When President Donald Trump won last year’s election, European officials quickly began discussing how to sustain US weapons shipments to Ukraine under a leader who had vowed to pull back American support.
Eight months later, the results of that plan are coming into view, with Trump on board with a novel idea to sell US weapons to European nations that will then transfer them to Kyiv.
The president announced the plan during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday. The president also laid out a new deadline for Russia — threatening trade consequences if no peace deal is reached with Ukraine within 50 days.
“We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” Trump said. “Tariffs at about 100% you’d call them secondary tariffs. You know what that means.”
A White House official clarified to CNN that when the president referred to “secondary tariffs,” he meant 100% tariffs on Russia and secondary sanctions on other countries that buy Russian oil.
As for the weapons, in addition to Patriot missile batteries — the top item on Kyiv’s wish list and one Trump said Sunday was vital to Ukraine’s defenses — the US could also sell short-range missiles, Howitzer rounds and medium-range air-to-air missiles to NATO members, which would then be transferred to Ukraine, a person familiar with the deliberations said.
The thinking behind Trump’s decision on weapons is multifold, officials said.
By selling weapons to European nations, rather than transferring them to Ukraine itself, Trump hopes to insulate himself from political criticism that he is reversing a campaign pledge to reduce the US role in the years-long war.
He is also expecting a financial windfall: each Patriot missile system costs roughly $1 billion and he has already touted the profits for the US as part of the scheme.
American officials also noted it would be quicker to get the Patriot systems to Ukraine if they are already in Europe as opposed to moving them from the United States or producing them new at a US factory.
And, at least in the view of some US officials, providing Ukraine with a surge in new weaponry could send a signal to Moscow that Trump is serious about his frustrations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who the US leader accused of peddling “bullshit” last week.
“He’s seriously frustrated with Putin,” a US official said. “He wants to show he’s serious about ending the war, and maybe this will show Putin it’s time to start negotiating.”
The plan was discussed in earnest around last month’s NATO summit in the Netherlands, where Trump met with European leaders and the Ukrainian president for talks described by people familiar as surprisingly productive.
But its origins actually came months earlier, after Trump won last year’s election — thrusting US support for Kyiv into fresh doubt. European officials, at that stage, began conceiving of a way to allow for continued weapons support to Ukraine even if Trump pulled back Washington’s role, as he had promised as a candidate.
For the last two weeks, officials in the US and Europe have been working on the details of how the plan would operate. NATO does not itself dispatch weapons to Ukraine, but rather acts as a clearinghouse, coordinating deliveries from individual countries.
The mechanism for transferring the weapons could include European nations transferring weapons already bought from the United States and backfilling them with new purchases. Or they could purchase new US weapons for immediate transfer to Ukraine.
Among the countries already on tap to participate are Germany and Norway. Officials said at least four other countries are likely to join.
Trump spoke last week to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Merz said on the call he was looking for the US to deliver the systems to Germany so they could be transferred to Ukraine, a person familiar with the call said.
He also spoke on Thursday with Rutte to discuss the initiative and lay plans for the secretary general’s visit to the White House on Monday.
Rutte later spoke with top US military officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to delve further into the details of the plan.
On that call, Rutte said he’d received several messages of interest from European nations looking to join in, a person familiar said.
Ukraine has said it needs 10 new Patriot systems to protect itself against Russia’s increased onslaught of missiles and drones.
At last month’s NATO meeting in the Netherlands, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented Trump and other leaders with a list of weaponry he said his country needs to stave off Russia’s invasion, according to a US official.
Trump has signed off on some of the items.
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
Robert Redford, the actor and director who sailed to Hollywood stardom with turns in classics such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” and invigorated American independent cinema as one of the founders of the Sundance Film Festival, died Tuesday morning.
He was 89.
Cindi Berger, his publicist, said he died at his home “in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
Redford was best known as a go-to leading man of the late 1960s and 1970s, instantly recognizable for his windswept hair and widely beloved for his easy charisma. But he was also an accomplished filmmaker, committed political activist, and culture-shaping entrepreneur.
He won the best director Oscar for the family melodrama “Ordinary People” (1980), the first of his nine stints behind the camera.
Redford’s expansive spirit will live on through the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1981 that sponsors the Sundance Film Festival. The festival, held annually in snowy Park City, Utah, showcases offbeat projects and helps launch the careers of new artists.
“I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance,’” Redford recalled in a 2018 interview. “As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
In a career that stretched across more than six decades, Redford won two Academy Awards, including an honorary prize in 2002 and three Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award lifetime achievement honor in 1994.
President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Robert Redford on Nov. 22, 2016.Andrew Harnik / AP file
President Barack Obama awarded Redford the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, saying in remarks at the White House that Americans “admire Bob not just for his remarkable acting, but for having figured out what to do next.”
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born Aug. 18, 1936, in the beachside community of Santa Monica, California, to Martha Hart and Charles Robert Redford Sr., a milkman turned oil company accountant.
The younger Redford described himself as a poor student who was more interested in the arts and athletics. He graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1954 and briefly attended the University of Colorado Boulder. He later ambled around Europe, soaking up the culture in France, Spain and Italy.
He eventually moved to New York City, enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his Broadway debut in the play “Tall Story” (1959) and went on to appear in several popular television shows of the early 1960s, including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.”
Redford’s most high-profile theatrical performance from the period was opposite Elizabeth Ashley in the original Broadway run of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” (1963), playing the uptight newlywed Paul.
“Barefoot in the Park” catapulted Redford to supporting roles in movies, including the off-kilter Alec Guinness comedy “Situation Hopeless … But Not Serious” (1965) and the show business tale “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965), starring Natalie Wood.
Redford, Elizabeth Ashley and Kurt Kaznar backstage after opening night at New York Biltmore Theater in1963. Marty Lederhandler / AP file
“Inside Daisy Clover” handed Redford his first Golden Globe (for best new star), and the actor earned wider attention co-starring with Jane Fonda in both the prison break yarn “The Chase” (1966) and the 1967 big-screen version of “Barefoot in the Park.”
Redford reached a career turning point in 1969 with George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He was the sharp-shooting Sundance Kid to Paul Newman’s quick-witted Butch Cassidy, two charming Wild West outlaws trying to make their way to Bolivia.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” anchored by one of the most electric star pairings in Hollywood history, conquered the box office and won over critics. Redford was suddenly a bankable leading man with his pick of projects — and legions of admirers across the country.
The same year, Redford starred as a relentless skier in “Downhill Racer” and a lawman in “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.” He followed those parts with turns as a motorcyclist in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy” (1970) and a jewel thief in “The Hot Rock” (1972), but both movies fizzled at the box office.
“The Candidate,” a political satire starring Redford as a callow U.S. Senate aspirant, performed respectably and collected largely positive reviews. Obama, in his remarks at the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in 2016, called it “the best movie about what politics is actually like, ever.”
Redford’s next several projects were among his most commercially successful, lighting up multiplex ticket booths and cementing his status as one of the key A-list performers of the era.
He captivated audiences as a rugged mountain man in Sydney Pollack’s “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) and Barbra Streisand’s romantic partner in “The Way We Were” (1973). He teamed again with Paul Newman and director George Roy Hill for the light-hearted caper “The Sting” (1973).
Robert Redford, left, as Sundance Kid and Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy in the 1969 western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”John Springer Collection / Corbis via Getty ImagesRobert Redford as Johnny Hooker and Paul Newman as Henry Gondorff on the set of the film “The Sting,” in 1973.Silver Screen Collection / via Getty Images file
“The Sting,” starring Redford and Newman as too-cool-for-school grifters in the 1930s, dominated the box office, scooped up the Oscar for best picture, and delivered Redford his first and only nomination for best actor at the 1974 ceremony. (He lost to Jack Lemmon for “Save the Tiger.”)
Redford scored more hits in the middle of the decade, playing the title character in a 1974 retelling of “The Great Gatsby,” a cocky aviator in “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975), and a CIA analyst swept into a high-stakes conspiracy in “Three Days of the Condor” (1975).
He next co-starred in one of the most celebrated movies of the 1970s: “All the President’s Men” (1976), an adaptation of a bestselling memoir of the same name by The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who doggedly investigated the Watergate scandal.
“All the President’s Men,” a commercial and critical triumph, represented one of the peaks of Redford’s influence in the film industry. He orchestrated the project, including purchasing the film rights to the book and hiring “Butch Cassidy” scribe William Goldman to write the screenplay.
Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein, second from left, and Bob Woodward, third from left, are flanked by actors Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as they attend the premiere of “All the President’s Men” in 1976.AP file
The film, a tense and fast-paced account of how Woodward (Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) unraveled the conspiracy that brought down President Richard Nixon, also reflected Redford’s political consciousness and sense of civic responsibility.
“Accuracy was the big, big objective in making the film,” Redford recalled in a 2006 interview. “We had to be accurate, otherwise we would fall under that perception that Hollywood was messing around with a very vital event.”
Redford closed out the 1970s with a relatively small part in the war epic “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and the role of a shambolic rodeo star in “The Electric Horseman” (1979), co-starring frequent collaborator Jane Fonda.
The dawn of the 1980s marked the start of a crucial career chapter. He appeared in the 1980 prison flick “Brubaker,” but Redford’s more significant project that year was his wrenching directorial debut, “Ordinary People.”
“Ordinary People” chronicles an upper-middle-class Midwestern family wracked by grief and dysfunction. The film, starring Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, examines the emotional fault lines underneath America’s clean-cut suburban ideal.
Oscar voters lavished the acclaimed drama with four awards, including best picture and a director trophy for Redford. (“Raging Bull” fans are still smarting from the knockout punch.)
Redford holding the Oscar he won for best director for “Ordinary People” at the 1981 Academy Awards.AP file
Redford acted in only three more films in the 1980s — the baseball picture “The Natural” (1984), the best picture winner “Out of Africa” (1985) and the courtroom comedy “Legal Eagles” (1986) — and directed the largely forgotten dramedy “The Milagro Beanfield War,” released in 1987.
But in that same period, Redford helped form one of the signature institutions of modern film culture. He founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 with the goal of discovering talent from outside the Hollywood system, highlighting independent productions and supporting new artists.
The Sundance Film Festival, named for one of the actor’s most iconic characters, grew into a cornerstone of the film industry and eventually one of the most glitzy extravaganzas on the Hollywood social calendar, known as much for screenings as for executive deal-making and VIP parties.
The festival was a launching pad for some of the most well-known auteurs of the last quarter-century — Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Gina Prince-Bythewood — and continues to be an incubator for promising young writers, directors and other creative personalities.
It has likewise focused national attention on seminal independent films such as Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (1989) and Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) as well as “Clerks” (1994), “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), “Donnie Darko” (2001) and “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006).
In the 1990s and early 2000s, as Sundance helped turn independent film into a lucrative business, Redford continued to act steadily.
In those years, Redford starred in the heist comedy “Sneakers” (1992), the erotic potboiler “Indecent Proposal” (1993), and the back-to-back 2001 thrillers “The Last Castle” and “Spy Game.”
He was also an active director during that period, helming “A River Runs Through It” (1992), “Quiz Show” (1994), “The Horse Whisperer” (1998), “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000), and “Lions for Lambs” (2007), and more recently “The Conspirator” (2010) and “The Company You Keep” (2012).
“A River Runs Through It” and “Quiz Show” drew praise, and the latter received Oscar nominations for best picture and best director. Redford’s subsequent directorial outings received mixed reviews, however, although “Lions” and “Company” allowed him to explore political themes.
Sibylle Szaggars, Redford and their family attend the 42nd Chaplin Award Gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York in 2015.Kevin Mazur / Getty Images file
In his later years, Redford took on a challenging role in “All Is Lost,” a 2013 survival story that featured virtually no other characters and barely any dialogue. The actor received a standing ovation after the film screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
He portrayed former CBS newsman Dan Rather in “Truth” (2015) and introduced himself to a new generation of moviegoers as the villainous government operative Alexander Pierce in the Marvel franchise entries “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).
Redford’s leading role as a gentlemanly bank robber in David Lowery’s character study “The Old Man & the Gun” (2018) was his last, adding a gentle grace note to an illustrious Hollywood career.
“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21. I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family,” Redford told the Associated Press in 2018.
He is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars, and two children from a previous marriage to Lola Van Wagenen: Shauna Jean Redford and Amy Hart Redford. Redford and his first wife lost two sons: Scott Anthony Redford, born in 1959, died of sudden infant death syndrome; David James Redford died of cancer in 2020.
A shootout at a private homeless encampment in south Minneapolis late Monday night left eight people injured, four critically, less than 12 hours after another mass shooting on the city’s south side.
The gunfire erupted around 10 p.m. near the intersection of E. Lake Street and 28th Avenue S, police said. An off-duty officer working at a nearby Target store was approached by several people running from a torrent of bullets a few blocks away.
Responding officers found five victims inside the encampment, including a man and a woman, each gravely wounded in their respective tents from a shot to the head. Another man was struck in the stomach.
Three more self-transported to area hospitals, including one man with gunshot wounds to the neck and torso.
Investigators collected approximately 30 shell casings from the crime scene, but noted there might be more hidden amid a dense layer of debris. Evidence suggests there was an exchange of gunfire between at least two people. A fire broke out in one of the tents as police were processing the site, requiring intervention from the fire department.
The shooting occurred at the private encampment set up by prominent Minneapolis landlord Hamoudi Sabri, on a parking lot behind a vacant building he owns on E. Lake Street, city officials said. Sabri has been in a battle with the city to keep the encampment open for months — ignoring $15,000 in citations and daring them to get a court order.
“This is a whole lot worse than a nuisance,” an exasperated Mayor Jacob Frey said during an overnight press conference. “This is a danger to the community. They deserve better.”
US President Donald Trump has said he will sue the New York Times for $15bn (£11bn) over what the US president calls defamation and libel.
“The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Monday.
He singled out the Times’ endorsement of Kamala Harris in the last presidential election in 2024, saying it had become a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.
Trump added that his lawsuit was being launched in Florida, a Republican stronghold. The BBC has reached out to the newspaper for a comment.
Trump has long expressed displeasure at what he bills left-leaning media outlets unfavourable to his presidency.
In a post late on Monday, Trump took issue at the Times’ endorsement of his election rival, saying: “Their Endorsement of Kamala Harris was actually put dead center on the front page of The New York Times, something heretofore UNHEARD OF!”
In the post he also accused other media outlets or TV programmes of “smearing” him through “a highly sophisticated system of document and visual alteration”.
ABC News and Paramount’s CBS News both agreed to multimillion-dollar payouts to Trump to settle lawsuits brought by the president in recent months.
He has also launched a case against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on the Epstein scandal.
This is not the first time Trump has sought to sue the New York Times.
In 2023, a judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by him, then an ex-president, against the New York Times, saying the claims in the lawsuit “fail as a matter of constitutional law”.
The $100m (£79m) lawsuit accused the newspaper and Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, of “an insidious plot” to obtain his tax records.
It was filed in 2021 and relates to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Trump’s financial affairs.
Trump also lost another defamation bid in 2023, when he sought in vain to sue CNN for allegedly likening him to Adolf Hitler. A federal judge later threw out the $475m (£369m) lawsuit.
Clarification: This story has been updated to include the lawsuits against ABC News and Paramount which ended with settlements in Trump’s favour.
