Global News Podcast - UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

The UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveils a four-step plan to guarantee peace in Ukraine, after a summit with European leaders in London. Also: Israel blocks Gaza aid, and second commercial spacecraft lands on Moon.

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Andrew Peech and in the early hours of Monday, 3 March, these are our main stories. A new plan for Ukraine after a summit of European leaders in London. Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer describes it as a crossroads in history. The UN Humanitarian Chief says Israel's suspension of aid into Gaza violates international law. Also in this podcast, the Congolese women who took the Belgian government to court for forcibly separating them from their families and one. We didn't know what to expect. I remember feeling really hot and nervous. That's when

Madame Isha's phone rang and we were told we had won. It was a miracle. And a US company has landed a spacecraft on the moon. It was, according to the British Prime Minister, a once-in-a-generation moment for the security of Europe. A summit of primarily European leaders to discuss the war in Ukraine. It was arranged before the fractious meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday, but that extraordinary falling out gave it much more significance. After two hours of talks at Lancaster House in London,

Sakir Starmer outlined the plan they'd agreed, including support for Ukraine with military aid and ensuring Ukraine's sovereignty and security. He said they'd form a so-called Coalition of the Willing, which would then help preserve the peace if a deal was signed to end the war. Not every nation will feel able to contribute, but that can't mean that we sit back. Instead those willing will intensify planning now with real urgency. The UK is prepared to back

this. With boots on the ground and planes in the air, together with others, Europe must do the heavy listing. But to support peace in our continent and to succeed, this effort must have strong US backing. We're working with the US on this point after my meeting with President Trump last week. And let me be clear, we agree with the President on the urgent need for a durable peace. Now we need to deliver together. We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk. It's time to act, time to step up and lead, and to unite around a new plan for a just and enduring peace. For her part the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen pledged a massive surge in defence spending in Europe.

We all have understood that after a long time of under investment it is now of utmost importance to step up the defence investment for a prolonged period of time. It's for the security of the European Union and we need in the strategic environment in which we live to prepare for the worst and therefore stepping up the defence is crucial. For Analysis I spoke to our political correspondent Rob Watson and our diplomatic correspondent James Landale. First I asked James about the next steps. It is just a plan at the moment. Essentially it's an attempt by the British Prime Minister, Sikhi Astama and the French President Macron to try and take some ownership of this process.

If you think about it, the discussions about ceasefire in Ukraine have been dominated by US initiatives in recent weeks, primarily begun by a long conversation between President Trump and President Putin. And I think what we've seen today is an attempt by the Europeans to say, look, we need to enter that conversation. We need to agree our own position. We need to make our own offer in terms of this coalition of the willing of more European countries that are willing to try and deploy

their own military forces in principle to guarantee Ukraine's security after some kind of a ceasefire so that they can take that to the Americans and say, look, this is what we Europeans are prepared to do. But we need that, as the Prime Minister said, to come with an American military backstop too. And I think that's the aim, is to get the Americans back on track to that sort of discussion. Because both in his talks with Mr Macron and Sir Keir Estamah last week, the US President made it very clear at the moment that he's very reluctant to get involved in talking about a US military backstop. Now in the questions after his news conference, Keir Starmer said, I wouldn't be announcing

this if I didn't think the US would sign up to it after my conversation with Donald Trump yesterday. Is he trying to bounce him into it? No, I think he genuinely believes that the Americans are still biddable on this. That's not a position held by everybody simply because of the scale of the the antipathy expressed towards President Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday night. But clearly, you know, Mr. Kirstama has said explicitly in terms today that he trusts Mr. Trump's motives, that Mr. Trump in his view is still determined to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine.

Again, that is not an analysis shared by everybody. Others think that Mr. Trump is too trusting of Mr. Putin, that he's too willing to agree a rushed ceasefire that will not endure, that is to Russia's favour and not in Ukraine's favour. But at the moment, what we've seen today is the Europeans saying, we still think we can get the Americans back on side and get a united position on this. So that there is an element of optimism about that. We still don't know whether or not that is going to work. And Rob Watson, Keir Starmer's front and centre of this whole thing.

Many people are saying it's his strongest week in office since he was elected last year. Why is he taking the lead? I think he feels that he just has to. I mean you might characterise the way he's handled it as playing a bad hand as well as he could because if you think about it, would Keir Starmer have chosen to be holding this summit which was long planned after Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky had had the most spectacular falling out? Absolutely no, he would not. But I mean he takes the view

and he's articulated this that it's just it wouldn't it just wouldn't be in Britain's or Europe's interest to put your hands up and say, oh my goodness, Trump is a monster, what are we going to do? It's all just too important for that. And so as James was essentially saying, Mr Stammer and the French and other leaders in Europe are sort of biting their lip, biting their tongue and thinking, right, keep your eye on the main prize. What is the main prize? Getting a sustainable ceasefire in Ukraine and making sure that the United States remains engaged with its European allies and doesn't go drifting off to Vladimir Putin. James what happens next? We've

promised a load more announcements of different European countries on defense spending, more from the European Commission coming up as well. Yeah I think Mr. Kirstein was very clear that he will get to make announcements on behalf of other countries so I think there'll be other countries that will announce that they will join this coalition of the willing that they'll be willing to you know put some kind of you know military chips onto the table as part of a security guarantee going forward. I think there'll be other announcements about defense spending contributions. I think there'll be other announcements about

defence spending contributions. I spoke to the Finnish President Alexander Stubbe earlier this morning and Finland has made announcements about its own defence spending increases in recent days. So I think we'll see other decisions about that. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief, again hinted at the possibility of the Europeans, the European Union relaxing some of its debt rules to allow extra spending on defense that are currently, they can't do. So I think there will be an attempt to put forward something to the Americans saying, look, Europe is stepping up. Again, the question is will that be enough? Will it happen fast

enough? And will it be enough to get the Americans and the Europeans back on the same page? And final thought, Rob, in the week when Donald Trump had that invitation from the King, Vladimir Zelensky has been meeting the King. Yes, absolutely. And I don't think any of that happened by accident. I mean, I think it's partly to show British support. It continues very strongly for Vladimir Zelensky and the Ukrainian people. And I think partly as well to sort of chip away at perhaps some unease that many voters in Britain will have when they see Donald Trump and think, hang on a minute, why is it that our Prime Minister and other

European leaders seem to be looking quite so desperate or undignified in cosying up to a man who's revealed himself to be a bully. So I think part of it is setting minds at rest in this country and trying to assess that danger, which of course exists for Keir Starmer and other leaders in continuing to deal with President Trump the way they do in the light of the extraordinary events in the Oval Office on Friday. Our correspondents Rob Watson and James Landale. Russian politicians have dismissed the summit, saying it's produced no plan to settle the war in Ukraine.

Russia editor Steve Rosenberg reports from Moscow. Writing on social media tonight, Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, who is now the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, and someone who's quite close to Vladimir Putin, he wrote this about the London summit. He called it an anti-Trump, anti-Russian coven. In other words, a gathering of witches. And so that those people who were taking part

want to continue the war. Now, what's interesting about that, I I think is that phrase anti-Trump because the Russian government newspaper on its website tonight used the same phrase anti-Trump to describe the meeting in London. I think after this the message from Moscow to the White House will be dear President Trump, those European leaders who met in London, they are against you, they are against Russia, they are against peace. We know what Russia is against and that is the idea of European peacekeepers in Ukraine

after some kind of deal. We know that because Russian officials have made that clear several times over the last few weeks. And in an interview published today, a new interview, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this. He said, the plan for peacekeepers in Ukraine is a continuation of attempts to egg on the Kiev regime to fight a war with Russia. So it seems that Russia's position hasn't changed on European peacekeepers.

It's a big no. Russian state television and its big weekly news review show not only criticised the idea of peacekeepers from Europe, it mocked the idea. It said, what troops can they afford to send? You could fit the whole British army into Wembley Stadium and still have room for some of the French. For more on the fallout from the summit, BBC.com slash news. The second phase of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas should have started on Saturday, but it hasn't. Hamas didn't agree to an extension of the first phase.

Now Israel has stopped all humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip. There are fears the six-week process could soon collapse. Our World Affairs correspondent Paul Adams is in Jerusalem. The Gaza ceasefire has had many uncertain moments over the past six weeks and this is another. Phase one is over and phase two should already have begun. Phase two involves the release of more Israeli hostages, the release of Palestinian prisoners and crucially the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Now Israel says it wants an extension to phase one, more hostage and prisoner releases but no withdrawal of Israeli military forces from the Gaza Strip.

Israel argues that since Hamas is still there, a force on the ground, that it is not the right time for the Israeli military to relinquish its grip on the Gaza Strip. So they are asking for an extension. They say that they have American backing for this. But Hamas is saying, no, we must stick to the original agreement and start implementing phase two. That is the impasse that we have reached. Israel is attempting to pressure Hamas and as part of that has cut off the supply of aid to the Gaza Strip starting from today.

Now that's not having an immediate impact in terms of hunger inside the Gaza Strip. Over the last six weeks, aid agencies have been able to get a lot of supplies in. But the moment the supply of aid is cut off, prices inside the Gaza Strip start to rise, so it will cause hardship. It may be that a negotiated agreement to this is still possible. It's not in sight at the moment. And there are many here who fear that what we're seeing now is a gradual slide towards a resumption of a military conflict in Gaza.

It took some time, but after five long months, a new government in Austria is ready to come to power. On Sunday, the small Liberal Party decided to join the Conservative People's Party and the Social Democrats in a coalition, the first time a government has been formed of three parties. The winners of last September's election, the right-wing Freedom Party, won't be in the government. Our correspondent in Vienna, Bethany Bell, explained. This took a very long time. It took five months. That's the longest in Austria since the Second World War. So this is a really it's been a long and tortuous period of coalition negotiations.

First of all, it was these three parties who were trying to form a coalition. They spoke until the beginning of January and then their talks failed. After that the president said to the far-right Freedom Party, which as you said won the election in September, they then began talks with the Conservatives but in February that collapsed as well and then these three centrist parties got back together again as Conservatives, the Social Democrats and the small Liberalneers and they have been able to put together a coalition which now has had the green light from the party members of the Liberal Party so tomorrow the government

will be sworn in and Austria will have a government but it's been very complicated. Obviously this is how it works and no one's suggesting the process hasn't been followed but presumably there's some questions about legitimacy bearing in mind the winners of the election don't get to be in power. Yes this is a it's been a very complicated decision. The head of the Freedom Party was given a chance to try to form a government in February. He didn't, in January and February, he didn't manage that. His reaction today, though, has been that this three party coalition is, in his words, a bitter pill for Austria. is in his words a bitter pill for Austria. And he said it's their fear of new elections, which is the heart of Austria's democracy in his words.

And he's called this a coalition of losers. And the polls have actually suggested that were there to be an election quite soon, the Freedom Party would be likely to increase its share of the vote. It got about 29% in September, but it's at the moment that the poll suggests that it wouldn't get enough to get a majority. So the sort of difficulties in the coalition forming have just expressed a general difficulty here in Austria, but for now the government is

set to take shape tomorrow and we'll see what happens then. Bethany Bell with me from Vienna. Still to come in this podcast, after the floods in the Spanish region of Valencia last year, students and volunteers are attempting to save family photos. When people who have lost everything, they hold onto memory and photographs hold memory. This podcast is sponsored by WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. If you're sending or spending money abroad, you should use WISE. You'll have up to 40 currencies in the palm

of your hand. WISE gives you the real exchange rate, which means you'll spend less on fees and more of your money gets where you need it to be. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. world. From artificial intelligence to divisive politics tearing our societies apart. From the movements of money and markets to the human stories that touch our lives. We bring you in-depth insights from across the BBC and beyond. Listen to the Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Soaring inflation and a plummeting currency, Iran's finances are in dire straits. Now after an impeachment vote in parliament, the Finance Minister, Abdul Nasser Hamadi, has been sacked. Two thirds of deputies voted for him to be removed from his post, which he'd had for

just eight months. The President, Masoud Peseshkian, tried to come to his defense, saying the economic problems of the Islamic Republic were not the fault of one man alone. Parham Gabbadi is a senior reporter with BBC Persian. We are right before the Persian New Year, no rules. And Iranian people are suffering economically in an unprecedented manner.

Inflation has been soaring. In the past seven months that this new government has taken office, the Iranian currency has lost its value over 50%. And so the soaring inflation and the plunging value of Iranian currency has made the Iranian lawmakers impeach the Iranian finance minister. However, probably both parties, they know that the buck does not stop with him. And that's what the Iranian president, reformist president Masoud Pazishkian said in his speech in today's parliament in defense of his finance minister that such major decisions in Iran is made by the head of different branches, like the

government and the judiciary and the parliament. So Iranian finance minister has not that much of a power in this economy and that's what the Iranian critics have been saying all along that major decisions in Iran are made by the Iranian supreme leader and Pesachkian said that you know I was in favor of negotiating with the West and that's how he managed to get the 50% of the vote but he said that the Iranian Supreme Leader said that he banned the negotiations with the United States after Donald Trump took office. He said that Iran is in a state of war, economic warfare with the United States. He said

that those countries that have good relations with Iran such as Qatar, such as Turkey, such as Iraq, they are not giving our money back, the money they owe us and he said that since Donald Trump has taken office and he signed that memorandum to exert a maximum pressure campaign again on Iran, Iranian tankers around the globe are in the seas and they are not able to sell their oil or their gas. And what Donald Trump has promised is to make Iranians not be able to sell even a gallon of oil. Now, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s in what was then the Belgian Congo,

thousands of mixed-race children were forcibly taken from their families and placed in Catholic institutions. Decades later, five women, now elderly, took the former colonial power Belgium to court seeking justice for themselves and many others. The BBC's Cain Pieri spoke to one of them. In June 1960 Congolese people take to the streets singing a song of hard-won independence. Before then large parts of today's Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo were under Belgian colonial rule. It was during that time that one day Belgian soldiers enter a village and forcibly remove

a four-year-old girl from her family. My name is Marie Jose Loshi. I am Métis, mixtress. When they stole me from my mother, I felt lost. I was crying. I was abducted from my mother and dropped off among strangers who didn't even speak my language. Marie-Josée Loshi is now 76 years old. And her story is not a one-off. Under colonial rule, Belgian officers stormed villages, seizing children with mixed-race heritage whom authorities saw as a threat to the colonial state. Bambi Kurpens is a senior researcher at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium.

Every single mixed-race child was seen as... Well, it literally showed that racial segregation could not be maintained. It was racist, it was gendered, so it was taken for granted that the children would identify with their white father because he was superior to their black mother. Marie-Josée spent her childhood in a Catholic institute, 600 kilometres away from her family. With independence coming so suddenly after 80 years of Belgian rule, the Congolese are furiously divided. As more African countries gained independence in the early 1960s, so did Marie-Josée and the friends she had made at the institute.

Some chose to stay in the newly emancipated Congo, while others sought refuge from the conflict that ensued during the country's struggle for independence. Marie-Josée ended up in France after she was denied Belgian citizenship. But in 2021, she and four other women who suffered the same treatment launched a legal case against the government of Belgium

accusing it of kidnapping and racial persecution. Michelle Irsch is their lawyer. The first thing that motivated me to help them was the courage of these women. For the first time, they were breaking their silence. Even their own children had never heard of this story. By speaking out, they believed they children had never heard of this story. By speaking out, they believed they could prevent the repetition of a trauma.

During the first trial, the judges said that too much time had passed since the alleged crimes were committed. But the women appealed the court's decision and on December 2nd 2024, they were summoned to their lawyer lawyers office to face the verdict. We didn't know what to expect. I remember feeling really hot and nervous. That's when Madame Isha's phone rang and we were told we had won. It was a miracle. A report from C Kane Pierry. A spacecraft owned by a private American company has begun gathering data on the surface of the Moon after touching down on Sunday. Blue Ghost is only the second commercial lander to reach the lunar surface. And as our science correspondent Pallav Ghosh now reports,

staff at the firm behind the latest mission, Firefly Aerospace, have been celebrating the successful landing. Y'all set the landing, we're on the moon. Cheering Delight from the mission control team as confirmation came that the uncrewed spacecraft was stable and upright. The first image it sent back shows a rocky pockmarked terrain. The golden lunar lander is about the size of a hippopotamus and carries 10 scientific instruments. Dr. Nikki Fox of NASA said that the mission would provide vital knowledge about the layer of dust on the

moon's surface which is called regolith. We have an instrument on there that is going to actually look at how the regolith kicked up, what kind of plume it made as that lander came down, which is so important as we start landing more and more things and we start to set up that sustained presence on the moon. We need to understand when one lands next to you what it does to your scientific equipment. Until today just one private sector spacecraft had successfully touched down on the moon. That was a landing last year of a craft built by Texas company Intuitive Machines, which will be attempting a second landing in a few days' time.

And there are likely to be many more private sector missions to the lunar surface, as firms across the world build up the expertise and capability to support NASA's plans for a long-term human presence on the moon. After the devastating floods in the Spanish region of Valencia last year, students and volunteers are attempting to save some precious memories. In the days following the disaster which killed more than 220 people, a team from Valencia's Polytechnic University sifted through the wreckage for some old family photos and they're now working painstakingly to restore what had been damaged.

They've received thousands of photos from other survivors too. Pedro Vicente, who's leading this project, spoke to Paul Henley about what they're doing. When we started to do the project we thought we were going to get, I don't know, maybe 10, 20, 30,000 photographs, but now we have got 280,000 photographs. So it was massive, the response that we got, because well, there were those photographs that were damaged. And a lot of people do say, don't they, that they're their most treasured possessions. When the house burns or the house floods, that's what they run to. Yeah, absolutely. I think when people who have lost everything, they hold on to

memory and photographs hold memory. So that's why it's so important, or family photographs. They say who we are, who we were, and probably who we are going to be. A few weeks ago a man came to us with just one photograph, just one. Normally people came with hundreds of them, but this man only had one. It was the only photograph he had of his father who died when he was five years old. He had lost everything because the flood, everything. And the photograph was the only thing that he had left. So you can imagine the pressure on us, the big responsibility and an incredibly moving

and emotional to be able to clean that photograph and ultimately to save it. Now you're dealing with lots of soggy bits of paper that have been submerged for days, in some cases weeks. How do you go about restoring them? Well the first thing we do is we freeze them because there's a lot of bacteria on the papers that are destroying, literally eating the paper. So if we can't intervene then immediately we freeze them. And then when we restore actually the paper, we clean them with clean water, with several baths of clean water, around 10 baths, very, very carefully, one photograph at a time, one by one, with some brushes and trying to get out all the bacteria, all the

mud they still have on the paper. And then we clean them, we scan them because we also give a digital copy of all the photographs to the families and then we mount them on clean piece of cardboard to give the family back, well not the album as it was, but at least as close as it is possible to how it was. And if you have lost some of the image there's a role for artificial intelligence I hear. Yes, we are starting now with this second stage of the project in which we are trying to train artificial intelligence to restore digitally some of those photos. We are thinking that we could restore around 80,000, 90,000 photographs with this AI. The problem is to

restore these images using Photoshop or any other program for retouching photographs is quite easy. It's not difficult. The problem that we have here are numbers. We have 18,000, 19,000 photographs that need to be digitally restored. And with artificial intelligence, what we are trying to do is to automatize. So it will be much faster and quicker than if a human restores the image.

Dr Pedro Vicente from Valencia's Polytechnic University leading a team restoring images damaged in the floods last year. And that's all from us for now. There will be a new edition of Global News to download later. If you'd like to comment on this podcast podcast drop us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You'll find us on X at BBC World Service. Just use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll, the producer is Stephanie Tillotson, the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Andrew Peach. Thank you for listening and until next time, goodbye. you should use WISE. You'll have up to 40 currencies in the palm of your hand. WISE gives you the real exchange rate which means you'll spend less on fees and more of your money

gets where you need it to be. Download the WISE app today or visit www.wise.com. T's and C's apply.