is still a move. Whether it'll happen in the next 50 days, well, we'll wait and see. Paul Adams. The Israeli military has attacked Syrian tanks that were sent by Damascus to stop clashes between militia from the minority Druze community and Bedouin Sunni tribes in southern Syria. 150,000 Druze live in Israel and the Israeli army has pledged to protect the religious group in Syria. The safety of religious minorities in Syria has come under

greater international scrutiny since Islamist militants overthrew President Bashar al-Assad last year. Mike Thompson reports. The Israeli army says it struck the Syrian tanks as they were advancing towards the predominantly Druze city of Sueda, where 50 people are reported to have been killed in clashes between largely pro-government Bedouin tribes and Druze militias. In a statement, the IDF said it won't allow the establishment of a military threat in southern Syria, part of which borders Israel. It sees the Druze community, many of whose

members live in Israel, as allies against what it views as a potentially hostile Islamist regime in Damascus. Mike Thompson, for 21 months after the Hamas attacks on Israel, there is no let-up in Israel's war on Gaza. At least 20 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes on Monday, according to local hospital sources. More than a hundred reportedly killed over the weekend, including a group of ten, most of them children, at a water collection point. The Israel Defense Forces said that strike was a technical error. In all, the Hamas-run health ministry says more than 58,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli

forces since the war began. Amid all this death and destruction, the Israeli defence minister has proposed creating what he calls a humanitarian city in southern Gaza for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. But Israel's former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmet, has said that this will be seen by the rest of the world as a concentration camp for Palestinians. My colleague, Sarah Montagu, asked him why, given the history of that phrase, he still chose to use it. There is no other way to understand what lies behind it.

The idea is, as I understood from those who promoted it, including the Minister of Defense and some of the Messianic supporters and members of this cabinet, they want to deport, to provide a route of assistance to 600,000 Palestinians from where they live now into a restricted area that will be completely confined. They will not be able to move. They will not be able to go out. They will be actually forced out from where they live. The idea is that it will be for humanitarian support.

Those who talk about it are precisely the ones that say that we shouldn't provide any humanitarian support and they threaten to leave the cabinet if there will be humanitarian support provided by Israel. And now suddenly, in order to justify the deportation of the 600,000 from areas in Gaza, they call it a humanitarian city. The outcome will be that a large part of the northern part of Gaza will be cleared of residences in order to qualify for new settlements by the bankers and smoth rich and their supporters. To use the words concentration camp, which of course most people will think of Nazi concentration

camps where mainly Jews were collected and were collected with a view to killing them. I understand, I understand. That is not the meaning or that is not the purpose of what I said. But this is how the international community will understand these camps to be. They don't need me to interpret them what it is. When they are doing it, and those who are in charge of doing it are the ones that say that we should actually get rid of all the Palestinians living in Gaza and that all of them are Hamas and therefore they have no right to exist. And now they are deporting them into restricted areas, which are completely controlled from all sides

without any chance to move out. So can I ask- It is a reminder of something terrible. Well, have you- And I say that it may turn out to be because there will not be any other way to interpret it. I didn't say that they will be, I said that they will be interpreted as concentration camps.

The former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Ahmet. Well, our correspondent in Jerusalem, Emen Nader, told me more about the Israeli government's plan to create a vast camp in Gaza. Well, we saw this proposal put forward by Israel Katz the defense minister. The idea that he's putting forward is a large what he calls a humanitarian city in the south of the Gaza Strip, an area called Rafa which has essentially been systematically leveled by the Israeli military in the past weeks. So it's a sort of a whole area that's just complete rubble now. The plan is to move initially 600,000 Palestinians by force it seems like, screening them and then ultimately to move all of the

Palestinians of the Gaza Strip into this area. Now it's been, as you've heard from the former Prime Minister Ahud Omert, it's been roundly criticised by many. It's been called a euphemism for an open-air prison, a blueprint for a crime against humanity. One Israeli legal scholar called it that. Many people have said that there are numerous Geneva Conventions that it would break the crime of the forced permanent transfer of civilians, ethnic cleansing. There are many criticisms of the plan coming from not only internationally but also here in Israel. And yet there are also those who've jumped on the idea and are really vehemently backing it, including those on the far right of the government who are essentially coming from a school of thought in

Israel where they want to see the Palestinians leave the Gaza Strip and to turn it into Israeli territory. And what's been the reaction to Ehud Olmert's comments in Israel? What is the Israeli government saying? There hasn't been a direct response to his comments yet from the Prime Minister or from the cabinet, the government itself. We've seen this evening a public statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a video statement released actually in English, which suggested he was trying to speak to the widest possible audience. But he's defending his strategy throughout the war against criticisms that the decisions that he's taken have been for personal political survival

rather than for the other war goals of returning the hostages and defeating Hamas. This has been a running ongoing criticism of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has handled the war. There are many here in Israel who indeed a majority who back an all-in deal that should be struck they say which is get all the hostages out in one single deal and conclude the war as soon as possible there's a majority for that. However there is also according to the polling a majority that within Israel around 80% who would like to see Palestinians leave the Gaza Strip. So there are sort of conflicting messages coming from political polling here in Israel.

Ameen Nader. For Staying with Gaza, a review has found that the BBC broke its own editorial rules on accuracy over a controversial documentary about the Palestinian territory. The documentary called called Gaza, How to Survive a War Zone, was made by an independent production company, Ho-Yo Films, for the BBC. But it then emerged in February that the 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. The BBC removed the film from its online services and commissioned the internal review. Its report found that Ho-Yo films bore most of the responsibility for the failures but that there should have been greater oversight by

the BBC. This was a response from the British Culture Minister Lisa Nandy who has recently queried why no one has been sacked over the Gaza documentary. It is important that the BBC has acknowledged that there have been a series of catastrophic failures over recent weeks. Our national broadcaster is too important for its independence and partiality editorial standards to be called into question as they have been over recent weeks. I am pleased that there has been progress but as the BBC itself has recognised there is more that has to be done. The manager in overall charge of news and current affairs at the BBC, Deborah Turnis,

said the broadcaster should have been more persistent in checking the documentary complied with BBC editorial guidelines. We are finding out what went wrong, we're acting on the findings and we've said we're sorry and I am sorry. I said it at the time, I'm sorry this happened, it was a mistake. Our current affairs teams, day in day out, are creating and pushing out incredibly controversial difficult complex documentaries. We have really good best in class systems in place but in this we failed. It's been a difficult year for the BBC which has also been under scrutiny for live streaming a band at Glastonbury that led anti-Israeli chants, and over the way it dealt with a presenter

from its popular cooking show MasterChef who repeatedly made sexual comments to women he worked with. Our UK Affairs correspondent Rob Watson told me more about what the review had found. The main finding of the report, Jeanette, was that the documentary breached the BBC's editorial guidelines on the specific issue of accuracy because of its failure to disclose the narrator was the son of a Hamas official. And the report says audiences should have known that fact, regardless of whether or not it had much effect on the documentary. And it says, while most of the fault lies with the independent company who made the

film for the BBC, the BBC should have done more to press them for details about the narrator given how absolutely vital that was to how the programme would be seen. And given how sensitive a subject Gaza is, it does seem incredible that the BBC didn't press harder because it did ask right questions but didn't insist on the answers. That is absolutely right. It asked several times but it didn't get the answer back from the production company. And that is really at the, I guess, at the nub of some of the criticism of the BBC today, which is my goodness, what on earth were BBC senior managers doing not absolutely insisting on knowing everything about the narrator or anybody else in the

programme. And how damaging is this for the BBC? Will heads roll? We don't know, is the short answer to that. I mean, as to how much damage it's done, I mean, at the time that the documentary first was aired, Jeanette, you probably remember the BBC's chairman said it was a dagger to the heart of the BBC's impartiality. I mean, this report doesn't actually find the documentary was not impartial, but obviously it just doesn't look good that the BBC didn't do as much checking as it might have done on something as sensitive and vital as who was narrating it.

And this all comes at a very difficult time for the BBC. It does. It comes at a time where the government is looking at renewing the BBC's charter, that is how basically the document that establishes the BBC, although it is important to remember the review of the BBC's charter is much more about how you fund it in an increasingly competitive environment rather than about editorial standards. And although it's true that the government is extremely critical, thinks that the BBC has been utterly hopeless, not just on the news side on this particular issue, but in the question you raised about how it deals with some of the celebrities that it employs. But all of that said, I mean, by and large, Britain's main political parties think whatever controversies come along with the BBC is a

good thing domestically and it's a sort of huge asset internationally and nationally for the country. Rob Watson, the Russian author Boris Akunin has often been compared to Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle. His wildly popular detective series set in czarist times is thought to have sold tens of millions of copies in Russia alone. But now the author, a longtime critic of the war in Ukraine, has been sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison by a Russian court. Okunin, who's been living in self-imposed exile since 2014 following Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine, has described the trial as a

farce. Will Vernon was based in Moscow and told me more about Boris Okunin. He's an incredibly celebrated, well-respected author. He's known for writing detective novels. He created this character called Erast Fandorin, fantastic name, who is a fictional detective who kind of solves crimes in the late 18th and early 19th century. Akunin moved to London, so left Russia in 2014,

back when Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. And when the war started, the full-scale invasion started in 2022, he was immediately very critical. He was one of the co-founders of this platform called True Russia. This was a kind of campaigning platform for Russian cultural figures who would help Ukrainian refugees, but also help Russians who had left Russia. A year and a half ago, he was, Boris Okunin was added to a terrorism list. At the time he said that terrorists declared me a terrorist. And he's not the only cultural figure to be penalised in some way by Putin's Russia.

No, the authorities unleashed really a campaign against a cultural war, I guess you could call it. a campaign against a cultural war, I guess you could call it. The real clampdown started in around 2020, 2021. And how did they do this? Firstly, by passing a kind of raft of repressive laws, which basically intended to shut down any criticism, any debate. There were two main laws in that. The first one was discrediting the Russian army and the second one was spreading fakes about the Russian army. Both of them carry quite serious sentences and what that meant, that basically led to a cultural fear. So people were afraid to speak out, speak their mind and oppose the war. And then they created these kind of high profile cases, making examples of people in order to scare everyone else into submission. Another

method they used was cancellation. The authorities would put pressure on theatres, on publishers to cancel plays, to take writers' books off shelves. The biggest publisher in Russia removed all of Boris Akunin's books from their shelves and all the books of Dmitry Buikov as well, another writer who is often put in the same camp as Akunin. And has been put on a police wanted list as well. Yeah, yeah, Dmitry Buikov, he's interesting. In 2019, which is one year before the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned, he suffered a similar incident where he was on a plane and he became ill and had very similar symptoms. And there were several investigations that concluded that most likely

he was targeted by the security services and poisoned as well. He left Russia a week of shortly before the full scale invasion moved to the US. And he's now been added to this Russian police wanted list for spreading so-called fakes about the Russian army. That's a very serious charge in Russia. The authorities said that he spread fakes about how the Russian army treats civilians in Ukraine. Of course, the UN, the ICC, lots of other independent bodies say that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, which Moscow, of course, denies. Will Vernon, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has said his social media giant Metta will

spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge AI data centres. He said one of the sites would cover an area nearly the size of Manhattan. Andrew Oceang reports. Metta has been investing heavily in efforts to develop what it calls super intelligence, technology that could outthink the smartest humans. The first two data centers are called Hyperion and Prometheus and are being built in the states of Louisiana and Ohio. At least one should be online next year. The company is seeking to rival other tech giants like Google and OpenAI in the artificial intelligence race. Critics however say the centres will deprive local communities of vital resources like water and

electricity. US media say Prometheus and Hyperion alone will soak up enough energy to power millions of homes. Andrew Ochieng. Still to come, good news for those involved in the global fight against HIV, a new way to protect people from infection. An injectable formulation that can be taken twice a year should start to be made available across the globe. You're listening to the Global News Podcast, The trial of a palliative care doctor accused of murdering 15 of his patients has begun in Germany. The 40-year-old medic is alleged to have administered an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients without their

consent. Most of the alleged victims were elderly, but one was a 25-year-old woman who had cancer. Damian McGuinness reports from Berlin. As the trial opened, the palliative care doctor identified as Johannes M. stayed silent about why he allegedly killed at least 15 of his patients. His job was to visit people in their homes to provide relief from pain. Instead, he's accused of giving a lethal combination of drugs without his patient's knowledge. Prosecutors believe he acted out of malice. There could be many victims. The doctor is being

investigated for links to 96 deaths in total, including that of his mother-in-law. In some cases he's accused of setting fire to his victim's apartments in an attempt to cover his tracks. It was this that raised suspicions and led to his arrest. Damian McGuinness. At a time of great concern about funding for the global fight against AIDS, the World Health Organisation has recommended a twice yearly injectable drug as a tool to prevent HIV infections. It would be an alternative to pills that have to be taken daily. The WHO recommendation of Lena Kapovir at the International AIDS Conference in Rwanda

comes just weeks after the US regulator approved the drug. Dr. Will Nutland is co-founder of an HIV activist group called PrEP. Tim Franks asked him how significant this recommendation was. We have had oral variations of this kind of medicine which is called PrEP, or pre-exposure HIV prophylaxis, for more than 15 years. And today's recommendation from the World Health Organization adds a potential additional way of preventing HIV by approving or acknowledging that an injectable formulation that can be taken twice a year should start to be made available across the globe. So,

for the very many people who cannot take an oral type of this medication to prevent HIV, maybe they cannot have the tablets available at home or they don't like taking tablets or they forget to take the tablets. This new injectable formulation of this HIV prevention drug is really taking us into a new HIV prevention era. So just to be clear, it is not a new drug in itself, but it is a new way of administering it. It is not a new drug and it is a new way of administering this HIV prevention method called PrEP.

Yeah. And how effective is PrEP? So when PrEP is taken as prescribed, it is almost 100% effective. And the good news about the injectable formulations of PrEP is that we know that sometimes when PrEP doesn't work it's because people forget to take the tablet. So an injectable formulation takes away the ability for us to forget because we've already had the injections in our body and the PrEP is there. Has it been a case of just waiting?

I mean, you said that this drug's been around for 15 years. Have we been waiting for it to be turned into an injectable form? Or is it that that happened quite some time ago, but as with all these things, there needs to be exhaustive checks in terms of efficacy and safety? So it's all of those things. We've been waiting for new formulations of PrEP since the science showed us that it works. And the easiest, cheapest version of that happens to be a pill format. And the pill format is what we've had for the last decade and a half. But those of us who are HIV prevention activists have always said that we should be exploring different ways of taking this HIV prevention medication.

And we've been pushing for formulations such as injectable PrEP or implants or gels or lotions that we could insert into our bodies for a long, long time. And it is such stunning news that we now have this twice yearly injectable formulation. And we think that probably around the corner in the next year or so there will be news about a once a year formulation of injectable PrEP.

You mentioned cost. Have you any idea how much this regime costs? Well unfortunately right now in places where I live like Europe we think that the cost of the drug is going to be too prohibitive either for individuals to buy or for our national health services and systems to buy. We know in low and middle income countries, the pharmaceutical companies that are producing these drugs are striking up agreements for cheaper generic formulations of the drugs to be available. But in high income countries, right now the biggest barrier to these drugs becoming available

will be cost. And that's why organisations like Prepster, the organisation I run, is really, really putting those drug companies under pressure to reduce the cost of drugs for those people who most need to access these HIV prevention methods. Dr. Will Nutland. Bitcoin has hit a new record high, trading at more than one hundred and twenty thousand dollars on Monday. Investor confidence in crypto currencies has soared since the start of the year when Donald Trump began his second term. Congress in Washington is debating a series of crypto bills

aimed at overhauling the regulation of the digital asset industry in the US. Mark Llewyn spoke to our tech reporter Chris Vallance and asked him why Bitcoin has spiked to this level. You know to put this increase in the current price of Bitcoin into some context, I mean it's now bigger than the market capitalization of Amazon, for example. And to cut, you know, if we just take a very long view, you know, we're a long way from the days back in 2010 when someone was able to buy two pizzas for the price of 10,000 Bitcoin.

I mean, if you fast forwarded to today, those pizzas would be worth about $1.2 billion. So you know, Bitcoin's price has risen a lot. Why is it rising? Particularly since we've seen President Trump take office for a second time. Well, people are expecting what they're calling Crypto Week, which is a discussion in Congress of three bills that are seen as favorable to the crypto industry and anticipation that those will lead to further price rises. And of course, if an asset is going to go up in value, then lots of people will say, well, that's a good idea.

It's a good idea to buy it. We should say that Bitcoin's history has been marked by reversals and by falls in the price. So, you know, and many people have for a long time been warning it's a volatile asset. But certainly we've seen under the, you know, the president administration price rises. Yeah, Donald Trump calls himself the crypto president. If you'd invested last year in Bitcoin, you'd be laughing because it's doubled just in the past year. And all of this, Chris, coming at a time when traditional currencies and traditional stock markets have been so volatile in

the wake of the tariffs and the kind of uncertain economic policy. So Bitcoin seems to be a safer haven at the moment. It's an interesting question about sort of how safe it is, but certainly, you know, while people have seen things move around a lot in the wake of tariffs. For the moment, optimism in the cryptocurrency world that they are going to get legislation that's going to make things a lot easier for them, in particular something called the Clarity Act, which would mean that Bitcoin, rather than being sort of treated as a security

and subject to the complex rules that have caught out a number of big crypto firms, particularly under the Biden administration, is going to be treated as a commodity with much simpler rules. Chris Vallance, finally, what do you do if a guest sticks around for longer than they perhaps should? That was the situation the Chelsea football team found themselves in on Sunday after winning the FIFA Club World Cup against Paris Saint-Germain in the US state of New Jersey. Donald Trump presented the trophy to the captain. He was then invited to move aside by FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

But the US president remained with the team while they lifted the trophy and celebrated. He did eventually move away but his lingering presence was noted. The Chelsea player Cole Palmer spoke about it after the game. I knew he was going to be here but I didn't know he was going to be on the stand when we lifted the trophy so I was a bit confused. The British etiquette coach William Hansen has a few suggestions on how to best handle such situations. Heads of state, whether they're political or royal, will have protocol advisers. However,

you can have an entire department of protocol advisers, as they do in the US, and you can brief your head of state or your dignitary but they're not necessarily going to listen because they are human and they have human reactions and egos as well. So it's unfortunate he did stay there because not just really his moment in that instance but really you need someone to come and sort of usher him off and indeed that might have happened but you, you can always overrule the person that's ushering ushering you off. I'm a great believer in passive aggression, particularly with etiquette, because it's better than active aggression. And remember, you know, they're overstaying their welcome and actually being a good guest, you have as lovely as time as you may be having. And

it's in many ways, it's a great compliment that guests want to stay for so long at your house after dinner or whatever it happens to be. You know, people have all got things to do the next day and we need to get on. So I will sometimes say to my guests, can I get you anything else? I might then say to them as the next sort of step in passive aggressive etiquette, I might say, have you got a very busy day tomorrow? And normally I've never had to go beyond that. Etiquette coach William Hanson. And it's time for us to go now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcasts.bbc.co.uk.

This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll. The producers were Liam McShepard and Peter Goffin. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jhanah Jaleel. Until next time, goodbye.