The Kremlin has denied Donald Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin had “no problem” with European troops being deployed to Ukraine as part of a peace deal. The US president, who made the comments after talks with Emmanuel Macron at the White House, also said the Ukraine war could end “within weeks” and invited President Zelensky to a meeting in Washington. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has joined calls for MP Mike Amesbury to resign after he was sentenced to 10 weeks in jail for repeatedly punching a constituent. Cooper says it is “unacceptable” that the Runcorn and Helsby MP, who has been suspended by the Labour party, will continue to receive his full £91,000 salary during his imprisonment. Mars may once have been home to sun-soaked beaches and lapping waves, according to data collected by a Chinese rover. Scientists identified the remnants of a shoreline hidden beneath the martian surface using ground-penetrating radar, and concluded that the red planet likely once had a “proper, vacation-style beach”.

The dilemma facing Germany’s new leader

Friedrich Merz is now the “most important man in Europe”, says Christoph Hickmann in Der Spiegel. After his centre-right CDU party won the largest vote share in Sunday’s German elections, his task over the next four years – once he has cobbled together a coalition – is no less than “defending liberal democracy against its enemies”. One in five Germans voted for the far-right AfD, a distinctly “authoritarian” party that gives a political home to avowed fascists and wants to deport citizens with a “migration background”. These voters are by no means all far-right extremists – theirs is largely a “vote of no confidence in the political centre”. But Merz is “stuck in a “pincer grip from right and left”: whatever he does on migration will not be enough for the AfD, and the left will accuse him of gutting the welfare state before he lifts a finger. Truly, “no chancellor has faced a greater task since reunification”.

Merz’s mission on the international stage is arguably even greater, says Le Monde. And he’s off to an encouraging start: he declared within hours of his victory that he was ready to build his country’s “independence” from Donald Trump’s America. The German election campaign took place in the shadow of a fundamental upheaval in the transatlantic relationship, with Trump determined to turn his back on Europe and draw closer to Russia. To his credit, “Merz has clearly learned the lessons of this geopolitical earthquake”. By Sunday evening he had denounced the unprecedented interference of the US in the AfD’s campaign and stressed the need for European unity, including more muscular defences. This won’t be easy for a German leader, but he deserves praise for his clear-sightedness. Let’s hope he’s up to the job.

You may remember a survey last month which found that half of Gen Z would prefer a “strong leader” who shouldn’t bother with elections, says Private Eye. Don’t be too disheartened. The poll, commissioned by Channel 4, was carried out by a “strategic insight agency”, not a registered polling company. That agency, Craft, hasn’t released any of the actual polling data. And other pollsters who have been asking the same question for years have found “no upward trend in support for autocracy”. In fact, the British Election Study has found that Gen Z are the least likely generation to support a strong leader.

Rachel Reeves once said she enjoyed chess because it forced you to “think strategically and not just tactically”, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. When I played against her a decade ago, the opposite was true. She was “remarkably aggressive” from the off, quickly getting herself into a losing position, and “entirely tactical” throughout: plenty of tricks and traps, “no overall strategy”. Yet Reeves never gave up. Like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who refuses to surrender “even after all his limbs have been sliced off”, she played on long after most people would have resigned. Make of that what you will.

The logic behind Trump’s Russia policy

Donald Trump’s foes and fans alike seem to think his reshaping of the transatlantic alliance is unprecedented, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. But his Russia policy is surprisingly “mainstream”. Like Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, the US president wants to look past political and ideological differences with Moscow and “develop mutually beneficial economic links”. Like Barack Obama, he thinks antagonism between the US and Russia is an “anachronistic echo of the Cold War”. The substance of what he is proposing on Ukraine – accepting Russia’s territorial gains and providing “inadequate” security assistance to Kyiv – is roughly where Joe Biden and his European allies would have ended up.

For Trump, the problem isn’t just that Germany and others have “stiff-armed” Washington’s requests to increase defence spending. They have also taken every opportunity to trade with Russia, even when that trade weakened European security. This led to the absurd situation where the US was “begging Berlin to stop undermining its own security”. Trump wants to flip this dynamic. Germany, which is obviously under greater threat from Russia, can take on the burden of its security, while America can establish close commercial relations with Russia. There are clear risks to all this. Europeans won’t easily forgive or forget Trump’s “affronts to their dignity”, and Vladimir Putin may well “pocket all the concessions Washington offers him” and then double down in Ukraine. But Trump’s logic is at least “internally consistent”.

🇨🇳🤝 One theory is that Trump’s approach is all part of a cunning strategy to isolate China, says Christian Caryl in Foreign Policy. If so, it’s “deeply flawed”. Russia depends on China in “just about every way that matters” – Beijing is by far the biggest customer for the Russian coal and crude oil on which Putin’s economy relies, and supplies 90% of the computer chips used by Russian industry. They mimic each other’s anti-US propaganda, and conduct regular joint military exercises. For the US to persuade Putin to abandon what Xi Jinping called their “no limits” partnership, the price would have to be extraordinarily high.

The most successful influencers put their lives – and faces – all over social media, says The Economist. But a new kind of creator is upending things: the “faceless influencer” – hands with manicured nails clasping iced coffees; nondescript figures lounging in cosy bedrooms. The aesthetic is generally “soothing, minimalist and domestic”. A Facebook group called “Girls Gone Faceless” has attracted over 100,000 members. On TikTok, the 200,000 posts tagged #Faceless have a combined 1.1 billion views.

Scientists think they have worked out how to get drinking water to some of the driest cities on earth, says BBC News: “fog harvesting”. The process itself – suspending a fine mesh between two poles in a foggy spot so that water droplets form when moisture-laden clouds pass by – has long been used for small settlements, mainly in rural South and Central America. But weather wonks who looked at its potential in the Chilean desert city of Alto Hospicio, where average rainfall is around 5mm per year, say it could work on a much larger scale. They are now creating a “fog harvesting map” of the whole country.

On the left is where the AfD (light blue) won in Sunday’s German election; on the right is the old border between East and West Germany. There are plenty of explanations for this divide, such as the lack of economic opportunities in the east driving political alienation. But underlying it all, argues Tony Judt in his 2005 book Postwar, is that whereas West Germany undertook a thorough collective reckoning with Nazism, the communists insisted it was the logical endpoint of bourgeois capitalism, and that the proletarian masses of East Germany were victims, not perpetrators, of Nazi crimes. To many in the east, historical guilt and collective responsibility – animating issues for the AfD – are not just unpleasant, they are simply alien.