UK gives royal welcome to Zelenskyy after White House meltdown
King Charles will hold an official audience at Sandringham with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday as the UK and EU demonstrate their “unwavering” support after his humiliation at the hands of Donald Trump and JD Vance in the White House.
Keir Starmer will also host European heads of government and the leaders of Canada and Turkey at a special defence summit aimed at presenting a united front on the Ukraine crisis.
On arrival in Downing Street for a meeting with Starmer on Saturday night, just 24 hours after Trump and his vice-president Vance subjected him to a 10-minute tirade in the Oval Office, Zelenskyy said he was “very happy” that the king had agreed to the meeting.
The offer of a royal audience was seen at Westminster as a deliberate move to give the Ukrainian president equal treatment to Trump, who was presented during his meeting at the White House on Wednesday by Starmer with an invitation to a second state visit to the UK, including a meeting with King Charles.
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Drought-hit Danube River reveals scuttled German World War II ships
Mohacs, Hungary/Prahovo, Serbia
Reuters
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The wrecks of explosives-laden Nazi ships sunk in the Danube River during World War II have emerged near Serbia’s river port town of Prahovo, after a drought in July and August that saw the river’s water level drop.
Four vessels dating from before 1950 have also come to light in Hungary’s Danube-Drava National Park near Mohacs, where the Danube’s water level stood at only 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) on Tuesday, the lingering effect of severe heat waves and persistent drought in July and August.
The vessels revealed in Prahovo were among hundreds scuttled along the Danube by Nazi Germany’s Black Sea fleet in 1944 as they retreated from advancing Soviet forces, destroying the ships themselves. The wrecks can hamper river traffic during low water levels.
Strewn across the riverbed, some of the ships still have turrets, command bridges, broken masts and twisted hulls, while others lie mostly submerged under sandbanks.
Endre Sztellik, a guard at the Danube-Drava national park, said of one of the ships, “we still don’t know what this is exactly. What is visible and an unfortunate fact is that the wreck is diminishing as people are interested in it and parts of it are going missing.”
The Danube stood at 1.17 meters (3.8 feet) in Budapest on Tuesday, which compares with an all-time record low of around 0.4 meters (1.3 feet) registered in October 2018. During floods, the Danube rises well above 6 meters (19.7 feet).
“Eastern Europe is experiencing critical drought conditions that are affecting crops and vegetation,” the European climate service Copernicus said on its website in its latest drought report, published earlier this month.
Long-awaited rainfall set in on Monday, which is expected to raise Danube levels to around 3 meters (9.8 feet) at Mohacs by the weekend, with the river likely to submerge the shipwrecks again.
The level of Poland’s longest river, the Vistula, has fallen to a record low, leaving sandbanks exposed in Warsaw and water so shallow a moose was filmed walking across it in a section in the countryside.
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Starmer and Macron plan to accompany Zelensky to White House on Trump visit
Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are considering accompanying Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington to salvage his relationship with Donald Trump.
The visit would be part of a three-pronged plan being worked out by Kyiv’s European allies after a dramatic spat in the Oval Office between the US and Ukrainian presidents led to Washington suspending military support for the war-torn nation.
“We are considering potentially having President Macron travel again to Washington, alongside President Zelensky and his British counterpart,” an Élysée Palace spokesman said.
“We’re currently engaged in tight negotiations which involve the French president, as well as the entire government.”
Mr Macron’s office later said there were no current plans for the trip, while No 10 also denied plans were under way.
It comes as Mike Waltz, the US president’s national security adviser, said the president would consider restoring aid to Ukraine if peace talks were arranged and “confidence-building measures on the table”.
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